A Dump or a Masterpiece?

The image of man that dominates in modern [culture] is a primarily a gloomy image. The great and the noble are suspect from the outset… morality counts as hypocrisy, joy as self-deception. [At the same time there is a kind of optimism] that the fundamental trajectory of human development is progress and that the good lies in the future—and nowhere else.

A Turning Point for Europe? 15-16

Reflection – “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing,” goes the memorable Oscar Wilde quip. Ratzinger echoes this in his analysis of modernity and its view of humanity. Everything stinks—bluntly put, this is the typical view of the cynic. It is, at base, a rejection of the transcendental truth and goodness of all being. When this sense of goodness, of intrinsic value is lost, all that is left is the current market value. How is your personal stock price doing today? Are you a valuable commodity? A treasured resource? What are you trading at (i-trade!)?

Running alongside the dour cynic with the cash register heart is the optimist of sorts: everything stinks… now. But let us pull everything apart and tear everything to bits, and we’ll fix it. This, as far as I can make out, is the general ‘idea’ (if that’s not too strong a word) of the protestors on Wall Street right now. Not sure what they want, but they hate the way things are – let them burn everything down, and they’ll eventually get around to figuring something else out.
I sympathize with them in their frustration. I don’t sympathize much with the cynic—I’ve always considered cynicism to be one of the cheapest ‘outs’ available to men. It’s too easy to just sneer at everything. But the Christian response is different. We begin with “God saw everything He had made and said ‘It is very good.’” We begin with ‘In God’s image and likeness He made man’. We begin with the apprehension of truth, goodness, and beauty, ineradicable at the heart of every creature, of every molecule God made, and above all every person God made.
It’s only from this that we can even know what to think about the world and the mess it inarguably is in. It’s only from this that we can do our little bit to love, serve, help, clean up the mess at least a bit—whatever we can. But if we don’t know that we’re not so much clearing out a dump as restoring a great masterpiece, then we won’t go about it correctly. It takes reverence, care, caution, and above all much love and compassion to move into the world’s pain and wounds. All of this is what is lacking too often today; this is what Christians must bring.

The Child in the Womb of the World

 I must accept the limits of my freedom, or rather, I must live my freedom not out of competition but in a spirit of mutual support. If we open our eyes, we see that this, in turn, is true not only of the child, but that the child in the mother’s womb is simply a very graphic depiction of the essence of human existence in general. Even the adult can only exist with and from another, and is thus continually thrown back on that being-for which is the very thing he would like to shut out.

"Truth and Freedom," in Communio Spring 1996

Reflection - In this passage Ratzinger is actually talking about abortion and its implications. Besides the destruction of a human life, and the implicit overthrowing of the sanctity of human life that abortion signifies in our modern world, he points out this perhaps even deeper implication here.

So often on the pro-abortion-rights side of the debate it is heard that because of the unborn child's lack of viability, its inability to function as an autonomous individual, he or she does not qualify as a fully human person. Underneath that, though, is a view of humanity and dignity that identifies it with autonomy, with freedom from dependence on anyone or anything.

But really, how many of us are actually 'viable' by that standard? If you dropped me in the woods with nothing but the clothes on my back, I'm not sure I'd fare too well. Am I 'viable'? Does my life proceed without any assistance from anyone? And is 'survivoman' who can make his way in the wilderness just fine therefore more worthy of life than me or you?

And of course even survivoman learned his skills from someone else, and all of us rest in a true dependence on a whole web of reality that we did not create and do not maintain in existence. We who are Christians recognize that underneath and all around that web of supporting reality lies our Creator God who holds us all in his care moment by moment.

And so the unborn baby is an icon, if you will, of the deep truth of our humanity. We are all in that state of received life, received existence, being held in life by Another. Each of us is the child in the womb of the world, so to speak.

When we, as a society, say 'no' to that - say that this is inhuman and not worthy of our care and protection, we radically cut ourselves off from the deep truth of our own being.

There are profound implications to all this, and much to ponder. How we view each other, how we treat each other, the way we measure each other--all of this is bound up in this mystery of need and dependence and where our true dignity lies.

Those of us who identify ourselves as pro-life have to be very careful that we be faithful to our ideals in every area of our life - every human being is of inestimable precious value, and this is especially true of the weak, the poor, the vulnerable, the broken, the burdensome. All of us are held in being and life by others and by the Other; let us be vigilant to hold each of our brothers and sisters in our care as well.

How Can I Know?

Perhaps so many relationships break down today because we are aware of the certainty only of the verified hypothesis, and do not admit the ultimate validity of anything not scientifically proved. Thus, the essential phenomena of human life escape us, with their quite different kind of certainty, which is in truth far higher.

Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith, 20

Reflection – This is an interesting hypothesis Ratzinger is advancing here – I’m not sure if I totally agree with it (for once!), and I mean that with all the respect possible. But he could be right, for all that.

I tend to think relationships fail so much, either because of that earlier question I raised of ‘who will do the loving? or other reasons – failure to communicate, a lack of realization that relationships have to be constantly invested in, worked at, or that kind of thing.
But Ratzinger does raise an intriguing possibility, and he certainly does highlight a significant reality of any truly human relationship. Namely, that there is always an element of risk, of faith, of having to jump into it, commit yourself to it without the guarantee of full knowledge and scientific certainty.
“How will I know if he really loves me?’ Whitney Houston asked when I was a teenager. The truth is, Whitney, you won’t! You don’t! You can’t! Love is a chance, a risk. Any love is that, any commitment. I want to get married… become a priest… join Madonna House… become a nun… a monk. Will it work out? The only way to find out is to do it. No guarantees.
We know that this is a terrible struggle for many people today – indeed, I’ve heard from reliable sources that it’s hard to get people today to commit to a dinner party or a lunch date, let alone a marriage. But it’s at its root an issue of faith. And not only faith in the person you are marrying, or the community or diocese you are joining. Faith, really, in God – that even if the commitment fails you, even if it doesn’t work out, at least not as you were hoping, that there is a deeper love, a deeper truth, a deeper reality that holds us and does not let us go no matter what. Even if we fail, He does not. And this is the ground so many lack today, the ground which makes it possible to commit yourself irrevocably to any vocation.

Asking the Right Question

The call to follow [Christ] is not concerned simply with the human virtues of Jesus. Rather it involves His entire way ‘through the veil’ (Heb 10, 20). The element which is essential and new in this way of Christ Jesus consists in the fact the He opens up this way for us, for it is thus that we first come to freedom. The aspect of following Him means: to walk towards communion with God.

From a 1990 talk in Washington DC at the John Paul II Cultural Center

Reflection – WWJD? Remember when those bracelets were all the rage? While the motivation behind them was commendable and undoubtedly at least some people wearing them remembered to be a bit kinder, more generous, more chaste and temperate as a result, this quote from Ratzinger reminds us that the following of Christ is not at its deepest level a simple imitation of that nice guy, Jesus, who did a lot of good things back in the day.

No, when we talk about following Christ, we are literally talking about following a person, not just mimicking his good deeds. He is not only our teacher; he’s our shepherd. He’s not only the new Moses giving the law; he is the new Joshua leading us into the promised land.

This is so crucial. The moral law is important and necessary—without at least a serious commitment to living a chaste, temperate, just life there is no following of Christ. But Christianity is not a moral reform society. Christianity is not a tao, an ethical system of life which we follow so as to attain some kind of serenity.

Christianity is, ultimately, essentially and always, a Person. A Person to whom we give our whole allegiance, our love, our trust, our loyalty. A Person to whom we look at every moment, hoping and praying that in his mercy and goodness He will draw us into His own relationship with his Father, all of which is possible because His Spirit is living and active in our hearts.

And this is the Promised Land, the way of freedom, the true ‘system’ of our faith. Yes, it implies obeying the commandments and becoming a virtuous person, but the deep root of that virtue and obedience is our living communion with Jesus Christ, a living reality, passionate, fresh, vibrant, radiant even in times of darkness, struggle, and pain.

It’s not so much the question ‘what would Jesus do?’. It is ‘what is Jesus doing—in you, in me, in the world, in all of us?’ And from that question, to plunge ourselves into his life in our life, his love in our call to love. And this is how we become saints, which is the great happiness and freedom of our humanity.

I Am Not a Sphere

The first novelty of biblical faith consists, as we have seen, in its image of God. The second, essentially connected to this, is found in the image of man. The biblical account of creation speaks of the solitude of Adam, the first man, and God's decision to give him a helper. Of all other creatures, not one is capable of being the helper that man needs, even though he has assigned a name to all the wild beasts and birds and thus made them fully a part of his life. So God forms woman from the rib of man. Now Adam finds the helper that he needed: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gen 2:23). Here one might detect hints of ideas that are also found, for example, in the myth mentioned by Plato, according to which man was originally spherical, because he was complete in himself and self-sufficient. But as a punishment for pride, he was split in two by Zeus, so that now he longs for his other half, striving with all his being to possess it and thus regain his integrity. While the biblical narrative does not speak of punishment, the idea is certainly present that man is somehow incomplete, driven by nature to seek in another the part that can make him whole, the idea that only in communion with the opposite sex can he become “complete”. The biblical account thus concludes with a prophecy about Adam: “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife and they become one flesh” (Gen 2:24).

Two aspects of this are important. First, eros is somehow rooted in man's very nature; Adam is a seeker, who “abandons his mother and father” in order to find woman; only together do the two represent complete humanity and become “one flesh”. The second aspect is equally important. From the standpoint of creation, eros directs man towards marriage, to a bond which is unique and definitive; thus, and only thus, does it fulfil its deepest purpose. Corresponding to the image of a monotheistic God is monogamous marriage. Marriage based on exclusive and definitive love becomes the icon of the relationship between God and his people and vice versa. God's way of loving becomes the measure of human love. This close connection between eros and marriage in the Bible has practically no equivalent in extra-biblical literature.

Deus Caritas Est 11

Reflection – First, I have to say that I’ve always been deeply amused at Plato’s idea that the original perfect design of humanity is to be spherical! As I get older and struggle with just how easy it is to gain weight as the metabolism slows down, it is a consolation to know that I am actually approaching the Greek ideal of human perfection in my ‘well-rounded’ character.

Of course, Plato’s deep point is the idea that human perfection is to be understood as human self-sufficiency, and a circle being a self-contained shape turning in on itself at every point is the image of this perfect self-enclosed reality.

What a difference the Biblical revelation makes! No longer is dependence or incompleteness seen as a punishment, a flaw, a breakdown somewhere. Rather, our perfection comes not in being perfectly self-sufficient, but perfectly in communion. Our dependence, our orientation towards the other, the deep sense of incompletion so long as we are not united to the other, which in our very bodies is realized in the dynamic of heterosexual attraction, and in our whole person is expressed in the vocation of marriage—this is a deep revelation of God’s image expressed in human flesh.

Marriage reveals this not only to those who are called to the vocation of marriage. I believe that each vocation has a prophetic dimension, revealing something that is common to the whole body of humanity in its specific form of life. All human beings are called to find in their ‘hunger’, their incompleteness, a call not to clutch and grab and be selfish, but to give themselves, to abandon themselves body and soul to whatever mission, task, vocation they are led to, and to above all turn that longing towards God Himself, the fulfillment of all our desires, and the Bridegroom of all humanity.

The Sustaining Forces of Reality

We must not in our day conceal our faith in creation. We may not conceal it, for only if it is true that the universe comes from freedom, love, and reason, and that these are the real underlying powers, can we trust one another, go forward into the future, and live as human beings. God in the Lord of all things because he is their Creator... freedom and love are not ineffectual ideas but rather they are the sustaining forces of reality.

In the Beginning, 28-9

Reflection – One of the most unfortunate aspects of the culture wars that have raged in the past decades has been the effect it has had on certain necessary conversations. Take this one, for example: these days, as soon as a Christian mentions faith in creation, it is almost automatically assumed to be a faith in the literal-six-day-creation-story-in-Genesis-1. God planted the dinosaur bones as a test of our faith, and all that stuff. You know the drill. None of which has anything to do with authentic Catholic doctrine and reading of Scripture.

Meanwhile, the theory of evolution is held up as definitively disproving all that nonsense of a Creator God (hint: it doesn’t). And so all discussions of these matters tend to founder very quickly on mutual misunderstandings, ignorance, and disdain. Especially discussions on the Internet, which are prone to that anyhow.
But the doctrine of creation is at the very heart of our Christian understanding of reality, and Ratzinger in this passage, and indeed in this entire book, describes beautifully just how central it is. That the universe is the product of love, not chance, a Father’s care, not a cosmic accident, a free choice and not a determination of physical laws—it all means that love and freedom are at the very heart of reality.
And so we can, as he says, go forward into the future in that spirit of love and freedom. Creation is the ground of action, mission, service, sacrifice. Without the clear and abiding sense of God as Creator and creation as thus good, we are deeply compromised in our ability to throw ourselves into life with generosity and joy.
And we can throw ourselves into it in such a way because we know that God our Father is meeting us on the other side of that choice, that He will catch us, and that in His love and care for us, his creative work will not be in vain.

Letting The Chips Fall

Reform is ever-renewed ablatio—removal, whose purpose is to allow the nobilis forma, the countenance of the bride, and with it the Bridegroom himself, the living Lord, to appear… this path alone allows the divine to penetrate and brings about congregatio, which as both gathering and purification is that pure communion we all long for, where ‘I’ is no longer pitted against ‘I’ and self against self. Rather, the self-giving and self-abandonment that characterize love becomes the reciprocal reception of all that is pure and good. Thus, the word of the kindly father who reminds the jealous older son what the content of all freedom and the realization of utopia consist of becomes true for every man: ‘all that is mine is yours’ (Lk 15:31).’

Called to Communion, 142-3

Reflection – Well, this is a mouthful! The Holy Father is talking in this book about the reform of the Church, the whole project that has taken up so much of the energies of Catholics, especially clergy and religious, in the past 50 years or so.

His reference to ablatio is a bit obscure (the surrounding context of the quote explains it). He is using here the image of the sculptor who ‘sees’ the statue in the block of marble and merely chips away everything that is not part of it.
This is crucial, though, both in the reform of the Church and in our own personal Reformations, big and small. The point is that the Church already exists, not as our creation or as any kind of product of human ingenuity, but as a creature of God, indeed the most noble creature there is, for it shares in a wholly supernatural way in the life of Christ who is God.
So our efforts to ‘reform’ the Church, which are perfectly legitimate and necessary (ecclesia semper reformanda-the Church always in need of reform) have to proceed from that understanding. What has God made? Who is this Bride, this Body? What has been established from the beginning, what have we understood over the millennia as being proper to the life of the Church? Only from that can we ‘chip away’ at things that should not or do not need to be there.
So the reformer who talks about eliminating Confession or changing the nature of the priesthood by allowing women’s ordination or jettisoning the indissolubility of marriage or… well, we all know the drill. Throw everything out that offends modern sensibilities. But this proceeds from the idea that we are the ones determining what the Church is. There is no ‘Church’ that is given from the hands of God – only our making and fashioning.
There is a deep principle at stake here, even deeper in some ways than the specific controversies which get most of the media play, important as they are. Is God the author of reality? What is human creativity? Who am I? Who are you? Do we create ourselves? Or are we co-creators with God? What is my path of self-reformation? Making myself up out of thin air, or beholding within myself the image of God already there, and ‘chipping away’ at what doesn’t belong to that? Very deep questions.
And it is fascinating (this quotation from Ratzinger is rich, rich, rich!) that he links it to communion. Of course he’s talking about the Church, and that is the whole substance of the Church’s life, but again the deep point he makes is that communion between people comes from living in truth. When the truth of my being and your being emerges from all the falsehood we have to ‘chip away,’ then we can live both in that open receptivity towards God (the image of the Bride), ‘all that I have is yours,’ and from that a happy receptivity towards one another.
I could go on and on about this, but this post is long enough. It’s worth meditating on, though. What is my ablatio today? What chips of marble are keeping me from you, from God, from happy communion? And what tool will remove those chips? (Hint, it starts with ‘Cr’ and rhymes with ‘boss’!)

Unpredictable, Unprecedented, and Dramatic

The real novelty of the New Testament lies not so much in new ideas as in the figure of Christ himself, who gives flesh and blood to those concepts—an unprecedented realism. In the Old Testament, the novelty of the Bible did not consist merely in abstract notions but in God's unpredictable and in some sense unprecedented activity. This divine activity now takes on dramatic form when, in Jesus Christ, it is God himself who goes in search of the “stray sheep”, a suffering and lost humanity. When Jesus speaks in his parables of the shepherd who goes after the lost sheep, of the woman who looks for the lost coin, of the father who goes to meet and embrace his prodigal son, these are no mere words: they constitute an explanation of his very being and activity. His death on the Cross is the culmination of that turning of God against himself in which he gives himself in order to raise man up and save him. This is love in its most radical form. By contemplating the pierced side of Christ (cf. 19:37), we can understand the starting-point of this Encyclical Letter: “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8). It is there that this truth can be contemplated. It is from there that our definition of love must begin. In this contemplation the Christian discovers the path along which his life and love must move.

Deus Caritas Est 12

Reflection – This passage from Pope Benedict’s first encyclical follows in a natural and beautiful way from the one cited in the previous post. The path of love, the mystery of love, the challenge and call to love—all of this only gets translated from either the realm of theory (let me draw you a schematic diagram of love!) or of lofty ideal (oh, wouldn’t it be nice if we could live like that… sigh) when we come into a relationship with Love Itself, which is not an idea or an ideal, but a person.

And this person cannot be someone who lived a very long time ago and who we read about it a nice book encrusted with jewels and gold leaf. He has to be someone real who we can meet somehow, somewhere, and truly draw life from. And so we have the Eucharist, which in a most literal and almost shockingly practical way gives ‘flesh and blood’ to the concept of love. Love poured out on every altar, love patiently awaiting us in every tabernacle, every monstrance, love coming into the depths of our bodies, souls, minds, and hearts to make love a living reality in our own life.

It is this unpredictable (who could ever have invented the Eucharist?), unprecedented (there really is nothing quite like this anywhere else), and dramatic (in other words, an event that occurs in real time and history, both the historical Incarnation, Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ and the ongoing event of the sacraments in the Church) activity of God which can alone translate love, real love, perfect love into an actual reality in our lives.

Deus Caritas Est – God is Love, and this love is poured out onto the world continually in the offering of Christ. And it is here that we both see and come to understand the way of love, and that way is made available to us as a real path we can walk on, if we choose. If we want our lives to reflect that kind of love.

The Only Way to Be Satisfied

According to [1 Cor 6:12-19], receiving the Eucharist means blending one’s existence, closely analogical, spiritually, to what happens when man and wife become one… the dream of blending divinity with humanity, of breaking out of the limitations of a creature—this dream, which persists through all the history of mankind and in hidden ways, in profane versions, is dreamed anew even within the atheistic ideologies of our time, just as it is in the drunken excesses of a world without God—this dream is here fulfilled. Man’s promethean attempts to break out of his limitations himself, to build with his own capacities the tower by which he may mount up to divinity, always necessarily end in collapse and disappointment—indeed, in despair. This blending, this union, has become possible because God came down in Christ, took upon himself the limitations of human existence, suffering them to the end, and in the infinite love of the Crucified One opened up the door to infinity.

Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith, 101-2

Reflection – The passage Ratzinger refers to here is the one about being a temple of the Holy Spirit, about our bodies becoming one with Christ’s body in the mystery of grace and love, a mystery that Paul goes on to say in the letter is most profoundly realized in the Lord’s Supper.

It is lovely how Ratzinger weaves together so many things here: the mystery of love, embodied in a particular way in the vocation of marriage, the yearning of the human person to break out of the limitations of our humanity, the tragedy of secular ideologies and all other human projects to attain this superhuman transcendence, and the action of God in Christ to do in us what we cannot do of ourselves.

And yet… we know, don’t we, that it’s all a rather messy, difficult business. After all, man and woman in marriage don’t exactly become one in totality from their wedding day onward. I have worked with many, many married couples in my Madonna House life, and all testify that it is a long hard road to unity.

And so it is with our union with Christ. Here too Ratzinger shows his understanding, as he refers to this union, this transcendence of humanity to the divine level, as being one with the way of the Cross. It was the path of suffering love, not a triumphal victory march, that opened up for us the glorious divine life we yearn for.

And as with the Head, so with the Body. Our path to union with Christ and with the Father in Christ is the via crucis, the Way of the Cross. But it is, indeed, the way of love, the way of abandoning ourselves to the mystery, the challenge, the excruciatingly difficult task of love, moment by moment, turning to Christ, crying out for mercy, falling down and getting up, and again and again partaking of this Bread, this Wine, this food and drink where He comes to us and makes it possible to start over with Him each day.

This is how human beings become divinized – not some mystical mountain top or some esoteric prayer practice or some New Age-y neo-Gnostic head trip. It is dying with Christ so as to rise with Christ. This is the only way the deepest desire of our hearts will ever be satisfied.

Catholic Guilt

The ability to recognize one’s guilt is an essential element of man’s psychological makeup. The guilt feeling that shatters a conscience’s false calm and the criticism made by my conscience of my self-satisfied existence are signals that we need just as much as we need the physical pain that lets us know that our normal vital functions have been disturbed.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 80

Reflection – Oh, that Catholic guilt! That’s what everyone knows about Catholics, right? Guilt ridden, shame-filled neurotics, one and all!

I don’t know. I’m Catholic (in case you didn’t know…) and I can’t say I’ve been overly troubled with neurotic guilt in my life. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, in a Church climate where little moral instruction was given us (frankly), and the fear of God’s judgment and Hell was virtually non-existent, I’ve actually had to spend much of my adult Catholic life working on developing my conscience and having a proper sense of sin.
Maybe I’m weird. But I really don’t think so. When I hear Catholics of my generation or younger going on about their neurotic Catholic guilt, it makes me wonder, really. Where does that come from? Because it doesn’t come from the kind of instruction we received in our parishes and schools, for the most part. The corner of the Catholic Church I grew up in was a pretty conservative backwater in my day (I mean that in a nice way), and even so there was precious little indoctrination about sin and hell there.
I guess the bigger question might be where guilt, period, comes from, Catholic or otherwise. And is it always neurotic? Is there a proper place for guilt feelings, and what might it be, and what are we to do with them?
This quote from Ratzinger is very helpful, in a nice concise way. By comparing it to physical pain he helps us see what guilt is for. None of us would like to be unable to experience physical pain, I would imagine. We all know that pain is nature or God’s way of giving us immediate information that something has gone wrong in our bodies, so that we can do something different or take care of ourselves in whatever way we need to.
Guilt is a form of pain, but not a bodily pain that tells us our physical plant has gone wrong. It is a moral pain that tells us we have done or are doing something wrong.
Now with physical pain, what do we do? We analyze the pain. We try to figure out what is causing it. We evaluate how serious it is. If we are unsure, we consult an expert (a doctor). And we decide if it’s just something we have to live with or if there is something we can do differently to feel better.
The moral pain of guilt is the same – we are to use our minds to evaluate this feeling. What have I done or not done? Is it truly wrong? How serious a wrong is it? Do we need to consult someone about it? And then, the magic question, ‘what am I to do differently’? In other words, what do I need to repent of?
Guilt can be misplaced or exaggerated or erroneous in some other way. And if we are always suffering from misplaced or exaggerated guilt, we are indeed neurotic, whether we’re Catholic or not! But, as we know not to ignore physical pain (lest we end up prematurely dead), we shouldn’t ignore or stuff down our guilt, either, lest we end up spiritually dead. The feeling of guilt means something has gone wrong in our lives, pure and simple. So, let’s make it right.

A Short Cut to the Kingdom?

The blessed person is not the one who is a blood relative of the Lord but the one who has ears to hear: the one who is not locked into the narrow world of flesh and blood, the narrow world of the self-centered and earthly; the one who knows how to listen to God’s word. Elizabeth’s greeting to Mary tells us in advance that the Lord’s later correction of the woman in the crowd does not deny Mary the praise that is due her but simply points out the real basis for such praise.

Dogma and Preaching, 110

Reflection – We’re all looking for an ‘in’, aren’t we? What’s the secret (or The Secret, if that kind of self-help book is what appeals to you). What are the rules (or The Rules, if that kind of… well, you get the idea).

Whether we think of it in terms of God and eternal life, or some kind of more secular strain of salvation, there is a deep human urge to find the way in, the VIP entrance, the short cut.

That is what this whole business in the Gospel is about where Jesus seems to rebuff his mother and brothers. ‘Blessed is the womb that bore you.’ ‘Rather, blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it.’ ‘Your mother and brothers are waiting for you.’ ‘These are my mother and brothers. Whoever hears the word of God and keeps it…’

Painful… if you happen to be the mother or ‘brother’ of the Lord. What is this Gospel passage about? Jesus, I maintain, is here closing off the idea that there is can be any path to intimacy with him except the path of faith. There is no short cut, no ‘in’, no secret, no rules, no VIP entrance into the kingdom.

No esoteric knowledge, no purely formalistic religious initiation, nothing of that sort can bring us to the kingdom of heaven.

The only entrance into the kingdom is the path that leads us out of our ego, our self-enclosed, self-defined little world into the broad and beautiful expanses of the Lord. And this path is faith—to accept the word of the Other and base our life on this word. And this was Mary’s path to the kingdom too. Not for her is the claiming of some privileged access to God based on physical relationship. She is blessed not because she bore Christ in her womb, but because she surrendered her entire being to him in faith and obedience.

If there is a ‘short cut’ or an ‘in’ to the kingdom it can only be this: to put ourselves at the feet of Mary and ask her to teach us how to do this, too, in all the big and little events of everyday life. And this is what we try to do, day by day, at Madonna House.

The Persistent 'Perhaps'

The penetrating ‘perhaps’ which belief whispers in man’s ear in every place and in very age does not point to any uncertainty within the realm of practical knowledge; it simply queries the absoluteness of this realm and relativizes it, reminding man that it is only one plane of human existence and of existence in general, a plane that can only have the character of something less than final… there are two basic forms of human attitude or reaction to reality, one of which cannot be traced back to the other because both operate on completely different planes.

Introduction to Christianity, 40

Reflection – What a lovely phrase it is: the ‘penetrating perhaps of belief.’ We live, always, in a world of certainties: the various facts of science, geography, history, and the practical know-how one accumulates one the path through life. As one progresses in life, these certainties pile up: we know how things work, we know the way the world goes. And these certainties can become a prison surrounding us if we’re not careful. We are so sure of the way things are that there is little room in our lives for surprise, for delight, for something new and different to happen. The jaded cynic (and we all stand in danger of becoming that terrible creature) lives in a cramped prison cell of his own making.

So faith comes to us in this with its penetrating ‘perhaps’. Maybe, just maybe, there’s another reality beyond, above, around the ‘way things are’. There is something, or rather Someone, who holds all our known realities in being, and Who is ever-new, ever-young, ever-free in His holding.

The way things are is relative, then, in the light of faith. The way of the world, the unshakeable certainties about life and its operations is always being broken into by that Other reality, which is the grace of God. ‘Expect a miracle’, Catherine Doherty loved to say. Expect things to not be ‘the way they are’. It is faith that there is Something Else which opens us up to this perpetual freedom, this hope that God’s mercy and love can (perhaps) make things so much better.

The Truth Will Make You Free

[Truth] purifies man from egotism and from the illusion of absolute autonomy… makes him obedient and gives him the courage to be humble… teaches him to see through producibility as a parody of freedom and to unmask undisciplined chatter as a parody of dialogue. It is victorious over the tendency to mistake the absence of all ties for freedom.

Nature and Mission of Theology, 39

Reflection – Well, this is a mouthful, isn’t it! A bit dense perhaps. What is Ratzinger saying here? Let’s unpack it a bit. ‘Producibility’ is the mentality or ideology that the goal of human life is to… well, produce something! To be an effective economic unit, to achieve so many ergs of work each day and have something external to show for one’s life.

Ratzinger says that truth liberates us from this. By saying this, he is not simply saying ‘it ain’t so!’ What he means is something a bit deeper. It is the reality that there is something called ‘truth’ – that truth is a meaningful word in itself, in other words that there is a real reality that presents itself to us and that our minds can receive and grasp and make it our own. This is the reality that frees us from the terrible slavery of having to justify our existence by producing something.
How so? Because in the knowledge of the truth, we see or begin to see that the primary movement of our humanity is receptivity. We receive reality… and then we shape it and do things with it. But reception comes first, and it is ‘truth’ as a concept that communicates that to us.
We’re talking about an intensely Godly reality here. God is the author of all creation, and the author of all truth. And the first movement of God’s creation is to say ‘it is good’… and to rest in that goodness. Before we are to move as his co-creators by the work of our hands, we must receive what he has done, see it, and call it ‘good’ with Him. And this is prior, both in time and in importance, to our own shaping of reality.
The same dynamic holds true with true dialogue as opposed to empty chatter, and the rejection of autonomy as a pallid parody of freedom. It’s all about the fact of creation, that God has made something (everything, actually) and that our words are to be held by his creative Word, our freedom a movement held in his free creative act.
This is deep stuff, and I can’t make it un-deep. But we see here why relativism is so destructive of our humanity. When there is no truth, no overarching reality holding our frail individual humanity, then we are trapped in a world where the only stability we have is our projection of our egos into the ether, whether by work or words, and any tie that binds us to any other reality is a threat to our freedom, since all other realities are themselves forcing their own being onto us.
It is truth that sets us free from this terrible competition of being, that makes us free and secure, and able to meet the other in a true exchange of hearts and minds.

A Hole in the Holy of Holies

During the exile, the Ark of the Covenant was lost, and from then on the Holy of Holies was empty. That is what Pompeius found when he strode through the Temple and pulled back the curtain. He entered the Holy of Holies full of curiosity and there, in the very emptiness of the place, discovered what is special about biblical religion. The empty Holy of Holies had now become an act of expectation, of hope, that God himself would one day restore his throne.

Spirit of the Liturgy, 65

Reflection – If there is one piece of Old Testament lore that is familiar to the general public in our time of biblical literacy, it is probably the business of the Ark of the Covenant. People who would not be able to list the Ten Commandments with any surety know that they were carried around in an Ark (whatever that is), and people who know little about David, Solomon, and the Temple know what treasure lay at its center.

Of course we can thank Stephen Spielberg and Indiana Jones for that. But the key thing about the Ark is precisely what the movie was called, and what Ratzinger refers to here: it is, indeed a Lost Ark.
More importantly yet, there was no ‘backup ark,’ no replacement ark. The Jewish people did not do what would be almost second nature for us to do. Oh we lost the ark – well, that’s OK, we have the plans here in Leviticus, so let’s just make another one, and we’ll carve out a couple stone tablets to put in it, some imitation manna (I Can't Believe It's Not Manna!)… and no problem!
No. The tablets were written by God. The manna was given by God. The ark of the covenant was, in some sense, the very presence of God in their midst. There would be no rebuilding, no replacement, no attempt to fill the hole it had left.
While the New Covenant of Christ has changed a great deal of how we who are Catholics think about things like temples, tabernacles, holies of holies, and the Presence of God in our midst, while there is a new and eternal Bread and a new and eternal Law which abides with us forever, nonetheless there is a deep point Ratzinger is making here which is just as relevant today and to us as it was 2500 years ago.
Namely, we do not ‘make’ God present. We do not control or determine the gift of the divine in our midst. We receive the Manna, receive the Presence. We must wait upon the One who is the center and heart of our lives.
The Holy of Holies is the Eucharist, but it is also the very gift of God in our own hearts. It is that which is the center, the source, the heart of our own personal heart… and we neither control nor manipulate nor own this center. If it goes away, we live with a hole in our holy of holies, and that's all there is to it.
The Song of Songs plays with the image of the Lover who comes and goes, who is present, and then must be sought. Our God who we are to build our life around is like that, although He is, of course, always present. But his presence is mysterious, and more often than not feels like absence.
C.S. Lewis, in the Narnia chronicles puts it another way. Aslan is ‘not a tame lion’ – he comes and goes according to his designs. And our lives, if they are truly centered on this Lover, this lion, this mysterious God who is ‘lost’ and found and lost again, must reflect this mystery.
Things happen to us, things that are mysterious, hard to accept, hard to fathom. Our lives take twists and turns that can be painful. Things do not work out the way we had hoped. There are exiles; there are persecutions; there are terrible losses. Always in these the question arises somehow – what is my Holy of Holies? What is at the center of my temple? Something I can control or generate or manipulate, which in the end shows itself to have no power to save? Or a mysterious emptiness, a promise of fulfilment, an expectation, a hope that will not disappoint? This is the key question of all of our lives.

Love is Indeed Ecstasy

It is part of love's growth towards higher levels and inward purification that it now seeks to become definitive, and it does so in a twofold sense: both in the sense of exclusivity (this particular person alone) and in the sense of being “for ever”. Love embraces the whole of existence in each of its dimensions, including the dimension of time. It could hardly be otherwise, since its promise looks towards its definitive goal: love looks to the eternal. Love is indeed “ecstasy”, not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God: “Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it” (Lk 17:33), as Jesus says throughout the Gospels (cf. Mt 10:39; 16:25; Mk 8:35; Lk 9:24; Jn 12:25). In these words, Jesus portrays his own path, which leads through the Cross to the Resurrection: the path of the grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies, and in this way bears much fruit. Starting from the depths of his own sacrifice and of the love that reaches fulfilment therein, he also portrays in these words the essence of love and indeed of human life itself.

Deus Caritas Est 6

Reflection – What a great passage this is! Pope Benedict winds together so many images, basic biblical themes, theological insights, and connecting them in a few well-chosen words with the practical reality of love and the challenges and struggles of our daily life. He is at his best here, ‘firing on all cylinders.’
It is his connection of the dramatic language of the exodus, the profound spiritual image of the grain of wheat falling to the ground and dying, the Paschal Mystery of Christ, and your choices and mine this day to love or not love that is so striking.
It is ‘connection’ that counts here. It is when I realize that my choice to be generous or merciful or hospitable in some small everyday way is, in fact, another step in my ongoing journey out of Egypt and slavery into freedom, that I can find the grace to do it. Otherwise, it’s just an endless chore, a burden, a misery.
When I become aware of myself as ‘seed’, as a little hard thing that has little value or weight… but great potential, a potential only realized when it is broken, ceases to be a seed, becomes something quite different… well then, when the pressures of the heavy soil I am planted in begin to strain and crack me, I am more prone to remain there, rather than fleeing, shrugging off the commitment, the demands, shying away from the sacrifice it entails.
And when I finally get that every movement of my being, every moment of my life, everything actually going on in and around me and every conceivable future possibility is taken up, united to, and transformed by the suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ, becomes in that a small movement in the Great Dance of Salvation… well, I am likely to find joy in the life he has given me, whatever pains and burdens it levies on me.
‘Without vision the people perish’, the Scriptures say. Pope Benedict has vision, and generously and beautifully shares this vision with us. And it is all tied up with the earlier part of the encyclical, the purification of eros into agape, the true meaning of ecstasy in the Christian mystery, the ongoing call not to merely lose ourselves in some intense Dionysian release of pleasure, but to freely and nobly give ourselves—through, with, and in Jesus—in a solemn act of selfless love, lived out here and now in the duty of each moment.

Who Will Do the Loving?

Concretely, what does this path of ascent and purification [of eros] entail? How might love be experienced so that it can fully realize its human and divine promise? Here we can find a first, important indication in the Song of Songs, an Old Testament book well known to the mystics. According to the interpretation generally held today, the poems contained in this book were originally love-songs, perhaps intended for a Jewish wedding feast and meant to exalt conjugal love. In this context it is highly instructive to note that in the course of the book two different Hebrew words are used to indicate “love”. First there is the word dodim, a plural form suggesting a love that is still insecure, indeterminate and searching. This comes to be replaced by the word ahabà, which the Greek version of the Old Testament translates with the similar-sounding agape, which, as we have seen, becomes the typical expression for the biblical notion of love. By contrast with an indeterminate, “searching” love, this word expresses the experience of a love which involves a real discovery of the other, moving beyond the selfish character that prevailed earlier. Love now becomes concern and care for the other. No longer is it self-seeking, a sinking in the intoxication of happiness; instead it seeks the good of the beloved: it becomes renunciation and it is ready, and even willing, for sacrifice.

Deus Caritas Est 6

Reflection – ‘Everybody’s got a hungry heart… I still haven’t found what I’m looking for… I can’t get no satisfaction…’ and so on and so forth. The annals of popular music bear witness to this reality that Pope Benedict so ably describes in this passage from his first encyclical. Dodim – searching love, hungry love, love that pursues, clings to, is moved by the beloved. We all know this, regardless of our state of life—it is intrinsic to the human experience.
In our modern world (and it may well be that this is no modern innovation, but a perennial human reality) the idea seems to be that we are hungry, we desire, we search, we pursue… and then the big happy ending is that we attain the object of our desire and are satisfied.
Pope Benedict points out quite wisely that this doesn’t really work. Catherine Doherty made the same point in a very different way. She had talked with many teenagers and young adults about their aspirations and dreams for life. Most of them wanted to get married, and when she asked them why, they mostly answered, “So I can be loved.” Her question was short and to the point: “And who is going to do the loving?”
If it’s all about ‘my hunger’ and my quest to have my desires met… well, where does that leave the rest of you? What about your hunger, your desire? There’s a deep question of our humanity at stake in all this. If we’re all just a bunch of hungry hearts running around looking for satisfaction… well, who’s going to do the loving? If it’s left there, doesn’t it all get turned into mutual using, mutual desiring, what one of our MH staff calls ‘the law of mutual gobbling’?
The Holy Father points out the way out of this ‘law,’ which in Scripture is really what is meant by the term ‘the flesh’ – what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours. Love is always about ‘the other’ – but immature love is about what the other can give me. Love is to be matured past that – the other matters because they matter – not because he or she gives me this or that, ‘satisfies’ me in one way or another (this is about much more than sex, you know – there are all kind of ways of both using the other and truly loving the other).
Pope Benedict will go on in the encyclical (and we will go right along with him) to show how it is that love is purified from use to a true caring for the other. It is the path of commitment, consecration, true gift of self to the other. It is, simply, marriage, whether the vocation of marriage between man and woman or the total consecration of the person to the True Other, the deep gift of self to God which is predicated on the deep gift of God to each. And this is the path each one of us is travelling on, the path of purified eros leading us to the heights of agape and self-gift. A hard path, but the only one that leads up, if you know what I mean.

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An Obvious Point (sort of...)

The Church… has to bring men to Christ, and Christ to men, so as to bring God to them and them to God. Christ is not just some great man or other with a significant religious experience: he is God, God who became man to establish a bridge between man and God and so that man can become truly himself.

Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith, 292

Reflection – At first glance this quote from Ratzinger seems a bit… well, obvious, I guess. Of course the Christian Church has something to do with bringing people to Christ, and vice versa. What else would it be for? What is there to say about such a basic statement?
I think there’s quite a bit to say, actually. The mission of the Church can get wound up and bound up with lots and lots of different things, all of which are valuable and all of which are part of this large mission of bringing Christ to men and men to Christ.
But we can easily lose sight of the big picture in the details, right? Religion can be a powerful force of social change, for example, a view that can be found on both the left and the right. Urgent moral causes like the sanctity of life, the definition of marriage, or the alleviation of global poverty certainly are part of the mission of the Church… but only if they are understood as dimensions of bringing ‘Christ to men and men to Christ.’
Or the Church can be a place of social gathering, a force of cohesion and identity in society… again, not entirely illegitimate, but only if the force making us one is the Spirit of Jesus.
The Church and its mission can encompass all sorts of things: patronage of the arts and artists, of science and scientists, educator of youth, healer of the sick—all the social and corporal works of mercy are part of what the Church is for.
But if we lose the center of it all—bringing Christ to men and men to Christ—then it is all ultimately for naught. Some temporary alleviation of suffering, or various other temporal goods achieved for a time.
It is the intense Christ-centered nature of the Church’s mission that has to be returned to over and over. Only in Christ do human beings ascend to communion with God, and only in communion with God is our humanity healed and elevated to its supernatural end. Everything else is to be subordinated to this. In our times of social instability and uncertain future, we really have to dig deep into this—what does it mean? What does it look like? How are we to do it.
This is the mission of the Church. And remember, the Church is not the Pope, the bishops, the diocese, the parish, the priests and religious, not only. The Church is you and me. This is our mission, your mission. Your life and what it is for today.

Big Mama Sourpuss

Here… is the decisive reason for the abandonment of Christianity: its model for life is apparently unconvincing. It seems to place too many restraints on humankind that stifle its joie de vivre, that limit its precious freedom, and that do not lead it into open pastures—in the language of the Psalms—but rather into want, into deprivation… today it is a matter of the greatest urgency to show a Christian model of life that offers a livable alternative to the increasingly vacuous entertainments of leisure-time society, a society force to make increasing recourse to drugs  because it is sated by the usual shabby pleasures.

“Letter to Marcello Pera,” in Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, and Islam, 125-6.

Reflection – Ratzinger in this passage shows how very much in touch he is with the tenor of our times. Religion ruins everything, Christopher Hitchens sums it up quite succinctly. Religion: the global spoilsport, the sour nanny watching over all humanity and boxing our ears whenever we start having too much fun. This, sadly, is the image of religion in general, the Christian religion in particular, and the Catholic Church especially, for many many people.

We’ve all run across this picture of religion and the Church, right? And (do I know who’s reading this blog? No I do not…) maybe some of my readers have precisely this idea of it, too.
It is difficult to dialogue with this view of religion. For one thing, it is simply true that the Church does say ‘no’ to certain activities that cause considerable pleasure to those engaging in them (fornication, for example; also drug use). There is a virtue called temperance, which is the proper ordering and restraining of our boundless human appetite for sensual pleasure, whether for food, drink, sex, or any other body-pleasing activity.
A perfectly reasonable case can be made for such restrictions; certainly, when it comes to food and drink we all know that too much of good thing results in 'too much of me', especially around the middle, and probably far too little of me in terms of longevity. And, as I’ve been pointing out on this blog in multiple posts, unrestricted sexual activity has manifestly not led to great happiness in our society—clearly some kind of structure around sexual expression is needed, and this means having to practice self-control, continence. Just saying no, in other words, at least some of the time. All of this is perfectly reasonable.
But it is the nature of desire that the first thing it shuts down is sober logical analysis—and the stronger and more intense the desire, the quicker we become blind to reason and argument.
‘Sin makes you stupid,’ as Aquinas put it (it sounds more erudite in medieval Latin). ‘I want what I want when I want it’ – as long as that is the prevailing ethos in a person or society, the Church with its rules and regulations and lists of virtues is going to be Big Mama Sourpuss. And who needs that?
So, what are we to do? I think the deepest witness of Christians today is the witness of joy. People aren’t happy in general—modern secularism has not delivered on its promise by and large. To see Christians leading faithful obedient lives and possessing joy in this is more powerful a witness than a dozen rational arguments. And the witness of our lives opens the door to these arguments – when people see that we have something real, something that gives us life, they might just be willing to entertain the idea of temperance or chastity or obedience. And this is the challenge before us today.

The Fundamental Things Apply

The true meaning of the teaching authority of the pope is that he is the advocate of Christian memory. He does not impose something from the outside but develops and defends Christian memory.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 95

Reflection – In a recent Republican presidential debate Rick Santorum, a Catholic, was lectured by one of the moderators, also Catholic, on how holding the position that homosexual intercourse is intrinsically immoral was ‘bordering on bigotry’. When Santorum defended his position as being nothing else than the abiding moral teaching of the Catholic Church, the moderator (whose name I’ve forgotten and refuse to look up!) brushed that aside with a peremptory, “The world has changed.”

This is what Ratzinger is getting at here in his explanation of the role of the pope, an explanation that is part of a longer analysis of the relationship of truth, freedom, morality, and authority. I’ll be quoting bits and pieces of it here and there on the blog.
Our sensibilities about what is or is not moral are in constant flux, aren’t they? A few decades ago, drinking and driving was not considered such a big deal; now it is rightly abhorred. Just yesterday I went grocery shopping and was guilt stricken when I realized I had forgotten to bring any plastic bags with me: environment killer, j’accuse (or is that je m’accuse)! I wouldn’t have given it a thought ten years ago.
And obviously some of this changing sensibility is good, when it is based on new facts coming to light or becoming more obvious to everyone: e.g. drinking and driving is criminally dangerous. But when it is not that, when no new facts have come to light about a matter, when there is simply a change based on how we feel about something – well, that needs to be examined, doesn’t it?
What new facts have come to light about human sexuality to provide a rational basis for changing our moral understandings about it? And no, the Kinsey Report et al does not constitute new facts (or any kind of facts at all, actually – it’s been thoroughly debunked in every particular).
But fashion is a strong force, and wide-spread cultural shift is even stronger. It is almost universally assumed today that contraception is simply necessary. It is impossible today to have more than a few children, which comes as a great surprise to my friends with double-digit sized families. It is impossible today for teenagers to refrain from sexual activity, which comes as a great surprise to the millions of them who do just that, actually.
And apart from the controversial hot-button sexual issues, more and more today it is assumed that lying is OK and even necessary in some or even many circumstances, that stealing is OK as long as it’s from rich people or the government, that shady business practices are all right as long as ‘no one’ is hurt, whatever that means. And forget about the first three commandments of the Decalogue. OMG!
Against such shifts and swings in fashionable moral ‘thought’, if that’s not too strong a word for it, stands… well, the Pope, mostly. He stands for the memory of humanity, reminding us that neither God nor human nature has changed in the last forty years. Man and woman are still man and woman; human sexual love is still created as a reflection of the divine covenantal love from which all life and fruitfulness springs. A kiss is still a kiss, so to speak. And the same unchanging truths hold for matters of truth and integrity, worship and piety.
Nothing has changed; nothing of these essential fundamental matters of our humanity and how it is ordered to God ever will change. The Catholic Church cannot and will not change its moral teachings, because She remembers, and the voice of her memory is currently a little old man in Rome named Benedict XVI, who is the servant of the truth, not its author or its editor.