Reflection While Showering

I was showering early in the afternoon on one of those rare weekdays that I was off from work. The hot water felt so wonderful trickling down my body creating a sense of warmth and comfort. [Warning; please do not try to envision this scene as it may be detrimental in producing the intended effect of this reflection.]

This is not the first time that the following thoughts have occurred to me. Quite often it occurs to me, while showering, that I have been particularly blessed by God with the ability to perform such an everyday function. A function which is not readily available to many people in this world.

And so my thoughts go from the blessings of the shower to a consideration of the many other blessings, small and large, that have been heaped upon me by the good Lord. And my mind naturally turns toward gratitude. It is not that I feel that I don't express gratitude for these blessings, rather I ask myself the question, "Do I show enough gratitude?" Of course, I'm asking myself this question in the comfort of a nice home in a nice suburb, living a life in which I have wanted for very little. Most of my time is spent tending to the small everyday tasks that I find necessary. Do I spend enough of my time, talent, and treasure in gratitude to the Lord for all he has given me? I don't know and it's probably a question I'll be asking myself when I am asked to meet Him.

Whenever I express this idea to others they often respond that I might be just a little guilty of scrupulosity. Perhaps I am. Who of us is able, though, to go through life without considering such a question? Do I give enough? I'll never know the answer in this life. I do think however that regardless of what the answer to that question might be at any point in time I should strive all the time to be more like St. Francis who was willing to give it all away or more like St. Therese who was willing to spend her entire life praying and serving others.

Lord help me to be equal to the task. Amen

Actions, Not Intentions, Make Us Who We Are

Joseph Brodsky, 1987 Literature Nobel Prize winner, wrote a poem each Christmas for many years, all of which are collected in his book, Nativity Poems. In an interview at the end of the book, the interviewer asks Brodsky what kind of believer he is. Brodsky comments he is not firmly convicted, but believes "Calvinist." In explanation he says, "Why I say Calvinist -- not particularly seriously -- is because according to Calvinist doctrine man answers to himself for everything. That is, he is his own Judgment Day, to some extent. I don't have the strength to forgive myself. And, on the other hand, I don't feel any particular attraction or respect for anyone who could forgive me. When I was younger, I tried to figure this all out for myself. But at some point I realized that I am the sum of all my actions, my acts, and not the sum of my intentions."

I agree with his attitude: Our actions build us and render us unto judgment.

The connection between our actions and self-possession is explicitly recognized by the author of James (1:22-25):

"Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deluding yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the owrd and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his own face in a mirror. He sees himself, then goes off and promptly forgets what he looked like. But the one who peers into the perfect law of freedom and perseveres, and is not a hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, such a one shall be blessed in what he does."

Teilhard at Vespers

It has been a while snce I've posted anything to the blog. In doing this post I discovered that many of you had not been invited to participate. An oversight I hope that I've corrected.
The following editorial was published in the August 17-24, 2009 issue of America the Jesuit magazine. It is lengthy but good stuff.
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Teilhard at Vespers
The church seems forever to be embracing those she once held in suspicion. Galileo Galilei, the Italian astronomer, is the most famous among them. But there are others, too, like Thomas Aquinas, Joan of Arc and Ignatius Loyola. The most recent candidate for rehabilitation is the Jesuit paleontologist, evolutionary philosopher and spiritual writer Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Vatican watchers have taken note of Pope Benedict XVI's appeal to Teilhard during an evening prayer service he celebrated July 24 in Aosta, Italy, as a sign of re­appraisal of the priest and his thought. Citing Teilhard's `great vision;' Pope Benedict urged that "we consecrate the world, so it may become a living host;' a phrase reminiscent of the French Jesuit's eucharistic theology, in which all cre­ation becomes an offering to God.
Teilhard articulated his vision during an expedition to the Ordos Desert of Inner Mongolia in 1923. Lacking the elements of unleavened bread and wine to celebrate Mass, he composed a poetic prayer, "Mass on the World" (pub­lished in Hymn of the Universe; Harper, 1961), offering the whole of creation in its evolutionary history as a host to God. Pope Benedict has previously praised the sense of cos­mic liturgy in the Eastern church. His appeal to Teilhard adds the distinctive resonances of the Frenchman's vision: a cosmos evolved over time and increasingly known by scien­tific investigation; a spiritual process that comes to con­sciousness in humanity, a humanity whose spirituality is found in activity as well as passivity; and a humanity called not only to live in the world but also to transform it.
The pope's prayer in fact puts emphasis on our obliga­tion to "transform the world:" In adopting this theme, his thinking seems to have developed along the same trajectory as that of Pope John Paul II. After the Second Vatican Council, both expressed dismay at the optimistic, Teilhardian tone of the "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World;' with its focus on the cosmic Christ and its affirmation of the transformative power of the resurrection in history. ....

The pope appears to acknowledge that the kind of sensibility Teilhard possessed belongs to the full flowering of our human nature. To an unexpected degree, he voices trust in the graced capacity of human beings to transform the world and in so doing make it a more fitting offering to God. ...

Like Teilhard, Pope Benedict reminds us that the world we transform by our labor, our learning and our inge­nuity contributes to Christ's great offering of the world to God. The pope has pointed to an array of problems await­ing solution and transformation: the protection of human life and the environment, the expansion of the "responsibil­ity to protect' to include provision of food and water for needy populations, and the creation of international struc­tures to regulate speculation in financial markets and gov­ern a global economy. Will American Catholics rise to the occasion, leading our fellow citizens to meet these chal­lenges by taking new initiatives on behalf of the human fam­ily? Or will we allow ourselves to fall back, enthralled by the idols of self-aggrandizement and self-amusement that so captivate our culture?Decline is our civilization's future if recovery from the global fiscal crisis returns to the consumerist pattern of the late 20th-century America. Consumption has its place in creating a floor of material well-being. But after a point it becomes debilitating to the soul and to society. The trans­formation of the world certainly involves the expansion of markets-not primarily among the affluent, however, but rather among the poor. Furthermore, human creativity needs to be directed by fuller aspirations than improvements in material welfare alone, because human beings are more and desire more: aesthetically, intellectually, athletically, eco­logically, religiously. In whatever field we endeavor to trans­form the world-science, engineering, communications, business, the arts-we must aim at promoting sustainable, fully human development at rising levels of well-being for all and for everyone. At the end, when this transformation has reached its fullness, as Teilhard wrote, "the presence of Christ, which has been silently accruing in things, will sud­denly be revealed-like a flash of light from pole to pole:"

From a review of de Jouvenal's book, On Power: It's Nature and the History of Its Growth, by Jude P. Dougherty:

"One of the pitfalls of democracy is its lack of accountability. The popular will is easily manipulated. It recognizes no authority outside itself that possesses the strength to limit its excesses."

"The kings of old, the personification of power, were possessed of personality, possessed of passions good and bad. More often than not, their sense of responsibility led them to will 'the good' for their people. Power within a democracy, by contrast, resides in a faceless and impersonal bureaucracy that claims to have no existence of its own and becomes the anonymous, impersonal, passionless instrument of what is presumed to be the general will."

"Writing in France when the Roosevelt administration was barely 10 years old, de Jouvenal feared the long range danger posed by the many regulatory commissions created by that administration. He saw that agencies possessing at once legislative, executive, and judicial control could operate largely outside of public control and become tyrannical."

I thought of this this when I read that the PBS Board of Directors recently decided that no new religioius programming would be allowed on the "public" airways. It grandfathered in existing religious programming, like Mass For Shut-ins in various locations, but will not allow new overtly religious programming in its outlets. Its justification is that when it comes to religion, there's no pleasing anyone.

For more, see Fr. Barron's recent column and his argument that since PBS allows overtly anti-religious programming, its new position is unfair.

This from the Wall Street Journal on June 26, 2009:

By Laurence Krauss, a cosmologist, is director of the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University. His most recent book is "Hiding in the Mirror" (Viking, 2005).

"Messrs. Harris and Dawkins are simply being honest when they point out the inconsistency of belief in an activist god with modern science.

"J.B.S. Haldane, an evolutionary biologist and a founder of population genetics, understood that science is by necessity an atheistic discipline. As Haldane so aptly described it, one cannot proceed with the process of scientific discovery if one assumes a "god, angel, or devil" will interfere with one's experiments. God is, of necessity, irrelevant in science.

"Faced with the remarkable success of science to explain the workings of the physical world, many, indeed probably most, scientists understandably react as Haldane did. Namely, they extrapolate the atheism of science to a more general atheism.

"While such a leap may not be unimpeachable it is certainly rational, as Mr. McGinn pointed out at the World Science Festival. Though the scientific process may be compatible with the vague idea of some relaxed deity who merely established the universe and let it proceed from there, it is in fact rationally incompatible with the detailed tenets of most of the world's organized religions. As Sam Harris recently wrote in a letter responding to the Nature editorial that called him an "atheist absolutist," a "reconciliation between science and Christianity would mean squaring physics, chemistry, biology, and a basic understanding of probabilistic reasoning with a raft of patently ridiculous, Iron Age convictions."

"When I confronted my two Catholic colleagues on the panel with the apparent miracle of the virgin birth and asked how they could reconcile this with basic biology, I was ultimately told that perhaps this biblical claim merely meant to emphasize what an important event the birth was. Neither came to the explicit defense of what is undeniably one of the central tenets of Catholic theology.

"Science is only truly consistent with an atheistic worldview with regards to the claimed miracles of the gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Moreover, the true believers in each of these faiths are atheists regarding the specific sacred tenets of all other faiths. Christianity rejects the proposition that the Quran contains the infallible words of the creator of the universe. Muslims and Jews reject the divinity of Jesus.

"So while scientific rationality does not require atheism, it is by no means irrational to use it as the basis for arguing against the existence of God, and thus to conclude that claimed miracles like the virgin birth are incompatible with our scientific understanding of nature.

"Finally, it is worth pointing out that these issues are not purely academic. The current crisis in Iran has laid bare the striking inconsistency between a world built on reason and a world built on religious dogma.

"Perhaps the most important contribution an honest assessment of the incompatibility between science and religious doctrine can provide is to make it starkly clear that in human affairs -- as well as in the rest of the physical world -- reason is the better guide."

How does one respond to a position like this?

One response is that reason itself is a reflection of God's presence and guiding hand. Where could the "reasonable" come from?

Another is that science as a methodology is limited to evaluating material causes, and thus never gets to God because God is outside nature and his workings are utterly beyond our comprehension. Humility about human reason's ability to comprehend God seems eminently reasonable.

Yet another is that science is just one example of man's concerns, to which he applies his reason, if he can. Other, more important concerns about birth and death, right and wrong, justice and injustice, suffering and mercy, and all of the immensely important imponderables, are not amenable to determination by science, because they are not material. Perhaps they may not be penetrated by human reason at all. Yet these concerns are the most important we face as humans.

In this regard, I read this recently by Edwin O'Connor, a Catholic novelist, in The Edge of Sadness (p 128 - 129). (The narrator is a Catholic priest, and in this passage talks about the death of his father. The novel was published in 1961.)

"And so my father died. All through his illness I had said my Mass for him each morning; every day and every night I had prayed that he might be allowed either the miracle of recovery or the blessing of a happy death. These prayers were not answered. My father did not recover, and he died witless and in pain. Any why this should have been I have no idea at all. He was a very good man who had lived a very good life -- yet he died a very cruel death. This is the hardest sort of thing to accept; for some, it's impossible. Because here is the old, baffling problem which has always been with us and will be until the end of time: the problem of reconciling pain and suffering with an omnipotent and merciful God. There are all sorts of answers suggested to this problem, most of which are as old as the problem itself; some oare foolish, others are as reasonable as the mind of man could possibly devise. But here it seems to me we deal with something reason cannot reach, and with that part of man which reason does not touch, for when someone stands fixed and helpless before another's suffering -- especially in those cases when those who suffer are plainly innocent of any guilt -- then the cool like of reason may not be of much help. A syllogism does not support a mother who has seen her baby burned. And here, I think, faith comes in. I myself believe there is no such thing as purposeless pain or suffering, though I must confess that for much of it I can see no purpose at all. But the point is that if one accepts God, one accepts Him totally, accepts what He does and what He permits. One accepts it, but one does not necessarily understand it. Surely it's a question of vision, for as we are, we can see, but only to the corner; we cannot begin to see the whole design. . . "

Kraus' view of science seems imperialistic in that he places science in the driver's seat and places "faith" in the realm of darkness and superstition. It sounds like scientism, which holds that science is the only way that reality can be grasped rationally. But we know that science can build bombs but not keep them from being used. Only a different kind of wisdom can solve the human dilemmas we face.

I also find no basis for Kraus' claim that all "religious dogma" is essentially the same, and that Christian beliefs are essentially no different than the extreme Islamic beliefs of the Iranian state's mullahs. It should be obvious to all except the most prejudiced that religious beliefs are not identical. We may think our beliefs are right, but reason also tells us that opposing views cannot both be right. Both can be wrong, and one can be right.

If it only were so easy as Kraus suggests.

"84 Charing Cross Road"

This 1987 film depicts the post-WWII correspondence between a Jewish NY script writer interested in British literature and a London bookseller operating from the address that is the title of the movie. It shows how two unlikely aficionados of antiquarian books strike up a warm-hearted correspondence and the inner and outer life they share as a result. I heartily recommend the movie, which you can get at the library.

One scene in the film shows Joan Bancroft, who plays the Jewish scriptwriter, carefully cradling and caressing a leather bound volume, with pages trimmed in gold, as she ponders its heft, its richness and beauty, and its history and contents.

This is how beauty is to be appreciated, as I read recently in an article about Iris Murdoch's views on art, which reflected Simone Weil's views as well. The article states, "learning to appreciate beauty is a matter of learning to attend properly to beautiful things, which means learning to contemplate both their integrity or unity, their independent reality, and often learning to contemplate the aspects of reality to which they direct us by their truthful representation of the world."

The author of the article goes on to say, "[t]he thought of Simone Weil behind this . . . is that to recognise an object as beautiful is to refrain from consuming it, to want it not to change; the experience of the beautiful thus places a check on the ego's desire to ingest reality, to project its own fantasies and desires upon the world in which it finds itself. It works to disrupt the self's addiction to illusion and its refusal to accept reality as it truly is, and thereby purifies our consciousness."

The author states that this "orientation to the truth" requires the discipline of truthfulness, a transcending of egotism, "a deepening capacity to place the self properly in the world, which can only be done by recognising the reality and value of that which is not the self." This, says Murdoch, is a "spiritual pilgrimmage (transformation-renewal-salvation)."

This transformation, the author says, is at the "centre and essence of morality." "The essentially egoistic energies that permeate and generate the texture of the self's everyday inner life . . . can be transformed only by transforming their orientation; they must be re-directed, away from the ego and its interests and toward that which is not the ego. The broadest characterization of the various techniques by which this transformation can be effected is that of attending to particulars: we must either attune our consciousness to its objects, or (if we fail) those objects will be attuned to one's consciousness, to its fantasies and distortions, for on Murdoch's account, the reality of our world is determined, the facts are set up as such, by the morally inflected discriminations of our consciousness. In this sense, every subject has the objects it deserves."

In other words, the subjective willingness to let things (and persons) be what they are, an attitude called truthfulness (and respect), is what permits the world (and persons) to be experienced as they truly are. The enjoyment of beauty is the fruit of that attitude since goodness and beauty are garmets of the true. Responsibility for truthfulness is at the core of human morality, and requires self-mastery and renunciation. Says the author, truthfulness "often feels like deprivation, since it demands that we deprive ourselves of consoling pictures of reality in favor of ones less gratifying to our egos."

A religious dimension in the discipline of truthfulness isn't hard to detect. Conversion is the same process of turning away from (ego-induced) falsehood to the truth. The pain suffered from this conversion ushers us into the temple of truth, with its sacred beauty and goodness, experienced in joy, together with the silent, transcendental Being that is its inhabitant, source and foundation. Thus appropos is another comment of Simone Weil: "All art of the highest order is religious in essence."

Stephen Mulhall, "Misplacing freedom, displacing the imagination," p. 258-260 in Philosophy, the Good, the True and the Beautiful, Ed. Anthony O'Hear (Cambridge University, 2000). The references to Simone Weil are to Gravity and Grace, pp. 137.

Therese of Lisieux, Theology and Love

I read a review on the First Things website of a new biography of St. Therese that, while the reviewer was appreciative of the author's fleshing out of the setting of 19th century French Catholicism, he was a bit critical of the author's approach to Therese's spirituality. The last three paragraphs of the review are what struck me:

The proper images for understanding Little Thérèse are not those of modern theology, which tends to promote unfortunate and untenable dichotomies between official church teachings and a living faith, or, as Nevin put it, between “the historical complex of creeds, council statements, theologies, and decrees,” which he suggests “fade before a radical intimacy with Jesus.”

Instead, if we attend to her writings, we see that Thérèse suggests an illuminative rather than critical method. Thérèse takes church teaching about heaven and hell, sin and grace, Christology and ecclesiology and puts them into strikingly fresh forms. She is not critiquing the male priesthood when she imagines her priestly vocation; she is helping us see the universal priesthood of all believers. She is not denying the existence of hell; she is testifying to the omnipotent power of divine love. The truths of the faith are servant truths—they serve the Truth of Christ. They do not fade or fall away. Instead, when used properly, they become ever more luminous with the light of Christ.

As John Paul II observed when he announced Thérèse as a doctor of the church, her radical awareness of her spiritual childhood teaches a fundamental truth. The breath of Christ’s love fans even the smallest spark of desire for him in our hearts. It’s something we all need to hear. But Thérèse also has a lesson for theologians. We should beware the modern tendency to explain the dry limitations we so often feel in the official language of church teaching with easy dichotomies between spirit and letter. The problem is not in the obvious fact that a creed or a council decree is not the living Word of God. As Thérèse’s “little way” suggests, the dryness comes from the poverty of our love.

I thought this was an excellent reminder when we too often try to pit the Church and her teachings against "faith", or organized religion against spirituality.