What Science Cannot Do

Up to [the dawning of modernity], the recovery of what man had lost through the expulsion from Paradise was expected from faith in Jesus Christ: herein lay “redemption”. Now, this “redemption”, the restoration of the lost “Paradise” is no longer expected from faith, but from the newly discovered link between science and praxis. It is not that faith is simply denied; rather it is displaced onto another level—that of purely private and other-worldly affairs—and at the same time it becomes somehow irrelevant for the world. This programmatic vision has determined the trajectory of modern times and it also shapes the present-day crisis of faith which is essentially a crisis of Christian hope. Thus hope too, in Francis Bacon, acquires a new form. Now it is called: faith in progress. For Bacon, it is clear that the recent spate of discoveries and inventions is just the beginning; through the interplay of science and praxis, totally new discoveries will follow, a totally new world will emerge, the kingdom of man. He even put forward a vision of foreseeable inventions—including the aeroplane and the submarine. As the ideology of progress developed further, joy at visible advances in human potential remained a continuing confirmation of faith in progress as such.

Spe Salvi 17

Reflection – This passage brings up once again one of Pope Benedict’s perennial themes: the substitution of human progress for salvation in Christ in the modern era. The age of discovery and inventions (still ongoing, of course) held out at one time an assurance that in time, human beings would solve every problem, crack all the riddles of existence, and be able to eliminate suffering from the world.
It is truly hard to see how anyone can maintain this attitude today. I’m not sure anyone does, really. For myself, growing up as I did in the world science created, a world that in my childhood was continually threatened by the prospect of nuclear destruction, the ideology of science holds little appeal.
As Ratzinger has always underlined throughout his writings, the problem is that scientific and technological progress tells us how to do things; it does not and cannot tell us what we are supposed to do. It certainly has no faculty at all to tell us what we must not do if we wish to remain human at all.
It can tell us how we might alleviate the suffering of a given disease, but cannot tell us that experimentation on murdered human fetuses is a crime against all justice and goodness, a callous destruction of human life that calls into question the entire human project.
It can tell us everything about fetal development, and the delicate bonds that connect the life of the growing child to the life of its mother; it cannot tell us that we must not deliberately sever that bond and end that life, and that to do so unleashes evil into the world beyond our comprehension.
It can tell us so many things… except the things we most urgently need to know if we are to live happy lives of dignity, freedom, and joy. Science has nothing to say, nothing at all, about these matters. And we have to be clear about that.
So we cannot put our ‘faith’ in scientific progress. It is valuable indeed, and who would want to live in a world without the discoveries of the past 500 years? But it is not the source of happiness. For that, we must go somewhere else: to the quest for perennial wisdom, the deep plunge into the wellsprings of human thought and understanding, the challenge to penetrate and contemplate the meaning of life and existence.
In the Christian religion, we understand that God has offered Himself in Jesus Christ to humanity to open the path of wisdom and goodness to us. Clearly, not everybody feels they can accept that path or believe that God has done this. But for those who are not or cannot be Christians, there is a call nonetheless to find a path of truth and wisdom that is deep enough, persuasive enough, to shape the development and use of technology and scientific invention. Without this, we are truly at the mercy of the powerful elites who control the levers of the world… and they may not know anything more than we do about what they should do, but they certainly seem to know what they want to do… to us.
And this is among the most urgent tasks of our time – to provide a rational and persuasive basis to resist this exaltation of power and control over the whole of our lives. This is what Pope Benedict has labored hard to provide; this is what this blog is about.

The True Ark

[Mary is] the true Ark of the Covenant in Israel, so that the symbol of the Ark gathers an incredibly realistic force: God in the flesh of a human being, which flesh now becomes his dwelling place in the midst of creation.

Mary, the Church at the Source, 65

Reflection – We all remember the climatic scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark—the one with the melting Nazis and all that. While it made for a stirring action film, we have to be clear that the real ark of the covenant is a much more profound reality, much more beautiful, much more meaningful.

God has made his home among men—this is the point. The historical ark of the covenant, as we read in 1 Samuel 4, truly symbolized the presence of God among his people, but we see there how they used this object as a way of ‘making God’ fight their battles. The ark, the physical object, begins to be used as a magical object, something we can manipulate so as to manipulate God.

This project of ‘manipulating’ God by manipulating the signs and symbols of our religion is not exactly alien to us. We may not be quite as crude about it as the ancient Israelites, but many of us harbor the idea that if we just say certain prayers, if we just carry around certain sacramentals, if we just follow certain rules—well, then, it will all turn out all right. Everything will go according to (our) plan.

And of course, this form of ‘religion’ is doomed to failure. We do not manipulate God. Our life is not about our own plans and ideas. The whole point of all reality is the obedience of faith, the total surrender of the human person to the mystery of God and his love for the world. It was no doubt by the mercy of God that the original Ark was lost forever, as it would have continued to pull Israel into this totemic kind of magical religion, instead of the true dynamic of faith.

So we have Mary emerging from the heart of our Christian faith as the true Ark of the Covenant. The one who makes a home for God in the world precisely through this obedience, this totality of surrender. If we understand this—that the home of God in the world is found only in this obedience, this act of surrender, then all our shabby and rather pathetic ways of trying to make God present fall away.

No longer do we try to ‘please’ God by slavish ritual or fearful rule-keeping; no longer do we try to impress God with a ‘pious’ demeanor or a continually cheerful countenance. The obedience of faith is very different from all of that, even though it encompasses fidelity to ritual, moral life, true devotion to piety, and a radical commitment to joy.

But it’s all about love, not fear. It’s about knowing the One who we follow is awesome, beautiful, glorious, and good beyond measure. It is not about a grubby little effort to make God behave Himself.

Mary stands before us always as the great icon of the obedience of faith, the human creature who was so obedient, so given over, that God could actually physically take flesh in her womb. And that is why we hold Mary in high esteem, keep her statues and pictures in prominent places in our churches and homes, and ask her help and intercession continually. She knows what the presence of God is, and how to place ourselves in that presence, and how to offer ourselves to Him so that we too can become his tabernacles in the world today.

Who Wants to Be Free?

Freedom [is seen] as the right and the opportunity to do just what we wish and not to have to do anything which we do not wish to do. Said in other terms: freedom would mean that our own will is the sole norm of our action and that the will not only can desire anything but also has the chance to carry out its own desire. At this point, however, questions begin to arise: how free is the will after all? And how reasonable is it?

“Truth and Freedom,” in Communio Spring 1996, 17

Reflection – Ah, the perennial question of freedom! A favorite of Ratzinger’s, a favorite on this blog. The above idea of freedom is exactly what most modern people would unhesitatingly say, if you pressed them for a definition. ‘Being able to do what I want to do!’ – it sounds so very reasonable. What else could freedom be, anyhow?
But, as Ratzinger says, ‘questions begin to arise.’ If that is the only measure of freedom, the only meaning of freedom, then how free is it? How valuable is it? How real is it?
‘I am free. I do what I want.’ But where do your desires come from? Are they just the animal drives of your passions: “Og want food now! Og want sleep! Og want pretty cave woman! Urg!’ If that’s the whole source of your desires, then you are not free in the slightest. You are the slave of your desires, being borne along irresistibly by whatever sensible object is placed before you that you like. The greyhounds chasing the rabbit around the race track may be having a good time, but one would not call them free.
Or are our desires informed by something outside us? But then the question is, by what? Society, the world we live in, places all sorts of ‘things’ in front of us as things to be desired: home ownership, a successful career, a stock portfolio, marriage, children (two or three, maximum, or else you’re irresponsible!), etc. But if we simply sign on to whatever society decrees the good life to be and go chasing after it… well, how free is that? When everything you want is simply everything society has told you from day one of your life that you’re supposed to want, you may be many things, but free is not one of them.
Maybe you’re an idealist of some sort, and your freedom consists in having decided to live by certain ideals. Well, we’re getting warmer here, but again… what ideals? Where are they from? What are their origins? Have you examined them? Are they true? Because to embrace a bunch of ideals that are not really true is just another form of slavery to desires or soical conventions.
Again, society and the larger culture (whatever that means) have a whole set of ideals they present in every age to their more idealistically inclined citizens. Right now tolerance is a prime ideal, and environmental stewardship. These are not bad things, of course, but if you uncritically accept the current slate of ideas and intellectual fads… well, again, you may be many things, but free is not among them.
Ah, freedom! It is elusive… and people, seeing the difficulty of its demands, can sometimes decide it’s just too much bother. Isn’t it easier just to chase the objects of desires, sign on to society’s norms of the good life, and console oneself with the fashionable ideologies of the day? Is freedom such a great thing, after all, since it seems to be so much bloody work?
But… we are made for freedom. And we all know that, somehow. It’s not so easy to just say, ‘well, forget about freedom – I’ll be a society drone sating myself on bread and circuses.’ Something in us resists that – we are made for freedom.
So we know it’s not slavery to passions, or to social expectation, or to fashions of thought. What is freedom, then? It is, as Ratzinger develops magnificently in this article, a response in love to the demands of truth. Freedom, once we accept its yoke, makes us into pilgrims seeking the truth, the goodness, and the beauty of all things, and demands of us a responsible attitude towards this truth, which is the embrace of love.
This pilgrimage becomes a very deep matter indeed. It is not just the truth that ‘chocolate is yummy’ – so let’s embrace it with love and enthusiasm! It is the deeper truth – what is the world for? Where is it from? What is the point of it all? If we are to be free, and remain free, these deep questions emerge inevitably. How can I live in truth, if the horizons of truth are reduced to the immediate and the obvious? If truth is smaller than me, how can it be the framework in which I live?
There is much more to be said here, and I will return to the subject on this blog, as I have many times already – but that’s enough for now. The questions insistent upon all of us, though, are ‘what is freedom? Is it real? Is it valuable? Am I free?’

Man's True Peril

The Greek world, whose zest for life is wonderfully portrayed in the Homeric epics, was nonetheless deeply aware that man’s real sin, his deepest temptation, is hubris—the arrogant presumption of autonomy that leads man to put on the airs of divinity, to claim to be his own god, in order to possess life totally and to draw from it every last drop of what it has to offer. This awareness that man’s true peril consists in the temptation to ostentatious self-sufficiency, which at first seems so plausible, is brought to its full depth in the Sermon on the Mount in light of the figure of Christ.

Jesus of Nazareth, Part One, 98-9

Reflection – ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’ – this is the text the Pope has in mind in this passage. It really is all about the perennial question of philosophy, which is really the perennial question of humanity. What will make us happy? What is the good life? What are we to be?

We see all around us the playing out of precisely this hubris that the Greeks were so aware of, this strange idea human beings get that what is best for us is that we get to unilaterally decide what is best for us, that the road to fulfillment and goodness is the road of the unhampered ego, that the more power we have, the more we get to call the shots in our life, the better off we are.

Because this attitude does not actually correspond to the metaphysical reality of the cosmos, of course it sets us on a path to disaster. We are not little gods, able to make up our own version of reality. Reality is. When we flout it, reality bites. If I smoke a pack a day, I will get emphysema; if I eat lots of bad food, I will get fat and worse; if I refuse to think clearly and seek truth, I will become dull and stupid; if I do as I please with my passions, my relationships will lie in ruins.

Simply on the ‘natural level’ (whatever that means, really) I am not a little god making up reality. I have to conform my choices to the real world in which I live, or I will perish. But we can experience this as a necessary evil, I think - something we have to accept, but would change if we could. What the Sermon on the Mount tells us, what Jesus tells us, is that in fact we are blessed to be poor, to be meek, to be seeking righteousness. To be in this condition of dependency, of bowing to truth and goodness, to be the seekers, the contemplators, the disciples, not the masters and fashioners of reality—that this is blessedness.

Jesus can tell us this because He actually is God, and this is the way He chose to come to us. Not in almighty power making a big show of it, not bashing heads and laying down the law in a harsh masterful manner. He came in poverty, in lowliness, in weakness. And He is God.

And as the Christian Church received the Gospel and began to meditate on it, the whole doctrine of the Trinity began to shed some light on this mystery. That God the Son, who was incarnate of the Virgin Mary in Jesus the Christ, Himself in the fullness of his divinity received everything that the Father was—this becomes a fact of enormous significance to us.

Even in the very Godhead, in the very reality of divinity, in God-as-God (not only God-become man, in other words) there is an attitude of receptivity. God is entirely different from us, in ways that beggar our understanding and hence our language, but nonetheless, the Son receives Being from the Father; the Son is (God forgive me my poor words!) not autonomous. The Son, who in Jesus shows us the path of true human life, reveals to us something so astounding about God that we truly do not know what to say about it.

In the face of this revelation, all we can really say is that we really don’t know very much about reality. We really understand almost nothing. But we have been given, in God’s gracious mercy and love, a Teacher, a Shepherd, a Master. We don’t need to understand a whole lot about how it all fits together: God and Man, freedom and law, discipleship and lordship. We need to come to Him and listen, take his yoke upon our shoulders, for his yoke is easy and his burden is light. He knows how to be human, and He is God. He knows what a happy human life is, and He Himself is our happiness. Listen to Him.

Tried By Fire

With death, our life-choice becomes definitive—our life stands before the judge. Our choice, which in the course of an entire life takes on a certain shape, can have a variety of forms. There can be people who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and readiness to love, people for whom everything has become a lie, people who have lived for hatred and have suppressed all love within themselves. This is a terrifying thought, but alarming profiles of this type can be seen in certain figures of our own history. In such people all would be beyond remedy and the destruction of good would be irrevocable: this is what we mean by the word Hell. On the other hand there can be people who are utterly pure, completely permeated by God, and thus fully open to their neighbors—people for whom communion with God even now gives direction to their entire being and whose journey towards God only brings to fulfillment what they already are.

For the great majority of people—we may suppose—there remains in the depths of their being an ultimate interior openness to truth, to love, to God. In the concrete choices of life, however, it is covered over by ever new compromises with evil—much filth covers purity, but the thirst for purity remains and it still constantly re-emerges from all that is base and remains present in the soul. What happens to such individuals when they appear before the Judge? Will all the impurity they have amassed through life suddenly cease to matter? What else might occur? Saint Paul, in his First Letter to the Corinthians, gives us an idea of the differing impact of God's judgment according to each person's particular circumstances. He does this using images which in some way try to express the invisible, without it being possible for us to conceptualize these images—simply because we can neither see into the world beyond death nor do we have any experience of it. Paul begins by saying that Christian life is built upon a common foundation: Jesus Christ. This foundation endures. If we have stood firm on this foundation and built our life upon it, we know that it cannot be taken away from us even in death. Then Paul continues: “Now if any one builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw—each man's work will become manifest; for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If any man's work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire” (1 Cor 3:12-15). In this text, it is in any case evident that our salvation can take different forms, that some of what is built may be burned down, that in order to be saved we personally have to pass through “fire” so as to become fully open to receiving God and able to take our place at the table of the eternal marriage-feast.

Spe Salvi 45-6

Reflection – This is a lengthier passage from the Pope than I normally quote, so my reflection will be correspondingly briefer. I couldn’t really excerpt it or cut it up into small pieces without it ceasing to makes sense. It is interesting that the Pope here makes a profoundly scriptural argument for Purgatory, using the quote from 1 Corinthians, along with a philosophical argument based on what we all know of human behavior, mostly from our own interior self-knowledge. Most of us desire goodness, freedom, love, joy, and yet most of us act otherwise, at least some of the time. How is God to receive such conflicted messed-up creatures into the kingdom of light and love? By washing away our impurities, by purging us of them… that’s all. It’s truly not a complicated doctrine. The imagery used to describe this purgation is just that—imagery—and my own opinion is that the traditional images (fire and lengths of time and all that) are no longer terribly helpful for us. But the resistance one often hears about Purgatory - that it's some kind of horrible heavy teaching, baffles me. What do we want - to be filled with selfishness and malice and all sorts of nonsense for all eternity? How can we become pure if God doesn't purify us?

It truly is God’s great mercy towards us that leads us to posit this doctrine – we know that in heaven there is nothing but love; we know that almost all of us are a mixture of love and hate, light and darkness. We know, then, that God in his mercy helps us do what we seemingly could not or would not do during our lives – transforms us into all light. This probably hurts (we know it hurts in this life to repent and turn away from sin). But in his love he hurts us, so as to save us and enfold us into his kingdom, where we will be joyful forever. Thanks, God! Thanks, Father! Thanks, Jesus, for giving us Purgatory!

Justice is Mysterious

To protest against God in the name of justice is not helpful. A world without God is a world without hope (cf. Eph 2:12). Only God can create justice. And faith gives us the certainty that he does so. The image of the Last Judgement is not primarily an image of terror, but an image of hope; for us it may even be the decisive image of hope. Is it not also a frightening image? I would say: it is an image that evokes responsibility, an image, therefore, of that fear of which Saint Hilary spoke when he said that all our fear has its place in love. God is justice and creates justice. This is our consolation and our hope. And in his justice there is also grace. This we know by turning our gaze to the crucified and risen Christ. Both these things—justice and grace—must be seen in their correct inner relationship. Grace does not cancel out justice.

Spe Salvi 44

Reflection – Today in Madonna House we are burying one of our members, Paul Holland, as I mentioned a couple of days ago. This passage from Spe Salvi is quite apt, then, for the mystery of community is once again going through, the mysterious passage of one our own from death to life through this strange and terrible encounter with Christ, an encounter that none of us really knows anything about until we pass through it.

There is justice, and there is grace. There is justice because God loves us. We matter to him, and so our actions matter to him. What did we choose to do in this world? How have we chosen to love? What has our response been to the Love given to us in Christ by God? These things matter; there is justice, there is a reckoning. What that reckoning looks like and how it is managed—well, that we don’t know too much about. But God’s genuine love for us demands it. It is no sign of love to say to someone, “Oh, whatever – I don’t really care what you did.” That’s not love – that’s indifference, and when we humans say that kind of nonsense to each other (usually in the name of love) it really means, “I want what you give me so badly that I will ignore everything real about you.”

Of course we keep loving people who do wrong things, but we are never indifferent to the harm they do to themselves and to others. That is not love; that is selfishness.

So our loving God exercises justice towards us… but in that justice there is grace. There is mercy. There is Christ, and his wounds, his death, his strange and most mysterious self-offering for us.

There is justice, but ‘justice’ itself comes to mean something very different in light of all this business of Jesus and his saving work. How to make sense of it all, especially since none of us will ever know exactly how it works until we are there? Well, we come, I believe, into an encounter with Christ somewhere in all this mystery. For some, it may even be before death – this strange moment when there is ‘just me’ and ‘just Jesus’ – no pretence, no hiding, no fighting—just encounter. And this encounter is just—everything in us is that is not love is burned, consumed, smelted, sifted—all the images we care to use to describe purification. But there is grace, there is mercy in this encounter. The one who judges us died to save us. If we have any openness to this gift of salvation, he will take it and draw us through justice to mercy, through purification to illumination and union, through mystery of death into mystery of life eternal.

And so we are getting ready to bury Paul Holland on a cold Canadian winter day. Paul was a very ordinary man, with the ordinary struggles and pains, brokenness and goodness of all ordinary men. And now he is somewhere in this mystery, and so we pray for him. And all of us ordinary men and women—all of us are moving into this same mystery, this same strange, strange encounter with Him, with Love, with the just and merciful One. So let us pray for one another, too, that grace may temper justice, and God may be merciful to all of us.

A New Freedom

A new freedom is created with regard to this habitual foundation of life, which only appears to be capable of providing support, although this is obviously not to deny its normal meaning. This new freedom, the awareness of the new “substance” which we have been given, is revealed not only in martyrdom, in which people resist the overbearing power of ideology and its political organs and, by their death, renew the world. Above all, it is seen in the great acts of renunciation, from the monks of ancient times to Saint Francis of Assisi and those of our contemporaries who enter modern religious Institutes and movements and leave everything for love of Christ, so as to bring to men and women the faith and love of Christ, and to help those who are suffering in body and spirit.

In their case, the new “substance” has proved to be a genuine “substance”; from the hope of these people who have been touched by Christ, hope has arisen for others who were living in darkness and without hope. In their case, it has been demonstrated that this new life truly possesses and is “substance” that calls forth life for others. For us who contemplate these figures, their way of acting and living is de facto a “proof” that the things to come, the promise of Christ, are not only a reality that we await, but a real presence: he is truly the “philosopher” and the “shepherd” who shows us what life is and where it is to be found.

Spe Salvi 8

Reflection – Today’s post follows upon yesterday’s reflection on Hebrews 10:34 – the persecuted Christians who were willing to lose their ‘substance’ (property) because they had hope of another ‘substance’ (eternal life). Earlier in the encyclical the Pope had introduced the ancient image of Christ as philosopher and shepherd, guiding us on the path of wisdom that leads to life.

So we see in this part of the encyclical the value of consecrated life, of the promises or vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience being lived out by individuals and communities. Those of us called to this vocation make visible to the whole Church the simple reality that this world is not the only one there is, that the goods of this world are not the most important goods human beings are to pursue.

We are not to scramble after money and hoard it like a dog with a bone; we are not to look to human relationships and intimacy as if they will provide us with the love and communion our deepest hearts desire; we are not to stake all our value on self-determination and self-will. The practices of poverty, chastity, and obedience being lived by those of us called to that form of life are meant to have an application in the life of each baptized person. It will be very different for married people, for single people, for young people still searching for their life vocation, but all are called to hold worldly goods in low esteem, to turn to God and God alone for the love they crave, and to seek his will in all things.

Of course, if there is no God and no hope beyond this world, all of this is silly nonsense, and harmful nonsense at that, since it deprives us of the only happiness there is—a surfeit of worldly delights—for an illusory joy. That the worldly happiness on offer is fleeting at best and eludes a large percentage of humanity most of the time—well, that’s just too bad. Life sucks and then you die.

So for me, and for any of us who have been beckoned by Christ onto this beautiful road of consecrated life, there is a powerful imperative to bear witness to the goodness, the joy that these renunciations bring. And so I do that, here and now. What God has given me in Christ is so much beyond the trivialities I have given up for him (money, marriage, career!) that I have no words for it. I give him finite temporal goods; He gives me His infinite self. And joy. And peace. And hope. And love.

If anyone happens to be reading this who is troubled by a vague sense of call to some consecrated form of life—religious life, priesthood, maybe even Madonna House!—I encourage you to not be afraid, but to boldly throw everything aside and run after Christ. Even if He turns out to have another plan for you, He is not outdone in generosity, and will use your generous self-abandonment to bring you exactly where He wants you to be. And what else do we need, than to be where God wants us to be?

Prayer Request

One of our Madonna House members, Paul Holland, died today after a lengthy and at times quite difficult time of old age and illness. He was our oldest man, dying just shy of his 90th birthday. Pray for him, and for all of us as we accompany him on the last lap of his journey into the mystery of God and eternity.

What Gives Us Security?

[In Hebrews 10:34] the author speaks to believers who have undergone the experience of persecution and he says to them: “you had compassion on the prisoners, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property (hyparchonton), since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession (hyparxin) and an abiding one.” Hyparchonta refers to property, to what in earthly life constitutes the means of support, indeed the basis, the “substance” for life, what we depend upon. This “substance”, life's normal source of security, has been taken away from Christians in the course of persecution. They have stood firm, though, because they considered this material substance to be of little account. They could abandon it because they had found a better “basis” for their existence—a basis that abides, that no one can take away. We must not overlook the link between these two types of “substance”, between means of support or material basis and the word of faith as the “basis”, the “substance” that endures. Faith gives life a new basis, a new foundation on which we can stand, one which relativizes the habitual foundation, the reliability of material income.

Spe Salvi 8

Reflection – In a time of economic instability and uncertainty, these words from Pope Benedict are timely. Well, they’re always timely, aren’t they? ‘Do not worry about what you are to eat, what you are to wear, where you are to live’ (cf. Mt 6:25). It is one of the permanent areas of struggle for a believer to take these words quite literally and not get paralyzed or trapped by anxiety over material goods.

And of course this is an area where many can raise a host of perfectly reasonable objections. Money does not, in fact, grow on trees, and all those perfectly sensible, perfectly reasonable observations about the practical realities of life in the world.

Granted. We are not to be improvident, not to be silly about things. But we have to take the words from the Lord in Matthew’s Gospel, the words from Hebrews, the words of the Pope to heart nonetheless. It’s a question of knowing where our security lies. It does not lie in a bank balance, an RRSP or whatever alphabetized jumble you have for your retirement. It does not lie in having a nice home or a secure job or an impressive resume.

We are seeing these days what we all already know: all of that can be swept away at any moment. The house can burn down, the money or stock portfolio can evaporate quickly in a changing volatile economy, the job can vanish too. If our security is found in these things, we are building our life on sand and there are other Gospel passages (not to mention building codes) advising us against that particular course of action.

The question looms large these days, but it’s a permanent question: do we have anything else? Is there another ‘possession’ which gives us a better security? And what implications does this have for our life here and now?

Many people, it seems to me, are paralyzed somewhat from fear of economic ruin these days. Young people are slow to get married, not only because of financial reasons, but certainly because they are told they have to be financially and professionally secure before considering marriage. Practically, this means they cannot marry until their late 20s or early 30s… and realistically this means they will not live chaste lives. We all know that, yet so many, even practicing Catholics, uncritically accept the priority of financial security over the peril of mortal sin. Better to fornicate together than be poor together, I suppose the reasoning goes.

Clearly there is little understanding of the real grounds of security for our lives in this particular calculus. But I have seen this in other contexts, too. Young people who feel called to explore consecrated life, but the anxieties around money, jobs, careers press on them. There is a real terror about taking the time to give God a chance to get a word in edgewise, because it thrusts us away from the security of worldly goods into some other elusive security.

So we have to decide, don’t we? Where is our security? Is God real? Is heaven our goal? Is money going to get us there, or is love and fidelity? And, having decided, we have to order our lives according to what we have decided is our security. Wordly goods, or faith, hope, and love. Which is it going to be?

Calumny and Lies (I Tell You!)

In the gradual unfolding of this encounter [with God], it is clearly revealed that love is not merely a sentiment. Sentiments come and go. A sentiment can be a marvellous first spark, but it is not the fullness of love. Earlier we spoke of the process of purification and maturation by which eros comes fully into its own, becomes love in the full meaning of the word. It is characteristic of mature love that it calls into play all man's potentialities; it engages the whole man, so to speak. Contact with the visible manifestations of God's love can awaken within us a feeling of joy born of the experience of being loved. But this encounter also engages our will and our intellect. Acknowledgment of the living God is one path towards love, and the “yes” of our will to his will unites our intellect, will and sentiments in the all-embracing act of love. But this process is always open-ended; love is never “finished” and complete; throughout life, it changes and matures, and thus remains faithful to itself. Idem velle atque idem nolle—to want the same thing, and to reject the same thing—was recognized by antiquity as the authentic content of love: the one becomes similar to the other, and this leads to a community of will and thought. The love-story between God and man consists in the very fact that this communion of will increases in a communion of thought and sentiment, and thus our will and God's will increasingly coincide: God's will is no longer for me an alien will, something imposed on me from without by the commandments, but it is now my own will, based on the realization that God is in fact more deeply present to me than I am to myself. Then self- abandonment to God increases and God becomes our joy (cf. Ps 73 [72]:23-28).

Deus Caritas Est 17

Reflection – Well, I’ve been at this blogging thing for over six months now, and just over 200 posts, which means I’ve been pretty much having a daily encounter with the writings of Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict all that time, not to mention the year I spent immersed in his writings doing my thesis on his Marian writings.

So when I run across a passage like the above one, it is all the more astonishing how utterly astonished I am at this man, his clarity, wisdom, profundity, simplicity… I mean, the above passage clearly, briefly, beautifully and with a stunning depth of insight explains what it means to love God, and from that, what the very nature of love itself is. I hardly want to say anything about it – it’s just there, folks. Read it, meditate on it, take it to prayer. This is the path of love.

And this is what humanity is crying out for, underneath all our other cries and anguish. “I wanna know what love is (whoa whoa),” as the power ballad of my youth bellowed. Well, here’s what love is, this and nothing else. The rest is mere sentiment and hormones, which are not wrong (God made our bodies and emotions after all) but are not sufficient to see us through life.

This is why one of the few things that really gets my Gallic temper up is the persistent character assassination of Ratzinger/Benedict in the mass media, which deters so many people from reading him. He writes simply, clearly, and deeply, with a great understanding of the modern world and its struggles, and with a tremendous ability to show the modern world the path of Christ and the Gospel.

Because—and here comes my Gallic temper!—there have been lies upon lies told about this man by powerful people who shape the public perception, so many people will not read him, dismiss him, reflexively scoff at him. It is evil, and I for one don’t believe it’s entirely accidental. The one writer who in a simple, accessible, and authoritative way presents the path of Christ and the Gospel to modern people, who writes in a way that any reasonably literate person can follow his thought, has had his reputation blackened by calumny and lies (calumny and lies, I tell you!!!!!). As the church lady from Saturday Night Live used to say, I wonder who could be behind that? Could it be…. (if you don’t know the punchline, Google it!)

So that’s why I’m blogging – Ratzinger/Benedict has the vision, the answer, the Gospel proclamation we need today. He is able to tell us what love looks like, the beauty of truth and the splendour of goodness, the freedom that comes from obeying the moral law, the dignity of the human person in the light of Christ—everything our poor battered world needs so badly.

Read him. Encourage others to read him. It’s really important.

(OK, I’m done ranting now…)

That's All, Folks

True, no one has ever seen God as he is. And yet God is not totally invisible to us; he does not remain completely inaccessible. God loved us first (1 Jn 4:10), and this love of God has appeared in our midst. He has become visible in as much as he “has sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him” (1 Jn 4:9). God has made himself visible: in Jesus we are able to see the Father (cf. Jn 14:9). Indeed, God is visible in a number of ways. In the love-story recounted by the Bible, he comes towards us, he seeks to win our hearts, all the way to the Last Supper, to the piercing of his heart on the Cross, to his appearances after the Resurrection and to the great deeds by which, through the activity of the Apostles, he guided the nascent Church along its path. Nor has the Lord been absent from subsequent Church history: he encounters us ever anew, in the men and women who reflect his presence, in his word, in the sacraments, and especially in the Eucharist. In the Church's Liturgy, in her prayer, in the living community of believers, we experience the love of God, we perceive his presence and we thus learn to recognize that presence in our daily lives. He has loved us first and he continues to do so; we too, then, can respond with love. God does not demand of us a feeling which we ourselves are incapable of producing. He loves us, he makes us see and experience his love, and since he has “loved us first”, love can also blossom as a response within us.

Deus Caritas Est, 17

Reflection – How are we to love? For some this question is more acute and painful than for others. Some people have a certain reservoir of what appears to be ‘natural’ love – a predisposition to like most people, a generally positive view of life and humanity, an easy-going temperament, a natural affection.

Others lack this, and struggle mightily to ‘play well with others’ as the saying goes. But for everyone, as the true nature of love, its demands, its cost unfolds itself through our lives, the question becomes acute. How are we to love as we have been commanded to do?
The answer of the Bible, which is the answer of the Pope in this paragraph of the encyclical, and was also one of Catherine Doherty’s favourite quotes is that God loves us first, and his love is meant to become our love.
This means that the first business of life is to live in such a way that we are available to receive God’s love. Without His love we cannot love as we should, and are condemned either to superficial ‘good relationships’ which may be pleasant but don’t really take us anywhere, or to perpetual struggle, conflict, and warfare with the rest of humanity, which takes us somewhere, all right—into deep loneliness and isolation if they are unchecked.
In talking about where we are to go to receive God’s love, the Pope significantly highlights the life of the Church. It is there that: “he encounters us ever anew, in the men and women who reflect his presence, in his word, in the sacraments, and especially in the Eucharist. In the Church's Liturgy, in her prayer, in the living community of believers, we experience the love of God, we perceive his presence and we thus learn to recognize that presence in our daily lives”
As we begin today another stretch of ‘ordinary’ time, it is good to reflect on the most basic basics of life. We are to love one another as Christ loves us; this is impossible for us unless Christ is giving us his life; Christ gives us his life through the ministry of the Church. As Porky Pig was wont to say, ‘b’dee, b’dee, b’dee that’s all folks!’
But let’s not kid ourselves. We cannot drift through life just being nice, getting along, playing well with others. The world needs something more from us than that, and it doesn’t really work anyhow, in terms of making us happy.
It’s not complicated, the path that God in Christ has laid out for us in his Church. Not easy, but not complicated. Go to Church, say your prayers, receive the grace of the sacraments, and knock yourself out every day of your life loving and serving and giving to everyone as you are able. That’s all, folks.

There Are No Monsters Now

On one hand, immersion into the waters is a symbol of death, which recalls the death symbolism of the annihilating, destructive power of the ocean flood. The ancient mind perceived the ocean as a permanent threat to the cosmos, to the earth; it was the primeval flood that might submerge all life. The river could also assume this symbolic value for those who were immersed in it. But the flowing waters of the river are above all a symbol of life. The great rivers are the great givers of life. The Jordan, too is—even  today—a source of life for the surrounding region. Immersion in the water is about purification, about liberation from the filth of the past that burdens and distorts life—it is about beginning again, and that means it is about death and resurrection, about starting life over again anew… all of this will have to wait for Christian baptismal theology to be worked out explicitly, but the act of descending into the Jordan and coming up again out of the waters already implicitly contains this later development.

Jesus of Nazareth Part One, 16

Reflection – The profundity of today’s feast, the Baptism of the Lord, is hard to grasp. This event inaugurating Christ’s public life is little emphasized in the Western Christian tradition; in the East, it is much more prominent, as I mentioned yesterday.

Water is so symbolic on so many levels, that Christ plunging into the waters bears meaning on top of meaning on top of meaning.

He identifies himself with sinful humanity, for starters. The immersion ritual of Judaism practiced by John the Baptist was a sort of Jewish ‘altar call’ – come, you sinners, repent and believe in God. And there’s Jesus, the sinless one, taking his place among all the prostitutes and tax collectors and drunks and thieves.

Water is also life and death. No water, we die—and people living in a desert climate are acutely aware of that. Too much water, we die—sailors and fishermen know that all to well, too. So Christ who is God, the deathless one, is plunging into the whole human scene of life and death, our perilous contingent reality where we need in order to live, but our very needs make us so very vulnerable.

And water has all these cosmic associations—the waters of creation, of the flood, the whole sense of plunging into the depths of created reality. And water is chaos—the waters are the place of Leviathan, the sea monster who is the Jewish symbol of creation as chaotic and unmanageable. The world where it stops making sense, where the ways of God with his creation are unfathomable and frightening, as the book of Job so powerfully conveys.

Jesus goes there, too. Into the heart of all hearts of all created reality, into the very depths of life, death, suffering, chaos, weakness, helplessness, humility… into the waters plunges the Word of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, God Himself become man for precisely this purpose.

I remember hearing an Orthodox priest preach a homily on this feast once, and saying very simply, “There are no monsters now.” The light of God has penetrated the outermost depths of the universe, and the deepest depths of the ocean, and the innermost depths of the human heart.

Because of this, even in the face of the most horrible violence or atrocity, of suffering and death, we believe (with fear and trembling) and we assert (with shaky voices, perhaps) that God is bigger, that Christ is there, that the power of love is stronger than all the hate in the universe, that the light of God does shine in the darkness, and the darkness can not overpower it. That’s what the Baptism of the Lord means. Happy Feast Day.

Into the Darkest Places

At Christmas we encounter the tenderness and love of God, who stoops down to our limitations, to our weakness, to our sins -- and He lowers Himself to us. St. Paul affirms that Jesus Christ ‘though He was in the form of God ... emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men’ (Philippians 2:6-7). Let us look upon the cave of Bethlehem: God lowers Himself to the point of being laid in a manger -- which is already a prelude of His self-abasement in the hour of His Passion. The climax of the love story between God and man passes by way of the manger of Bethlehem and the sepulcher of Jerusalem…

Let us live this wondrous event: The Son of God again is born "today"; God is truly close to each one of us, and He wants to meet us -- He wants to bring us to Himself. He is the true light, which dispels and dissolves the darkness enveloping our lives and mankind. Let us live the Lord's birth by contemplating the path of God's immense love, which raised us to Himself through the mystery of the incarnation, passion, death and resurrection of His Son… Above all, let us contemplate and live this Mystery in the celebration of the Eucharist, the heart of Christmas; there, Jesus makes Himself really present -- as the true Bread come down from heaven, as the true Lamb sacrificed for our salvation.

General Audience, December 21, 2011

Reflection – “The climax of the love story between God and man passes by way of the manger.” Today the magi come to this manger. They represent us—all of humanity, coming from the ends of the earth, to behold and adore, fall down and worship this baby in the manger.

In the Eastern Church (and in Madonna House this day we celebrate the Divine Liturgy of the Eastern Church) the focus is on the baptism of Christ in the Jordan. But this too is part of the same mystery—the true light dispelling the darkness. In the visit of the magi, we see the light dispelling the darkness of paganism, all of humanity separate and ignorant of the God of Israel. In the baptism, we see Christ plunging into the depths of darkness, the darkness of sin and death, symbolized by the waters that cleanse even as they kill.

We could almost legitimately put the feast of Corpus Christi right after this Epiphany-Baptism cycle. Christ shines light to the gentiles; Christ shines light to the sinful heart of man; Christ in the Eucharist shines light into the depths of your heart and mine.

This is our God—a light shining in the darkness. And what a light! Gentle, unassuming, non-violent, non-aggressive. God the baby, God the man humbling himself to be baptized by John, God giving Himself as food and drink to all who receive Him.

In MH today, after the divine liturgy we will process to the Madawaska River and throw in a crucifix. This is a ritual found throughout the Eastern Christian world. Symbolically, all the waters of the world are blessed in this simple rite, since of course all waters flow to the ocean and are connected together.

God has penetrated his world. The depths of the ocean, the innermost heart of reality, the darkest places of human sin and depravity, the hidden recesses of the human soul and everything that is found there—God has permanently and wholly immersed himself in our world.

His presence is hidden and gentle. He forces Himself on no one. But He is there, He is here, and because He is here, we have hope. Hope for everyone; hope for the silly people who have given up on any depth of meaning in life and plunge themselves into ephemeral pleasures and trivia; hope for the power brokers, the movers and shakers, the people who ‘count’ in the eyes of the world; hope for the evil-doers, the ones who embrace the path of violence and crime and hate. Hope for everyone—even hope for me and you, eh? The baby, the man in the water, the man on the Cross, the bread and wine which is not bread and wine at all—hope! So, once more for this Christmas season, O Come, let us adore Him, Christ the Lord.

What is Reality Again?

There is a second aspect [of Christmas] that I would like to touch upon briefly. The event of Bethlehem should be considered in the light of the Paschal Mystery: The one and the other are part of the one redemptive work of Christ. Jesus' incarnation and birth invite us to direct our gaze to His death and resurrection: Christmas and Easter are both feasts of the Redemption. Easter celebrates it as the victory over sin and death: It signals the final moment, when the glory of the Man-God shines forth as the light of day; Christmas celebrates it as God's entrance into history, His becoming man in order to restore man to God: It marks, so to speak, the initial moment when we begin to see the first light of dawn.

But just as dawn precedes and already heralds the day's light, so Christmas already announces the cross and the glory of the resurrection. Even the two times of year when we mark the two great feasts -- at least in some parts of the world -- can help us to understand this aspect. In fact, while Easter falls at the beginning of spring, when the sun breaks through the thick, chilly mists and renews the face of the earth, Christmas falls right at the beginning of winter, when the sun's light and warmth seek in vain to awaken nature enwrapped by the cold. Under this blanket, however, life throbs and the victory of the sun and warmth begins again.

General Audience, December 21, 2011

Reflection – Ah yes, a reminder here that the Pope is not, in fact, Canadian! December 25 as the ‘beginning’ of winter? Hah!
That said, we do have this beautiful opportunity in this part of this talk to reflect on how the seasons of the earth reflect the liturgical calendar. People often get this wrong, of course. Oh, Christians just put Christmas near the winter solstice so as to take over the pagan feast of Sol Invictus… and it’s all just paganism redux, taking over the cycles of earth and sun and giving them a superficial Christian gloss. We’ve all heard that kind of thing.
It’s entirely wrong. It turns out that the Roman pagans invented or located their big feast at the end of December precisely to counter the Christian celebration of the birth of Christ, which dates to centuries before the Roman feast is ever mentioned. Christmas is where it is because the Annunciation is where it is, and that is because of the ancient tradition that the Incarnation and Jesus’ life began the same day as he died, which was March 25 according to the primitive Church’s calculations.
But even beyond the historical facts, which are indisputable, there is a deeper point. We Christians do not look at the birth of Christ and say, ‘oh yeah, that’s like winter and the way life and light are present in the midst of death and darkness.’ We look at the winter and we say, ‘oh yeah, this is just like what God did in Christ.’ Jesus is not a symbol of nature; nature—the earth and what fills it, the sun, the stars, the heavens—is a symbol of Jesus.
He is the center; all of reality points towards him. The sun rises every morning as proclamation of the Resurrection of Christ. Flowers receive light and give forth perfume and beauty as a proclamation of the fruits of redemption. The modern world says that the real things are the immediate visible things, the measurable, the prosaic, and that we humans just dress them up with a glossy religious sheen, in which case who cares if it’s Jesus, Mithras, Baldur, or Pan? Christians say that the reality is Christ, and all the visible objects surrounding us are his heralds, signs telling us of his goodness and beauty.
There is a blanket of snow on the earth right now where I am: all creation is wearing its baptismal robes. The sun is shining where I am right now: the light of Christ makes all things radiant. The birch tree outside my window is slender and elegant, a thing of beauty even though it is bare of its leafy raiment: so are our souls naked before God beautiful in their simplicity. On and on and on: this is not pious fiction or sentimentality. The reality is God in Christ, and every atom of creation proclaims that reality to us. Come, let us adore Him.

Just in Case You Need One

Modern man -- a man of "the sensible," of the empirically verifiable -- finds it increasingly more difficult to open his horizons and enter the world of God. The Redemption of mankind certainly took place at a precise and identifiable moment in history: in the event of Jesus of Nazareth. But Jesus is the Son of God -- He is God Himself, who not only spoke to man, showed him wondrous signs and guided him throughout the history of salvation -- but became man and remains man. The Eternal entered into the limits of time and space, in order to make possible an encounter with Him "today."

The liturgical texts of Christmas help us to understand that the events of salvation wrought by Christ are always actual -- the interest of every man and of all mankind. When, within liturgical celebrations, we hear or proclaim this "Today a Savior is born for us," we are not employing an empty, conventional expression; rather, we mean that God offers us "today", now, to me, to each one of us, the possibility of acknowledging and receiving Him like the shepherds in Bethlehem, so that He might be born in our lives and renew them, illumine them, transform them by His grace, by His Presence.

General Audience, December 21, 2011

Reflection – We see in this lovely and rather simple passage one of the true greatnesses of Pope Benedict. He is so alive to the modern world and its challenges, understands the philosophical and intellectual struggles of the modern world as only a European of his generation can, having lived through so much of the bloody consequences of these struggles. But his greatness is that he brings to bear on these complex and tangled intellectual difficulties a childlike faith and expectation.

Modernity is mired in positivism and intellectual reductionism. The Pope says, “A child is born for us today, so we can meet Jesus here and now.” Modernity is mired in skepticism and disbelief. The Pope says, “Come, let us adore Him.”

I believe firmly that this is the answer to our modern world and its terrible confusions, terrible errors, terrible deeds against human life and dignity. To simply say, ‘we have a savior, you know.’ Just in case you’re ever looking for one. Just in case you ever decide you’re not doing so great without one.

We have a savior. His name is Jesus. Want to come meet Him? To the atheist, the Marxist, the scientist, the hedonist, the young barbarian who chooses to simply ignore all the deep questions of life. We have a savior – you know. His name is Jesus. He’s waiting for you and for all of us, when we decide we need one.

It’s like these wise men coming to this baby. What were they coming for? What did they expect? They were the intellectuals of their own day, the ones who knew whatever there was to know, and I’m sure it all was complicated and tangled up, as all human knowledge tends to be.

And they found… what? A baby? A mother? Some straw and animals, and good old Joseph in the corner keeping everyone comfortable? What did they find? They bowed down and worshipped him. And all their complexity was made radiantly simple in childlike wonder and awe.

This is the answer for all of us, whatever complexity and tangles we find ourselves in. We have a savior, his name is Jesus, let us go and worship Him. Let us pray that all who desire Him in their hearts, whether they know it or not, find him this year of 2012.

A New Softness Enters In

Today, anyone wishing to enter the Church of Jesus’ Nativity in Bethlehem will find that the doorway five and a half metres high, through which emperors and caliphs used to enter the building, is now largely walled up. Only a low opening of one and a half metres has remained. The intention was probably to provide the church with better protection from attack, but above all to prevent people from entering God’s house on horseback. Anyone wishing to enter the place of Jesus’ birth has to bend down. It seems to me that a deeper truth is revealed here, which should touch our hearts on this holy night: if we want to find the God who appeared as a child, then we must dismount from the high horse of our ‘enlightened’ reason. We must set aside our false certainties, our intellectual pride, which prevents us from recognizing God’s closeness. We must follow the interior path of Saint Francis – the path leading to that ultimate outward and inward simplicity which enables the heart to see. We must bend down, spiritually we must as it were go on foot, in order to pass through the portal of faith and encounter the God who is so different from our prejudices and opinions – the God who conceals himself in the humility of a newborn baby. In this spirit let us celebrate the liturgy of the holy night, let us strip away our fixation on what is material, on what can be measured and grasped. Let us allow ourselves to be made simple by the God who reveals himself to the simple of heart. And let us also pray especially at this hour for all who have to celebrate Christmas in poverty, in suffering, as migrants, that a ray of God’s kindness may shine upon them, that they – and we – may be touched by the kindness that God chose to bring into the world through the birth of his Son in a stable. Amen.

Homily, Midnight Mass, December 25, 2011

Reflection – The Holy Father, having laid out a lovely vision of the child, the manger, the stable, having invoked the great and very beloved St. Francis of Assisi and his love for Christmas and the crèche, now does what every good homilist does.

He now brings this around to us, lowering the boom on us with his typical direct gentleness. Our ‘false certainties, our intellectual pride’ – this can take many forms, you know. It is not only the pride and certainty of the scholar, the theologian, the academic. There is the false certainty of the shrewd person who ‘knows how the world is.’ The intellectual pride of the one who always has everyone figured out, and knows just what end is up. The false certainty of the mover and shaker, the intellectual pride of the competent sensible person who knows exactly what to do in most situations.
Out with it all, when we enter the stable! No room at this inn for any of that intellectual pride or false certainty! When we bow down to enter Bethlehem, we enter into a totality of mystery, a reality that surpasses all human understanding.
I don’t care how smart you are, how knowledgeable you are, how old and experienced you are, how shrewd and jaundiced you are, how competent you are. There is a baby lying on straw here, and that baby is God Almighty. No room for human intellect and its calm ascendancy here, no room at all. All of that falls away in the presence of this little one who is immense, this weak one who holds the universe in the palm of his hand, this poor one to whom all heaven and earth bows in worship.
So if we don’t park our high horse, the symbol of mastery and control, outside the stable, we simply will not find the God who came to us this way. We simply will not find God, period. There is something greater here, and we must bow very low before this greatness.
It seems to me that, as we bow down low before this, there is a great blessing for us. All of that false certainty and intellectual pride, even if it is relatively benign, sort of hardens us, don’t you think? The person who always knows the answer, always knows what needs doing, always knows which end is up, tends to become a bit hardened, a bit closed to anything outside of that knowledge. So when God smashes all our pride and certainties, painful as that may be, a new softness enters into us, a new openness to what is not us.
I’m not so smart, after all. This little baby is so far beyond my comprehension, that I’m just not such a smart capable guy… and out of this bowing, this mystery, I become more childlike, more open, more receptive. Humbler. And this is joy and wonder for us, awe and delight. Not just a smashing of pride, but a gift given to us. The permanent Christmas gift of God to the human race—‘give me the heart of a child, and the awesome courage to live it out.’

Don't Throw the Tree Out

Saint Francis of Assisi called Christmas the feast of feasts – above all other feasts – and he celebrated it with unutterable devotion. He kissed images of the Christ-child with great devotion and he stammered tender words such as children say…

For the early Church, the feast of feasts was Easter: in the Resurrection Christ had flung open the doors of death and in so doing had radically changed the world: he had made a place for man in God himself. Now, Francis neither changed nor intended to change this objective order of precedence among the feasts, the inner structure of the faith centred on the Paschal Mystery. And yet through him and the character of his faith, something new took place: Francis discovered Jesus’ humanity in an entirely new depth. This human existence of God became most visible to him at the moment when God’s Son, born of the Virgin Mary, was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger. The Resurrection presupposes the Incarnation.

For God’s Son to take the form of a child, a truly human child, made a profound impression on the heart of the Saint of Assisi, transforming faith into love… In the child born in the stable at Bethlehem, we can as it were touch and caress God. And so the liturgical year acquired a second focus in a feast that is above all a feast of the heart.

This has nothing to do with sentimentality. It is right here, in this new experience of the reality of Jesus’ humanity that the great mystery of faith is revealed. Francis loved the child Jesus, because for him it was in this childish estate that God’s humility shone forth. God became poor. His Son was born in the poverty of the stable. In the child Jesus, God made himself dependent, in need of human love, he put himself in the position of asking for human love – our love. Today Christmas has become a commercial celebration, whose bright lights hide the mystery of God’s humility, which in turn calls us to humility and simplicity. Let us ask the Lord to help us see through the superficial glitter of this season, and to discover behind it the child in the stable in Bethlehem, so as to find true joy and true light.

Homily, Midnight Mass, December 25, 2011

Reflection – Now, I realize that for almost the entire secular world, the ‘superficial glitter’ of Christmas is a remote memory by now. We remain in the liturgical Christmas season while the culture has moved on to… well, what, now? Come to think of it, early January is a bit of empty space, culturally.

Actually this disjunction between cultural Christmas and liturgical Christmas may be a blessing in disguise for us Christians. It can be distracting, all the superficial glitter of the season, especially since more and more people are determined to separate the celebration of Christmas from anything to do with Jesus and his birth. The tired (and utterly false, by the way) trope that Christians took a pagan holiday and Christianized it continues to be used to justify neo-pagans taking Christian Christmas and paganizing it. Even if we know how spurious that claim is, it can be an effort to swim against the tide and really celebrate Christmas as a Christian feast.

And so we have the opportunity in this period from Dec 26-Jan 6 (or 8 if you are in a country where Epiphany is moved to the nearest Sunday) to truly focus ourselves on the mystery of this child in Bethlehem, the awesome coming of God to us in such humble and poor garb. God making himself something we can pick up and caress, God making himself something needy, a being we can love and care for. Everyone else has forgotten about Christmas, and so we have the joint to ourselves for this time, and can relax and do what we like with it.

So let’s stay with baby Jesus for a while yet – until this Sunday, anyhow. He may not be done with us this year; he may have more Christmas gifts to give us, still. There might still be a package or two under the tree with your name on it. Don’t throw the tree out just yet!

Shock and Awww

In all three Christmas Masses, the liturgy quotes a passage from the Prophet Isaiah, which describes the epiphany that took place at Christmas in greater detail: ‘A child is born for us, a son given to us and dominion is laid on his shoulders; and this is the name they give him: Wonder-Counsellor, Mighty-God, Eternal-Father, Prince-of-Peace. Wide is his dominion in a peace that has no end’ (Is 9:5f.). Whether the prophet had a particular child in mind, born during his own period of history, we do not know. But it seems impossible. This is the only text in the Old Testament in which it is said of a child, of a human being: his name will be Mighty-God, Eternal-Father. We are presented with a vision that extends far beyond the historical moment into the mysterious, into the future. A child, in all its weakness, is Mighty God. A child, in all its neediness and dependence, is Eternal Father. And his peace has no end. The prophet had previously described the child as ‘a great light’ and had said of the peace he would usher in that the rod of the oppressor, the footgear of battle, every cloak rolled in blood would be burned (Is 9:1, 3-4).

Homily, Midnight Mass, December 25, 2011

Reflection – You know, there is an element of Christmas, understandable and really quite appropriate, that one could term the ‘awww’ factor. The cute little baby, the mother, the ox and ass, shepherds carrying little lambs. All very lovely, like a Christmas card or a snow globe or something.

And this is truly part of the picture. Babies are cute—ain’t no denying it. But of course we cannot stay there – God became cute for our sake. He didn’t become cute; he became weak, helpless, poor, naked, cold. He took to himself a body to be pierced and crushed, a heart to be broken, a soul to descend to the dead.

This Christmas mystery, if it is more than just a cute tableau at the local grade school Christmas pageant, is the most central reality of human history. God did this for us. God, in a manner beyond all understanding, became one of us. The Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace shivers on straw and needs to be carried from place to place. It is a shocking picture.

And we are plunged into mystery within mystery in this. The historical fact of the Incarnation is deep mystery, and then within it is the deeper mystery of just how this is breaking any rod of any oppressor, how this removes any burden off of any shoulders.

God does this mighty deed to save us, and it baffles us. What difference does Jesus make, anyhow? Wars and hatred and oppression have gone on quite nicely for the last 2000 years, after all, and Christians have not been noticeably absent from the field.

What does Jesus liberate us from? What did his coming as man change? It’s all about this blasted will to power, this terrible dynamism in humanity that drives so much, if not all, of the hatred and violence and exploitation that makes life on earth hell on earth.

God strips Himself of power, and in that stripping recreates the universe. And in that stripping, and that recreation, we human beings are, if we choose, freed from the horrible slavery of power and its ruthless demands. I do not need to manipulate, control, exploit, use you. You do not need to manipulate, control, exploit, use me. God opens up, in Christ, another path to walk. A difficult path, a true via crucis, and it is no great wonder that so many have declined to follow Christ down that path. But it is a path that leads to life and glory, where the other path (the way of the world) leads to death and degradation.

God is born among us, and in Him we have a different way to live. That’s all. But that’s everything. God is born among us, and so we have hope that love is stronger, that mercy is deeper, that life is victorious. That’s all.

Stop and Stare

The reading from Saint Paul’s Letter to Titus that we have just heard begins solemnly with the word apparuit, which then comes back again in the reading at the Dawn Mass: apparuit – there has appeared.

This is a programmatic word, by which the Church seeks to express synthetically the essence of Christmas. Formerly, people had spoken of God and formed human images of him in all sorts of different ways. God himself had spoken in many and various ways to mankind (cf. Heb 1:1 – Mass during the Day). But now something new has happened: he has appeared. He has revealed himself. He has emerged from the inaccessible light in which he dwells. He himself has come into our midst. This was the great joy of Christmas for the early Church: God has appeared. No longer is he merely an idea, no longer do we have to form a picture of him on the basis of mere words. He has appeared. But now we ask: how has he appeared? Who is he in reality? The reading at the Dawn Mass goes on to say: ‘the kindness and love of God our Saviour for mankind were revealed’ (Tit 3:4). For the people of pre-Christian times, whose response to the terrors and contradictions of the world was to fear that God himself might not be good either, that he too might well be cruel and arbitrary, this was a real epiphany, the great light that has appeared to us: God is pure goodness. Today too, people who are no longer able to recognize God through faith are asking whether the ultimate power that underpins and sustains the world is truly good, or whether evil is just as powerful and primordial as the good and the beautiful which we encounter in radiant moments in our world. The kindness and love of God our Saviour for mankind were revealed: this is the new, consoling certainty that is granted to us at Christmas.

Homily, Midnight Mass, December 25, 2011

Reflection – God really is mysterious, isn’t He? I see this more and more clearly as life goes on. So many things happen, both in the world at large and in our own personal lives, that make the whole business of God, and hence Meaning, Truth, Goodness… well, very mysterious, to say the least.

It’s not a question of constantly having crises of faith, of being beset by doubts and constantly risking a lapse into atheistic nihilism. In some ways, that’s a cheap path out of the mysteriousness of life. After all, to simply throw up one’s hands and say, ‘well, there is no God then, and hence no real Meaning to it all!’ is one way to ‘solve’ the problem. There is no solution.
Or we can just not think too hard about it, not pay too close attention to it all. This is easier to do when one’s own immediate life is going all right; not so easy to do when sorrow and distress bust through your front door and stage a home invasion of you and yours. For many who choose the path of superficiality and unthinking, this is when faith fails.
It is really mysterious. As the Pope so beautifully reflects, and will continue to reflect in this homily, the mystery is not so much solved as deepened and made into a mystery of beauty, a luminous mystery, by this baby, this child, this strange Jesus who presents himself to us in this feast.
God has appeared—and his appearance makes the whole business of life, the world, pain and evil, sorrow and darkness, love and loss more mysterious. But a mystery in which we can find hope. We stare and stare at the little baby in the crib, in the manger, and something happens to us. We start to know that God is with us.
We still don’t know much. We don’t really know ‘what’ God is, or how his goodness and light are making their way through our lives and the life of the world. But we stare and stare at the baby, and we come to believe that He is here, anyhow. We are not alone, anyhow. And something is happening—slowly, strangely, in a fashion hard to see, hard to discern, but it is happening. Love grows, as we stop and stare at this strange appearance of God in our midst. Love grows, and with love, peace, joy, hope, and trust that as we stay with Him and keep staring, He will finally make all things well and gather all creation to Himself.
“Look towards Him and be radiant.”

The Lengthy Way

Jesus Christ is the proof that God has heard our cry. And not only this! God's love for us is so strong that he cannot remain aloof; he comes out of himself to enter into our midst and to share fully in our human condition (cf. Ex 3:7-12). The answer to our cry which God gave in Jesus infinitely transcends our expectations, achieving a solidarity which cannot be human alone, but divine. Only the God who is love, and the love which is God, could choose to save us in this way, which is certainly the lengthiest way, yet the way which respects the truth about him and about us: the way of reconciliation, dialogue and cooperation.

Dear brothers and sisters in Rome and throughout the world, on this Christmas 2011, let us then turn to the Child of Bethlehem, to the Son of the Virgin Mary, and say: "Come to save us!" Let us repeat these words in spiritual union with the many people who experience particularly difficult situations; let us speak out for those who have no voice.

Urbi et orbi  message, December 25, 2011

Reflection – The Pope went on in this address to mention the nations and peoples of the world suffering especially in this time—the litany of trouble spots that is all too familiar to those who follow the news closely.

When we contemplate the world as it is, with all its war and hunger, disease and oppression, and when we contemplate the sufferings that may come more close to ourselves personally and those we love—illness and death, marital breakdown and financial worries—the temptation is always there to at the very least question God’s care and presence, perhaps even his reality.

For many today, it is more than a temptation—the suffering and ugliness of the world seems to make faith difficult to the point of impossibility. To us who have faith, and to those whose faith may be shaky, the Pope calls us to contemplate this mysterious baby in the manger, this mysterious coming of God into the world, not as a mighty warrior to put all the armies to flight, not as an all-powerful king to take command and dispense perfect justice, not as an all-encompassing wonder worker taking all our afflictions away, but as a baby.

‘The lengthiest way’ of salvation – what a nice turn of phrase that is. God chooses to save us by entering into our woes with us, not by taking our woes away. There is such a deep reality at play and at stake here.

What is our central illness, our central affliction, the passion that drives all passions, the poison that blights everything it touches? It is that we want something other than God, or want something in preference to God, or in place of God. This is how wars start, how poverty and oppression thrive, how relationships are fractured, and how even our bodies are damaged and so break down and perish. The poison is universal; it is in all of us, and so all of us share in its effects.

So God comes to us—and we see in this Christmas mystery He offers us nothing but Himself. If He had come in might and power immediately, solving all our problems and curing all our ailments, he would have, in fact, solved nothing and cured nothing. We poor benighted human beings would have simply welcomed all the gifts and blessings He was giving us… and turned our backs on Him, as we do.

God made us so that we will never be truly well, never truly happy, never truly free, until we love Him, turn towards Him, seek Him, worship Him. This is the order of all created reality, and we are His creatures. He is our happiness, our health, our freedom, our joy, our peace.

And so He embarks on the lengthiest path of salvation, but the one ‘which respects the truth about him and about us’. And He remains so present in each of our lives, helping us, yes, healing us, yes, in so many mysterious and often hidden ways. But always, in His presence, His help, and His healing, drawing us to the deep healing, which is to love Him and seek Him and follow Him with all our hearts.

How does this play out on the world stage, in Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Egypt, North Korea, and in the myriad personal tragedies each of us is bitterly acquainted with in our families and loved ones? I don’t know.

But I know the truth of what I have written above in my own life. I also know that I am nothing special, just another sinner in need of mercy and salvation. So I know that God must be doing for each human being what He is doing for me, or at least wanting to.

This is the deal God offers us, though, to enter and share our human condition Himself, and in that to transform it from within, to make it a sharing in the mystery of love and grace. And each of us must decide if this is true, this Christmas present, this gift of God to us.