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."

I Am My Prayer

We talked at our weekly cursio 4th day conversation about why we pray when our prayer should be to ask that "God's will be done." I read somewhere that the idea of petitionary prayer is transformative, i.e., we pray to ask that we be conformed to God's will. I read an interview with Levinas in which he explained the "transformative" nature of prayer in a profound way. Is it Righteous to Be? p.256-57.

Levinas, a Jew, was born in Lithuania. He said that as a child there, there was no connection between Christianity and Judaism. He knew about Christianity only from stories about the Inquisition, the Crusades, the suffering of the Marrano Jews in Spain.

When he moved to France he had a more substantial contact with Christians, and one formative event was attending the Christian funeral of his friend's small child. "It was still some time before May 1940, and yet already everything was in question." (Meaning the uncertainty of the status of the Jews was very much in the air.)

While in the Church of St. Augustine at the funeral he happened to see "a fresco of Hannah bringing the small Samuel into the temple. It was my world! Especially Hannah! A completely extraordinary figure of a woman, with her prayer, the misunderstanding with Eli ["Are you drunk?"], and her answer: 'No, my Lord, I am a woman of sorrowful spirit. I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but have poured out my soul before the Lord" (1 Samuel 1:15). She speaks the authentic prayer of the heart, the prayer of the soul. It is a concrete relation, the mise-en-scene of a soul. Hannah is this prayer." (emphasis added)

Prayer, then, is a "concrete relation," a "mise-en-scene," meaning that prayer is what situates us and pulls everything together into a meaning in the "drama" of our lives. Prayer is extremely practical, both an experience and "practice" in which we relate to God all that pains us, all that we find joy in, all that we yearn for. "Hannah is this prayer." Through prayer, we can and do become our prayer. We are our prayer.

This it seems, is what Paul means when he says, "I no longer live, but Christ lives in me." Gal.2:20.

And what Thomas More means when he says: "Only God is loved right throughout and that's my-self."

Hannah's song of thanksgiving to God for having heard her earlier prayers, is full of joy and confidence and has much in common with Mary's magnificat. Hannah is, reputedly, the model for Jewish prayer. You can read Hannah's song of thanksgiving here. You can listen to first Samuel here.

Falling with Christ

Lest anyone think the prior posts on falling leaves and the season of autumn have nothing to do with anything, here is a direct quote from our reading of this last Saturday!

"Blessed are the pure of heart; they shall see God."

"On Jesus' lips [], these words acquire a new depth. For it belongs to his nature that he sees God, that he stands face-to-face with him, in permanent interior discourse -- in a relation of Sonship. In other words, this Beatitude is profoundly Christological. We will see God when we enter into the 'mind of Christ' (Phil.2:5). Purification of heart occurs as a consequence of following Christ, of becoming one with him. 'It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me' (Gal 2:20). And at this point something new comes to light: The ascent to God occurs precisely in the descent of humble service, in the descent of love, for love is God's essence, and is thus the power that truly purifies man and enables him to perceive God and to see him. . . . 'He humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God highly exalted him' (Phil. 2:6-9).

"These words mark a decisive turning point in the history of mysticism. They indicate what is new. . . . God descends, to the point of death on the Cross. And precisely by doing so, he reveals himself in his true divinity. We ascend to God by accompanying him on this descending path."

Jesus of Nazareth, p. 95.

Another Autumn Song:

Vivaldi-From Four Seasons

The Pathos of a Falling Leaf

Here is a paragraph I read that helps me understand what I think the poem and tune "Autumn Leaves" (see post below) can teach us about Christian "attunement" (how we get into sync with God and the world):

"Among the phenomena, you and all other persons constitute the most emphatic and enigmatic presence of the hidden 'Presence' that challenges me 'in' and 'as' the (visible and invisible) universe. Your facing me is the most impressive way in which God's blinding obscurity and thundering silence calls for an appropriate response. Amazingly, the most accurate revelation of that Presence occurs in the humiliation of innocent persons who accept their passion as the sacrament of the God's compassion. The human history of this compassion is the phenomenon in which God's givenness crosses the boundary between phenomenal self-sufficiency and the dimension of a very para-doxical attunement.

"This attunement is a pathos. The Christian tradition of 'spiritual' life has described it through a constellation of words like 'acceptance,' 'confidence,' 'patience,' 'kenosis,' 'humility,' 'sacrifice,' and 'mortification.' Though overuse has worn them out, these words may still be reanimated, on the condition that we think their content as inseparably united with gratitude, loyalty toward the earth, enjoyment of life, and hopeful reaching out to the always already present and still desired proximity of the hidden Speech."

Adriaan Peperzak, "Affective Theology/ Theological Affectivity," in Between Philosophy and Theology, p. 167.

Another Autumn Song:
Justin Hayward -Forever Autumn

A Leaf in Fall

Its yellow blade hugs my pane,
Showing age spots, midrib, vein,
Wanly to me waving?

Caught between the ground and tree
No more sense of life as free
No more summer preening.

Quietly I wave "Goodbye",
Thanking it for pausing nigh.
Adieu till spring's greening!

Humbly it awaits the wind
To carry it to its end;
Model for my living.

Some wistful music celebrating this season:

Autumn Leaves - Instrumental Version

Autumn Leaves- Andy Williams

Autumn Leaves - Doris Day

Autumn Leaves-Chet Akins

Autumn Leaves-Natalie Cole

Simon and Garfunkel - Sounds of Silence

Trips to Another Land

Note: I wrote this for our TEACH newsletter:

To be touched by another is to be invited out of ourselves into a bigger and nobler world.

It was high good fortune for me when, owing to the invitation of a law school friend (our executive director), I traveled for the first time to Guatemala in 2004. My first impressions of that country are still with me: a visit to Camino Seguro at the Guatemala City dump; the beautiful old City of Antigua; the chicken buses and precarious roadways we traveled on to reach the lush interior of the country; the welcoming faces of little children looking up at us, lightened by the sun; the different languages I heard that drew a veil over comprehension.

Our goal then, as now, has been to assist in the education of Mayan children, a goal that I have embraced owing to my own gratitude for schooling, and the freedom and opportunity it has made possible for me. But most meaningful and touching for me has been meeting many kindred spirits in our sister land to the south, fellow human beings who are confronting the same basic life struggles and strivings as we face here in the more northern climes of America, and who are buoyed up by the same hopes and aspirations, the same dreams for a better life.

I think of Ingrid Perez, Olgar Pop, Brother Chico, Sister Margaret, Padre Javier, Bishop Penate, Enrique Xol Rax, Padre Sam, and the many little (and not so little) children I have met, including my own sponsored children. I can truly say that my life has been widened and ennobled by the many folks I have met and friendships I have made.

With each visit my sense of the mystery of Guatemala changes. I no longer have an incipient anxiety in entering this country the size of Ohio. My rudimentary Spanish gives me confidence (though perhaps it shouldn’t in light of the times I am asked why my Spanish isn’t getting better!). And I see improvements in Guatemala’s infrastructure and economy each time I visit.

But my strongest impression in the many conversations we have with our friends there (revolving around issues of education but touching on many things), is the almost impossible difficulty of comprehending the complex challenges these people face, and the need for us to work hard to listen so we have some hope of understanding. My goal is to be such a listening friend, and my prayer is that God may use me (and us) in some small way to realize His plan.

When I attempt to express the meaning of my experience, I am in the end left pretty much at a loss for words. What I can say, and do say, to those who ask is: “Come and see!”

To Be Mastered by Truth is the Yoke and Grace of Freedom

Philip Rieff writes, "Freedom is always and everywhere a change of masters." The Crisis of the Officer Class, p. 128.

We have a name for our ultimate master in our finite and temporal world: "truth." Truth is an emblem of the transcendent, to which we owe obeisance, for our own good, and it is what makes freedom real.

The image of freedom as arbitrary selection from a smorgasboard of choices is so strong, that we need a strong corrective to understand what freedom truly is, and to conform ourselves to it.

Robert Sokolowski's work has largely been devoted to describing how human persons can live a life mastered by truth. Our rationality does in fact present us with alternatives, but that fact does not go far enough. The question is what choice do we make? The answer is, the best choice, one to realize our good. And our good is only known through our deliberation, our rational capacity, which can (but doesn't always) uncover the truth of things. The root of freedom is found in truth.

"If we love the truth, then when we attempt to determine the future we will be moved to deliberate truthfully, that is, to consider carefully all the realistic alternatives, including those we may find distasteful, and to choose the alternative that is truly the best, all things considered, here and now.

"Our freedom is a function of our veracity; freedom does not mean arbitrary selection, but adherence to what is best. Freedom is wanting what is truly good, not imposing what we want. " Phenomenology of the Human Person, p.27.

The concept is simple enough, it seems. If I am faced with an array of choices, some of which, if taken, will lead to disaster, and others to happiness, it stands to reason that I had better know the difference.

"The truth will set you free," says the old proverb, which is true, for truth is needed to choose what is truly best, the definition of true freedom.

In this way we are linked and bound to God: acting in truth, which is His, and acting freely under this tutelage.

More and Henry: Paradox of Freedom

Giussani asks how it is that "man has this right, this absoluteness whereby even if the whole world were to move in one direction he has something within which gives him the right to stay where he is?" The Religious Sense, p. 91.

The only way to understand this, says Giussani, is in terms of something beyond biology. If we are solely a product of the biology of the mother and father, "a mere brief instant in which all the flux of innumerable prior reactions produced this ephemeral fruit," then "we really would be talking about something ridiculous, something cynically absurd when we use expressions such as 'freedom,' 'human rights,' the very word 'person.' Freedom, like this, without any foundation, is flatus vocis, just pure sound, dispersed by the wind." Ibid.

"In only one case is . . . this single human being, free from the entire world, free, so that the world together and even the total universe cannot force him into anything. . . . This is when we assume that this point is not totally the fruit of the biology of the mother and father . . . but rather when it possess a direct relationship with the infinite, the origin of all of the flux of the world. . .". Ibid.

"So here is the paradox: freedom is dependence upon God. . . . [O]nce we were not, now we are, and tomorrow will no longer be: thus we depend. And either we depend upon the flux of our material antecedents, and are consequently the slaves of the powers that be, or we depend upon What lies at the orgin of the movement of all things, beyond them, which is to say, God."

"Freedom identifies itself with dependence upon God at a human level: it is a recognized and lived dependence, while slavery, on the other hand, denies or censures this relationship. Religiosity is the lived awareness of this relationship. Freedom comes through religiosity."

"It is for this reason that the powerful, whoever they might be . . . are tempted to hate true religiosity unless they are profoundly religious themselves. . . . [A]uthentic religiosity in the other . . . limits, [] challenges possession." Ibid, p. 92.

This explains both More and Henry, and, seemingly, many of the disputes between religion and the state today.

A Free Man?

At our Red Mass this weekend, Bishop Conlon stated that he believed our current culture is "individualistic," meaning that people largely insist on taking their own path on moral issues, uninfluenced by a sense of "what God wants." An ethic of "anything goes" pervades, which many people think of as freedom. Freedom is the inviting smorgasboard of choices surveyed by a person with a hearty appetite!

Was Thomas More free? I would make a case that he was, infinitely more so than the vast majority of the English who marched in lockstep with Henry VIII in his quixotic journey to again marry church and state. Robert Bolt, in his play Man For All Seasons, has Thomas More say that there was something inside of him that made him unable to go along, not free to accept Henry's edict.

What was that quality? According to Philip Rieff (Crisis of the Officer Class, p.8), "More's self takes its identity -- he is himself -- from the one fixed fact of his life. 'Only God is loved right throughout and that's my-self.' The credal self can neither erase nor cross certain boundaries. More, too, has an appetite for evading a boundary issue. But his self is identified in a way that restricts his room for legal maneuver. 'I will not give in [to the Henrisian state political will] because I oppose it, not my pride, not my spleen nor any other of my appetites oppose it, but I do -- I, I.' For what it delivers, this passage should be read aloud."

Free or unfree? Gabriel Marcel said, in Man Against Mass Society, p. 23, that "a man cannot be free or remain free, except in the degree to which he remains linked with that which transcends him. . ." What transcended More was his relationship to God, with an absolute that rendered him free of the powers that be. Only in the truth is freedom found.

Without true freedom man is merely "busy", as Czeslaw Milosz said in a poem:

Man has been given to understand
that he lives only by the grace of those in power.
Let him therefore busy himself sipping coffee, catching butterflies.
Who cares for the Republic will have his right hand cut off.

Quoted by Guissani in The Religious Sense at p. 90.

We must bind ourselves to an absolute in order not to be "moved" by the powers that be. To be so moved is slavery, but to be bound by something infinitely greater than ourselves is the mark of a free man!