Wow - Part II

OK, so I am now out of poustinia, and of course prayed much of the last few hours for Pope Benedict and for the Church. My goodness, what a turn of events.
First... it may have come to the attention of the more discerning readers of this blog that I kind of like the Pope. I try to hide it, but it just keeps on popping out all over. It's not just respect for the office, which is high, nor is it regard for his writings and insight, which is very high indeed.
I like the man. I think he is a good and gracious man. I think if I was ever so blessed as to meet him, we would get along quite well. I have enormous personal affection for Joseph Ratzinger. So... my first reaction is still a deep filial concern for him. I hope he's OK, and I can only think that all of this must be very painful for him. My impression of him has always been that he is a shy, private man, more interested in expressing ideas and insights that sharing his own personal business with others. So please, if you haven't already done so, pray for him, eh? I have to think he needs it especially today.
Also, somewhere in the world there is a man who God has been preparing to be our next Pope. I will not enter into the fevered speculations as to who this man might be. The old saying about conclaves holds true: Go in a Pope, come out a cardinal. But we do need to hold up this man in prayer, as well, whoever he is.
Now, of course all of this leads all of us to think of Pope John Paul II and the way he moved through his own illness and death. And of course, while I haven't plunged into the Catholic social media world just yet, It occurs to me that some might be subjecting one or the other of these two men to invidious comparisons. "Well, JPII didn't resign, and look how sick he was. BXVI is a quitter." Or, "BXVI has the common sense to know when to quit - what was wrong with JPII?"
OK, everyone knock it off. We are seeing here, once again, how very different these two men are in personal style and charism, even as they were one in mind and in heart throughout their lives together.
Pope John Paul II was an actor, and lived much of his life under atheistic Communism. He understood deeply the importance of the symbolic act, and of the charismatic leader inspiring by dramatic gesture and singular deed. Communism is by definition an ideology that crushes the human person, reducing man to a faceless cog in a revolutionary machine. The power of one individual to stand up, to show forth the emptiness of the ideology, to manifest the courage and nobility of the human spirit by a grand dramatic gesture was very much part of his own personal vocation and his own personality and style.
And so, in a world where old age is despised, where euthanasia looms around the corner, where strength is worshipped and where commitment is optional, he chose to make the end of his life a grand dramatic statement of love to the end in a most public forum
Pope Benedict is not dramatic. He is a teacher, a man of ideas, a man of the word. 'John Paul made you cry; Benedict makes you think.' So said a pundit whose name escapes me right now. And... well, he's making us think today, isn't he? Making us think about the papacy, about the nature of authority, about the place of authority in the Church and the ways in which this authority can and should move in our times. About time and age and the proper discernment of our place in the world and how we are to love and serve at the different seasons of life. About many things - he is inviting us to think deeply and pray seriously about our Church and about its mission.
It's not all about the Pope, you know. It's not all on him - the mission of shepherding humanity into the kingdom and towards the King. There will be a new Pope shortly, and he will doubtless be a good and wise man - I trust the Holy Spirit. But all of us are in this together, and all of us are 'shepherds' in our proper way. The Pope has a job to do, and Pope Benedict has decided he personally can no longer do that particular job; you and I have a job to do, too, and may we take it up and take in on most zealously as long as God gives us strength to do it.

Wow

Well, I just stepped out of poustinia today to check my e-mails for urgent messages, and heard the news. Pope Benedict is going to resign at the end of the month. I am in a bit of a state of shock at the moment.
First thoughts: let us pray for our beloved Holy Father with great gratitude and solicitude. This cannot have been easy for him to discern on a personal level, and the immediate reactions/responses to it must not be easy either. He is a good and (I believe) holy man, but he is human nonetheless and needs our prayers at this time.
I think I will continue the blog. He is still a shepherd, still a bishop, still the Pope for the next few weeks too, and I began this blog because I believe his shepherding of us has been one of the great, and largely unheralded, gifts of God to His Church in the 20th century. There is still much for us to learn from this good, gentle man of God.
And... let us pray with great peace and great seriousness for the Church. This is a near-unprecedented event in Church history (that one medieval Pope resigned, whose name eludes me), and of course a conclave is always a time of great importance. Let us pray... and have great trust and confidence in God's great care of His people.
There is only one Shepherd ultimately, and all the little assistant shepherds are just that - God's assistants, his ministers, his 'silly servants', as I said a couple days ago. We are in His hands, and He is caring for all of us, Joseph Ratzinger no less than you and me, in all this.
More to say tomorrow - back to poustinia now.

The Unbroken Chain

There is an unbroken chain in the life of the Church, in the proclamation of the Word of God, of the celebration of the Sacraments, that has come down to us and that we call Tradition. It gives us the guarantee that what we believe is the original message of Christ, preached by the Apostles. The nucleus of the primordial proclamation is the death and the Resurrection of the Lord, from which stems the entire patrimony of the faith. The Council says: “The apostolic preaching, which is expressed in a special way in the inspired books, was to be preserved by a continuous line of succession until the end of time” (Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum, n. 8).

In this way, if Sacred Scripture contains the Word of God, the Tradition of the Church preserves it and faithfully transmits it, so that the men and women of every age might have access to its vast resources and be enriched by its treasures of grace. Thus, the Church, “in her doctrine, life and worship, perpetuates and transmits to every generation all that she herself is, all that she believes” (ibid.).

General Audience, 31 October 2012

Reflection – Well here we have a good little catechesis on revelation, the Church, and faith. Where the Reformation tradition of Luther and Calvin upholds sola scriptura (the scriptures alone) as the place of revelation, the Catholic faith has always been that God reveals Himself in His word and in the living unbroken Tradition of the Church, that which has been passed down to us from generation to generation.

If I can briefly dip into the field of apologetics, the fatal weakness of the Protestant position is that it is itself unscriptural. By its own argument—that the scriptures alone are the source of revealed truth—it is self-refuting. There is not a single Bible verse from Genesis to Revelation that states the principle of sola scriptura. It is, itself, an expression of Protestant Tradition, and extra-biblical. There is also, nowhere in the Bible, a list of the canonical books of the Bible (and no, the table of contents at the front doesn’t count). The very composition of the Bible, then, is an extra-biblical contribution of Sacred Tradition.

None of that is a problem for Catholics. It has always been our understanding that God comes to us in His word, in Tradition, and that all this is mediated by the living authority of His Church and its episcopal leadership. The Bible is a precious and unique place of God’s revelation, where the very words of Truth and salvation are recorded in an fixed, unchanging expression, but it sits in honour within a living communion of faith and love—the life of the Church.

Anyhow, enough apologetics. It is amazing, though, how many Catholics need to be reminded of our faith in this matter. For many Catholics, it is a serious business if a Protestant says to them, ‘Well, your beliefs about Mary (or Confession… or the papacy…) are not in the Bible!’ Really, this shouldn’t faze us. We could easily respond, with charity of course, ‘Well, your beliefs about the Bible are not in the Bible!’ and that would be the end of the matter.

Meanwhile, it is so very beautiful that God arranged things this way. It is, again, this whole business I have blogged about already this week—he really means it that we are to be a family, a body, a communion of love. He really wants us, and in fact is quite set on it, that the life of the Church will be a true life, and so He communicates the fullness of his Truth to us only in the life of the body.

Any fool can walk into a book store, buy a Bible, sit down and read it, and think they now possess the fullness of God’s truth. And, as we see so clearly, that approach to understanding God’s revelation results in—how many is it now?—thousands of little Protestant churches, each quite sure that their doctrines are 100% scriptural. A privatized, deeply individualistic, and ultimately relativistic view of faith is the inevitable result of sola scriptura theology.

 

Meanwhile, to receive Scripture and Tradition together as the fullness of truth means being part of the living communion of the Church. It means, yes, being submissive to the authority of the Church, but even the bishops and even the Pope must themselves be submissive to the 2000 years of unbroken transmission of faith in the life of the Church. It is the utter opposite of an individual, private, relativized faith—it is an entry, if we choose to take it as such, into the depths of communion with God and from that, with one another. And that is what God has revealed to us as His great desire for the human race.

The King's Silly Servants

At the start of the Christian adventure, when the Holy Spirit descends with power upon the disciples, on the day of Pentecost — as we read in the Acts of the Apostles (cf. 2:1-13) — the early Church receives the power to begin the mission entrusted to her by the Risen Lord: to spread the Gospel to every corner of the earth, the Good News of the Kingdom of God, and thus to lead every human person to the encounter with Him, to the faith that saves.

 

The Apostles overcame every fear in proclaiming what they had heard, seen, personally experienced with Jesus. By the power of the Holy Spirit, they start to speak in tongues, openly announcing the mystery of which they were witnesses… And so began the journey of the Church, the community that bears this proclamation through time and space, the community that is the People of God founded on the New Covenant thanks to the Blood of Christ. Her members do not belong to a particular social or ethnic group, but are men and women of every nation and culture. It is a “catholic” people, a people who speaks in tongues, universally open to welcoming all, beyond all boundaries, breaking down every barrier. St Paul says: “Here there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all” (Col 3:11).

General Audience, 31 October 2012

Reflection – The Pope is very much focussing in on the Church as the vessel of faith in this General Audience. From the very beginning until today, the task of inspiring divine faith in man has been given to the Church in its proclamation of the Gospel.

That can seem a bit overwhelming, perhaps, especially as we come to think of the Church not so much as those guys up at the front wearing the funny robes, but as… well, as you. And me (I’m one of those guys at the front, of course). It is our proclamation of the Gospel that will continue this mission of the Church and the raising up of men and women of faith in the next generation.

Overwhelming, yes, and if we thought it was some kind of task we had to perform by our own wonderfulness and strength, we would be fairly hopeless. But, you know, I think back to my own childhood and adolescence here. How did I receive the faith, personally?

My parents (both deceased now) were very ordinary people, and didn’t do such a great job passing on the faith in the home, to be honest. The priests in my parish growing up were not exactly dynamic preachers or men of great personal charisma. Small town Ontario is a pretty sleepy place for the most part. The Catholic schools I went to were in the immediate post-Vatican II meltdown, and consequently taught us nothing.

So how on earth did I receive the faith from the Church, when its local representatives didn’t seem to have much personal genius or ability to teach it? Well, I did have the words of the Gospel proclaimed to me, Sunday after Sunday, and the rest of God’s word. I did have crucifixes and rosaries and pictures and statues of saints all about me. I did have the Eucharist, and regular Confession, and Jesus just kind of around… even if the explanations of just who He was and what He was doing were a bit deficient. And somehow, in all that, faith came to me.

I’m not trying to suggest that the (truly) woefully inadequate religious formation I received was really OK—I do wish everyone involved had done a better job of it. After all, most of my generation walked away from the Church and from the Catholic faith with seemingly little regrets and fuss. That would not have happened quite so much if we had been taught better.

But I guess what I am saying is that the treasure of the faith—the Gospel, the sacraments, the whole of our Catholic rich spiritual heritage—all of this is ours to give, and the power and beauty of it is not dependent entirely on our brilliant presentation of it. We are silly semi-competent servants of the King, and our primary job in life is to usher people into the presence of the King Himself—He can take it from there.

 

That’s what my own religious formators with all their defects and confusions did for me, and once I was in the presence of Jesus… well, that’s another story for another day. Faith came in, and thirty years later here I am, tripping over my own feet and being just as deficient and silly as anyone as I try not to bumble and fumble too much in the one task I have been given, of bringing people to the King.

It's Almost Like He Means It

On Sunday, in the Holy Mass, reciting the “Creed”, we speak in the first person, but we confess as one the one faith of the Church. That “I believe” said individually joins a vast chorus across time and space, in which each person contributes, so to speak, to the harmonious polyphony in faith. The Catechism of the Catholic Church sums this up in a clear way: thus, “believing” is an act of the Church. The Church's faith precedes, engenders, supports and nourishes our faith. The Church is the Mother of all believers. “‘No one can have God as his Father, who does not have the Church as his Mother’ (St Cyprian)” (n. 181). Therefore, the faith is born in the Church, leads to her and lives in her. This is important to remember.

General Audience, 31 October 2012

Reflection – I have mentioned before on this blog my encounter with a young theology student who told me she wasn’t interested in studying ecclesiology because ‘she wasn’t married to the Church.’ My reaction to her was, alas, gaping horrified silence (I was a second year seminarian then, and not quite as quick on the draw), although afterwards in a fit of l’esprit d’escalier (that’s French for thinking of something clever to say five minutes after the conversation ends), I said to the empty air, ‘Well, that’s too bad, since Jesus is.”

But of course it’s not for us to be married to the Church, precisely. The Church is, as the Pope says, and as we have always said, our Mother. There is this body, this group of believers spread across time and space, this countless throng of mostly ordinary men and women, a few of them saints, but most of them struggling sinners like you and I… and the faith we profess comes to us through them. It also comes to us as a direct action of God our Father, but in the womb, if you will, of the Church our Mother.

This is so crucial. For so many people today, ‘The  Church’ has a bad name. Even many Catholics find it a fairly anguished term, like that young woman who distanced herself from it. Either the horrible sexual scandals that have beset us all have become the primary association with ‘Church’, or failures (real or perceived) of ecclesiastical leadership to teach the faith and promote justice and charity, or teachings that simply seem wrong to some, or the appalling unkindnesses and inhospitality and harshness that can occur at the Church on the most local and immediate levels.

So many people leave the Church simply because ‘Fr. X. was mean to my mother.’ It’s easy to dismiss this (‘oh, for crying out loud – there’s more to the Church then Fr. X. at St. Blatherings Parish!’). But for many people, there really isn’t, and harsh or rude treatment really does that kind of major damage.

So it is important—beyond important, it is crucial—for those of us who can expand our vision of the Church to do so. To see this motherly reality, this profound dynamic where God the Father begets us as his sons and daughters in the womb of our Mother the Church. Because it didn’t have to be this way, you know. God could have just done it on a person-by-person basis without reference to a Church, you know. He chose, in his sovereign will, to have all these graces of divine life, sonship, deep communion with the Trinity all come to us through and in the life of the Church.

You know, it’s almost as if He’s really serious about this ‘love one another’ business. It’s almost as if it is really matters to Him that we fashion a human family, a real community of persons among ourselves. It’s almost as if He really means it that it is not good for man to be alone, and He really does intend us to be with each other, not just in superficial commercial or social interactions, but in depth and in love.

 

And all this happens in all our brokenness—sex scandals and lousy leadership, mean pastors and cold parishioners, teachings we don’t understand or agree with and people we would rather not say hello to, let alone embrace as brothers and sisters. All of this is ‘the Church’, along with all the beauty and goodness that we can see if our eyes are not too jaundiced or blinded by our judgments. Our Mother—a bit shabby in her dress at times, a bit odd in her behaviour at other times, but nonetheless, where faith is born in us, and where the faith has been borne from generation to generation for 2000 years now.

The Whole of Our Faith

Today I would like to take another step in our reflection, starting once more with a few questions: Does faith have a solely personal, individual nature? Does it concern only myself? Do I live my faith alone? Of course, the act of faith is an eminently personal act; it happens in the deepest part of us and signals a change in direction through personal conversion. It is my life that changes, that is given a new direction.

In the Rite of Baptism, at the moment of the promises, the celebrant asks for a profession of the Catholic faith and formulates three questions: Do you believe in God the Father Almighty? Do you believe in Jesus Christ his only Son? Do you believe in the Holy Spirit? In ancient times these questions were addressed to the person who was to receive Baptism before being immersed three times in water. And today, too, the answer is one and the same: “I do”.

But this faith of mine is not the result of my own solitary reflection, it is not the product of my thought, it is the fruit of a relationship, a dialogue, in which there is a listener, a receiver and a respondent; it is communication with Jesus that draws me out of the “I” enclosed in myself to open me to the love of God, the Father. It is like a rebirth in which I am united not only to Jesus, but also to all those who have walked and are walking on the same path; and this new birth, that begins with Baptism, continues for the rest of my life.

I cannot build my personal faith in a private dialogue with Jesus, because faith is given to me by God through a community of believers that is the Church and projects me into the multitude of believers, into a kind of communion that is not only sociological but rooted in the eternal love of God who is in himself the communion of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, it is Trinitarian Love. Our faith is truly personal, only if it is also communal: it can be my faith only if it dwells in and moves with the “we” of the Church, only if it is our faith, the common faith of the one Church.

General Audience, 31 October 2012

Reflection – I’m committed to a time-sensitive project tomorrow, so am posting tomorrow’s blog post this evening. You know, we see here in this beautiful general audience talk a whole Christian anthropology emerging. A whole vision of the human person that flows from the revelation of God in Jesus Christ – what I’ve been blogging about all week as I made my way through one of the central texts of that revelation, the Lord’s prayer.

It is this encounter of the individual and the other, the subject with the Subject, which occurs in harmony and a real unity with the encounter of person with community. We are individuals; I am a person, with my freedom, my intellect, my own self-determined being. This is precious, real. When this is violated, it is one form or another of abuse—physical, emotional, verbal.

But this person does exist only through the actions of others. God, but also mom and dad. God, but also the society that shaped me, the civilization that maintains much of my life in existence. The strong atomic individual living off the grid and dependent on no one for anything is a myth. Even the most un-gridded people still have some dependence, some involvement in the lives of others, some reliance on their fellow man.

And God… this is the whole anthropology of Christ. We come from Another and our lives are in and for and towards this other. And this is not some horrible turn of events, some degrading slavery, some terrible oppressive tyranny. It is love, and communion, and this is where joy and peace lie.

And it is all deeply connected with the Church and our communion with and in the Church. Love one another, for love comes from God, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in Him.

I’m out of room, since Pope Benedict’s quote is a bit longer than normal – I’m also out of time, since supper at MH is about to begin, and I must be off to it. We are made for communion—this is the whole of our faith, ultimately. Communion with God, and from and in that, with one another.

Back with more on Friday, God willing.

More Trouble in Paradise

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Reflection – On last Friday’s blog the Pope wrote about the Our Father as a prayer which uniquely bears us into Christ’s own prayer to his Father, and hence into the very heart and life of the Trinity. He urged us to study the words of the prayer carefully, as the deepest truths about God, and hence the deepest truths about man, are held within it. So, being shepherded by our good German in that way, I am blogging my way through the Lord’s prayer for a few days.

‘Oh, we got trouble (oh, we got trouble). Right here in River City (right here in River City). With a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for pool!’ Yesterday in the prayer we hit the trouble, trouble, trouble—not the fake moral panic type of Henry Hill in The Music Man, and not just in River City. Trouble in the depths of our hearts, the trouble of sin and moral failure in the life of every human being. And so to enter into the relationship of the Son to the Father, the heart and life of the Trinity, the healing of mercy and forgiveness is necessary.

Today we see that there’s more trouble-with-a-capital-T yet, and this time it’s not within us only. We live in a world of peril and are called to live out our divine filiation, our communion with the Father as his sons and daughters, not in the sublimity of the eternal Triune bliss but in a world of conflict, struggle, encounter with evil, temptation, death.

These last petitions of the Lord’s prayer are essentially an acknowledgement of our own weakness, and a humble request to God that our lives not be too hard, that we not be tested beyond our strength.

People get a bit hung up sometimes on the ‘lead us not into temptation’, and why on earth we would think God would lead us into temptation. Isn’t it bad to lead other people into temptation? Of course it is bad if I lead you into an occasion of sin for you. This is because I have no idea whatsoever what degree of virtue you have attained and what you are or are not capable of. It is grossly uncharitable of me to willfully expose you to temptations.

God, on the other hand, knows me better than I know myself, and so can justly allow me to be exposed to temptations, to confirm me in virtue and build up my resolve to overcome sin in my life… or to expose to me my own weakness and total need for His mercy and grace. What is utterly wrong for one finite limited creature to do to another finite limited creature may not be wrong for the All-Knowing and All-Loving One to do to us.

But really, the key of the intention here is that to be childlike and simple, to say in effect to God, ‘You know just how weak I am; you know I’ve already got trouble in my own heart with my own trespasses; please deliver me from assaults from outside, as much as possible.’ In other words, this is a prayer against presumption, where we go haring off into battles God has not asked us to fight and difficulties He is not giving us the grace to withstand.

It does indeed all come back to living as sons of the Father, living within the communion of the Son with the Father. To refer everything to God, to know that all is for Him, all is from Him, all is directed towards Him. Our very path through a truly dangerous world, a world of spiritual as well as physical dangers, is from Him and towards Him. These last petitions of the Our Father commit this path to His care, and beg Him for the grace to walk it successfully and not be brought down by the genuine difficulties of life.

One of my favorite desert father stories is of a monk who was shown by God all the snares the devil was laying for the faithful in the world, and it was such a morass of snares and traps and pitfalls that he cried out, “What can see us through this?” The answer came from heaven, “Humility.”

Humility is the key to this whole last half of the Lord’s prayer. We are called to a sublime life, a life of true communion with the Trinity, a true unity in love with Our Father in heaven. We are wholly unable to do this and need daily bread; we are wounded deeply in our own spirits by sin and need forgiveness; we are beset by difficulties on all side and need protection and deliverance from evil. We have to know all this, and cry out to God for help, and so help is given, and our lives become a beautiful reflection of Christ’s own life in and for the Father. Pretty nice prayer, eh?

 

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Trouble in Paradise

And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us

Reflection – On last Friday’s blog the Pope wrote about the Our Father as a prayer which uniquely bears us into Christ’s own prayer to his Father, and hence into the very heart and life of the Trinity. He urged us to study the words of the prayer carefully, as the deepest truths about God, and hence the deepest truths about man, are held within it. So, being shepherded by our good German in that way, I am blogging my way through the Lord’s prayer for a few days.

But here in the prayer we come to something that is not exactly the Son’s experience with the Father, not exactly part of Jesus’ own prayer exactly. ‘Forgive us, Lord.’ Jesus does not need forgiveness. There is no sin in God. The son’s communion with the Father is perfect from all eternity.

So here we have a new dimension added to the prayer ‘just for us.’ There is trouble in paradise. Human beings are not just nicely rolling along in life, communing with God and neighbor in an uninterrupted flow of faith, hope, and love. Not quite, not exactly.

There is a breach, a wound, an estrangement, and it needs to be healed, if we are to live that first half of the Lord’s prayer I have been blogging about these past days. The Son’s communion with His Father is unimaginable, yet it is our destiny to share it, and we already begin to have glimpses of it here and there as we strive to respond to his grace in us. But always this grace and this sharing comes on the heels of an act of mercy, of the forgiveness of our sins.

I have been pondering all of this lately in the context of babies, of all things. I love babies and children (some have argued that they are the only people on my level). I had the great privilege of becoming a godfather this Sunday, to the daughter of two of my directees, so spent some time Sunday holding the baby, who slept soundly through the entire affair, both the ritual and the party afterwards.

But it got me thinking about, of all things, St. Augustine and some of his (in)famous writings about babies. A lot of our cultural affection for babies comes out of Christianity. He, a convert and a saint, came from a different culture, and babies were not, for him, cute or sweet. They were selfish little brutes with no control over their emotions and imperiously demanding in their needs. He does not have a trace of sentimentality in his view of them.

Reading his thoughts on this matter is either amusing or irritating for us moderns. But… you know, he is kind of right. And I think the point he makes is not that ‘babies are jerks’, which would be a bit petty and silly of him, but rather that none of us start off from a position of great virtue. The starting point of human beings is, in fact, selfishness and that constant clamor of desire and will. The point is not what babies are like, but what we all are like… until the Father forgives us and begins to fashion his kingdom in our hearts.

In other words, where yesterday I wrote about the urgent and constant need for grace for us to persevere in good godly lives, today we see that this grace needs to heal us of our wounds.

Now what about this business of ‘as we forgive those…’? Does it mean, as some say, that God can only forgive us as much as we forgive others? I hope not—that would be a pretty bleak picture for the human race. There is no question that there is a correlation between our mercy and God’s mercy—many, many Gospel passages lay that out quite explicitly. We simply must practice mercy and forgiveness or we do shut out God’s mercy from our hearts.

But I don’t think it can be reduced to a strict mathematical formula or ratio. I forgive ten times, so God forgives a thousand. I forgive a hundred times; God, ten thousand—that kind of thing. I’m not enough of a Greek scholar to know the exact nuances of the word ὡς (hos), which is rendered ‘as’, but it cannot be that kind of mathematical thing.

If it were, God’s mercy would be reduced to a sort of bean-counting miserliness, and this is simply not the face of the Father revealed to us by Jesus. We must be merciful and forgive those who hurt us, but this is because only thus are we living out the first half of the Lord’s prayer – acknowledging God as our Father, bowing before his greatness, seeking his kingdom and doing his will, and receiving the bread of his grace. The fruit of all that is mercy—God’s mercy and forgiving love comes first, and makes us people of mercy, forgiving our enemies. And that’s the first fruit of our living as children of our Father in heaven.

 

Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Are You Ready For This?

Give us this day our daily bread

Reflection – On last Friday’s blog the Pope wrote about the Our Father as a prayer which uniquely bears us into Christ’s own prayer to his Father, and hence into the very heart and life of the Trinity. He urged us to study the words of the prayer carefully, as the deepest truths about God, and hence the deepest truths about man, are held within it. So, being shepherded by our good German in that way, I am blogging my way through the Lord’s prayer for a few days.

So we’ve already looked at what we find so hard to believe (that God is our loving Father), what we find hard to maintain in our modern skeptical age (reverence and awe), what we just don’t wanna do nohow noway (God’s will, not ours). Now we come to the petition that offends us in our practical sensible selves.

‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ Hmmph. Most people I know work pretty hard for their daily bread. In MH, while we certainly do live as a mendicant community, begging for alms from our benefactors, we also work very hard farming and doing everything else needed to put that daily bread on the table for ourselves and those we serve. God does not rain down loaves of bread or whatever else might qualify as subsistent fare for us. He expects us to work!

So what are we asking here, anyhow? Well, quite a lot really, and I don’t think a blog post will be long enough to exhaust it. It is true, isn’t it, that the first half of the Lord’s prayer is encompassing quite a program of life for us? Not to mention what we’re about to ask our Father for in the last petitions of the prayer. But to continually lift our minds and hearts to God in a continuous act of worship and love, to ongoingly surrender our will to His and give ourselves over to the building of his kingdom in our world—that’s quite a mouthful, isn’t it?

Are you up to that challenge? I’m not. I need help! And so the next logical petition in the prayer is, logically, just that. Helllllllllp! Give us what we need, Lord. My pantry is bare, my resources are simply not going to carry me through life in a godly, faithful, loving way.

When I was about to be ordained a priest, I had to fill in a ‘final evaluation’ – one small part of the endless paperwork seminary life entails. A question on it was ‘are you ready to be ordained?’ My answer began by saying that, while I was reasonably realistic about the demands and challenges of priestly life, and was quite happy to assume those challenges, I knew very well that my own ‘readiness’ would get me about as far as the seminary gates before I would collapse in a useless heap. They were OK with ordaining me, anyhow.

The first thing we need to know about living the Christian life is that we cannot do it. The level of faith, hope, love that God asks of us and that is the deep heart of living in the heart of Jesus, living in the heart of the Trinity, is so ridiculously beyond our capacity, that we simply must turn to God and say, ‘give us this day our daily bread.’

Is it the Eucharist? Yes. Is it the hidden working of grace in the depths of our soul? Yes. Is it the amazing reality that each day we do find it in us to serve, to love, to be kind, to forgive, when we’re not quite sure ourselves why and how we are doing it? Yes. Is it, even, practical help coming to us in ways that do not look miraculous—the kindness of strangers, the normal ebb and flow of human goodness in and around us? Yes, yes, yes.

All is from God ultimately, and all is ordered by God for our benefit ultimately. And even when the hunger pangs and seeming failure of our lives bite deeply into us, this too is ‘daily bread’ for us. This too is what we need, right now, to get deeper into Christ, deeper into God’s love. To experience painfully my utter poverty, my utter failure to love and be a Christian, the famine in the land, the starvation rations of my own frail and fickle humanity. All is, in a strange way, the bread of affliction I need today to spur me to turn to our Father in heaven in a new way, at a new depth, with a new purpose and a deeper sincerity of heart.

God gives us what we need—but this ‘need’ comes to us in strange packages and with sharp edges at times. So this petition calls us both to expectantly look to God for the help we need in life, but also to bow to His will with deep trust and faith.

Give us this day our daily bread.

A Matter of the Heart

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven

Reflection – On Friday’s blog the Pope wrote about the Our Father as a prayer which uniquely bears us into Christ’s own prayer to his Father, and hence into the very heart and life of the Trinity. He urged us to study the words of the prayer carefully, as the deepest truths about God, and hence the deepest truths about man, are held within it. So, being shepherded by our good German in that way, I am blogging my way through the Lord’s prayer for a few days.

So now we come to the cruncher of the prayer, where it all starts to get a bit ‘ouchy’ a bit ‘well, am I really praying this? Do I really mean this?’ We can at least make a leap of faith to God being our loving Father; we can acknowledge as a matter of sheer logic that He is transcendent in heaven and to be approached with reverence and devotion.

But… surrendering our will to Him? Ummm… can I get back to you on that one? Again, good ol’ logic kicks in here. We know that the kingdom of God is a way of saying a world ordered by perfect love, perfect truth, perfect justice leavened by perfect mercy. We know that God is all knowing, all good and all loving (well, we say we know this anyhow), and that therefore His will is our good.

But good ol’ logic only takes us so far on this path. We want to do our own will. We want to build our own kingdom. We like things arranged just as we want them. We may even have our own brilliant ideas about truth, justice, love and how to build God’s kingdom on earth. We’re not all sociopaths accruing personal power and wealth while cackling over the corpses of our enemies.

We’re nice people! Nice people who just want to do things our way! Nothing wrong with that. Oh wait… there’s everything in the world wrong with that. ‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’

Well, what is this will of God anyhow, that’s so all-fired important! I was just talking with someone about this recently. The person was agonizing over what God’s will was in a specific situation, and very disturbed at the prospect of doing something against God’s will. As I said to this person, you know, He doesn’t send us a registered letter each day detailing His will for our day.

We are meant to seek God’s will, long for God’s will, pray for God’s will, do it without question and without hesitation when it is revealed, and never do anything that we know is against His will (i.e. violate the moral law). But if God required us to perform His perfect will at every moment without faltering or stumbling or ever making the slightest mistake, He would be required as a matter of justice to, in fact, send us that registered letter each day, to make His perfect will perfectly clear at each moment to us.

I don’t know about you, but that is not the world I live in. God’s will is murky at times, somewhat clearer at other times. I live in a community where I have a superior and obedience, and this helps. Most of us spend our days with fairly obvious chores and demands in front of our noses, and that certainly helps.

But of course we can discern wrongly, and step outside his will, and He clearly allows us to do so and, I will be bold to say, doesn’t seriously mind. This is how we learn discernment, by doing things that were not quite it and stubbing our toes or bruising our noses on the brick walls of ‘not-God’s-will.’

It’s primarily a matter of the heart, this petition of the Lord’s will. To long for the kingdom, to long for God’s will, to ask for it, beg for it, desire it with fervent desire. And to know—really know—that our own will and our own kingdom are not really taking us to a happy place.

You know, this is how we live out that ‘hallowed be thy name’, that reverence to God. By seeking His will. He is our Father who loves us, is greater than us and worthy of reverent praise and worship, and so we are to cast aside all concerns but to do what He wishes of us. This how Jesus was with His Father, this is truly a reflection of the life of the Trinity, the Son from and with the Father from all eternity. And this is the true path of human life in this world, reflecting and destined to share in that divine life.

 

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Getting Real

Who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

Reflection – On Friday’s blog the Pope wrote about the Our Father as a prayer which uniquely bears us into Christ’s own prayer to his Father, and hence into the very heart and life of the Trinity. He urged us to study the words of the prayer carefully, as the deepest truths about God, and hence the deepest truths about man, are held within it. So, being shepherded by our good German in that way, I am blogging my way through the Lord’s prayer for a few days.

So right after the words ‘Our Father’ comes these next words, perhaps a bit remote to us, ‘who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name.’ Children of the space age and the Copernican universe, heaven to us either means that place we go when we die about which we know precisely nothing, or the vast empty expanses of outer space, where William Shatner boldly goes where no man has gone before.

Neither of these is terribly helpful to praying the Lord’s prayer, nor has much connection to the Greek word ouranois, or the Hebrew shamayim. God is not someone who we only meet when we die, or someone living light years away from us, accessible only if the warp drive is functioning.

Without getting into the whole intricacies of ancient cosmology—the concentric heavenly spheres of the Ptolemaic universe and all that—I think the simplest way of understanding ‘the heavens’ and God living there is that it is a way of saying that God is of a different order of being than us. The earthly realm and the heavenly realm were seen as radically different in essential ways, and God is not of the earthly mode of being.

God is transcendent, in other words. He is not the little god living in the shrine or temple, not a god who roams around like Zeus or Apollo seducing maidens or getting jealous of heroes. God is of an entirely different order of being from us, and this is the significance of His being ‘in heaven.’

He is not distant from us—He is our Father!—but he is different. And this difference calls forth from us a fundamental attitude which is reverence. Hallowed be thy name. This petition is so crucial, right at the beginning of the prayer, because we have this terrible human habit of reducing God to our size, cutting God up into the little bits that suit us and rejecting or at least ignoring the rest, and treating God as a hired servant here to do our bidding and arrange the world to our liking… that is, if He really loves us, He would do that for us.

Especially as Jesus reveals God to us in such intimate terms of fatherhood, we need an immediate salutary reminder that this father of ours is Father. We are not to tremble in fear of Him or keep our distance from His lest we offend Him, but we are to always approach Him on our knees, and with deep humility and reverence.

He is in heaven; we are not. We don’t really know all that much about God-as-God. We know quite a lot about how He wants us to live and what His fundamental attitude and action towards us is, but God Himself remains an unfathomable and awesome mystery.

And we acknowledge and live in the truth of this mystery by reverence. We of North America of the year 2013 have to work a bit to get there. We are so flippant, so irreverent, so ironic about everything. I am prone to that, certainly. To make fun of everything, up to and including God, is seen as a positive value, a virtue, something that establishes us (frankly) as the smartest person in the room, the one who can see through sham piety and cant, who won’t be taken in by anything.

Well, when it comes to God, if we won’t be taken in, we will have to remain outside. It is not really so smart to mock God, as it places us wholly outside the basic attitude necessary to be in communion with Him. It’s not that He gets angry with us and smites us; it is that we are so outside of reality when we do this that He who is the Real cannot reach us. We have to get real with God, and that reality is reverence and humble adoration.

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

Food and Drink, Foundation and Goal

The fact that Luke places the Our Father in the context of Jesus’ own praying is significant. Jesus thereby involves us in his own prayer; he leads us into the interior dialogue of triune love; he draws our human hardships deep into God’s heart, as it were. This also means, however, that the words of the Our Father are signposts to interior prayer, they provide a basic direction for our being, and they aim to configure us to the image of the Son. The meaning of the Our Father goes much further than the mere provision of a prayer text. It aims to form our being, to train us in the inner attitude of Jesus.

This has two different implications for our interpretation of the Our Father. First of all, it is important to listen as accurately as possible to Jesus’ words as transmitted to us in Scripture. We must strive to recognize the thoughts Jesus wished to pass on to us in these words. But we must also keep in mind that the Our Father originates from his own praying, from the Son’s dialogue with the Father. This means that it reaches down into depths far beyond the words. It embraces the whole compass of man’s being in all ages and can therefore never be fully fathomed by a purely historical exegesis, however important this may be.

Jesus of Nazareth 1, 132-3

Reflection – Well, this is certainly a mouthful to ponder, perhaps not just for a day, but for a life. I don’t know about you, but I can certainly rattle off the Our Father, in Mass, in the Office, in the rosary, with hardly a thought about any of it. Ourfatherwhoartinheavenhallowedbethyname… Inattention, habit, spiritual shallowness can all make of it an exercise with seemingly little value. So it’s good to read things like this, that remind us of just how deep this prayer is, just what depths of God it contains, just how far into the mystery of God it takes us, if we consent to be taken.

Our Father—perhaps the first two words alone are enough to ponder on. That God is Father, that the ultimate reality is not some nebulous ‘energy’ or some unfathomable unreachable mystery. He is Father—there is a relationship, a possibility of intimacy. There is provision and protection, care and concern, a rushing out of the house to embrace the son in love (cf. Luke 15). Everything good that we can say about the word ‘father’, all that we hope for and desire and perhaps experienced (or, sadly, maybe not) from our earthly fathers, all of this is who God tells us He is in a surpassing way.

But there’s more yet. God is Father in that our whole being comes from Him. He fashions us forth and shapes us into true sons and daughters, bearing his name and image. Our whole self and all it means is from Him and towards Him. God is Father… we can meditate on this one word for months without moving an inch further in the prayer.

He is also ‘our’ Father. And this too has great significance. I am not separated from you. We are not mere atoms bumping up against each other in the cosmic soup. I have a Father and you have a Father and He is the same Father of us both. So you are my brother, my sister. He is ours, and so this whole life of ‘from the Father/towards the Father’ is also a life of you with me and I with you. Called to communion with God, and in God, with one another. And this is the call of the Church.

And it is Jesus who ushers us into all these realities, not as mere words of some fool of a blog from some fool of a priest, but as a living reality, as food and drink for our souls, as a foundation we can live on, a height to which we can ascend. Jesus is the Son, and only in his Sonship and in our shared life with Him, can we know the Father in truth.

So that’s the first two words of the prayer. Perhaps the most important two words in the prayer; arguably the rest of the prayer is a commentary on how to live with God as our Father. But there is a call in all this, and a good call it is in this Year of Faith, to really slow down and look at these basic faith elements, these most common prayers and practices, and really delve into what they mean, why we do them, where they take us.

So… time for another series on the blog. I want to do something a little different for a few days. Since Pope Benedict here invites us to pay this close attention to the Our Father, I am going to let myself be ‘German Shepherded’ to do just that, and for the next days, rather than the usual blog format (quote the pope, discuss the quote), I will simply write meditations on each petition of the prayer. Hope you will enjoy it, and that it will be a spark to your own meditation and delving into the heart of Christ which is the doorway to the heart of the Trinity.

Apocalypse? Now, Please!

What did Jesus bring, if not world peace, universal prosperity, and a better world? What has he brought? The answer is simple: God. He has brought God. He has brought the God who formerly unveiled his countenance gradually, first to Abraham, then to Moses and the Prophets, and then in the Wisdom Literature—the God who revealed his face only in Israel, even though he was honored among the pagans in various shadowy guises.

It is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the true God whom he has brought to the nations of the earth. He has brought God, and now we know his face, now we can call upon him.  Now we know the path we human beings have to take in this world. Jesus has brought God, and with God the truth about our origin and destiny: faith, hope and love. It is only because of the hardness of our hearts that we think this too little.

Jesus of Nazareth 1, 44

Reflection – Yesterday we talked about the apocalyptic trends of some historic political movements (Marxism) and some current ones (radical environmentalism and gender politics). So what is Christian apocalyptism, then? After all, it’s our word. If society is not to be reborn in a violent revolution, what is the radical promise of renewal held out by Christianity?

Pope Benedict nails it here. Jesus brings us God. He brings us the truth of our origin, and the truth of our destiny, and the truth of how to get there. Not only does he bring it to us as intellectual knowledge, but he gives us the power to live and act on that knowledge.

He brings us faith, hope, and love—the capacity to know God, to attain God, to be one with God in this world and in the next. I do love his simple sentence: “It is only because of the hardness of our hearts that we think this too little.”

What is this hardness of heart? Well, I don’t know about you, but I personally want what I want. I want gross physical things like plenty of scrumptious food and abundant drink. I want ‘success’ – for me, defined as (now don’t be shocked!) being a best selling author of dozens of books, for you defined in other terms, probably. I want peace, which means that people who annoy me leave me alone, and people I like hang out with me. I want… well, you get the drift.

We want what we want, and all these wants take us far far away from the true center of our being, our innermost hearts. We get caught up in trivialities, like whether we have enough money in the bank or whether or not we are succeeding in our chosen field of endeavour. The world, the flesh, the devil all conspire to pull us out of our hearts into the chasing of temporal goods and will-o-the-wisps of worldly well-being.

All these do not matter; what matters is God and the life God gives us. A great deal of our spiritual life is a matter of getting back into our hearts and actually believing and living as if that were true. And that Jesus actually does give us what our deepest hearts most deeply need – God is with us, truly.

And from that radical satisfaction of our deep desires, we can then go out with wisdom and peace to serve the world, to combat injustice, to alleviate the sufferings of the poor, to restore dignity to those who have lost it, and to proclaim the truth God has given us to the world. We do not try to bring about the apocalypse. On one level, the apocalypse has already happened – God has come and revealed Himself. On another level we await the final revelation of God, and simply strive to live good and upright lives by the help of his grace.

It’s not terribly complicated, although life can get complicated enough sometimes. And it’s not always terribly glamorous, although it really is quite exciting, if you believe it is true.

I think I do believe it to be true—well, at least I'm excited by it! But that’s a choice we all have to make—is God real and has God given Himself to us truly in Jesus, and will He be the one who radically and utterly creates a new heaven and a new earth in His time? Or is all of that… well, not quite true. And so we are left to make our own earth into a rude facsimile of heaven, which generally results in a hell of a mess.

Ours to choose, and ours to live. Take your pick.

Apocalypse? Not!

[In] the world of the intellectuals, most of whom were well off, the rejection of reform became all the louder, and revolution increasingly took on a divine quality. They demanded something completely new; reality as it was evoked a strange feeling of surfeit.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 17

Reflection – Ratzinger here is offering a historical analysis of Marxism in the 19^th century. Of course the little snippet I excerpt here is one small part of a long and very fine analysis of this time period. The popularity of radical Marxist thought among the 19^th century intelligentsia and its relative lack of popularity among the very workers to whom it promised liberation is an interesting historical phenomenon.

So why blog about this in the year 2013? Because the underlying attitude described here is still very much with us, in wildly different ways. There are truly few people left who  long for the worker’s paradise and work for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Class warfare is stoked up as an electoral ploy by cynical politicians; I personally don’t believe too many of those politicians actually subscribe to the whole Marxist theory of history behind that phrase. Certainly politicians on all sides of the spectrum are happy to live in upper class splendor and luxury, even as they make pious speeches about the evils of wealth and the need for solidarity.

But this revolutionary urge, this desire to tear everything down and create a new world—it still is alive in the hearts and minds of at least some of our contemporaries. Environmentalism for example: in itself it is a good thing. Human beings should take care of the earth and not poison the air, water, soil. Madonna House was recycling long before it was fashionable, and there is no way to reduce one’s carbon footprint more effectively than to live in community as we do. We’re all about environmental responsibility here.

But the radical revolutionary environmental movement is something quite different. Human beings are a plague, a disease upon the earth, a cancer. The (scientifically dubious) specter of total global catastrophe is evoked to call for truly totalitarian state policies governing human fertility—China’s one child policy on a planetary scale. It is this revolutionary apocalyptic urge—not simply for people to ‘give a hoot, don’t pollute,’ but a desire to seize the reins of power to utterly reshape society, at the cost of millions or even billions of human lives, that is troublesome, to say the least. One could say that these people don’t have power, so it is of no concern. One could have said that about Karl Marx and his disciples in the 19^th century, too.

The radical LGBTQ agenda is another example. I am all in favor of treating people kindly and with respect. I hope I succeed in doing so in my personal life. Yes, I am Catholic and will continue to explain Catholic sexual morality in public as long as I am allowed to do so. I am indeed opposed to same-sex marriage and have tried to explain my thoughts on the matter a few times on this blog. (By the way, Mark Shea does a great job on that here in a few trenchant words, which is why he gets thousands of readers to my hundreds). But I’m all about ‘live and let live’ otherwise.

But the LGBTQ radicals do not wish to live and let live. There is a large swath of the rainbow that desires to eradicate religion, stamp out free speech, and impose a de-natured ideology of gender diversity upon society. Where the radical Green want to kill everyone (frankly), the radical LGBTQs want to ‘queer’ everyone (this is their own words, not mine, by the way).

So Ratzinger’s reflections on the history and psychological dynamics of Marxism are quite relevant, and I recommend the book I’m quoting today quite highly. Whenever a group in society begins to wish to tear down everything a build a new heavens and a new earth, watch out for that group. Gulags and secret police tend to follow upon that desire.

Reality as it is, is fundamentally good. Our proper task is to make it incrementally better—to strive to identify and eliminate clear injustices, to personally strive for charity and kindness and fair treatment in our own lives, to generally promote decency and discourage nastiness in ourselves and others.

More than that—the revolutionary urge, the apocalypse now agenda—is from the evil one, and has always and every time yielded immense human suffering and horrors whenever it has assumed a position of power in the world.

The Default Setting

We find the first mention of singing in the Bible after the crossing of the Red Sea. Israel has now been definitively delivered from slavery. In a desperate situation, it has had an overwhelming experience of God’s saving power. Just as Moses as a baby was taken from the Nile and only then really received the gift of life, so Israel now feels as if it has been, so to speak, taken out of the water: it is free, newly endowed with the gift of itself from God’s own hand… “Then Moses and the people of Israel sang this song to the Lord” (Ex 14:31).

Year by year, at the Easter Vigil, Christians join in the singing of this song. They sing it in a new way as their song, because they know that they have “been taken out of the water” by God’s power, set free by God for authentic life.

Spirit of the Liturgy, 136-7

Reflection – I realize that the blog has had a rather sombre tone in recent days, what with the 40^th Anniversary of the Roe v. Wade abortion decision in the US, and the related March for Life down there. We have to turn our eyes to these darker subjects from time to time, and this past week was one of those times.

However, enough of that (for now). It is so crucial in our personal lives and in our apostolic and social lives, to return always and emphatically to the deepest truth of God and humanity, of the world and its destiny. And this truth is the saving love of God, poured forth in time and history in Jesus Christ, a force and an action of grace and mercy continually drawing all humanity, anyone who will, into the life of freedom and joy.

This is the deepest and final truth about things. There are Egyptians enslaving us, yes. There are enemies pursuing us, yes. There are deserts to cross, yes. Our own rebellious stiff-necked selves to contend with, emphatically yes. We are not in the Promised Land of heaven yet, and all this stuff is with us until we are, yes, yes, yes.

But the deepest truth is salvation. The deepest truth is love and mercy. And we have to live in that deepest truth, and act out of it, both for our own peace and joy in this life, and if we ever hope to convince even one other human being of it.

As Ratzinger says here, the normal response to this truth, to knowing that our lives have been saved miraculously, to the experience of deliverance, is to burst into song. This is the primary, almost reflexive, human response to a happy turn of events.

Now I’m kind of a musical guy—nothing professional, but I enjoy making music and singing and am at least not offensively off-key most of the time. I realize that for some, the notion of breaking into song is not a pleasant one, and is definitely not their idea of a happy response to good news. Fair enough… as long as joy is communicated somehow.

We have to live in the joy of salvation and mercy, and we have to convey this joy to others. If not by bursting into song (which admittedly may annoy those others more than anything), then somehow. If we believe that what God in his Word says He has done is really and truly done, then joy must be our natural state of being, the ‘default setting’ in our internal software, the center of gravity towards which we incline.

Some people, true, are prone to a more melancholy temperament, tend towards a certain gravitas, a certain serious view of life. This is not wrong, of course. But joy has to break through even for the most melancholy babies among us. Christ is risen. Death is conquered. The hope of heaven is real. We are not headed towards disaster and the grave.

 

And so joy and song and laughter, or at least a quiet strong certainty of the goodness of God and of life, must be our normal Christian attitude. This is most especially so if our lives are filled with challenges, sorrows, strivings, difficulties. We have to turn to God above all in those times and place all our hope and trust in Him. And ask Him to confirm us in the joy and peace of knowing His love and the assurance of knowing that He is bigger than all the darkness, all the pain, and all the evil the world can throw at us. Which He is.

It's Not the Crime, It's the Cover-Up

Human beings can only be healthy when they are true and when they stop suppressing and destroying the truth.

In the Beginning, 80

Reflection – A little vintage one-liner from Ratzinger here – let’s see what I make of it. I don’t have the book in front of me, so can’t tell you what the context of this is; quite possibly he is talking about the lies of the serpent in Genesis 3, and how the fall of our humanity into sin and sorrow came in the form of lies and deceit.

Of course, all sin is a form of lying. Theft is a lie about property and meaning and value of the world’s goods. Murder is a lie about the relative value of human life and the respect it is due. Sins of violence are a lie about human freedom and dignity. Sins of superstition and false religion are a lie about the nature of  God and the nature of creation. Specific sins of disobedience to the Church are a lie about the nature and God-given authority of the Church. And sexual sins are a lie about the nature of love and its bodily expression.

All sin is flight from reality, denial of truth. But it seems to me that the real damage is done to our humanity, not by the initial fall into sin to which (alas) we all are prone. No, it is the denial of the sin, the hardening of the heart against repentance, the construction of rationalizations and alternate ethical constructs—whatever it takes so that we can keep doing what we want to do.

In other words, it’s not the crime, it’s the cover up. It’s not that the sin itself is harmless—sin by definition harms—but that the real, lasting, and eternally damaging harm is impenitence more than sin. All the harms of sin can be healed by a sincere turning to God for mercy, but the refusal to turn to God for mercy cannot be healed at all.

And so we had this past weekend the spectacle of 500 000 pro-life protestors walking the streets of Washington, an event that was apparently near-invisible to the media, who saw at most ‘thousands’ (technically accurate, in the same sense that ‘hundreds’ of people were killed in WWII), and who made sure to photograph and interview the five pro-abortion rights protestors at the Supreme Court in the interest of ‘balanced reporting’.

There is a desire to cover up the reality of abortion, to do anything to avoid having to talk about it, look at it, honestly discuss what happens in an abortion, to honestly discuss the scientific facts of when a human life begins and the real legal and moral implications of those facts. It is this suppression and distortion of the truth—and of course abortion is only one instance of it, if perhaps the most serious one with the highest body count—that is the deep pathology of humanity in our time.

Abortion hurts everyone. It kills the fetus, does incalculable damage to the woman, unmans the man in the deepest reality of his masculinity, which is to protect and provide for his own. It damages the medical system horribly by negating its whole purpose, which is to heal and save lives. It robs politicians of their integrity. It makes the mass of society complicit in a web of lies and nonsense—silly slogans about choice and reproductive health substituting for actual thought, and the result is another year of wholesale slaughter of babies in the clinics and hospitals of our land.

I promise to move on to another subject tomorrow. I realize this is a heavy one that can only be looked at for so long before it all becomes a little too much. But we need to be clear that the truth does, in fact, set us free, even if our freedom may involve some weeping, some sorrow of contrition, some painful call to conversion. But the truth is good: God is merciful and loving, human beings are infinitely precious in his sight, and so must not be destroyed, the world is a good place, and love truly is the answer to every problem, every hurt, every ailment, every life.

We need not fear the truth; we need not flee from the truth; we need not distort or suppress the truth about anything, however painful, however humiliating. God’s mercy and his power to heal and save are greater than all that, and the fullness of truth he brings us into is beautiful, glorious, and joyful. And with that, we will put the subject of abortion to rest for a little while, and turn our minds to some aspect or other of that glorious truth tomorrow.

Retreat! Retreat!

So, off I am heading now to the distant city of Pem Broke Ontario (for those non-locals, it's about an hour away), to give a men's retreat. Expecting about 35 guys there, so should be full and fun.
As always, have no idea until I get there if I have wifi or what, so may be blogging again on Monday, or may be back here tomorrow.
Until then, prayers please, for the event.

40 Years Later

[Mary’s] whole life embodies what is meant by ‘Zion’. She does not construct a self-enclosed individuality whose principal concern is the originality of its own ego. She does not wish to be just this one human being who defends and protects her own ego. She does not want to regard life as a stock of goods of which everyone wants to get as much as possible for himself. Her life is such that she is transparent to God, ‘habitable’ for him. Her life is such that she is a place for God. Her life sinks her into the common measure of sacred history, so that what appears in her is, not the narrow and constricted ego of an isolated individual, but the whole, true Israel.

 Mary, the Church at the Source, 66

Reflection – The March for Life this year in Washington DC, on the tragic 40^th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade which nullified all abortion laws in America, coincides this year with today’s feast of the Conversion of St. Paul.

Meanwhile my Randomized Ratzinger Quote Generator™ coughed up this little gem which was one of the key drivers for my licentiate thesis on Mary and modernity. All of which comes together rather significantly, it seems to me.

Apparently some recent polls show a swing in the direction of pro-choice sentiment in America. While these polls have been critiqued (as polls always are), the fact is inarguable that abortion is legal because there is no real will to make it illegal. This is true in the USA, and even more true in Canada, where abortion can hardly be discussed in the public forum at all.

This means that there is profound need, a desperate need for conversion in our society. Fundamentally, we want abortion legal because we want to have sex without consequences. Human beings at their smallest and most vulnerable are killed by dismemberment by the hundreds of thousands each year so that we can structure society around consequence-free sex. I am striving here to use the most non-inflammatory and yet accurate language I can find, by the way.

The Ten Commandments all hang together, by the way, it turns out. If a man is going to commit adultery, he is also going to have to lie, and he certainly is no longer worshipping God. Thieves by definition are covetous, and liars, and violent. And idolators inevitably perform human sacrifice for their gods.

The god of sexual freedom is a particularly blood-thirsty one, and the corpses piled high on that altar number now in the tens of millions in North America alone.

And so… conversion. Stop worshipping the god of autonomy and start worshipping the God of Israel. And this description of Mary from Ratzinger is just about perfect in describing this worship and this God. To be habitable for God, to be an open space where He can live, to abandon the project of life as an exercise in egoism and acquisition, to live a life ordered to something bigger and better than ourselves, yet which is the deepest truth of ourselves—this is what Mary shows us, and what true human life and true human dignity consists of.

Of course this takes us far beyond the specific issue of abortion. It has implications for economic life, political life, for how we treat the poor and how we live in our neighborhoods and churches and work places. But abortion is, I would say, the most important issue of our time, simply because it is the open gaping wound of our society which claims the lives of hundreds of thousands of unborn human beings each year, blights the lives of their mothers, coarsens and deadens the hearts and minds of their fathers, and perpetuates our society in a truly demonic system of child sacrifice at the service of lust and greed.

I realize some who read this will be offended by my words. You know, I don’t really care. I do realize that individual women have abortions often because they are scared, or shamed, or coerced into it. We need to help them, and the pro-life movement does a great deal to do just that.

But the larger reality of abortion, the hardening of hearts and consciences, the turning of blind eyes towards the fact of abortion, the tacit decision of the silent majority to maintain a status quo that is truly a culture of death—this has to be brought into the light and called what it is.

It is evil, and our civilization, insofar as it chooses to maintain this reality, is an evil civilization. And so, we all need a conversion, and let us pray for that grace of repentance and conversion in all our hearts.