Who's That Knocking at the Door?

Paul, continuing to describe the moral depredations of pagan Rome, goes deeper than a mere catalogue of vices:

At the origin of all these negative things lies the negation of the truth in favor of what is convenient – or rather, of what is profitable. The starting point in man is a resistance to the evidential character of the Creator that is present in his heart as the sign of a Being who looks at him and summons him… Paul is far from regarding atheism, or an agnosticism that is lived out as atheism, as an innocent position. In his eyes, it is always the fruit of a refusal of that knowledge which is in fact offered to man; man is unwilling to accept the conditions attached to that knowledge.

Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, p. 96

Reflection – Strong language here! It is important to note that Ratzinger will go on in this essay, which I’ve already blogged about twice, to acknowledge that many who struggle with faith and are either atheists or agnostics are not consciously or deliberately resisting God out of malicious selfishness.

Nonetheless, we must acknowledge, at least in our own hearts, the truth of this observation. There’s something in us that just doesn’t want to be mastered, doesn’t want a God who is the Lord of all. To believe in God is to believe that I have a Lord. One of the turning points of my own life was a moment when I had a happy realization that Jesus, in fact, had a right to my obedience. I wasn’t doing him no favors by obeying him! I wasn’t being some kind of especially nice guy. It was a simple matter of justice. He is Lord; I am not; he is to be obeyed. Period.

And there is something in us all, for sure, that chafes at that God. And there is something in this world, for sure, in the very structure of our experience of the world, that bears witness to just that God, that Master. There is a Force (trust the Force, Luke!) that binds all reality together and gives it coherence, order.

And so, if we truly set ourselves towards our own self-will, our own devices and desires, then we must blind ourselves to these ‘signs of intelligent life in the universe’, deafen ourselves to the voice of goodness, truth, and beauty that echoes from the caverns of all beings, harden ourselves against the solicitations of all these creatures knocking Jehovah Witness-like at the doors of our minds and hearts to tell us they and we have a Maker.

The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows forth the work of his hands. If we do not wish to glorify God or unite the work of our hands to His, then we must, ultimately, blind, deafen, harden, and deaden ourselves to ‘all of that’. The choice is always open to us; the way is always offered to us; the truth is, as Mulder and Scully kept telling us, ‘out there’. We can accept God and the world he made; if we reject God, we end up rejecting the world he made, too.

An Interesting New Blog

This looks like a good blog resource for people in pro-life work. One woman's journey through abortion to recovery and healing. We need to get stories like this out there, I believe, and this woman is very courageous to make herself vulnerable in this way.

Religion and Politics

We have raised the question: can our encounter with the God who in Christ has shown us his face and opened his heart be for us too not just “informative” but “performative”—that is to say, can it change our lives, so that we know we are redeemed through the hope that it expresses? Before attempting to answer the question, let us return once more to the early Church. Christianity did not bring a message of social revolution like that of the ill-fated Spartacus, whose struggle led to so much bloodshed. Jesus was not Spartacus, he was not engaged in a fight for political liberation like Barabbas or Bar- Kochba. Jesus, who himself died on the Cross, brought something totally different: an encounter with the Lord of all lords, an encounter with the living God and thus an encounter with a hope stronger than the sufferings of slavery, a hope which therefore transformed life and the world from within.

Spe Salvi 4

Reflection – The distinction between ‘informative’ and ‘performative’ is something Pope Benedict has explained earlier in the encyclical. It means something I referred to a couple posts ago - that the Christian revelation is not just interesting (maybe) data about God and the world, but that it does something to us. It changes us, or it least it is meant to, and if we receive it sincerely, it most certainly will, for that is its very nature.

In this passage we touch upon the delicate and complex question of the political ramifications of Christianity. It is important to read this passage correctly; a quick or careless reading could make it sound like the Holy Father is removing Christianity from the sphere of political change or liberation entirely.

This is not correct, nor is it what the text says or even implies. Pope Benedict has lived, as a 20^th century European, through a great deal of political upheaval and violence. He is well aware of the tendency in the past centuries to locate messianic hope or eschatological expectation in the sphere of political change. If only we can establish the right form of government, the proper social and economic structures, the right leadership… then and only then we will have a just and peaceful society.

He knows well the dangers of this approach. Elsewhere he writes that when politics becomes messianic it promises too much and becomes demonic. The effort to usher in the kingdom through political change, because it is doomed, leads to greater and greater intensity of effort, terminating in violence and tyranny.

It is the encounter with God that changes the human heart that ushers in a world of peace, justice, and love. We are indeed supposed to transform our world; we are supposed to seek justice for the poor, care of the needy, a beautiful society based on social justice and charity. But the primary field of transformation is the human heart; without this inner transformation, which can only come from a living encounter with the God of love, nothing really changes.

In Madonna House terms (and really, our little community is so much of one mind with Pope Benedict) it is the poustinia of the heart where God fashions us into a sobornost, a unity, so that we can go forth into the world as stranniki—pilgrims—proclaiming the kingdom with our lives. We can thus live as urodivoi (fools), with the foolish generosity of divine charity rooted in the deep interior molchanie (silence) of God. That, and not this or that political or economic program, is the hope of the world.

Ecclesia Delenda Est!

The thirst for freedom is the form in which the yearning for redemption and the feeling of unredemption and alienation make their voices heard today. The call for freedom demands an existence uncramped by prior givens that keep me from fully realizing myself and throw up external obstacles to my chosen path…  The limits that the Church erects seem doubly burdensome because they reach into man’s most personal and most intimate depths. For the church’s rules for ordering life are far more than a set of regulations to keep the shoulder-to-shoulder traffic of humanity as far as possible from collision. They inwardly affect my course in life, telling me how I am supposed to understand and shape my freedom. They demand of me decisions that cannot be made without painful renunciation. Is this not intended to deny us the sweetest fruits in the garden of life? Is not the way into the wide open closed by the restrictive confines of so many commandments and prohibitions? Is not thought kept from reaching its full stature just as much as the will is? must not liberation consist in breaking out of such immature dependency? And would not the only real reform be to rid ourselves of the whole business?

Called to Communion

Reflection – Ratzinger shows in this passage how well he understands the modern world. He had, after all, been a university professor in 1968, when student riots swept across Europe. The soixant-huitards and their anomic anti-authoritarianism would define the next half-century in European intellectual and cultural life.

Ecclesia delenda est – the Church must be destroyed – this is the spirit of the age. It tells us what to do, and this is intolerable. For anyone to tell me what to do is intolerable. Ecrasez l’infame! Voltaire’s cry rings out louder than ever today. How dare—how dare!—the Church tell me what to do.

It is an interesting phenomenon, though. The indignation at the Church’s moral teachings does not seem to extend to other groups and individuals who have their own ideas of what we should do.

For example, the environmental movement tells us what to do every day of the week, and even indoctrinates schoolchildren to spy on and hector their parents. The government never tires of telling us what to do: what to eat, how to exercise, what we can and cannot do on our own private property (to use a quaint old-fashioned term!). The secular gurus – Oprah and all that – never ever cease for a day doling out instructions on how to live, shop, love, budget, what to read, what to think, etc. etc. etc.

And yet, when the Church, which has no police force, little indoctrination of children these days (alas), and nothing remotely approaching Oprah or Dr. Phil’s Neilson ratings, tells people what to do, there is outrage. Or, rather, OUTRAGE!!!!!!!!!

Hmmm. One might be tempted to suspect that the Church’s advice on the meaning and mores of life, unlike all of the above parallel magisteria of secularity, actually hits something in us, something deep and true, some innate knowledge of God and the truth of human life that we cannot quite suppress. So when Holy Mother Church tells us not to fornicate, or contracept, or abort (I mention these, not because they are the only or even most important teachings, but because they are the ones that cause the most OUTRAGE), it is intolerable.

We’re trying to forget; don’t remind us. We’re working on our denial; stop bothering us. We’re hardening our hearts against truth in favor of self-will; don’t touch those places in us that still know, a little bit, the truth of life.

I can’t think of any other reason why the Church’s teachings provoke such anger and rage when the far more intrusive and omni-present teachings of everyone else provoke none. Can you?

Gone for The Weekend

Blogging will be light to non-existent the next few days, as I'm off to attend this, and the schedule will be a dawn-to-dusk kind of thing. Meanwhile, may I solicit prayers for a special intention - a dear friend of mine who is very sick at this time. Thank you, and God bless you.

Why Bitterness Towards God Might Be a Good Thing

The world of the Bible presents us with a new image of God. In surrounding cultures, the image of God and of the gods ultimately remained unclear and contradictory. In the development of biblical faith, however, the content of the prayer fundamental to Israel, the Shema, became increasingly clear and unequivocal: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord” (Dt 6:4). There is only one God, the Creator of heaven and earth, who is thus the God of all. Two facts are significant about this statement: all other gods are not God, and the universe in which we live has its source in God and was created by him. Certainly, the notion of creation is found elsewhere, yet only here does it become absolutely clear that it is not one god among many, but the one true God himself who is the source of all that exists; the whole world comes into existence by the power of his creative Word. Consequently, his creation is dear to him, for it was willed by him and “made” by him. The second important element now emerges: this God loves man.

Deus Caritas Est 9

Reflection -  We who come from a culture shaped by millennia of monotheistic Biblical faith often find it hard to imagine the world of polytheistic paganism. God for us, even if we are not especially religious or educated, is (if he exists) the Big Guy, the Head Honcho, the Man, the One.

This sense of multiple gods and goddesses reigning over different corners of the world, of competing forces treating humans like chess pieces or like toys to be played with and then tossed away, of a universe springing out of chaos, bloodshed, and strife and only precariously held in balance by gods of limited power—all of this we might know from our reading of Homer, the Greek myths, the great tragedies of Sophocles and Aeschylus, or various other sources.

But we know it from within our own deeply ingrained monotheistic conditioning. I use that word deliberately as opposed to ‘faith’, as I am thinking here of people who may have little if any religion but who nonetheless still bear the cultural inheritance of Christianity.

I think of people who have little faith and less religion, but who have a deep bitterness towards God for the injustices, evils, and sufferings of the world and in their own life. Yet why should they be bitter towards an 'uncaring' God… unless they have a deep sense that He should not be so? Only in very late paganism, the paganism that frankly was wide open to the proclamation of Christianity, does that note of bitterness towards the gods appear. A normal pagan would never imagine that the gods should be other than what they are: capricious, vengeful, bloodthirsty little two-bit despots running a sort of cosmic protection racket – ‘nice world you’ve got here… shame if something happened to it.’

And even if there is a good god who he liked, the pious pagan was well aware that some other god or goddess, not so nice, could always seize the reins of power at least temporarily and get a few licks in.

The Jew, the Christian, and the post-Christian deeply know that this will not do with our God. He made it, He’s the only Show in town, and He is supposed to love us and be on our side. This generates for us the fearsome problem of evil and suffering, which is no small matter, and which (at least in this post, which is too long already!) I have no intention of getting into.

For now, it is important to realize that our very concept of God and the world and their inter-relation is wildly different from the non-Biblical one, and that this Biblical conception, while it generates its own questions and quandaries, opens us up to a genuine encounter with the Reality behind all realities, an encounter that at least promises to be an embrace of love and care.

Breaking the Stronghold of the Self

Speaking of Church as Body of Christ, Ratzinger writes:

The Semitic concept of the ‘corporate personality’ stands in the background; this concept is expressed, for example, in the idea that we are all Adam, a single man writ large. In the modern era, with the apotheosis of the subject, this notion became entirely incomprehensible. The ‘I’ was now a fortified stronghold with impassable walls. Descartes’ attempt to derive the whole of philosophy from the cogito – because only the ‘I’ still appeared accessible in any way – is typical in this regard. Today the concept of subject is gradually unraveling; it is becoming evident that the ‘I’ locked securely in itself does not exist…”

Called to Communion: Understanding the Church Today, p. 35

Reflection – Ah yes – individualism! The air we breathe, the ocean in which we swim, the first principle of life, at least in the formerly Christian West. In Madonna House, where we live what most people consider a fairly intense communal life, we’ve had a large number of Korean guests over the last ten years or so. They have enriched our lives in many ways--regular infusions of kimchi among them!

More seriously, we’ve had many opportunities to reflect on the differences between the individualistic culture of North America and the communal cultures more typical of Asia. What for us is an intensely, almost intrusively communal life for most of them barely registers as communal life at all. It has been good for us to learn and reflect that modern individualism (which we cannot help carrying within us, children of our culture that we are) is far from being the only way of being human in the world.

Individualism in fact poses a serious problem for the proclamation of Christ to the world. Ratzinger in this passage expresses it well: when the ‘I’ is everything, a fortified stronghold, the measure of all reality, the beginning and end of personal identity, then the call to find one’s deepest truth, one’s most essential reality in the Word and Love of Another is either an outrage or a complete cipher. How is it even possible to receive one’s life from another? I am I and Jesus is Jesus – both of us locked in our subjective realities. Isn’t it some kind of sick co-dependence for me to look to Him for everything? Shouldn’t I grow up?

The path out of this impasse with Christianity is the path out of individualism. We are in fact made for others; we are in fact made to experience our human dignity and freedom in our life with and for others. We are in fact constituted as a self, a person, a subject who can choose to love or not love, serve or not serve, by being first known, loved, and served as an object by the One who made us.

That this One who made us is so intensely relational, yet One, within His Triune Self,  implies that He has made us to be this one body, this one collective group, in Him. Yet it is not the collective we have rightly come to dread of the soviet, the communist collectivist Hell where the individual is crushed in the name of the spurious whole. The collective of the Body of Christ, because it comes from the Heart of Love, dwells in this Heart, and is oriented always and everywhere towards this Heart, this love, crushes no one. In fact, it is the pathway to true life and joy, which we cannot experience as isolated individuals. We are made to be part of a family, a group, a society; only in God can this society be one in which our true and deepest selves flourish and grow to their full measure.

The Way to Rational Bliss

Theology exists only through awareness that the circle of our own thinking has been broken, that our thinking has, so to say, been given a hand and helped upward, beyond what it could achieve for itself… The advantage given to the seeking spirit is the Word, which is quite reasonable. In the procedure of science, the idea comes before the word. It is translated into the word.  But here, where our own thinking fails, down to us from the eternal reason is thrown the Word, in which is hidden a splinter of its splendor—as much as we can bear, as much as we need, as much as human speech can encompass.”

Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith, pp. 31-2

Reflection – The ‘New Atheism’ of recent years (the Dawkins/Hitchens/Dennett/Harris variety) has suggested that religious faith and human reason are utterly unrelated, even opposing elements in the human person, and that one has to choose between them. To be a religious person means some kind of foreswearing of the use of one’s intellect; to be a scientific, rational person means allowing nothing into one’s consciousness except what empirical testing can verify.

A very different picture of the relationship between faith and reason has been a major theme in Ratzinger’s writings, one which will show up on this blog periodically. His presentation has many facets and nuances, and displays precisely the kind of subtle reasoning skills that the Dawkinses of the world deny religious believers are capable of.

In this passage we see the awareness that scientific reason, what in philosophy is known as postivisitic reason, has its limits. It is limited to singular, repeatable, quantifiable phenomena, and cannot extend to the whole of reality, to questions of value, purpose, meaning. Only a deeper type of reasoning can even begin to broach these sorts of matters, the reasoning of the metaphysician, the ethicist, the poet, the sage.

Ratzinger is aware, however, that these deeper thinkers themselves have failed to penetrate by their own lights the depths of the mystery of reality. And so comes the breaking of ‘the circle of our thinking’ – this Christian conviction that Divine Thought – the Word of God – has been thrown down from Heaven to us, to elevate our minds to where they could never go of their own power.

It is a beautiful vision: God giving us a Word, the Word which is Christ, which bears to us as much of the hidden splendor of Reality as we can bear or comprehend, so that our minds can in Him be broken open to the infinite depths of the Godhead. And from this breaking open of the human limitations of intellect, we can attain new heights of reasoning, of insight, of penetration into the truth of things. Faith meets reason and takes it where it cannot go. Reason, far from being negated by faith, is empowered by it. Human reason, informed by the Word of God, begins a pilgrimage into the very heart of the Trinity, a pilgrimage barely begun on earth, and which will continue in rational bliss for eternity.

The Seeds of Totalitarianism

The scientific façade [of totalitarianism] hides a dogmatic intolerance that views spirit as produced by matter and morals as produced by circumstances. According to its dictates, morality should be defined and practiced on the basis of society’s purposes, and everything is deemed moral that helps to usher in the final state of happiness.

This dogmatism completely subverts the values that build Europe. It also breaks with the entire moral tradition of humankind by rejecting the existence of values independent of the goals of material progress. Depending on the circumstances, anything can become legitimate and even necessary; anything can become moral in the new sense of the term. Even humankind itself can be treated as an instrument, since the individual does not matter, only the future, the cruel deity adjudicating over one and all… the greatest catastrophe encountered by such systems was not economic. It was the starvation of souls and the destruction of the moral conscience.

“The Spiritual Roots of Europe: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” In Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, and Islam, pp. 72-3.

Reflection – Joseph Ratzinger grew up in a country ravaged by totalitarian Nazism, and lived the great part of his life as a cleric confronted by the Iron Curtain bisecting this same country, and all of Europe. Understandably, he has written quite a bit over the decades about the confrontation of Christianity with totalitarian ideologies.

Totalitarianism outside of China, North Korea, and a handful of other states, is in abeyance in the last decades. But he points out here that the underlying spiritual impulse of these ideologies is far from absent among us. When we determine that  nothing, but nothing, matters except material happiness and prosperity, that there is no moral rule we will even acknowledge, let alone keep, if it will lessen our immediate prospects of these, that everything, every standard, law, right, must be sacrificed for the immediate good of the individual or society as a whole—well, when this is afoot in our lands, then totalitarianism is not so much in abeyance, at least in prospect.

Can we torture to obtain information to make ourselves secure from attack? Can we kill human embryos to harvest their stem cells for medical research that may cure this or that disease? Can we silence dissenting voices on contentious social matters such as same-sex marriage with threats of fines and costly legal actions? Is society, represented by the power of the state, of course, allowed to do just about anything to advance whatever goals it sets before itself?

It seems to me that many in our own societies would answer yes to these questions—certainly, if they were being honest. Behind that ‘yes’, however, is a view that the universe is essentially amoral, that moral rules or laws are some added and optional feature to reality. Also behind that ‘yes’ is an attitude to suffering that sees it as intolerable, as utterly unacceptable. Better to massacre embryonic human beings by the million, better to torture everyone, better to do anything, than to have to endure suffering.

There is a deep spiritual crisis in all this. We are made by God to live in conformity to his will and being; suffering is a necessary presence in every human life in our current situation. To reject the first and the second of these propositions places us on a road that terminates in the Gulag, in the killing fields of Cambodia, in the camps of the Third Reich. We are a long, long way from the terminus of that road, but we must be clear that that’s where it leads.

And if we are that road, there is only one human course open to us. Repent, and believe the good news.

We Are Not Mice

Man’s listening to the message of faith is not the passive registering of otherwise unknown information, but the resuscitation of our choked memory and the opening of the powers of understanding which await the light of the truth in us.

“Truth and Freedom,” in Communio 23, p. 33

Reflection – Sometimes we can miss this, right? We can think of faith as a set of doctrines to be learned, a series of formulas which we have to memorize (somehow!) so that we get the answers right, whether on an exam or on The Great Exam to end all exams.

Certainly, our Catholic faith has content. We have dogmas, there are things revealed to us that are essential to our salvation. But it is this very essentiality of the dogmas of the faith that reveals to us what Ratzinger is referring to in this passage.

We are not Gnostics. God is not some Being up there who has set a series of traps and tricks and puzzles that we have to work our way through, like mice in a maze, to get to Heaven.

God has made us for communion with Him. He has made us to be one with Him, not by nature, but by grace, in at eternal embrace, an eternal dance, an eternal banquet. This is encoded into our very spiritual DNA, our very being, the structure of our humanity.

And something in us has gotten choked, somehow. We have lost our memory. Call it original sin (that’s one of those dogmas, after all) or call it something else—we need revelation, not to get the right answers for the Final Judgment SATs, but to stir up in us the deep truth of who we are and what we are to be and how we are to live to get there, and Who is accompanying us to bring us there.

As I keep saying (and will continue to keep saying) on this blog, it’s all about relationship, communion, love, encounter. And the message of faith, the Creed, the dogmas—all awaken in us the deep remembrance of this, and steer us, if we let them, into that path of love and union.

Change to Blog Design

Someone mentioned to me that she was unable to read my blog because of the light text on the dark background, and that other people may have that same problem. So, I'm trying a new layout. I am severely aesthetically challenged, so have no real idea if this looks nice or not. Could any readers who possess good taste (you know who you are) e-mail me with feeback?
And yes, I notice that my changes have messed up all the links on the right side of the page - I will fix that shortly.
Update: Fixed!

I Want What I Want - Now!

For Paul, even for those living in the most morally decadent and amnesiac society:

the truth is accessible to them, but they do not want it, because they refuse the demands the truth would make on them… Man resists the truth that would demand a submission expressed in giving glory and thanks to God (Rom 1:21). For Paul, the moral decadence of society is nothing more than the logical consequence and the faithful reflection of this radical perversion. When man prefers his own egoism, his pride, and his convenience to the demands made on him by the truth, the only possible outcome is an upside-down existence. Adoration is due to God alone, but what is adored is no longer God; images, outward appearances, and current opinion have dominion over man.
Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, pp. 94-5.

Reflection – This is a continuation of the essay which I began commenting on previously, in which Ratzinger writes of St. Paul’s assessment of pagan society in Romans 1. It’s a pretty bleak picture, isn’t it? One we might not want very much to consider. Surely we’re not that bad, are we?
Well, I leave that for God to sort out. Speaking personally, if not confessionally, I know that self-will runs deep in the human heart. There is something profound in us (in me, certainly, alas) that wants what it wants when it wants it how it wants it. There is at least an urge in my own heart, my own soul, to order everything else around that – God included. Truth included.
The choice to worship God is a choice, fundamentally, to accept that the world does not revolve around my ego. The choice to believe, to accept, to embrace the fact that the world emanates from God and is ordered towards Him—the famous exitus-reditus movement that Catholic theology has held for over a millennium—this faith puts my ego in its proper place.
It is important to note that for St. Paul and Ratzinger, moral perversion, the violation of the right order of human relations, whether it be same-sex unions (cf Rom 1:27) or whatever other brand of disordered desire, flows from this central refusal to acknowledge God as God. When I decide that the most important thing in the whole wide world is for me to get what I want, for me to scratch whatever is itching, well then anything goes, right?
But this choice of anything goes is a desperate one. God is lost in this – we cannot have it both ways. The most important thing possible in my life is that I do just as I please… and there’s a God in heaven who is the source, center, and goal of my life. Which is it? Because to assert both is a flat logical contradiction.
Deep choices are at stake in these matters. But as we ponder this choice, and these stakes, we must assert that this God who is our All in All is also our merciful Father who loves every creature He made. We have to trust that his grace, if we allow it, is sufficient to overcome the dreadful force of our ego, and the dreadful bondage of our self-will. This, too, is a key element of Christian hope.

Eternal Life II

It is true that anyone who does not know God, even though he may entertain all kinds of hopes, is ultimately without hope, without the great hope that sustains the whole of life (cf. Eph 2:12). Man's great, true hope which holds firm in spite of all disappointments can only be God—God who has loved us and who continues to love us “to the end,” until all “is accomplished” (cf. Jn 13:1 and 19:30). Whoever is moved by love begins to perceive what “life” really is. He begins to perceive the meaning of the word of hope that we encountered in the Baptismal Rite: from faith I await “eternal life”—the true life which, whole and unthreatened, in all its fullness, is simply life. Jesus, who said that he had come so that we might have life and have it in its fullness, in abundance (cf. Jn 10:10), has also explained to us what “life” means: “this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (Jn 17:3). Life in its true sense is not something we have exclusively in or from ourselves: it is a relationship. And life in its totality is a relationship with him who is the source of life. If we are in relation with him who does not die, who is Life itself and Love itself, then we are in life. Then we “live”.

Spe Salvi 27



Reflection - A directee of mine once told me that she didn’t really look forward to eternal life, since it just seemed to be a infinite duration of our own being. Life is hard and full of struggles and travails: who wants it to go on forever? Such was her reasoning.

The encyclical Spe Salvi tackles this squarely. Eternal life is not just a duration of what we now know life to be. Life, for you, may be something basically enjoyable with bits of suffering interspersed; it may be mostly horrible with bits of happiness interspersed. For most of us, it’s an intermingling of the two, right? Joy and sorrow, pain and bliss, and lots of in-between ordinariness, the plain bread of daily living. Who would want all of that to go on forever?

Eternal life, in the Christian tradition, means something different than that. While the details remain sketchy, probably because we really don’t have the vocabulary or capacity to really understand or describe them, it is essentially a translation into love, an expansion of our being, through-with-and-in Jesus Christ, into what the Holy Father calls here ‘simply life’. In our life on earth, life and death are continually mixed together. We live, but the principles of disintegration and dissolution are constantly manifested in our being. There, we will simply live, simply be, which means simply love, which means simply be held in this mysterious relationship with Life Itself, with Love Itself, with God Himself.

And this is truly our hope – that there is a life offered us in which all death is finally destroyed and removed, in which we can finally be free of the ancient curse, in which we can finally stand straight, breathe freely, and throw ourselves with wild abandon into the endless dance and fire of love beyond measure and telling, the unknown life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit forever and ever.

Eternal Life I

Anyone whom God loves never ceases to be. In him, in his thinking and loving, it is not just a shadow of us that continues in being; rather, in him and his creative love we ourselves, with all that we are and all that is most ourselves, are preserved immortally and forever in being. It is his love that makes us immortal.

Dogma and Preaching, p. 116

Reflection – “Those who have died live on in our memories, in our hearts.” This has become the standard line in many quarters, to deal with the problem of death and loss. It is so prevalent that it is almost becoming the normal cultural trope for life after death. The idea of actually continuing to exist in one’s personal being after physical death, a basic insight about the nature of human life for millennia, is becoming less and less familiar to many.

It is a deeply inadequate way of resolving the problem of death and grief. My mother died last November. The youngest person in our family who carries significant memories of her that he will carry for the rest of his life is 12 years old (if you’re reading this, hi, Mike!). So, if mom is alive primarily or solely in ‘the hearts and memories’ of those who loved her, that gives her at most another 80 to 90 years of life. What then? When the last person who knew you dies, is that it for you? What good is that?

But we live in God’s memory, and in His memory we are truly alive. We only live now, in our bodily temporal life, because God is thinking of us and loving us right now. His creative intention towards us sustains us in being in a continuous fashion. We truly live in the mind of God, but this mind of God bestows upon us substantial life, real existence.

And this is what carries us over the threshold of death. Not the good wishes and fond memories of our loved ones, precious as these are. Not some kind of mastery of our own over the processes of life, which is the current dream of the trans-humanists. But the love of our Father in heaven and his desire that we spend eternity with Him, his irrevocable choice to hold us in Being, even if we are so unwise as to refuse to spend eternity with Him—this is the hope that sustains us across the mysterious one-way passage from this life to what comes after it. We know very little about that ‘after’, but we know that the Father’s love awaits us there, as it accompanies us here.

The Trinity: Why Bother?

Being made in the image of God means that the human person is a being of word and of love, a being moving toward Another, oriented toward giving himself to the Other and only truly receiving himself back in real self-giving.

In the Beginning, p. 63

Reflection – What difference does the Trinity make, anyway? (The doctrine, that is, not the reality.) Many Christians would be unable to give a coherent answer to that question, let alone a coherent account of what it even means to say that God is three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

What difference does it make? Why bother with this difficult dogma? This very brief quote of Ratzinger’s points to an answer. While the Trinity is an unfathomable and infinite mystery, which even in heaven we will never exhaust, our Scriptures and our theological tradition has spoken of the Son as the Word, the perfect self-knowledge of God, and of the Spirit as the perfect love emanating forth from the Father’s perfect knowledge of the Son and the Son’s reciprocal knowledge of the Father.

The Scriptural testimony of humanity being made in the image of God, then, means that we are made in the image of the Trinity – made to know and to love, made to receive and to give. That the human person is not a closed off fortress, an autonomous self made to grab and grasp and consume as much of the world’s riches as possible. Rather, he is known by God, made to know God, loved by God, made to love God. An inherently relational creature, whose very being is only found and made comprehensible in this constant circle of gift, reception, and gift.

God as Trinity, taken together with man as made in the image of God breaks us out of the terrible burden of competition, self-aggrandizement, and isolation. The two together reveal to us that at the deepest depths of reality, of Being, is relation, communion, love, and that out of this flows glory, delight, beauty, and joy. The Trinity reveals to us that infinite happiness, found in a communion of persons, is at the heart of all that is. That’s the difference it makes.

Tradition! Or, why Tevye the milkman was right.

In Rome, St. Paul

encountered the type of moral decadence that comes from the total loss of tradition: people were deprived of that interior evidential character that in other times had been offered to man form the outset of this life by usages and customs. Where nothing can be taken for granted, everything become possible, and nothing is impossible any longer. Now there is no value capable of sustaining man, and there are no inviolable norms. All that counts is man’s ego and the present moment.

Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, p. 93

Reflection – This is from the beginning of an essay entitled “The Natural Knowledge of God” which is so utterly relevant to our times that I will probably be quoting most of it in short bits and pieces on this blog. (Really, though, if you’re going to buy one book of the pope’s, make it this one – it is short and superb!)

We touch in this passage upon another major theme in Ratzinger’s writings – the historical amnesia of Western Civilization, our being cut off from the vast wisdom of tradition accumulated and passed down through the centuries. It is this sundering of the individual from ‘usages and customs’ that draws us down into moral decadence and chaos.

Simply put, when nothing is passed on, everyone is left having to figure it all out themselves. Since this is rather difficult, to say the least, most of us end up parroting whatever the majority opinions or fashionable gurus of the day tell us, in easy to remember slogans. Hence we are trapped in the present moment and whatever 'wisdom' it has to offer us.

Of course human traditions are flawed—after all, slavery is a venerable human tradition, as is child sacrifice. But when tradition is discarded whole cloth, which is certainly the case in much of North America and Europe today, then the sole counterbalance to the force of the ego and the spirit of the age is lost. We are left trapped in our own desires and devices, our own projects, agendae, and plans, with no actual experience of a standard, a rule, a social norm to check or correct us.

Social convention, for all its flaws, has a capacity for curbing the unbridled egoism of the human person. That there are things that 'one simply doesn't do' is more important than we like to admit. Its loss (largely) in our day is a terrible one. The amnesia of our inherited moral wisdom is even worse; each person has to laboriously work their way through the whole mess.

I will never forget the young woman who triumphantly pointed out to me that the idea of a binding absolute moral law could not possibly be right since people have to steal food if they are starving to death and kill in self defense. It had simply never occurred to her that both starvation and violent attacks are not recently discovered phenomena, and, just perhaps, the very moral theologians and philosophers who argued for an absolute moral law had noticed those facts and given those questions some thought over the millennia.

Ratzinger has repeatedly called us to a radical anamnesis (remembrance) of the moral tradition of our civilization, so that we can rebuild a bulwark against the moral decadence of the unfettered ego and a defense against crushing conformism to current fashion. His life work is dedicated in many respects precisely to this.

So is this blog.

The Freedom of Love

Philosophies of what is necessary assert that they can explain everything. They offer user’s instructions on how to bring about the better world by necessity. The philosophy of freedom that comes from faith cannot do this. It has no simple formula for the world. Or, to put it more exactly, its formula for the world is the freedom of God’s love, which calls us in Jesus Christ and ever anew shows the path for man’s freedom.

A Turning Point for Europe? p. 110.

Reflection – Oh, how we desire to explain everything! It is such a typical human reality. To have it all figured out, get everything, and everyone, nailed down. Seven habits of highly effective people. The Secret to getting what you want. Say this prayer every day, and watch your life flourish. The five-year plan which will yield the worker’s paradise. Tragically, the Final Solution to the “Jewish Problem.”

From the perky self-help books promising the world to their readers to the gas chambers of Auschwitz may seem like a bit of a stretch. I am not, of course, saying that there’s even remotely a moral equivalence of any magnitude between them. But the common thread linking them together is this deep human urge to get everything figured out, settled, tidied up, and nicely squared away. It really is, at heart, a longing for Heaven, for the kingdom where everything will be just as it should be... but channelled into our own efforts and projects.

How hard it is for us to live in the freedom of God’s love! We say we want to. We make the right sounds about the love of God and the beauty of His mercy. But when we realize that this freedom of God’s love calls us to live in a world that we do not control, that is messy and burdensome and dirty and at times excruciatingly painful… and we are called to extend that same mercy, that same free gift to that world, as it is—well, let’s see if there’s one more self-help book that will give us a better option.

The trouble with the self-help books, the ideologies, the programs and plans, is that they exclude the person, the individual, the relationship. There's this set of principles or rules or structures that are going to guarantee our success, and we just have to plug all our relationships and people into those structures... or eliminate them if they won't plug in. The reduction of people to parts of our schemas. Because it's the schema that will make us happy, not the people.

And of course, people as such won't make us happy, will they? But we go looking for our happiness somewhere other than the real communion of persons, the self-gift, the embrace of love between the Father, the Son, the Spirit into which we are called, and out of which we are destined to live.

No! That's too messy, too insecure. Too much trust required! We will make our happiness on the seven secret habits of the highly effective rules of the Marxist Jabez Nazis! Or something.

Freedom. God. Relationship. Communion. Mess. Somehow it is in embracing the untidy messiness of the world that we open up to the freedom of God’s love, the depths of His mercy, both the receiving of the Gift, and the giving of our little gift.

That’s all we’ve got, we Christians. Is it enough? What do you think?

Two Kinds of Hope

In what does this hope consist which, as hope, is “redemption”? The essence of the answer is given in the phrase from the Letter to the Ephesians: the Ephesians, before their encounter with Christ, were without hope because they were “without God in the world” (Eph 2:12). To come to know God—the true God—means to receive hope. We who have always lived with the Christian concept of God, and have grown accustomed to it, have almost ceased to notice that we possess the hope that ensues from a real encounter with this God.

                                                                                                                                         Spe Salvi 3

Reflection – Hope, according to Aquinas, is the natural emotion that arises within us in regard to an object that has four qualities. It is in the future (i.e. you cannot hope for something you already have), is good (you cannot hope for a stomach flu, unless you reallllly want to miss work), is difficult (someone in normal health doesn’t really hope that they will be able to walk across the room), but nonetheless possible (I neither believe nor hope that I can fly, or thereby touch the sky).
This is natural hope – hoping to graduate summa cum laude or to make a million dollars or have a good time at a cocktail party (oh wait, I don’t think that last one is actually possible…)
Theological hope is of a different order – it is hope that the outcome of our life will be in accord with our divinely intended end. Hope that we will attain eternal beatitude. Hope that God is going to make of us a divine success story.
Natural hope energizes us to work hard to attain the difficult future possible goods that we anticipate. But we cannot possibly attain beatitude ourselves, no matter how hard we try, and so theological hope enables us to keep our eyes, and hearts, and whole person fixed on God who alone can save us and raise us up. It is entirely theological in its character – its whole dynamism is to bring us to seek and cling to the Lord in all things.
To know this God is to know hope. As Pope Benedict says, for we who are Christians this is so huge and constantly present a reality that we forget how radical it is, how radical it was in the ancient world that received the Christian proclamation. The assurance that God is our loving Father, that he sent his Son to become a man to be our loving Savior, that his Holy Spirit moves over and through and within us constantly to hold us in a deep union with Himself—this is radical stuff, strong meat for the soul.
As the world seems to be more and more in danger of a total forgetfulness of the Christian proclamation, more and more Christian hope that God can and will make our lives beautiful and glorious forever becomes our most urgent virtue.
There is a lot of despair in the world; do you have hope? How are you sharing it?

Commenting Just Became Easier!

Some people were having difficulty leaving comments - I just opened up comments to the most open wide setting - hope those who have wanted to comment will read this and try again.
I am new at this blogging thing...

It is Hard to Believe

“God’s seed in the world seems ineffectual. The word God speaks in [Is 55:10-11] thus comes in the midst of a cloud of darkness as an encouragement to all who still believe in God’s power; who believe that the world is more than rocky ground in which the seed finds no room to take root…”

Mary, the Church at the Source, p. 13.

Reflection – “Why is it so hard for people to have faith today?” This was the cry of my heart to God in poustinia the other day. While I was thinking of this or that specific individual in my life, my awareness really was global. Why is it so hard for so many to believe in God, in Jesus, in the Church?

‘God’s seed in the world seems ineffectual.’ Ratzinger has addressed this modern loss of faith countless times in his writings. He is well aware of the profound difficulty we have today to believe in the goodness, the trustworthiness, the absolute value and priority of God in our lives. The world seems to be a very rocky ground indeed.

Faith is a matter of receiving this word of God. Elsewhere (and I’m sure I’ll get there on this blog eventually) Ratzinger distinguishes faith as precisely that which we receive from the word of another. Not our own conclusions or reflections or ideas, faith is trusting the word of the other, of the Other who sends this word as a seed into our hearts.

The seed is meant to sprout and grow and bear fruit both in deepening insight and reflection upon reality, and more importantly in lives of hope and love, expressed in apostolic action.

Perhaps it has never been easy, exactly, to believe, and perhaps we simply find it especially hard to believe today because ‘today’ is the only day we know. Whether it's harder now or not, our call is always to clear out the rocks from our own hearts – those horrible modern rocks of cynicism and irony, hedonism and despair, along with the perennial rocks of fear, anger, hatred – and strive to welcome the Seed given to us.

Mary truly does walk among us poor post-moderns as the one who did this, and who can teach us to do this, and who manifests to us the goodness and beauty of doing it. Our hope is that as we receive, or try to receive, the Word, the Seed, the One who comes to us, our own lives slowly begin to glow with that same beauty and goodness. The more this happens, maybe it won’t be quite so hard for so many people to believe.