It's Not About You

[Schleiermacher] arrived at the independence of religion from metaphysics, from the operation of pure reason in general. Religion was experience, the experience of the infinite and of the dependence of men upon it… the contents in which religion expresses itself become no more than forms of piety which in the end are purely secondary… the place of faith is taken over by piety, or in other words, in place of an objective partner who comes to meet me, who binds and yet frees me, we find the identity of the subject who sees the eternal. This all becomes particularly clear in Schleiermacher’s verdict of Jesus Christ, whom he portrays as the man with the highest and purest sensitivity to God… consciousness never spills over in the direction of being, or vice versa; consciousness takes the place of being.

Faith and the Future, 55-6

Reflection – ‘It’s all about me.’ This is the simplified version of the above passage. It’s all about me and how I feel and how religion engenders in me certain attitudes of mind and heart which help me to be a better person… this is Schleiermacher’s view of it, and while many of you may never have heard the name, clearly his influence has been profound.

Religion as a form of therapy, of self-improvement, of elevated consciousness, but never, ever, ever, as a true statement about how the universe really is, what God really is, what our actual metaphysical situation is. This is still very strong in our world today. It’s not a far leap from this to religion being a servant of politics, a ‘force for social order’, a dispenser of government-approved (of course!) charity, a vague and not-terribly specific benediction on the powers that be.

Religion at the service of… something. My own peace of mind or social peace; self-actualization or soup kitchens. Religion, however, cannot be subordinated to other ends and goods.

Our religion simply is, in our Catholic understanding, true. God really is, in reality, what and who we say Him to be; Jesus really is and really did what we say; the path of life forged by Christ in the world really is made known to us in the way of life of a Catholic Christian—sacrament, creed, commandment, community.

All of this may indeed bring us to peace and certainly has fostered social charity and justice wherever it has been practiced… but that’s not the point. The point is, it is true. As I said two days ago, God really wants us to know the truth about things, and so has told us the truth of things, so we can build our lives on the truth about the universe, God, and ourselves. This is our Catholic faith, anyhow.

Schleiermacher’s view of faith reduces it, inevitably, to a private phenomenon, and this is where it gets a bit ominous. If religion is just some nice way to make us feel a certain way, and the contents are essentially irrelevant to those interior feelings, then religion becomes wholly interiorized, wholly private. It becomes arrogant at best to share one’s religious beliefs with anyone, and certainly unwelcome to bring any religious content into a public discussion.

This too is a common reality today. And it is toxic—why exactly should religious speech be beyond the pale of acceptable discourse? Why should, as happened recently in Canada, a religious t-shirt be banned from a public school while other students could wear atheist or other-messaged shirts? When religious faith becomes identified as a uniquely private matter, free speech is weakened, and when free speech is weakened, a free society is illusory at best.

Now Schleiermacher’s philosophy of religion is not wholly responsible for this. Neo-Marxism and Comtian scientism have a big role to play in our world today. But his view of religion does support this relentless driving of faith-language and religious expression into the realm of the private, behind the closed doors of churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, and homes. And so we must clarify that we believe that what we believe is true, that it is universally true, and that our obligation to express, explain, and promote that truth is essential to our freedom of religion, today and always.

Putting It On the Line

If the misery of contemporary man is his increasing disintegration into mere bios and mere rationality, Marian piety could work against this ‘decomposition’ and help man to rediscover unity in the center, from the heart.

Mary, the Church at the Source, 36

Reflection – Happy Feast Day! Another Marian feast rolls around today, the Birth of Mary. Of course we do not know Mary’s actual birthday, and this feast simply commemorates this event, this beautiful appearance on earth of the pure one, the immaculate one who is to be God’s mother, who is to be the instrument by which God’s awesome plan is realized.

In Madonna House, as in many communities, it is also the day when we receive new applicants, new candidates beginning their period of discernment and formation for the vocation. And so at supper tonight three women will be received in a simple ceremony as ‘staff worker applicants’ to Madonna House.

This brings us to the quote from Ratzinger above. Vocation is a matter of unity in the center, from the heart. There is so much fragmentation in the world, and it takes many forms. Certainly what Ratzinger describes above is at the heart of much of it: we are merely, in secular modernity, clever apes, physical creatures bounded by the laws of the animality and biology, but with these strange intellects empowering us to ever greater feats of abstraction and invention.

In such a picture, there is no coherent realization of the human person. We simply are one or the other—‘sentient bags of meat’, in that charming phrase popular among the new atheists, or ‘artificial intelligences’ floating in a increasingly digital and cybernetic world, and increasingly part of and subsumed to that world. The Borg are coming, and you will be assimilated!

And so we have Mary. Her mind completely ordered to faith in God; her will completely ordered to obedience to God; her body completely given over to give flesh to the Word. And so the highest Reality—God Himself—and the lowest reality—the level of matter—become one. Disintegration and fragmentation give way to a depth of unity that surpasses our wildest hopes.

And so it goes with us, when we embrace the vocation God gives us. When our minds and hearts choose the path of the obedience of faith, and we put our bodies on the line by making a commitment to a way of life. This is how we enter this Marian unity of person.

And commitment is crucial in this. In our bodies we are temporal creatures, crawling along the face of history like little ants, moving from one ‘now’ to the other. In our minds we can stand apart from this movement to some degree, through memory and imagination, and so we can choose to dispose of our temporal being, our future, here and now.

And so we commit ourselves to a life. We entrust our future to God, and in this entrustment we are giving him our bodies, so that the Word can become flesh in us. This is so crucial. The deep struggle of so many young people, especially young men, to commit to any permanent way of life, while it is understandable and worthy of nothing but our compassion, is a tragic one. What is lost is immeasurable—the capacity of the person to fully bring forth in his or her flesh the word of God.

So we have Mary, and in her example, prayers, and motherly help we have a powerful advocate to help us get out of that fragmented life. So do something nice today to celebrate the feast, and pray for our new applicants, and all who God is calling to follow Him in consecrated life of any kind.

We CAN Handle the Truth!

Ignorance means dependence; it is slavery: when you do not know, you remain a servant. As soon as understanding dawns and we begin to grasp what is essential, we start to be free. Any freedom from which the truth is excluded is a deception. Christ the truth means: God changes us from ignorant servants into friends in as much as He permits us to become sharers in His own divine self-knowledge.

Unpublished Talk: Jesus Christ, Yesterday, Today, Forever

Reflection – Ratzinger here is referring to the famous words of Christ ‘I call you friends, for I have taught you all I have learned from the Father’ (John 15:15). You know, sometimes I pick up from my non-Christian family members or friends a certain sense that it just doesn’t matter what the truth is, that we cannot know and that it is not important to know what life is all about. We’re all in a muddle about it all, and so let’s just keep muddling on and trying to be nice to each other while we’re doing it.

While I’m all in favor of muddling along and being nice to one another, this quote from Ratzinger shows why this in inadequate. Ignorance means slavery—if we don’t know what life is about we remain at best passive victims of its inner workings. When we are surrounded by cosmic powers greater than us and plunged into a world where the ultimate purposes and ends of things is shrouded in darkness, we truly are floating helplessly for the most part on the tide of life, not really free.

Freedom is such a basic human good, though, that I think most people cannot happily submit to that kind of ignorant slavery. Indeed, one of the main driving reasons for the wide-scale rejection of Christianity and the Church is, simply, that people don’t want to be told what to do. ‘Too many rules’ – I think that’s 90% of the reason for the abandonment of religion in our days.

But without religion—without a coherent, consistent vision of reality that empowers us to act in accordance with itself—we are not free, but helpless victims of fate. And meanwhile God did not make us to be slaves, but to be free. Our own hearts tell us that, and they do not lie to us.

So God, desiring our freedom, tells us what life is about. Who He is (as much as our feeble brains can manage), who we are, what He has done on our behalf and what we are to do to be in reality and in union with Him.

This is freedom; even if life indeed is ‘too much’ for us, even if the storms and flood waters rage high, by virtue of our knowing God and knowing His ways with us, which is what we mean by ‘faith’, we are not overwhelmed, not reduced to passive victims of fate. Knowing the one who sits ‘enthroned above the flood’ (Ps 29:10) we are not without recourse, even in the face of death and utter calamity.

There is an incredible dignity in all this. God makes us sharers in his divine self-knowledge. He doesn’t want us to be in a total muddle, just being nice to one another while we blunder about the world. He wants us to know the truth, because unlike Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men, He seems to think we can handle the truth.

Our trouble in life is that God keeps paying us these compliments that are a little more than we care to accept. We can know the truth; we can truly penetrate into the depths of reality; we can know how we are to live and, yes, how we are not to live (all those pesky ‘rules’ we so want to get away from!).

All of this imposes obligations on us, demands a response from us. It is easier to retreat to the muddle, to not knowing, to blundering along and just trying to not be mean to anyone today. But God made us for something better than that. We can handle the truth, and we can handle with His help the obligations and burdens the truth places on us. We are not slaves; we are not children; we are free men and women, made to carry with God the burden of reality and transform it by our love and our service.

All The Way to Heaven

‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ Two things are immediately clear from the words of this petition: God has a will for us and it must become the measure of our willing and being; and the essence of ‘heaven’ is that it is where God’s will is unswervingly done. Or to put it is somewhat different terms, where God’s will is done is heaven. The essence of heaven is oneness with God’s will, the oneness of will and truth. Earth becomes ‘heaven’ when and insofar as God’s will is done there; and it is merely ‘earth’, the opposite of heaven, when and insofar as it withdraws from the will of God. This is why we pray that it may be on earth as it is in heaven—that earth may become ‘heaven’.

Jesus of Nazareth 1, 147-8

Reflection – When I grew up (in those-lo!-distant days of the 1980s) it was assumed, in Catholic circles at least, that God had a plan for our lives and that the faithful response of the Christian was to find out God’s plan and do it. This was simply understood, not argued for, and it was equally understood that to discern and do the will of God was a good thing. I’m not claiming that God’s will got done all that much (it was the 1980s, after all), but the theory was still in place, anyhow. Sartre and Nietzsche had few takers in the Catholic world of Glengarry County.

I will never forget, then, the first time I was presented with a young Catholic who just did not see and would not accept the idea of God having a plan for his life. It wasn’t a question of God having a plan and him struggling to know or obey it; he flatly denied that God had such a thing or that it would have anything to do with him if He did.

I don’t know if this is widespread, but it did get me thinking. Of course, the missing piece for this young man was the love of the Father. If we don’t know, at least a little bit, that God is truly a loving Father, that we are truly beloved of Him, then the notion of His overriding will being the ‘measure of our willing and being’ is frightening at best, repulsive at worst. Why should someone else’s will determine my life, after all?

This petition of the Our Father then opens up for us a very deep reflection into the nature of God and the nature of mankind. Heaven is to do the will of the Father. ‘Earth’ only exists as a distinct place, a distinct mode of being apart from heaven, insofar as it withdraws from the Father’s will.

And the will of the Father is heaven—it is bliss, peace, joy, delight, happiness. This takes a great act of faith on our part. Of course in the world as it is, broken by sin and filled with conflict and confusion, to do the will of the Father means, often, to accept pain, sacrifice, renunciations, arduous labour. It takes faith to say, with Catherine of Siena, that ‘all the way to heaven is heaven.’

But we really do have to take hold of that and make that little saying our own, best as we can. My life is to do the will of my Father in heaven. Your life today is to do what your Father in heaven desires you to do. And this will today is not some cipher, some deep enigma. It is love, service, prayer, generosity, faithfulness to the duty of the moment today done with as much joy and enthusiasm as you can muster up with His help and grace. It’s not complicated… and not easy.

But it is thus that we make earth into heaven, that heaven comes down to earth now, today, in your life and mine. It is thus that Christ’s life is made one with our life today—He came to do ‘not his will but the will of the one who sent him’ (John 5:30), and this is what He would have us do today, so that His kingdom come and all be set right in that kingdom.

On the Wrong Side of History?

Suffering is a part of our human existence. Suffering stems partly from our finitude, and partly from the mass of sin that has accumulated over the course of history, and continues to grow unabated today. Certainly we must do whatever we can to reduce suffering: to avoid as far as possible the suffering of the innocent; to soothe pain; to give assistance in overcoming mental suffering. These are obligations both in justice and in love, and they are included among the fundamental requirements of the Christian life and every truly human life. Great progress has been made in the battle against physical pain; yet the sufferings of the innocent and mental suffering have, if anything, increased in recent decades.

Indeed, we must do all we can to overcome suffering, but to banish it from the world altogether is not in our power. This is simply because we are unable to shake off our finitude and because none of us is capable of eliminating the power of evil, of sin which, as we plainly see, is a constant source of suffering. Only God is able to do this: only a God who personally enters history by making himself man and suffering within history. We know that this God exists, and hence that this power to “take away the sin of the world” (Jn 1:29) is present in the world. Through faith in the existence of this power, hope for the world's healing has emerged in history. It is, however, hope—not yet fulfillment; hope that gives us the courage to place ourselves on the side of good even in seemingly hopeless situations, aware that, as far as the external course of history is concerned, the power of sin will continue to be a terrible presence.

Spe Salvi 36

Reflection – Hope means being able to do what is right even when in worldly terms we will fail. Hope means taking up the lost cause, being on ‘the wrong side of history’, as the saying goes so very often these days. It means standing up for what we know is right even if this means being exposed to increasing hostility, insult, hatred, financial loss, and even physical attack or government coercion in the future.

Hope means being willing to be martyred. We live in this world where ‘the power of sin will continue to be a terrible presence.’ God is God, and our lives and eternal souls are in his merciful hands, but there is no question that we do not know what is going to happen in our societies in the days ahead and just how far the hostility towards religion and its traditional moral codes will be allowed to go.

We are not to be paranoid or live in fear, anxiety, or anger about these things. We are to be very simple, to know that our lives do indeed belong to God, and that we are to continue placing ourselves on the side of good, even when the prevailing currents of the day loudly and angrily inform us that we are on the side of evil.

And so I reiterate, with love and compassion for all who struggle with all of what follows: marriage is between one man and one woman, ordained by God so that the creation of new human life emerges from and is sustained by unity of persons in love of body and soul; homosexual intercourse is opposed to the law of God, and those inclined to those acts are called by God to a beautiful life of chastity and continence; contraceptive methods to render the sexual act infertile are a grave evil, as are all the methods of assisted reproduction that separate conception from sexual union of husband and wife; abortion is an ever more grave evil, destroying the life of a human being in the most horrific way; we must not directly cause the death of the elderly and ill—life and death belong to God.

I hope that these views, some of which are widely held even now, some of which are increasingly marginalized and mocked, will prevail. But they may not—it is our task to keep stating them, with patience and love, with hope in God’s mercy and His desire to save all his children and bring us all into his kingdom.

The Third Greatest Day

Originally the word ‘orthodoxy’ did not mean, as we generally think today, right doctrine. In Greek, the word doxa means, on the one hand, opinion or splendour. But then in Christian usage it means something on the order of ‘true splendour’, that is, the glory of God. Orthodoxy means, therefore, the right way to glorify God, the right form of adoration… It is not a question of theories about God but of the right way to encounter him. This, then, was seen as the Christian faith’s great gift: we know what right worship is. We know how we should truly glorify God—by praying and living in communion with the Paschal journey of Jesus Christ, by accomplishing with him his Eucharistia, in which incarnation leads to Resurrection—along the way of the Cross.

Spirit of the Liturgy, 159-160

Reflection – Eight years ago today was the third greatest day of my life. The greatest day of my life has not occurred yet—that will be the day I leave this life and by His grace and mercy enter the presence of God. The second greatest day of my life was my baptism, of course, when the life of God poured forth in Christ became truly my life, deeper and more present to me than my own self.

But the third greatest day was that day when Bishop Richard Smith placed his anointed hands upon my head and ordained me as a priest of Jesus Christ, in the person of Christ the head. September 4, 2004: the third greatest day of my life.

The priesthood of Christ is entirely and utterly at the service of what Ratzinger so ably describes above. ‘The right way to glorify God… the right way to encounter him.’ Orthodoxy—yes, certainly it is having right opinion, having the truth revealed to us by Christ present in our minds as clearly as our capacities allow. But this truth and our holding of this truth is not enough. The devil, I presume, has good theology—at least he knows the truth about Jesus and the Church. But he isn’t orthodox—he doesn’t worship and adore rightly.

And this is what it’s all about: encounter, relationship, communion. And this communion is achieved not by our own efforts or cleverness or goodness. It is the gift of God given to us in Jesus Christ which we enter most fully and perfectly through the sacramental life of the Church.

And of course the rituals, the prayers, the words and signs and symbols of the liturgy contain within them, bear within them such a reality that it must transform our whole life, if we are truly entering it. Our life is to be ‘liturgized’—our whole life is to become ‘orthodox’, a right glorification of God. We go to Mass, and from the Mass our life becomes a living Mass. Offered to the Father through, with, and in Jesus; offered to the world as bread and wine, also through, with, and in Jesus.

This is ‘orthodoxy’, and all the good theology and right doctrine is at the service of this reality, or it is of no value whatsoever. We are not Gnostics, saved by having all the right ideas and formulas in or heads. We are Christians, and we are saved by Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever, amen.

And that's what my life was consecrated to, eight years ago today, on the third greatest day of my life.

The Only Christian Answer

Receiving the Lord in the Eucharist means entering into a community of existence with Christ, entering into that state in which human existence is opened up to God and which is at the same time the necessary condition for the opening up of the inner being of men for one another. The path toward the communion of men with one another goes by way of communion with God.

Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith, 79

Reflection -  Hello, everyone! I’m back. Back from what seems like a slightly-too-brief holiday to dive into another year of MH living and papal blogging.

In today’s passage we see the Pope reflecting on something Catherine Doherty (founder of Madonna House, for my newer readers) often spoke of. We cannot be one with each other unless we are first one with God. And this oneness of God, while not limited exclusively to the Eucharist, happens most fully, totally, perfectly there.

Well, why, one might ask. Why do we have to be one with God to be one with each other? Besides the obvious reality, that is, of the depths of human divisions, the rancor of conflicting passions and emotions, the clashing of diverse agendae and opinion, all of which indicates that we need a little help to be one, there is another question behind that question.

Namely, how ‘one’ are human beings called to be? Am I really called to love… well, I’m not sure it would wise to start listing the people I find it hardest to be one with! People who hold positions and act on them that I find morally repellent… people who commit crimes against humanity, and especially against innocent humanity that are abhorrent by any standard… people who exploit and defile and profit on the gift and treasure of human sexuality… am I (are you) really called to be one with such people?

The only Christian answer is yes. And the lesser situations—people we disagree with, dislike, who rub us the wrong way, who have  hurt us in various ways. Christians are called, and we believe all humanity is called, to a depth of union, a union of love and compassion and ultimately a deep union of mind and heart that is total and absolute.

Catherine Doherty called it sobornost, a Russian word that for her was the only one strong enough to capture the totality of this unity. And clearly we cannot get there by sheer human will power and good intentions.

It is only by planting ourselves so deeply on the soil of God, made available to us in Jesus Christ, that we can attain the compassionate love and generosity of spirit to open our hearts to those who we may naturally shrink from. It is only as you and I together plant ourselves in this rich soil so that its life becomes our life that you and I can become one.

Everything else pales in comparison to this call to love, compassion and union. Politics, economics, war and peace, sexual morality—all will eventually fall into place if (and only if) you and I (and, OK, a few of our friends!) thrust our roots into this soil, this divine milieu, this living source of life.

And it is not some distant abstraction. It is bread and wine, body and blood, food and drink, waiting for us on the altar of God. Let us go there, be fed, be one with Him and so journey into deeper and deeper oneness with each other and towards this oneness with every human being God made, loved, and desires to save.

On Vacation, and On Hiatus

Well, I was going to write some super-duper-ultra-profound blog post today, but was felled last night by a nasty stomach bug. Nothing eliminates spiritual profundity quite like little bugs wreacking havoc in the intestinal tract, I have found!
The reason I wanted to be extra-super-duper profound today is that this is my last blog post for the month of August. I am going on vacation tomorrow, and have decided that the blog is due for a vacation, too.
Writing a small theological essay every morning is actually quite enjoyable for me - a challenge to my writing skills - but it does take its toll, and I'm not sure of my ability to keep the quality up indefinitely. So I have decided to give it a rest for a couple weeks.
I will be back and blogging normally September 3. Talk to you then!

The Meaning of the Assumption

Happy Feast Day! This is truly one of our biggest celebrations in Madonna House, next to Christmas and Easter. A day of joy and gladness in the company of the Mother of God, radiant in God’s glory.

I thought today I would simply give you an excerpt from my book She is Our Response, on the Virgin Mary in the writings of Joseph Ratzinger, the book that was the genesis of this blog in the first place. It’s a bit long, but hopefully not too technical. Enjoy!

A Call to the Action of Grace

Mariology demonstrates that the doctrine of grace does not revoke creation; rather, it is the definitive Yes to creation. In this way, Mariology guarantees the ontological independence of creation, undergirds faith in creation, and crowns the doctrine of creation, rightly understood… Mary is the believing other, who God calls.

Mary, The Church at the Source, 31

Reflection – In the early decades of the 20^th century Catholic theology was very much taken up with a debate about the relationship between nature and grace. Writers such as Karl Rahner and Henri de Lubac challenged the existing neo-Thomistic orthodoxy which emphasized nature and grace as two separate realms, two distinctly delineated modes of existence with their own proper functioning, rules, integrity.

Without going into all the details of the debate, which would be impossible to do justice to in a blog post, Rahner and de Lubac attempted in different ways to show more of a continuity between nature and grace, to show how God’s grace completes nature or how nature is ‘by nature’ open to grace and incomplete without it, while preserving the utter gratuity of God’s action of grace.

It is a complex debate, perhaps notable in our day and age for the intensely Catholic and faithful way in which it was conducted. There were no full-page ads in the New York Times, no petitions circulated, no pressure groups formed (Call to Action of Grace!), no manifestos published. All the players involved in the debate were faithful Catholic men and conducted themselves in just that way, while opening doors to new theological insight that are still being explored today.

That is the underlying theological context (part of it, anyhow) behind this quote from Ratzinger today. And so we see in this quote how Mary is, in fact, the one who shows us both the reality and beauty of creation, since she stands before God as wholly other, as ‘not-God’ and at the same time wholly beloved of God, wholly in dialogue, in encounter, in commuion with Him.

Creation is not at war with God. Humanity is not at war with God. So many Enlightenment thinkers held that God and man are in conflict, that God is a threat to human autonomy, freedom, dignity. Mary smiles at all that.

The queen of heaven and earth does not need Nietzsche to teach her about human dignity and power. The one who freely said yes to God and freely walked the way of that yes through the years of Nazareth, to the foot of the Cross, and ultimately to heaven itself does not need Sartre to teach her about freedom.

Mary shows us that humanity is made free and confirmed in royal dignity precisely by its openness to God and to His grace. Creation—nature—is an open space for God. Its ‘ontological independence’ (big words!) is precisely for that: to be something real, something that exists, not without God exactly, but truly as not-God,  so as to receive God as a guest, to extend hospitality if you will to the Most High God.

What a dignity! This is what our freedom is for, that something real, something existing, can say to Existence Itself, Reality Itself, “Hello! Come in! Welcome! I love you!” Mary did it, and she shows us that this is what we are to do, what God wants us to do.

And tomorrow’s feast, about which I will have more to say tomorrow, shows us that this openness, this hospitality, this utter giving over of ourselves to God, leads not ultimately to the Cross, to suffering, to sorrow and death, but to glory, glory, glory. Creation (you and me, if we will) opens up to its Creator, and the fruit is a beauty, a joy, a life that is radiant and eternal beyond our wildest imaginings. And Mary teaches us that, too.

Getting Sorted Out

The salvation brought about by the triune God, the true center of all history, is ‘Christ and the Church’—Church here meaning the creature’s fusion with its Lord in spousal love, in which its hope for divinization is fulfilled by way of faith… Mary’s motherhood becomes theologically significant as the ultimate personal concretization of Church. At the moment when she pronounces her Yes, Mary is Israel in person; she is the Church in person and as a person.

Mary, the Church at the Source, 30

Reflection  - Mary is at the heart of the mystery of salvation. This is why she is so important, why we cannot just ignore Mary and go to Jesus directly, as Protestants and others are always telling us to do.

Mary is not the savior, but she reveals to us the nature of God’s saving work. And she embodies for us, and helps lead us into, our own part in that saving work. Salvation is not just God forgiving us our sins, not just some loving action of God that causes an effect for us. It certainly is that, but it’s not just that.

Salvation draws us into a life, a way of life in which our whole person is transformed by grace. When Mary said ‘yes’ to God, her whole being was transformed. Her womb was filled with the presence of God incarnate by the work of the Spirit; her whole being—body, soul, spirit—centered upon this new life, this mysterious presence in her of the divine.

This is a model for us of the Church and of our own personal entry into the life of the Church. The Church is not in essence institution or function or social ministry or even mission. Before all of that, the Church is Mary: humanity receiving the life of God in a real, concrete way, and bearing that life into the world of man in a real, concrete way.

Mary, then, answers the question ‘why the Church?’ Why the institution, why the social action, why the mission? We have received God really, and we must give God really. There is no other purpose, no other end, to the life of the Church. Any other end introduced into the Church’s life is idolatry which needs to be purified. Of course we all know that this purification is an ongoing and painful reality. Ecclesia semper reformanda (the church always to be reformed) is not just an elegant Latin maxim, but an excruciating and humiliating experience these days.

But the reform is always into the form of Mary. That’s why she’s so important. She not only models for us the pattern of Church life, but it is in our devotion to Mary that we become conformed better to this pattern.

She helps Jesus make us saints—that’s all. When I see someone with a lively and deep Marian devotion (which in Madonna House is a fairly common sight!), I don’t worry too much about that person spiritually. They may be a mess psychologically, socially, economically, and those areas are real and important, but spiritually I know Mary and Jesus are sorting this person out.

So as August 15, the great feast of Mary’s assumption into heaven draws near, let us allow her to sort us out today, tomorrow, and ongoingly.

Biology is (Theological) Destiny

We must avoid relegating Mary’s maternity to the sphere of mere biology. But we can do so only if our reading of Scripture can legitimately presuppose a hermeneutics that rules out just this kind of division and allows us instead to recognize the correlation of Christ and his Mother as a theological reality.

Mary, the Church at the Source, 29

Reflection – Well, August 15 is coming up, the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven, and it seems timely to do another series of reflections on Mary, her meaning and role in our lives.

Ratzinger is, in this slightly dry technical passage, making a very basic point about all that. Namely, that there is a tendency to reduce Mary to a simply biological role in Christ’s coming-to-be. This would be the general approach in Protestantism, for example. Mary is Jesus’ mother simply in the physical sense, or at best in the sociological, relational reality of motherhood.

No deeper significance to this fact, then. It’s just the case that God chose to come into this world as a man, and so some woman somewhere had to be his mother. Now I’m not quite sure what Ratzinger means about hermeneutics and reading of Scripture—I don’t have the book at hand where this quote is from, and it’s been awhile since I read it. The underlying point is clear, though—we see Mary’s maternity as a theological reality, not simply as a biological one.

This means that Mary’s mothering of God in the Incarnation reveals something very profound about God and his ways with us. God could have come into the world in any number of ways—an adult Christ could have sprung from the earth fully formed, for example. God could have saved the world in any number of ways—it is a good exercise in theological imagination to think of a few.

He chose to be born of a woman. This means something. Mary means something. He is showing us something, revealing something to us in this choice of His. The relationship of the unborn child to his or her mother is unique, intimate. Literally, the child takes flesh from the flesh of the mother, grows within the womb of the mother. That which is the mother’s own being, her body, her physical self is given to become the physical self of the child.

Mary gave Jesus his flesh, and his flesh is what hung on the Cross for our salvation. Mary gave Jesus his flesh, and his flesh is the life of the world, our true bread and true drink. Jesus is the savior, not Mary, but she is intimately involved in his saving work. This is a simple fact tied up in the reality of maternity, the reality God freely chose in his saving plan for us.

There is something being communicated about the role of the creature, the human being, in the drama of salvation. Mary’s own unique once-and-for-all role, for sure, but she is revealing to us (or rather, God is revealing to us through Mary) something of the inner meaning, purpose, action, and dignity of the creature and of the human person.

God is the savior, the creator, the redeemer, the great love of mankind… but Mary has a role to play, and this role is vital, real, necessary. And in this we see that we are not just passive recipients of salvation. We receive salvation, but in that are called into an active, vital role, a necessary task, a giving over of our flesh to Him, a conscious choice to enter into his work and his love for the world.

All this Mary reveals to us in the simple biological fact of her maternity. Biology and theology are made one, and no longer is anything ‘merely’ physical, since the physical itself has become the place of divine life and divine love. ‘My flesh is the life of the world,’ says the Lord.

Healing the Wound

[With legal abortion] one becomes blind to the right to life of another, the smallest and weakest person involved, one without a voice. The rights of some individuals are affirmed at the cost of the fundamental right to life of another individual. This is why every legalization of abortion implies the idea that law is based on power.

Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, 62-3

Reflection – As I have said here before, abortion is one of the hardest topics to write about well. (It’s easy to write about it badly…). The evil at the heart of it is so monstrous that words fail to express it. At the same time, there is so much real pain and anguish surrounding every abortion—the horrible fears and truly tragic circumstances that so often drive women in crisis pregnancies to abort, the breakdown in relationships that an abortion both manifests and quickens, the emotional fallout of anger, hurt, guilt, depression that so many women (and some men) experience afterwards… abortion is a gaping open wound in our society.

I would argue that it is in fact the wound at the heart of our civilization, a wound that (I am convinced) will be the death of us if it is not staunched eventually. Ratzinger here in typical mild understatement puts his finger on it. Abortion means that in the end power is what counts in this world. An unborn human being is the most powerless creature—invisible, voiceless, largely immobile—and by virtue of that is denied protection under the law. Therefore, the possession of rights is linked to the possession of power.

The truth of the humanity of the unborn does not matter. The manifest goodness, obvious to everyone this side of serial killers, of respecting the right to life of a human being does not matter. The beauty that emerges when truth and goodness are honored is torn asunder. Abortion is an ugly evil lie, and the heart of that lie is that truth, goodness, and beauty are not the ultimate realities in this world.

Power is, instead. And from power, violence. And from violence, death. We say that love is stronger than death, and everyone wants to believe that. But with abortion, death has the last word, trumping whatever love was present in the situation. We sing, along with the Beatles and a thousand other sentimental songs, that ‘all you need is love,’ but apparently we also need to be able to kill at will the unborn children that arise from love’s embrace.

Abortion puts to death, not only the child, but all our sentimental notions about love and its supremacy. It is power, violence, and death that conquer all, not love. All the romantic songs begin to ring a bit hollow after a few decades of this.

And so what are we to do? Repent, of course. I realize that almost everyone who reads this is already pro-life by conviction. But, you know, the infection of power, violence, and death is a deep and insidious one. Pro-life people need to be vigilant about this. Do I disregard the powerless one, the disadvantaged one, the poor one? And don’t forget that poverty has a million faces and aspects beyond the obvious material one.

Do I gravitate to the powerful ones, the ones who can help me, the ones who have something to offer me? Do I despise, subtly perhaps, those who cannot or have not? Whenever we do this, our pro-life convictions are belied by our inner attitudes. We have to guard against this.

The ugly evil lie is that what makes a person valuable is their power, their ability, their strength. The beautiful radiant truth is that what makes a person valuable is the love of the Father poured out upon them from the moment of their creation. Let us strive to live in that love ourselves, and strive mightily to see each human being in our life today in the light of that love and that truth. It is the only way that the open, gaping, festering wound of abortion will be healed in our world.

Breaking the Spell

[After Kant], the thing to suffer most has been the reliable certainty that man can press, by solid intellectual argument, behind the realms of physics to the being of things and to their ultimate cause… there is thus no point at which faith can any longer link up securely with human thought.

Faith and the Future, 53

Reflection – Now, I have to start here by saying that I am no expert on Kant. In fact, I have always found Kant’s thought somewhat elusive. He is not an easy writer. All of that is to say that, if any smart person is reading this who actually knows Kant better than me, and I happen to put a foot wrong in this post, be nice to me and correct me in the comments.

The whole problem of Kant and his massive influence on philosophy is precisely in the area of epistemology, or the theory of knowledge. If I get him correctly, Kant holds that merely the phenomena of things present themselves to us—raw sensory data. The resolution of these phenomena into known objects comes entirely from our own minds, as we impose our own categories of meaning and truth onto what are otherwise jumbles of meaningless data.

This means that the real world is certainly out there, but there is no correspondence between the real world (things as they really are) and the contents of our minds (things as we know them to be). In other words, reality is inaccessible to our minds, and all we have is our internal mental acts.

Anyhow, Kant is complex and blogging is supposed to be concise, so let’s leave it at that for now (again, apologies to the philosophy majors reading this!). The problem with Kant and the post-Kantian world, of course, is that we are cut off from any real intellectual contact with the world and its deep truth. Questions of meaning, goodness, God become not matters of intellectual discussion and questing, but at best expressions of emotion, feeling, and at worst literally meaningless nonsense.

And this has indeed been the trend of philosophy since Kant. The shying away from metaphysics as a subject with any validity, the concentrating on language’s structures and rules apart from any considerations of truth, the flight into political theories of praxis and radical critique of society (i.e. Marxism and associated fields)—all of this flows from a sense that reality in itself is inaccessible and so all that remains is the human project of imposing meaning onto the world.

Of course this has terrible effects on Christian theology. Our whole religion is based on the possibility of our having a real relationship to God and to the cosmos as it truly is. We are a ‘reality-based’ religion—a Christianity that is seen as simply a projection of human meaning onto an indifferent universe is not the Christianity of the Bible, the Fathers, the saints, or the Church. Kant, whether he intended this or not, makes the whole notion of revelation and genuine encounter with God impossible.

But Kant’s philosophy, and the subsequent developments, in fact lock each one of us in the prison of our minds. We have no way out, no way to really encounter real reality. We have only our radically subjective experiences, our imposed ‘truth’ on a world that hides its true face from us. Again, I’m not sure that Kant fully intended that, but this has been the influence of Kant on human intellectual development.

It is important, then, to question just how persuasive Kant is. His influence has been immense; is that really warranted? Is Kant king? Why? His philosophy closes so many doors to us, doors that even the most irreligious of us may not want to be so firmly shut. Doors like inter-personal relationships… or human community… or a binding moral law… So many things that Kant and his followers decree to be off limits. On what authority? By what compelling argument? Who sez?

By breaking the Kantian spell on the modern mind, we can break through to the world, to one another, and the door is opened to the possibility of God and the knowledge of God. Those of us who would like to have a real relationship with the world and each other and have this possibility of God need to shake off the Kantian chains that bind us, and get on with the task of thinking about reality, its meaning and purpose, its goodness and truth.

Something Worth Watching

The technical and scientific attitude has produced a certain kind of certitude… this has give humankind a certain freedom from anxiety and superstition, a certain power… but now there is a temptation to view as reasonable and therefore as serious only what can be corroborated through experiment and computation. This means that the moral and the holy no longer count for anything.

In the Beginning, 61

Reflection – Science and technology work. That is a principle argument, as I grasp it, of the New Atheists as they first (falsely) oppose science and religion, and then come down on the ‘side’ of science on that basis.

It works. Scientific experimentation leads to discoveries that translate into inventions and medicines that do what we want them to do. And so science is true. And because religion does not produce inventions and medicine, it is not true, or at least there is no reason to consider its truth claims seriously.

I think I’ve done justice to the New Atheist position there. If I have not, I am committing the logical fallacy of the straw man, which is the bane of the internet and much public discourse today: misrepresenting your opponent’s position and then critiquing your misrepresentation.

It is difficult for me to give a fair accounting of atheism, as I have little natural sympathy for the position. There’s not much atheist in me, and one of the hardest thing to do is give a fair rendering of a position that you have little respect or liking for.

At any rate, I think I did OK here. But the New Atheist position is so illogical! First, there is no real opposition between religion and science, and hence no need to choose one over the other. The actual practice of science proceeds on atheistic grounds—that is, science can only be done by seeking natural explanations for events—but there is no reason whatsoever that a scientist cannot be a person of faith. Many are. And there is no logical opposition whatsoever between scientific method and religious truth.

Meanwhile, the statement that ‘x is true’ does not immediately entail ‘not-x is false’. The truth of x precludes the falsehood of anti-x, not other truths besides x.

Simply because our reason works in one direction, towards material reality, in such a way as to understand and manipulate it, we cannot say on that basis that our reason can only work in that way. It is illogical and arbitrary to limit reason to scientific computation and experimentation, simply because we know those things work.

Humanity has 3000 years (and counting!) of reasoning about God, humanity, morality, the meaning and purpose of life, and this reasoning has produced, not toasters and TVs, but an outpouring of poetry, music, art, architecture, literature of unsurpassed beauty. Science gives us the i-pod; religion gives us Bach. Science gives us TV; religion gives us Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Eliot, Dickens… something worth watching, in other words.

In other words, the atheist arguing that ‘science works’ has weighted the scales by subtly defining the word ‘works’ in a narrow way that nobody really accepts. Who wants a world filled with technological gadgets and gizmos if there’s nothing worth doing with them? Who wants a world of medical interventions and life-saving treatments if life itself is a meaningless mess?

In other words, religion ‘works’, but in a wholly different way and according to a wholly different metric than science. Yes, religion does not produce certitude in the way science does. Yes, religion’s ‘products’ are of a different kind than science’s, and the mode by which religion begets all these cultural human artifacts is indirect and diffuse.

I won’t even go into the argument that one of the artifacts of religion is… well, science. For now, let’s leave it that the atheist argument that only science works and therefore only science is credible is illogical, arbitrary, and unproven. And hence (irony alert!) unscientific.

Prosperity Gospel

Today there are on the one hand the forces of the market, of traffic in weapons, in drugs, and in human beings, all forces that weigh upon the world and ensnare humanity irresistibly. Today, on the other hand, there is also the ideology of success, of well-being, that tells us, ‘God is just a fiction, he only robs us on our time and our enjoyment of life. Don’t bother with him! Just try to squeeze as much out of life as you can.’ These temptations seem irresistible as well.

The Our Father in general and the petition ‘deliver us from evil’ in particular are trying to tell us that it is only when you have lost God that you have lost yourself; then you are nothing more than a random product of evolution. Then the ‘dragon’ really has won. So long as the dragon cannot wrest God from you, your deepest being remains unharmed, even in the midst of all the evils that threaten you.

Jesus of Nazareth 1, 165-6

Reflection – This lovely passage from Pope Benedict evokes the deep wisdom of the Gospel: ‘What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose himself?’ (Matt 16:26). This is a wisdom we need to reclaim, recapture in our time.

So often we marry the Gospel, awkwardly, to material concepts of worldly gain and prosperity. There is the crude, obvious form of this in some types of evangelical Protestantism, the so-called ‘properity Gospel’ where God makes all the elect rich, and healthy. God wants you to drive a BMW and wear the latest designer labels, you know (ignore all that ‘blessed are the poor’ nonsense!).

But aside from that easily debunked parody of Christianity, prosperity gospels can come in other more subtle forms, too. As soon as we identify ‘life in Christ’ with a shopping list of goods, as soon as ‘union with God’ is measured by some other qualities, we are slipping, more often than not quite innocently and unaware, into prosperity Christianity.

‘Christ should bring us inner peace’, so if I’m not at peace, something is wrong. Really? The world is full of trouble, you know. Sometimes our lives are very troubled, and that trouble can be deeply interior, not just outside of us. ‘Christian life should result in a loving community.’ Well, perhaps, but many saints didn’t have that. Many holy people had to contend with opposition, loneliness, rejection. ‘If I’m united with God, my life should be working out.’ If you are united with God, your life is indeed working out… but not necessarily in any way that you can see it.

It goes on and on—all sorts of ways that the prosperity gospel manifests itself in our lives. Few of us are entirely free of it. So we have to go back to the basics—the Our Father being a good place to start. ‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done… lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.’ To know that it is God and God alone who secures our life, that it is God and God alone who matters, that it is God and God alone who is our desire, our hope, our happiness—this is basic Christianity.

To lose God is to lose everything. To have God is to have everything, even if our lives are plunged into turmoil, full of loneliness and pain, and wrapped in deep mystery. Do we ever need to tell ourselves this, over and over again, daily!

There is a measure of our union with God—the only measure, in fact. It is our growth in love. The only way we can know we are in union with God is that we love more. But this is invisible to us, and only partially visible to others. So we cannot actually know that we are in union with God—we can only turn to Him and cry out for His mercy and ask Him to make it so. And this is Christian life in the world.

Paradoxically, it is a great life, a life that does (even in turmoil, darkness, loneliness, mystery) lead to joy and peace in abundance. But it only leads to that joy and peace when we no longer seek them as ‘prosperity’, but turn to God and seek Him alone. He is our prosperity; He is our treasure. When we seek first the kingdom of God, all else is added to us, but we have to be sincere in seeking the kingdom, and not the ‘all else.’

We Have To Choose

Barabbas figures as a sort of alter ego of Jesus, who makes the same claim [as him] but understands it a completely different way. So the choice is between a Messiah who leads an armed struggle, promises freedom and a kingdom of one’s own, and this mysterious Jesus who proclaims that losing oneself is the way to life. Is it any wonder that the crowds prefer Barabbas?

Jesus of Nazareth 1, 41

Reflection – I have always found it interesting, to say the least, that the name Barabbas means in Aramaic ‘Son of the Father.’ But I must say I never understood the significance until Pope Benedict laid it out for me in the above passage.

The context of this passage is the temptations of Christ in the desert, specifically the temptation to power through the worship of Satan. The Pope has explained that the word used to describe Barabbas—ΛΗΣΤΗΣ (lestes)—in the context of the time meant a leader of the armed resistance to the Romans. So one Son of the Father beckons us on the road to freedom by power; the other on the road to freedom by suffering love.

Well, this can have a thousand different manifestations in our daily lives, right? Most of us reading this are not in a position of political oppression and tyranny. If you are, you have my prayers. But all of us have this same basic temptation, this same basic option. Is my life to be secured by my own efforts and mastery, or by the power of Christ and his love?

Am I going to achieve whatever it is I need to achieve today by manipulation, by bullying, by cajoling and conniving, or am I going to choose to love today? We all have some measure of strength, some degree of personal gifts, be they physical, intellectual, social, emotional. Are my gifts going to be at the service of building up the kingdom of Fr. Denis Lemieux, or the kingdom of God? This is the very basic decision we all have to make, here and now, on August 7, 2012. Jesus or Barabbas?

Of course, it is helpful to reflect that the kingdom of (insert your name here) is a pretty fragile and ultimately pathetic thing. It is vulnerable at every moment to some bigger kingdom conquering it, or to destruction from within. An illness, a calamitous loss, a breach in our defenses, and it’s all gone. No more kingdom for you!

The kingdom of heaven, on the other hand, endures forever, is eternally secured by our Father in heaven and by the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. To live in that kingdom—to abandon all other concerns but to do the will of the Father and to love our brothers and sisters in that will—secures our life for eternity.

Of course, it is an invisible kingdom, one only apprehended by faith, and this is difficult for us, no doubt. So we have the visible immediate kingdom, in which we rule, but which can and indeed someday will be destroyed at any moment. And we have the eternally secure kingdom which is neither visible nor provides us with any immediate experience of mastery.

Well, it’s our choice. The crowd chose Barabbas, and so can we. Many do. Let’s try to choose Jesus and his kingdom, at least for today, OK? ‘Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.’

Updated to add: After more than six months, suddenly this post is getting lots and lots of hits. The Internet, she is mysterious. Dear readers: to help me understand why all of the sudden this post is being widely read (apparently) could you leave a comment or e-mail me at fatherdenis@gmail.com to explain how you found this post?

How Are You Doing With That?

In the same vein he says to the Thessalonians: you must not “grieve as others do who have no hope” (1 Th 4:13). Here too we see as a distinguishing mark of Christians the fact that they have a future: it is not that they know the details of what awaits them, but they know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness. Only when the future is certain as a positive reality does it become possible to live the present as well.

So now we can say: Christianity was not only “good news”—the communication of a hitherto unknown content. In our language we would say: the Christian message was not only “informative” but “performative”. That means: the Gospel is not merely a communication of things that can be known—it is one that makes things happen and is life-changing. The dark door of time, of the future, has been thrown open. The one who has hope lives differently; the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life.

Spe Salvi 2

Reflection – So here we see what I wrote about yesterday—the logos of the hope of Christianity. What is the difference Christianity makes, and why does it give us hope and so empower us to act and live in the present in a certain way?

Because of Christ, death has no power over us any more. That’s it, basically. The fear of death, the terrible dread that drives our world, along with the fear of suffering that is it’s intimate companion, is simply not to be ours. Christ suffered and died for us, and his suffering and death were and are the salvation of the world. So we need not be afraid of suffering or death, since a glorious future has been assured for us through, with, and in this Lord who is all in all.

So, how are you doing with that? How am I doing with that? Afraid of death, much? Afraid of pain, much? This is truly something we need to take to prayer, you know. Of course there is a natural fear of pain and death that resides in our very bodies and is not subject to our rational wills. Jesus himself manifests this species of fear in the garden of Gethsemane. Our flesh shrinks from the cross.

But we need to pray and think very hard about the fear of pain and death that does reside in our reason. Because the world is tearing itself to pieces over the fear of pain and death. Abortion is legal, and millions of human beings have died from abortion, because of fear of pain and death. Economic injustice—unchecked avarice and gluttony—is driven by nothing else than the fear of pain and death. Euthanasia will be legalized to the extent that the fear of pain and death goes unchecked, and millions more will die from that evil in the decades to come.

So if we Christians don’t get our act together, a little bit at least, on this point we are really doing the world a disservice. We know Christ is risen. We know that a glorious future awaits all those who put their trust in Him. We know that suffering joined to Him is a glorious treasure, a way of co-redeeming the world with Him. We know that there is nothing to fear in this world but sin, and nothing to seek in this world but love.

Why do we act so differently, so much of the time? Or, why do we act the same as everyone else, so much of the time? Act as if the worst possible thing that could happen to us is suffering, and that death is a dreadful calamity. And so any course of action that will lead to suffering must be avoided, and any snatching at pleasure is to be excused if not approved. The pleasure-pain principle, and so much trampling of the moral law flows from that, you know?

But the worst thing that can happen to us is not suffering, but mortal sin, and to die in a state of mortal sin is the only true calamity. We who are Christians, and who say we know these things, need to proclaim them by our lives and by our words.

But we have to start with our own hearts. We are not to live by the pleasure-pain principle—seek pleasure and avoid pain. No! Seek love and avoid sin—this is the ethos of the Christian. And because Christ is risen, and assures us of a glorious triumphant future, we can give ourselves to this love and this ethos unreservedly and accept whatever pain and sacrifice it entails on us.

If we don’t do that, the world will go on and on, aborting, euthanizing, oppressing, drugging, fornicating… on and on without anyone to show it anything different. We need to get our act together on this, and learn to live as if what we believe is , you know, really true. For our own sakes, and for the sake of the world which is so very lost right now.

That Was Then, This Is Now

“Hope” is a key word in Biblical faith—so much so that in several passages the words “faith” and “hope” seem interchangeable. Thus the Letter to the Hebrews closely links the “fullness of faith” (10:22) to “the confession of our hope without wavering” (10:23). Likewise, when the First Letter of Peter exhorts Christians to be always ready to give an answer concerning the logos—the meaning and the reason—of their hope (cf. 3:15), “hope” is equivalent to “faith”.

We see how decisively the self-understanding of the early Christians was shaped by their having received the gift of a trustworthy hope, when we compare the Christian life with life prior to faith, or with the situation of the followers of other religions. Paul reminds the Ephesians that before their encounter with Christ they were “without hope and without God in the world” (Eph 2:12). Of course he knew they had had gods, he knew they had had a religion, but their gods had proved questionable, and no hope emerged from their contradictory myths. Notwithstanding their gods, they were “without God” and consequently found themselves in a dark world, facing a dark future. In nihil ab nihilo quam cito recidimus (How quickly we fall back from nothing to nothing): so says an epitaph of that period. In this phrase we see in no uncertain terms the point Paul was making.

Spe Salvi 2

Reflection – It is significant that the last thing we know about the pagan world of antiquity is that it willingly sought baptism. The myth that Christianity was forced at the point of the sword on an unwilling populace is unhistorical, at least in this period.

Paganism was insufficient. The gods, and the myths surrounding them, had clearly lapsed into ahistorical unreality; the consolation of philosophy was available only to a small elite, and even for them was hard-won and tenuous. Christianity, its claims firmly rooted in history, time, place and filled with all the vibrancy and enthusiasm of an entirely new thing in the world, was profoundly attractive.

And the pagan world was attracted. And they came for baptism, by the hundreds, by the thousands, by the millions. Over a period of some centuries, for most of which time the Church had little or no political power, the pagan world became steadily, increasingly Christian. I’m no expert in history, but offhand I can’t think of a parallel to this kind of religious transformation of a civilization over a relatively short span of time. No matter what your opinion of it might be—was it the bringing of the good news to the nations or a tragic descent into superstitious darkness and obscurantism—it happened, and it happened in an extraordinary way.

Well, that was then, this is now. Christianity does indeed seem to have meant ‘hope’ for a decadent paganism. It does seem to have brought a vitality and energy, a historical validity and a universal appeal to the world of late antiquity. What about now? People have abandoned Christianity in such vast numbers, either for nothing at all or for an eclectic mélange of neo-paganism and New Age practices. Religion for so many people is a dirty word. What is the message of hope the battered old Church, no longer quite so new and vibrant, brings to the year 2012?

This is a question of some urgency. I would suggest that this cannot be a question left to the Pope, the bishops, the pastors alone. The question really is – do you have a logos for your hope? Does your faith bring you hope, and if so, why?

We need to dig into the depths of our Christianity for this, and it really is a matter of some importance to do so. The world truly thinks (largely) that Christianity has been basically discredited and that we are all better off living without religion. This is the essential view of secularism.

But I believe many people are, in fact, living ‘without God and without hope’ in the world today, or with species of hope that are so unreal and fragile that a stiff wind can destroy them. Do we have something better to offer them? Do we believe it ourselves? On the answer to those questions lies much of the success or failure of the New Evangelization today. And, I repeat, it is not so much a matter of the pope, the bishops, the pastors. It is you and me and the real hope we bear in our heart, and our ability to bear witness, to give the reason for that hope to those who are seeking for it.

And So We Sing

On the very next day after the joy of the Exodus, the Israelites had to accept that they were now exposed to the wilderness and its terrors, and even entry into the Promised Land did not put a stop to the threats to their life. But there were also the mighty deeds of God, which were new every day. These were cause for singing Moses’ song anew and proved that God is not a God of the past, but of the present and future. Of course, while singing the song, they realized it was only provisional, and so they longed for the definitive new song, for the salvation that would no longer be followed by a moment of anguish but would be a song only of praise. The man who believes in the Resurrection of Christ really does know what definitive salvation is.

Spirit of the Liturgy, 138

Reflection – “The man who believes in the Resurrection of Christ really does know what definitive salvation is…” and yet you know, we continue to have problems. I’m not being cynical or disbelieving here, just expressing a fact.

The wilderness and its terrors, threats to our life, moments of anguish—all of these are still very much part of the human condition. Someone just forwarded us an e-mail from a Christian living in Damascus, Syria, telling of their situation, which is one of extreme mortal peril, a nightmare of mortar and shelling and gunfire ravaging the city and its residents. While life in North America has seen relatively little of that form of terror, on any day anguish can descend upon any one of us.

And yet, we sing. Christians sing. This is the great act of Christian hope, Christian joy—to sing a new song to the Lord. I’m a musical sort of fellow and so can easily read this ‘singing’ business literally. I enjoy singing. I do realize, though, that not everyone has such direct joy in music. Singing can be understood symbolically. It is the choice to live in joy, to raise up mind, heart, and voice to God above, to proclaim with every fiber of our being that God is good and that His ways are good. That is what singing means, biblicaly.

And so we sing. Ratzinger writes here of the difference between the singing of the people of God in the Old Testament and our Christian singing, this ‘definitive as opposed to provisional’ business. One might reasonably ask what real difference there is, since all of us still live in this world of suffering and danger. All of our singing is hard-won, a choice for joy in the midst of the battle, for hope in the midst of the mortar and shelling of a broken world.

The difference, I would say is this: in the Old Testament, the faith was that God has acted in the past to mighty deeds, and He will act again to save his people; in the New Testament era, our faith is that Christ is risen, and so even now in the very heart of the battle, the most degraded and anguished times of struggle and distress, God is acting, He is present.

The victory of Christ, then, is not a past event with a future promise of fulfillment only. It is a living and present reality, because Christ is risen from the dead and ascended in his risen humanity to the Father. The power and presence of the risen Christ is at work even in Syria, even in the abortion clinic, even in the cancer ward, even in the morgue.

And so we sing. One thinks of the Ugandan martyrs, Charles Lwanga and his companions, who laughed and joked and sang as they were led out to torture and death, or the Carmelite nuns of Compiegne, singing hymns of praise to God as they were led to the guillotine in the days of the Terror. If they can sing, surely we can too.

Singing may not come easily to us. The pressures and problems and burdens of life can overwhelm us. But it is a choice, an asceticism. The asceticism of joy, the conscious deliberate choice for joy, for song, for hope in the midst of life’s travails. Christ is risen, He is alive, He is acting in your life and my life today to work his salvation in our midst, today, alleluia. ‘Let us sing to the Lord a new song, playing loudly with all our skill, for the word of the Lord is faithful, and all his works to be trusted’ (Ps 33).