Apocalypse Not

In the modern era, the idea of the Last Judgement has faded into the background: Christian faith has been individualized and primarily oriented towards the salvation of the believer's own soul, while reflection on world history is largely dominated by the idea of progress. The fundamental content of awaiting a final Judgement, however, has not disappeared: it has simply taken on a totally different form. The atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is—in its origins and aims—a type of moralism: a protest against the injustices of the world and of world history. A world marked by so much injustice, innocent suffering, and cynicism of power cannot be the work of a good God. A God with responsibility for such a world would not be a just God, much less a good God. It is for the sake of morality that this God has to be contested.

Spe Salvi 42

Reflection – Well, it’s been quite a while since we visited this document. This is good solid intellectual meat here, and not something to pass over lightly. I will do the second half of par. 42 tomorrow, where Pope Benedict gets into even more dense matter… but it’s worth it to make the effort.

So our Christian doctrine, just to make it clear, is that there is a Last and General Judgment, distinct from the particular judgment of yours or my soul, at which the whole cosmic order will be set into perfect order. The particular judgment pertains to how you or I have lived and what our eternal destiny will be, a fearsome prospect or at least it should be so. God is merciful and loving, but He is an awesome and just judge, too. None of us should be so foolish as to blithely approach that judgment seat without a bit of trembling.

But the Last Judgment is about the world and God’s justice in regard to the world. It is a question of the whole of creation and God’s action towards creation being laid open and bare for all to see, so that the perfect goodness, love, and justice of God towards the works of his hands may be manifest, and all the saints may rejoice in seeing at last that God has established his kingdom and put an end, forever, to all injustice and evil.

Now, we believe this because it is clearly revealed by Jesus in the Scriptures. But this is a Christian doctrine that flows from a deep human experience as well. Namely, the experience that (excuse my language) the world kind of sucks, you know? I mean it has its OK moments, and some people seem to get off a bit lighter than others, suffering-wise, but generally there is something deeply wrong with the world. It just doesn’t add up—the ledgers of humanity, that is.

Justice is fleeting, fugitive, hard-won and quickly lost. Joy is precious to us because it only stays for a season. Truth is elusive; many don’t find it, many don’t want to. ‘Men cannot bear much reality,’ I believe it was T.S. Eliot who said that.

The world is in a state of grave and gross imperfection, and this bothers us deeply. This belies the truth of materialist evolutionary philosophy, by the way. Why on earth would imperfection bother us if we are merely evolved blobs of matter? It is perfectly natural for matter to be imperfect, in flux, and to be exactly all these things we experience that cause us so much distress. That it bothers us so much (and any familiarity with the grand history of human thinking, striving, expression shows that it does indeed do this) suggests that we are more than matter, more than simply evolved blobs of flesh.

So we have a Christian doctrine of the Last Judgment, saying that all that distresses us, all that is incomplete and imperfect and absurd will at last be done away with so that perfect justice and goodness may reign.

The rejection of Christianity, then, or of any theism, does not remove the problem, but instead places us in a deep travail. We must make the world perfectly just, must remove every last trace of evil, hatred, deceit, exploitation, exclusion, every failure of love, every petty or gross injustice. We must, because God won’t do it now, and in fact there is no God and so He won’t do it later, either.

Simply, whenever humanity has entered this travail of creating a perfect world (apocalypse now!), the result has been tyranny, misery, totalitarianism, and the death of tens of millions of people. The doctrine of the last judgment, and the implied acceptance of our current state of injustice, ironically is the safeguard of human justice and freedom in the here and now.

What Difference Does it Make?

Two days ago I posted about the action of the Spirit in the resurrection of Christ and of our own lives. Reader and regular commenter Patricio asked questions in that com-box that seemed to me to be beyond the scope of what I could answer in that short format, and that were big and important enough to not simply be passed over. Here is his comment:

Is the Spirit brushing the cheek of all persons and participating in all good? Is the Spirit involved in the good actions of the secular person? Is the non believer unknowingly and perhaps unwillingly an instrument of the Spirit when repenting, loving or doing good? Is Christian life different?

It does seem there is no identifiable difference between most Eucharistic recipients and other Christians. The Sacrament of Confirmation is often the door through which young people leave an active Catholic faith. Where is the Spirit? How does a person of faith come to a oneness with the Spirit? Do we simply trust the Spirit is present in our lives or can a person of faith look for some identifiable life change to result as happened in the hearts of the Apostles? Looking forward to your comments. 

Now there's an awful lot going on in this series of questions, eh? Theological depths and heights, truth be told, some of which take us into the deepest heart of the mystery of Christ and humanity. But let's see if I can break it down a bit.

Is the Spirit brushing the cheek of all persons and participating in all good? Is the Spirit involved in the good actions of a secular person? Is the non-believer unknowingly and perhaps unwillingly an instrument of the Spirit when repenting, loving or doing good? Yes, yes, and yes... with one proviso. This really flows from the orthodox Christian doctrine of creation. God is both utterly transcendent and other than his creature, and intimately present and loving towards every particle of his creation.

Every creature--even inanimate ones--insofar as they 'pursue' the good of their being are implicitly ordered towards God who is the ultimate form, if you will, of all goodness. Persons, in essence made to freely know and choose the true and the good, experience this presence and intimate action of God in a personal way, the 'brushing of the cheek.' A human being genuinely choosing what is good to the best of his or her knowledge of it is moving under the aegis of the Holy Spirit and with His help, whether they know it or not. But not 'unwillingly' - that's the one proviso. Unknowingly, as God in his divine charity and humility does not wait for us to have our intellectual act together before He will help us, but implicitly one who freely chooses to love, to seek truth, to choose others over oneself--all of this is an implicit choice for Christ and for God, and is a choice freely made with the help and grace of the Holy Spirit.

Is Christian life different? Now that's where we get into true heights and depths of theology. Yes, Christian life is profoundly different. The Spirit is moving in the hearts and minds and souls of every human being, true. In our created order we are made to know the truth and do the good, and God's whole action towards each person is to move them in that direction, as much as he or she will cooperate.

But Christian Baptism, Confirmation, and Eucharist initiate us, not into merely a better and more successful pursuit of 'the true, the good', but into being sharers of the life of God. On Sunday we will hear the great commandment of Christ proclaimed at Mass: Love one another as I have loved you. Not, 'as you love yourself', which is still on the human level, loving in a human way, but to love as God loves. This is the elevation of our humanity to the divine plane. This is salvation and eternal life, and is what God desires for each human being, but it only comes through incorporation into Christ, and in that incorporation, into the life of the Church. In these sacraments of initiation our entire interior being is configured into that of Christ, into being a direct graced sharer of the life of the Trinity.

Where is the Spirit? Patricio points out the dreadful fact that very little indeed of what I have just written here is visible in the life of the average Catholic/Christian sitting in the pew and receiving the body and blood of Jesus each Sunday. This is a dreadful, lamentable, tragic fact indeed. Of course we all know the usual suspects, the usual explanations. God gave us free will; God does not force our participation in all this; the sacramental acts of the Spirit are only fruitful if we freely dispose ourselves to it. Yes, yes, and yes.

But I believe there is also a terrible failure in our catechesis and formation of Catholics from infancy to know who they are and to know what they are called to. Human sin is always a reality, and life in the Spirit is always a battle to be fought to the end of our earthly lives. 'Give blood - receive the Spirit!' is one of the great axioms of the desert fathers of the early Church. Do we teach our children, our teens, our young adults that they have to fight the world, the flesh, and the devil if they are to love as Christ loves? I wasn't taught that, and it has taken me many years in the best possible spiritual environment with the best teachers possible (Madonna House, in case you're interested) to learn this.

We do not equip people for the battle, and then we are surprised when they are mediocre, compromised, lackluster in their performance. There is a deep need for renewal and reform in the Church in the matter of Christian education and formation in discipleship, at least in the North American church which is all I have direct experience of.

This blog post is getting long enough. Patricio goes on to ask how we are to receive the transforming gift of the Spirit, and is it supposed to make a difference in our lives (I paraphrase here). The masters of the spiritual life have always taught that prayer, fasting, and almsgiving (Lent redux!) are the basic spiritual exercises of the serious Christian disciple, and are what dispose us to the Spirit's divinizing work. The question of the difference in our lives is a bit tricky. People tend to think the spiritual person should walk around in some kind of mystical haze or permanent emotional high. This is incorrect.

But it does make a difference, and the difference it makes should be 'freedom to love, freedom to serve, freedom from any and all encumbrances that impede living the great commandment of Christ.' And with that, I need to go love and serve my MH family in the kitchen right now (I'm on breakfast duty this week!), so I'll sign off for today.     

Whack-a-Moloch

The passage that we heard from the Book of Revelation speaks to us of worship: the myriads of angels, all creatures, the living beings, the elders, prostrate themselves before the Throne of God and of the Lamb that was slain, namely Christ, to whom be praise, honour and glory (cf. Rev 5:11-14). 

I would like all of us to ask ourselves this question: You, I, do we worship the Lord? Do we turn to God only to ask him for things, to thank him, or do we also turn to him to worship him? What does it mean, then, to worship God? It means learning to be with him, it means that we stop trying to dialogue with him, and it means sensing that his presence is the most true, the most good, the most important thing of all. All of us, in our own lives, consciously and perhaps sometimes unconsciously, have a very clear order of priority concerning the things we consider important. Worshipping the Lord means giving him the place that he must have; worshipping the Lord means stating, believing – not only by our words – that he alone truly guides our lives; worshipping the Lord means that we are convinced before him that he is the only God, the God of our lives, the God of our history.

This has a consequence in our lives: we have to empty ourselves of the many small or great idols that we have and in which we take refuge, on which we often seek to base our security. 

They are idols that we sometimes keep well hidden; they can be ambition, careerism, a taste for success, placing ourselves at the centre, the tendency to dominate others, the claim to be the sole masters of our lives, some sins to which we are bound, and many others.

This evening I would like a question to resound in the heart of each one of you, and I would like you to answer it honestly: Have I considered which idol lies hidden in my life that prevents me from worshipping the Lord? Worshipping is stripping ourselves of our idols, even the most hidden ones, and choosing the Lord as the centre, as the highway of our lives.

Pope Francis, Homily, April 14, 2013

Reflection – Well this is ‘classic Bergoglio’, I guess. Although I have to laugh a bit, still, that a man I had never even heard of a month ago I can now recognize characteristic themes and tonalities in his words. It has been a tumultuous month in the upper hierarchy of the Church, eh?

But here we are, with the classic Papafranciscan touch of blunt challenge and uncompromising call to take the Gospel seriously and do something about it. Do we worship God? Or do we worship money/position/fame/security/pleasure/etc ad nauseum?

Which is it, indeed? A hard question for each of us, but if we don’t answer it here and now we will indeed have to answer it in a much more difficult forum—the judgment seat of God, where all the tin idols will be smashed for good and for all, and only what is real and true will be left. Will you and I… be left? A serious question, and none of us can duck it, really.

Meanwhile, what does it mean to worship? It means to strip oneself of the false idols, Francis tells us. Now that’s really good, very practical, very sensible. When we decide that money/career/fame/pleasure/etc. are not the highest goods and make conscious choices for God against (or at least irrespective) of these goods, we are worshipping Him. We are choosing Him as the highest good, insofar as we sacrifice these other lesser goods for His sake.

This is why sacrifice is always and has always been at the heart of our religion. Not because God is a bloodthirsty tyrant demanding the death of myriads of sheep and cattle and then finally (because His wrath was not assuaged!!!!) of His own Son. No. We sacrifice because we are idolators and all these created goods are idols if we let them be, and we have to give them up in some fashion or other to enter the great truth of the created order, which is the worship of God.

And of course in our Christian dispensation this sacrifice occurs only and always and essentially through, with, and in the Lord Jesus. All is done through Him, as our priest who has made the sacrifice; with Him as our good shepherd who teaches us the path of sacrifice God desires, which the path of agape love; and in Him as we exercise our own priestly office given us in baptism to offer our whole bodies and souls as a consecrated offering to God.

Well that’s enough to chew on for one day, eh? See you tomorrow, and happy idol smashing (Hit that Baal out of the park! Whack-a-Moloch! Astarte? Stop!).

A Caress of the Cheek

No one saw the hour of your victory. No one is witness to the birth of a world. No one knows how the night of that Saturday’s hell was transformed into the light of the Easter dawn.

Asleep it was that we were carried on wings over the abyss, and asleep did we receive the grace of Easter. And no one knows how it happened to Him. No one knows which hand it was caressed his cheek so that suddenly the wan world beamed with a thousand colors, and he had to smile involuntarily over the miracle that was realized in him.

Who can describe what it means to say ‘The Lord is Spirit’? Spirit is the invisible reality that asserts itself more manifestly than all that is sensible. Spirit is the invisible fragrance of the Paradise that has arisen in our very midst. Spirit is the great invisible wing which we recognize by the blowing of the wind and by the keen desire that overflows us when we are grazed by its down.

Spirit is the Paraclete, the Consoler, whose tenderness makes the world of remorse be muted unsaid, absorbed like a drop of dew in the sunlight. A great white mantle, light as silk, is laid about your body, and under it the clinging garments of despair fall to tatters of themselves.

Spirit is a sorcerer: it can create in you what does not exist; it can make disappear what appeared to be irremovable; in the midst of a wilderness it creates gardens, fountains, birds; and what it conjures is no specter: it is sheer truth.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Heart of the World

Reflection  - This is another great classic of contemporary spiritual reading. Those who have heard of von Balthasar, are a bit intimidated at the prospect of reading him, especially since he tended to write his books not so much by the word as by the pound, may find this title a good introduction to his thought. It is (relatively) short, accessible to the normal literate reader, and (oh yes) also stunningly beautiful and shattering in its insight into God’s love and human sin, mercy and what our need for it is.

As we start to draw our attention more towards the other pole of the Easter season, the great feast of Pentecost, it is good to meditate some on this reality of ‘Spirit’ in our lives. What does it mean, anyhow, that God is Spirit, and that, as in John 6, ‘it is the Spirit that gives life’?

Well, it means a great deal, and hopefully none of you expect me to comprehensively treat it in a blog post. What strikes me on this early morning hour is this business of the hand brushing the cheek of the dead Christ, leaving in its wake a flush of warmth and color on that pale fixed visage, stirring to motion and vitality the dead God of the world.

This is the great action of the Spirit in time and history, the raising of Christ from the dead. But it is also the great action of the Spirit in the history of all humanity. The Church, understood at its deepest reality, is this very resurrection of man from the dead, the whole human race stirred to new and everlasting life by the brush of the hand of the Holy Spirit.

It is also the great action of the Spirit in your life and mine. Whenever there is a stirring to life in us, whenever ‘love is come again’ just when we thought it couldn’t possibly, whenever repentance cracks our hard shell, and hope awakens in us, when faith blossoms after a season of doubt and near-despair, whenever forgiveness happens, whenever gifts flower, whenever good triumphs, even in some little way that nobody else even notices—whenever any of this blooming into new life happens, the Spirit is acting.

And it is the ‘personal touch’ that I want to highlight. The action of the Spirit is not some wholesale thing – like a big fire hose of water being poured out on a bunch of people. The Spirit is given to all, but to each it is that hand caressing the cheek, that personal intimate and very loving contact with God.

Spirit is deeply personal, deeply a matter of communion, of freedom, and of a great encounter of love with Love, of person with Person. And it is this encounter that rebirths a world in peace and in joy, and that rebirths you and me into sons and daughters of the Father of us all, by the saving work of the Risen Lord, Jesus Christ.

Leaving the Funhouse

Prayer that is spiritual and genuine is both a call and a response: a divine call and a human response.

The definition of prayer rests on an important fact: prayer does not reach its power and efficacy as an actual communion with God until man is fully aware that his soul is created in God’s image. He should feel that it derives its very being from him. In this being, nothing is more vital than this self-awareness. Once man’s soul becomes sure of this, it will have laid hold of the source of such awareness—which is God. Thus the soul realizes, sees, and touches God’s self.

There is only one true, realistic, and honest way for man to be aware of himself. It is to first be aware of God. For it is God who created man’s soul in his own likeness. When man then becomes aware of himself, he finds himself at once facing God’s likeness.

Even self consciousness, a faculty that God has granted to man’s soul, is but an image of God’s consciousness of himself. And so the way leading man to a true and honest awareness of himself is a simple one. It is the same way, and the only way, which leads to his awareness of God.

Matthew the Poor, Orthodox Prayer Life

Reflection – Well, here I am, finally back from my unexpectedly long hiatus from blogging, and charging ahead with bloggy business as usual on my brand spankin’ new MacBook Pro ™. I am not insensible of the irony that the author of The I-Choice: Staying Human in a Digital Age (publication pending… soon) has now joined the Church of Apple. I am a mass of contradictions.

Meanwhile the above quote is from a book I used on my five-day poustinia retreat, along with the Philokalia which is the great treasury of Eastern Christian wisdom, to supplement my reading of Scripture. And I was so enraptured, really, by Matthew the Poor’s wisdom and insight that I wanted to share a bit of it with you on the blog, from time to time.

Matthew is a contemporary monk of Egypt, and stands at the heart of a revival of Egyptian monasticism in our times. He is a Copt who has eaten and drunk deeply of the wisdom of the whole Christian tradition—Byzantine, Catholic, and his own Egyptian forebears. He is also a member of a persecuted Church, and his wisdom no doubt derives in no small part from the sufferings of his people, for whom he is great spiritual father.

These words above are from the beginning of the book I was reading, and strike directly to the heart of the matter. What does it mean to ‘know ourselves’. Who are we, anyhow? What is a human person? Do I know myself by virtue of knowing that I like chicken and dislike brussel sprouts, that I enjoy blues and folk rock a la Mumford and Sons, and detest rap music? Do I know myself by virtue of knowing my own personal history, family, friends, episodes? My gifts and strengths, and my weakness and failures?

I think we all sense, dimly perhaps, that there is something left out of all these and any other kind of ‘self-knowledge’ conducted along strictly humanistic and natural lines. Namely… ourselves.

Matthew, then, plunges to the heart of the matter. We do not know ourselves until we know ourselves as made in God’s image and according to his likeness. We do not know ourselves until we know the self that God knows. We do not know ourselves except and unless we pray.

We live in a circus funhouse, distorted reflections of our own visage wherever we turn. We know what we are like… but not quite, not really. We know ourselves, but not as we really are. We can strive to bang away at the mirrors to straighten them out, clear out the distortions, smash the ones that are warped beyond repair, constantly correct our perception for accuracy (no, my face is not actually as long as my body… no, my legs are not actually six inches long).

Or we can forget about it all, and turn our whole attention to God, to Jesus, to the true mirror and the One who tells us the truth about ourselves and about everything else we need to know. Prayer is not some little hobby spiritually inclined people can engage in, or some desperate last-ditch clutching at divine succor in times of crisis.

Prayer is the deep truth of our being, the only real truth of our being, and the only way to abide in deep truth and out of that deep truth, communion and love. So that’s what I bring you out of my five days in poustinia, and we will just see where else Matthew the Poor and all my other friends take us as we reflect on truth together in prayer and in love. 

Back From Retreat, But...

Hi, everyone! Well, I am back from my five-day poustinia retreat, much refreshed and recollected, alleluia, and ready to resume full apostolic life, blogging included.
But... my trusty and long-suffering lap top computer, which has long been showing signs of it, chose this very week to go on a permanent retreat, being unceremoniously demoted in the process from 'valuable piece of information technology' to 'scrap metal and plastic.'
I am going computer shopping Monday, but in the meantime don't really have an easy way to write and post to my blog without that particular piece of hardware. So, the blog remains on hiatus until Monday. Talk to you then, with lots of insights from my time away, no doubt.