Forgetting Ourselves

[The foolish rich man of Luke 12: 16-23] strikes me as a very exact picture of our average modern attitude. Our technical and economic capabilities have grown to an extent that could not have been imagined earlier. The precision of our calculations is worthy of admiration.

Despite all the ghastly things that have happened in this age of ours the opinion is continually becoming stronger among many people that we are now close to the point of bringing about the greatest happiness of the greatest number and finally ushering in a new phase of history… but precisely when we seem to be coming close to humankind’s redemption of itself, frightening explosions erupt from the depths of the unsatisfied and oppressed human soul to tell us: ‘Fool , you have forgotten yourself…’

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, To Look on Christ: Exercises in Faith, Hope, and Love

Reflection – This book was published in 1991, compiled from previously given talks and homilies. I think the heady optimism Ratzinger refers to here has become a little threadbare in the ensuing decades and particularly in the past ten years. The 1980s are a long time ago, and not just in terms of big hair and leggings. From financial meltdowns to Ebola outbreaks, a resurgent Russia and the steady growth of the most radical and violent forms of Islam, it would take a most determinedly optimistic sort to believe that ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ is just around the corner. Any day now! Eschatology now! Well, if not now, then… uhh…. tomorrow! Or not…

That being said, the fundamental attitude still is in place, namely that there is no happiness possible except that which we attain by our own efforts. If it cannot be a happiness for the whole of humanity, the kingdom of heaven on earth, then I will just grab as big a piece of the pie as I can get away with and make off with it.

This returns us to the precise position of the rich fool of Luke’s Gospel – once my barns are full, I can sit back and relax and let the rest of the world burn. Whether we are ‘social justice warriors’ determined to bring the final state of human happiness to pass by some type of political action or big greedy pigs concerned only for our own happiness, the same mistake is made, that happiness lies within human power of action, and that in fact there is no other happiness to be had except what we can fashion for ourselves in this world.

Of course my sympathies are more with the SJW types (I wouldn’t very well have joined Madonna House otherwise), but nonetheless it is a terrible trap, one that many decent and caring people have fallen into. We are supposed to care, deeply and passionately, about the sufferings of all humanity, and strive to do our bit, anyhow, to alleviate this suffering.

But if there is no God, no hope for redemption beyond this world and beyond our own choices and acts, if there is in fact no kingdom of heaven, then our care for humanity will either burn itself out and we will collapse into indifference, cynicism, and selfishness, or we will be prey to more and more extreme ideologies which comes at a very high price to our humanity.

Communism, fascism, and indeed radical Islam are all examples of ideological projects to create the kingdom of heaven on earth which inevitably entail killing everyone who seems to be getting in the way: the infidels, the subsersives, the Jews—whoever.

And we are not immune to this in our North American world. The ideology of the day on our continent seems to be that of gender libertarianism—if only everyone gets to express his or her (or whatever pronouns we come up with) gender identity and sexual preference without censure in absolute freedom, then we will all be happy. But to achieve that eschatological state of bliss, those religions that hold to a sexual ethos rooted in the complementariness of the genders and the sanctity of marriage must be silenced on this matter, must themselves be censured and censored by state fiat if necessary. And this is a growing sentiment in Canada and the United States.

All of this is based on this terrible loss of our true selves and the truth of human happiness, the summa bonum, the true greatest good of man and woman in God. Deprived of this, we are forced into desperate straits, into a frantic and futile quest for beatitude in this life, doomed to failure and yielding misery, despondency and rage.

Fortunately, the way back is always available to us, and the true kingdom of heaven, the redemption given by God in Christ Jesus is always ours for the asking, ours not for the taking but for the receiving as a gracious gift of God’s mercy and love, and so we are free and need not fall into the terrible traps of selfish greed, cynical apathy, or ideological extremism. The beatitude of God is as near to us as the choice to love and serve, pray and believe, in this present moment, and that is the great redemption from human folly and failure in this world.

Truth and Freedom

The salvation offered by the Logos, by the Word of God made man, is of its nature a liberation from the slavery of appearance, a return to the truth. But the transition from appearance to the light of truth takes place in the figure of the cross.

To Look on Christ, 81

Reflection – My previous post was about truth as the necessary ground for communion. Without a shared reality, without at least some shared meaning, no communication, and hence no community is possible.

This passage takes up the theme of truth and develops it further. Jesus tells us that the truth will set us free (John 8:32). Truth is liberation – to live in reality is to live in freedom from illusion and artifice. But this truth comes to us, Ratzinger tells us, in the figure of the cross.

Now what does that mean? I don’t have the original passage in context in front of me, but I see two interwoven meanings here. First, when we come into the truth, we see things as they are, as opposed to what we would like them to be. Reality is what it is; our desires are not king of the world. The entire cosmos, in a sense, is like Rhett to our Scarlett saying to us, ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn (what you want).’

So of course, to live in truth is to live in humility, and of course this hurts our ego. We must accept that we are just one little person in a very big world, and that our primary call is to accept things as they are, since all our efforts and energies can only make a small difference in the world.

So this hurts, and so truth comes to us in the figure of the cross. But there is a deeper meaning to all this, of course. The cross is not merely a symbol of pain and helplessness, right? Jesus died on the cross, and the cross then becomes not only the symbol but the deep realization of the deepest truth of all.

And this truth is the infinite love and mercy of God poured out, freely given, big enough for every human being to have a full share in it. This is the deepest truth of reality, of the cosmos and what lies beneath and above it. Reality comes to us hard and unyielding, like the wood of the cross, yet it is by lying on that cross that we come to know we are sharing it with our Lord who loves us.

‘The cross is the marriage bed of Christ and humanity.’ To accept the sorrowful mystery of things as they are, and to discover within them the mysterious awesome presence, power, and love of God—this is the truth that liberates us. We have nothing to fear. There is no reality we need to flee from or deny or reject. Even the most horrific and agonizing turns of fate can be and indeed are met by the mercy and love of God coming out to us from the very heart of the world’s anguish.

This is our Christian faith, and from this faith comes the power to love and spend ourselves freely for the life of the world. And that is what we mean by freedom in our religion.

In the Strange Twilight

One can always say with Thomas [Aquinas] that unbelief is unnatural, but at the same time it is always true that human beings cannot completely dispel the strange twilight that hangs over the question of the eternal, that God must cross over to them and talk to them if real relations are to be established with him… but how should this happen?

…God’s speaking to us reaches us through men and women who have listened to God and come into contact with God.

To Look on Christ, 29

Reflection – Ratzinger has often reflected on this theme, namely, the difficulty of faith for human beings at all times, but most especially in our time. He has reflected on it in books such as Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith, Introduction to Christianity, and Faith and the Future.

It is this paradoxical situation: we are made to reach out beyond ourselves and beyond the natural order into a transcendent reality. Religion is a naturally occurring phenomenon, universal across all human cultures and civilizations. At the same time, this ‘reaching out’ is a reaching out into darkness, into mystery, into the great unknown. And so there is a drawing back that is equally ‘natural’ to us (at least it feels natural).

We are filled with longings and desires that pull us beyond ourselves and that are satisfied by no created being. At the same time, we are afraid of the heights, afraid of where this mysterious Being who draws us out may take us, afraid of the Great Unknown. And we hesitate. We are strange, confused, contradictory creatures, we humans.

And God indeed must come to us. We cannot just go to Him. To some degree this is because of our fallen condition, our heightened fears and selfish tendencies that result from our rebellion against God and against truth. But I think it’s also how God intended it in the beginning—not that it be so hard, but that it be His initiative, His movement towards us. In the garden, God came to the man and woman and walked and talked with them in the cool of the evening. God comes to us; we cannot go to Him.

And so now, as Ratzinger has often said in his writings, this terrible gap, this terrible abyss that has formed between God and man has been bridged. First by Jesus, but then by the host of men and women, Mary first among them, who have come to know God through, with, and in Jesus.

The saints—this is how we come to know God and come to real relationship with Him. Not only the canonized ones, but the truly good, spiritual people who we are blessed to encounter in our lives. People who walk and talk with God in the heat of the day and the cool of the evening. People who have listened to God and let Him shape their humanity into a divine pattern.

This is how we come to know God. This is why (I maintain) Jesus established a Church, a place where we could come together, to know the Lord together. Where my darkness can meet your light, and your darkness can meet my light. It’s so simple. We help each other, even in the midst of the human struggles and difficulties of life in the Church. We help each other, or at least we’re meant to. And it is in our own ‘walking and talking’ with God in the light and darkness of our lives that we become those very saints, become  what we are meant to be.

And as we help each other as we’re meant to, we shine that light to those outside the Church, those who may be searching for God and not quite know where to find Him. If they see us loving each other, they may just draw a bit closer to us, and to the Lord who brings us together. And that’s how the New Evangelization works.

Something Bigger

All the more we are forced to face up to whether the question of God does not simply surpass the boundaries of human ability so that to this extent agnosticism would be the only correct attitude for men and women: in keeping with the nature of being honest, in deed in the profoundest sense of the ‘pious’ – the recognition of where vision ends, respect for what has not been disclosed to us. Ought it perhaps to be the new piety of human thinking to leave what cannot be investigated and be content with what we are given?

To Look on Christ, 16

Reflection – The above describes perfectly what is apparently a growing attitude, especially among young people today. I recently read a statistic that some large number (30%?) of young adults have simply decided to ignore questions of meaning, God, the deeper purpose of life and the universe.
As Ratzinger goes on to discuss in the passage (and indeed it is one of his common themes), this attitude only seems to be modest, humble, and unassuming.
The truth is, we cannot adopt a neutral stance towards the deep questions of life. These questions are not simply matters of esoteric knowledge or trivial information. I can live my life very well knowing nothing about string theory; whether or not Accra is the capital of Ghana is also irrelevant to my daily decisions.
But the underlying structure of all reality? The question as to whether or not human life is going anywhere? Is there a God who made us for a reason, and to whom we will have to give an account of ourselves? These questions are not irrelevant. They cannot be ducked.
If I say that ‘I am not going to worry my silly head about these things – I’m not smart enough, and anyway, who cares?’ what I am really saying is ‘There is no significant meaning or purpose, there is no God, the world and my life is not going anywhere, really.
Mind you, I am not talking here about people who genuinely anguish with doubts and questions, who do not know, really, what to believe, but who struggle to hold on to the truths they know. What Ratzinger and I are describing is an attitude of indifference, a kind of metaphysical despair which just plunges the individual into pleasure seeking, worldly pursuits, transient sensations and trivia.
This is not a neutral attitude. In fact, this attitude always throws the person holding it more and more into egoism, into living life tightly constrained by my own lights, likes, thoughts and attitudes. Because there is no larger meaning calling me out of myself, I inevitably collapse into myself and whatever I want and choose.
We are always being summoned to something bigger than ourselves. Christianity identifies this ‘bigger’ with the God who made the universe who became man in Jesus Christ to lead us to heaven. This I believe with all my heart. Others believe differently, but those who suspend the questions, who decide to dismiss the whole matter from their heads—these people are well on the way to barbarism, to living a life without any depth, without anything existing outside themselves and their small circle of self-chosen concerns that matters to them. And this is, sadly, more and more the situation we are confronting in our post-modern world. Let us confront it with the good news and hope we hold in Christ.

What Ails Ya?

Making [Christ’s yes] present and actual is possible because the Lord lives even today in his saints and because in the love that comes from their faith his love can touch me directly.

To Look on Christ, 94

Reflection – In surveying the landscape of the world in the dying days of 2011, one could diagnose many illnesses, many pathologies in what we see. There is fiscal irresponsibility in high places, environmental irresponsibility (perhaps) in other places. There is moral confusion, corruption, and a breakdown of community in almost all places.

But I would say honestly that I think the great poverty afflicting us in the world today is precisely what Ratzinger touches on here. We have a poverty of saints. We need to touch Christ, you see. We need, not an endless profusion of words (hearken, o blogger!), not the endless chatter and clatter and debate of the public square, not more programs in our governments and churches, not even (principally) more services to the poor and needy, good though all these things may be.
We need saints. What ails humanity, always and everywhere and in every age, is the great ‘no’ to God that I have been reflecting on with the Pope this past week or so. This great choice in humanity to go its own way, to make a life apart from God, away from Him, in opposition to Him perhaps, but certainly separated from Him. And this ‘no’ places us in a terrible wilderness, a terrible darkness, a strange sort of hell of the self, an endless hall of mirrors where all we can see is our own egoism reflected back to us.
This is, as I say, the perennial complaint of the human race, our chronic illness. And Christ is the remedy. His ‘yes’ to the Father, made as man, but made an eternally fruitful ‘yes’ by the fact that he is God, this yes is powerful enough to heal all of our ‘nos’.
But we need saints. We need to see that yes. We need to see what it looks like when a sinner like us through some unaccountable miracle says ‘yes’ to God and so is transformed by the power of Christ.
Everything that ails the world—all the fiscal, environmental, moral, communal, etc. failures we see on all sides at this time—traces back to the rampant ‘no’ to God, the endemic choice in our time to build a world apart from and without God. And nothing will ever be made right in this world until we repent of this choice and return to Him without whom the world does not exist and cannot be what He designed it to be.
And it is the saints who in every age show us what this repentance, this return, looks like, and what God want the world today to look like. Only they know, because only they have attacked the problem at its root. The saints are radicals; they attack the problem at the root, and the root of the problem, now and always and forever and ever, is sin. My sin, your sin.
There is a poverty of saints in the world today, a poverty of people who can make visible Christ’s yes to the Father, the human yes to God that is the healing of the nations. A poverty of saints… hmm. Now, where will we find them? Where are they going to come from? Hey! How about you and me! Do you think that could work?

How Can We Make a Difference?

Faith is communion with Jesus and thus liberation from the repression that is opposed to the truth, liberation of my ego from its going against the grain of its being, so as to respond to the Father and say ‘yes’ to love, ‘yes’ to being, to say that ‘yes’ that is our redemption and that overcomes the world… it is a breaking out of the isolation of my ego that is its own illness.

To Look on Christ, 37

Reflection – This lovely little passage lends itself to prolonged meditation. The vision Ratzinger gives here is so simple, and so simply expressed, yet possesses the key to happiness, to freedom, to joy.

So often we think in terms of ‘if onlys.’ If only this hadn’t happened. If only I hadn’t made that mistake. If only my community wasn’t like this, my spouse like that, my family like this, my job such and such. If only the economy were doing better. If only society was more Christian, less brutal.

If only, if only, if only… then I would be happy, then I would be free. Ratzinger opens up in this brief passage the reality of our happiness and freedom. Yes, outward events affect us and cause us grief and pain. But it is in the heart that redemption comes to us, not in the miraculous resolving of all our problems and ills. It is within ourselves that we overcome the world, and this overcoming of the world only comes through faith in Jesus.

The bottom line is we cannot do it alone. In fact, we cannot break out of our aloneness alone, by our own power or even by our collective wisdom and goodness. It is this power and presence of Christ in our hearts by faith and by the gift of the Holy Spirit that works to break us free from this terrible isolation that locks us up and makes us so terribly unhappy. And it is this same power and presence that empowers us then to move out in love and hope towards the world, our brothers and sisters, and all especially the poor, the little ones, the ones who most desperately need our help.

For 2000 years this has, factually, been the Christian experience. It is the saint, the one who knows Christ and has been interiorly transformed by his presence and power, who truly overcomes the world and transforms society, the Church—everything. We are living in a time that badly needs transformation. The only path to that transformation is to open the doors of our hearts and minds to Christ and thus become the saints he made us to be.

You Gotta Have Faith F-Faith F-Faith (aka, Once in a Very Great While, George Michaels is Right)

Human life becomes impossible if one can no longer trust other people and is no longer able to rely on their experience, their knowledge, on what is already provided for us. That is one aspect of faith, the positive side. On the other side it is naturally the expression of a lack of knowledge and to that extent of an attitude of inferiority: it would be better to know. [This type of faith] bears the character of what is insufficient and provisional: it is a purely initial preliminary stage of knowledge that whenever possible one will strive to pass beyond. But alongside this there is something quite different: this kind of ‘faith’ is a mutual trust, a common sharing in understanding and in mastering the world, and this aspect is unessential for the organization of human life. A society without trust cannot live.

To Look on Christ, 12-13.

Reflection – Who do you trust? Who, when they tell you something is so, do you believe? Anyone? Perhaps it might depend on the question – people in MH sometimes (once in a while) trust me on questions of theology or scripture, but they sure don’t trust me on auto mechanics or proper silk screening techniques (and rightly so!).

But that is the species of faith Ratzinger is talking about here. Not the supernatural theological virtue, but ordinary choices to believe a trusted authority. But without this, as he points out, life gets pretty difficult. Who of us can know everything about everything? We all have to make some decision to trust other people’s say so, even on mundane matters. If someone tells me they were working in the garden in the morning, I more or less take it at face value, even if I didn’t personally witness the momentous event.

Ratzinger’s point here (and of course he’s always addressing his opponents the logical positivists and their anti-faith bias) is that this is, in fact, a good thing. Yes, it is good to know everything from our own knowledge. Yes, it is good to have tested things out and determined to our own satisfaction the truth of this or that matter. It would be really great if I did know all about auto mechanics and handicrafts—but my brother Bryan knows, and I trust him. My sister Anne Marie knows, and I trust her. And this is the basis of social life—the bonds of trust that come from our mutual need, our mutual ignorance, and the little acts of faith we engage in every day without hardly noticing it.

So the ideologues who deny that any act of faith is valid, that it is always an abdication of the intellect and its rigors to engage in faith, have a very steep hill to climb, don’t they? Better fix your own car, tend your own illnesses, drive yourself wherever you go (surely you don’t trust the pilot, do you? Have you seen, and can you personally authenticate, his credentials?). Better grow your own food while you’re at it, and generate your own power—in fact, you’re basically going to have live off the grid, if you’re going to live without faith in your life.

Every human action is a faith-based initiative. And if this is true of food and housing, medicine and travel, why should we exclude faith from the fundamental matters of life and death, meaning and purpose? I choose to trust my mechanic with my car; why, if I determine that this book or that Church is trustworthy, should I not trust them with myself?

Yes, it’s more important, more consequential. Hence it’s a more important decision. But if faith is allowed in all these lesser matters, by what rational argument do we exclude it from the larger?

Why I Am a Conservative

Optimism is the theological virtue of a new god, and a new religion, the virtue of deified history, of a god ‘history’, and thus of the great god of modern ideologies and their promise… [As despair] is the sin against the Holy Spirit because it excludes the latter’s power to heal and to forgive and thereby rejects salvation, [so] in the new religion ‘pessimism’ is the sin of all sins, for to doubt optimism, progress, utopia is a frontal attack on the spirit of the modern age: it is to dispute its fundamental creed on which its security rests, even though this is always under threat in view of the weakness of the sham god of history.

To Look on Christ, 43

Reflection – This passage from Ratzinger is an interesting one. It well reflects the distinctive spirit of ‘modernity’ – a spirit that many would argue has given way to something quite different in post-modernity.
Modernity is characterized by just this idea of marching towards a glorious future, of the inevitable progress of history, of a certain historical determinism in which events unfold according to a definite program, and in which we are either to ‘lead, follow, or get out of the way’… or be crushed under the wheels of history’s vanguard.
Has this modern sense eroded, fractured under post-modernity’s weight? I’m not so sure. I was living in Washington DC during the last presidential election. Whatever one might think of Barack Obama, the type of enthusiasm around his campaign bore many characteristics of this sort of historical determinism, the quasi-Hegelian view of the historical moment and epochal change. There was a kind of ‘messianic’ excitement around his campaign, at least in some circles.
The aggressive movement towards same-sex marriage bears much of this same ideology of historical inevitability. Those opposed to both Obama and same-sex marriage have been characterized as ‘on the wrong side of history’ – as if history is a living entity with its own agenda.
I identify myself as a conservative, politically. Truthfully, I despise labels, and particularly the almost meaningless labels of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ which seem to mean whatever the person using them wants them to mean, and more often than not are either tribal totems of belonging or terms of abuse hurled back and forth.
However, my overall perception after 45 years on the planet is that contemporary political liberalism seeks to fundamentally re-order society so as to usher in some sort of ‘new age’ of justice and equality, whereas conservatism accepts that human beings and human society will always be as they are, and the role of the state is fundamentally to restrain the worst excesses of human behavior and otherwise allow people to live their lives as best they see fit. This seems more in line with reality to me; hence, I call myself a conservative.
I am not a pessimist; I believe that God is indeed going to create a new heavens and a new earth, and the redeemed will live forever in the light of his glory. But that is His work, not ours. Our work is to live in peace and love, to serve and suffer and give ourselves away until we have nothing left to give. Our work is not to create this new heaven and earth by our own ideas and energies.
The world, or rather the human beings alive in the world today, will keep blundering along, not too bad and not too good, with flashes of beauty and heroism here and there, and a strong undercurrent of love and sacrifice running through nearly every human life. God’s grace active everywhere and in everyone, and the shadow reality of sin present in all hearts, too. So it always has been, so it will be until God comes to usher in the real New Age, the fullness of the kingdom of heaven.