Talking About Integrity

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

Truth and Tolerance, 159

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Throwing Down the Gauntlet

Our life today is marked not only by dissatisfaction with faith, but equally by dissatisfaction with the world of science. Only if we describe this double dissatisfaction… will we provide a reasonably fair representation of the presuppositions of the problem of faith and knowledge today.

Faith and the Future, 16

Reflection – This passage from Fr. Ratzinger dates from the early 1970s. In the context of the Cold War, the nuclear arms race, the burgeoning oil crisis, and various forms of naturalism or back-to-the-land movements, he identifies a suspicion or discontent with the promises of scientific progress.

What he is describing is not so much a questioning of the validity of science, but of its sufficiency. Science and technology are what they are, and they do work, if done properly. That is, we get real insights into how the world works and how to make the world work for us better.

But science cannot tell us what this ‘better’ is—that’s the central point. The scientific method is a powerful tool, but there is no laboratory test that can tell us what we are here for and what the true good of man is.

This is also the problem with faith in the modern world, from a different angle. People resist faith (in the sense of formal religious commitment) for a similar reason. The perception is that as science simply tells us what we can do, the list growing longer every year, religious faith simply tells us what we cannot do, the list seemingly drawn up by and under the control of a small group of all too human authorities who themselves may or may not observe it too closely.

Science allows us to do everything (almost) but cannot tell us what we should do. Religion (it is seen) forbids us from doing much that we want to do, but gives us no convincing account of why we should listen to it or to its representatives. And so post-modern man bobs along without direction, driven by the currents of culture, more often than not manipulated by the powerful and clever who don’t actually know any more than we do what is good and true, but certainly know what they want and how to get it.

Ratzinger’s entire career as a theologian is bound up with charting a course out of this impasse. He has presented over and over religious faith as a positive vision of human life in the world, one aspect of which is moral prohibitions, but which far more centrally and crucially is an encounter with transforming love in Jesus Christ.

This encounter leads us to a fuller understanding not only of God but of the human person, our dignity and freedom. Out of this understanding, the scientific community can take direction on how to best utilize its discoveries for the true good of humanity.

This is the vision Ratzinger, and really, the Catholic Church, presents to the post-modern world. Many will not find it attractive or persuasive, it must be granted. But in laying out such a sweeping, creative vision of faith and reason, science and religion working together, Ratzinger has thrown down a challenge to those unwilling to accept his position. Namely, suggest something better! What is the true good of man, and how do you reason your way to it? How are we to govern human progress so that it is true progress, and what are we progressing towards? If not the New Jerusalem, then where is our destination? And will it be truly human? Will we be free there? Will dignity be acknowledged there?

The Pope has truly thrown down the gauntlet (admittedly in his characteristic gentle, kindly fashion) to secular modernity by presenting a powerful synthetic vision of humanity for the 21^st century. His challenge has mostly gone ignored, unheard, unheeded. Part of my desire for this blog is that by popularizing his vision, it will seep out slowly and begin to have the influence it deserves in fashioning the world to be a place human beings can live in, in truth, goodness, and beauty.

The Slavery of Desire

Moral obligation is not man’s prison, from which he must liberate himself in order finally be able to do what he wants. It is moral obligation that constitutes his dignity, and he does not become more free if he discards it: on the contrary, he takes a step backward, to the level of a machine, of a mere thing.

A Turning Point for Europe?, 36

Reflection – I’m on a roll here—from Marxism to scientism to today’s passage, describing just why a binding moral law is the only safeguard of human happiness and dignity.

This passage really undercuts the moral theory of ‘consequentialism’ – that model of morality which says that the only moral principle binding on us is to do that action which we deem will have the most overall positive effect. So we can torture prisoners who may (or may not) have information about future terrorist attacks, since to abuse and debase one human being is a better consequence than the deaths of thousands.

We can abort a baby who is going to be born in difficult circumstances: better that the life be ended just as it begins rather than ‘condemn’ the child to lifelong deprivation. And we can have sex whenever and however we wish, as long as all are consenting adults (although even that last word is being disputed by some): the obvious pleasure of sexual activity is a good consequence not obviously undercut by any bad ones. Telling lies is good if it spares pain or gets you what you want.

Consequentialism is rampant in North America—I can’t speak for the rest of the world. It is the assumed moral theory by almost everyone, even Catholics, even ‘conservatives’ (see torture example above). And it is entirely wrong.

For one thing, it is useless as a practical tool to measure morality. We can never know all, or even very many, of the consequences of our actions. Every action we take has ripple effects that wholly escape our powers of observation or prediction. Even our past actions have consequences we cannot gauge, so how can we evaluate our potential future actions? We just don’t know how this or that action is going to play out, consequence-wise. So to say we have to evaluate all the consequences of a deed to make a moral judgment about it is impractical in the extreme.

What we do know is the immediate moral content of what we are doing. If I am physically abusing a prisoner in my control, if I am participating in the killing of an unborn child, if I am using my sexuality as an immediate means of self-gratification, if the truth means nothing at all to me, then I know I am contravening human dignity. The act itself contains its own moral status.

Ratzinger’s point is that all of this moral weight given to the acts themselves really is a matter of preserving human freedom and dignity. Without this strong moral sense, we are reduced to the level of the beast or the machine, just recklessly pursuing our own interests and desires. No deeper consideration, no deeper concern for the fullness of our humanity and the humanity of the other. Far from releasing us from the prison of morality, amorality casts us into the prison of the rampaging ego, the slavery of desire.

To live a moral life is to live as a free man or woman, pursuing the good, the true, the beautiful even when it causes me pain or is the occasion of great sacrifice and struggle. This is the grandeur of the human person: that in this world of exigency and brute physical law and force, we frail creatures of flesh can stand in freedom and choose to live as sons and daughters of God, in goodness, justice, and charity for all. Without this, we are beasts or machines, nothing special at all. Our choice.
Update: Welcome, Sheavians! Uhhh, Sheavites? Shea-valanche? While your here, enjoy the scenery - I'm talking these days about tattoos as a response to persecution, Mae West and the Immaculate Conception, and being committed to the truth while we sweep the floor or clean the toilet. Enjoy!

A Blunt Object

[Science] is an immensely good thing… but there exist also pathological forms of science that deprive man of all honor, when scientific capabilities are put at the service of power.

Values in a Time of Upheaval 26

Reflection – So I’m following up here on yesterday’s post, on Marxism and its ongoing presence in our world today in the form of a rejection of any existing order in creation in favor of whatever the most powerful person or group decree.

Here we see that the ideology of science is precisely that. Not the practice of science—to simply learn the principles by which the physical universe and living creatures operate is nothing but good. Indeed, there is an implicit giving of honor and glory to God in the scientific method—we take in the wisdom of the Creator by studying the detailed workings of his creation.
It is when the discoveries of science are put into practice by the powerful of the world without regard to the ethical demands of human dignity and freedom that we see the pathological form of science Ratzinger describes here. To harness the power of stem cells to treat and even cure hitherto devastating illnesses such as diabetes or Parkinson’s, or even to cure spinal cord injuries is manifestly a good thing.
To kill embryonic human beings so as to harvest those stem cells is not.
To refuse to acknowledge that scientific research and practice must be done according to the larger realities of our humanity, its nature, dignity and rights, is essentially to make such research devoid of any particular meaning and value. After all, why cure Parkinson’s? Because human beings suffer greatly from it, right? But if human life is worthless and meaningless, which the destruction of embryonic human beings entails, then why does that matter?
Science unmoored from morality becomes simply power—no more meaningful really than the crocodile’s jaws or the grizzly bear’s claws. A blunt or sharp object (as the case may be) to get whatever we want right now, but no more significant that that.
Only when we live in the fullness of our humanity, which means the fullness of our responsibility for one another in truth and in love, does science and any other manifestation of human powers and skills take on a meaningful mien.
And this is what the Church has to offer humanity and its ‘secular’ fields of knowledge: that which alone makes knowledge something worth possessing and conducive to a beautiful form of human life.

That Terror Be Put to Flight

Marx was the one who said that humankind should no longer inquire into its origins and that to do so would be to act foolishly. Marx’s intention here was to move away from the question of understanding the ‘whence’ of the universe and its design… since creation in its innermost reasonableness attested most strongly and ineluctably to the Creator…. The question is seen as foolish from the very start. Creation is of no consequence; it is humanity that must produce the real creation, and it is that which will count for something. This is the source of the change of humanity’s fundamental directive vis a vis the world; it was at this point that progress became the real truth and matter became the material out of which human beings would cerate a world that was truly worth being lived in. Ernst Bloch intensified this idea and gave it a truly terrifying mien. He said that truth is now what we take it to be and that the only truth is change. Truth is, accordingly, whatever prevails, and as a result reality is a ‘signal to invade and an instruction to attack.’

In the Beginning, 49-50

Reflection – Might makes right, and the winners write the history books. So we have all been told. This is not new with Marx or the less well known Bloch. Ruthless and unscrupulous people have generally been able to articulate such as their philosophy, when they bothered to take time out from their busy schedule of rape, pillage, and looting to have a philosophy.

With the Marxist development (and Marxism is far from dead, and far from being limited to its explicit historic development in political-economic communism), the great brake that always bore on the schemes of the unscrupulous is removed.

This brake was the sense, the intuition, the barely grasped idea (at times), and firmly stated and codified idea (at other times) that there is an order to things that human beings cannot change.

We can rape, pillage, and loot—sure thing! But it was always at least dimly grasped that in time a bill would be presented, a debt exacted, that there were weights and measures valuing our deeds, that, in the words of an old Spanish proverb: “Take what you want… and pay for it!”

The Marxist sense is that there is no order to things, no scale in which we are balanced, no one to make us pay because there is no One there. We can do what we want, and make the world however we want. ‘Truth’ is a future-only concept, and the truth will be forged by whoever is strongest.

The theology of creation is more important than ever, in the face of this philosophy, which I firmly believe has broken free of its specifically Marxist context and is now a largely regnant rule of life in the year 2011. That God fashioned all that is, that it has a meaning and a purpose from Him, not from us, and that even our own fashioning, and the freedom with which we move through the world, is from Him, and has its own purpose in His schemes—this is the truth that liberates us from the ‘terrifying’ vista of Ernst Bloch, the vision of  a world in which all are at war with all to see whose truth will prevail among its many versions.

To recapture the sense of creation requires, I believe, a recapturing of the contemplative spirit in the world. It is Advent; we are all very busy. It can be very difficult to figure out how to contemplate cooking supper once more this time of year, let alone anything more profound.

But the Advent season calls us to this quietness. Not without difficulty, not without struggle. To stop, at least some time; to listen. To watch the snow fall on the hard earth, to hear the wind in the pine trees, to look at the winter stars. To receive creation as it is from God; and in that reception to know our own selves as received, as given, as gift. This is the wellspring of peace out of which we can truly act to fashion the world in justice and beauty. This is the open space we can create so that God can come into our world and have a place to lay his head, a place to be born anew. So that joy can enter the world again, and terror be put to flight, again.

The Measure of Humanity

Certainly, in our many different sufferings and trials we always need the lesser and greater hopes too—a kind visit, the healing of internal and external wounds, a favorable resolution of a crisis, and so on. In our lesser trials these kinds of hope may even be sufficient. But in truly great trials, where I must make a definitive decision to place the truth before my own welfare, career and possessions, I need the certitude of that true, great hope of which we have spoken here. For this too we need witnesses—martyrs—who have given themselves totally, so as to show us the way—day after day. We need them if we are to prefer goodness to comfort, even in the little choices we face each day—knowing that this is how we live life to the full. Let us say it once again: the capacity to suffer for the sake of the truth is the measure of humanity. Yet this capacity to suffer depends on the type and extent of the hope that we bear within us and build upon. The saints were able to make the great journey of human existence in the way that Christ had done before them, because they were brimming with great hope.

Spe Salvi 39

Reflection – Hope is proved by martyrdom, in other words. We can go along in life, ‘hoping’ things work out—and sometimes they do, amazingly enough! Eventually, though, we are confronted with the situation that does not work out, with the suffering that is not assuaged in human terms, with a choice that must be made, an affliction that must be borne, a sacrifice that is asked of us—and there is little or no prospect of it humanly ‘working out’—in fact, what those words mean can become very murky indeed.

True hope, divine hope, is what alone pulls us through this moment, that choice, those situations. We have to know that our destiny is not earthly happiness, but eternal communion with God. Our goal is not to have everything ‘work out’, but to carried by our Father in heaven into a realm of light beyond anything we can conceive.

If we lose this—if we lose hope—we are reduced in big and small ways, but ultimately in a total way, to the level of expediency, compromise, cynical bids for our own comfort or advantage. The whole way of the world of self-interest and utilitarian calculation.

Yet, as Pope Benedict points out so well, ‘the capacity to suffer for the truth is the measure of our humanity.’ Without this, we lapse into a sub-human, bestial existence where all that matters is that ‘I get what I want.’  But we can only suffer for the truth if we are oriented towards our divine destiny in a deep abiding fashion. So we can only be human if we are open to the divine.

The saints and martyrs are the truly human ones among us: the rest of us are ‘on the way’ (hopefully!), but always with that downward tug into self-seeking which negates our true humanity.

It is Advent, and the Church invites us, not to enter into an orgy of consumption, shopping, eating, drinking, and frenzied socializing, but to look up. To look to the One who is our hope, to renew and place and deepen our hope in the One who carries us through the mazes and abysses of life in this world, and who promises to carry us over the threshold of death into the next world, and who is carrying the whole world towards this mysterious glorious consummation when all will be made well in Him.

Only this will free us from the gravitational pull of the self; only this will make our lives truly human; and only this will open us to the fullness of divinity for which we have been made.

The Star Baby

The Christian faith has shown us that truth, justice and love are not simply ideals, but enormously weighty realities. It has shown us that God —Truth and Love in person—desired to suffer for us and with us. Bernard of Clairvaux coined the marvellous expression: Impassibilis est Deus, sed non incompassibilis—God cannot suffer, but he can suffer with. Man is worth so much to God that he himself became man in order to suffer with man in an utterly real way—in flesh and blood—as is revealed to us in the account of Jesus’ Passion. Hence in all human suffering we are joined by one who experiences and carries that suffering with us; hence con-solatio is present in all suffering, the consolation of God's compassionate love—and so the star of hope rises.

Spe Salvi 39

Reflection – So this is the crux of the matter (pun somewhat intended) in this whole business of suffering and our relationship to it. That God cannot suffer sounds hard and off-putting to us, but it follows upon our understanding of the nature of God. Suffering always flows from a lack of something in us, a privation, an imperfection; God is perfect and lacks nothing.

But this perfect and hence impassible God also lacks nothing in terms of love for his creatures. And so God who cannot suffer can suffer with—can have compassion. And this is the whole Christian revelation, the whole Christian mystery. God comes to us and makes himself able to suffer by assuming a human body and soul.
We’re starting Advent this evening, a new liturgical year with (in the English world) a new translation of the Mass to accompany it. Advent is the season where longing for the second coming and joyful anticipation of the celebration of the first coming mingle together.
But you can see how these two are related. We long for the second and final coming of Christ, because this is our true and deepest hope. The world continues on its path of suffering and death, darkness and sin, and we are all borne along on this current, even as we turn to Jesus moment by moment. We long for a true liberation, a true resolution to the crises and chaos of the world alienated from God.
We can have a true hope in the midst of this because, while we look forward to the final coming of Christ, we look back to that little baby born in Bethlehem, that little slip of a thing, that piece of human flesh and bone, shivering in the cold of the stable, fleeing to Egypt from Herod’s hatred, living among us in Nazareth, dying among us on Calvary.
Because God came into our world and did all this, and so opened heaven for all the faithful, we have a sure and certain hope that he will come and finish the job, so to speak, come and wrap all of creation up in his perfect love and justice, put an end to all hatred and war and cruelty, and draw all men and women who will to enter the eternal dance of love and joy.
The baby of Bethlehem is the star of hope. As we rush about in the busyness of December and all it entails, let us hold onto that baby, and so keep our eyes fixed on that star which leads us into the future God has opened up for us. He has come. He is real. He shares our burdens and sufferings. He gives us the strength to bear them to the end. He loves us.

A Couple of Stray Articles

Hey - I suspect many of my blog readers already get the MH paper Restoration, but for those who don't, I've had a little series on relativism in the modern world and the Christian response.
Part One is here, and Part Two is here. Part Three isn't online yet.
Read 'em and let me know what you think - so far it's been a love them or hate them affair.

The Easy Ways Don't Work

To suffer with the other and for others; to suffer for the sake of truth and justice; to suffer out of love and in order to become a person who truly loves—these are fundamental elements of humanity, and to abandon them would destroy man himself. Yet once again the question arises: are we capable of this? Is the other important enough to warrant my becoming, on his account, a person who suffers? Does truth matter to me enough to make suffering worthwhile? Is the promise of love so great that it justifies the gift of myself? In the history of humanity, it was the Christian faith that had the particular merit of bringing forth within man a new and deeper capacity for these kinds of suffering that are decisive for his humanity.

Spe Salvi 39

Reflection – Yesterday I reflected with the Holy Father on the redemption of our own personal suffering – how the fear of suffering drives us into all sorts of pathological and even evil acts, and how Christ present in our suffering heals us of this fear so we can bear whatever pain we must bear in this life with hope.

Today he goes on to reflect on the reality of suffering for others, not merely our own personal pain. The fact is, as we all know, we live in a broken world, and to truly help others, to be a force for love and healing, justice and mercy in this broken world, is not easy (to say the least!)

I am reminded of something Catherine Doherty was told by her spiritual director in the 1940s, Fr. Paul Furfey: that many people were willing to help change the world in easy ways… but the easy ways do not work. Very few people are willing to lay down their lives for the world, but the effect of their lives is all out of proportion to their numbers.

Truly, to live one’s life is such a way that some little light of love is shone into our corner of the world, to spend one’s time and energy in such a way that at least a few other people come to know something of joy and love—this is a task that demands all we have. It is a crucifying way of life, yet without it, love and joy remain very small and weak in the world.

And so we do have to know that there is a Love that meets our love, a Death that meets our death, and a Life, radiant and unending, that will catch and enfold our life as we strive to pour it out for the world.

And that it matters – that this little brother or sister, this little person in fact does matter enough for me to die for them, or be willing to suffer that they may live. Here too we need some kind of vision of Christ—how much I mean to Him—so you can mean that much to me, and so forth.

The pro-life cause is one I am passionate about, yet the circumstances of my life mean I have little direct involvement with it. But I believe firmly that the most deeply pro-life work anyone can engage with is to treat every human being as someone who is worth dying for, someone who is of immense importance to the world and to myself. Someone who is a precious and irreplaceable treasure. Everyone.

It is the absence of this attitude—the treating of people as units of production or valuable only if they are pleasing to the eye or in some other way—that is the deep root of the culture of death. But to live a true culture of life means being willing to suffer and die, even for one person who we might not even like terribly. And this is the force of love and hope that changes the world; nothing else will, you know.

The Anchor of the Heart Reaches the Throne of God

We can try to limit suffering, to fight against it, but we cannot eliminate it. It is when we attempt to avoid suffering by withdrawing from anything that might involve hurt, when we try to spare ourselves the effort and pain of pursuing truth, love, and goodness, that we drift into a life of emptiness, in which there may be almost no pain, but the dark sensation of meaninglessness and abandonment is all the greater. It is not by sidestepping or fleeing from suffering that we are healed, but rather by our capacity for accepting it, maturing through it and finding meaning through union with Christ, who suffered with infinite love… Christ descended into “Hell” and is therefore close to those cast into it, transforming their darkness into light. Suffering and torment is still terrible and well- nigh unbearable. Yet the star of hope has risen—the anchor of the heart reaches the very throne of God. Instead of evil being unleashed within man, the light shines victorious: suffering—without ceasing to be suffering—becomes, despite everything, a hymn of praise.

Spe Salvi 37

Reflection – You know, there are passages from this encyclical that really need very little commentary from me, that are well-nigh perfect in themselves. This is one of them. All I would really have to say is that I believe the Pope has squarely identified here the primary pathology of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. This is the root of abortion, of contraception, of pornography, of consumerism, of greed, of fascism, of so many of the behaviors and ideologies that have driven us to the edge of the abyss we are on today.

When we fear suffering above all other things, when we are willing to do anything—kill our children, mutilate our bodies, suspend civil liberties, run away from painful relationships, flee into a world of fantasy and lies—rather than bear the suffering that is inevitable in this world, then we fall into this terrible abyss of meaningless dark emptiness.
This is our current pathology; Christ is the current (and eternal) answer. God penetrated suffering. God suffuses every corner, every facet, every moment and movement of the human condition. He has come; He is here; He has fused Himself with us in our human experience, most particularly in our suffering and death. And so we have nothing to fear; suffering, fear, anguish, terror, death have been touched by God in Jesus Christ. And so there is hope. Suffering, fear, anguish, terror, and death are not the last word. The last word is love, resurrection, joy, victory, a hymn of praise.
But we have to cling to Him. And we have to stop fleeing suffering. We have to stop doing terrible things to ourselves, one another, our children, in our vain futile effort to put an end to suffering. We have to cling to Him, and enter whatever suffering comes to us in love and patient endurance, knowing that ‘patient endurance attains all things; who possesses God wants for nothing; God alone suffices’ (Teresa of Avila).
I guess I did have a few things to say about this passage after all…

Let's Be Logical

Liturgy is meant to be indeed a logike latreia, the ‘logicizing’ of my existence, my interior contemporaneity with the self-giving of Christ. His self-giving is meant to become mine, so that I become contemporary with the Pasch of Christ and assimilated unto God.

Spirit of the Liturgy, 58

Reflection – Two sentences here, absolutely packed with meaning and depth. Boy, that Ratzinger sure knows how to do it!

The phrase logike latreia is a quote from Romans 12:1 – ‘logical worship’ would be one way to render it. But as Ratzinger points out, for Christians ‘logic’ is not some dry abstract intellectual exercise. Logic is from the Logos—from the Word of God who is Christ in the flesh. The ‘logic’ of Christian life always reaches its fullness in our entry into the Paschal Mystery. We are being precisely and utterly logical only when we stretch out our arms to die with Christ so as to be raised to life with him. Any other mode of existence is senseless, illogical, silly.
What a way of talking about logic! What does it mean? Well, the logos of God is to love to the end of love. The Father pours Himself begetting the Son, the Son returns everything to the Father in an eternal act of love and gratitude. The Spirit pours forth eternally from this mutual love and gift. God’s creative act is a constant outpouring of being into what is not Him. And the action of redemption, of salvation, of bringing creation to its completion, takes the shape of this same act of love and gift, this time in a man of flesh who is also God from God.
And our entry into this is, precisely worship. And this worship is, precisely, the liturgy. We take our little selves, such as they are, and plunk them down before the altar of God where the Logos is doing what the Logos does—pouring out love to the end. And out of this encounter, here and now, today if you will, we are drawn into the dynamism of love to the end.
And this is what we mean by divinization. It’s not ascending to some astral plane, some esoteric New Age nirvana. It is to receive from God the capacity to live and love as God lives and loves. And out of this, or in the midst of all this, we receive eternal life. Love is stronger than death—but not just sentimental or emotional love. Crucified love. Sacrificial love. Love that is willing to die for the beloved. That’s how God loves us; that’s the love we receive in the Eucharist; that, and only that, is the love that bears us to eternal life.

Away for the Weekend

And I'm off again - last one for awhile. This time, I'm helping with a bereavement retreat at St. Mary of Egypt Refuge near Madoc. Pray for the retreatants, the retreat staff, and me! Back Monday.

A Love Affair

OK – before you all read this passage from Ratzinger, I need to post a warning – “Academic Language Ahead – Proceed With Caution.” Don’t give up on this blog post – I promise to make it all crystal clear. Cuz hey – that’s my job! But here it is:

 

Mariology can never simply be dissolved into an impersonal ecclesiology. It is a thorough misunderstanding of patristic typology to reduce Mary to a mere, hence, interchangeable, exemplification of theological structures. Rather, the type remains true to its meaning only when the non-interchangeable personal figure of Mary becomes transparent to the personal form of the church herself. In theology, it is not the person that is reducible to the thing, but the thing to the person.

A purely structural ecclesiology is bound to degrade Church to the level of a program of action. Only the Marian dimension secures the place of affectivity in faith and thus ensures a fully human correspondence to the reality of the incarnate Logos. Here I see the truth of the saying that Mary is the ‘vanquisher of all heresies’. This affective rooting [of the mystery of the Church in the personal mystery of Mary] guarantees the bond ex toto corde – from the depth of the heart – to the personal God and his Christ and rules out any recasting of Christology into a Jesus program.

Mary, the Church at the Source, 27

Reflection – ‘Mary is a symbol of the Church’. ‘Mary is the pattern of discipleship.’ ‘Mary is the model for Christian life.’ We have probably all heard something like this at some point – at least those practicing Catholic readers of this blog.

This quote from Ratzinger is giving an important, crucial brake on that kind of language, correct as it certainly is.

Mary is a symbol of… fill in the blank here. But wait a minute—she’s not a symbol, she’s a person. That is the precise point he is making. Better yet, she is a symbol because she is a person. This is what Mary brings to our Catholic understanding and why she remains so important and central to us.

Our faith is not a set of diagrams and schematics. Our faith is not a dry assemblage of rules and programs. Our faith is not a bunch of learned ideas and propositions.

The Christian religion is personal, warm, or it is no longer Christian. It is a love affair, or it has become something false to its own nature. But it is Mary ‘the symbol of the Church’ who by her very personal presence makes this clear, and makes it so.

Mary is only all the things she is—symbol, pattern, model—because she had and has a direct personal relationship with Jesus Christ, with God the Father, and with the Holy Spirit. Daughter of the Father, Mother of the Son, and Spouse of the Spirit—at every turn, Mary is in relationship, in a personal encounter, in a personal gift and reception of gift, all of which is utterly bound up in the central fact that she said yes to God, and so conceived and bore His Son into the world for its salvation.

And this is the Church. Not a bureaucracy or an army or a social agency or a club or a vehicle for ideology or any other abstract bloodless reality we may make it into. 'A Jesus Program', as he so eloquently puts it. The Church is daughter of the Father receiving everything from God out of love, mother of the Son’s life in her children, and spouse of the Spirit bringing forth the life of Christ into the world continually in the sacraments and in the saints begotten from her womb.

Mary, by standing before us always as our mother, teacher, guide, and friend, makes all of this not just more words, more abstract notions, but a living reality. She is our symbol, our model, and our pattern, but only because she is first our Mother, and our very best friend after Jesus.

God is a pretty smart Guy, you know! Along with everything else He has done to save us and give us eternal life, He gave us the most beautiful thing in the world he ever created—a truly beautiful Woman—to take us in hand and lead us down all the pathways of grace and mercy to the innermost corridors of the heart of God.

God is a Person, and you are a person, and Mary is a person, and the Church, in a sense, is a person—it is all intensely personal, warm, loving, and extraordinarily beautiful. Isn’t it great to be a Christian? Don’t we want to share all this beauty with the world?

The One Spiritual Ailment

The loss of the ability to see one’s guilt, the falling silent of conscience in so many areas, is a more dangerous illness of the soul than guilt which is recognized as guilt.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 81

Reflection – “‘He claims to be able to cure all physical ailments,’ said Flambeau.

‘Can he heal the one spiritual ailment?’ asked the priest with interest.
‘And what is that?’
‘Oh, thinking oneself quite well.’
This passage from Chesterton’s Father Brown story The Eye of Apollo (quoted from memory) has always stuck in my mind. ‘To think oneself quite well’ – this is the one sickness of the soul that truly is without remedy. All the other sins and vices, serious and destructive as they are, if they are known to be sins and vices, at least lead the soul who grapples with them to cry out to God, to ‘get help’ as the saying goes, to admit to being weak and needy and in need of mercy.
But to say “I’m all right, Jack – what’s your problem?” – this puts us in grave mortal peril. The above passage from Ratzinger is from a discussion of Nazi Germany and the apparent sincere belief of the SS and Gestapo that they were, in fact, ‘all right, Jack (or, perhaps, Hans).’ Some moral philosophers and theologians actually have argued that since these men were seemingly doing what in conscience they believed to be morally right, they could well be in heaven, since after all, we all have to follow our consciences.
Ratzinger (while of course making no pronouncement on the fate of anyone’s immortal soul) counters this line of argument. To become so morally blind and deaf, so depraved in one’s conscience that one no longer can see anything wrong whatsoever in one’s conduct is actually the most spiritually perilous state to be in. Every human being has implanted in them from God some original knowledge of good and evil, some basic sense of the moral law. To have killed that basic sense is deeply dangerous.
We are not Nazis. But more and more in the world today the attitude of ‘I’m all right, Jack – what’s your problem?’ crops up. It’s a familiar strain to us: I’m not doing anything wrong – it’s those people, the ones over there. They’re the bad guys! It’s those liberals, or conservatives, or gays, or fundies. It’s the Sanduskys or Corapis or Cains. It’s Obama. It’s Palin. It’s BushCheney. It’s Wall Street. It’s big government. It’s… fill in the blank here.
But what am I doing? Am I really so perfect, that I can shake my fist and point my finger and call people names, posture like I’m some kind of paragon? Yes, people do wrong things – of course! And I never do anything wrong? Really? Who am I, and where am I, that I can sit in judgment over the world?
When the London Daily News was hosting an essay contest entitled “What’s Wrong With the World?” Chesterton submitted his entry. It consisted of two words. It read, “I am.”
We really have to get there, folks. The problem is not him, or them, or you, or her. It’s not the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, or the North Koreans, the Republicans, the Democrats, or whatever political party you dislike wherever you live.
The problem is me—so long as I am not loving without counting the cost and living and dying every day with Jesus. The problem is me—until I become the saint God made me to be. The problem is me, not you, not them, not him, not her. Period. End of story.
Update: Flambeau, not Flaubert (HA!). Chesterton used to quote from memory, too, and consequently his books are full of mistakes...

Are We Living in the Past?

[In the modern world] belief no longer appears as the bold but challenging leap out of the ‘apparent all’ of our visible world and into the apparent void of the invisible and intangible; it looks much more like a demand to bind oneself to yesterday and accept it as eternally valid. And who wants to do that?

Introduction to Christianity, 26

Reflection – The chronological snobbery of modernity is a well known and well commented on phenomenon. The blithe assumption that we are smarter, better, more educated, than people of past ages goes without saying in many quarters. “Medieval” is a synonym for backwards, superstitious, intolerant, violent, misogynist, racist—and so forth. All bad things happened in that vague period known as the Middle Ages or Dark Ages—although most who hold that would be hard pressed to define exactly what centuries specifically they mean by those phrases, what they were in the middle of, and what the darkness consisted of.

People who hold that view would also be hard pressed to describe the origin of the university system, the theory of universal human rights, the distinction between Platonism, neo-Platonism, and Artistotelianism, who Avicenna, Averroes, and Aquinas were and what difference they made, the varied contributions of the Vincentians, the Franciscans, and the monastic schools of the 12^th century, and the significance to philosophy of such names as Boethius, Augustine, and pseudo-Dionysius.
In other words, people who sneer at the ignorance of the Middle Ages tend to be pretty ignorant; people who despise the prejudices of their ancestors tend to be prejudiced; those who scoff at the illiteracy and poor education of the benighted souls of the 13^th century show themselves to be fundamentally illiterate and badly educated.
That being said, Ratzinger touches upon a fairly common attitude here in this short passage, and not one that can only be dismissed as the usual modern prejudice against pre-modernism. Why should the past have veto power over the present? Why are we bound to dogmatic formulations of the 4^th, 5^th, or 13^th century? The substance of the bread and wine change to the substance of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist, while the accidents (i.e. appearances, sensible qualities) remain the same. This is the dogma defined at the 4^th Lateran Council of the 13^th century. But to a people who no longer think of reality in terms of substance and accident, matter and form, how can this be maintained? Are we living in the past?
This, and similar concerns, are serious questions, perhaps somewhat beyond what can be addressed in a blog post. The essential point, though, in this question of belief and the seeming tyranny of the past over the present in Christianity is that we insist that there has been a definitive action of God in the course of human history. Belief, this leap from the ‘apparent all’ of the visible into the ‘apparent nothing’ of the invisible, is also belief that this apparent nothing made its own leap in our direction, that it became a visible, tangible reality, walked among us, acted in ways that were utterly human, though the action was divine.
If we do not have something like this, something like what Christians claim to be the case, then ‘belief’ becomes rather amorphous. “I believe in an invisible world”… but what is this world. “Oh, I don’t know…” And it all tends to become something I have constructed, projected into the void of the world. Something that suits me, that reflects what I want it all to be about. In other words, it becomes one more extension of my ego into the world.
Unless God has done something, unless there has been an objective and concrete imposition of the divine into the mundane, belief fails, becomes yet one more ego project. And so we stand (or kneel, perhaps) before this concrete, tangible God who did this Thing 2000 years ago, this Thing which is a living concrete tangible reality in the tabernacle and on the altar today. Only this kind of belief carries us truly from the visible and the immediate into the truly invisible and eternal, which remains so present to us that it can bear our weight and bear us into the realm of the divine, the realm of faith, the kingdom of God.

And a Great Silence Descended Upon the Blog

Very busy day Sunday. Medical situation (non life-threatening) today that took up most of my day and all of my energy. Result: no blog. If only I could just post cute pictures of cats I'd be up for it...
For those who may be wondering why I'm all quiet all of the sudden. I'm OK - life just got overwhelming all of the sudden...

Oracles and Auguries

The prophet is not the Israelite’s version of the soothsayer… his task is not to report on the events of tomorrow or the next day in order to satisfy human curiosity or the need for security. He shows us the face of God, and is so doing he shows us the path that we have to take. The future of which he speaks reaches far beyond what people seek from soothsayers. He points out the path to the true ‘exodus,’ which consists in this: among all the paths of history, the path to God is the true direction that we must seek and find.

Jesus of Nazareth Part One, 4

Reflection – Remember Y2K? The fuss around the magical changing of the calendar from starting with the number ‘1’ to the number ‘2’? I’m not talking about the Church’s response to the new millennium, the proclamation of the great Jubilee—that was an invitation to contemplate Christ’s face as we recalled 2000 years of his life among us in the Church.

No, I’m remembering all the hysteria around computers, and the apocalyptic scenarios being dictated from heaven to various soi disant seers, which seemed to be rewritten on a regular basis (you would think that voices from heaven would have their act together regarding the apocalypse and wouldn’t need constant recourse to editing…)
And many were taken in by this, many were frightened or impelled to make massive changes in their life because some ‘prophet’ somewhere told them something was going to happen sometime soon. Personally I am aware of at least one marriage that was destroyed by this kind of apocalyptic soothsaying, and the panic it engendered in one half of the marriage.
I don’t recall any of those self-appointed seers apologizing after the year 2000 came and went without serious incident. Maybe they did, and I just didn’t hear about it.
And so we are coming up to the year 2012, and apocalyptic speculations are again rife, at least in some quarters. At least this time it’s more in the New Age circle as opposed to Catholic.
It’s this whole business of wanting to know the future, isn’t it? Wanting security or the inside track by getting the program. This is a deeply human reality: soothsayers, diviners, witches, spiritualists, oracles and auguries of all kinds extend back as far as we have records of human striving to live well in the world.
It’s all about security, I think. And this is why for Christians and Jews, divination has always been strictly forbidden. It’s not just that we are forbidden to know the future—actually there are instances in our sacred story of holy people being given isolated and immediate knowledge about some future event, generally so they could pray or do some charitable deed connected with it.
It’s that we are not meant to seek our security in this… and how we want to! If we can just know how the stock market is going to go… how the Middle East is going to go… how Europe is going to go… how my job and finances are going to go… if we could just know…
No. What we are to know is that we have a Father in heaven who loves us. We have a Lord, Jesus Christ, who is with us to lead us and guide us into the divine life. We have a Spirit poured into our hearts to make this a living reality, a here and now event. Prophecy, as it exists today, is simply and purely to guide us towards this Father, this Lord, and this Spirit acting in the world and in our lives.
We have no other real security, and we never will. All the oracles and soothsayers are liars or failures, as are all the modern secular versions: self-help books with guaranteed results, and all that business of securing our future by controlling our present.
God and God alone makes our life secure, and Jesus offers us the sure and certain path to God, and so to the freedom and peace and joy we long for.

Love, the Universe, and Everything!

Hey, all! We just had a planning meeting for our annual MH 2012 Summer Program, a five week immersion into Christian community and Gospel life. As you can see I've added a box on the side of FAQs about the program, but the main info is on the Facebook events page, linked above.
We really want to get the word out this year for this program, so help me out, here, eh? Link, share, pass on the program to your facebook pages, twitter feeds, blogs... whatever!
The young people who come to our summer program, and come to MH throughout the year, really experience life changing graces here. Thousands have come to Christ, or come closer to Christ, or been healed and blessed in multiple ways. So help us find the young people (and even not-quite-so-young) who the Lord is calling to experience our life this summer.

A Hope That Goes Further

Day by day, man experiences many greater or lesser hopes, different in kind according to the different periods of his life. Sometimes one of these hopes may appear to be totally satisfying without any need for other hopes. Young people can have the hope of a great and fully satisfying love; the hope of a certain position in their profession, or of some success that will prove decisive for the rest of their lives. When these hopes are fulfilled, however, it becomes clear that they were not, in reality, the whole. It becomes evident that man has need of a hope that goes further. It becomes clear that only something infinite will suffice for him, something that will always be more than he can ever attain. In this regard our contemporary age has developed the hope of creating a perfect world that, thanks to scientific knowledge and to scientifically based politics, seemed to be achievable… This seemed at last to be the great and realistic hope that man needs. It was capable of galvanizing—for a time—all man's energies… it has become clear that this hope is constantly receding. Above all it has become apparent that this may be a hope for a future generation, but not for me… [but] a hope that does not concern me personally is not a real hope. It has also become clear that this hope is opposed to freedom, since human affairs depend in each generation on the free decisions of those concerned. If this freedom were to be taken away, as a result of certain conditions or structures, then ultimately this world would not be good, since a world without freedom can by no means be a good world… the question always arises: when is the world “better”? What makes it good? By what standard are we to judge its goodness? What are the paths that lead to this “goodness”?

Spe Salvi 30

Reflection -  Whither Greece? Whither Italy? Whither Europe? Is the Euro about the wither? Are we? Am I? How about you? Whither the withered, these days?

The world is in a bit of shaky state these days, as I have pointed out more than once on this blog. Truly hard to know what to make of it all, at least from where I’m sitting up in the backwoods of Canada. The Pope ‘s encyclical on hope is so utterly relevant these days, perhaps of all his writings it is the most urgently relevant in this time of global uncertainty.
We all hope that our lives will work out, for health and prosperity, success and the world’s goods. And sometimes we get what we hope for. Then we find out that all that stuff, nice as it is, does not make us fully happy. And even if we’re pretty happy, at some point we lose it – we grow old, we lose our health, people we love. That’s life. And oftentimes, it doesn’t work out at all. That’s life, too.
But hope must deepen, then, in us, if life is not to be a sad tragic affair. We have to learn to turn our earthly hopes to heavenly hopes. We have to learn that happiness, real and lasting perfect happiness, just is not given to us here and now. Otherwise we either become very sad and bitter, or plunge ourselves into the kind of ideological frenzy that the Pope outlines so well above – trying to build some kind of perfect world where none of that bad stuff will ever happen.
That’s what Europe’s been trying to do since the end of WWII, and it seems to be about to come crashing down around them. That’s what so much of the world has tried to do in the past decades, and it’s not working out very well. We have to learn. We have to go deeper. We have to accept suffering as the price of life in this world. We have to find that 'hope that goes further' than life in this world. We have to learn there’s another world beckoning to us. And we have to learn how to get there, and Who will bring us there.

Why We Choose to Be Sub-Human

Peace in the universe through peace with God, the union of above and below—that is how we can describe the essential intention of worship in all the world’s religions. But this basic definition of the attributes of worship is marked concretely by an awareness of man’s fall and estrangement. Of necessity it takes place as a struggle for atonement, forgiveness, reconciliation. The awareness of guilt weighs down on mankind. Worship is the attempt to be found at every stage of world history to bring back the world and one’s own life into right order.

Spirit of the Liturgy, 35

Reflection – At the end of her wonderful little book The Loser Letters, Mary Eberstadt, in the voice of her narrator A.F.C. (A Former Christian, although by the end of the book… well, I don’t want to spoil it for you…), points out the unsolvable problem for materialist atheism and its evolutionary reductionism of human experience. Namely, why do we feel guilty? What is the evolutionary advantage of remorse, of contrition, of sadness for past sins?

In a strictly materialist universe governed by rigid criteria of evolutionary advantage, survival of the fittest and all that (understood, not in its proper scientific sense, but with a sort of quasi-psychological/ethical/sociological fuzziness), remorse and contrition are enigmas, truly. What benefit do they confer, and how, in a strictly materialistic universe, can human beings find relief for these strong experiences which cause us so much suffering?

The consciousness of sin, of having done some terrible thing wrong which we cannot quite make right, is one of the deeply imbedded indicators in humanity that there is a Bigger Reality surrounding us, to whom we are accountable. That our relationship to this Bigger Reality is somehow key to whole project of happiness, peace, joy, love. And that there is something in us that has badly messed up this relationship.

And so, worship. And in worship, sacrifice, atonement, expiation. This is, as Ratzinger points out, a theme running broadly throughout the whole religious experience of the human race. It is a deeply human experience, and its increasing absence is not a sign of progress but of de-humanization.

To lose a sense of guilt, to consciously suppress, deny, rationalize, the sense every human carries of ‘something wrong in me’ is not the action of an enlightened free person. It is an act of fear, rather—fear that we may need to do something about that, may need to change, may need to turn to God and put ourselves under His authority. That this bigger reality surrounding us not only is the key to our happiness and joy, but that it (He) may make demands on us that may not be easy for us to fulfill. And so we choose to turn aside, to deny this powerful experience of guilt, or wrong.

But what a choice! To suppress our guilt is to then effectively place ourselves outside that ‘something bigger than me,’ the openness to which is the very condition of an authentic human life, as we have been exploring for some days now on this blog. But I think that's why we do it - guilt is a painful reality, and we flee from pain. But the price we pay for that flight from pain is a high one indeed. To choose to be sub-human, rather than choosing to be human, and in need of mercy.

No, worship, and in worship the free coming before God in need of forgiveness, of cleansing, of expiation, is the very heart of human life in the fallen world. But in Christ, this mystery which runs through all religions is made so joyous, so lavish, so simple. He is our expiation, his love and his gift are the cleansing of our sins. Our sole act is to enter into his life through faith in him, so that he can work in us the great work of re-creation and redemption that is his will for us. And this is the true fullness of human life – to enter into Christ’s life and because of that, to be able to love as he loves, to live in the heart of the mystery of love and gift as he lives there. Human life—worship, obedience, love.