What Love Loves

What in another person do we love?  His or her qualities, or something ineffable beyond all qualities? Only the latter supports the promise of faithfulness, which is loyalty through all possible changes of qualities. And so only the latter truly is love.

The ineffable beyond all qualities is, in a certain sense, an infinite, but it is also unique.  It is that infinite uniqueness in another person -- which constitutes that person -- that who we love, if we love.  Such is the central content of love: the other person as person. Love recognizes that person.  A person is a whole, encompassing and surpassing qualities, parts.

Robert Spaemann comments in his article on love: "Love gives the beloved the possibility to be a person, and to be a person in a unique, non-interchangeable way.  It is the eyes of the lover that perceive the uniqueness of the beloved, a uniqueness that is more than the combination of empirical qualities.  Nicolas Gomes Davila writes: 'To love someone means to understand the reason that God had to create this person.'

The Possibility of Catharsis

Among the trenchant commentators on the "anthropological breakdown" (Jos. Brodsky) of the 20th Century, Nadezhda Mandelstam surely can claim pride of place.  Her memoirs Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned set out her extended rumination on the breakdown of values in Communist Russia and the western world in general and the consequences occasioned for her husband Osip Mandelstam, who was arrested and sent away to the gulag where he quickly died, and for herself.  Her memoirs aimed to preserve his memory and make sense of her loss within the larger cultural context of the West.

She comments (pp. 337 - 350 of Hope Abandoned) on her husband's view that tragedy was no longer possible in the west because of its loss of "an integrated national consciousness," which, he thought, "can exist only during eras when a people preserves 'the torch bequeathed by its forebears,' that is, when it lives by established values whose desecration or upholding is then the concern of tragedy.  What is catharsis but a cleansing or illumination of the spirit, following the triumph of values, the affirmation of their inexorable power?  The European world was based on the supreme catharsis, accessible only to the religious mind: the conquest of death by atonement."

She notes further: "In the whole of the European-Christian world the basic values have been under attack for many decades, if not for centuries, but they have never anywhere been trampled and mocked to such a degree as in this country. If, however, one were to gather all our 'jackal-spectators' [Osip's term for those sucking up to power] together and reenact this defilement of our values before their eyes, they would howl with joy at the sight.  For decades now this is how they have been trained to respond to any spectacle of desecration, whether it be of altars, private homes, or the hallowed rights of a whole nation.  Some aided and abetted the desecrators, and all that can be said of the very best is that they turned away indifferently and attended to the business of keeping themselves alive.  Unworthy of tragedy, we were capable only of melodrama staged with all the trappings of expressionism and pseudorealism, and -- more importantly -- a topsy-turvy plot in which the desecrator of values and the unrighteous judge is held up to us as a hero defending his claim to power over the human masses under his control."

The test of tragedy is the possibility of catharsis, which is defined as a "purification" and a "resolution of a tension," in which shared values reclaim ascendancy and give meaning to the suffering endured. In a world in which the desecrators, the "jackal-spectators," hold ascendancy, there are no shared values -- except each to his own -- and there is little hope of catharsis.

The same question of the possibility of catharsis arises in connection with the HHS mandate, and the mainstream reaction to it.  A New York Times Editorial, "The Freedom to Choose Birth Control," Feb. 11, 2012, claimed that the Bishop's objection to it, based on conscience and religion objection, was "phony," essentially because a religion's moral views are only "private" values, applicable to its adherents alone, and not "shared values" if the state does not happen to share them. 

The "paper of record's" response reminds me of Hitler's "Commissar Order" in March 1941 (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer, p. 830-31) in which he informed his chief military officers that the war against the Soviet Union must include the liquidation of all Soviet commissars (political class).  Hitler specifically told the German officers they must "rid themselves of obsolete ideologies.  I know that the necessity for such means of waging war is beyond the comprehension of you generals but . . . I insist absolutely that my orders be executed . . ."  Of course, Hitler's word was the law -- the German people had earlier decreed it!

Everyone really knows that no "law" is law if it violates the moral law. Hitler's Commissar Order was at the center of the Nuremberg trial debate over whether the German generals "should have obeyed the orders of the Fuehrer to commit war crimes or obeyed their own consciences." Ibid., 830.

Unless conscience is allowed to speak shared values society devolves into barbarism.  In our country, the "shared value" is the dignity of human life, which is everywhere threatened by abortion-inducing birth control.  To call the bishops' claim "phony," as the NY Times does, is to argue that conscience, the avenue to purification and return to this shared value, should be closed off since it should not be heard over the contrary voice of the state.  While we haven't yet reached the level of barbarism Hitler ordered, we are well down the road to another, equally violent, kind of barbarism. 

Of course, we know that Soviet Communism did not survive.  It eventually succumbed to the law of reality and "shared values" of human freedom. Catharsis finally occurred, and so we recognize the 20th Century Soviet history for the tragedy it was.  But how much suffering and death occurred before this happened!  And in our culture, how much more suffering and death will have to be endured by the unborn (and all injured by this violence) before the voice of conscience, the voice of our shared humanity, is heard and heeded?  If the New York Times is an indication, it will be a long time.

Listen to "Perfect Love"

A Baccalaureate to Remember

My family and I attended my son Rob's college graduation this weekend in Boston. It was less than four years from the day we dropped him off for marching band, and to begin his nose-to-the-grindstone study of biology, and ROTC cadet training. Now Rob had a smile on his face knowing had survived ROTC, biology, marching band, as well as dorm life, cafeteria food, library time, exams, beer parties, in sum, all the variegated "pleasures" of college life. I know he has an armful of memories. We collected a fistful in our weekend.

All my kids traveled to Boston to congratulate their bro, and we ate dinner with my daughter-in-law's parents in Little Italy. Desert was a walk around the North End and cannolis from a local family bakery!

Other notable events:

Rob was commissioned into the Army as a second lieutenant at a formal ceremony. The speaker noted Boston College's motto, Ever to Excel, from the 6th book of the Iliad, line 208, where a Greek soldier, Glaucus, ready to enter battle, used these words to describe what motivated his courage: "Hippolocus begat me. I claim to be his son, and he sent me to Troy with strict instructions: Ever to excel, to do better than others, and to bring glory to your forebears, who indeed were very great ... This is my ancestry; this is the blood I am proud to inherit." See Wikipedia article.

The commencement speaker was Bob Woodruff, who was almost killed in 2005 by a roadside bomb while reporting in Afghanistan. His words of wisdom, formed after 36 days in a coma and a miraculous recovery, included: Try to find and do what you love, exercise your faith, serve, and value your family and friends. He said that it was his faith, family and friends that rescued him.

The Baccalaureate mass (the farewell mass for the graduates) was also special, a lovely Christian celebration with thousands of graduates, parents and families. The psalm was particularly beautiful, and a fitting invitation to the departing class and to all present: Give Us a Pure Heart (Christopher Willcock). (hear it below)

As we returned to Chicago last night, we were tired but thankful to God for our son, his college experience, and for our family and friends who traveled to Boston to celebrate with him and to wish him well. Our baccalaureate "farewell" to his college life was a hopeful hello to his future.

Sedek - Correct Action and Blessings

 I’ve long held the notion that our actions produce good or not depending on our intention in performing them. I’m sure I’ll get some arguments against this idea. It can easily be imagined that people can do things with perfectly well-meaning intentions and have their actions produce some disastrous results. Anthony DeMello’s story of the monkey who put the fish in the tree. When asked why the monkey replied, “To keep it from drowning.”

Von Balthasar’s discussion of the Hebrew concept of sedek provides a somewhat different concept, “immanent righteousness” in the order of the world. This idea he claims was common to all the Orient. The crux of the idea is that the deeds of man inherently have this immanent righteousness in that “they posit a state of affairs to which the one who acts is subject … evil deeds bring at some time or other to light the doom that lies inherent in them for their perpetrator, and the good deeds bring to light their blessing. – And now the part that struck me. – “The one who acts may think that his deed lies in his own power, but in fact it is the deed that takes him into the sphere of its power.”

Sedek, to the Israelite mind, meant both correct behavior and the blessing inherent in it. The whole scheme of immanent righteousness could be applied to the reality of the Covenant and in doing so produces the history of the Deuteronomist: Israel turns away from the Lord with disastrous effects that God permits; Israel repents and cries to the Lord and salvation is effected.

Which of our actions has taken hold of us? What are the blessings they have produced? What destructions have they caused? Much food for thought.

I've never read any of the writtings of Karl Rahner. There have been a couple of attempted readings, but nothing I've been able to sustain. For some reason, obviously unsubstantiated,  thought of him as being dry and academic. Recently, though, I picked up a book I've had on the shelf for a while, Karl Rahner Spiritual Writings. This book introduced me to his spiritual side. The few exerpts I've read so far are reminiscent, to me at least, of the Confessions of St. Augustine, thai is, highly personal and introspective.

The following is an offering from his book, Encounters with Silence.

“Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you” (James 4:8). Yet where He is communicating Himself to His creature and embracing it into His love and His praise, He is having the soul recognize how null, how empty, and how weak it is, filled with the nullities of its narrow existence, full of fear at the pain and suffering of the cross, full of petty pride and narrow self-seeking …

But then, in His own time, when it pleases Him, He makes the soul bright, enlightened, so that it longs for a heart of faith, full of sturdy hope, full of love that never ends, so that it longs for a heart that is open and selfless and pure.

Then the Lord fills “His” soul with the power of grace, so that its deeds fulfill the desires and promises of its prayer, so that it becomes strong enough to accomplish all things and endure all a things.

Then HE gives it the Spirit of God, “which comes to help us in our weakness,”

the Spirit that loves it, so that it can forget desires shaped by

the world’s love,

the Spirit that consoles it with His joy,

the Spirit that is the soul’s “first fruits of eternal life.”

Look, that is what a heart is like when it prays. For the person who draws near to God ---

they become one Spirit with HIM. But God’s Spirit is “LOVE, JOY, PATIENCE, KINDNESS, FAITHFULNESS, GENTLENESS, SELF-CONTROL” (Gal. 5:22-23)

That’s what our heart becomes if we pray in the Spirit of God.

Sedek, sedaka: right conduct in faithfulness

FOR PREVIOUS POSTS ON THE TOPIC SEE POSTS OF FEB 29, MAR 3, 5 & 8

The Greek translation of the Hebrew word sedaka is dikaiosune and in English is translated as righteousness. This word does not adequately convey the meaning it had for a Hebrew in ancient Israel.

Righteousness to the Western mind is considered to be correct behavior with respect to some objective standard. The Hebrew sedaka can be described as the highest value in life, that upon which all life rests when it is properly ordered; a value so universal that its totality embraces everything transcendental in reality and as such escapes attempts at a precise definition.[1]

 Righteousness, when considered as an aspect of relationship, is achieved when the relationship is “in good order”. “… the easterner lives within the relationship and knows intuitively and generally when it is in good order without defining the … various aspects of the experience that have given him this knowledge….”[2]

To the Oriental mind the one who watches over the just order, be it judge, king or God, must consider as primary, protecting the rights of the weak against subjugation by the strong. In Israel the Covenant God is the supreme protector of the right of the poor, the oppressed, and the powerless. Those who represent the law must hold God’s position, a chief theme of the preaching of the prophets.

 As a society do we have the intuitive ability to recognize whether or not our various relationship are rightly ordered? Has our individualistic nature and materialistic nature skewed our idea of what a right order is?

---

[1] See Glory of the Lord, Vol. 6, p163

[2] Ibid., p. 164

Unconditional Love or "Unspeakable Nonsense"?

God's love is unconditional. . . or is it?  The idea is current that God accepts us as we are and loves us that way.  Of course, it is true that God loves us, but God cannot love sinfulness and evil.  God cannot love the evil within us, or put otherwise, cannot love us committing sin.  God loves who he created us to be, and is constantly faithful to "us" in wanting to forgive and draw us into that person, who is close to God and in whom God abides.

Philosopher Robert Spaemann calls "unspeakable nonsense" the idea that God accepts us as we are.  Spaemann, "The Paradoxes of Love," in Love and the Dignity of Human Life, 16. Spaemann goes on to say:

"If that were true, then there would be no such thing as forgiveness.  To say to someone who has done me wrong, 'Well, that's just how you are,' is the opposite of forgiveness.  Forgiveness means not to pin someone down on being what he is -- a coward, a liar, or a traitor -- but to allow him to distance himself from his being that way, and to begin anew.  Being able to do so is characteristic of a person.  Because love aims at the person, it can let go of the 'that is just how you are,' and allow the other to distance himself from himself and have a new beginning.  To accept someone as he is, is the ultimate form of resignation.  The proclamation of Jesus does not begin with the words, "God accepts you as you are," but with the words: 'Repent, change! Be different from what you are now.'"

All of morality depends on man's ability to take a distance from himself and to change his future behavior in response to the call of conscience.  Forgiveness, as Spaemann points out, gives a person the moral space to forgo what he has done before.  To say to someone, whatever you've done is OK because you were born this way, may be unconditional, but it isn't love.

Jesus' words in this 6th Sunday of Easter's gospel are congruent: "If you keep my commandments you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and remain in His love." (John 15:10).

A Gentle Twitch

What is important in life?  It seems, from a chapter heading in Brideshead Revisited, it is a "twitch upon the thread."  As my friend explained to me, this is a metaphor for how God deals with his free creatures:  He plays out plenty of thread, but at times gives a gentle twitch to remind us of our end and destiny.  That twitch, explained my friend, is what led her to return to the Church after some years of wandering.

A life in full includes the thread and the twitch, both of which are signs of God's "play" in the world, his providence.  Evelyn Waugh appreciated this, for he said that his books meant to "represent man more fully, which, to me, means only one thing, man in his relation to God . . . . I believe that you can only leave God out by making your characters pure abstractions.  Countless admirable writers, perhaps some of the best in the world, succeed in this . . . . They try to represent the whole human mind and soul and yet omit its determining character -- that of being God's creature." (cited in Thomas Prufer's "The Death of Charm and the Advent of Grace: Waugh's Brideshead Revisited", contained at p. 92 in his Recapitulations, 1993, The Catholic University of America Press.)

Prufer goes on to say, "the artfully represented course of events includes the gift and the call, the partnership and the exchange between God and man, man and God." Ibid at 92-93.

An artist cannot truly represent a life in full without including the thread that binds us with God, a thread that is weak enough to break, but strong enough to transmit a twitch.  Likewise, one can't live life fully without feeling, at special times, this twitch.  The twitch reminds us that we do not live life alone but in companionship with Someone who loves us enough to tap us gently on the shoulder and invite us home! The twitch reminds us of the thread of love that binds our life and our lives together in a divine meaning.

Love's Triangle

Yesterday's Psalm (145: 10-11) response struck me:  "Your friends make known, O Lord, the glorious splendor of your kingdom."

What struck me is the idea that living, in friendship, the two great commandments of love of God and neighbor, allows God's Trinitarian nature, his "glorious splendor," to be revealed in the world.

The first great commandment is to love God wholly:  "to will or desire his glory."  J-P Torrell, "Charity as Friendship," in Christ and Spirituality, at 56.  Loving God is only possible because God loves us, and so enables us to love him. Our love for others arises out of God's love for us. "In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us." (1st letter of John). "You did not choose me, but I chose you." John 15:15.

God makes friendship with him possible by making us adopted sons and daughters by his love, says Torrell. "'I say, you are god' (Jn 10:34)."  "[G]race introduces us into the family of God and puts us as it were on the divine level, thus making [the reciprocity of love] possible."  Unlike the Greeks who could not accept that there could be a relationship of love between the gods and man, the Judeo-Christian tradition believes God does love and can be loved.  A reciprocity of love between God and man is possible.

It is God's love for us that enables us to love God, ourselves and others in friendship.  We love both ourselves and others properly when we love in consideration of God and for God's sake, since it is God that knows each person's true good.  God is the ever-present "third" that makes love complete and true.  True human love, then, whose model is friendship, is a reflection and image of God's own trinitarian love.

To love myself is properly to want for myself the highest good, which is actually that God's will for me be done. To love myself is not, properly speaking, selfish.  "If I want the divine good for this friend of God that I am, it is in order that I might belong to God and be for his sake.  He is the ultimate end I have in view, not myself." Ibid, 57. 

Likewise, to love my neighbor is to will for him or her what I will for myself: the highest good, that God's will for that person be done.  "I desire these goods for my friend, not for his or her sake, in the sense that he or she would be the ultimate end, but rather because of God and in order that he or she might belong to God." Ibid.

According to Torrell (who is expounding St. Thomas Aquinas), even the command to love our enemies makes sense by this way of thinking because we love our enemies for the sake of our friend, God.  We don't love an enemy because of the evil he does, but because he is "a friend of a friend," i.e., his is still beloved of God despite his evil deeds.  And so we hope, pray and encourage him return to a right relationship with God, his true good.

Lived out, our friendships with God, ourselves and others, reveal in the world the glorious nature of God's love, the point of the responsorial psalm.  To my mind, this means the world is not ultimately "secular" or neutral and devoid of the presence of God, but from the beginning full of God's "glorious splendor," which we experience, share, and reveal, through true friendships.

Hey Kid!

I met a young seminarian, Edouard, when I was in Guatemala recently.  Edouard is from Haiti, and is spending a year at the Claretian seminary in Guatemala City.  We struck up a very nice conversation and exchanged emails.

Yesterday he emailed me to say hello, and reminded me that this is May, the month of Mary.  He signed his email, "your younger brother in Christ."  I thanked him for his email and said I would send him an article on Mary I happened to read recently. "The Marian Dimension of Existence," Stratford Caldecott, in Being Holy in the World, Nicholas J. Healy, Jr., 281 - 294.

The Marian dimension of existence is, essentially, a receptivity or fiat to goodness, and the incarnation of that goodness in one's life.  The church is Marian, and since we are in the church, so are we.  The Marian is our ideal, that is, to strive for a perfect bodily response to God's prior love for us.

One aspect of the article struck me particularly:

Marian spirituality is the spirituality of childhood.  We can say, in fact, that the authentic Christian never grows up.  "Only the Christian religion, which in its essence is communicated by the eternal child of God, keeps alive in its believers the lifelong awareness of their being children, and therefore of having to ask and give thanks for things."  (quoting Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child, at 49.) It is only sin that causes us to become old (in an other-than-physical sense).  Bernanos was perfectly correct, then, in describing Mary as "younger than sin."  The saint lives in an eternal spring, because her existence is always being received, celebrated, and appreciated (that is, shared and given back) instead of snatched, hoarded, and taken for granted.  Motherhood and childhood are very much alike in some ways, since it is necessary for the mother to understand the child, and for the child to be understood by the mother.  But the childlike aspect of motherhood is also present in genuine fatherhood. . .

A child is innocent, fresh, spontaneous, and lively.  It's that attitude of childlike receptivity that responds to another by seeing his or her beauty and goodness, and going out to affirm it in love.

And so, wasn't it appropriate that Edouard signed his email, "your younger brother."

The Spin on a Song

I saw the movie "The Music Never Stopped," which I recommend.  It tells the story of a man's memory loss caused by a brain tumor.  The memory loss prevented the man from remembering about 20 years of his life.  And his short term memory was almost nil, so he couldn't remember what happened only moments before.

But the movie is really about a father's relationship with his son.  The father and son were at odds during the late 1960's turmoil, causing the son to leave home in 1969.  The boy's mom and dad didn't see him again until the late 1980's, when they were called to a hospital room and confronted with their son's brain tumor and almost catatonic state.  While benign, and removable, the tumor caused memory loss and essentially erased their son's identity and personality.

It was only the intervention by an inventive music therapist that allowed the son to regain some of his identity.    He did so by listening to 1960's songs, which jogged his memory of that era, including memories of his family.   The father, while he disliked that music, changed his mind when he saw that it was the only way he could  re-connect with a lost son.  The film's climax is the two attending a Grateful Dead concert, a privilege the father denied the son in the late 1960's, which led to his disappearance.  Now the concert brings father and son together.

Music often is exquisite.  Not only does it make us smarter, it helps us manage our emotions, and creates memories that last a lifetime.  I can still remember "My Boy Lollipop," and "Downtown" . . . well it goes on and on.  It is fitting that music, a universal elixir, should also harmonize hearts.

It Depends on . . . Me!

Some Christians in Nazi Germany decided action had to be taken against a regime that more and more clearly was recognized as a perpetrator of horrible evils. The White Rose was one such movement in opposition, and its story testifies to the power of conscience and truth. The White Rose was a small group of Christians who wrote leaflets calling for protest against the Nazi state in 1942-3, circulating them anonymously in several German cities. The individuals were caught in 1943 in Munich, and executed immediately. You can read about the White Rose here. There is also a movie about the White Rose, The Final Days.

A key inspiration for the group was the sermon given by Bishop August von Galen, decrying Nazi eugenics practices. The name "White Rose" was taken from a the title of a book banned by the Nazis.

One member, Karl Huber, a university professor in Munich, at his sentencing (they were tried and beheaded the same day) offered this as his motivation:

I acted as an inner voice had me act. . . . I take the consequences upon myself as expressed in the beautiful words of Johann Gottlieb Fichte:

And you must act, as if
On you and your actions alone
The fate of the German matter depends,
And the responsibility were yours.

(quoted from Annette E. Dumbach and Jud Newborn, Shattering the German Night: The Story of the White Rose, at 228.)

Hans and Sophi Scholl's father, Robert, managed to enter the courtroom during their trial. Before being forcibly removed, he shouted, "There is a higher justice!" Ibid, at 209.

Conscience is the voice of higher justice, commanding "you must act" for the fate of all depends on you! Conscience's voice is usually considered a threat by "the powers that be," which want to be the sole, and controlling, voice. Conscience's voice, when spoken in flesh and blood by one who listens, is a martyr's voice, a prophet's voice. It, and only it, makes higher justice visible in this world. But this justice will endure since, in the words of today's gospel (John 12:50), God's law lives eternally.