The Foundation of Hope

Let us say once again: we need the greater and lesser hopes that keep us going day by day. But these are not enough without the great hope, which must surpass everything else. This great hope can only be God, who encompasses the whole of reality and who can bestow upon us what we, by ourselves, cannot attain. The fact that it comes to us as a gift is actually part of hope. God is the foundation of hope: not any god, but the God who has a human face and who has loved us to the end, each one of us and humanity in its entirety. His Kingdom is not an imaginary hereafter, situated in a future that will never arrive; his Kingdom is present wherever he is loved and wherever his love reaches us. His love alone gives us the possibility of soberly persevering day by day, without ceasing to be spurred on by hope, in a world which by its very nature is imperfect. His love is at the same time our guarantee of the existence of what we only vaguely sense and which nevertheless, in our deepest self, we await: a life that is “truly” life.

Spe Salvi, 31

Reflection – Well, once again Pope Benedict nails it on the head. As I mentioned a few days ago, I just did a retreat for 83 teenagers of the Pembroke diocese. It was a lovely, if somewhat exhausting, experience. I love young people. I love their energy, their enthusiasm, their intensity. I love their earnest seeking and questioning, their often very serious doubts about life and faith, and their determination to figure something out about all of it in the face of much turmoil and adolescent hormonal/social/emotional/familial upheaval.

It’s an extraordinarily difficult period in life, but very beautiful, and I love to be part of it and offer whatever help to them a middle-aged dude with a Roman collar can offer. Which might be quite a lot, actually, if they’re willing to receive it… (but that’s another story).

What I also love about young people is the natural quality of hope they possess in abundance. Their lives are open before them; possibilities stretch out in all directions. Within the limits of their inherent abilities and talents, they could really end up doing and being just about anything. Hope in its natural form is super-abundant in youth, and it is a beautiful sight.

The Pope here makes the essential point, though, that natural hope is not itself virtuous. Virtues always perfect the person; a natural hope can be misguided or even wicked: e.g. “Gee, I sure hope my plan to rob the liquor store comes off OK!” Or, “I hope I end up playing for the Ottawa Senators!” Uh, no, Fr. Denis—that’s not really a realistic hope.

Natural hope has to be perfected by this mysterious virtue of hope, this hope that takes everything we desire, all our plans and dreams and yearnings and ideas about life, extracts from the heart of all of it what we really want—happiness, joy, ‘life itself’, as the Pope so well puts it—and then informs us by the closely connected gift of faith that all of that is held for us in God and God alone.

All our little hopes, our human hopes, everything we so deeply desire and dream of, is fundamentally a desire for God. And theological hope, the gift of hope, the virtue of hope, raises our minds and hearts, sets our eyes and directs our feet, on this upward path to the fulfillment of all our desires.

And Pope Benedict so ably points out that this deep hope is not only for some future kingdom of heaven that awaits us when we die (‘goin up to the spirit in the sky…’). It is found where love is found, where God is loved, and where His love comes to us. Faith leads to hope, and hope is fulfilled in love.

And in this all the energy and excitement of youth, all the dedication and commitment of young adulthood, all the long years of cross bearing and hard labor of middle age, all the latter years of surrender and letting go, all become expressions and movements of this faith-hope-love dynamic. It’s all about God, and God is all about love and life poured out for all who look to Him for the fulfillment of all our desires.

Light Came, Fear Fled

God is Logos. We must add a second point: Christian faith in God also affirms that God, the eternal reason, is love. He is not a relationless existence circling around its own self. Precisely because he is sovereign, because he is the Creator and encompasses all things, he is relationship and love…

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 112-3

Reflection – The great primeval fear of humanity is touched on in this brief passage. Namely, God is not love. The universe is a cold, dark, dead place, and at the heart of reality there is either Nothing or nothing good.

This primeval fear is the source of all our monster movies, horror stories, and much of the primitive magical practices surrounding the ancient religions of mankind. We’ve got to keep the darkness at bay—break out the garlic!

We had a priest visit MH some years ago. He was from a part of Africa that had only relatively recently been exposed to the Christian Gospel. In fact, he himself had grown up the son of a ‘witch doctor’, and his family and village had become Catholic Christians when he was a boy.

So he had a certain authority on the subject. He told us that, before the missionaries arrived, they lived in fear—fear of the dark primitive forces of the universe, fear of the ‘gods’ who had to be placated and kept at bay. When Christ came, light came. When Christ came to them, fear fled.

It’s this whole business of God revealing Himself to us as relationship, as love. That which is at the heart of all reality is not some mute implacable force, some anonymous energy, some inhuman mystery. The center and ground of the universe is a Father to us. The mystery at the heart of all mysteries is a mystery of love and gift.

In a world where there is, indeed, suffering, darkness, and terror, this is not always the easiest thing to believe. There is a reason all the primeval terrors of mankind arose and continue to abide in us. We have reason to be afraid.

It is the specifically Christian revelation that shows us God not only as some kind of loving Father ‘up there’ or ‘out there’ or… well, somewhere. God in Christ penetrates to the heart of darkness. Jesus who is God, who is the utter center of all reality, embraces us not only in some vague abstract way, but in our very encounter with death and suffering and evil.

Because of this we can, and do, have hope. And it is the martyrs (as I have said more than once on this blog) who show us the deep truth of this hope. They had the grace to enter with Christ into the very heart of the world’s pain and darkness, and even though they died, prevailed. They were not defeated, even though they suffered and were killed.

I guess my thoughts run this way because the world is losing this hope (at least the corner of the world that used to go by the name ‘Western Civilization’). Slowly, darkness and fear are seeping back into our deepest hearts. The magical rituals don’t involve garlic or witch doctors usually. Instead, ‘better living through science’! We will conquer the universe with technological mastery. We will eradicate suffering by the unfettered power of our minds and our wills.

It doesn’t work. It never works. The results are an increase in suffering a hundred-fold. And so we Christians are in a serious position. Both facing (maybe) a steady increasing pressure to compromise our beliefs in particular around sanctity of human life and the sacred quality of human sexuality, and possible persecution as we don’t, and at the same time holding out to the world the true hope and light and peace it desires.

It is a serious position, but we need to take heart in it. And the ‘heart’ we need to take is not our own—it is the Heart of the World, the heart of all reality. We do have a Father. And a Lord who has gone before us and done everything for us already. And a Spirit given to us so that we can prevail, even if (yes!) we are martyred.

Take heart, stand firm, and hope in the Lord.

Two Kinds of People

The contemporary situation is fundamentally marked by that same tension between opposite tendencies which runs through the whole of history. On the one side, there is the interior opening up of the human soul to God; but on the other side, there is the stronger attraction of our needs and our immediate experience. Man is the battlefield where these two contend with each other.

Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, 100

Reflection – I think we can all easily identify with this passage. There is God, and then there is ‘what I want right now.’ Which will I choose this time? There is God and the infinite eternal reality He opens up for us, and then there is the maelstrom of immediate concrete life pulling us in all sorts of directions. Can any of us say we are never pulled of course? There is God and His constant call to us to ground our life in the depths of charity, justice, and goodness—and then there is the persistent desire to just do whatever will yield us immediate pleasure or satisfaction. The broad and easy way—and oh, that narrow and steep path is hard to stay on all the time!

Yep, it’s a battlefield. And it is right and proper to experience it as such. As one of our wise holy priests used to say here, “If you don’t know you’re in a battle, you’re probably losing.” The only way we wholly escape the ‘battle’ of life is if we capitulate entirely to the downward tug of self-seeking and shallow pursuit of the immediate and the easy. And this is a wretched state beyond wretchedness.

We are made to be more than what we are. This is the glory of humanity. We are made to transcend ourselves, a self-transcendence achieved not by our own powers (which would be a contradiction in terms anyhow), but by the gracious gift of Another. Our human nature is found and fulfilled when we open up to a Nature that is not ours, that pulls us up, broadens us out, deepens and expands us until we can embrace in Love the whole of reality.

Because it is a question of surpassing ourselves, there is always the matter of the Self, and the option always open to us to refuse the invitation. As Chesterton put it, selfishness is the necessary possibility opened up to us by virtue of the fact that we have a self. We can always close in, close up, curl into a ball, grab the prize we want and wrap ourselves around it like our life depended on it. Actually, our death depends on it.

Our life depends on the opposite. Opening up wide, letting go of everything, allowing God full scope in us to live and love and move—this is the path of freedom and life. A constant movement of opening, of holding ourselves open before God, and of detachment and dispossession from all other things. Holding them lightly, and tossing them up to God for Him to do what He likes with them.

This is the perennial battle of man in the world, and all the immediate battles, personal and cultural, are at heart expressions of this battle. Will we let God have His way with us? Or are we going to have our way? Lewis says in the end there are only two kinds of people: those who say to God ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, with great sorrow, ‘Thy will be done.’

Which will it be, today? For you, for me? Just for today, since that’s all we have.

I Was a Teenage Retreat Master

Or rather, I will be this weekend. Yep, me and 83 (at last count) 13-18 year olds. Posting this not so much to explain my lack of blogging the next few days as to beg prayers for all concerned. The retreat is Truth Quest, for the Pembroke diocese, and we have a great team... except for the doofus priest giving the talks. Come Holy Spirit...

A War on Humanity

The denial of the ethical principle, the denial of a capacity for insight that is antecedent to every specialization – that capacity for insight which we call ‘conscience’ – is a denial of man.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 46

Reflection – The Obama administration in the States has declared war on the Catholic Church. Yeah, yeah—strong words, I know. I usually go to great lengths to avoid mucking into current controversies, mostly because I only have a small amount of time each day to blog, and I don’t want/am not able to be one of those blogs that engenders mucho dialogue and debate and fierce arguments.

Nonetheless, there are times and issues where to be silent is irresponsible, even if you are Canadian! The Obama administration has declared war on the Catholic Church. And America is such a key nation, a linchpin of freedom and democracy in the world, that this effects everyone.

By forcing all health care providers to pay for contraception, the Obama administration is forcing all Catholic institutions to either pay for what we believe to be gravely evil products, or pay heavy fines, or be driven out of the vast fields of education, health care, and social services that the Catholic Church has always done with great skill and generosity.

This is religious persecution. This is war. And it is Barack Obama and his administration (key figures of which are ‘Catholic’, so they tell us) who have done this.

The (feeble) justification for doing it is fascinating, though. In the official communiqué coming from the department of Health and Human Services, it said that birth control is universally known to be ‘medically beneficial.’ In other words, science has spoken, and science looks upon what it has made and says ‘It is very good.’

Leaving aside the fact that the birth control pill is associated with all sorts of heavy side effects, and leaving aside the fact the it can work as an abortifacient, and therefore is somewhat less than medically beneficial to the nascent human being who is killed by its use, this claim by HHS sheds a fascinating light on the modern mindset.

It’s the whole business of ‘leave it to the experts!’ Doctors say birth control is good, and so it is good. Researchers say embryonic stem cell research is good, and so it is good. AIDS activists say condom distribution in Africa is good, and so it is good.

The whole ‘cult of the expert’ is strong today, and has been for quite a while. And it is, as Ratzinger says above, a denial of man. A denial that every human being has an ethical sense, an ability to not just accept the assurances of the ‘experts’, but to discern whether or not this ‘thing’ is good.

A scientist, a doctor, can tell us exactly what a birth control pill does, how it works, and can understand the chemical and biological processes of that far better than you or I.

They have absolutely no superior insight into whether or not using birth control pills is a good thing. None whatsoever—and we have to be clear about that.

We have to be clear about it because these waters are muddied all over the place. Steven Hawking knows all about physics; Richard Dawkins knows all about biology; neither one of them knows anything at all about philosophy and metaphysics, which provide the rational tools to discuss God and the human soul and the meaning of life. But they are considered qualified experts to opine on these matters. Why? Because they are scientists. Nonsense.

Back to contraception. When ‘science’ is used as a pretext to violate conscience, to force people to do things that they know are evil, it is not simply a Catholic issue or a Jewish issue or a Buddhist issue or a secular humanist issue. The very human project is being denied, the very nature of humanity and our dignity, our sovereign right to determine good and evil, right and wrong, and shape our lives accordingly. And this is what is at stake in the current controversy in America.

The Obama administration has not declared war on the Catholic Church. It has declared war on the human race. May God have mercy on them, and may God grant wisdom and discernment and courage to the American bishops, clergy, and all the American people to address this crisis in a suitable, peaceful, and loving fashion.

I Kant Get No Satisfaction

We must look briefly at the two essential stages in the political realization of this hope, because they are of great importance for the development of Christian hope, for a proper understanding of it and of the reasons for its persistence. First there is the French Revolution—an attempt to establish the rule of reason and freedom as a political reality. To begin with, the Europe of the Enlightenment looked on with fascination at these events, but then, as they developed, had cause to reflect anew on reason and freedom.

A good illustration of these two phases in the reception of events in France is found in two essays by Immanuel Kant in which he reflects on what had taken place. In 1792 he wrote Der Sieg des guten Prinzips über das böse und die Gründung eines Reiches Gottes auf Erden (“The Victory of the Good over the Evil Principle and the Founding of a Kingdom of God on Earth”). In this text he says the following: “The gradual transition of ecclesiastical faith to the exclusive sovereignty of pure religious faith is the coming of the Kingdom of God.”

He also tells us that revolutions can accelerate this transition from ecclesiastical faith to rational faith. The “Kingdom of God” proclaimed by Jesus receives a new definition here and takes on a new mode of presence; a new “imminent expectation”, so to speak, comes into existence: the “Kingdom of God” arrives where “ecclesiastical faith” is vanquished and superseded by “religious faith”, that is to say, by simple rational faith. In 1795, in the text Das Ende aller Dinge (“The End of All Things”) a changed image appears. Now Kant considers the possibility that as well as the natural end of all things there may be another that is unnatural, a perverse end. He writes in this connection: “If Christianity should one day cease to be worthy of love ... then the prevailing mode in human thought would be rejection and opposition to it; and the Antichrist ... would begin his—albeit short—regime (presumably based on fear and self-interest); but then, because Christianity, though destined to be the world religion, would not in fact be favored by destiny to become so, then, in a moral respect, this could lead to the (perverted) end of all things.”

Spe Salvi 19

Reflection – OK, so that’s a mouthful. Pope Benedict goes on in the next paragraph of the encyclical to describe how this revolutionary spirit and the transferring of the ‘Kingdom of God’ from the realm of eschatological hope to imminent expectation resulted in Marxism and all the horrors of communist tyranny that it engendered.

So this is all a bit complicated and historical and philosophical and… ‘I never studied all this stuff! I’m totally at sea here! I’m going to go look at cute cat videos on YouTube!’ you might be saying.

Relax. This is actually not all that complicated and not all that hard to understand. In fact, most of us can look into our own hearts and easily identify with this passage.

Why are you a Christian? (Assuming you are, oh mysterious readers who visit this blog but rarely if ever leave comments… who are all you people anyhow? But I digress…) For at least some people, and maybe a little bit for most of us, there is a little bit of the above attitude in us. I’m a Christian because I want the Kingdom of God in my life. And the Kingdom of God means that my life is going to work out just fine. I’m a Christian because being a Christian is going to yield me peace, joy, satisfaction, the good things of the earth and promise of eternal Good Things in heaven.

Almost all of this is valid… so long as we understand that it is God’s Kingdom we desire. Not ours. And that He will indeed bring us peace, joy, satisfaction, good things on heaven and earth… in His time, His way, according to His ideas of what all these are. Not ours.

When we seek to ‘immanentize the eschaton’ (big words for I want it all now!) we are set on a course that will, if we follow it, take us out of the Church, away from Christ, away from God, and straight into the realm of the anti-Christ.

That’s putting it dramatically, but so be it. Life is dramatic. Today we celebrate the presentation of the Lord in the temple. God is a baby, carried in his mother’s arms. He is prophesied to be a sign due to be rejected, and a sword will pierce his mother’s heart, too. All of this pertains directly to the life of the Christian in the world. We are not in the kingdom, yet. We are a sign of contradiction, pierced by a sword. But out of that, content to follow our crucified Lord and wait on his action of grace and mercy, we do know peace, joy, love, mercy, and rest secure in his love. And that is our share in his kingdom, now. Not ours, but His.

Barking Up the Wrong Tree

Politicians… take it for granted today that they must promise changes… this must surely mean that there exists in modern society a deep and prevailing sense of dissatisfaction precisely in those places where prosperity and freedom have attained hitherto unknown heights. The world is experienced as hard to bear.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 11

Reflection – You know, my first thought upon considering this passage for the blog was that I would really have to point out that he wrote this before the current recession and economic struggles. Of course, now politicians have to promise change and reform. In fact, a politician supporting the status quo is almost criminally irresponsible, in my opinion.

However, upon reflection I rethought that. Ratzinger’s point stands quite well. We really must be aware (‘we’ being people of North America and Europe where most of my readers are) that, current recession aside, we are still in a time when ‘prosperity and freedom have attained hitherto unknown heights.’ This is still true, and is likely to remain so for the next while at least.

The ‘normal’ state of humanity, simply looked at as a historical average, is to be worried about having enough food. The ‘normal’ state of humanity is to lack adequate medical care, to have at best basic housing (four walls and a roof), to have few if any options available for one’s life regarding education and work.

This has been the normal condition of humanity since humanity has been, and by that standard most North Americans and Europeans are quite wealthy, really.

This is not to dismiss the sense of discontent that Ratzinger describes above. He doesn’t dismiss it, although he does seriously and searchingly criticize the tendency to look to the political sphere for remedy to this discontent.

Really, it all bears witness to the fundamental truth of Scripture: “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” (Mt 4:4, Dt 8:3). We have (generally, with some exceptions) enough bread; we are not happy. We can dismiss this state of affairs contemptuously—‘we’re a bunch of whiners!’—or we can look deeper into the matter.

The truth is, we are not made for a life of bourgeois comfort in this world. And when we place all our efforts in striving to establish this comfortable life for ourselves and our immediate circle of concern, we are unhappy. We are barking up the wrong tree: no squirrel for us!

Of course the other side of the picture is that when I place all my concern into building up a comfortable nest for myself, I will inevitably do so at the expense of others. Right now, in North America at least, these ‘others’ are the future generation; North Americans have for some decades now been basically in the middle of a long-term slow motion ‘dine and dash’ – eating and drinking to heart’s content, and leaving the bill for our children and grandchildren. The trouble being that, with abortion and contraception, we simply don’t have enough children and grandchildren to continue supporting us ‘in the manner to which we have become accustomed.’ The crash, it is coming.

But I digress (not really, but let’s say I did). The deeper point is that ‘man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ And that word coming from the mouth of God is a word of love, of mercy, of peace, of joy.

We are created, not to take care of ourselves and be all fat and cozy in this world, but to spend ourselves for love in this world so as to secure treasure in heaven. And, as politician after politician entirely fails to solve the unsolvable problems of our time, we are going to need to dig deep into this deeper reality. What are we here for? Where is our hope? Where is our joy? It cannot be in material security or everything coming up roses forever and ever for us here and now. It has to be in something better, something more real, something that will survive the coming crash.

It has to be in God, in His love for us, and our call to love Him back and to love our neighbor as ourselves.

The Essence of Christianity

Here we see the necessary interplay between love of God and love of neighbour which the First Letter of John speaks of with such insistence. If I have no contact whatsoever with God in my life, then I cannot see in the other anything more than the other, and I am incapable of seeing in him the image of God. But if in my life I fail completely to heed others, solely out of a desire to be “devout” and to perform my “religious duties”, then my relationship with God will also grow arid. It becomes merely “proper”, but loveless. Only my readiness to encounter my neighbour and to show him love makes me sensitive to God as well. Only if I serve my neighbour can my eyes be opened to what God does for me and how much he loves me. The saints—consider the example of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta—constantly renewed their capacity for love of neighbour from their encounter with the Eucharistic Lord, and conversely this encounter acquired its realism and depth in their service to others. Love of God and love of neighbour are thus inseparable, they form a single commandment. But both live from the love of God who has loved us first. No longer is it a question, then, of a “commandment” imposed from without and calling for the impossible, but rather of a freely-bestowed experience of love from within, a love which by its very nature must then be shared with others. Love grows through love. Love is “divine” because it comes from God and unites us to God; through this unifying process it makes us a “we” which transcends our divisions and makes us one, until in the end God is “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28).

Deus Caritas Est 18

Reflection – The Pope here has been exploring the question of how love can be ‘commanded’ – how is it possible that a feeling in the depths of one’s heart can be commanded by an external law? We know it is so: ‘a new commandment I give to you, that you love one another as I have loved you’ (John 13:34). But how are we to obey this commandment?

The answer he gives in this passage is so perfect, but expressed so simply and briefly, that we can miss it. And it really penetrates to the very heart of the Christian faith, to what our deepest understanding is of this strange religion God has inducted us into, this strange Way that God has opened for humanity.

Essentially, the Law of the Christian is not a set of rules, a list of prohibitions, a bunch of dos and don’ts. These exist, but they are not our law.

Our law is Jesus Christ. And the obedience to this law is this deep personal relationship with Jesus Christ that He calls each of us to enter. We cannot simply draw up a list of all the things Jesus tells us to do, and the somewhat shorter list of things he tells us not to do, and then say ‘This is our Christian Torah! Here’s the Law of the Gospel’.

Well, we could do it, but it would be ridiculous and impossible and we would end up looking very stupid. Not recommended.

What we are called to on every page of the Gospel is not to simply substitute a bunch of new commandments for the old ones of Moses, but to plunge into a depth of relationship with Jesus that is truly transformative. To turn to Him each day and cry out, “Lord, that I may love as you love! That I may love as you love! Have mercy on me, Jesus! Increase my love!” That’s the law of the Christian.

And out of this constant transforming encounter, which is not a once and for all affair, but must be renewed daily, and indeed moment by moment if we’re really going to do it, well then of course we will not fornicate, or seek revenge, or hate. Of course we will go the extra mile, be indifferent to possessions, share generously with the poor. Of course we will listen to the Church and allow our minds and hearts to be formed by its teachings. Of course we will pray constantly and fast and give alms.

Not because there is some list of rules, and a big man with a whip threatening us, or eternal fires of Hell threatening us. No! We will ‘of course’ do all this because Christ is coming to us moment by moment and changing our hearts so that we want to do it, even when we ‘don’t want’ to do it!

Our Law is Jesus, this Law is given to us by the Father, and is being promulgated in our hearts by the Holy Spirit moment by moment, who gives us the power to live it as He teaches it to us. And this is the very substance and essence of Christian life in the world.

Pretty good religion we got, eh?

The Way of God

Love of neighbour is [indeed] possible in the way proclaimed by the Bible, by Jesus. It consists in the very fact that, in God and with God, I love even the person whom I do not like or even know. This can only take place on the basis of an intimate encounter with God, an encounter which has become a communion of will, even affecting my feelings. Then I learn to look on this other person not simply with my eyes and my feelings, but from the perspective of Jesus Christ. His friend is my friend. Going beyond exterior appearances, I perceive in others an interior desire for a sign of love, of concern. This I can offer them not only through the organizations intended for such purposes, accepting it perhaps as a political necessity. Seeing with the eyes of Christ, I can give to others much more than their outward necessities; I can give them the look of love which they crave.

Deus Caritas Est 18

Reflection – I don’t know—is it possible?—that some of the readers of this blog have ever had the experience of finding it difficult to love a certain person? Is it just within the realm of possibility that any of you have ever encountered that particular problem?

Yes, once in a while it has been known that we meet a person who annoys, irks, repels, disgusts, enrages us. This is actually, of course, a fairly common human situation.

The wisdom of the world says, in those cases, ‘well, to Hell with them, then!’ Love those who love you, or love those who you like, and forget the rest of them.

This is not the wisdom of the Gospels. This is not the way of God. And we have to choose. Do we belong to the world, or to God? Who are we following?

To love those we dislike is a work. It doesn’t just happen. And this work is a matter of, as the Pope says, drawing closer to Christ. This intimate encounter with God, this crying out to the Lord: “That I may love this person! That I may see them as you see them! Have mercy on me, Jesus!”

This is the love that transforms our own hearts into a fire of love. This is the love that provides warmth and light for the world. Without this kind of love, this kind of movement towards God, we are just one more bunch of worldly people—nice, maybe, but nothing special.

God wants us to be fire and light in the world. And the quickest way to that fire and light is to commit ourselves to loving in difficult circumstances, with all the prayer and struggle that entails for us.

It’s our choice, but on that choice hangs a great deal. Will we shine the light of the Gospel into the world, or will we be part of the world’s darkness? Catherine Doherty puts it well: “The day you no longer burn with love many will die of the cold.”

The Failure of Reason

We must affirm that this Enlightenment philosophy, with its related culture, is incomplete. It consciously cuts off its own historical roots, depriving itself of the powerful sources from which it sprang. It detaches itself from what we might call the basic memory of mankind, without which reason loses its orientation, for now the guiding principle is that man’s capability determines what he does.

Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, 41

Reflection – Reason alone! This is the summary of the Enlightenment philosophy Ratzinger critiques in this passage. Rejection of authority, of tradition, of faith, of any source except its own self. The assured faith (paradox alert!) that it is by unaided and untrammeled reason that the human race will obtain happiness and security, solve all problems and heal all ills.

Well, it has failed—I don’t quite know how anyone can seriously disagree. We’ve had centuries now of reason doing its thing (a good thing in itself, let me hasten to add), and the results have beeen… well, mixed to say the least.

Antibiotics. Nuclear bombs. Organ transplants. Pollution. Improved crop yields. Zyklon B. Adult stem cell therapies. Machine guns.

Reason is a powerful tool penetrating how things work and how to make them work for us in a host of different ways. But unaided reason, reason cut off from anything outside its own narrow technological and scientific investigations, does not do so well in determining what we should do, what is genuinely for the good of humanity.

And so we see that all sorts of perfectly rational scientific men over the past centuries have used their reason to create instruments of death, terror, and destruction that in fact threaten the very survival of the human race and the planet. And that is not to mention the host of philosophies and ideologies that ‘reason’ has come up with and which have wrought carnage on a scale unprecedented in the history of humanity. Communism alone killed tens of millions of people in less than a century.

Reason—untrammelled, autonomous reason—is incomplete, as Ratzinger so summarily puts it.

We need context. We need a framework: what is humanity for? What is our good, anyhow? What is the meaning, the purpose, the goal? What is the value of man and his works? From this, which is what Ratzinger means by the ‘basic memory of mankind’ we can determine how technology and scientific progress can truly serve the good of humanity. Without this, we are simply thrashing around aimlessly and doing ourselves great harm in the process.

We cannot kill some human beings to benefit other human beings, even if the humans we are killing are very, very small. We cannot give the power to deal out life and death to the medical profession, as euthanasia advocates would have us do. We cannot by legal fiat change the fundamental realities of human life and its origin and nurturing. Man and woman come together, and this is how babies are made—the state has an interest in strengthening those relational bonds. The state has no interest whatsoever in any other relational bonds among people.

Underneath the Enlightenment philosophy is a sense that reality is infinitely malleable, that there is nothing ‘real’, really, that we can change and shape things without limit, or the only limit being our own power to do so. This is false, and the falsehood is currently driving our society to the brink of poverty and ruin.

There is reality; there is truth; and truth comes to us down the centuries from the sum total of human experience and reflection. We reject this traditional wisdom and insight at our own peril, and I fear this peril is imminent and grave in this year of 2012. Let us come to our senses, and allow our reason to be shaped by wisdom, and our wisdom informed by the witness of the centuries, before it is too late.

The Toughest of the Tough Questions

What has [the] Messiah Jesus actually brought? He has not brought world peace, and he has not conquered the world’s misery. So he can hardly be the true Messiah who, after all, is supposed to do just that. Yes, what has Jesus brought?.. He has brought the God of Israel to the nations, so that all the nations now pray to him and recognize Israel’s Scriptures as his word, the word of the living God. He has brought the gift of universality, which was the one great definitive promise to Israel and the world. This universality, this faith in the one God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—extended now in Jesus’ new family [the Church] to all nations over and above the bonds of descent according to the flesh—is the fruit of Jesus’ work. It is what proves him to be the Messiah.

Jesus of Nazareth, Part One, 116-7

Reflection – Here we see the fearlessness of Pope Benedict. He is not afraid to confront the toughest of the tough questions, which is not the question about same-sex marriage or priestly pedophilia at all. Rather, the question of ‘what good is Jesus, anyhow?’
This is the question that confronts all of us in our life somewhere. Besides the more global political concerns he lists above, there is the individual struggle we all have with our faith, one way or another.
Christians have the same problems as everyone else. Christians can and do fail in pretty much the same ways that anyone else can fail. Believing in Jesus is not a magic pill that takes all the pain away and instantly heals every illness and neurosis.
So what good is it? This is the tough question. It is not a tough question in my own inner dialogue, to be honest. I know what Jesus has done for me, the difference He has made in my life, and it is quite enough, thank you very much. Quite enough to leave me prostrate on my face before Him for the remainder of my years, even if He never does another thing for me.
It’s more the challenge of explaining this difference to those who may not have experienced it or something similar. What the Pope outlines above may seem a bit remote or abstract—so all nations can worship the God of Israel now. Ohhhkay… that clears that up satisfactorily! Not. But actually he knocks it out of the park here, as is his wont.
What it means is that every human being, because of Jesus, has direct access to God. God in Jesus has made Himself utterly available and present to every member of the human race. God is with us; we are not alone, and Jesus is the One who works this miracle.
I can hear the collective shrug of at least a few shoulders reading this. “God is with us – even if I believed that, whoop de doo! I should care why?”
And that’s where the challenge comes in – how to explain the difference this makes to those who may not quite know it already.
All I can say is that, if I had to choose between 1) having every physical and mental illness and being dirt poor and friendless and having God in Jesus; and 2) being in perfect health of mind and body and filthy rich and surrounded by friends and not having God in Jesus, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second. Monte, I’ll take what’s behind door number one!
And this is what the martyrs show us above all, and the great saints, too. They chose death rather than forsaking Christ, they gave up wealth and comfort and health and endured all kinds of trials and tortures rather than forsaking Christ. Words are cheap, easily written, easily forgotten. When we see the long and glorious line of men and women from the year 33 to today willing to die for Christ and proving it by dying, willing to live for Christ and proving it by heroic lives of service—well, we start to get the picture. Jesus makes a difference, if we give Him everything we have.
And this difference is available, here and now, for everyone.

The Way of Love in the World

Can we love God without seeing him? And can love be commanded? Against the double commandment of love these questions raise a double objection. No one has ever seen God, so how could we love him? Moreover, love cannot be commanded; it is ultimately a feeling that is either there or not, nor can it be produced by the will. Scripture seems to reinforce the first objection when it states: “If anyone says, ‘I love God,' and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 Jn 4:20). But this text hardly excludes the love of God as something impossible. On the contrary, the whole context of the passage quoted shows that such love is explicitly demanded. The unbreakable bond between love of God and love of neighbour is emphasized. One is so closely connected to the other that to say that we love God becomes a lie if we are closed to our neighbour or hate him altogether. Saint John's words should rather be interpreted to mean that love of neighbour is a path that leads to the encounter with God, and that closing our eyes to our neighbour also blinds us to God.

Deus Caritas Est 16

Reflection – I have already blogged about the next paragraph of the encyclical, where the Pope addresses the question of love being ‘commanded.’ Here, he tackles briefly the thorny question of the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour.

Personally, I have always found one of the most challenging, confronting sentences to be something the Lord said to St. Catherine of Siena, to the effect that “The degree to which you love the person you love least in the world is the degree to which you love Me.” That’s something to ponder.

Of course, it’s not a complicated matter. God created everyone. God loves everything He created. To love God is to love what He loves. Therefore our love of God (that mysterious commodity) can be ‘gauged’ by our love of what He loves.

But what this simple little syllogism does to us is immense. It plunges us into the passion of faith, into the crucifixion of our emotions, into battle with the world, the flesh, the devil. When we really get that our very communion with God which is the very essence and substance of life for us, is bound up with how we treat that obnoxious co-worker, that malicious relative, that person who swindled/lied/cheated/abused us… well, this may be simple, but it sure ain’t easy.

But it’s a passion of faith we must enter. God is waiting for us in the midst of that struggle. God is offering us, at the heart of these most painful encounters when everything in us cries out ‘Strike back! Don’t take that! Don’t let him do that! Don’t let her get away with that!’—God offers us, in the midst of all that, Himself. An intimate sharing with his own life, his own way of love in the world.

If we refuse, it doesn’t mean that we’re going to Hell, necessarily. But it does mean we are distancing ourselves from God. It does mean that we are choosing not to become saints. It does mean that we are choosing to not burn with love in the world, and the world is so very cold right now, you know. So many people are shivering and freezing because so few people are willing to burn with love of God and neighbour.

Well, it’s up to each one of us. No one can make me love; no one can make you love. But it seems to me that this is the way of it – we choose the path of universal love, with all the struggle and anguish it entails, or we choose the path of least resistance, loving those we like, loving when we feel like it, and meanwhile returning slap for slap and insult for insult. Perhaps not a wicked way of living, but also not a way of living that makes much difference in the world.

If we want to make a difference in the world, we have to meet God in the battlefield of love, where his love sets our hearts on fire, and our hearts on fire pour out towards everyone, without exception, loving with out counting the cost and clinging fiercely to God in the midst of it all.

Words About Words

[With writers such as Wittgenstein] positivism has now very largely taken possession of philosophy… this means that today both natural science and philosophy no longer seek truth, but only inquire about the correctness of the methods applied, and experiment in logic… quite independently of whether the starting point of this form of thinking corresponds to reality. In any case, reality seems to be inaccessible.

Faith and the Future, 17

Reflection – OK, so we’re back in territory that is a bit unfamiliar to most of you, right? And perhaps you’re thinking, ‘Well, I’ll come back tomorrow when Fr. Denis is writing about love or the Eucharist or the US presidential elections or something.’
Stop! Don’t touch that mouse pad! Yes, I’m talking to you! Hang in there.
While details of Wittgenstein’s thought are, indeed, a little beyond us all (I studied this stuff, but a looong time ago, and the details are hazy), the basic point is not beyond us at all. In fact, it’s quite a familiar refrain.
In the intellectual world, the academic business of philosophy, there is this strain that has abandoned metaphysics. We cannot know anything about ‘reality’ as such, so let’s forget all about it. Philosophy in this sense becomes a matter of words, ‘words about words’, making sure that we follow correct rules around the use of language. What ‘correct’ means in this form of philosophy, since we have no idea of truth or reality, is where I get lost, I must confess… how do we know our use of words is correct if we have no access to extra-lingual correctness? What standard do we apply to judge our use of language?
But here’s where all this admittedly rather abstruse philosophy actually has to do with us. We too can easily say ‘no, I don’t really care about the big picture, about what is true or not. All I care about is how things work, and getting them to work for me.’
While Wittgenstein-ian philosophers are a rare breed these days, people who say some variation on the above are common as dirt. But the same objection holds. How do you know things are ‘working for you’ if you don’t know what your life is about, what it’s for? If you manipulate and lie and cheat and steal and mess around because ‘that’s what works for me!’ you may find yourself burning in Hell for all eternity. Frankly. So I guess it didn’t work too well for you after all, eh?
So the big questions of life, death, God, sin, virtue, and judgment are not questions we can just bracket off as irrelevant to our daily business and getting the job done. The choices we make each day are either opening us up to Life or closing us off from Life, and hence killing us. Isn’t it just about the most practical concern in the world to figure all this out? To figure out which way is up, in other words?
I guess I’m still really worried about all these young people I read about the other day who just don’t bother their little heads about matters metaphysical, about deep questions of life. Don’t they ever stop and think that the car they’re driving merrily along down the highway of life might be heading for a cliff? And if there are large signs posted to that effect, and guard rails—well, isn’t it practical to take note of such things?
When we reject authority as any sort of guide to our choices, then the only teacher we have left to us is experience—and Experience is a mean, mean teacher. Experience teaches with a boxing glove to the face, a kick in the groin, a blow to the kidneys.  Experience sometimes kills its pupils.
Gee, it’s too bad there’s no other way to learn, isn’t it? Too bad God didn’t think of establishing an authority on earth to preserve and pass on moral wisdom to each generation! Oh wait… you say he did… well, where is it?

We Are Not Pigs

The relationship of creature to Christ, of the first to the second Adam, signifies that the human person is a being en route, a being characterized by transition. He is not yet himself; he must ultimately become himself.

In the Beginning, 64

Reflection – Have you ever noticed that your dog doesn’t have too many existential crises? That cats don’t spend much time anguishing over their identity? I’m just wrapping up writing my latest book (publication details pending…) on the effects of technology on our humanity, the subtitle of which will be Staying Human in a Digital Age. But we don’t see pigs publishing books about staying porcine in a bovine age, or fish publishing about staying piscine in a mammalian age.
And its not just because of the lack of opposable thumbs, either. There is something deeply human about the very fact that we don’t know what being deeply human means. We have to struggle and wrestle and labor at our humanity, toiling and spinning around madly in a way that the birds of the air and the lilies of the field just don’t have to do. They just are; we just aren’t, not without a fight.
This is actually one of the great arguments against atheistic materialism, if you think about it. If human beings are just one more form of protoplasm, just one more blob of tissue in a universe that is nothing but one big blob of tissue… then why do we mind so much? Why, if we are just meaningless products of a wholly material universe, do we constantly kick against the goad, constantly look for some deeper meaning, some deeper definition or identity or human expression? Because we do, you know, and it’s across cultures and civilizations, across history and place.
Human beings ask questions about human being, and seek to become what we are not.
Ratzinger explains this universal human experience in light of the creation of the first Adam in the image of the second Adam. Adam (humanity in its origin) is made with a view to, in consideration of Christ (humanity as perfected by the divine indwelling).
Human beings are created, then, to be open vessels, empty cups, a space in which God can give Himself in a unique way, a being incomplete in itself, but opening up to be completed by the gift of its Maker. We are a creature endowed, not only with a present reality, but a future destiny that surpasses it, that surpasses our own capacities.
Sin complicates this, of course, as we try to fill that empty space with any number of created goods and fulfill our destiny in all sorts of self-directed ways. And so we get all confused and conflicted and frankly miserable.
But this second Adam, who is not merely an abstraction or an idea, but the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary, the Christ of God, comes to each of us, I maintain, to work in us precisely this completion of our humanity.
It ties back to exactly what I wrote about yesterday. Love comes to us; love is given to us. Love is our destiny, our divine identity, and to be filled with the divine love is what we are made for. And this love comes to us, not just 2000 years ago when Jesus was born, but here and now, every day. And not just in some abstract or mysterious esoteric way—no, Love comes as food and drink, concrete, specific, real, tangible, in the Eucharist.
We are creatures in transition, en route, becoming. But this becoming has to be guided and shaped by the One who is our destiny, or else it goes badly awry. Cats and dogs, pigs and fish, birds and flowers are all OK. We need help! And that’s OK, as long as we know that help has been given, it is available, and all we have to do is show up and ask nicely for it.

The Soup Kitchen of the World

Jesus gave this act of oblation an enduring presence through his institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper. He anticipated his death and resurrection by giving his disciples, in the bread and wine, his very self, his body and blood as the new manna (cf. Jn 6:31-33). The ancient world had dimly perceived that man's real food—what truly nourishes him as man—is ultimately the Logos, eternal wisdom: this same Logos now truly becomes food for us—as love. The Eucharist draws us into Jesus' act of self-oblation. More than just statically receiving the incarnate Logos, we enter into the very dynamic of his self-giving. The imagery of marriage between God and Israel is now realized in a way previously inconceivable: it had meant standing in God's presence, but now it becomes union with God through sharing in Jesus' self-gift, sharing in his body and blood. The sacramental “mysticism”, grounded in God's condescension towards us, operates at a radically different level and lifts us to far greater heights than anything that any human mystical elevation could ever accomplish.

Deus Caritas Est, 13

Reflection – After yesterday’s political post, it is good today to ground ourselves back into the depth of reality. Politics come and go: love abides forever. And love, only because of what Jesus did and revealed to us, is not sentiment or physical urge, not vague benevolence or kindly feelings. It is bread and wine, food and drink.

It is as real, as concrete as a slap in the face (but better than that, somehow!). Love is not something ‘out there’, something hidden in some recess of God that we have to spend our life searching for. Love is not a scarcity commodity that we have to scramble for and wrestle away from others for ourselves.

Love is not something we have to be so desperate to get that we do terrible things to get it, prostituting ourselves out for little crumbs of love (as so many young girls and women do, if I can put it rather bluntly), or plunging into every internet brothel and x-rated site we can find to satisfy that urge for love in a pale and shoddy physical substitute for it (as so many young men do).

Love is bread and wine, food and drink. Love pours itself out upon us from every altar, every tabernacle, every Mass. There is no shortage of love; God’s love is poured out upon all, all the time. We just have to receive it.

But what is this reception? Yes, there is the mere fact of being a practicing Catholic and receiving the Eucharist, and this is no small thing.

But it seems to me that, if this reception of the Eucharist is to be understood and known by us as the reception of every bit of God’s love, the whole of Love Itself poured into our souls with every reception of holy communion, we have to be living in a certain way.

It is this ‘wisdom’ that the Pope talks about. Wisdom in the Biblical tradition is not esoteric knowledge or speculative intellectualizing. It is practical: how are we to live? What are we supposed to do? Hokmah (Hebrew) or Sophia (Greek) is what tells us how to live a good life.

So this Eucharist which is food and drink, which is God’s love poured out, is also Wisdom. It tells us how to live. In other words, if you want your hunger of love to be filled, love. If you want to know yourself to be loved by God in a total, unconditional, free, life-giving, all-embracing way, then at least start to love that way yourself, at least a bit, as much as you can. Pour yourself into the task of love in the world, and then turn to God to receive His love as food and drink. Empty yourself out, and then show up at the great Soup Kitchen of the world, the Mass, with your beggar’s bowl to be filled up.

That’s all there is to it! Simple, huh? It hurts like blazes to live like this, and pushes us beyond anything we can imagine, but it is the only way to live in the precincts of love and gift, the only way to be really and truly filled with everything we hunger for.

It’s the only way to be happy.

Looking for Another City

The fact that Christians are journeying toward the other city [i.e. the New Jerusalem]… allows us to be healthy and our states to be healthy. For if men have nothing more to expect than what this world offers them, and if they may and must demand all this from the state, they destroy both their own selves and every human society.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 71

Reflection – I admit it – I am a political junkie. I know, I know—it’s bad for me! It’s fattening! Causes cancer in lab rats! Linked to higher rates of depression! (actually that last one is true…) But, as the movie line has it, I find myself saying to political games of all stripes “I wish ah could quit you…” but I cain’t…

To make matters even worse, Canadian politics are just about the most boring spectacle on the planet, and always have been. Right now we have one party, Conservative in name if nothing else, who have a virtual lock on power with its almost freakishly competent leader, while the other two parties are in deep disarray, devoid of either leadership or viable ideas. Not a lot of scope for political interest there.

So I’m forced to illicitly feed my political addiction on the black market, smuggling  American politics across the border and consuming it in back alleys and seedy news dens until I pass out amidst the fumes of newsprint…

OK, enough cheesy metaphors. I like politics, and I’m following the American presidential campaign with great interest. Doing so, it seems to me that the above quote from Ratzinger could well be read and reflected on by everyone involved, which means every American citizen, The USA being a democracy.

What do we expect from this world? What do we expect from the state? Do we have this orientation towards the New Jerusalem, towards heaven? The criticism has always been that Christians are so focused on heaven that they ignore the poor and injustice. This has always been a ridiculous criticism (yeah, that Mother Teresa sure ignored the poor!). We could counter that those who despair of heaven mostly try to drag heaven down to earth… which results in hell on earth.

That’s what happened in Russia under Communism, in Germany under Nazism, and what is increasingly happening in North America and Europe under secular liberalism. The Obama administration is trying to force the Catholic Church in America out of charitable activity by forcing them to fund contraception for their employees. If the Catholic church in the States is forced (because we cannot violate our conscience on this matter) to shutter its hospitals, schools, adoption agencies, and every other social service, what will that mean for the poor? A terrible increase in suffering, that’s what.

But the underlying problem is this terrible idea fixed in the minds of so many that the government, the state and its various extensions, is the primary agent in society, the one to whom we look for just about everything. A terrible exaltation of that most frail and flawed human institution—government—to the grave diminishment of personal responsibility and action and small group initiatives and works of charity and justice.

It really does revolve around the question of the New Jerusalem. Are we trying to build heaven on earth? Better give all power to the state, then! If we know that there is another city, another world, another place where alone true happiness will be ours, then our lives here fall into proper perspective. We can spend our days serving the poor and striving to live justly. We will not look to politicians (for crying out loud!) to solve our problems.

So to my American readers, you have my great sympathies and good wishes as you move through this election year. To them and to everyone else, let’s try to put politics in its place—a low place, really. Let’s keep our eyes fixed on the Lord, our hands to the plow of good works and service, and our feet continuing to trod towards that City where every tear will be wiped away.

Something Bigger

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

To Look on Christ, 16

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

What Science Cannot Do

Up to [the dawning of modernity], the recovery of what man had lost through the expulsion from Paradise was expected from faith in Jesus Christ: herein lay “redemption”. Now, this “redemption”, the restoration of the lost “Paradise” is no longer expected from faith, but from the newly discovered link between science and praxis. It is not that faith is simply denied; rather it is displaced onto another level—that of purely private and other-worldly affairs—and at the same time it becomes somehow irrelevant for the world. This programmatic vision has determined the trajectory of modern times and it also shapes the present-day crisis of faith which is essentially a crisis of Christian hope. Thus hope too, in Francis Bacon, acquires a new form. Now it is called: faith in progress. For Bacon, it is clear that the recent spate of discoveries and inventions is just the beginning; through the interplay of science and praxis, totally new discoveries will follow, a totally new world will emerge, the kingdom of man. He even put forward a vision of foreseeable inventions—including the aeroplane and the submarine. As the ideology of progress developed further, joy at visible advances in human potential remained a continuing confirmation of faith in progress as such.

Spe Salvi 17

Reflection – This passage brings up once again one of Pope Benedict’s perennial themes: the substitution of human progress for salvation in Christ in the modern era. The age of discovery and inventions (still ongoing, of course) held out at one time an assurance that in time, human beings would solve every problem, crack all the riddles of existence, and be able to eliminate suffering from the world.
It is truly hard to see how anyone can maintain this attitude today. I’m not sure anyone does, really. For myself, growing up as I did in the world science created, a world that in my childhood was continually threatened by the prospect of nuclear destruction, the ideology of science holds little appeal.
As Ratzinger has always underlined throughout his writings, the problem is that scientific and technological progress tells us how to do things; it does not and cannot tell us what we are supposed to do. It certainly has no faculty at all to tell us what we must not do if we wish to remain human at all.
It can tell us how we might alleviate the suffering of a given disease, but cannot tell us that experimentation on murdered human fetuses is a crime against all justice and goodness, a callous destruction of human life that calls into question the entire human project.
It can tell us everything about fetal development, and the delicate bonds that connect the life of the growing child to the life of its mother; it cannot tell us that we must not deliberately sever that bond and end that life, and that to do so unleashes evil into the world beyond our comprehension.
It can tell us so many things… except the things we most urgently need to know if we are to live happy lives of dignity, freedom, and joy. Science has nothing to say, nothing at all, about these matters. And we have to be clear about that.
So we cannot put our ‘faith’ in scientific progress. It is valuable indeed, and who would want to live in a world without the discoveries of the past 500 years? But it is not the source of happiness. For that, we must go somewhere else: to the quest for perennial wisdom, the deep plunge into the wellsprings of human thought and understanding, the challenge to penetrate and contemplate the meaning of life and existence.
In the Christian religion, we understand that God has offered Himself in Jesus Christ to humanity to open the path of wisdom and goodness to us. Clearly, not everybody feels they can accept that path or believe that God has done this. But for those who are not or cannot be Christians, there is a call nonetheless to find a path of truth and wisdom that is deep enough, persuasive enough, to shape the development and use of technology and scientific invention. Without this, we are truly at the mercy of the powerful elites who control the levers of the world… and they may not know anything more than we do about what they should do, but they certainly seem to know what they want to do… to us.
And this is among the most urgent tasks of our time – to provide a rational and persuasive basis to resist this exaltation of power and control over the whole of our lives. This is what Pope Benedict has labored hard to provide; this is what this blog is about.

The True Ark

[Mary is] the true Ark of the Covenant in Israel, so that the symbol of the Ark gathers an incredibly realistic force: God in the flesh of a human being, which flesh now becomes his dwelling place in the midst of creation.

Mary, the Church at the Source, 65

Reflection – We all remember the climatic scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark—the one with the melting Nazis and all that. While it made for a stirring action film, we have to be clear that the real ark of the covenant is a much more profound reality, much more beautiful, much more meaningful.

God has made his home among men—this is the point. The historical ark of the covenant, as we read in 1 Samuel 4, truly symbolized the presence of God among his people, but we see there how they used this object as a way of ‘making God’ fight their battles. The ark, the physical object, begins to be used as a magical object, something we can manipulate so as to manipulate God.

This project of ‘manipulating’ God by manipulating the signs and symbols of our religion is not exactly alien to us. We may not be quite as crude about it as the ancient Israelites, but many of us harbor the idea that if we just say certain prayers, if we just carry around certain sacramentals, if we just follow certain rules—well, then, it will all turn out all right. Everything will go according to (our) plan.

And of course, this form of ‘religion’ is doomed to failure. We do not manipulate God. Our life is not about our own plans and ideas. The whole point of all reality is the obedience of faith, the total surrender of the human person to the mystery of God and his love for the world. It was no doubt by the mercy of God that the original Ark was lost forever, as it would have continued to pull Israel into this totemic kind of magical religion, instead of the true dynamic of faith.

So we have Mary emerging from the heart of our Christian faith as the true Ark of the Covenant. The one who makes a home for God in the world precisely through this obedience, this totality of surrender. If we understand this—that the home of God in the world is found only in this obedience, this act of surrender, then all our shabby and rather pathetic ways of trying to make God present fall away.

No longer do we try to ‘please’ God by slavish ritual or fearful rule-keeping; no longer do we try to impress God with a ‘pious’ demeanor or a continually cheerful countenance. The obedience of faith is very different from all of that, even though it encompasses fidelity to ritual, moral life, true devotion to piety, and a radical commitment to joy.

But it’s all about love, not fear. It’s about knowing the One who we follow is awesome, beautiful, glorious, and good beyond measure. It is not about a grubby little effort to make God behave Himself.

Mary stands before us always as the great icon of the obedience of faith, the human creature who was so obedient, so given over, that God could actually physically take flesh in her womb. And that is why we hold Mary in high esteem, keep her statues and pictures in prominent places in our churches and homes, and ask her help and intercession continually. She knows what the presence of God is, and how to place ourselves in that presence, and how to offer ourselves to Him so that we too can become his tabernacles in the world today.

Who Wants to Be Free?

Freedom [is seen] as the right and the opportunity to do just what we wish and not to have to do anything which we do not wish to do. Said in other terms: freedom would mean that our own will is the sole norm of our action and that the will not only can desire anything but also has the chance to carry out its own desire. At this point, however, questions begin to arise: how free is the will after all? And how reasonable is it?

“Truth and Freedom,” in Communio Spring 1996, 17

Reflection – Ah, the perennial question of freedom! A favorite of Ratzinger’s, a favorite on this blog. The above idea of freedom is exactly what most modern people would unhesitatingly say, if you pressed them for a definition. ‘Being able to do what I want to do!’ – it sounds so very reasonable. What else could freedom be, anyhow?
But, as Ratzinger says, ‘questions begin to arise.’ If that is the only measure of freedom, the only meaning of freedom, then how free is it? How valuable is it? How real is it?
‘I am free. I do what I want.’ But where do your desires come from? Are they just the animal drives of your passions: “Og want food now! Og want sleep! Og want pretty cave woman! Urg!’ If that’s the whole source of your desires, then you are not free in the slightest. You are the slave of your desires, being borne along irresistibly by whatever sensible object is placed before you that you like. The greyhounds chasing the rabbit around the race track may be having a good time, but one would not call them free.
Or are our desires informed by something outside us? But then the question is, by what? Society, the world we live in, places all sorts of ‘things’ in front of us as things to be desired: home ownership, a successful career, a stock portfolio, marriage, children (two or three, maximum, or else you’re irresponsible!), etc. But if we simply sign on to whatever society decrees the good life to be and go chasing after it… well, how free is that? When everything you want is simply everything society has told you from day one of your life that you’re supposed to want, you may be many things, but free is not one of them.
Maybe you’re an idealist of some sort, and your freedom consists in having decided to live by certain ideals. Well, we’re getting warmer here, but again… what ideals? Where are they from? What are their origins? Have you examined them? Are they true? Because to embrace a bunch of ideals that are not really true is just another form of slavery to desires or soical conventions.
Again, society and the larger culture (whatever that means) have a whole set of ideals they present in every age to their more idealistically inclined citizens. Right now tolerance is a prime ideal, and environmental stewardship. These are not bad things, of course, but if you uncritically accept the current slate of ideas and intellectual fads… well, again, you may be many things, but free is not among them.
Ah, freedom! It is elusive… and people, seeing the difficulty of its demands, can sometimes decide it’s just too much bother. Isn’t it easier just to chase the objects of desires, sign on to society’s norms of the good life, and console oneself with the fashionable ideologies of the day? Is freedom such a great thing, after all, since it seems to be so much bloody work?
But… we are made for freedom. And we all know that, somehow. It’s not so easy to just say, ‘well, forget about freedom – I’ll be a society drone sating myself on bread and circuses.’ Something in us resists that – we are made for freedom.
So we know it’s not slavery to passions, or to social expectation, or to fashions of thought. What is freedom, then? It is, as Ratzinger develops magnificently in this article, a response in love to the demands of truth. Freedom, once we accept its yoke, makes us into pilgrims seeking the truth, the goodness, and the beauty of all things, and demands of us a responsible attitude towards this truth, which is the embrace of love.
This pilgrimage becomes a very deep matter indeed. It is not just the truth that ‘chocolate is yummy’ – so let’s embrace it with love and enthusiasm! It is the deeper truth – what is the world for? Where is it from? What is the point of it all? If we are to be free, and remain free, these deep questions emerge inevitably. How can I live in truth, if the horizons of truth are reduced to the immediate and the obvious? If truth is smaller than me, how can it be the framework in which I live?
There is much more to be said here, and I will return to the subject on this blog, as I have many times already – but that’s enough for now. The questions insistent upon all of us, though, are ‘what is freedom? Is it real? Is it valuable? Am I free?’