Letters, Liturgy, and Life

Thursday is Liturgy Day on this blog—I am going through the Mass, bit by bit, showing how our entire Catholic faith and life is informed by the structures and rites of the liturgy. We are in the midst of the Liturgy of the Word, and have come to the second reading, the Epistle. For most of the Church year, this reading is taken from the letters of St. Paul.

The epistles of Paul represent the first theology of the Church, the very first movements, uniquely graced by the Holy Spirit so as to be inerrant and thus biblical, to make sense of the revelation we were given of Jesus Christ, the object of our faith. Faced with various problems and questions arising in the communities he had evangelized, Paul was the first to take up pen and papyrus to use his mind to apply this core matter of faith to the situations he was confronting.

Theology is ‘faith seeking understanding’ and it is telling that the Church began this quest for understanding instantly upon the reception of the revealed doctrine. The letters of St. Paul were the first Christian writings, pre-dating even the four Gospels, the earliest ones (scholars say 1 Thessalonians and Galatians) being composed as early as the late 40s AD.

That the letters of St. Paul are given canonical status, included (again from the earliest days) as Sacred Scripture, reflect both their own inspired content and authorative theological exploration of the mystery of Christ, but also reveals something essential about Christianity. And their prominent place in the liturgy, the simple fact that we are continually exposed to Paul’s writings and those of the other letter writers, keeps this essential truth before us week after week.

It is this: that faith and intellect are not opposed, that we are to use our minds to explore the content of our faith, that there is nothing in our faith that cannot be thought about, unpacked, re-packed, applied to this situation, tested against that situation, challenged by these alternative views of reality and meeting the challenge by the careful use of our God-created intellects.

Faith and reason, and the essential harmony of the two are literally ‘canonized’ in the first writings of the New Testament and proclaimed in the Mass. We need this proclamation because of course in our frail humanity we are always struggling to keep these two in harmony. We lapse into anti-intellectualism where we blindly accept the truths of God and shrink back from trying to reconcile these with our lived experience and the lived experience of others (the phrase ‘Well, it’s all a mystery…’ comes in handy here).

Or we set up two tracks in our mind—our faith which deprived of intellectual heft tends to become a matter of feelings and aesthetics, and our intellects engaged in whatever worldly pursuits we have. We live with a sort of split personality, not in the pathological sense, but tightly compartmentalizing the faith we profess on the one hand and the use of our minds on the other.

St. Paul and the others teach us that the revelation of the mystery of Christ—that to which we give our fundamental allegiance, our basic acceptance of faith—is something strong enough, deep enough, and rich enough to provide material for intellectual exploration and to meet the challenges, quandaries, obstacles, contradictions and quarrels of our messy human condition. We can make sense of things, to a large degree anyhow; we are not left in the darkness of the mind.

In our world today there is more and more a lapsing into a sort of unreason about things. A couple days ago I blogged about modern critical gender theory and how it seems (to me at least) to make the very words ‘man’ and ‘woman’ meaningless cyphers, and that perhaps this is a problem. 

Unfortunately life has been hectic in the extreme for me in the ensuing days (and alas will continue to be) so I haven’t been able to engage too much in the conversation on that post or its related Facebook thread. But one commenter seemed to suggest that it’s OK that none of it makes much sense or that words so central to our humanity have any coherent meaning, so long as people feel good about themselves.

It matters because when we go that way, reality becomes fragmented and disconnected. Our bodies have no meaning. Our minds and their pursuit of truth are futile and fruitless. Our social converse is void of any content. And absent a coherent doctrine of reality and of humanity we are reduced to a vicious power struggle (which is exactly what we see happening right now in our public discourse around gender and sexuality) in which whoever controls the levers of language controls society.

All of this is a perennial struggle in our fallen human condition. And so it is vital that we Christians, as we embrace the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, also embrace what it implies – that our whole humanity, including our intellects, is taken up into the divine mystery, that truth has been made known to us, and truth is available to us so that our minds can reason rightly, and come to know the truth in our concrete situation. St. Paul and the epistles of the New Testament, enshrined in the Mass, show us that this is so, and that this is an essential element of Christian faith and life.

Bacon, Bliss, and Beatitude

On Wednesdays on the blog I have been going through my book Idol Thoughts, on the patterns of thinking that lead us away from the freedom and joy that comes from life in God into other illusory ways of seeking and finding happiness.

This very ancient doctrine of these thoughts, eight in number, and their power over us was later adapted to the doctrine of the seven deadly sins, and the lists have a lot of overlap. So today we come to the thought of gluttony.

Gluttony is not simply over-eating, or enjoying food for that matter. God made food not only to nourish the body but to delight the palate. It would be silly, not to mention impossible, for us not to enjoy food that tastes good. Gluttony may well lead to the practice of over-eating (and as I say in my book, I do indeed struggle with this thought, and so am a little bit over-weight as a result), but the thing itself resides not in the body, but in the mind.

It is the fixed certainty that happiness lies in the immediate satisfaction of the body. That there is nothing worse than to be hungry, to have a physical need unmet, to be uncomfortable in one’s own flesh.

Gluttony is in itself the least serious of the thoughts and leads to what generally are the least serious sins, but there is a dynamic within gluttony that must be mastered if we are to ever break through this immediate grasping for instant happiness, bacon-bliss, so to speak.

Namely, the dynamic in which we have a desire, see the object of our desire, grab it, stuff it in, and are satisfied. I want-I see-I grab-I stuff-yay! That is the dynamic that can run through all of our desires, all the thoughts of our minds, and it is a powerful illusion, a dreadful mistake. It is expressed in its most immediate form in our relationship to eating, as well as how we navigate our way through the next thought, lust. But it applies to all of the thoughts – as long as desire runs rampant and unchecked in us, we are seriously impaired in our journey to true happiness.

This is because true happiness does not come from the immediate satisfaction of desire. God and our communion in love with Him is our true happiness, and He is not a consumer product that we can grab and stuff in to ourselves. He comes to us, gives Himself to us, but that is quite a different affair.

And so, fasting. This is why fasting is an integral part of every religious tradition. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists all fast. I believe that there is a spiritual intuition in all the serious wisdom traditions, borne out by lived experience, that some degree of physical hunger breaks us through the level of the superficial and the immediate to transcendent reality.

In our Christian faith, this means communion with God through Jesus Christ, expressed in its fullest and deepest aspect through the gift of the Eucharist. This is why the Church asks us to fast before receiving communion, even though at the moment the fast asked of us is so minimal that there is no actual experience of hunger involved in it (I maintain that this is a pastoral problem). And why we have a season of fasting before we celebrate the great feast of the year, Easter.

A modicum of hunger, a small experience of that emptiness, that slight weakness, that little bit of ache—this is vital to the spiritual life. And to never, ever be hungry—to live our relationship with food in such a way that our bodies are continually full to the brim—this has a deadening effect in our lives. This is not a particularly Christian observation – the united testimony of all the world religions happens to agree on this point.

And so, ‘blessed are the hungry, for they shall be filled.’ (Luke 6: 21). We have to enter a little bit into the reality of hunger now, so as to be filled later. To want now, so as to want nothing (Psalm 23:1) later.

Anyhow, I have quite a bit more to say on the subject, and you can read all about it, if you so desire.

A Fair And Reasonable Question

What does the word ‘gender’ mean?

I have been wanting to write a post about this for some time. I realize that the very fact that I have written the above sentence is enough to brand me in some people’s minds as a ‘H8R’, a bigot, who should be jailed if not killed, and at the very least driven from polite society.

I find it interesting that asking a simple question about a definition of a common word yields that reaction. Gender has become the third rail of public discourse today, and to even touch on the subject with anything besides the rote and rather vacuous slogans of the day (‘Love Wins!’) is to take one’s life in one’s hands.

Well, nobody has ever accused me of being timid. So I’m going to jump on the third rail and ride it as far as it will take me here. The architects of critical gender theory, the activists of the LGBTQ movement, do indeed want their concept of gender to be the organizing principle of society, to deconstruct and discard the binary notion of male-female polarity for… well, what, exactly? What does the word ‘gender’ mean, as it is used by these activists? It seems to me that this is a reasonable and fair question, since we are supposed to construct society around their definition.

So let us first establish what gender is not, according to this world view. First, gender is not anatomy. It is not body morphology—men are shaped one way, women are shaped another way. This has nothing to do with the person’s gender—so we are told.

Second, gender is not sexual orientation. There are men who identify as men who are gay, women identifying as women who are lesbian.

Third, gender is not a list of personality traits. This of course was established by second wave feminism. It is sexist, we have been told (and I happen to agree, largely) to say that women are gentle, sweet, empathetic, emotional, while men are logical, aggressive, strong.

Fourth, gender is not defined by the things we are interested in or are good at. Women like flowers, clothes, cooking, babies, while men like cars, sports, guns. I also happen to agree with this, being very much a man while having precisely zero interest in cars and guns and only a slight interest in sports (I’m not much on flowers or clothes, either…)

Fifth, gender is not defined by social roles. Women stay at home and take care of the kids while men go out and earn money for their families.

So… gender is not your body, your personality, your interests, your actions, or who you want to sleep with. Ummm… what is it, then? Please, someone elucidate it for me. I swear I am not being sarcastic or asking the question rhetorically. I want to know what people mean when they say that someone with the body of a man is ‘really’ a woman, even if he (sorry, she) does not choose to have the radical body modifications needed to outwardly resemble a woman in body morphology.

It does seem to me that there is something almost mystical in this deconstructed notion of gender, something so interior and ineffable that it is difficult to put into words beyond the phraseology of ‘I just know it to be so.’ But, my brothers and sisters, massive and complete social reconstruction cannot be done on the basis of such interior and mystical knowledge – it is unreasonable to expect society to reconfigure itself around something ‘you just know.’ I just know that I am a Catholic priest, not as a job or profession but as a mystical configuration of my soul to Christ the head of the Church. But I would never expect a non-Catholic to call me ‘Father’.

For myself, I believe gender is, simply, body morphology, determined by chromosomes. Yes, there are the vanishingly rare instances of babies born inter-sex, and this is a medical and social problem for those very few people—but this is not common enough to justify jettisoning the male-female bi-polarity that has been the basis of every human society since human beings have existed.

And just to completely cook my goose, I wish to say very simply and without any rancor or dislike or indeed anything but great compassion and friendship for all people, that I believe the men who believe they are women and the women who believe they are men are in fact suffering from a mental illness and need psychiatric help, not surgical mutilation and society enabling.

I do find it odd that this is considered by many to be a hateful thing to say. That attitude itself seems to reflect contempt and hatred for people who are mentally ill. As a priest I have many people in my life who suffer from various kinds of mental illness. It is a hard suffering, but it’s not a death sentence and it is not inherently an insult to someone to say “I believe your problem is psychological.”

Anyhow, I don’t intend to write ongoingly about the whole ‘transgender moment’ we are having in our society right now – this is not that kind of blog, obsessing over whatever the controversy of the day is. But I think the question I raise is reasonable and fair. I have given my answer to it, and I would be interested to hear other answers, and other civil responses to it (for anyone who is new to the blog reading this, abusive nasty comments will be deleted without mercy!).

So, what does gender mean?

Our Daily Walk Through Zion

Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God!

His holy mountain, beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all the earth,

Mount Zion, in the far north, the city of the great King.

Within her citadels God has made himself known as a fortress.

For behold, the kings assembled; they came on together.

As soon as they saw it, they were astounded; they were in panic; they took to flight.

Trembling took hold of them there, anguish as of a woman in labor.

By the east wind you shattered the ships of Tarshish.

As we have heard, so have we seen in the city of the Lord of hosts,

in the city of our God, which God will establish forever.

We have thought on your steadfast love, O God, in the midst of your temple.

As your name, O God, so your praise reaches to the ends of the earth.

Your right hand is filled with righteousness. Let Mount Zion be glad!

Let the daughters of Judah rejoice because of your judgments!

Walk about Zion, go around her, number her towers,

consider well her ramparts, go through her citadels,

That you may tell the next generation that this is God,

our God forever and ever. He will guide us forever.

Psalm 47

Reflection – Well, I’m back, more or less rested up and ready to go for another year. And we’re back on the blog where we left off with the Monday Psalter, at Psalm 47. This is an unusual psalm, taking as its theme the beauty of the city of God Jerusalem, the place where God has chosen to dwell and where His help and guidance, saving love and wisdom comes forth for his people.

For Catholic Christians, there is no question that we apply this psalm to the Church and pray it in that light. It is not a question of substituting Rome for Jerusalem, or even a question of buildings and spires, Gothic architecture or Romanesque, or those sorts of visible realities. These have their proper place; we are a sacramental people and so the outward appearances of things is never just window dressing or something superfluous to the reality. The reality flows through and is expressed through these elements.

But the splendor and beauty of the Church is much deeper and more consequential than the beauty of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome or Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. All of these buildings, magnificent treasures and towering human achievements that they are, could be razed tomorrow and the splendor of the Church would be undiminished.

The splendor of the Church lies in that it is where God has chosen to dwell on earth. It is the place where the Incarnation is still occurring, in other words. God became man, assumed to Himself created reality, in Nazareth, was born in Bethlehem, walked the roads of Galilee and Judea, died, rose, and ascended to heaven in Jerusalem.

But his physical presence—the very material, concrete, visible, touchable life of God—is still on earth, and it is on earth precisely in the Church. In the Eucharist par excellence as in the other sacraments, but also in the proclaimed Word, in the ordained minister, in the gathered assembly. Christ continues His life on earth, and He does so through the instrumentality of the Church He founded.

This means that love of the Church is love of Christ. And it means that we have to be very careful how we speak of the Church, how we speak not only of our leaders and their words and deeds but how we speak of one another. There is a presence of Christ flowing through the communion of the Body of Christ—do we acknowledge it? If we do, we probably will moderate our tone when we do have something critical to say, and be quick to acknowledge and praise that which is good and true and beautiful.

We are living in an era, fueled by social media, of intense criticism and negativity, when it is too easy to constantly focus on everything that is not, everything that is wrong, everything that is lousy and shabby and mean and wretched. Our Facebook and Twitter feeds will happily dish up for us a daily menu of things happening in the world and in the Church to be incensed over.

It is vitally important that we take a stand against that, that we choose each day to “Walk about Zion, go around her, number her towers, consider well her ramparts, go through her citadels, that you may tell the next generation that this is God.” For all that is wrong, for all that is simply human and flawed and messy, God dwells here. Take off your shoes, lower your voice, sheathe your sword—this place is holy. Not because we are holy, but because the Holy One has chosen it for his dwelling place.