From a Bargain Book at Borders

MY POEMS ATTEMPT

 All

 of what

 I would want my child to know

 my poems attempt.

We are infants before each other, are we not,

so vulnerable to each other’s words and

movements.

A school I sat in cured me of hurting others.

I have come to see that all are seated at His table, and I

have become His

servant.

Sometimes God is too shy to speak in public

and He pinches me.

That

is my cue –

to fill in the blanks of your

understanding

the best I

can.

Rabia of Basra (c. 717 – 801)

Progressing the Church into the Modern Age

I read a book review sent to me by Albert. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/books/review/book-review-absolute-monarchs-a-history-of-the-papacy-by-john-julius-norwich.html?pagewanted=all How long are those critics of the Roman Church going to lament the Church's failure to bring the Church into the "modern age"? It gets to be a tired argument, especially from those not immersed in the spirit of Catholicism. From the book review:


“It is now well over half a century since progressive Catholics have longed to see their church bring itself into the modern age,” he writes. “With the accession of every succeeding pontiff they have raised their hopes that some progress might be made on the leading issues of the day — on homosexuality, on contraception, on the ordination of women priests. And each time they have been disappointed.”

What is the modern age? Where do the "progressives" want the Church to go? The following is a description of "modern" culture written by David Bentley Hart in a recent issue of First Things.:

" Late Western modernity, especially in its purest (that is, most American) form, certainly values the available and the plentiful, but not necessarily the intrinsically pleasing. As far as the actual senses are concerned, ours is in many ways a culture of peculiar poverty, evident even—perhaps especially—in its excesses. The diet produced by mass production and mass marketing, our civic and commercial architecture, our consumer goods, our style of dress, our popular entertainments, and so forth—it all seems to have a kind of premeditated aesthetic squalor about it, an almost militant indifference to the distinction between quantity and quality.
...
Today it often seems as if truly aesthetic values have been moved out of the social realm altogether, into ever smaller private preserves. Certainly they are not central to our concept or experience of the common good, even though we may occasionally make a public pretense of caring about such things. Our culture, with its almost absolute emphasis on the power of acquisition, trains us to be beguiled by the bright and the shrill rather than the lovely and the subtle. That, after all, is the transcendental logic of late-modern capitalism: the fabrication of innumerable artificial appetites, not the refinement of the few that are natural to us. Late modernity’s defining art, advertising, is nothing but a piercingly relentless tutelage in desire for the intrinsically undesirable."

Is this where the progressives want the Church to go? For a change we should put away our addiction to immediate gratification. Let's look at the Church seeking the beautiful in it with gratitude for the gift that it is and with an appreciation for the monumental battles it has waged against the excesses of human nature and still managing to retain its essence.

Carrying a Heavy Load?

Of course we all reflect on our youth and the freedom from cares we enjoyed then. Taking on life's responsibilities, however exciting it might be at first, eventually can weigh us down. When it does, we begin to look forward to the day we can slow down or retire. When that time arrives our bodies begin to malfunction, our parents, if we are lucky enough to have them with us, need us and even our adult children might need our help. I think in the passage below Moses expresses very well how we might feel.

from Numbers chapter 11

The children of Israel lamented,
“Would that we had meat for food!
We remember the fish we used to eat without cost in Egypt,
and the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks,
the onions, and the garlic.
But now we are famished;
we see nothing before us but this manna.”


When Moses heard the people, family after family,
crying at the entrance of their tents,
so that the LORD became very angry, he was grieved.
“Why do you treat your servant so badly?” Moses asked the Lord.
“Why are you so displeased with me
that you burden me with all this people?
Was it I who conceived all this people?
Or was it I who gave them birth,
that you tell me to carry them at my bosom,
like a foster father carrying an infant,
to the land you have promised under oath to their fathers?
Where can I get meat to give to all this people?
For they are crying to me,
‘Give us meat for our food.’
I cannot carry all this people by myself,
for they are too heavy for me.
If this is the way you will deal with me,
then please do me the favor of killing me at once,
so that I need no longer face this distress.”

Poor Moses! When he arrived (or will arrive?) in heaven, he'll be glad to realize what a future generation of Israelites heard first hand from Jesus, that the yoke is easy and the burden light.

Ubi Fides ibi libertas

As St. Ambrose said, "Where there is faith, there is liberty." Freedom is called a paradox because freedom is only found in recognizing our relationship of dependence on the infinite, the creator. Here is how Luigi Giussani puts it: "The human being -- the concrete human person, me, you -- once 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 slaves of the powers that be, or we depend upon What lies at the origin of the movement of all things, beyond them, which is to say, God.

"Freedom identifies itself with dependence upon God at the 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!

"Religiosity is the single hindrance, limit, confine to the dictatorship of man over man, whether we are referring to men and women, parents and children, owners and workers, party chiefs, and rank and file. It is the only hindrance, the single barrier and objection to the slavery imposed by the powers that be." The Religious Sense, pp. 91-92.

Yesterday I saw a picture of hundreds of people lined up waiting to enter the new casino in Des Plaines. Then a picture of a room full of hundreds of slot machines with a person sitting in front of each one. The article said the managers of the casino were having to encourage people to stay away and come back another day as the casino had reached its crowd limit. I asked myself, slaves or free?

Mothers and Fathers and Generation

I'm nearly done wading through volume five of The Glory of the Lord. Near the end I came accross one of those gems of Balthasar's thinking that makes worthwhile the effort of reading his work. Following is a quote from a section in the book entitled "The Miracle of Being".

“The fact that I find myself within the realm of a world and in the boundless community of other existent beings is astonishing beyond measure … . From the infinite prodigality of an act of generation … resulting in a ‘chance hit’ … a ‘new’ being is created which … cannot interpret itself in any way as a product of chance … . Nothing … indicates that this had the ‘personal’ intention of producing precisely this unique and as such irreplaceable person through that game of chance; there is nothing to prove that this unique person receives a kind of necessary place through his incorporation [into the world]. I could imagine … that an infinite number of ‘others’ could have occupied this ‘same’ place in the universe instead of me.


Of course, the child does not awaken into consciousness with this question on its mind. … Its ‘I’ awakens in the experience of a ‘Thou’: in its mother’s smile through which it learns that it is contained, affirmed and loved in a relationship which is incomprehensibly encompassing, already actual, sheltering and nourishing. The body which its snuggles into, a soft, warm and nourishing kiss, is a kiss of love in which it can take shelter because it has been sheltered there a priori.... a light which has been perpetually asleep awakens at some point into an alert and self-knowing light. But it awakens at the love of the Thou, as it has always slept in the womb and on the bosom of the Thou.... therefore it is right that the child should glimpse the Absolute,... first in its mother, its parents, and that only in a second and third stage does it have to learn to distinguish the love of God from the love which it has experienced in this way."

A Spiritual Canticle of the Soul and the Bridegroom Christ

"Someone who could show us the way would be a true hero! As Christians, we know who that hero is."

We know who he is, but we may not know where he is. So, I offer these stanzas of a poet's thought on the matter.

A Spiritual Canticle of the Soul and the Bridegroom Christ

Where have you fled and vanished,
Beloved, since you left me here to moan?
Deer-like you leaped; then, banished
and wounded by my own
I followed you with cries, but you have flown.

Shepherds, if you discover,
going about this knoll to tend your sheep,
the dwelling of that lover
whose memory I keep,
tell him I sicken unto death and weep.

To seek him, I shall scour
these trackless woods to where the rivers flow –
not stop to pick a flower,
not run from beasts – but go
past every fort and border that I know.

O forests darkly glooming,
seeded by my beloved’s very hand!
O pasture richly blooming,
you flower-jeweled band!
I beg you, say if he has crossed your land.

These are just the opening stanzas in a thirty plus stanza poem. The poet is St. John of the Cross. The poem is translated from the Spanish by Rhina P. Espaillat. I think it captures the spirit of the seeker who is trying to counter "the spirit of the age".

For the Sake of Others

"A hero in the Talmud is someone who works on his own spiritual development for the sake of others." Bob's post rightly emphasizes the communal dimension in religion -- that our relationship with God, in which we experience His love, properly involves our relationships with and love of others. Why is this so? I think the key is love. We cannot really experience God's love unless we love and are loved by others. And love is always "for the sake of" another.

The need for involvement of others in our spiritual growth is reminiscent of the problem of modern science, which, in its scientistic form, eliminates the human from the world of knowledge. Scientism claims to have the "final say" on what is real, but the result is to leave out the human being whose mystery cannot be captured by science.

According to E.L. Fortin, the corrective is "a new 'Socratic turn' that, like the original Socratic turn, would both preserve science and return it to its native human context." Fortin quotes Walker Percy's The Moviegoer where the narrator said that he focused on science (his so-called "vertical search") and when he finished this search, the "difficulty was that though the universe had been disposed of, I myself was left over." The narrator finally realizes that his search really needed to be "horizontal," to be conducted by "wander[ing] in the neighborhood." Fortin concludes, "This is as good a recapitulation of the Socratic turn as one is likely to come across anywhere today. Socrates' turn toward human things did not necessitate abandonment of his quest for the knowledge of nature. The two must somehow go hand in hand. Our task is to find a way of bringing them together again." He calls this "[o]ur most urgent need." Fortin, "The Bible Made Me Do It," in Human Rights, Virtue, and the Common Good, at pp. 128-129.

So, to heal our theology and our science requires that we act "for the sake of others." Someone who could show us the way would be a true hero! As Christians, we know who that hero is.