Diogenes' Quest

Paul starts his beautiful letter to the Phillipians with a greeting "To all the saints [holy ones] in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi . . ."

I read that rather than thinking of a saint or holy one in terms of "a destination to which a person of moral perfection arrived," Paul says, 'No, Sainthood is not a destination. It's a journey. You were called to be saints.' . . . [A saint is] a baptized person with a vocation." Karl Barth comments: "'Holy' people are unholy people, who nevertheless as such have been singled out, claimed and requisitioned by God for his control, for his use, for himself who is holy. Their holiness is and remains in Christ Jesus." Both from Dwelling With Phillipians, p.8.

I saw the 1973 movie Serpico yesterday, and it reminded me of this definition of holiness. Serpico is the true story of Frank Serpico, a NY City cop who refused to take bribes, refused to work corruptly in a corrupt "system." He was a "little guy" who tried to survive but wanted even more to live a morally correct life. It almost did cost him his life, but in the end his struggles helped clean up the corrupt NY police culture. (For more information about the movie, go here: Serpico.)

That a life of holiness (the only "meaningful" life) is not an "outcome," "not something realized only after history, time, and human experience have run their course," is a central idea of Levinas. He says that our "call" to holiness, involves a 'perpetual duty of vigilance and effort that can never slumber . . . the incessant watching over the other.'" In other words, the "call" to holiness comes, as Christ's call comes, not in the future, but now, and is lived now. Christ's coming, his call, "is a matter of living every moment of life in a certain way, with compassion and concern for others." From"Time, History, and Messianism," in The Cambridge Introduction to Emmanual Levinas, by Michael Morgan, p. 170.

The holy ones, the saints are found in the present, in the struggle despite setback to find righteousness, to help bring it about for others, to hear and try to respond to a calling nobler (greater, higher) than me, myself and I. When making the movie, Al Pacino asked Frank Serpico why he did what he did. He answered, "Well, Al, I don't know. I guess I would have to say it would be because ... if I didn't, who would I be when I listened to a piece of music?" This is our "call," our responsibility, and only here is meaning in life found. For more on Frank Serpico's life, click here.

So for me, Frank Serpico is a saint, a "holy one" like Thomas More, and others, who day by day choose to struggle to live a life of integrity in a world whose common denominator is low, where the m.o. is graft and compromise; a person who responds to an inner (transcendent) call to be just, to treat others right, not counting cost to himself. I commend his story and movie as an image of this calling, and a tribute to its importance for each of us and for our world.

If the Incarnation means anything, it is the ever re-birthing of the call of the perfect God to each of us to be part of a holy people, to be perfect as he is perfect, in Christ: ("Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. "Mt. 5:48.) It is to be called and "claimed" by God, "set apart" like the prophets of old, to accomplish God's will. It is Jesus' "gentle yoke," his cross. And, judging from my own experience, it requires every particle of our ongoing attention to answer this call.

Listen to the lovely, elevating theme from Serpico, composed by Mikis Theodorakis

Listen to Same with shots from the movie.

Listen to "I'd love to Change the World" by Ten Years After with scenes from Serpico.

Listen to Mikis Theodorakis' "Adagio for Solo Flute"

Vaulted Cathedrals

I attended a friend's mother's funeral yesterday at St. Wenceslaus' Church on the west side of Chicago, just south and west of the Kennedy as it arcs into the loop. The church commemorates King Wenceslaus I of Bohemia.

The church was awesome in the word's proper sense: large, vaulted, with arches lifting one's gaze to the great crucifix at the center, amid gold patterns interlaced with wood, and many stylized symbols of the workmen and culture of pre and post-war Polish life. The church was quiet and reverent, formal and stolid -- a fixture in a now-changed neighborhood, its catholic school rented to the City of Chicago, its long aisles empty and silent on this funeral morning Tuesday, its pews polished and shiny, with Polish-language missals neatly stored. The left-hand altar boldly proclaims, "Cor Jesu sanctissimus miserere nobis," and atop the crucifix, "Introibo ad altare Dei".

I thought, why would anyone want to leave this church, and move to the the suburbs!

This, I thought, is how a church integrates a culture, how it draws the city into a meaning larger than the city, into a City of God! (see attached photo by Scott Mutter, Church Aisle from his Surrational Images.) The microcosm united with the macrocosm.

Listen to "Good King Wenceslaus"

The lyrics of "Good King Wenceslaus" show how Christianity embraces the city in its care.

Valuables

A common prejudice is that facts trump values. "The fact is . . ." The reason is that value is commonly placed in the world of opinion, and fact in the "real" world. But it doesn't take too much imagination to realize that values are "facts" in the "real" world too. But are they just opinions?

It seems we all can agree that we choose the higher value item if we can identify it. When shopping for a flat screen TV, we try to get the largest screen, the most vivid, crisp colors for the money we spend. We can usually tell why the $5,000 item is priced more than the $500 item.

I think it is fair to say that a higher value item is more truly real. To dis-value something is to treat it as other than it is, as less real. Plenty of us choose fools gold rather than real gold because we can't tell the difference. How do we get into such a pickle? Because value often is not on the surface. Diamonds have to be mined. The homely girl may make the best wife. Goodness is usually seen in time, not immediately. To experience value we need to listen better, to see better, to live better. Often our tangled lives, sinfulness in other words, hobble us.

Some philosophers have pointed out that values are more primary, more elementary, than knowledge. Nicholas Rescher, for example, has proposed that value may play a crucial role in the world, not as an "efficient cause" like the principle of cause and effect, but as a filter, letting more optimal values emerge and preventing less valuable outcomes. One might wonder which is the better way to explain the fact of man's appearance in this world, the blind outcome of genetic mutation, or the realization of great value?

To Christians, fact and highest value are found together in Christ's incarnation, an event or "fact" in the world, laden with value for all. Christians believe that Christ is the best and final revelation of God to man, and that living as he lived, we experience, as real, the highest value. What is that value? Ultimately, I think, it is the joy of living, of being created, of having a Father, and brother, and mother, and children, and friends. To experience these we must strive to love, and to be loved.

As valuable as these insights are, better yet is the fact of living them!

Listen to Enya "Fairytale"

Listen to Enya "Listen to the Rain"

Here we Come a Caroling!

A few days ago a group from our company visited the local nursing home to sing Christmas carols, an annual ritual we have been following for a number of years. The experience was wonderful for us and for our hearers, many of whom mouthed the words to the songs along with us. I reflected that Christmas carols in this Christian country of ours are our folk songs, a common possession that helps to bring us together as a Christian community, no matter how much our intellectual betters deny it.

Christmas carols date from the early days of the church. My memory of caroling goes back to childhood, and I enjoy taking part in caroling today, as I did with our Burmese friends last week. In our company's caroling, we sang in english, german and spanish. I recommended to our Laotian Mung employees that they prepare some Mung songs for us to sing next year. They informed me that Christianity among the Mung tribes in Laos dates from the French missionaries of the 1950's, and that their Christmas songs are the same as ours.

The creche, caroling, all the trappings of Christmas celebration, are the center of our national experience, no matter how secular they have become. Intrepid atheists have only "negative ads" to offer, and so their "gifts" fall on deaf ears. I and, I think, all of us, will keep coming back to the rich, lovely music that celebrates God's gift of his Son, in love, to us, living in this hurting world, longing for hope.

Have a Merry, a happy, hopeful, joyful, prayerful, Christmas!

Listen to Sinead O'Connor sing "Silent Night."

Listen to John Denver singing "Little Drummer Boy"

Listen to "O Little Town of Bethlehem."

Listen to Celtic Woman sing "Oh Come All Ye Faithful."

Listen to Vienna Choir Boys' Adeste Fidelis.

Listen to Celine Dion "O Holy Night"

Another version of "O Holy Night" by a seven year old!

Another version of "O Holy Night" by Susan Boyle.

Listen to "While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night."

Comfort Ye!

Handel's Messiah puts to music Isaiah Ch. 40, which begins "Comfort, give comfort to my people."

And so the meaning of the birth of Jesus is brought home to a people burdened, oppressed in sin and darkness.

As Giussani observes in "How We Become Christian," the word "comfort" comes from "con" "forto" or with strength, and united in strength. Comfort comes to us because God joins with us, in his Son, to give us strength in our desolation, to offer "comfort" and consolation in his strength. So, let us joyfully "unite" with Him in this Christmas celebration of His incarnation, his love and mercy for us, who need his comfort, his strength, and the goodness, truth, and justice he brings, as an "echo of eternity" in our world of today.

Listen to Handel "Comfort Ye"

Listen to Handel "Unto Us a Child is Given"

That Sheep May Safely Graze

The Fourth Sunday in Advent's first reading from Samuel recounts God's promise to David that He will remember this shepherd whom He "took [] from the the pasture and from the care of the flock to be commander of my people Israel." 2 Sam. 7:8.

Geoff Wood (Living the Lectionary, Cycle B, p. 10) points out that Israel was concerned from the crime of Cain (Cain the city maker killed Abel the herder of sheep) and from Abraham, a nomad and keeper of sheeps and goats, that the spirit of the shepherd be maintained in a nation that had moved into cities. For that reason "Israel's holy men . . . insisted that, if the Israelite tribes must unite into a kingdom under a monarch, that monarch should be a shepherd."

"Shepherding was symbolic of freedom, mobility, flexibility, a hankering after wide-open spaces and starry skies where one felt closer to God. It also said something about gentleness, concern for things vulnerable, a willingness to protect the weak and confront the ravenous elements of this universe. These were qualities worth remembering and maintaining, especially when the pressures of urban life and royal politics might tempt Israel to become like so many other nations: hard, polarized, aggressive, even lethal like Cain." When Israel's monarchy failed, its prophets naturally looked to Bethlehem, birthplace of David, for a pastoral king to renew its prospects as a nation. (Cf. Micah 5:2 "But as for you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, Too little to be among the clans of Judah, From you One will go forth for Me to be ruler in Israel.")

We are close to our anniversary of remembering that our longed for promise has been kept, that our shepherd has come and is here, a "good shepherd" whose yoke is light" (Mt.11:29), who "leadeth me beside still waters," who "restoreth my soul" (Ps. 23). Our shepherd shows us all the way to a nation of peace, a nation concerned with the "rest" of its citizens, a nation happy in its role to bring about happiness in the world.

May this remembrance, renewed as real in our life today and on Christmas Day, bring us joy and comfort!

Listen to Bach "Sheep May Safely Graze"

Another version (Stokowski).

Sheep may safely graze
where a good shepherd watches.
Where rulers govern well
we may feel peace and rest
and what makes countries happy

Text (German):
Schafe können sicher weiden,
Wo ein guter Hirte wacht.
Wo Regenten wohl regieren,
Kann man Ruh und Friede spüren
Und was Länder glücklich macht.

"It's All about Agape Love"

In his book, Knowing Christ Today, Dallas Willard describes behaviors that he believes will bring us closer to knowing Christ: humility, inward rightness, obedience, solitude and silence, fellowship. He concludes, "It's all about agape love."

"Love means that we humbly and simply devote ourselves under God to the promotion of the goods of human life that come under our influence. We live to serve. We do this expecting God to intervene with us to produce an outcome that is beyond all human ability, and we it do it knowing that God is the one 'watching our back.' We cast all our 'care' on him, knowing he is the one who takes care of us (Ps.55:22; 1 Pet.5:5-7)." Knowing Christ Today, 155.

As we await Christmas, traveling with the Holy Family to Bethlehem, we try to imagine Mary and Joseph's anxieties and their expectations, and we try to imitate them in building a "holy family" of our own.

If the Holy Family is the example par excellence of agape love, the following tragic counter-example serves to underscore the crucial importance of agape love, which is "of service," self-sacrificing and life-giving.

A Gift

The boy comes to the back door of the parish,
bearing he says, "A gift."
A crib, its mattress, and a baby bearish
quilt. "I hear you people stand for life."
What came between them, what could cleave a rift
and birth such sorrow?
Girlfriend or wife,
she gave her child no chance for a tomorrow
but left a young man sobbing in despair
on the chipped flagstones of my pastor's stair.
--Timothy Murphy

From First Things, Jan. 2012, p.32.

We, sinful and sorrowful, can learn from the Lord of Love what love means.

Listen to Chrissie Hynde sing (with the Pretenders) "I'll Stand By You"

Same, live performance.

Prayer - The Role of the Son

This is a continuation of the December 9th post, following the thread of von Balthasar's meditation on the role of Christ in prayer.

"... the apex on which everything converges is no longer the Son on earth but the Father in heaven.  Ascending to the Father, the Son draws all things with him and orients them to the Father.  Moreover, the Son not only takes the boundless wealth of created things to the Father and polarizes them in this way, making them transparent; there is also the entire, infinitely greater wealth which the Son has brought from heaven and spread out before men, treasures of eternity. The contemplative who thirsts for unity, recollection and deep immersion in prayer may well be offended at this dazzling multiplicity, and his alienation may intensify as he finds it expanding into the multifarious aspects of the Church and its history, its dogmas and institutions, definitions and paragraphs.  For the contemplative all this is like so much barbed wire; he finds it difficult to penetrate it and reach God.  This is because nowhere except in the Catholic Church is there such absolute insistence on the formula as such and its binding nature; nowhere else is it so hard to render the mundane and finite form transparent, so that God's infinity, which the contemplative seeks in and through all things, can be perceived." Prayer, p. 53

Breath of Heavan

The Dresden Madonna, by Raphael, considered one of the greatest works of art, prompted the following reflections by Vasily Grossman when he saw it displayed in Moscow 10 years after being confiscated by the Soviets:

"The Madonna's beauty is closely tied to earthly life. It is a democratic, human and humane beauty. It is a beauty that lives in every woman . . . It is a universal beauty. This Madonna is the soul and mirror of all human beings, and everyone who looks at her can see her humanity. She is the image of the maternal soul.

. . .

"The child in the Madonna's arms seems more earthly still. His face is more adult than that of his mother.

"His gaze is sad and serious, focused both ahead and within. It is the kind of gaze that allows one to glimpse one's fate.

"Both faces are calm and sad. Perhaps they can see Golgotha, and the dusty rocky road up the hill, and the hideous short, heavy, rough-hewn cross lying on a shoulder that is now only little and that now feels only the warmth of the maternal breast.

. . .

"I saw her in 1930, in Konotop, at the station. Swarthy from hunger and illness, she walked towards the express train, looked up at me with her wonderful eyes and said with her lips, without any voice, 'Bread. . .'

"I saw her son, already thirty years old. He was wearing wornout soldiers' boots -- so completely worn out that no-one would even take the trouble to remove them from the feet of the corpse -- and a padded jacket with a large hold exposing his milk-white shoulder. He was walking along a path through a bog. A huge cloud of midges was hanging above him, but he was unable to drive them away; he was unable to remove this living, flickering halo because he needed both his hands to steady the damp heavy log on his shoulder. At one moment he raised his bowed head. I saw his fair curly beard, covering the whole of his face. I saw his half-open lips. I saw his eyes -- and I knew them at once. They were the eyes that look out from Raphael's painting."

From "The Sistene Madonna", by Vasily Grossman, The Road, at pp. 172-73, 177-78.

Listen to Amy Grant singing "Breath of Heaven."

Listen to Kenny Rogers and Wynonna Judd sing "Mary Did You Know?"

A Story of the Holy Family

I would like to offer the story related below as an Advent meditation on the question asked in the Conclusion section of Ch. 11 of Giussani's The Religious Sense:

"What is the formula for the journey to the ultimate meaning of reality? Living the real. There is an experience, hidden yet implied, of that arcane, mysterious presence to be found within the opening of the eye, within the attraction reawakened by things, within the beauty of things, within an amazement, full of gratitude, comfort, and hope."

One could characterize this sad story from Everything Flows (by Vasily Grossman), whose background is the tragedy and horror of the "Great Famine" in the Ukraine in 1932-33, in many ways: "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth." (Mt. 5:5). "Guilt before the holiness of the other" (Levinas). An "icon" in words. A story of the holy family. However characterized, the story shows that an intense aliveness is found in the "reality" of human relationships of love. This, it seems to me, is near to Giussani's central message.

I hope you find this brief story as moving and poignant as I do, and of help in our Advent (and lifetime's) preparation to make love's gift a reality in our lives:

Everything Flows, by Vasily Grossman, chapter 15:

"Vasily Timofeyevich had a quiet voice and a hesitant way of moving. And when someone talked to Ganna, she would look down at the ground with her brown eyes and reply almost inaudibly.

"After their marriage, they both became still more timid. He was fifty years old, and the neighbors' children called him 'Grandad'; he was gray-haired, balding, and wrinkled -- and he felt embarrassed to have married someone so young. He felt ashamed to be so happy in his love, to find himself whispering 'My darling, my sweetheart' as he looked at his wife. As for her, when she was a little girl, she had tried to imagine her future husband. He was going to be a Civil War hero like Shchors; he was going to be the best accordion player in the village; and he was going to be a writer of heartfelt poems like Taras Shevchenko. Nevertheless, even though Vasily Timofeyevich was no longer young; even though he was poor, timid, and generally unlucky; even though he had always lived through others rather than living a life of his own, her meek heart understood the strength of the love he felt for her. And he understood how she, so young, had hoped for more, how she had dreamed of a village knight who would ride up and bear her away from her stepfather's cramped hut -- instead of which he had come along in his old boots, with his big brown peasant hands, coughing apologetically and clearing his throat. And now here he was, looking at her happily, adoringly, guiltily and with grief. And she, for her part, felt guilty before him and was meek and silent.

"They had a son Grisha, a quiet little baby who never cried. His mother, now once again looking like a skinny little girl, sometimes went up to his cradle at night. Seeing the boy lying there with open eyes, she would say to him, 'Try crying a bit, little Grishenka. Why are you always so silent?'

"Even when they were in their own hut, both husband and wife always talked in soft voices. 'Why do you always speak so quietly?' neighbors would ask in astonishment.

"It was strange that the young woman and her plain, elderly husband should be so alike, equally timid, equally meek in their hearts.

"They both worked without a word of complaint. They did not even dare let out a sigh when the brigade leader was unjust, when he sent them out into the fields even if it was not their turn.

"Once, Vasily Timofeyevich was sent to the district center on an errand for the collective-farm stables; he went with the farm chairman. While the chairman was going about his business in the land and finance offices, he tied the horses to a post, went into the shop, and bought his wife a treat: some poppy-seek cakes, some candies, some bread rings, some nuts. Not a lot, just 150 grams of each. When he got back home and untied his white kerchief, his wife flung her hands up in the air with joy and cried out, 'Oh, Mama!' In his embarrassment, Vasily Timofeyevich went off into the storeroom, so that she would not see the tears of happiness in his eyes.

"For Christmas she embroidered a shirt for her husband. Never did she learn that, after she had given it to him, Vasily Timofeyevich Karpenko was hardly able to sleep. All through the night he kept getting up and walking across, in his bare feet, to the little chest of drawers on top of which he had put the shirt. He kept stroking it with the palm of his hand, feeling the simple cross-stitch design. . . And when he was taking his wife home from the maternity ward of the district hospital, when he saw her holding their child in her arms, he felt that he would never forget this day -- even if he were to live a thousand years.

"Sometimes he felt frightened. How was it possible for such happiness to have come into his life? How was it possible that he could wake in the middle of the night and find himself listening to the breathing of a wife and a son?

"Whoever he was with, Vasily Timofeyevich felt shy and timid. How could he have the right to something like this?

"But that was how it was. He came home from work and saw smoke coming out of the chimney and a baby's nappy drying on the fence. He would see his wife bending down over the cradle or smiling about something as she put a bowl of borsch on the table. He would look at her hands, at her hair peeping out from beneath her kerchief. He would listen to her talking about their little one or about the neighbor's ewe. Sometimes she would go out into the storeroom and he would miss her and even feel lonely. As soon as she came back, he would feel happy again. Catching his eye, she would give him a sad, meek smile.

"Vasily Timofeyevich died first, two days ahead of little Grisha. He had been giving almost every crumb to his wife and child, and so he died before them. Probably there has been no self-sacrifice in the world greater than this -- and no despair greater than his despair as he looked at his wife, already disfigured by the dropsy of death, and at his dying son.

"Even during his last hour he felt no indignation, no anger with regard to the great and senseless thing that had been accomplished by the State and Stalin. He did not even ask, 'Why?' he did not once ask why the torment of death by starvation had been allotted to him and his wife -- meek, obedient, and hardworking as they were -- and to their quiet little one-year-old boy.

"Still in their rotten rags, the skeletons spent the winter together. The husband, his young wife, and their little son went on smiling whitely, not separated even by death.

"The next spring, after the first starlings had arrived, the representative from the district land office entered the hut, covering his mouth and nose with a handkerchief. He looked at the paraffin lamp with no glass, at the icon in the corner, at the little chest of drawers, and the cold cast-iron pots, and at the bed.

"'Two and a child,' he called out.

"The brigade leader, standing on this most holy threshold of love and meekness, nodded his head and made a mark on a scrap of paper.

"Back in the fresh air, the representative looked at the white huts and the green orchards and said, 'Take the corpses away -- but don't bother about this ruin. It's not worth trying to repair it.

"Once again the brigade leader nodded."

Saving Ritual

Why do we do it over and over again? Go to mass over and over again? Go to confession over and over again? Say our prayers over and over again? Sing this song over and over again? Fast over and over again? Praise God over and over again . . .

Ritual is our discipline, our training for the spiritual life.

"In order to be free for obedience and service one has to be free with regard to the forces through which nature steers our actions and [free with regard to] one's own spontaneous and 'natural' egoism. Without discipline we are not able to be entirely dedicated to God and justice. The elan of passion and pathos must be simultaneously broken and maintained to concentrate conscientiously on the main task. This discipline is procured by the ritual structuring of daily life." "Judaism According to Levinas" in Beyond, Adriaan Peperzak, p. 30.

The truth is, we must call to God "over and over" in prayer and in praise in order to realize His merciful grace and the freedom it brings.

Listen to Mozart's Laudate Dominum sung by Cecilia Bartoli.

Same by Carolina Ulrich.

Latin text	English translation
Laudate Dominum omnes gentes Laudate eum, omnes populi Quoniam confirmata est Super nos misericordia eius, Et veritas Domini manet in aeternum. Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper. Et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.	Praise the Lord, all nations; Praise Him, all people. For He has bestowed His mercy upon us, And the truth of the Lord endures forever. Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and forever, and for generations of generations. Amen.

Laudate Dominum are the opening words of Psalm 116 (Greek numbering) or 117 (Hebrew numbering) in Latin. As with the other Psalms, "Laudate Dominum" is concluded with a trinitarian doxology (Gloria Patri) when used in Roman rite.^[1] In Catholic churches, the Psalm may be sung after the blessing at the devotional service called Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament.^[2]

Prayer - The Role of the Son

von Balthasar continues the thread of the role of the Son in prayer:

In the Son, therefore, heaven Is open to the world.  He has opened the way from the one to the other and made exchange between the two possible, first and foremost through his Incarnation.... God's immense richness is concentrated and focused at this one spot, the humanity of Jesus Christ, so that here, in this single Person, "are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge", here "the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily", here stands the Eternally Beloved Son....  This is the meeting place where all the roads from heaven come together at the one “gate" through which every one who wishes to go to the Father must pass.  It is a meeting place, too, of all the roads which crisscross the world's history....  Man... can feel … this immense, ineluctable convergence of all paths toward God, this channeling of all human relationships to God toward the one Mediator....  The contemplative [must grasp] the fact that the Mediator’s uniqueness has been established by God himself as the counterpart of God the Father's own uniqueness.  Everything that radiates from this one Mediator, therefore, necessarily bears the stamp of their unity, a unity which always points to the Father but is at the same time universal and integrating, and hence catholic: "There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, who is above all and through all and in all" (Eph 4:4-6) Prayer, p.52-53

Bread for the World

It is our good fortune, our grace, to be invited into the mystery of "the one, eternal Child, who, from the beginning of the world, intervenes as sponsor for his alienated creatures." (prev. post)

Advent helps us to prepare for this Incarnation, and its renewal in the Eucharist, "as we wait in hope for the coming of our Savior, Lord Jesus Christ."

"The spiritual vocation of human individuals is not primarily a concern for one's own salvation or eternal happiness. That would still be a sublime form of egoism: "The soul is not a demand of immortality, but a [moral] impossibility of murdering. . .; the spirit is the very concern for a just society." Peperzak, Beyond, p. 27 (quoting Levinas).

I read that to mean that our "vocation", and the meaning of our faith, is our call to see all, and treat all, in terms of the hoped for realization of the kingdom of God for all.

According to Levinas, incarnation is in the other. "The Divine cannot manifest itself except through the neighbor. For a Jew, incarnation is neither possible, nor necessary. After all, Jeremiah himself said it: "To judge the case of the poor and miserable, is not that to know me? says the Eternal?" Jer. 22:16.

If we believe in Incarnation, its meaning must be the same: Christ as entering between the murderer and the victim. The "bread" of God is what in the here and now symbolizes and graces us to act like Christ, our brother, in this, our role as persons in this world.

Lest you think of this a theoretical enterprise (since "killing is far from my thoughts"), think about this article in yesterday's Chgo. Tribune.

Listen to Elina Garanca sing Panis Angelicus

Latin text	An English translation
Panis angelicus fit panis hominum; Dat panis coelicus figuris terminum: O res mirabilis! Manducat Dominum Pauper, servus et humilis. Te trina Deitas unaque poscimus: Sic nos tu visita, sicut te colimus; Per tuas semitas duc nos quo tendimus, Ad lucem quam inhabitas. Amen.	The angelic bread (The bread of angels) becomes the bread of men; The heavenly bread ends all prefigurations: What wonder! The Lord is eaten by a poor and humble servant. Triune God, We beg of you: visit us, just as we worship you. By your ways, lead us where we are heading, to the light in which you dwell. Amen.

Hans Urs von Balthasar on Prayer

From  Prayer, by Hans Urs von Balthasar, p. 51:

What empowers us to embrace a contemplative faith which listens, which beholds, is fundamentally grace; grace as our calling and justification by God the Father, and the resultant faculty and liberty to gaze openly into his truth made manifest.

But the manifest truth of the Father is the Son. In the Son, the Father contemplates us from before all time, and is well pleased. It is in the Son that the Father can predestine and chose us to be his children, fellow children with the one, eternal Child, who, from the beginning of the world, intervenes as sponsor for his alienated creatures. It is in him that the Father justifies us, viewing and valuing us in the context of the Son’s righteousness which pays all our debts; he ascribes the Son’s righteousness to us; he gives it to us as our very own. Finally, it is in the Son that the Father glorifies us, by permitting us to participate in the Son’s resurrection and finally, by grace, setting us at his right hand, the Son’s rightful place.

Ave Maria

In this "Advent" of waiting, a time of preparing for Christ's coming, isn't it appropriate to contemplate Mary's meditation, her "holding these things close to her heart" while awaiting the coming of her special one? For one so close to God's spirit that she could say "be it done unto me according to Thy word," would not the passion of her (and God's) son be near to her heart? And is that not why we are close to Mary, our Mother, who accompanies us in life's perils and pains? And how better expressed than in this lovely aria by Pietro Mascagni.

Listen to Ave Maria, sung by Elina Garanca.

Ave Maria, madre Santa,
Sorreggi il piè del misero che t'implora,
In sul cammin del rio dolor
E fede, e speme gl'infondi in cor.

(Hail Mary, holy Mother,
Guide the feet of the wretched one who implores thee
Along the path of bitter grief
And fill the hearts with faith and hope.)

O pietosa, tu che soffristi tanto,
Vedi, ah! Vedi il mio penar.
Nelle crudeli ambasce d'un infinito pianto,
Deh! Non m'abbandonar.

(O merciful Mother, thou who suffered so greatly,
See, ah! See my anguish.
In the cruel torment of endless weeping,
Ah! Do not abandon me.)

Ave Maria! In preda al duol,
Non mi lasciar, o madre mia, pietà!
O madre mia, pietà! In preda al duol,
Non mi lasciar, non mi lasciar.

(Hail mary! Oppressed by grief,
Do not leave me, O Mother, have mercy!
O Mother, have mercy! Oppressed by grief,
Do not leave me.)

Listen to Ave Maria sung by Angela Gheorghiu

Same sung by Kathleen Battle

Here is some information about this piece and the and the man who wrote it.

In this song I am with all who, like Mary and Joseph on their way to Bethlehem, wait in hope on Christ, whom we experience in the love of those who love Him.

The Glory of the Lord

The following quote Is taken from an essay by Louis Dupre'. In this essay Dupre' provides an overview of von Balthasar's work entitled "The Glory of the Lord".  On the topic of nature and grace the following insight is provided.

"If the modern world has closed itself to redemption, it is not because of its greater respect for nature, but because of its systematic destruction of the natural order,the very soil of grace. Reducing the natural"rightness" of things to mathematical equation, modern culture has equalized, quantified, depersonalized, and formalized human life.The full embodiment of the Christ event requires not only that it be solidly attached to the cultures that preceded and followed it, but, even more, that it plunge its roots deep in the historical soil in which it has been planted."

Our understanding of our history is essential to our Faith.

Saintliness is Primordial in the Human Being

A question was addressed to Levinas:

Q.: Somebody wrote that the ethical responsibility you speak of is abstract and devoid of concrete content. Does that seem a valid critique to you?

E.L.: I have never claimed to describe human reality in its immediate appearance, but what human depravation itself cannot obliterate: the human vocation to saintliness. I don't affirm human saintliness; I say that man cannot question the supreme value of saintliness.

In 1968, the year of questioning in and around the universities, all values were 'up for grabs,' with the exception of the value of the 'other man,' to which one was to dedicate oneself. The young people who for hours abandoned themselves to all sorts of fun and unruliness went at the end of the day to visit the 'striking Renault workers' as if to pray. Man is the being who recognizes saintliness and the forgetting of self. The 'for oneself' is always open to suspicion.

We live in a state in which the idea of justice is superimposed on that initial charity, but it is in that initial charity that the human resides; justice itself can be traced back to it. Man is not only the being who understands what being means, as Heidegger would have it, but the being who has already heard and understood the commandment of saintliness in the face of the other man. When it is said that at the origin there are altruistic instincts, there is the recognition that God has already spoken. He began to speak very early. The anthropological meaning of instinct!

In the daily Jewish liturgy, the first morning prayer says, 'Blessed art thou, O Lord, our God, King of the Universe, who giveth the cock knowledge to distinguish between day and night.' In the crowing of the cock, the first Revelation: the awakening to the light.

Desire For the Beautiful One

We naturally desire what is beautiful. But early on Plato has Diotima teach Socrates (in the Symposium) that:

"Eros cannot find rest in the beloved, whose beauty is real but limited. Desire pushes us from one desirability to another, from superficial to deeper, from lower to higher forms of beauty. If the ascent succeeds, it leads to a sudden revelation: beauty itself is none of the desirable phenomena that meet us on our journey; it is the secret toward which the entire diversity of beautiful people, things, works, institutions, and stories point as their granting origin.

"Beauty -- or the Good -- itself cannot be the summit of the entire range of good and beautiful phenomena whose qualities and degrees of splendor can be compared. It is not the highest of all, but the incomparable 'giving' to which all of them owe their goodness and beauty. It is therefore 'beyond' and 'before' as well as 'in' and 'with' all splendid persons, things, and events.

"However, we would not even have an inkling of beauty itself if we were not touched and moved and delighted by the variety of finite wonders that surround us. There is no way of reaching the Good itself directly, no possibility of bypassing the empirically given diversity of limited goods. If the Good somehow exists, it can be contacted only through and in the desiderata of the many desires that rule our practical, theoretical, and emotional involvement in the empirical world where we live.

"All of them attract and tempt us; they elicit our activities and promise us some sort of rest, but none of them can completely pacify our yearning. And yet, this world and its attractions are all we have to experience and cultivate. To be possible at all, the experience of the Good itself must therefore be an 'aspect' or 'moment' or a hidden secret of our dealings with its finite manifestations."

Peperzak, Elements of Ethics, p. 89. And so, says Peperzak, we experience the Good and evoke it in a series of negatives. "Desire is not a hunger, not a kind of greed or thirst; the ultimate Desideratum is not beautiful or good, it cannot even be said to be as an entity (not even as the highest one); although absolutely overwhelming, it cannot fulfill; it neither stills nor ends our longing because it is beyond all these, beyond being, and thus most urgent and absolute.

"The discovery of this absolute difference does not dissuade us from any attempt at reaching out to it. On the contrary, it intensifies our longing. It does not silence the voices of the finite desiderabilia that populate our universe, but rather refers us to them and their call for an appropriate response. Conspiring with our desires, they must give us a taste for a well-ordered 'economy' of desirability (a 'system' of 'values'?), which might reveal to us what it means to be in touch with the Good itself. " It is through this "erotic economy" -- the interaction between our desire for beauty and goodness and the beauty and goodness we experience, that we can, perhaps, "glimpse" the Good in its "inescapable absoluteness." Ibid.

I can glimpse a trace of an infinite Beauty, hear a whisper of an infinite Goodness, as I truly experience the finite beauty with which I am blessed. My experience is true to the extent that it directs me skyward, elevates my appreciation for the goodness and beauty I am experiencing.

I think of the lovely "Song to the Moon" in Dvorak's opera Rusalka as a way of depicting the "negative" experience of Beauty and the Good that Diotima speaks of. The moon, elusive but all-seeing, is witness to the Good's kindling of all of the "lesser" loves by which we finite beings try to light our lives.

Listen to Rene Fleming's "Song to the Moon" in "Rusalka"

"Moon high up in the sky,
you light up vast distances,
you wander through the wide, wide wold
loking into the homes of men.
Stay awhile, moon,
tell me, oh tell me where my beloved is!

"Tell him, silvery moon,
that my arms embrace him,
so that at least in his dreams he may remember me.
Shine for him in far away places, shine for him,
tell him, oh tell him who is waiting here!

"If he dreams about me,
let that remembrance waken him!
Moon, don't go away, don't go away,
moon, don't go away!"

The attention paid to the immediate beauty in the song "You are So Beautiful," seems also to elevate the appreciation to Beauty itself, the ineffable, elusive "giving" that brings beauty and goodness into being.

Listen to Joe Cocker's "You Are So Beautiful"

Listen to Billy Preston's "You Are So Beautiful"

Listen to Doris Day's "You Are So Beautiful"

Our "Other" Vocation

Levinas conceives of our relationship to others in terms of the word "substitution." In my relationship with another, I somehow substitute myself for the other. But let Levinas himself explain it:

"For me, the notion of substitution is tied to the notion of responsibility. To substitute oneself does not amount to putting oneself in the place of the other in order to feel what he feels; it does not involve becoming the other nor, if he be destitute and desperate, the courage of such a trial. Rather, substitution entails bringing comfort by associating ourselves with the essential weakness and finitude of the other; it is to bear his weight while sacrificing one's interestedness and complacency-in-being, which then turn into responsibility for the other.

"In human existence, there is, as it were, interrupting or surpassing the vocation of being, another vocation: that of the other, his existing, his destiny. Here, the existential adventure of the neighbor would matter more to the I than does its own, and would thus posit the I straightaway as responsible for this alterity in its trials, as if the upsurge of the human within the economy of being overturned ontology's meaning and plot. All of the culture of the human seems to me to be oriented by this new "plot," in which the in-itself of a being persisting in its being is surpassed in the gratuity of being outside-of-oneself, for the other, in the act of sacrifice or the possibility of sacrifice, in holiness."

From "Responsibility and Substitution" in Is It Righteous To Be? at pp. 228-29.

Listen to Joan Osborne's "One of Us"

Listen to Joan Osborne "What Becomes of the Broken-hearted"

Listen to Joan Osborne in "I'll Be Around"

Thanks!

Martin Buber, in a letter to friends, tried to describe to his well-wishers his gratitude at reaching the ripe age of 85. Here is what he wrote:

"Once again the hour for uncommon gratitude has come for me. I have much to give thanks for. For me, this was a time to meditate once more upon the word thank [remercier]. Its ordinary meaning is generally understood, but it does not lend itself to a description that would define it unequivocally.

"It belongs to a category of words whose original meaning is multiple. It thus awakens a variety of associations in various languages.

"In German and English, the verb for 'remercier,' which is danken and thank, is related to denken and think, in the sense of having in one's thoughts, remembering someone. The person who says, 'I thank you,' 'Ich danke dir,' assures the other person that he or she will be kept in the memory, and more specifically in the good memory, that of friendship and joy. The eventuality of a different sort of memory isn't wanted.

"The sense in Hebrew is different. There the verb form hodot means first to come in support of someone, and only later, to thank. He who thanks someone rallies in support of the one thanked. He will now -- and from now on -- be his ally. This includes the idea of memory, but more: it proceeds from within the soul toward the world to become act and event. To come in support of someone in this way is to confirm him in his existence.

"I propose to vow a thankful memory and to come in support of all who have sent me their good wishes for my eighty-fifth birthday. -Jerusalem, Feb. 1963."

From Levinas, Proper Names, pp. 38-39.

At Mass today, Fr. Don quoted Meister Eckhart, a 13th Century mystic, who said, "If 'thank you' is the only prayer you said, it would be enough."

Let me add the Spanish word, gracias. Grace too is a gift, for which we freely give thanks by giving back an appreciation, a grace returned.

What a blessing to experience gratitude. To be grateful is to be present to the gift that is our life, our family, our friends, our community, nation, world, artists and scientists, and all who help to support us, and us them, in this extraordinary world. For that I give thanks!

Listen to ABBA's "Thank You For the Music"

Listen to the Beatles' "Thank You Girl"

Another thank you song.

Johnny Cash's "Thanksgiving Song"

Johnny Cash's "Thank You Prayer"

Mary Chapin Carpenter "Thanksgiving"

Heaven on Earth

Man can avert his gaze from God, he can neglect to give his life the "splendor" of Christ's manifest glory; by doing so he will show that his contemplation of the glory was not serious enough to be enduring.  On the other hand the Word of God speaks of the Father's world of eternity being open and accessible to the believer, and we must not water this down, as if this world were merely in the future, merely promised, merely spiritual, and not also present , realized and of the body.  He it must not be presented merely as something for which we strive (aspiring from nature to super nature, from the earth to heaven), for it is no less true that it is the basis of all our living and loving.  Grace, the foundation of everything, is also the foundation of our living at the natural level, at the level of the world.  The believer loves the earth because it is bathed in the radiance which comes from a heaven which has already been laid open. He is able to do this because he must.

Prayer, von Balthasar p. 50-51

Replacing Emotion With Hope

I have always been suspicious of emotion. The reason is, I suppose, that while it is fun to ride the crest of a wave of emotion, the wave finally ebbs and the motivation it carries ebbs too. I wonder, can I can continue on when my enthusiasm fails? And if not, as is often the case, wasn't the enthusiasm really false from the beginning, an emotional froth ultimately without substance?

This problem is relevant to the disponibilite that Gabriel Marcel identifies as the hallmark of the human person. How, he asks, can I remain available to others through time, i.e. past the time when my emotions buoy me up?

Marcel wrote a book on this question, Creative Fidelity. In it (at p.162) he explains that availability is maintained by an active and creative willing to be available, a willing of myself to remain open to the influx of the presence of the other.

The fact is that when I commit myself, I grant in principle that the commitment will not again be put into question. And it is clear that this active volition not to question something again, intervenes as an essential element in the determination of what in fact will be the case. . . it bids me to invent a certain modus vivendi . . . it is rudimentary form of creative fidelity.

Marcel believes that fidelity is creative when I alter or innovate my way of living in order to preserve my availability to the other. In the words of the Stanford Encyclopedia on Marcel, creative fidelity "creates the self in order to meet the demands of fidelity." My infidelity, my failure to "be there," I see as not the other's fault, but my own, and I try to correct it by changing myself.

Where does the strength to continue to create myself and meet the demands of fidelity come from? What buoys me, Marcel says, is hope, not emotion. Hope is a trust in what does not depend on me, a consciousness of something greater than myself, in which I trust.

Hope consists in asserting that there is at the heart of being, beyond all data, beyond all inventories and all calculations, a mysterious principle which is in connivance with me.

The Philosophy of Existentialism, p. 32. Hope is not stoicism, not a passive acceptance, but an "active patience," something that has kinship with willing rather than emotion and desiring. I place hope in a being greater than me, for an outcome that is not brought about by me, but by that greater power. Hope and humility go together. The flush or flash of pride, often at the core of emotion, is antithetical to it.

And so my desire, in my relationships, is to replace my addiction to emotion by a dependence on an active Hope, a Hope that ultimately rests in Providence, as we all do.

Christ the King

The Kingship of Christ is not a kingship of power. It's majesty is in its holiness, its concern for the other. The readings depict Christ our King as a shepherd, and members of his kingdom are, in the words of Matthew 25, those who see our Lord in our fellow human beings. At the mass I went to (in Wisconsin) the homilist thoughtfully contrasted Christ's domain with His rejection of the temptations to power offered by the devil.

Levinas cites Matthew 25 as showing the Christian recognition of our core human responsibility: to answer the call of the other for our care and consideration. Here is what he says in an interview in Is It Righteous to Be? at p. 52:

"Q.: Concretely, how is the responsibility for the other translated?

"E.L.: The other concerns me in all his material misery. It is a matter, eventually, of nourishing him, of clothing him. It is exactly the biblical assertion: Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give drink to the thirsty, give shelter to the shelterless. The material side of man, the material life of the other, concerns me and, in the other, takes on for me an elevated signification and concerns my holiness. Recall in Mattew 25, Jesus' 'You have hunted me, you have pursued me.' 'When have we hunted you, when have we pursued you?' the virtuous ask Jesus. Reply: when you 'refused to feed the poor,' when ou hunted down the poor, when you were indiffernt to him! As if, with regard to the other, I had responibilities starting from eating and drinking. And as if the other whom I hunted were equivalent to a hunted God. This holiness is perhaps but the holiness of a social problem. All the problems of eating and drinking, insofar as they concern the other, become sacred."

Levinas goes on to say:

"Ethically I cannot say that the other does not concern me. The political order -- institutions and justice -- relieve this incessant responsibility, but for the political order, for the good political order, we are still responsible. If one thinks this to the limit, one can say that I am responsible for the death of the other. I cannot leave him alone to die, even if I cannot stop it. This is how I have always interpreted the 'Thou shalt not kill.' 'Thou shall not kill' does not signify merely the interdiction against pulnging a knife into the breast of the neighbor. Of course, it signifies that, too. But so many ways of being comport a way of crushing the other. No doubt I cite the Bible too much. Let us cite Pascal's admirable formula: 'This is my place in the sun, the usurpation of the whole earth begins here.' In this sentence of Pascal, by the simple claiming of a place in the sun, I have already usurped the earth."

Our homilist didn't mention Matthew 25 in his exhortation to recognize Christ as King in our lives. But Matthew 25, as Levinas explains, is central to understanding what Christ's kingship means.

Listen to "Servant Song"

Listen to "You Are My Life" (World Youth Day 2011)

Listen to "Servant Song" (World Youth Day 2008)

Listen to Songs of World Youth Days.

I'm Your Man

How does one describe the attitude of someone oriented to others?
According to Gabriel Marcel, it is that of availability, disponibilite in French.

As against an egoistic desire, or fascination, "what I consider the basic characteristic of the person . . . [is] an aptitude to give oneself to anything which offers, and to bind oneself by the gift. Again, it means to transform circumstances into opportunities, we might even say favors, thus participating in the shaping of our own destiny and marking it with our seal." Homo Viator, p.23 "The Ego and its Relation to Others." See also Stanford Encyl. Philos. article.

I've always thought it important to accept invitations, and to extend them. Our ability to do this, to accept and extend an open hand, is a measure of our availability. The invitation is not always pleasant. As the founder of "40 Days For Life" in a speech I heard told his story of his growing involvement in the pro-life movement, his constant refrain was "I didn't want to do it" but "I did it anyway." Answering the call, accepting the invitation, is often hard.

How available are we? I think of Leonard Cohen's song, "I'm Your Man". A man, in love, says to his love, I will be whatever you want me to be, love you how you want me to love you, because all I want is to love you, to do your will. I come to do your will. Availability is humble, self-less. It doesn't pose but is disposed, doesn't except but accepts.

John Paul II at the Catholic University during one of his visits to the U.S. was confronted by some unhappy nuns who felt women "should be included in all the ministries of the Church" (including presumably the priesthood). The pope reminded the sisters of their relationship to Christ.

"Yet far more important than your love for Christ is Christ's love for you. You have been called by him, made a member of his Body, consecrated in a life of the evangelical counsels, and destined by him to have a share in the mission that Christ has entrusted to the Church: his own mission of salvation. . .

"Your service in the Church is, then, an extension of Christ, to whom you have dedicated your life . . . . And so your life must be characterized by a complete availability; a readiness to serve as the needs of the Church require, a readiness to give public witness to the Church whom you love. . . ." From Witness to Hope, p. 353.

One of John Paul II's core beliefs came from Gaudium et Spes, section 24: "Jesus, when he prayed to the Father 'that all may be one . . . as we are one' (Jn. 17:21-22) opened up vistas closed to human reason. For He implied a certain likeness between the union of the divine Persons, and in the union of God's sons in truth and charity. This likeness reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself."

Open hands . . . the posture of Mary, of Mary's Son; it is ours . . . in communion.

Listen to Leonard Cohen's, "I'm Your Man"

Some other Leonard Cohen songs:

Listen to Leonard Cohen's, "Dance Me to the End of Love"

Listen to Leonard Cohen's, "If it Be Your Will"

Listen to Leonard Cohen's, "By the Rivers Dark"

Listen to Leonard Cohen's, "Hallelujah"

Listen to Leonard Cohen's "The Story of Isaac"

Listen to Leonard Cohen's "In My Secret Life"

Listen to Leonard Cohen's "Love Itself"

Listen to Leonard Cohen's "There Ain't No Cure For Love"

Listen to Leonard Cohen's "Here It Is"

Listen to Leonard Cohen's "The Future"

Listen to Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows"

Listening . . . for Another

Guissani writes, "The 'I,' the human being, is that level of nature in which nature becomes aware of not being made by itself. . .experiences its own contingency." The Religious Sense, p. 106. Elsewhere he says that this experience of dependency is the root of prayer, for it leads us to look for another.

Emmanual Levinas, in his book Proper Names (at p.5) writes: "But already immediately after the First World War Gabriel Marcel, in his Metaphysical Journal, challenged 'the classical idea, the eminent value of autarkia, or personal self-sufficiency.'

'The perfect is not what is sufficient unto itself -- or at any rate that perfection is the perfection of a system, not of a being. On what condition can the relationship between a being and what it needs represent a spiritual value? It seems there must be reciprocity, an awakening. Only a relationship of being to being can be called spiritual . . . What counts here is the spiritual exchange between beings; here it is not a question of respect but of love.'

'Here being is not consciousness of self; it is relation to the other than self, and awakening. And the other than self -- is that not the Other [Autri]? And love means, before all else, the welcoming of the other as thou. "

It seems that when we experience ourselves as we really are, as incomplete, we have a hope of awakening, listening to another, and loving. For incompleteness is a lack. Is the other "for use" to complete my incompleteness? No, but to overcome the burden of solitude that autarchy delivers. My "home" is not by myself, but with others, in the absolute Other, God.

And in listening to the other, I can hear the call of vocation.

"For each Christian, God has an Idea which fixes his place within the membership of the Church: this Idea is unique and personal, embodying for each his appropriate sanctity. . . The Christian's supreme aim is to transform his life into this Idea of himself secreted in God, this 'individual law' freely promulgated for him by the pure grace of God."

From Balthasar, Therese of Lisieux: The Story of a Mission, at p.p. xii-xiii. Quoted from Ratzinger's Faith by Tracey Rowland, Ch. 5, "The Structure of Communion," p. 90.

There is freedom and fulfillment, responding to the spirit of grace!

Listen to Roxette sing "Listen To Your Heart" (hang in through the ad)

Listen to Carrie Underwood sing "Do You Hear What I Hear?"

Listen to the Seekers sing "Calling Me Home"

Asleep?

Yesterday's second reading from 1 Thes 5 ends:

"Therefore, let us not sleep as the rest do,
but let us stay alert and sober."

How does one stay awake, alert and sober?

Levinas has some advice:

"Q.: Let us imagine, EL, that a student who is about to graduate were to ask your definition of philosophy. What would you tell him?

E.L.: I would say to him that philosophy permits man to interrogate himself about what he says and about what one says to oneself in thinking. No longer to let oneself be swayed or intoxicated by the rhythm of words and the generality that they designate. but to open oneself to the uniqueness of the unique in the real, that is to say, to the uniqueness of the other. That is to say, in the final analysis, to love. To speak truly, not as one sings; to awaken; to sober up; to undo one's refrain. Already the philosopher Alain taught us to be on guard against everything that in our purportedly lucid civilization comes to us from the 'merchants of sleep.' Philosophy as insomnia, as a new awakening at the heart of the self-evidence which already marks the awakening, but which is still or always a dream.

Q.: Is it important to have insomnia?

E.L.: Awakening is, I believe, that which is proper to man. The search, on the part of the one who has been awakened, for a new sobering, more profound, philosophical. The encounter with texts which result from the conversations between Socrates and his interlocutors calls us to wake up, but so too does the encounter with the other man.

Q.: Is it the otther who renders one a philosopher?

E.L.: In a certain sense. The encounter with the other is the great experience, the grand event. The encounter with the other is not reducible to the acquisition of a supplementary knowledge. Certainly I can never totally grasp the other, but the responsibility on his behalf -- in which language originates -- and the sociality with him goes beyond knowledge, even if our Greek ancestors were circumspect on this point.

Q.: We live in a society of the image, of sound, of the spectacle, in which there is little place for a step back, for reflection. If this were to accelerate, would not our society lose humanity?

E.L.: Absolutely. I have no nostalgia for the primitive. Whatever be the human possibilities that appear there -- they must be stated. Though there is a danger of verbalism, language, which is a call to the other, is also the essential modality of the 'self-distrust' that is proper to philosophy. I don't wish to denounce the image. But I contend that in the audiovisual domain there is considerable distraction. It is a form of dreaming which plunges us into and maintains the sleep of which we were just talking."

From Is It Righteous To Be, pp. 234-35.

Listen to Bach's Sleepers Awake.

Same, Switched On

Same, Swingle Singers.

And when we wake up?
Otis Redding: Try a Little Tenderness

Tenting

The journey to where? and for what? To find God, but also to find ourselves, it seems.

Jean Wahl, a French philosopher, said this about the itinerant life, that is, a life seeking transcendence:

"'Man is always beyond himself.' This is not the designation of an ecstasy in which one's identity would be lost. 'An experience that disturbs or exalts profoundly,' Wahl was to write in the last lines of his last book, referring to that beyond by height and depth. But he goes on: 'an experience that, once the distance toward it has been crossed, gives itself, and gives ourselves, to ourselves.'" Levinas, Outside the Subject, p. 76.

I think of confession, for in that movement of going beyond pat existence through disclosure of the truth about ourselves, we discover our real self, and can start to travel toward it . . . tents in tow!


Listen to "Travelin Man" 50 years old!

Vaughn Williams "Vagabond"

Origen

In his book, “My Work In Retrospect”, von Balthasar shows his high regard for Origen. He states that in Origen “we find the most logically consistent theology of the patristic age …an almost inexhaustible source of spiritual and theological stimulus for all later Christian thinking”.

He undertook to write a collection “Origen Spirit & Fire: A Thematic Anthology of His Writings”. In his introduction he states, “None of the great Fathers … could escape an almost magical fascination for the ‘man of steel’ as they called him. Some were completely swept away.”

Here then is a sample from the Prologue.

“How fair are your houses, O Jacob, your tents, O Israel” (Num 24:5) … A house is a solidly grounded, permanent thing, set on a definite plot of ground. Tents, on the other hand, serve as a shelter for those who are always on the road, always moving, and who have not yet come to the end of their wandering. Thus ... Israel … stands for those who labor for wisdom and knowledge. … But they who labor for wisdom and knowledge, because there is no end to that task – for what could ever put a limit on God’s wisdom? Indeed, the more one enters into it, the deeper one goes, and the more one investigates, the more inexpressible and inconceivable it become, for God’s wisdom is incomprehensible and immeasurable – thus … he admires their “tents” in which they continually wander and make progress; and the more progress they make the more does the road to be travelled stretch out to the measureless. And so, contemplating in the spirit these progressions, he calls them the ‘tents of Israel.’ And true it is, when we make some progress in knowledge and gain some experience in such things … a certain insight and recognition of the spiritual mysteries, the soul rests there … as in a tent. But when it begins to make fresh sense again of what it finds there and moves on to other insights, it pushes on with folded tent, so to speak, to a higher place and sets itself up there, pegged down by strong conclusions; and again the soul finds in the place another spiritual meaning … and so the soul seems always to be pulled on toward the goal that lies ahead …. For once the soul has been struck by the fiery arrow of knowledge, it can never again sink into leisure and take its rest, but it will always be called onward from the good to the better and from the better to the higher.”

At times it seems that our conversations about things of the spirit go on and on and in the end only amount to so much babel. Both, Balthasar, in his prodigious output and Origen in his passion in the pursuit of knowledge, inspire me to treasure my restlessness and continue to fold up my tent and move on to another place.

Eye to I with Holiness

From an interview with Levinas: ("On the Usefulness of Insomnia", from Is it Righteous to Be? at pp. 235-36.)

Q. What is the ethical?

E.L. It is the recognition of holiness. To explain: the fundamental trait of being is the preoccupation that each particular being has with his being. Plants, animals, all living things strive to exist. For each one it is the struggle for life. And is not matter, in its essential hardness, closure and shock? In the human, lo and behold, the possible apparition of an ontological absurdity. The concern for the other breaches concern for the self. This is what I call holiness. Our humanity consists in being able to recognize this priority of the other. Now you can understand the first formulations of our conversation and why I have been so interested in language. Language is always addressed to the other, as if one could not think without already being concerned for the other. Always already my thinking is a saying. In the profundity of thinking, the for-the-other is articulated, or, said otherwise, goodness is articulated, love for the other, which is more spiritual than any science.

Q. This attention to the other, can it be taught?

E.L. In my view it is awakened in the face of the other.

Q.: Is the other about whom you speak the wholly Other, God?

E.L.: It is there in this priority of the other man over me that, before my admiration for creation, well before my search for the first cause of the universe, God comes to mind. When I speak of the other I use the term face. The face is that which is behind the facade and underneath "the face one puts on things." To see or to know the face is already to deface the other. The face in its nudity is the weakness of a unique being exposed to death, but at the same time the enunciation of an imperative which obliges me not to let it alone. This obligation is the first word of God. For me, theology begins in the face of the neighbor. The divinity of God is played out in the human. God descends in the "face" of the other. To recognize God is to hear his commandment "thou shalt not kill," which is not only a prohibition against murder, but a call to an incessant responsibility with regard to the other. It is to be unique, as if I were elected to this responsibility, which gives me as well the possibility of recognizing myself as unique and irreplaceable, of saying "I." Conscious that in each of my human endeavors -- from which the other is never absent -- I respond to his existence as a unique being."

Listen to Renee Fleming sing "You'll never walk alone"

Election in Christ

The call of Christ is to be like Him as he is like his Father. How do we respond to Christ's call? Adriaan Peperzak has some valuable insights.

"Unity with God is reached as a likeness with the Son, that is, through uniformity with the perfect image of the Good. This correspondence can be indicated by the words cited above from Jer. 22:16 ["He did justice to the poor and unhappy, and that benefited him. This is surely what is called to know me, says the Eternal."] Since the goodness toward one's neighbor includes giving one's own life and thus also one's own death for the Other, it can be clarified through Christian metaphors in which the cross has become the central image. The God of whom it is said that he is semper major, greater than every reality that can be thought, reveals himself as semper minor: as a man humiliated unto death because he did not refuse service, but rather became completely one with it.

"In our history, we have been confronted with the terrible fact that Christians, whose election implies the suffering and death of Christ -- a suffering and death which they likewise had to fulfill -- again and again imposed suffering and death on Jews. How is it possible that we have not recognized the Passion in the persecution of God's people, and why is it so difficult for Jews to recognize the same Passion in Jesus?

"The encounter with Christ is an encounter with the poor, the leprous, the foreign, the oppressed, the persecuted, the humiliated, and the marginal. The presence of Christ is, as the presence of God, essentially hidden. The encounter with a neighbor is at the same time a memory of the Lord's passing by and an anticipation of his coming. Christ does not reveal himself through appearances, but in the figure of the needy. The poor come "in the name of the Lord." Christ therefore comes as the always present exception that disturbs the order of powers and authorities. Recognition of this presence shows understanding of the Spirit and obedience to God's Word." "The Significance of Levinas for Christian Thought," in The Quest For Meaning.

See also the Pope's address this fall in Germany.

Listen to "Holy Is His Name"

Listen to "Here I Am"

Listen to "Servant Song"

Video "Servant Song" based on Lord of the Rings

On Eagles' Wings

The Christian "good news" answers the perennial question, "How can I live?", "How can I be free?". How to understand that answer and live it, is a challenge always before us.

The "Judeo-Christian" idea to consider is that freedom is not "doing what I want" but to do what I am called to, or elected to, do. Responsibility precedes freedom. I find my freedom and my identity in being responsible. Not in the "leisure" of being free from commitment, but in responding to a call and in responding discovering that I am a unique "someone." Christ says, I come to do the will of my Father. I am my Father's will. Christ walks to Golgotha freely, responding to his Father's will.

Levinas and Rieff, two Jews, help us understand the Jewish Christ's (and our) authentic calling.

Levinas says that "who I am" and "who God is" are answered in our experience of others. "In the innocence of our daily lives, the face of the other signifies above all a demand. The face requires you, calls you outside. And already there resounds the word from Sinai, 'thou shalt not kill,' which signifies 'you shall defend the life of the other.' An order of God, or an echo, or the mystery of that order, 'you will answer for the other!' It is the very articulation of the love of the other. You are indebted to someone from whom you have not borrowed a thing: a debt that precedes all borrowing. And you are responsible, the only one who could answer, the non-interchangeable, and the unique one. Within responsibility there is election, the original constitution of the I, and the revelation of its ethical meaning. I am chosen.

"Ricour would say to me, 'Your 'I' has no esteem for itself.' One thus reproaches one's freedom for losing itself in the burden of responsibility for oneself and others; and concern for others can, of course, appear as a form of subjection, as an infinite subjection. But is freedom -- which asserts itself against natural finalities, against what is natural in nature -- measured against its leisure? Is freedom not that which is most remarkable in the mortal, finite, and interchageable being who then raises himself to his unique identity as a unique being? This is the meaning of election. To be aware of it, to be able to say 'I,' is to be born to a new autonomy." Is it Righteous to Be? at pp. 192-93.

Philip Rieff also talks about Jewish election. "Because a credal vanguard [the Jews] is chosen, it cannot avoid being carried away, tward ends it would not choose. This is the point of the great 'upon the eagles' wings' speech in Exodus 19:4: 'You yourselves have seen what I did in Egypt. I bore you upon eagles' wings and brought you unto me.' 'Here we have,' concludes Martin Buber, 'election, deliverance and education, all in one.' The Jews were far from eagles. Moreover, having been so carried up out of slavery [into freedom], Israel had a debt to discharge, the debt incurred by its election to credal nationhood. This is a very special debt-ridden superiority. The only way to discharge this debt was to confirm their election as 'a kingdom of priests and a holy people' [Exodus 19:6]. This is more a sign of their debt than of any innate superiority. A credal vanguard can only work to become what it is appointed to be; the terms of its appointment give it a partial and particular character from which is can escape only by suffering the supreme punishment of that escape: the loss of its identity, the achievement of being nothing." Charisma, p. 14-15.

Our freedom, then, is found in answering the call or demand, from God, the divine, the transcendent other. In our free response to the call we are constituted, find our "I" and freedom. Else we achieve only "being nothing."

Listen to "On Eagles' Wings."

Listen to "Here am I, Lord."

Listen to "Make Me a Servant."