The God Who Meets Us On the Path

This discovery of love as a source of knowledge, which is part of the primordial experience of every man and woman, finds authoritative expression in the biblical understanding of faith. In savouring the love by which God chose them and made them a people, Israel came to understand the overall unity of the divine plan. Faith-knowledge, because it is born of God’s covenantal love, is knowledge which lights up a path in history.

That is why, in the Bible, truth and fidelity go together: the true God is the God of fidelity who keeps his promises and makes possible, in time, a deeper understanding of his plan. Through the experience of the prophets, in the pain of exile and in the hope of a definitive return to the holy city, Israel came to see that this divine "truth" extended beyond the confines of its own history, to embrace the entire history of the world, beginning with creation. Faith-knowledge sheds light not only on the destiny of one particular people, but the entire history of the created world, from its origins to its consummation.

Lumen Fidei 28

Reflection – I’m late today posting (for those few poor souls out there who are obsessive readers of my blog and value my regular habits), because yesterday was a trying day of cancelled and delayed flights, lost luggage and general unpleasantness, all of which happened while I nurse a bad cold. So I slept in this morning, here in Ottawa at my cousin’s house. No blog tomorrow, as I return from Ottawa to Combermere, then back to normal on Monday.

I wanted to follow through with this last bit of LF that we’ve been reading this week. It puts it all together in a very beautiful and comprehensive way. Essentially the unity of truth and love in the vision of faith means that truth is fundamentally a relationship. We do not fully apprehend the truth of reality unless we enter into a relationship with reality—it is not some list of facts, random or otherwise, to which we are forced to accede or be crushed underfoot.

Rather, truth comes out of a love affair, not with this or that finite individual, but with God. There is a nuptial quality to the whole matter, a call to fidelity and in that call to fidelity, an experience of joyous union and fruitful living.

This is such a far cry from how the normal discussion or experience of all these matters go. There, on the one hand, there is the monolithic truth of dogma, enforced by the tyrannical inquisitorial Church. On the other hand, there are men and women (or men and men, or women and women) trying to find some love and peace in this life and forging whatever path they can find towards beauty.

To realize that God is as loving as the Bible reveals Him to be, and that He meets us on all the paths we try to forge of peace, beauty, and joy, not to crush us, not to stomp out these paths and cruelly thwart us, but to redirect our paths towards true peace and beauty—this changes everything.

And you know, He does this for everyone, not just for ‘those people over there who are living wrongly – shame on them!’ – which can be the terrible and deeply uncharitable attitude of many Christians. All of us are, to some degree or another, on a wrong path of peace and beauty. All of us need conversion, all of us need to be thwarted by our loving Father and have our feet set on a better path. Sometimes the more subtly wrong paths, the more seemingly virtuous ways of life that are just slightly off kilter can take us more badly astray in the end, because they look so upright, so clean and wholesome.

Anyhow, God loves us and wants to be in a love affair with us, and all these matters of truth and faith, love and truth, faith and love—all wind around and lead from and to that central loving truth about God. And without that love affair and that vision of God, all our efforts to discuss what is true and false, good and evil, are a little bit off, don’t take us where we need to be taken. And I think that loss of vision of God and His passionate love is at the heart of why we don’t get very far these days in our discussions and debates.

Anyhow, I’m feeling pretty lousy, so I’m going to have a nap now! Talk to you all on Monday.

Benedict Versus Francis - The Real Difference

If love needs truth, truth also needs love. Love and truth are inseparable. Without love, truth becomes cold, impersonal and oppressive for people’s day-to-day lives. The truth we seek, the truth that gives meaning to our journey through life, enlightens us whenever we are touched by love. One who loves realizes that love is an experience of truth, that it opens our eyes to see reality in a new way, in union with the beloved.

In this sense, Saint Gregory the Great could write that "amor ipse notitia est", love is itself a kind of knowledge possessed of its own logic. It is a relational way of viewing the world, which then becomes a form of shared knowledge, vision through the eyes of another and a shared vision of all that exists. William of Saint-Thierry, in the Middle Ages, follows this tradition when he comments on the verse of the Song of Songs where the lover says to the beloved, "Your eyes are doves" (Song 1:15). The two eyes, says William, are faith-filled reason and love, which then become one in rising to the contemplation of God, when our understanding becomes "an understanding of enlightened love".

Lumen Fidei 27

Reflection – I seem to be on to something with my reading of this section of Lumen Fidei, at least if spikes in blog traffic, links and the like are any measure. Welcome, all you new people who are reading my blog these days – come for the learned discourse on truth and love, stay for the awesome salad bar. We have live jazz on Saturdays!

It seems to me that this movement here in the encyclical—yesterday, it was ‘love needs truth’, and today it is ‘yes, but truth needs love, too’—could be seen fairly as the shift in emphasis (not content, but emphasis, between Pope Benedict and Pope Francis. Both hold the same Catholic faith; both men have said largely the same things about all the painful and controversial issues of our times, affirming the Catholic doctrine; both have made strong challenges to economic structures of greed and waste, and to ideologically driven, quasi-pelagian pharisaical tendencies or factions within the Church.

But there is no question of a shift in emphasis between the two papacies. I think we are ill served by pitting the two men against each other in some kind of absurd papal cage match (two popes go in – only one leaves!!!), or by using ‘Benedict’ or ‘Francis’ as sort of banners to wave to get ‘our kind of Catholic’ to rally around us, cherry picking quotes to make each say what we want them to say.

Rather, the two men are in a loving and creative dialogue with each other, much as we see in this section of the encyclical. Love needs truth, and so much of Benedict’s papacy and indeed his whole career as a theologian has been to redeem truth from the clutches of Kant and Comte and Marx, where it essentially becomes a weapon of dominance and control of reality, to show how truth as understood in Catholic terms is truly at the service of love, and that a love that does not make base itself on and live from a solid apprehension of the truth of reality cannot thrive.

Truth needs love – this is Francis’ emphasis. Not, ‘eh, forget about the truth, and let’s all just be nice to each other. Everyone, smile!’ But yes, truth needs to be expressed with love. A wise and holy bishop I knew used to say that ‘The truth that does not sing is not the whole truth.’

This is why, hard as it is, we cannot simply hurl the moral law at people’s heads and expect it to do any good. Yes, the law is the law and it’s from God and to be obeyed and we should die rather than violate a single of God’s commandments and we must teach people these commandments for the sake of their salvation and ours. All of this I believe, as anyone who reads my blog regularly knows.

But… with love. Or it won’t do any good. Truth without love is indeed just a weapon to crush people with. In fact, the truth of God and man and human life and love and sexuality is so immense, such a vast and all encompassing vision, that it can indeed crush a person.

If – to pick on sex, since that’s what everyone thinks the Church is obsessed with, and we may as well live up to the stereotype for once – sex is not only not dirty, and also not ‘whatever you want it to be – have fun!’ but in fact is what we say it is – a bodily representation of the love of the Trinity made accessible to us by the love of Christ for the Church which is all redeemed humanity, a love he achieved in his body by his passion and death, and so all the laws governing sexual activity flow from that theology of sex—if all that is true, then yikes. Who would dare have sex again, in marriage or out? It’s too much, and we’re just stupid little people who are scrabbling along.

So, the truth has to be accompanied with love. Specifically God’s love, and the constant proclamation, not only in words but in deeds, that the God who establishes all this and who lays down these rules and this structure for reality, is a loving Father who intends our good, and who is very merciful to us when we fall.

If we do not show this mercy in our words, our tone of voice, our countenance, and our deeds, then we may as well forget about evangelizing our culture any time soon. And that’s what Francis is saying, roughly. More tomorrow…

Rejecting the False Dichotomy of Love and Truth

The explanation of the connection between faith and certainty put forward by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is well known. For Wittgenstein, believing can be compared to the experience of falling in love: it is something subjective which cannot be proposed as a truth valid for everyone. Indeed, most people nowadays would not consider love as related in any way to truth. Love is seen as an experience associated with the world of fleeting emotions, no longer with truth.

But is this an adequate description of love? Love cannot be reduced to an ephemeral emotion. True, it engages our affectivity, but in order to open it to the beloved and thus to blaze a trail leading away from self-centredness and towards another person, in order to build a lasting relationship; love aims at union with the beloved. Here we begin to see how love requires truth. 

Only to the extent that love is grounded in truth can it endure over time, can it transcend the passing moment and be sufficiently solid to sustain a shared journey. If love is not tied to truth, it falls prey to fickle emotions and cannot stand the test of time. True love, on the other hand, unifies all the elements of our person and becomes a new light pointing the way to a great and fulfilled life. Without truth, love is incapable of establishing a firm bond; it cannot liberate our isolated ego or redeem it from the fleeting moment in order to create life and bear fruit.

Lumen Fidei 27

Reflection – This section of the encyclical seems to be generating interest and discussion, both in my combox and on my FB page. I am in full swing giving a retreat to seminarians right now, and can contribute little beyond the actual posts – anyhow, discuss away.

Here we see Pope Benedict (this is definitely his work) tackling the false dichotomy of truth and love. In this passage he shows the insufficiency of love without truth; tomorrow he will discuss the inadequacy of truth without love.

It is easy to craft some fantastical soap-opera scenario to demonstrate this,  whereby Joe falls in love with Jane and they enter an intense romance, eventually becoming engaged. Joe finds out, shortly before their wedding, that not one thing Jane has told him about herself is true, from her name to her virtually every biographical fact, even to her likes and dislikes, opinions and beliefs, hopes and dreams. For some reason or other, her whole presentation of herself was a tissue of lies.

Would Joe simply shrug that off and say, “That’s OK – I don’t actually need to know anything about you!” and proceed happily along? It is entirely possible that Joe has in some fashion in their courtship encountered the real ‘Jane’ (or whoever) and would be willing to forgive the deception and move forward… but in anything resembling a healthy human dynamic, that moving forward would mean moving towards truth, towards knowing who this person really is and establishing the relationship on an actual footing of mutual disclosure and knowledge. If ‘Jane’ were unwilling to do that, then in what sense are she and Joe even in a relationship?

OK, enough with the melodrama (in tomorrow’s episode, the arrival of Jane’s mother brings a shocking revelation to Joe – she’s a Yeti!!! (You know, I could actually write this stuff)).

The fact is, with the stirring up of love in the heart, there is a stirring up of a deep hunger to know the person. And also, to know what is good for that person, what will help them, serve them, do them well. Think of the movie Lorenzo’s Oil, based on a true story, where the father of a desperately sick child ended up developing a treatment for his son’s rare disease despite having no medical training or knowledge beforehand.

Love is not opposed to truth or in some other category than truth. Love seeks truth, both the truth of the beloved and the truth for the beloved. It is love, in other words, that unites the true and the good in a contemplation of the beautiful.

All of this is miles away from where we started and where we need to get back to – the Church’s ongoing proclamation of hard and unwelcome truths and dogmas in the modern world. But surely this is at least addresses the charge that to proclaim an unwelcome truth is an unloving act. If I love someone, I sure as heck want to know if they have cancer, and how bad it is, and how radical a course of treatment they need to engage in, even if it will cause them (and me) great pain and travail.

The Church, in its love for the modern world, has to deliver a certain amount of ‘bad diagnoses’ and prescribe a certain amount of painful medications and arduous therapies. You may disagree with the diagnosis and reject the therapy, but at least theoretically, you can see that this is a loving act. As I said to the seminarians here yesterday, the Church has to keep preaching the hard teachings about morality for the simple reason that people are dying, every day, because those teachings are not accepted.

It would be the opposite of love—hatred and indifference, really—to withhold the truth from the world about these matters. Love requires truth… but truth requires great love and mercy, and that’s where we’ll go tomorrow.

A Question of Truth

Today more than ever, we need to be reminded of the bond between faith and truth, given the crisis of truth in our age. In contemporary culture, we often tend to consider the only real truth to be that of technology: truth is what we succeed in building and measuring by our scientific know-how, truth is what works and what makes life easier and more comfortable. Nowadays this appears as the only truth that is certain, the only truth that can be shared, the only truth that can serve as a basis for discussion or for common undertakings.

Yet at the other end of the scale we are willing to allow for subjective truths of the individual, which consist in fidelity to his or her deepest convictions, yet these are truths valid only for that individual and not capable of being proposed to others in an effort to serve the common good. But Truth itself, the truth which would comprehensively explain our life as individuals and in society, is regarded with suspicion.

Surely this kind of truth — we hear it said — is what was claimed by the great totalitarian movements of the last century, a truth that imposed its own world view in order to crush the actual lives of individuals. In the end, what we are left with is relativism, in which the question of universal truth — and ultimately this means the question of God — is no longer relevant. It would be logical, from this point of view, to attempt to sever the bond between religion and truth, because it seems to lie at the root of fanaticism, which proves oppressive for anyone who does not share the same beliefs. In this regard, though, we can speak of a massive amnesia in our contemporary world. 

The question of truth is really a question of memory, deep memory, for it deals with something prior to ourselves and can succeed in uniting us in a way that transcends our petty and limited individual consciousness. It is a question about the origin of all that is, in whose light we can glimpse the goal and thus the meaning of our common path.

Lumen Fidei, 25

Reflection – The Year of Faith ended and we were not quite at the half way point reading through this encyclical. It’s so full of fine, clear teaching that I thought I would just periodically revisit it on the blog.

It seems to me that Pope Benedict (and yes, this is clearly his work here) is touching upon a key point here, one that is factually a serious impediment in our efforts to proclaim the Gospel and the Church’s teachings, especially when those teachings are a bit hard to take for many in the world today.

For example, just a few days ago I had on the blog a little post about abortion, which I don’t really blog about very often, in reference to how Mary’s motherhood shows the deep structure of human freedom and how the claim that freedom requires severing sexual choice from reproduction actually is a terrible misunderstanding of the nature of freedom.

Well, you can take it or leave it – the post, and my argument, that is. Whatever – I’m doin’ my best here! But on my Facebook page, where I always post a link to the blog posts, a friend almost immediately left a comment that “Yes, but I don’t believe, though, that women who have abortions are going to hell.”

To me, this shows that something has gone awry in our ability to hear truth claims made on these hard topics. Because there was nothing—not a word indeed—in my post that would suggest that I would think women who have had abortions are going to hell. That would be a very strange attitude for me to take, given the number of post-abortive women I routinely minister to as a priest.

But the statement ‘x is wrong’ today almost automatically gets translated as ‘those who do ‘x’ are damned.’ Truth is then seen as a bulldozer running us all over roughshod, and I suppose those of who claim to ‘have the truth’ are seen in this metaphor as having climbed up into the cab of that dozer and are using truth as a weapon of mass destruction, essentially.

In other words, truth is utterly, completely, and almost unconsciously separated from love. To insist on a hard truth is to be unloving; caring, compassionate people are those who let people decide for themselves, without offering an opinion, whether arsenic is a good martini ingredient or whether ‘just keep going straight’ is a good driving direction when you’re parked at the edge of the Grand Canyon.

I’ll carry on with this tomorrow, as it is too much to address in a day, but the whole notion of truth has to be united with our understanding of love, or else both are mortally wounded. Or rather, millions upon millions of people are mortally wounded as love becomes unable to serve and truth does become a club to beat people with. Truth and love together are the healing of the world, but this is a long journey indeed. À demain.