Aiming For the Stars

“To stir a response in love and good works”: these words of the Letter to the Hebrews (10:24) urge us to reflect on the universal call to holiness, the continuing journey of the spiritual life as we aspire to the greater spiritual gifts and to an ever more sublime and fruitful charity (cf. 1 Cor 12:31-13:13). Being concerned for one another should spur us to an increasingly effective love which, “like the light of dawn, its brightness growing to the fullness of day” (Prov 4:18), makes us live each day as an anticipation of the eternal day awaiting us in God.

The time granted us in this life is precious for discerning and performing good works in the love of God. In this way the Church herself continuously grows towards the full maturity of Christ (cf. Eph 4:13). Our exhortation to encourage one another to attain the fullness of love and good works is situated in this dynamic prospect of growth.

Sadly, there is always the temptation to become lukewarm, to quench the Spirit, to refuse to invest the talents we have received, for our own good and for the good of others (cf. Mt 25:25ff.). All of us have received spiritual or material riches meant to be used for the fulfilment of God’s plan, for the good of the Church and for our personal salvation (cf. Lk 12:21b; 1 Tim 6:18). The spiritual masters remind us that in the life of faith those who do not advance inevitably regress.

Dear brothers and sisters, let us accept the invitation, today as timely as ever, to aim for the “high standard of ordinary Christian living” (Novo Millennio Ineunte, 31). The wisdom of the Church in recognizing and proclaiming certain outstanding Christians as Blessed and as Saints is also meant to inspire others to imitate their virtues. Saint Paul exhorts us to “anticipate one another in showing honour” (Rom 12:10).

In a world which demands of Christians a renewed witness of love and fidelity to the Lord, may all of us feel the urgent need to anticipate one another in charity, service and good works (cf. Heb 6:10). This appeal is particularly pressing in this holy season of preparation for Easter. As I offer my prayerful good wishes for a blessed and fruitful Lenten period, I entrust all of you to the intercession of Mary Ever Virgin and cordially impart my Apostolic Blessing.

2012 Lenten Message of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI

Reflection – I concluded my blog post yesterday by saying that Christian maturity is the same thing as holiness, and that the only good outcome of our lives is to become saints. Anything else is tragic, actually.

I hadn’t actually looked ahead to see where Pope Benedict was going in this Lenten message. It’s always nice when he and I think alike! For here he is, calling all of us to holiness, the ‘full maturity of Christ.’

When we hear of the call to holiness, many people understandably draw back a bit. ‘Well, I’ll try to be a decent Christian, but I don’t know about becoming a saint! I’m kind of a louse, you know!’ It seems a bit presumptuous somehow to speak of wanting to become a saint. Or a bit scary: anyone who knows any lives of the saints knows that they had to go through a lot of suffering to get where they got. Can’t I just be a (kind of) nice person? Why aim for the stars when I can have a decent enough life here on earth?

“Those who do not advance inevitably regress.” This has been the universal experience of the spiritual masters of the Church. There is no ‘stasis’ in spiritual life. Either love is growing in us, which is the essence of sanctity, or love is dying in us. Our life is either expanding or contracting. If we’re not aiming for the stars, we are not going to have a decent life on earth.

This is built into our humanity and its fundamental nature. We are made for God. We are made to be open vessels receiving the life of God. This life of God in our life is another way of expressing the essence of sanctity. When we close off to this life, we generally fill ourselves with something else, and when that doesn’t work too well, begin to shrink down, reduce ourselves to something less than what we truly are and truly made to become. And this is a tragic loss, not only for ourselves, but for the world.

Saints are what the world needs: lovers, God-bearers, Christ-bearers. Anything else we can become or offer the world is a poor and ineffective substitute. Sanctity is the only fitting goal of human life. To not become a saint is tragic. It is Lent, and it is time to ponder these things, and humbly and simply ask the Lord to put us more firmly and fully on the road to become the saints he made us to be.

Part of Me

This “custody” of others is in contrast to a mentality that, by reducing life exclusively to its earthly dimension, fails to see it in an eschatological perspective and accepts any moral choice in the name of personal freedom. A society like ours can become blind to physical sufferings and to the spiritual and moral demands of life. This must not be the case in the Christian community!

The Apostle Paul encourages us to seek “the ways which lead to peace and the ways in which we can support one another” (Rom 14:19) for our neighbour’s good, “so that we support one another” (15:2), seeking not personal gain but rather “the advantage of everybody else, so that they may be saved” (1 Cor 10:33). This mutual correction and encouragement in a spirit of humility and charity must be part of the life of the Christian community.

The Lord’s disciples, united with him through the Eucharist, live in a fellowship that binds them one to another as members of a single body. This means that the other is part of me, and that his or her life, his or her salvation, concern my own life and salvation. Here we touch upon a profound aspect of communion: our existence is related to that of others, for better or for worse. Both our sins and our acts of love have a social dimension.

This reciprocity is seen in the Church, the mystical body of Christ: the community constantly does penance and asks for the forgiveness of the sins of its members, but also unfailingly rejoices in the examples of virtue and charity present in her midst. As Saint Paul says: “Each part should be equally concerned for all the others” (1 Cor 12:25), for we all form one body. Acts of charity towards our brothers and sisters – as expressed by almsgiving, a practice which, together with prayer and fasting, is typical of Lent – is rooted in this common belonging.

Christians can also express their membership in the one body which is the Church through concrete concern for the poorest of the poor. Concern for one another likewise means acknowledging the good that the Lord is doing in others and giving thanks for the wonders of grace that Almighty God in his goodness continuously accomplishes in his children. When Christians perceive the Holy Spirit at work in others, they cannot but rejoice and give glory to the heavenly Father (cf. Mt 5:16).

2012 Lenten Message of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI

Reflection – The Pope develops here more explicitly a thought he has already alluded to, and which I reflected on a couple days ago: namely, the degree to which we are truly inter-connected, truly part of one another.

We are such individualists in North America (I can’t speak for the rest of the world) that this is one of the hardest things for us to grasp. We can choose to be nice to other people, even choose to care deeply for other people. But I don’t think we easily grasp the depths of interconnectedness we share with other people, especially that we the baptized share with our fellow Christians.

‘The other is part of me.’ This strikes us as strange, perhaps. Even unpleasant, perhaps: what’s left of me, then? Do I have no autonomy? Am I hopelessly bound up with all the rest of you losers forever? Don’t I have enough problems of my own without being necessarily saddled with all your problems?

So our thoughts can easily go. But this connection, this unity, this being brought together for better or for worse into a body—all this is working something very deep in us. The great lie of our humanity is that we find happiness/wholeness/fulfillment in some sort of independent stance, some kind of closing off of ourselves from the other. We become fully mature human beings through independence and autonomy.

This is a lie. We become fully mature human beings by so opening ourselves up to the mystery of God that His way of being—the unity of Three in One and One in Three—becomes reflected in our own human life. His way of loving—total gift and total reception of gift—becomes our way of loving.

We become fully mature realized adult human beings by transcending our human limitations and breaking through to the mystery of God and love. This itself is achieved by His grace, by the breaking out of our own self-imposed limits on our actions. But in the immediate sphere of life, the sense of being together, of sharing responsibility for each other, of needing to take care of each other—this is what pushes us towards this transcendence and the maturity it brings us.

Of course, the other name for this maturity is holiness. We are made to be saints; anything less is a tragic waste of a life.

Not So Nice

“Being concerned for each other” also entails being concerned for their spiritual well-being. Here I would like to mention an aspect of the Christian life, which I believe has been quite forgotten: fraternal correction in view of eternal salvation. Today, in general, we are very sensitive to the idea of charity and caring about the physical and material well-being of others, but almost completely silent about our spiritual responsibility towards our brothers and sisters.

This was not the case in the early Church or in those communities that are truly mature in faith, those which are concerned not only for the physical health of their brothers and sisters, but also for their spiritual health and ultimate destiny. The Scriptures tell us: “Rebuke the wise and he will love you for it. Be open with the wise, he grows wiser still, teach the upright, he will gain yet more” (Prov 9:8ff).

Christ himself commands us to admonish a brother who is committing a sin (cf. Mt 18:15). The verb used to express fraternal correction - elenchein – is the same used to indicate the prophetic mission of Christians to speak out against a generation indulging in evil (cf. Eph 5:11). The Church’s tradition has included “admonishing sinners” among the spiritual works of mercy.

It is important to recover this dimension of Christian charity. We must not remain silent before evil. I am thinking of all those Christians who, out of human regard or purely personal convenience, adapt to the prevailing mentality, rather than warning their brothers and sisters against ways of thinking and acting that are contrary to the truth and that do not follow the path of goodness.

Christian admonishment, for its part, is never motivated by a spirit of accusation or recrimination. It is always moved by love and mercy, and springs from genuine concern for the good of the other. As the Apostle Paul says: “If one of you is caught doing something wrong, those of you who are spiritual should set that person right in a spirit of gentleness; and watch yourselves that you are not put to the test in the same way” (Gal 6:1).

In a world pervaded by individualism, it is essential to rediscover the importance of fraternal correction, so that together we may journey towards holiness… There will always be a need for a gaze which loves and admonishes, which knows and understands, which discerns and forgives (cf. Lk 22:61), as God has done and continues to do with each of us.

2012 Lenten Message of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI

Reflection – And so the ‘hits’ keep on coming. The Pope is really challenging us in this Lenten message. So often we think that being ‘loving’ towards others is the same as being ‘nice’ to them. Everyone is nice! Everything is nice! Nicey-nice-nice!

But if my brother is committing a grave evil, that is not nice. If my sister is doing something that may imperil her soul, that is not nice. And if I am silent about this, maybe  I’m not being so nice, either. Not so much loving.

This does not mean we are to be perpetual scolds, of course. Soon no one would listen to us, if that was our normal practice. There is prudence and a true delicacy of love needed here. We cannot whap each other freely with the big baseball bat of Truth.

But we have to be able to call a spade a spade. We have to be able to say that the use of contraceptive devices and chemicals to prevent pregnancy is a grave evil. We have to be able to say that homosexual intercourse is a grave evil. We have to be able to say that cohabitation before marriage is a grave evil. And we must—we absolutely must—continue to say that abortion is a grave evil.

Not speaking out of anger, or hatred, or contempt, but out of a passionate love for those who are engaged in those practices. We cannot allow the world to go on its merry way to perdition, not without at least trying to cry out against it, so as to save at least some people from the wreckage.

This is deeply challenging, of course. Deeply confronting for all of us: how are we to love? How much do we love? And of course, I am a sinner, too. I need to be admonished for my sins, and had better welcome that from others, if I want to call myself a Christian.

But here it is: the ever deepening challenge to love and serve, not only in ways that may make us feel good, but in ways that are likely to be resented or rejected, that are likely to bring us trouble and turmoil. Lord Jesus, have mercy on us, and teach us how to love as you loved the Pharisees, as you love us.

Shutting Off

Sacred Scripture warns us of the danger that our hearts can become hardened by a sort of “spiritual anesthesia” which numbs us to the suffering of others. The Evangelist Luke relates two of Jesus’ parables by way of example. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the priest and the Levite “pass by”, indifferent to the presence of the man stripped and beaten by the robbers (cf. Lk 10:30-32). In that of Dives and Lazarus, the rich man is heedless of the poverty of Lazarus, who is starving to death at his very door (cf. Lk 16:19). Both parables show examples of the opposite of “being concerned”, of looking upon others with love and compassion.

What hinders this humane and loving gaze towards our brothers and sisters? Often it is the possession of material riches and a sense of sufficiency, but it can also be the tendency to put our own interests and problems above all else. We should never be incapable of “showing mercy” towards those who suffer. Our hearts should never be so wrapped up in our affairs and problems that they fail to hear the cry of the poor.

Humbleness of heart and the personal experience of suffering can awaken within us a sense of compassion and empathy. “The upright understands the cause of the weak, the wicked has not the wit to understand it” (Prov 29:7). We can then understand the beatitude of “those who mourn” (Mt 5:5), those who in effect are capable of looking beyond themselves and feeling compassion for the suffering of others. Reaching out to others and opening our hearts to their needs can become an opportunity for salvation and blessedness.

2012 Lenten Message of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI

 Reflection – Well the Pope continues to challenge us here. Good Lenten reading! Uncomfortable! I think that, on top of the two reasons he gives why we can become dulled to the pain of others—material sufficiency and self-absorption—I would add a third.

Sometimes, I think we ‘shut off’ to the pain of others and of the world because it just seems so overwhelming. It is beyond us; we can’t help everyone. Some days it seems like we can’t help anyone. And so to stand in the face of human suffering and misery, helpless and poor, is extraordinarily difficult. In fact, it may well seem impossible. So we shut off. We turn on—the TV, the radio, the music. Think about something else. Consciously or unconsciously choose not to care too much about all these people—the ones we know and the ones we don’t know.

This is understandable (to say the least!) but is a woeful mistake. It’s not that we can never relax, never have a good time, never watch TV or whatever. But if we do this ‘shutting off’ thing, we are not only shutting off the poor and the afflicted.

We’re shutting off… well, Jesus, for starters. ‘Whatsoever you do to the least of my brethren, you do to me.’ And also the deep truth of our own being. We are inter-connected. I am part of you, and you part of me. If I cut you off, I’m cutting off my own self. Terrible mistake!

But it is extraordinarily hard to really and deeply care about the pains and miseries of all humanity. It seems to me that this indeed is the ‘opportunity for salvation and blessedness’ the Pope mentions at the end of this section.

In other words, it is so hard to behold and truly be affected by the misery of the world that it drives us to Jesus like few other things can. We cannot carry the grief of the world; Jesus can and did and does. And so as we open our hearts to this one or that one, to this situation or that tragedy, it pushes us to cry out to Jesus. He can, will, and in fact does do in us what we cannot do in ourselves. And the ongoing choice to have this deep concern for humanity keeps us so closely welded to Jesus, so totally in need of his grace and help, that it is indeed a privileged way of encountering his saving power and love.

And isn’t that just what Lent is all about?

What Will Heal the World

Even today God asks us to be “guardians” of our brothers and sisters (Gen 4:9), to establish relationships based on mutual consideration and attentiveness to the well-being, the integral well-being of others. The great commandment of love for one another demands that we acknowledge our responsibility towards those who, like ourselves, are creatures and children of God. Being brothers and sisters in humanity and, in many cases, also in the faith, should help us to recognize in others a true alter ego, infinitely loved by the Lord.

If we cultivate this way of seeing others as our brothers and sisters, solidarity, justice, mercy and compassion will naturally well up in our hearts. The Servant of God Pope Paul VI stated that the world today is suffering above all from a lack of brotherhood: “Human society is sorely ill. The cause is not so much the depletion of natural resources, nor their monopolistic control by a privileged few; it is rather the weakening of brotherly ties between individuals and nations” (Populorum Progressio, 66).

Concern for others entails desiring what is good for them from every point of view: physical, moral and spiritual. Contemporary culture seems to have lost the sense of good and evil, yet there is a real need to reaffirm that good does exist and will prevail, because God is “generous and acts generously” (Ps 119:68). The good is whatever gives, protects and promotes life, brotherhood and communion. Responsibility towards others thus means desiring and working for the good of others, in the hope that they too will become receptive to goodness and its demands. Concern for others means being aware of their needs.

2012 Lenten Message of Pope Benedict XVI

Reflection – The quote from Populorum Progressio is really the money quote here. What ails society is not the ravenous power of multi-national corporations; it is not the destruction of the environment; it is not, even, the depredations and misdeeds of governments. All of these are harmful, but none of them is the real problem.

The real problem is the weakening of ties between individuals and nations. The real problem is that we do not love each other the way we should. The way we must, really—the world is in deep trouble, as we all know.

So the Pope is calling for a radical thing here. It’s not just a matter of contributing to this charity or participating in that social cause. These have their place, but it’s really a matter of how I treat every human being who crosses my path.

I am passionately pro-life, and consider legal abortion to be the greatest evil facing us right now. But if I, in my pro-life passion, treat another human being badly, if I come back from the March for Life and cold-shoulder, ignore, despise, use another human being, what good are my passionate pro-life convictions?

The whole evil of abortion is the denial of the humanity of the fetus. So if I treat you as anything less than a human being, if I reduce you to an object who is either serving my wants and needs or is in my way, then I am just as much in the culture of death as anyone.

In Madonna House, flawed human beings as we are, this really is our fundamental orientation. To treat every human being who enters our doors as, first, a human being. To honour the dignity of each one, and at least try to serve his or her needs—this is our fundamental apostolate. And we have seen countless people restored to life and dignity through this simple way of loving.

This is what the world needs. We need to love one another. We need to treat every human being as if they are the most important person in the world, simply because they are the one who is with us now. This is what will transform our society and heal the wounds of the world. I don’t really think anything else will, in the long run.

Persons of Concern

…This [Lent] I would like to propose a few thoughts in the light of a brief biblical passage drawn from the Letter to the Hebrews:  “Let us be concerned for each other, to stir a response in love and good works”. These words are part of a passage in which the sacred author exhorts us to trust in Jesus Christ as the High Priest who has won us forgiveness and opened up a pathway to God… I would like to reflect on [this] verse, which offers a succinct, valuable and ever timely teaching on the three aspects of Christian life: concern for others, reciprocity and personal holiness.

This first aspect is an invitation to be “concerned”: the Greek verb used here is katanoein, which means to scrutinize, to be attentive, to observe carefully and take stock of something. We come across this word in the Gospel when Jesus invites the disciples to “think of” the ravens that, without striving, are at the centre of the solicitous and caring Divine Providence (cf. Lk 12:24), and to “observe” the plank in our own eye before looking at the splinter in that of our brother (cf. Lk 6:41). In another verse of the Letter to the Hebrews, we find the encouragement to “turn your minds to Jesus” (3:1), the Apostle and High Priest of our faith. So the verb which introduces our exhortation tells us to look at others, first of all at Jesus, to be concerned for one another, and not to remain isolated and indifferent to the fate of our brothers and sisters.

All too often, however, our attitude is just the opposite: an indifference and disinterest born of selfishness and masked as a respect for “privacy”. Today too, the Lord’s voice summons all of us to be concerned for one another.

Message of His Holiness Benedict XVI for Lent 2012

Reflection – Well, I thought it was time I blogged a bit about Lent, since we’re at the end of the 2^nd week and all. I’ll be going through the Pope’s Lenten message over the next few days here.

This business of being concerned for one another is so important, of course. It’s a beautiful word: ‘concerned’. The way we use it normally provides a good basis for reflection: ‘What concern is it of yours?’; ‘Business concerns’; ‘Concerned parties’.

In other words, to be concerned is to have a stake in something, to have some ‘skin in the game’. It matters to me because I have a concern. A whole sense that this person or thing counts in my world.

Well, we should be concerned, then, for every human being on the face of the earth. Right off the bat, the Pope is calling us to be aware of how deeply inter-connected every one of us is. Your life, even if you are a total stranger, is of deep concern to me. How are you today? I hope all is well with you… can I help you?

This goes against a basic human tendency which is alive and flourishing today. Namely, to only care about one’s immediate circle of family and friends, or at best one’s ‘tribe’, however one defines that term. The rest of the human race is of no concern to me. As long as me and my little group are OK; the rest of you can go to Hell.

This is not a new attitude, of course. But it is an attitude that has no place in a Christian. For the Christian, every human being is one who God the Father loves, God the Son died for, God the Spirit desires to rest upon and give life to. Everyone. And if we are following this God, every human being is for us an object (really, a person) of concern.

So, Lent! Right away then we see that Lent is not just about giving up chocolate or saying a few extra prayers. It is a question of asking God to enlarge our hearts, so that we truly are concerned for everyone: for obscure African tribesmen and the person next to me on the bus. For the Chinese and the store clerk. For Afghanistan and for my next door neighbour. This is the challenge of Lent, because it is the challenge of the Gospel. All the self-denial and prayer is meant to bring us into a space where God is able to pour his love into us, so we can at least start to love, a little bit, the way He loves.

No Distant Stranger

The Sermon on the Mount draws a comprehensive portrait of the right way to live. It aims to show us how to be a human being. We could sum up its fundamental insights by saying that man can be understood only in light of God, and that his life is made righteous only when he lives it in relation to God. But God is not some distant stranger. He shows us his face in Jesus. In what Jesus does and wills we come to know the mind and will of God himself.

Jesus of Nazareth 1, 128

Reflection – I am reminded of a story. A woman named Jean Fox, who was the director of the MH women’s branch after the death of our founder Catherine de Hueck Doherty, was a remarkable woman of faith. Before she joined MH, she had worked as a public health nurse in New York City, and during that time, she  had decided, as a spiritual exercise, to take one line of the Sermon on the Mount each day and practice it as literally and closely as she could.

Her experience was that incredible spiritual power and grace flowed from that simple practice, that in doing exactly, one line at a time, what the Lord said to do—turning the other cheek, letting her yes be yes, going the extra mile, praying for her enemies—she was brought into a deep communion with God.

Now I realize that everyone’s Lent is well underway, and people are doing (or not doing, as the case may be) whatever they are doing. But it strikes me that this would be a superb Lenten discipline. Like, arrange it on a rota of some kind: Monday, I will give to whoever asks me; Tuesday I pray for my enemies; Wednesday I give alms in secret. Something like that. Total spirit of literal childlike obedience to Jesus, who is telling us the mind and will of God in these precepts.

I suspect we would find such a Lenten fast highly profitable, fruitful. To just do what God tells us to do—so often we fudge it a little bit. It’s really a question of letting God set the terms of our life. Not our own ‘brilliant’ insights, not our own prudential judgments, not our own capacities and limitations. All of those have a place in our decision making process, but the fundamental reality is that God has unveiled for us the path of life, and invites us to walk along it with Jesus.

And that really is the key. The Sermon on the mount is not only or simply or even primarily a list of precepts and observances. It certainly is that, but primarily it is the way of Jesus, the way of walking in the world that is the way Jesus walked, the way He wants to walk with us. All this generosity, all this interior dedication, all this depth of prayer and humility and love that flows through the whole sermon—this is the Heart of Christ for us. He’s telling us His own life here.

And it’s all about finding our life in His life. Which is nice, because then we don’t have to make up our own life or somehow thrash around in a cold meaningless world, a trackless waste of relativism, cynicism, and doubt.

We have a path laid out for us to walk on through and in the heart of this world. And this path will make our lives beautiful and good. Not pain-free, not without great struggle and toil, but beautiful and good nonetheless. And isn’t that what we all want, anyhow?

God Messes Everything Up

Matthew and Luke recount three temptations of Jesus that reflect the inner struggle over his own particular mission and, at the same time, address the question as to what truly matters in human life. At the heart of all temptations, as we see here, is the act of pushing God aside because we perceive him as secondary, if not actually superfluous and annoying, in comparison with all the apparently far more urgent matters that fill our lives. Constructing a world by our own lights, without reference to God, building on our own foundation; refusing to acknowledge the reality of anything beyond the political and material, while setting God aside as an illusion—that is the temptation that threatens us in many varied forms.

Jesus of Nazareth, Part One, 28

Reflection – Here we touch upon something very deep. Pope Benedict goes on to analyze the three temptations of Jesus in some depth (and this whole section alone is worth the price of the book, in terms of the light it sheds on the human heart), but here he really gets down to the nitty-gritty heart of the matter.

God is in our way. God messes up our lives. God prevents us from doing just what we please, from running our own show and making our life exactly what and how we think our lives should be.

So, ignore God. Push him to the side. Don’t think about him. Don’t talk to him. Don’t get too close to him. Avoid eye contact. Maybe a little bit of religion, just enough so you’re not feeling too guilty, but don’t let it get out of control. One hour a week, most weeks. That’ll do it—it's like getting a flu shot.

We so desperately want to ‘construct a world by our own lights’, so desperately want to do things our own way. God—we just know it!—is going to mess all that up for us.

I truly believe this is the deep existential struggle of a great number of people, and always has been. We just want that fruit from the tree—God surely didn’t mean that commandment to apply to us, now, did He? We just want that… whatever it is we want.

And the most important thing is to get what we want. That’s the fundamental human mistake: when we decide on some level that what matters most for our happiness is that we get what we want. I think there are very few of us indeed who are absolutely free of that illusion.

And it is an illusion. Getting what you want has very little to do with happiness. People get what they want all the time, and derive little happiness from it. Or at best a fleeting happiness. True and lasting happiness comes when we become what we should be, when we become people of mercy and justice, love and fidelity. Than, even if we can’t always get what we want, we do indeed get what we need, and what we need (which the Rolling Stones never seemed to figure out) is God.

So that’s the fundamental struggle, the great temptation, the deepest question of human life. Where does my happiness lie? In my wants, or in God’s will? There is no third option, and we have to decide. Lent is a good season to ponder these matters, and to decide anew which it will be.

Emerging From the Cave

Yet this bitterness against the Church has another more specific cause… a secret hope still looks to the Church, which, it is felt, ought to be a kind of island of the good life, a tiny oasis of freedom… it is in the church that the dream of a better world should be realized. There, at least, one would hope to know the taste of freedom, of redeemed existence—to emerge from the cave, as Gregory the Great expresses it in language borrowed from Plato.

Called to Communion, 134-5

Reflection – The bitterness to the Church Ratzinger describes here is that of the ‘how dare the Church tell me what to do! type’ The resentment of the Church as the pre-eminent voice proclaiming the moral law in its fullness to a world that largely would prefer to do without it.

It is interesting that he sees in this bitterness a subtle compliment being paid to the Church. Now, surely there are people who simply disagree with the Church, and dismiss its claims without much fuss. There are some people who are simply indifferent towards the Church, who think little of it.

But the people—and there are many of them—who have this kind of bitterness, this kind of outrage against the Church—well, that’s telling, isn’t it? Why be outraged? I’m not outraged at Hollywood for pushing its version of morality, even though I disagree with it entirely. I don’t expect Hollywood to do anything except… well, what they do (and this is a G-rated blog, so I won’t go into that any further).

The people who get really angry at the Church for teaching that abortion, contraception, homosexuality, IVF, pre-marital sex, euthanasia, torture, pre-emptive war, exploitation and neglect of the poor are morally wrong, who become bitter towards the Church on account of these things, actually are bearing witness in a sort of upside-down way to the Church’s own claims about itself.

The Church should be offering the good life to people. The Church should be offering freedom and peace, redemption and hope to people. So the moral law in all its unyielding strictures is seen by many as a betrayal of what they secretly hold the Church to be. After all, ‘my good life’ requires that I do (insert practice here).

Of course, some would say that this means the Church needs to loosen up. Pastoral sensitivity and concern for the Church’s mission mean that we need to change our rules, let people do what they want, stop making everyone feel guilty. Only then will people experience the Church as what it is, namely a place of freedom and joy.

We cannot do that. For one thing, we sincerely and deeply believe ‘the rules’ are God’s, not ours. We can’t change them even if we wanted to. And we don’t want to. Because they are God’s rules, and we believe that God alone knows the true path to freedom. The human notion of freedom as freedom from all restriction is self-defeating. Sooner or later some unrestricted human will use his freedom to destroy mine, or I will use my freedom in a self-destructive way.

Freedom is walking the path of life, of truth, and of love. The Church is the place of freedom, because the Church is the place of truth. This emergence from the cave signifies the movement from appearance and illusion into the clear daylight of reality. This is what the Church offers.

We are free to walk out of the cave into the light. We are not free to walk into the light and still stay in the dark. And the Church, in its teaching office, continues to shine the light it possesses—light as we understand it—into the darkness of the world. Let those who accept this light do so, those who reject the light look elsewhere. But those who are bitter and resentful of the Church for shedding the light it does on things, clearly are looking to the Church still. I guess that’s hopeful, in a funny sort of way.

Overthrowing the Citadel

Saint Paul says, “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor 10:17). Union with Christ is also union with all those to whom he gives himself. I cannot possess Christ just for myself; I can belong to him only in union with all those who have become, or who will become, his own.

Communion draws me out of myself towards him, and thus also towards unity with all Christians. We become “one body”, completely joined in a single existence. Love of God and love of neighbour are now truly united: God incarnate draws us all to himself. We can thus understand how agape also became a term for the Eucharist: there God's own agape comes to us bodily, in order to continue his work in us and through us.

Only by keeping in mind this Christological and sacramental basis can we correctly understand Jesus' teaching on love. The transition which he makes from the Law and the Prophets to the twofold commandment of love of God and of neighbour, and his grounding the whole life of faith on this central precept, is not simply a matter of morality—something that could exist apart from and alongside faith in Christ and its sacramental re-actualization.

Faith, worship and ethos are interwoven as a single reality which takes shape in our encounter with God's agape. Here the usual contraposition between worship and ethics simply falls apart. “Worship” itself, Eucharistic communion, includes the reality both of being loved and of loving others in turn. A Eucharist which does not pass over into the concrete practice of love is intrinsically fragmented.

Deus Caritas Est 14,

Reflection – I am writing this from the parish rectory in Fort Coulonge, Quebec (where??), my home base while I give parish missions in nearby parishes of Vinton and Otter Lake (where????). My theme for the mission is “Living the Eucharist” – looking at the Mass as teaching us how to live, giving us a pattern for our lives.

Well, this quote from Deus Caritas Est just about sums up everything I have to say on the subject! In the Mass, Jesus pours out his whole being for us in love and gift; in our lives we are to pour out our whole being for one another in love and gift. In the Mass, Jesus gives us His very self to be our food and drink, our strength and our life; in our lives, we can only be true to the Eucharist we celebrate by living and loving as Jesus does, and this power is in us because He is in us, because of the Mass.

It is the whole business of being drawn out of ourselves, of having the citadel of the self, the ego, be overthrown. This is the purpose of Lent, right? On a certain fundamental level? And here it is at the Mass. A good Lenten observance if you can do it: go to Mass every day. Right there is the whole meaning and substance of life opened up for us, drawing us in, giving us what we need to live it out in our lives. And that whole meaning and substance is ‘love’.

Being loved and loving others in return: this is ‘living the Eucharist’.

Talking About Conscience XV

This is part of an ongoing series on the blog, the rest of which can be found here.

In the Gentile world, Israel had encountered something that was confirmed anew in the experience of the messengers of Jesus Christ: their preaching responded to an expectation. It encountered a basic prior knowledge of the essential elements of the will of God that had taken written form in the commandments, and this knowledge is found in all cultures.

This primal knowledge develops all the more purely where it is not distorted by the arrogance of ‘civilization’. The more a person leads a life guided by the ‘fear of God’ (see the story of the centurion Cornelius, especially Acts 10:34), the more concrete and clear will be the effect of this anamnesis…

St. Basil insists that the love of God, which takes on a specific form in the commandments, is not imposed on us from outside. Rather, it is infused into us a priori. “A basic understanding of the good is imprinted upon us,” says Augustine.

It is only on this basis that we can understand Newman’s celebrated remark correctly, that if he were asked to make a religious toast he would indeed toast the pope, but he would toast conscience first. The pope does not have power to impose on believing Catholics just because he wants to do so or because he thinks it useful to do so.

This modern voluntaristic concept of authority can only distort the true theological sense of the papacy. If the true essence of the Petrine ministry has become so incomprehensible in the modern period, this is surely because we can conceive of authority only on the basis of philosophical positions that exclude all bridges between  subject and object. In such a view, whatever does not come from the subject can only be a heteronomous imposition.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 93-4

Reflection – The Pope can’t tell me what to do! Underneath some of the admittedly technical vocabulary in this passage (heteronomous… anamnesis… voluntaristic…), what we have here is Ratzinger’s response to this basic and commonly expressed sentiment.

Voluntarism means roughly the exalting of the will over the intellect. I want what I want—that’s all. No reasoning, or minimal reasoning: just will. So if someone else tells me to do something, there is nothing going on except that they are imposing their will on me—that’s heteronomy (literally, rule by another). A voluntaristic view of the papacy is just that: the pope just gets to tell us what he wants me to do, that dirty bum. Hmph! Laying some Catholic moral guilt trip on me. Down with the Pope! Ecrasez l’infame! (Yesterday, Sofia Loren, today, Voltaire—can’t say I’m not trying to mix it up!)

What Ratzinger (and remember, he wrote this before he became pope) is developing throughout this essay is the thought that the moral law which is from God is, in fact, written in our hearts already, by virtue of our creation by God. It is not an imposition of an external will upon our frail subjectivity. Rather, it springs up from the depths of our hearts. This is the ‘anamnesis’ he refers to – the remembrance of the moral law.

For this reason the Pope is at the service of conscience. For this reason, religious groups have to be allowed in a free society to both preach and practice the moral truths they hold. It is essential to the mission of a religion, among its central tasks, to teach its people, those who freely choose to belong to any given religion, what is true and false, good and evil, what the specific contents are of this moral law written on the heart of man.

If religion is forced by the government to falsify its preaching by its practice, then it is being forced to not be itself. In other words, freedom of religion is null and void. And if people are not free in matters religious, they are actually not free at all. If government can suppress religious freedom, then there is no freedom it cannot suppress.

And that’s what’s happening in America right now, which is sad. I hope it can be turned around there. We’ll see. Meanwhile, I’ll keep talking about conscience from time to time on this blog, and maybe we can all understand a little bit just what we are losing, and what that means for our humanity. Sadly, we’ll see.

They're All the Same

A false understanding of toleration is connected with the loss, or perhaps the renunciation, of the question of truth, which is indeed being dismissed by many people today as a meaningless question. In this way the intellectual weakness of present-day culture is becoming apparent. If the question of truth is no longer being considered, then what religion is, is no longer distinguishable from what it is not; faith is no longer differentiated from superstition, experience from illusion. Unless claims of truth are considered, respect for other religions becomes contradictory and meaningless, because there is no criterion by which to distinguish what is of positive value in any religion and what is negative or is the product of superstition and deception.

Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith, 213

Reflection – “It’s all the same,” the prostitute Aldonza sings in the musical Man from La Mancha. It’s all the same, sings, our modern secular governments, changing the words a bit: “One view of God’s just like the other, I don’t know why the Pope’s to blame. I’ll worship Zeus or Odin’s brother—it’s all the same. So do not talk to me of truth…”

To claim that one’s religion is true is to be a hateful ideologue. To claim that all religions are false (which is what is really meant when we say that all religions are equally true) is tolerant and kind.

‘The intellectual weakness of present-day culture is becoming apparent.’ Hah! Ratzinger is nothing if not the master of gentle understatement. And the other great observation: ‘respect for other religions becomes contradictory and meaningless.’ – this whole nonsense that all religions are the same or of equal value precisely disrespects religion’s actual claims. Muslims do not believe that Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism are of equal value to Islam.

Christians, myself emphatically included, do not believe Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and astrology are of equal value to Christianity. And—gasps of horror all around—Catholics (myself emphatically included) do not consider the various shades of Protestant and Orthodox Christianity equally valuable to Catholicism. And vice versa any old way you choose to swap around the names.

The point of religious belief is just that—we believe our religion is true. And hence, that other religions are false, insofar as they contradict our religion. There is nothing hateful or violent about this—it’s simple logic! I love Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Hindus (although I don’t know any of the latter) very dearly… but I consider them wrong, insofar as their beliefs differ from mine. And they may consider me wrong too. I won’t be offended.

It is from this healthy and clear-headed basis that we can have sensible conversations and even genuine friendships. The smarmy cult of feel good multi-cult is based on nothing true at all—no true respect for religious believers and their beliefs, no true engagement with the actual contents of the world religions. Just a silly and sentimental assertion that if we all just hold hands and sing campfire songs we are ‘all the same.’ Balderdash!

We are all the same only when and if we all earnestly and sincerely seek to know and live the truth about life, about God or gods, about who and what we are for, who and what the universe is for.

The sinister undercurrent of multicultural feel good relativism is, of course, to silence, marginalize, and drive underground actual religious voices and positions, all in the name of respect for religion. Statist governments of all descriptions always identify religion, along with the family, as their primary enemy, their major competition, that which needs to be put in its place, and which place needs to be as small as they can swing it politically.

Statist governments of the right or of the left always act this way, and that’s where we’re heading now, folks. They’ll prove to us before the night’s out they’re all the same.

Prayers for a Parish Mission

Well, I'm off to do a parish mission here in the diocese of Pembroke - giving it in two parishes in Vinton and Otter Lake, Quebec. Pray for me and for them, that the Gospel be preached and heard!

Weighing Your Spouse

A self-limiting reason… is an amputated reason. If man cannot use his reason to ask about the essential things in his life, where he comes from and where he is going, about what he should do and may do, about living and dying, but has to leave these decisive questions to feeling, divorced from reason, then he is not elevating reason but dishonoring it.

Truth and Tolerance, 158

Reflection – When Ratzinger talks about a ‘self-limiting’ reason, he is referring to the philosophical position known as logical positivism. This is the all-too-familiar insistence that the only things we can know and reason about are immediate sensory phenomena, controlled scientific experiments on these, and the logical truths of mathematics.

Everything else is out of bounds—mere emotion or sentiment. So that means that not only God and the soul are sentimental notions, but little things like… oh, I don’t know, love, justice, peace, friendship, good and evil, happiness. Little details like that—nothing important!

All of that is utterly beyond the scope of reason, according to strict logical positivism. Anything we say about those matters is strictly how we feel about them, not any real statement about reality.

Now, logical positivism sounds convincing to many people, especially people who are trained in the hard sciences. We know that experimental science yields hard facts about reality, when done correctly. We know this because…well, because science works! It leads to technological applications that do what the scientific experiment says they should do.

So knowing that we truly do know stuff through science and math, it is understandable to say that any other kind of knowing is not-really-knowing. There is no scientific experiment that will prove what friendship is, or justice, or love. Or that your spouse loves you, for that matter (‘honey, could you please step into this test tube for a minute? No, I can’t tell you why…’). You can't weigh your spouse on a scale... or at least it is not conducive to domestic harmony to try.

There is also no scientific experiment that can prove the truth of logical positivism. And this is the key point. By its own standards, it is self-refuting. Truth = math and hard science, right? That’s the hard stance of the positivist. But there is no and can be no mathematical equation or hard scientific experiment that can prove that positivism is true.

So it collapses—goodbye logical positivism! Thanks for playing!—and reason can expand out, as it always has, to all the deep questions about life and its meaning, good and evil, God and the soul. Hurray! The beautiful truth is, we are made to reach out with our minds and hearts both to these deepest matters, made to truly know, or at least truly search for true knowledge of all of these things.

Logical positivism reflects a certain despair in the possibility of knowledge of truth, or perhaps a certain dark desire to push away the truths that our reason might lead us to, in favor of being able to do whatever we please. But we are made for better things, made for a true encounter, a true dialogue with reality that will lead us out of our own self-enclosed worlds into broader fields of meaning and life. In short, the truth will set us free.

Beware of the God

[When considering the question of God’s existence] what we are looking for is the very foundation of all rationality; we are inquiring into how its light can be perceived… there is one fundamental point that seems obvious to me: where everything, and the foundations of everything are involved, the one who endeavors to comprehend is inevitably challenged to get involved with the totality of his being, with all the faculties of perception he has been given.

Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, 90

Reflection – So who knows if God exists or not? And really, does it matter? Who cares, anyhow? It’s irrelevant, right? We’re born, we live, we do stuff, we die. Whether there’s some Sky God up there looking at us is kind of unimportant, don’t you think? What difference does it make?

So goes the reasoning of at least some people today. We can’t know, and it doesn’t matter anyhow. Party on! Or, do whatever else you think makes for a good life. Ratzinger points out in the course of the above essay (which is superb, and from a superb (and short!) book) that of course this only seems to leave the question unsettled. In fact, such people proceed to live as functional atheists. Agnosticism may be intellectually possible—and in a certain sense we are all agnostics, since no one has ever seen God—but in practical terms one lives as a believer or as a non-believer.

Somehow, one never meets a determined agnostic who then concludes that he or she should pray every day and follow the moral law assiduously ‘just in case’. No, agnosticism always yields a lifestyle of practical atheism, ignoring God even if He does exist, because we’re just not certain.

This is funny, if you think of it. If I have reason to think there’s a big mean dog, say, inside a house, but I’m not sure and the evidence of this dog’s presence is inconclusive… well, I won’t just barge into the house as if I’m quite sure there’s no dog there. So if we entertain the possibility that there might just be a big (if not mean!) God in the house, why in the name of all prudence would we spend our lives ignoring such a possible being?

I mean, why not pray and ask this God to reveal Himself more clearly. Or ask Him to make his intentions and thoughts known vis a vis yourself? If you’re truly an agnostic and not an atheist, wouldn’t this be the sensible course of action?

Anyhow, this is, believe it or not, the point Ratzinger is making above in somewhat scholarly language. The question of God is not some abstract intellectual puzzle. The question is rather whether or not there is a Being who fashioned all reality, who is the Lord of all reality, and who therefore has absolute power over all our lives. It’s a question of everything—the difference it makes is the difference of… well, everything. It’s hard to start narrowing it down.

Either life is godless, and hence devoid of ultimate meaning (this is strictly logical), and therefore my only recourse is to live well according to what feeble light I possess (but even there, where did that light come from? What do I mean when I say ‘live well’? If there’s no God, doesn’t it all just collapse into ‘do whatever the hell you want’?), or the other possibility is true. There is a God, this God establishes the heavens and the earth and bestows His meaning and truth upon it. Therefore, the whole point of my life is to find out God’s meaning and truth and conform my choices and behaviors to it.

Surely this question is not abstract or meaningless. Instead, we must engage the question, as Ratzinger says, with the totality of our being and all the faculties of perception we have been given. Agnosticism is at best a transitional phase, at worst a cop out, atheism lacking the courage of its lack of convictions. Our human dignity demands something better from us—a true, searching engagement with ultimate questions about ultimate reality.

Up From the Ashes

We need men like Benedict of Nursia, who in an age of dissipation and decadence immersed himself in the uttermost solitude. Then, after all the purifications he had to undergo, he succeeded in rising again in the light. He returned and made his foundation at Monte Cassino, the ‘city on the hill’ where, in the midst of so many ruins, he assembled the forces from which a new world was formed. In this way, like Abraham, Benedict became the father of many peoples.

Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, 52-3

Reflection – Well, now we see (if we didn’t before) just why Joseph Ratzinger took the name ‘Benedict’ for his papacy. There is a certain sense permeating all his writings that this passage encapsulates nicely.

The world is passing away. The world we knew, what has loosely been termed ‘Western Civilization’, is gone or its last remnants are swiftly going. It is roughly analogous to the situation of late antiquity, when the Roman Empire, at least in the West, passed away over a period of some centuries. The void was filled by host of barbarian tribes, and the ensuing centuries (I’m thinking of the 6^th-10^th) are rightly called the ‘Dark Ages’ – a time of political and social chaos and intellectual stagnation.

Except for these little Benedictine monks, you know. Fanning out across Europe, as they were able, building their monasteries, planting their orchards, clearing land. Perhaps they would labor half their lives doing this, and then see all their works destroyed by the latest wave of tribal warfare and bloodshed. Perhaps they would themselves be martyred in the midst of all this.

But they kept building and rebuilding. And patiently copying out by hand whatever manuscripts they had. And composing beautiful works of liturgical piety—many of the prayers of the liturgy date from these centuries.

Over and over, doing these things—for centuries. And slowly a new civilization rose amidst the ashes of the old, slowly the barbarian tribes became Christian, slowly Europe became a cradle of music, art, literature, scholarship, architecture, contributing so much beauty to the human patrimony.

So here we are, folks, in the year 2012. And that civilization, while its monuments surround us, is largely if not wholly passed away. What are we going to do? Ratzinger tells us here what he thinks we need to do. Ultimately it is not political action or social media campaigns or snazzy production values that will forge a new civilization from the ruins of the old.

It is prayer and fasting, seeking God in the depths of our hearts, building little communities of love as we are able, planting gardens, planting seeds, clearing the land. You know, this is the whole substance of what Madonna House is about: in our littleness and poverty we are building a new civilization of love on the ruins of the old one. We are truly a new Monte Cassino—small as yet, but really, how many monks were at Monte Cassino in the 7^th century? It’s only in retrospect that we know the significance of what they were doing.

It’s kind of nice to have Pope Benedict agree with us that this is the truly necessary work of this time! Why don’t you come and visit us sometime?

Or, if that doesn’t work for you, start your own ‘Monte Cassino’ – seek the Lord in prayer and fasting, and then build what you can, where you are. Love and prayer are the two means by which this new world will come about. Our work may be ‘burnt down’ – we will rebuild. We may die without seeing the fruits of our labors; others will. What is asked of us is to be faithful, to be loving, to be praying, and to simply do what we can, according to the lights God has given us.

The Shaping of Reality

The essential problem of our times, for Europe and for the world, is that although the fallacy of the communist economy has been recognized… the moral and religious question it used to address has been almost totally repressed. The unresolved issue of Marxism lives on: the crumbling of man’s original certainties about God, himself, and the universe.

“The Spiritual Roots of Europe,” in Without Roots: Relativism, Christianity, and Islam, 73-4

Reflection – Communism may seem to most people today to be, outside of a few small enclaves like North Korea or Cuba, a historical phenomenon. China, ostensibly communist, has a thriving free market economy combined with a repressive central government: problematic for sure, but not exactly Marxist.

Ratzinger rightly points out, though, that while communism collapsed as an economic system in the 1990s, its spiritual and moral underpinnings have never collapsed, but take new and strange outward forms in the world today.

Who or what is God, or is there a God? Who or what is man, the human person? What is the relationship of man to the world? Underneath the specific tenets of Marxist theory lie certain answers to those questions, namely, that there is no god, that man is the sole shaper of reality, that this shaping of reality is wrought through seizing control of the levers of power. Along with this can come a certain historical determinism, a sense of inevitability of social progress along this or that line, which can then be used as a pretext to rather ruthlessly suppress dissent.

Might makes right! This is the crude expression of the underlying stance of Marxism. Whatever group has the upper hand is thereby endowed with moral probity and can punish its enemies as it sees fit.

And so… opponents of same-sex marriage routinely receive death threats. Those who question the ‘consensus’ on global climate warming (oops, I mean change), are compared to Holocaust deniers who should be jailed. And yes, those who question the ideology of sexual libertinism by suggesting that contraception is not a good thing are to be driven out of public life, by way of government mandates.

Underneath all of this is a sense that is fundamentally Marxist, that the whole point of the human project is to seize control of reality and shape it to our unfettered will. The corrosive crushing power of ideology, when man himself, the human person is to be shaped and fashioned according to the agendae of those who are in power.

This is indeed, as Ratzinger says, the central problem of Europe and of North America in our days. The answer—well, I’ve written a whole book about that! Suffice to say we need to recapture a vision of humanity that is first and fundamentally receptive and contemplative. Only from this receptive contemplative humanity can we fashion the world in peace and in love. That is our response.

Greetings, Shea Readers... Now About That Conscience Blogging...

Oh, I see that Mark Shea just gave me a link (thanks, Mark!). My series on conscience just wrapped up, at least for now, but is just down a few posts, or you could click on the 'talking about conscience' label at the bottom of this post. I do think it's crucial for us all to get clear as we can in our own minds about what conscience is, since it appears we are facing serious attacks on it and will be for the foreseeable future. What we don't understand, we will not fight to preserve.

Treasury of Compassion

There used to be a form of devotion—perhaps less practiced today but quite widespread not long ago—that included the idea of “offering up” the minor daily hardships that continually strike at us like irritating “jabs”, thereby giving them a meaning. Of course, there were some exaggerations and perhaps unhealthy applications of this devotion, but we need to ask ourselves whether there may not after all have been something essential and helpful contained within it. What does it mean to offer something up? Those who did so were convinced that they could insert these little annoyances into Christ's great “com-passion” so that they somehow became part of the treasury of compassion so greatly needed by the human race. In this way, even the small inconveniences of daily life could acquire meaning and contribute to the economy of good and of human love. Maybe we should consider whether it might be judicious to revive this practice ourselves.

Spe Salvi, 40

Reflection – A good Lenten reflection here! I am old enough (just) to have been taught the spirituality of ‘offer it up’. Somehow, I never experienced the ‘exaggerations and unhealthy applications’ of the practice, and in fact I don’t really know what they were or would be. So not only do I remember being taught this, I never got out of the habit of doing it, either!

It’s a simple practice, like all authentic spiritual practices. To simply give to God the little headaches and irritations of daily life. Getting stuck in traffic, aches and pains, plans gone awry—all the little stuff that irks and annoys us and can make us really crabby on any given day. It’s there anyhow, all that negative stuff—we may as well do something with it!

 To offer it to Christ to be a sharing in his passion—now that’s something to do with it! Our lives truly can become a sharing in his redemptive work, his love for the world. Of course it’s not only in the negative and painful aspects of our life that this is true; he wants our joys and our fun, our productive labor, our prayer—all of us.

But we can see, usually, that the good stuff is all blessed and somehow going up towards God, if we have any faith at all. It’s the ‘bad’ stuff, and especially all the petty little stuff that trips us up and seems to have little or no value, that we need to consciously unite with Christ.

So up goes the headache, up goes the traffic jam, up goes the missed appointment, the mean boss, the jangled nerves. All this dross and rubbish of our days, up to God. If we can truly believe (and I believe it is simply true) that all this offered to God with sincerity and devotion can be transformed by his grace into a blessing for the world, what a difference it makes to us!

Our lives are filled from top to bottom with blessings and gifts. The good stuff, the joyous stuff, and all the nuisances and annoyances. All of it is gift: tout est grâce, St. Therese of Lisieux said—the good, the bad, and the ugly, because all of it can be united to Christ and become part of his offering to save and heal the world.

What else do we want our lives to be about, anyhow? And if there is something else we want our lives to be about—well, isn’t that what Lent is for, to purify us of that stuff? Offer it up.

That's Where the Money Is

In a world based on calculations, it is the calculation of consequences that determines what should be considered moral and immoral. In this way, the category of the good vanishes, as Kant clearly showed. Nothing is good or evil in itself; everything depends on the consequences that may be thought to ensue upon an action.

Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, 31

Reflection – Consequentialism is the recurring decimal of modernity. The persistent idea that we can do evil because good things will result from it crosses all lines of political persuasion and ideological commitment. We can torture prisoners to get information to save lives; we can abort babies to relieve women who are in distressing circumstances; we can lie to advance our political/social cause; we can calumnize, detract, slander, savage people who oppose our agendas; we can have sex with anyone and in any way we please because… well, because it feels good! And that’s a good consequence!

On and on it goes. The rigorous commitment to a binding moral law, to an absolute sense that we simply must not, cannot, shalt not do an evil act, no matter what good may emerge from it—this is rare nowadays. Conservatives advocate torture; liberals advocate abortion; almost everyone advocates fornication and contraception and lying for a good cause.

Now the Church has always posited the principle of double effect, when a single act has two consequences, a good and an evil one, but the key point there is that the act itself cannot be intrinsically evil, nor may the evil consequence be desired.

Consequentialism is attractive because, of course, we ultimately get to do whatever we want. We just have to pinpoint the good effect we are going for. Like the bank robber asked why he robbed banks who answered, “Because that’s where the money is.” Why tell lies? Because that’s how I get what I want, duh!

But the price we pay is too high. The price we pay is that the very idea of good and evil is drained of meaning. All that is left is power, and getting what I want. And this plunges us into a world of the jungle, of raw struggles for domination and control. Who will have the upper hand? Nature is red of tooth and claw, and when human beings jettison the moral law we too get bloodied in the fight for survival and dominance. A bloody mess is what we’re left with.

The only way to preserve a world that is human and humane, where there is a sense of right and of rights, is to maintain a world of moral order, of intrinsic good and evil that must be acknowledged, even as we struggle to live righteously. Consequentialism in all its forms must be recognized, called what it is, and vigorously resisted and rejected. We are all called in this struggle to moral effort which may at times rise to the level of moral heroism—fidelity to the moral law is sacrificial. But the alternative is bestial and demonic—the naked worship of power. So we gotta choose: what’s it going to be?

Let It Go!

Modern “man enters the world, no longer as a gift of the Creator, but as the product of our activity – and a product that can be selected according to requirements that we ourselves stipulate. In this way the splendor of the fact that he is the image of God – the source of his dignity and of his inviolability – no longer shines upon this man; his only splendor is the power of human capabilities.”

Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures,  26

Reflection – Designer babies, genetic engineering, eugenics—these are still somewhat science fiction scenarios. So this is not exactly what Ratzinger is referring to in this passage.

Rather, he is referring to a certain attitude that is rather common. “We are made, we are not born,” the Parachute Club sang when I was a wee lad back in the 1980s. In other words, life is not a gift, but a product. My humanity is not a given, but an achievement. I make myself human by my choices; humanity itself is an utter blank slate.

Now the Parachute Club (and many who agree with this) are thinking of freedom from the moral law, the license to do whatever one pleases that follows when there is no human ‘nature’ to adhere to. And while that is problematic in itself, proponents of this view forget a whole slew of other implications that follow upon this ‘made not born’ paradigm.

For one thing, the value of any individual is only commensurate with the value of his accomplishments, with what he or she had made. People who make the ‘wrong choices’ or who fail to maximize their potential are intrinsically of less value than the ubermen who excel. The whole business of ‘lives not worth living’ and the specter of the gas chamber looms large all of the sudden.

For another thing, we do not live as isolated monads. When we are ‘made not born’ and that’s the ultimate reality of humanity, then the powerful people in society may decide that they will do the making, thank you very much, rather than leave it to the messy process of human personal choice. And if there is no intrinsic freedom or value to human life, then what cogent objection can be raised to that? Let the government-media-entertainment complex tell you what a human being should think, feel, and do—let yourself be made, since you were born with nothing. So much easier!

The denial of human nature, then, which seems to be liberating (“Let it go, let it free your body, let it move your soul…”) actually paves the way pretty quickly for nothing less than fascism, and there is no brakes to halt our precipitous slide thataway. Oops.

As I have said more than once on this blog, when a philosophical position leads necessarily to a monstrous conclusion, it’s time to go back and reconsider. Yes, an intrinsic and binding human nature implies logically a moral law, things we must not do that violate the nature we have been given. But without any human nature, the rich and powerful are free to manipulate, suppress, program, socially engineer, and virtually obliterate the rest of us.

And this is not exactly a theoretical possibility, eh? Recent court cases in Quebec and Alberta, and current legislation in Ontario make it clear that the government considers children to be primarily subjects of the state, and parents at best to be agents of the state thus compelled to educate their children according to central planning dictats (see Lifesite News for details). Very serious—the dictatorship of relativism waxing strong in Canada these days.

So let us be perfectly clear: we are born, not made, or if made, made by our Heavenly Father, and what we need to let go of to be freed in our bodies and souls is the terrible weight of moral and ontological nullity which makes us hopelessly vulnerable to tyranny and oppression. What we need to do in the political sphere is far from clear, but we need to start by clear articulations of the truth, strong arguments for our position, to be able to even begin to resist the growing tide of tyranny in the Western world.

And I’m sorry for getting that stupid Parachute Club song stuck in your head. Let it go!

Talking About Conscience XIV

The first level, which we might call the ontological level, of the phenomenon ‘conscience’ means that a kind of primal remembrance of the good and the true (which are identical) is bestowed on us. There is an inherent existential tendency of man, who is created in the image of God, to tend toward that which is in keeping with God. Thanks to its origin, man’s being is in harmony with some things but not with others.

This anamnesis of our origin, resulting from the fact that our being is constitutively in keeping with God, is not a knowledge articulated in concepts, a treasure store of retrievable contents. It is an inner sense, a capacity for recognition, in such a way that the one addressed recognizes in himself an echo of what is said to him. If he does not hide from his own self, he comes to the insight: this is the goal toward which my whole being tends, this is where I want to go.

This anamnesis of the Creator, which is identical with the foundations of our existence, is the reason that mission is both possible and justified. The gospel may and indeed must be proclaimed to the pagans, because this is what they are waiting for, even if they do not know this themselves (see Is 42:4). Mission is justified when those it addresses encounter the word of the Gospel and recognize that this is what they were waiting for.

This is what Paul means when he says that the Gentiles ‘are a law unto themselves’—not in the sense of the modern liberalistic idea of autonomy, where nothing can be posited higher than the subject, but in the much deeper sense that nothing belongs to me less than my own self, and that my ego is the place where I must transcend myself most profoundly, the place where I am touched by my ultimate origin and goal.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 92-3

Reflection – This will be my last blog post for the time being on this series on conscience. There’s more stuff in this essay, and I’ll probably get back to it in a bit, but perhaps enough is enough for the time being.

Anamnesis—this is a good ‘word for the day’. It means ‘remembrance’, of course, and here the Pope is arguing that beneath and below the conscious operations of our conscience, that concrete decisions we have to make about right and wrong, good and evil, lies a fundamental remembrance of God, of truth, of goodness, and of beauty in the depths of our souls.

In the depths of our hearts we belong to God. Obedience, that fearful word, is not a tyranny imposed on us from without, but something that corresponds to our deepest being. We are made to transcend ourselves, and it is in the depths of our hearts that this call to self-transcendence is encountered.

So freedom of conscience remains the deepest freedom, not because the most important thing in the world is that “I get to do just as I please,” but because it is in the inner encounter of the human person with his or her own conscience that the true living out of our human destiny is fulfilled. If people are forced to do things by the state that violate their consciences, a terrible violence has been done.

This violence is currently what the Obama administration is pursuing in the United States right now, and this is a woeful thing, a path which, if not repented of, will lead to great destruction of much that is good in America. Let us pray for them, for one another, for the bishops, and for ourselves, that we may each respond to the call of God resonating in the depths of our hearts and so attain the fullness of life for which God has made us.