The Foundation of All Human Reality

What Christ does is precisely to give effect to reality. He affirms reality. And indeed He is Himself the real man and consequently the foundation of all human reality. And so formation in conformity with Christ has this double implication. The form of Christ remains one and the same, not as a general idea but in its own unique character as the Incarnate, crucified and risen God. And precisely for the sake of Christ’s form the form of the real man is preserved, and in this way the real man receives the form of Christ.

This leads us away from any kind of abstract ethic and towards an ethic which is entirely concrete. What can and must be is said is not what is good once and for all, but the way in which Christ takes form among us here and now. The attempt to define what is good once and for all has, in the nature of the case, always ended in failure.

Either the proposition was asserted in such general and formal terms that it retained no significance as regards the contents, or else one tried to include in it and elaborate the whole immense range of conceivable contents, and thus to say in advance what would be good in every single conceivable case; this led to a casuistic system so unmanageable that it could satisfy the demand neither of general validity nor of concreteness.

The concretely Christian ethic is beyond formalism and casuistry. Formalism and casuistry set out from the conflict between the good and the real, but the Christian ethic can take for its point of departure the reconciliation, already accomplished, of the world with God and the man Jesus Christ and the acceptance of the real man by God.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

Reflection – OK, a bit of heavy going here theologically, and if you read this a certain way, it sounds like Bonhoeffer is advocating a sort of moral relativism. I don’t think he is, and in fact I think he is quite in line with traditional Catholic moral teaching here. So let's have a little refresher course on all that.

It has always been understood in our tradition that, we can identify specific actions as intrinsically immoral, as failing in their very structure as actions to conform to the truth of humanity which is (as B. says here) only fully revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. But we cannot identify a specific action in itself to be an intrinsically good action. Certain courses of action may suggest themselves to be generally good, but there is no species of action that is always and at all times and universally ‘the good thing to do.’

For example, almsgiving is a good thing. But almsgiving done for a bad motivation (vainglory, or in service of some other evil end) or done in wrong circumstances (when it will beggar my family and cause real suffering to them, say) is not a good action. Preaching the Gospel of Christ may seem like a supremely good action, but again bad intentions (self-aggrandizement) or bad circumstances (preaching in the wrong place, to the wrong people, with the wrong words, and the wrong manner) makes it not good.

Good consequences may yet flow from these wrong acts—the alms are given, the Gospel is preached, after all—but we know that it is not the consequences that make an act good or evil, but the combination of goodness of object (the act itself), intention, and circumstances.

Formalism here refers to trying to set out the good in some theoretical fashion. ‘Do the greatest good for the greatest number,’ for example. As B. points out, this is vague to the point of being utterly useless in terms of actual practical decision making. Casuistry is, as he describes, the effort to game out every possible scenario in advance to lay out what the proper course of action would be. I would give casuistry a bit more value than he does. It is limited, but the benefit of properly done casuistry is not to provide answers in advance for every possible moral dilemma, but to demonstrate the process of moral reasoning in difficult and questionable circumstances.

But Bonhoeffer’s point is well taken. Granted that there are courses of action that are intrinsically against the moral law and cannot be considered, the consideration of what concrete course of action one should, in fact, take, is never at the level of some theory of ethics. It is the contemplation of the face of Christ, the crucified and risen one, who reveals God to man, and reveals man to man as well. We cannot know what is the good action apart from this contemplation.

Ultimately, (and this is going beyond B.’s intentions here) we cannot know in full what is the good and righteous action outside of the work of the Holy Spirit and the gifts operative in us through baptism. The moral law teaches us to avoid sin, but the concrete pursuit of virtue comes not from the law but from the Spirit at work in our hearts, conforming us to Christ, and establishing and confirming us in a living communion with Him, without which ‘[we] can do nothing’ (John 15:5).

This Week in Madonna House - February 16-22

This week at Madonna House was an odd mixture of comedy and tragedy, with a great deal of ordinary life mixed in between. The week started with an influx of guests, about five or six, who all arrived at the same time because of their respective university reading weeks (we don’t call it Spring Break in Canada, for obvious reasons). It’s always nice to have an infusion of new blood at this point in the winter, when the long Canadian cold is starting to wear on all of us just a tad.

They arrived in time for the ‘comedy’ part of the week. Like everyone else in Canada, we’ve all been following the Sochi Olympics closely (Go Canada!). This past weekend was a long weekend, the rather fresh-minted Family Day holiday coming this past Monday. So we decided to hold the MH ‘So-cheap Olympics’, starting Sunday evening complete with an opening ceremony and a torch, and continuing Monday, as we knocked off work mid-afternoon for fun and frivolity (in that order).

There were men’s and women’s hockey games, an effort at curling (which is much harder than it looks), a ‘luge run’ (OK, so it was one of those flat toboggan thingys going down a snow berm), and a biathlon course (snowshoe race with water pistols). There were smores and other goodys and a general atmosphere of festivity.

So, that happened. MH is a Very Serious Community much of the time, but we do have our abundantly silly side, and it’s always great to let it rip once in a while.

The ‘tragedy’ side of the week came in relation to our week of prayer and study around the issue of human trafficking and slavery, which I mentioned last week. The US bishops had asked for people to pray for and educate themselves on this issue and the terrible evil it is in our world. Several of our members put together a powerful presentation one evening using the testimonies of survivors of various forms of human trafficking-a child soldier from Africa, an Eastern European woman snared by a sex trafficking ring, a migrant worker exploited by his employers, a domestic slave abused by her ‘owner’.

It was extraordinarily well done, and truly did make present the suffering and scandal of this modern day human rights crisis (there are currently estimated 27 million people caught in some form of slavery). There was a chance for discussion and feedback at supper last night and a holy hour in the evening.

Beyond the comedy and the tragedy, it was another pretty ordinary week. A lot of work accompanied the first real thaw of the winter – while we welcomed the mild temperatures mid-week, they do bring with them risk of flooding and slipping on ice, and so great work went into drainage and sanding of paths.

Our directors general—the three people who oversee the work of the apostolate as a whole—returned from their visitation of our house in Winslow, Arizona. Since I am the assistant to the DG of priests, and cover for him when he’s away, I’m always a bit relieved to see him return from these trips (he’s a nice guy, and I enjoy his company, too!).

One ongoing bit of ‘ordinary’ that I didn’t mention last week is the Wednesday classes. We have four young men here from October-Easter for our Spiritual Formation Program for men considering the priesthood. This has run at MH for over 30 years. So on Wednesdays they have classes. In the morning all of the guests have class—in the fall, it is on the Fundamentals of Spiritual Life, in the winter, it is the Catechism. In the afternoon, the four men in the program have a class. Right now, I am teaching them Scripture—at other points in the program they have classes on the priesthood, liturgy, and Mary.

So that’s pretty much it for this week in MH. A pretty standard-issue week, all things considered. Know that as we go about the ordinary tragicomic business of life, you are all in our prayers, and we hope you keep us in yours.

Extreme Makeover: God Edition

Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.

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“Give me all of you!!! I don’t want so much of your time, so much of your talents and money, and so much of your work. I want YOU!!! ALL OF YOU!! I have not come to torment or frustrate the natural man or woman, but to KILL IT! No half measures will do. I don’t want to only prune a branch here and a branch there; rather I want the whole tree out! Hand it over to me, the whole outfit, all of your desires, all of your wants and wishes and dreams. Turn them ALL over to me, give yourself to me and I will make of you a new self---in my image. Give me yourself and in exchange I will give you Myself. My will, shall become your will. My heart, shall become your heart.”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Reflection – A week of excerpts from my favorite Protestants would be grossly incomplete without a good chunk of C.S. Lewis. I grew up with his books in our family home (oddly, not the Narnia books, which I only discovered at Madonna House later, but several of his non-fiction apologetics works—my parents were bookish sorts who had all sorts of that kind of stuff randomly lying around (hard to believe that, eh?)).

If George MacDonald is characterized by a profound spirit of trust in God that was rooted (in part, at least) with his unusually close and loving relationship to his father, Lewis’ writings are characterized by a constant struggle with God and with faith—he had a deep faith which only got deeper as years went by, but always faith in a God whose ways are inscrutable and painful and where the surrender to Him is always hard-fought and comes at a high price.

Not to get too psycho-analytical about it (which Lewis would hate), his mother’s death when he was nine, and his own rather tortured relationship with his father no doubt played a part in this. He was also an intensely private man who above all loved to be left alone to do his study and work. God for Lewis was always the One who rushed in and upset his plans, would not let him be, forever upsetting his apple cart and pushing and pulling him in all sorts of directions that did not suit him one bit.

Lewis could very well echo the words of G.M. Hopkins in the sonnet Carrion Comfort: “But why does thou rude on me/lay a lion limb on me?” God was the perpetual Extreme Makeover: Home Edition host, knocking out walls and adding bathrooms willy nilly, God the all-demanding Lord, the all-consuming fire, the all-encompassing Life that demands our life to be utterly taken up into and refashioned into a communion with His.

Where MacDonald seems to have taken all of this in a spirit of childlike trust and that good bracing Scottish spirit of toughness endurance and courage, Lewis struggles, continually, throughout his writings, with his own humanity and his resistance to the process.

This is one reason that Lewis is far more widely read today than MacDonald (Lewis is the better writer of the two, as well). In our world today, there is a terrible struggle to trust God, to really affirm in a deep and incarnated way that God is good and to let Him have His way with us in toto is a Good Thing, in fact is the One Good Thing there is.

Between the calamitous global traumas of the 20^th century, the widescale breakdown of family structures and solidity in the post-Christian world, and the widespread (and alas, very often justifiable) mistrust of any human authority, there is a great struggle in the hearts and souls of human beings to truly believe in the goodness of God.

So Lewis has a great gift to offer us, and in his own grappling and working out of his own faith struggle shows us a way through it. Namely, God’s plans and God’s desires for us outstrip our own plans and desires by multiple orders of magnitude. We want a comfortable life – God wants us to be a blazing fire of charity in the dark and cold of the world, a torrent of living water in the desert of life; we want to do as we please and choose what we will – God made us to enter the dance and communion of the Trinity where all is from and for and of God, intensely free but never autonomous; we want success on our own terms and worldly wealth according to our own cupidity – God wants us to be divine, eternal success stories, and inheritors of the eternal kingdom of heaven.

So – we have to choose. God’s ways or ours, God’s plans or ours? But we have to be clear (and Lewis truly does help us to be clear) - one choice leads to Heaven, the other leads to Hell (if not repented of by the end), and that’s ultimately all there is to say on the matter.

A Deep and Holy Darkness

Perhaps, indeed, the better the gift we pray for, the more time is necessary for its arrival. To give us the spiritual gift we desire, God may have to begin far back in our spirit, in regions unknown to us, and do much work that we can be aware of only in the results; for our consciousness is to the extent of our being but as the flame of the volcano to the world-gulf whence it issues; in the gulf of our unknown being God works behind our consciousness.

With His holy influence, with His own presence (the one thing for which we most earnestly cry) He may be approaching our consciousness from behind, coming forward through regions of our darkness into our light, long before we begin to be aware that He is answering our request—has answered it, and is visiting his child.

George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons

Reflection – Another day with this good Scottish preacher man! I understand from reading C.S. Lewis’ introduction to the anthology where I found this quote that MacDonald was perhaps most profoundly shaped in his life by an exceptionally good relationship with his own father, who from the sound of it was a man of sterling character and genuine goodness. Certainly when you delve into MacDonald’s works you cannot help but be struck with the note of utter trust and certainty in the goodness of God and absolute confidence in His beneficence towards us. It is indeed helpful to have experienced that sort of thing on a human scale from one’s own father, en route to getting there with the Father of all.

Here, we see what I think is just about a perfect description of the efficacy of prayer and its mysterious workings. It is true that there is so much more to our inner selves than what our consciousness knows of itself—we did not really need Sigmund Freud to inform us that a great deal goes on below the level of conscious deliberation and choice.

And the grace of God is flowing and moving at these deep levels of our being in ways we can hardly begin to even dimly know. For example, a question that comes up in spiritual direction fairly often is that of whether or not someone has ‘a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.’ I don’t tend to put things that way myself, but the language is used generally, and so it comes up in the direction context.

My own answer to that question is very simple. I don’t actually know if I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. What I know with absolute certainty is that Jesus Christ has a personal relationship with me. The first strikes me as somewhat presumptuous, like the fact that I have all sorts of strong emotions and nice thoughts and talk to the Man frequently (all of which is true) somehow makes it certain that I am ‘in with Him.’ How should I know that, and would it not be a trifle arrogant of me to assume it?

The second formulation is simply a matter of faith, that Jesus my Lord is working away in me and at me, not because I’m some special precious snowflake (which is a hilarious metaphor, by the way, at this point of the mega-winter of 2013-14), but because He is at work in and at and on every human being who is, because He loves us.

All of it is happening at such a deep level of our being far below our level of consciousness. It is a rare and mystic soul who is given to know the action of grace clearly and habitually, and that kind of thing is usually given to a person at great cost of suffering, and so that they may offer instruction and guidance to others.

No, most of us live in the grace of God in a deep and holy darkness which quite often (and especially in times of suffering) feels to us like, rather, a bleak and lowly darkness. And it must be so—again this is where trust comes in—God knows what He is doing, and if it would be better for us that His workings in our soul be laid bare and clear and plain, that is how He would do it. 

Clearly, it is not, and our constant call is to pray without seeing the results, to ask and know we are receiving even though a great deal of the time that reception is occurring in the most deep and hidden recesses of our being. To seek and trust that the finding is happening in a way that feels more like being lost, to knock and have absolute confidence that the door is opened… even though to all our perceptions it appears that the door is shut and barred in our face.

Trust, trust, trust… and the only reliable sign possibly given to us that all this is in fact happening is the results of our prayer, and the only result that we can have any reliance on is our ability to keep loving, to keep believing, to keep going in fidelity and perseverance in the path God has set before us.