Path-ological Christianity

Christian faith is not a system… it is a path, and it is characteristic of a path that it only becomes recognizable if you enter on it and start following it.

Joseph Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance

Reflection – In the task of the new evangelization, one of the genuine pitfalls—a most understandable one, but still a pitfall—is to mistake catechesis for evangelization, confound ‘teaching the truths of the faith’ and ‘bearing witness to the faith’. Obviously these two are not in opposition to one another in any way (the faith we teach is the faith we strive to live), but they are two different tasks that occur at different points with different results. And to simply confine oneself to the work of apologetics—making known and offering a credible defense to the doctrines of the faith—is not going to have a huge evangelical impact, I would suggest.

This is because of what Ratzinger is saying here in this short passage. Christian faith is not a system, but a path. It is not a series of propositions that can be diagrammed out, but a relationship to be lived. Or, to the extent that our faith is a series of propositions, these serve as a sort of map guiding us along the path. And it is only by being on the path that we can know what the path really is like.

A map is a useful thing—perhaps a necessary thing, even. But let us not confuse the map with the city it is a map of. I can stare at a map of Ottawa, say, all the day long and not come one kilometer closer to the actual city or really know very much of what it is to walk on its streets.

Christian doctrine is like that. We can have the catechism memorized, and know every answer to every possible theological conundrum. But if there is little or no implementation, we cannot really say we know the path of Christ. And we have all beheld the sorry sight of the apologist who knows all the answers, who has it all wrapped up in a nice tidy package, can explaine it all with absolute logical coherence and ringing certainty… and is so abrasive and obnoxious in his presentation that he does more damage to the cause of evangelization and mission than Richard Dawkins, Planned Parenthood, and Jack Chick combined.

When the first disciples asked Jesus “Master, where do you live?”, he did not hand them a theological tome or a helpful summarizing pamphlet. He said to them, rather, “Come and see.” (John 1: 38-39). It seems to me that in our own desire to share the Good News of Christ with the world we have to do a fair bit more ‘come and see’ and only later come to the pamphlets and tomes.

Probably I am hopelessly biased, since this is in fact the Madonna House patented method of approaching the matter. On the other hand, we do seem to have helped an awful lot of people come to the faith over the years. Of course this way of doing things implies that there is something for the person to come to and look at. In other words, that we’re living something, and that the manner of our life is itself a proclamation of Christ and of the Gospel.

That being said, my firm belief is that hospitality of the home and the heart is one of the most powerful means of ordinary evangelization a Christian can engage in. There is so much loneliness in the world, and so much locking of doors, pulling up of drawbridges, shutting out of the world and its mess, withdrawal into safe little enclaves. To invite another person, one who may not be ‘in the club’ yet, faith-wise, to share a meal, go for a coffee together, to be a warm and friendly presence to those in our immediate environment who are not of our faith—this is a powerful, hidden and very beautiful way of radiating Christ to the world.

It is, in other words, to invite people to take just one or two steps along the path with us, to even see that it is a path, a real way of life, and not just a bunch of incomprehensible teachings and harsh rules (which is the picture of Christianity many people have).

They may venture one or two steps on that path and then retreat, and that’s OK – we all have to be free in this matter. But the path is there, then, and our simple invitation means that they know where to find it, how to get onto it, and later on, if they wish, they can unfold the map and see just where it came from, where it leads and what the whole thing is about.

Evangelization—and the way of doing it is so available, I believe, to just about anyone, as long as we ourselves make sure that we’re on the path, that we’re living life in such a way that our lives do bear that witness to the way of the Gospel.

Politics and Redemption (or, Happy First Tuesday in November!)

Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. When it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes, not divine, but demonic.

Truth and Tolerance, 116

Reflection – You know, I’m in a funny position today with the blog. I am Canadian, blogging from the wilderness of the Upper Ottawa Valley. However, my primary blog readership is American. Hi, y’all! And of course there is that thingamabob happening down in the USA today—something involving appointing people to a college in Ohio or whatever—I haven’t been following it too closely.

Um, yeah. And of course we Canadians are always in an odd relationship with America—a numerically tiny country rammed up against our large powerful neighbor. We tend to take an unseemly interest in your affairs, peering through the curtains of the 49^th parallel, so to speak, to see what you all are up to now.

Meanwhile, I realize that Americans in general are not crazy about us furriners sticking our oar in regarding your internal affairs. If only Canadian politics were not so dreadfully dull and pointless. At least you all inject some drama and flair into your electioneering.

So anyhow, I thought I would stick my and Ratzinger’s two cents in with the above quote. I think it is wise on a day of political sweep and excitement to offer a salutary reminder of the limitations of the political sphere.

Politics and governance (which are not the same thing, precisely) are necessary, but not necessary for salvation. Politics are not redemptive. It is so crucial to get this. Four years ago so many people honestly believed Barack Obama would save America. Many others believed he would destroy America. Four years later, America is still with us, neither saved (except by the one true Savior) nor destroyed.

I honestly don’t know who’s going to win the election today. ‘Too close to call’ and ‘We’ll find out late Tuesday evening’ have been the most honest forecasts I’ve heard. But neither four more years of President Obama nor four-eight years of President Romney will save America, and probably won’t destroy it, either. America is a tough old bird of a country.

Politics is not redemptive. We do not look to the political order to usher in the kingdom of God on earth. Whenever this has been seriously tried—the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, the Khmer Rouge, the Cultural Revolution of China, the French Revolution and its Terror—the result has been to unleash hell on earth. If the political order is truly the source and driving engine of human transcendence and perfection, then it must wage war against anything opposed to its claims, which inevitably and always means killing everyone who is ‘other,’ be it the Jews, the bourgeoisie, the ancien regime, subversives.

I rather liked Clint Eastwood’s famous ‘empty chair’ speech at the Republican convention. I especially liked the part where he said that the whole political process is basically a job interview in which the employers—the voters—hire someone to do a job. If they do a decent job, we can hire them back for another go; if they do a lousy job, we get to fire them. Nice and simple, no messianic overtones, no ‘healing the planet,’ no creeping lèse majesté, no hyperbolic blather at all.

So, you Americans, this furriner ain’t going to stick his frosty Canuck nose into your affairs and tell you who to vote for. Regular readers of this blog can probably surmise my opinions of the current occupant of the Oval Office (ahem). Go and hire him back for four more years if you like the job he’s doing and fire him if you don’t.

That’s all… and oh yes, as you do that, know that America, and Canada, and Europe, and India, and the rest of the whole wide world is healed, redeemed, held, and made the seedbed of the kingdom of God not by any human power or political program, not by ideology or economy or legislation or power broking.

 

We are saved by the merciful love of God poured out in Jesus Christ, and not one thing that happens today in the USA or anywhere else in the world can hold back that merciful love from doing its work in the heart of the world and in men and women who open their hearts to receive it.

Who's That Knocking at the Door?

[Upon the collapse of Marxism], relativism has become the central problem for faith in our time. It by no means appears simply as resignation in the face of the unfathomable nature of truth,… rather, it defines itself positively on the basis of the concepts of tolerance, dialectic epistemology, and freedom.

Truth and Tolerance, 117

Reflection – Well, the Year of Faith is upon us, one week and one day away. Got your plans made for it yet? Here’s an idea, right from the heart of this blog: why don’t you read a book or two by Pope Benedict? The above one, Truth and Tolerance, is for example a dandy (see the link to buy it on the right hand sidebar).

Faith is about the knowledge of the Truth of things, and we would spend the year well deepening our knowledge of this Truth. Of course, this is the great contentious claim made by Christians today. We believe we know the Truth about life, that this Truth has been revealed to us by God in Jesus Christ, and that it is a Truth that is not just for us but for every human being, to make known the path to salvation and eternal life and to draw all people into the body of Christ, the Church, which is the sign and sacrament, the effective instrument of salvation.

What a claim! How arrogant! How dare we! When billions of people seem to be perfectly happy being Hindus or Muslims or Buddhists or Jews or animists, and a small but growing number choose to have no particular religion, how dare we maintain this outrageous universal claim to Truth!

Well, we do. Relativism, Ratzinger says, is increasingly aggressive in asserting itself as the path to tolerance, freedom, peace, and (in fact) truth. That’s what the reference to ‘dialectic epistemology’ means, by the way. Epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge, what it means and how we come to know things; dialectic refers to the creative tension of opposing truth claims set side by side to yield a deeper synthesis of truth.

Of course, once we introduce the idea of dialectic epistemology into relativistic theory, the tolerance and freedom elements of relativism take quite a beating. If all our little partial truths are supposed to be juxtaposed, and some deeper truth emerges from this dialectic juxtaposition, urgent questions emerge.

Namely, who decides what this deeper truth is? And what if those of us (say, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists…) reject this new synthesis and cling (bitterly or not) to our religion? What if some new synthetic vision of reality, imposed by this mysterious nameless ‘whoever’, clashes with our conscience?

If relativism is advanced, not as a negative formulation to ensure peaceful co-existence in society, but as a positive and necessary agenda for social progress, then tolerance and freedom are quickly left in the dust. And this is hardly an abstract notion right now. In the United States Catholics are being forced to pay for birth control and abortifacient drugs for their employees; in Canada a pro-life protester was informed recently by a judge, an agent of the state, that ‘your God is wrong!’

 

Relativism works when it is simply an observation that people have different opinions about things, and that everyone should be allowed to express and hold their opinions, and act on them so long as their actions do not grievously harm the social order or the essential rights of others. When relativism becomes an ideology, when truth claims are seen a priori as a threat to the social order and the rights of others, then fascism is knocking at the door. And this, alas, is the situation we are facing in much of the world today.

The Door is Open

The desperate situation of philosophy—that is to say, the desperate situation into which reason obsessed by positivism has maneuvered itself—has become the desperate situation of our faith. Faith cannot be set free unless reason itself opens up again. If the door to metaphysical knowledge remains barred, if we cannot pass beyond the limits to human perception set by Kant, then faith will necessarily atrophy, simply for lack of breathing space.

Truth and Tolerance, 135

Reflection – Hi, folks, I’m back! ‘Real-time Fr. Denis’ blogging here. Cana was great (as it always is) – a week of hot, sunny days and cool evenings and a genuinely nice bunch of families to share it with. Returning to Madonna House yesterday I found the place packed to the rafters with young’uns who have rolled in for our MH summer program. Nice!

Well, back to business. And it’s my favorite business today – philosophy! Ratzinger’s critique of positivism is a core element in his writings over the years. ‘Reason obsessed by positivism’ is a good turn of phrase. His point has been that the positivistic approach to human reason is arbitrary and unproven, and that our insistence on limiting reason to that approach is entirely unwarranted and deeply harmful to the human project.

Oh yeah—not everyone reading this is trained in philosophy… so what is positivism again? It’s the theory of knowledge that limits the known and the knowable to the immediately observable and the scientifically demonstrable. If you can’t measure it in a laboratory or touch it with your hands, it either simply doesn’t exist or at any rate is entirely beyond your knowledge and hence utterly irrelevant to your life.

Of course, positivism is inherently self-contradictory. The ideas expressed in the above paragraph are not objects of sense perception, nor can they be demonstrated in a laboratory. Therefore, by strict positivistic criteria, they do not exist, or are unknowable and hence irrelevant. Positivism is disproved and ruled out… by positivism. An intellectual theory that begins by cutting its own epistemological throat is perhaps open to criticism, eh?

And so Ratzinger has critiqued it, extensively and fairly unanswerably (in my opinion). Positivism simply has no persuasive force. Meanwhile, the effect it has is to render any kind of penetration into the deep mystery of life and humanity impossible. Forget about faith for the moment—any kind of inquiry into what it all means and how we are to live is ruled out a priori by scientific positivism.

I remember reading some blogger or other on the internet saying just that. “Well, we can’t really know anything about the meaning of life, so why bother with it, and just get on with having fun and doing what you think you’re supposed to do!” Positivism in action—and I think there’s an awful lot of people who have never stepped inside of a philosophy classroom who live out of that. Trickle-down philosophy—the bane of our times. If you don’t think for yourself and come up with your own philosophy, one will be given to you—and it will probably be some version of logical positivism.

Who says we cannot know anything about the meaning of life? Really, sez who? The whole human quest for wisdom and justice is based on their being something out there to find. And meanwhile, Mr. Positivist has in fact snuck in a conclusion about what it all means anyhow. “Let’s just have fun”—aka hedonism, aka ‘pleasure is the point of life.’ And ‘do what you think you’re supposed to do’—aka there is a moral order, and such a thing as ‘what we are supposed to do’. Where it comes from and why we are beholden to it is left unanswered…

Meanwhile, the door to metaphysical knowledge (that is, what things really are and what reality really is) is not really barred. It has been swinging open all these centuries, and thinkers unbound by Kant and Comte and Russell and Hume have been merrily going in and out of it all along. And the real possibility of metaphysical knowledge makes faith possible, credible, viable, intellectually respectable, vibrant and strong.

So to those of you who have faith and maybe are not so intellectually or philosophically inclined – take heart! Faith may be many things, but it is not ridiculous or nonsensical or anti-intellectual. And to those reading who may have rejected faith as this, defend your position! Ratzinger has raised a formidable critique of Comtian scientific positivism, and it needs to be answered if the anti-faith, anti-metaphysical position is to be maintained.

Thinking of Getting a Tattoo

The humility that gives way to what has been found and does not try to manipulate it should not, however, become a false modesty that takes away our courage to recognize the truth. All the more must it oppose the pursuit of power, which is only interested in dominating the world and is no longer willing to perceive its inner logic, which sets limits to our desire to dominate.”

Truth and Tolerance, 159

Reflection – This passage follows directly upon yesterday’s, regarding the call to live in truth, to have truth and not our desires and whims be the guiding force in our work and lives.

Here, Ratzinger clarifies that this commitment to truth is meant to be a bold one. We are not to be all wussy about it: ‘well, I don’t know, and maybe it is, and let’s wait and see, and I’m not sure, and….’ Blah, blah, blah. Pussyfooting around.

No, we are a prophetic people. When we apprehend the truth, we are to fearlessly and faithfully proclaim it and bear the burden Christ bore, of opposition, ridicule, persecution and even martyrdom, if that’s where our witness to truth takes us.

This is so utterly crucial today. In Egypt, Christian babies are often tattooed with a cross on their wrist, so they cannot be kidnapped by their Muslim neighbors. This means that a Christian in Egypt goes through life with the mark of Truth displayed for all to see, even though this causes them great suffering and loss. They know what it means to bear witness to the truth of Christ in face of persecution… and the Coptic Church of Egypt is vibrant and growing, even as it faces intensifying attacks.

What about us? Where is our ‘tattoo’? Governments in the Western world are increasingly compelling Catholic and Christian institutions to provide services that contradict our basic religious beliefs as they apply to human life and sexuality: contraception, abortion, adoption to same sex couples. It is increasingly becoming dangerous, or at the very least extremely unpleasant, to simply speak the truth about the moral law as we believe it has been revealed to us by God.

For example, homosexual intercourse is gravely evil. Same sex marriage is a contradiction in terms. Human life begins at conception, and any action taken to end a human life is gravely evil. Assisted reproduction techniques which separate the marital embrace from the act of conception are gravely evil. The use of contraceptive devices or medications is gravely evil.

So there. Come and get me, you who wish to force Christians to shut up about these matters. You’ll never take me alive, coppers!!! Top of the world, ma!.. Oh sorry, started channeling Jimmy Cagney gangster movies there for a minute…

But in all seriousness, Christians have lost their jobs recently for simply saying some of the things I just said, even in private conversations. In a way, it’s easy for me: I’m a Catholic priest, and I don’t think I’m going to get fired for expressing Catholic moral teaching on a blog post. I realize this, that I have a somewhat privileged place, at least at this time. It may not always be so easy…

But it’s not so easy, I do realize, even now for Christians in the work place and the secular world to do this. So we need to remember those brave Egyptian Copts and their tattoos. Where the Church is persecuted, the Church grows strong and vibrant. When the world turns on us, heaven turns towards us. The blood of martyrs is the seed bed of faith. And we’ve had some significant ‘crop failures’ of faith in the past century or so in the Western world.

Truth, and the passionate proclamation of it, the fierce commitment to it, the willingness to bear any burden, pay any price, suffer any resistance—this is our prophetic mission as Catholic Christians in the coming year 2012. Let us pray for one another, for all those who are particularly in the crucible right now, and for the grace to do what we need to do so that Christ be proclaimed to the world until he comes in glory.

Talking About Integrity

The strict application of methodical discipline should not mean just the pursuit of success; it should mean the pursuit of truth and the readiness to find it. That methodological strictness, which again and again lays upon us the obligation to subject ourselves to what we have found, and not just to follow our own wishes, can amount to a great school in being human and can make man capable of recognizing and appreciating truth.

Truth and Tolerance, 159

Reflection – Ratzinger is talking here about integrity. We all want what we want, when and as we want it. Such is our fallen human condition. But when we engage with the world, we are all called, in integrity, to something a little more noble than that, a slightly higher bar of behavior.

He writes here in the context of his own field of life (which happens to be mine, too, at least at the present moment): theology, writing. And here there is a great call for integrity. When one deals in words all the time, there can be a great temptation to, well, say whatever you want! Words are infinitely pliable; the twenty-six letters of the alphabet just keep combining in all sorts of neat ways. And if I get the words wrong, it's not like crashing a car into a ditch or burning the soup.

Those of us who write as a way of life are called to a serious discipline, then. Words must be at the service, not of my saying whatever fool notion pops into my head, but of truth. The best truth I can get to, anyhow, right now. The same holds for artists and musicians, although I would be hard pressed to say much about the quest for truth and integrity in those fields, since they are not mine.

Always, though, in the creative fields there must be a certain grappling with not just self-expression, but with the Truth that is bigger than the artist, that is outside the artist and also within him or her, and which all of us live our lives in dialogue with. Real self-expression demands this: the real me is living in a real world with a real God and a real Truth I did not make.

But this call to integrity is for everyone, not just people who can be formally categorized as artists or scholars in one field or another. All of us are called to engage in our field of action with a concern for the ultimate reality of life—God, the human condition, the demands of justice, the demands of charity, the soul, death, suffering. All that good stuff.

It seems to me that this is what Catherine de Hueck Doherty, founder of Madonna House, had in spades: a profound vision of how every task of human life, from the most seemingly mundane (sweeping a floor, washing dishes) to the most seemingly exalted (composing a symphony, writing poetry) fit into the large cosmic vision of reality. Everything is at the service of love, everything taken up into the building of the Body of Christ in the world, the extension of the Kingdom into all creation.

And so the way every task is to be done reflects that. As she would say, ‘you can go to heaven or hell sweeping a floor’ – how it is done reflects the extent to which you connect this task with eternal realities and the call of the Gospel to love and serve.

It is all about being faithful to ‘what we have found, and not our own wishes’ as Ratzinger puts it. It is all about finding ourselves in a world where God has come (O Come, O Come Emmanuel…). He has come. He is here, and nothing is left outside that coming, that presence. Those of us who say we believe that must live with a great attentiveness, a great responsibility in our lives, so that how we shape and fashion our world through the work of our hands, minds, and hearts can faithfully correspond to the mystery we have found ourselves immersed in.