Possessed by Truth

Two rules are generally regarded nowadays as fundamental for interreligious dialogue:

1. Dialogue does not aim at conversion, but at understanding. In this respect it differs from evangelization, from mission;

2. Accordingly, both parties to the dialogue remain consciously within their identity, which the dialogue does not place in question either for themselves or for the other.

These rules are correct, but in the way they are formulated here I still find them too superficial. True, dialogue does not aim at conversion, but at better mutual understanding – that is correct. But all the same, the search for knowledge and understanding always has to involve drawing closer to the truth. Both sides in this piece-by-piece approach to truth are therefore on the path that leads forward and towards greater commonality, brought about by the oneness of the truth.

As far as preserving identity is concerned, it would be too little for the Christian, so to speak, to assert his identity in a such a way that he effectively blocks the path to truth. Then his Christianity would appear as something arbitrary, merely propositional. He would seem not to reckon with the possibility that religion has to do with truth.

On the contrary, I would say that the Christian can afford to be supremely confident, yes, fundamentally certain that he can venture freely into the open sea of the truth, without having to fear for his Christian identity. To be sure, we do not possess the truth, the truth possesses us: Christ, who is the truth, has taken us by the hand, and we know that his hand is holding us securely on the path of our quest for knowledge. Being inwardly held by the hand of Christ makes us free and keeps us safe: free – because if we are held by him, we can enter openly and fearlessly into any dialogue; safe – because he does not let go of us, unless we cut ourselves off from him. At one with him, we stand in the light of truth.

Address to Roman Curia, December 21, 2012

Reflection – ‘We do not possess the truth; the truth possesses us.’ The Pope hear sails into some of the truly tricky elements of inter-religious dialogue. We are not relativists. We do not believe that Catholicism is merely one religious path among many, all of equal value. We do believe it is true.

And yet this call to inter-religious dialogue, so vital in the world today wracked by war, violence, suspicion and hate, must be done with great respect for the beliefs of others, and the strong elements of beauty, truth, goodness present in every religion and every human heart.

It is this whole business of being possessed by the truth that is our surety in this work. In other words, ‘the truth’ is not in its essence some list of propositions or an ideology or debating points or a syllogism. It is a Person, and this is Jesus Christ who loves us and holds us in his care.

Because the truth that possesses us is that strong, that vital, that real—not some fragile certainty that we barely manage to hold onto, but a living communion of love—we don’t have to be afraid of other world views. We can listen with love to the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Muslim, the Jew. The love of Christ extends towards them, too, and if we are living in that love the very work of dialogue becomes deeply missionary, deeply evangelical, as Christ’s love enters the dialogue through our own interior dialogue with Him in the midst of it.

 

This is all so very important. Too often Christians draw back from the encounter with the ‘other’, perhaps for fear of losing their own faith or of capitulating to relativism or simply because it is hard work. We need this vision the Pope gives us here of how a loving respectful mutual searching out of truth always inclines our hearts towards deeper possession by the Truth, and in that Truth to show forth the face of love to all men and women.

Less Yelling! More Listening!

In man’s present situation, the dialogue of religions is a necessary condition for peace in the world and it is therefore a duty for Christians as well as other religious communities. This dialogue of religions has various dimensions.

In the first place it is simply a dialogue of life, a dialogue of being together. This will not involve discussing the great themes of faith – whether God is Trinitarian or how the inspiration of the sacred Scriptures is to be understood, and so on. It is about the concrete problems of coexistence and shared responsibility for society, for the state, for humanity.

In the process, it is necessary to learn to accept the other in his otherness and the otherness of his thinking. To this end, the shared responsibility for justice and peace must become the guiding principle of the conversation. A dialogue about peace and justice is bound to move beyond the purely pragmatic to become an ethical struggle for the truth and for the human being: a dialogue concerning the values that come before everything.

In this way what began as a purely practical dialogue becomes a quest for the right way to live as a human being. Even if the fundamental choices themselves are not under discussion, the search for an answer to a specific question becomes a process in which, through listening to the other, both sides can obtain purification and enrichment. Thus this search can also mean taking common steps towards the one truth, even if the fundamental choices remain unaltered. If both sides set out from a hermeneutic of justice and peace, the fundamental difference will not disappear, but a deeper closeness will emerge nevertheless.

Address to Roman Curia, December 21, 2012

Reflection – So often, when we either try to enter into dialogue, or when we think about what dialogue means and how it is to be done, we can think it means papering over the differences between people and religions. To ‘dialogue’ means to put aside our different opinions and do… well, I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do, and what kind of conversation is supposed to happen if we shelve or paper over our differences.

Of course some people want to avoid conflict and find it deeply unpleasant to be in disagreement with their neighbour; others seek it out and revel in the combat.

Neither of these attitudes is quite right, I think. Going along to get along can too easily become a compromise of integrity; deliberately picking fights or living in a state of constant dudgeon is not the way of peace and love in the world.

The Pope has a good model of dialogue in this passage, I think. Everyone wants justice in the world; everyone wants peace. Even the terrorist with the plastic explosives wants peace, and believes earnestly that his act of violence will help usher in the Dar es Salaam, the Islamic parallel to our Christian ‘kingdom of God.’

Dialogue—any dialogue, anywhere, between any people—must start from a point of common agreement. There is no other basis to enter into conversation with another person. And so, every serious human being beholds the world in its fragmented broken reality, and every serious human being of good will desires to advance justice and peace in the world.

This is where all real dialogues can begin. But the Pope observes insightfully that we cannot talk for very long about justice and peace, about what is wrong in the world and how to remedy it, without touching upon the deep questions of life and humanity. Not only do these deep questions inform what ‘justice and peace’ mean, but the very task of serving justice and peace requires that we come to understand the other in his or her difference.

I need to know why that terrorist believes his act of violence is needed for justice and peace. I need to know why the Planned Parenthood worker truly believes she is serving the cause of justice for women. I need to hear and know the perspective of the trans-gendered individual, the communist, the anarchist, the atheist.

 

Dialogue is an urgent need in the world today—there is far too much talking past one another, far too much yelling of slogans, far too much retreating into polarized camps. But if that dialogue is to be real, to be honest, we must get over the fear of putting on the table our different world views; we must able to disagree openly and honestly without vitriol or violence. It is this kind of dialogue—fearless, honest, searching—that is a purifying, enlightening, enriching activity that can truly move us all forward into the kingdom of God, into a more just, more peaceful world.

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What Does the Pope Mean By Dialogue?

What the Church has learned from the encounter between revelation and human experience does indeed extend beyond the realm of pure reason, but it is not a separate world that has nothing to say to unbelievers. By entering into the thinking and understanding of mankind, this knowledge broadens the horizon of reason and thus it speaks also to those who are unable to share the faith of the Church. In her dialogue with the state and with society, the Church does not, of course, have ready answers for individual questions. Along with other forces in society, she will wrestle for the answers that best correspond to the truth of the human condition. The values that she recognizes as fundamental and non-negotiable for the human condition she must propose with all clarity. She must do all she can to convince, and this can then stimulate political action.

Address to Roman Curia, December 21, 2012

Reflection – ‘What does the Pope mean by dialogue?’ my favourite commenter asked yesterday. I’ve been travelling here and there and have had lots of appointments this week, so haven’t been able to respond to comments too well. But I think this section of the address answers that particular question pretty well.

The Church is sometimes accused of arrogance, of thinking it has all the answers. Actually, though, since the development of modern Catholic social thinking, the Church, and especially Rome, has been very prudent for the most part in not attempting detailed policy positions on all the issues of the day.

It is the role of democratically elected governments to draft and enact legislation, following the constitutionally mandated procedures of their nations. The Church’s part in the dialogue is to uphold fundamental human values which human legislation must not traduce, and to decry the passage of laws that violate these human values.

In America right now gun control is the hot issue of the day. In Canada, it is aboriginal treaty rights and resource development on native lands. The Church is not about to get all specific in telling either nation how firearm ownership or land use is to be regulated. Basic principles of respect for life, respect for property, for solidarity and for subsidiarity, lively concern for the poor and for natural justice—all of these come to bear directly on these matters. But the Church lacks the competence and the authority to dictate specific solutions.

Dialogue means, for the Pope, what it means for anyone, in other words. I tell you what I believe to be true; you tell me what you believe to be true. Then we all decide in our sovereign free will what to think and what to do. The Church believes itself to have authority from God to teach on matters of faith and morals, and so this claim is part of an authentic honest dialogue. We are not about to change our beliefs because a dialogue partner disagrees with us, as in our view this would be an betrayal of God’s gift to the Church.

But we also believe that the faith and morals God has entrusted to the Church have a reasonable quality to them, and so we don’t just come in with dogmatic guns blazing to blow away the heretics. We have a case to make about fundamental human values and rights that does in fact appeal to human reason, and so we make it. The days are long past, and not returning (thank God, really) when the Church had any political power to enforce its views.

The Church, as the somewhat hackneyed saying goes, cannot impose anything, but only propose. Now some would argue, perhaps, that the dialogue model I describe is pretty one-sided – the Church teaching and proposing, but not willing to modify its own views one bit. But I don’t think that’s quite true.

Yes, we cannot change the permanent deposit of faith and the moral implications of that faith which we honestly believe God has given us. It’s not ours; it’s God’s, and that’s the end of the matter. But I think the Church does listen, slowly and carefully, to the voices of humanity. There is an Ent-like quality to this listening, a deliberate lack of haste in response. This is because the Vatican considers itself to have a divine mandate and binding authority on its faithful, and hence a serious responsibility to measure its words carefully.

But listen it does—a fair reading of what the Church has said in the last half-century about women’s rights, environmental issues, war and peace, economic justice shows that the dialogue has been a true dialogue. The eternal principles and mores abide, but the Church does listen to what is being said elsewhere, and responds with care.

 

Well, enough (ahem, more than enough) for one day. Á demain!

It's All Been Done Before

At this point I would like to address the…question of dialogue and proclamation. Let us speak firstly of dialogue. For the Church in our day I see three principal areas of dialogue, in which she must be present in the struggle for man and his humanity: dialogue with states, dialogue with society – which includes dialogue with cultures and with science – and finally dialogue with religions.

In all these dialogues the Church speaks on the basis of the light given her by faith. But at the same time she incorporates the memory of mankind, which is a memory of man’s experiences and sufferings from the beginnings and down the centuries, in which she has learned about the human condition, she has experienced its boundaries and its grandeur, its opportunities and its limitations.

Human culture, of which she is a guarantee, has developed from the encounter between divine revelation and human existence.

The Church represents the memory of what it means to be human in the face of a civilization of forgetfulness, which knows only itself and its own criteria. Yet just as an individual without memory has lost his identity, so too a human race without memory would lose its identity.

Address to Roman Curia, December 21, 2012

Reflection – ‘I knew you before the fall of Rome…’ The lyrics from that really catchy Barenaked Ladies song waft into my mind this morning, pondering the Pope’s words here.

What is mere lyrical cleverness in a pop song with a catchy beat is a sober claim of fact for the Catholic Church.

And this is, or at least it really should be, something even non-believers can acknowledge as valuable. There is in the Church  a continuity of thought, an inherited experience, an accumulated wisdom of 2000 years (3000, if you consider the Church to have inherited the wisdom of Israel at its foundation).

We call it tradition. Not the Sacred Tradition that in our Catholic understanding makes up with Sacred Scripture the deposit of faith given us by Christ. But, simply, tradition—human beings passing along from one to another, across generations and centuries, what we know of life. There is a continuity, a historical memory in the Church, that we bring to bear on every question of the day.

We were there before the fall of Rome (and when the West was won… and yes, we will be there still on a 30^th century night, God allowing us that time). So we have seen empires rise and empires die. We have seen the results of too much authority in religion (inquisitions and the like) and too little (heresy, schism). We have seen what happens when Church and State become too closely allied (caesaro-papism, generally to the great detriment of the Church’s autonomy) and what happens when the state is inimical to the Church (hint: lions are involved). We have seen violence being used in the service of religion, and have forsaken that path.

The Church in its human leadership and membership has made just about every mistake human beings can make, in its saints has ascended to the heights of what humanity is capable of, and in general has seen just about everything there is to see about human life in this world. And we’ve learned a thing or two along the way, you know, even leaving aside the deposit of faith and the ongoing ministry of the Holy Spirit to preserve and animate that faith in the heart of the Church..

Meanwhile, the modern world is, as the Pope says, “a civilization of forgetfulness, which knows only itself and its own criteria.” And so the dialogue of the Church with the world must include a strong element of reminding, of bringing the fruit of millennia of shared lived experience to the attention of our modern world. In a sense we can say that modernity and post-modernity were born from a conscious turning away from the past, a deliberate choice to sunder humanity from its historical communal roots towards a renewed future (modernity) or towards atomized individualism (post-modernity).

 

The Church does, in that sense, stand against the ‘modern’ world. But not to condemn it or reject it, but to correct it. Looking upon the experiments and agendae, the secular utopias and bold new ideas of our time, it says, you know “It’s all been done before.” And so the Church will continue to say its piece; many if not most will ignore it with various levels of hostility or indifference; the world will continue to stagger along the path of folly. But we will continue to say our piece.

Theology of the Body, Ratzinger Style

In a break from my usual style of blogging (quote the Pope, discuss the quote), it occurs to me that I’ve been touching upon some pretty deep and difficult subjects these past two days, with the constraints of space on a blog making it a challenge to do them justice.

So today I have a short section of my book She is Our Response, on the Mariology of Joseph Ratzinger, which treats precisely this question of gender and freedom. It is such an important question, and so here are some additional, if a bit heavy and academic, thoughts on the matter.

I’ll be back tomorrow with the usual nonsense…

 

Ratzinger, writing of Mary as the ‘answer’ of creation to God, stresses that the mode by which she represents creation, and hence humanity, is that of her physical conception of the child by the Holy Spirit, that is, by her virginal motherhood. Therefore, she “represents saved and liberated man… precisely as a woman, that is, in the bodily determinateness that is inseparable from man [i.e. human nature].” (Mary, the Church at the Source, 31).

This determinateness of gender, which in Mary is the very matrix of her free answer to God then becomes in her, and consequently in humanity as such, the irreducible sign of the received quality of being, of life, and of human freedom and dignity itself. Gender, as a received quality, is the imminent presence to each person of his or her own personal determinateness. It signifies as nothing else does the relativity of personal freedom within an already existing order of meaning and being which encompasses our entire human reality.

In this order of being we are participants and recipients before being agents and makers. Humanity does not create itself, and bodily determination in gender is the great sign that communicates this reality to every human being at every moment of their existence.

Mary, then, by entering into the very heart of the divine-human drama at the very point of her womanhood in its most biological facticity shows forth that this biological determinateness, far from being a bondage or an affront to freedom and dignity, actually is the place whereby both freedom and dignity encounter the divine sphere of reality and are caught up into transcendence.  Ratzinger writes of this precisely in light of the current anthropological theories of gender deconstruction, showing how this ideology which operates in the name of freedom and autonomy in fact reduces man to a ‘thing’ to be manipulated. The body and its sexual identity is an inescapable fact of human life, and a dis-embodied anthropology inevitably leads to a functional and technical view of the body, and hence, of man:

While today’s anthropological program hinges more radically than ever before on ‘emancipation’, it seeks a freedom whose goal is to ‘be like God’. But the idea that we can be like God implies a detachment of man from his biological conditionality… something that man, as a biological being, can never get rid of, something that marks man in the deepest center of his being. Yet it is regarded as a totally irrelevant triviality… and is therefore consigned to the ‘purely biological realm’ which has nothing to do with man as such. Accordingly, this ‘purely biological’ dimension is treated as a thing that man can manipulate at will because it lies beyond the scope of what counts as human and spiritual (so much so that man can freely manipulate the coming into being of life itself)… man thereby strikes a blow against his deepest being. He holds himself in contempt, because the truth is that he is human only insofar as he is bodily, only insofar as he is man or woman. When man reduces this fundamental determination of his being to a despicable trifle that can be treated as a thing, he himself becomes a trifle and a thing, and his ‘liberation’ turns out to be his degradation to an object of production. Whenever biology is subtracted from humanity, humanity itself is negated. (Mary, the Church at the Source,  32-33).

Mary, on the other hand, whose motherhood is obviously bound to her gender and body, and thus “in whom the ‘biological’ is ‘theological’—that is, motherhood of God,” (ibid.) stands at the very heart of the Church’s response to modern dualistic or instrumental anthropology.

As mother, she shows forth the theological implications of embodiment: it is in our very enfleshment that human beings bear the Logos in the world. As virgin, she shows forth that this same embodied integrated human person stands alone before God in a primary and essential way, receiving life and fulfillment from Him not only in the mode of time and history, but in its eschatological reference in the mode of eternity and heaven:

Mary’s virginity, no less than her maternity, confirms that the ‘biological’ is human, that the whole man stands before God, and that the fact of being human only as male and female is included in faith’s eschatological demand and its eschatological hope. It is no accident that virginity—although as a form of life it is also possible, and intended for, the man—is first patterned on the woman, the true keeper of the seal of creation, and has it normative, plenary form—which the man can, so to say, only imitate—in her. (ibid)

Freedom, then, emerges from embodiedness, not as a capacity for unbounded action or unfettered self-determination, but rather as a creative principle whereby the human person can become a sharer in the divine action in the world. Freedom, in its Marian revelation, is freedom to enter into the divine sphere, to leave behind the purely natural, self-directed, or self-organized level so as to become a participant in the perichoresis of the Trinity extending forth from its imminent principle into the world of created beings.

 

Whew… this is Fr. Denis, 2013 edition, writing again. Well, all that is a mouthful. Please feel free to discuss, question, argue, demand clarifications… in the comment section. God bless you.

Sentimentality Leads to the Gas Chamber

According to the biblical creation account, being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of the human creature. This duality is an essential aspect of what being human is all about, as ordained by God. This very duality as something previously given is what is now disputed. The words of the creation account: “male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27) no longer apply.

No, what applies now is this: it was not God who created them male and female – hitherto society did this, now we decide for ourselves. Man and woman as created realities, as the nature of the human being, no longer exist. Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will.

The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned. From now on there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be. Man and woman in their created state as complementary versions of what it means to be human are disputed. But if there is no pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation, then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation.

Likewise, the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him. Bernheim shows that now, perforce, from being a subject of rights, the child has become an object to which people have a right and which they have a right to obtain. When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being. The defence of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.

Address to Roman Curia, December 21, 2012

Reflection – This is a very tight, careful argument the Pope is making here. It needs to be read carefully and thought through. Essentially, his point is that many things come together into a single reality to maintain our human dignity and make it possible.

The modern idea of human freedom—that it means a rejection of human nature and the capacity to create oneself virtually ex nihilo—actually destroys human freedom. As Leonard Cohen says in his song Closing Time, “It looks like freedom but it feels like death.”

Once human being is not essentially a gift given, it becomes a commodity. If we are all free to make of ourselves whatever we will be, if humanity is nothing but a blank slate on which to cast our ideas and achievements, then the human person as person is something of little account, little value. It is a very short leap from there to talking of ‘lives not worth living,’ of Ubermensch and Untermensch.

It all seems very fine to speak of freedom in these terms. It seems kind and tolerant to say that everyone just gets to make anything whatsoever they want of their lives, and that the essence of happiness and freedom is to do just that. It is sentimental, but sentimentality leads to the gas chamber.

When the fundamental reality of the human person as made in God’s image and likeness, and of God the Creator fashioning us so, is lost, then the door is not just open to a radical devaluing of human life. In fact the door is closed and barred fast against any coherent picture of human dignity and the ineradicable value of the person.

To a large degree Western Civilization has been living off the capital of its Christian theology for some centuries now, while largely rejecting that theology. We seem to think that it is normal and natural for humanity to respect the dignity of persons. But it takes only a little knowledge of history to know that chattel slavery and child murder, tribal warfare and destruction of the weak has been the norm of humanity for most of its history. And it is to that norm we are returning, quickly, as our capital runs out. Not so much a fiscal cliff as a spiritual and moral one.

Our humanity is given to us, and given to us as a gift of being made in God’s image and likeness. Our male-female identity is at the heart of this ‘givenness’, both because we experience nowhere more deeply the determined nature of our humanity, and because it is only in this determined gendered humanity that the capacity to bring forth new human beings lies.

 

I said a few days ago, with great Chestertonian paradox, that freedom is perfected in slavery—only in committing our lives irrevocably to the other are we truly free. I now say, with equal paradox, that freedom only arises from slavery. It is only in experiencing our humanity as a gift we did not choose and cannot change that we enter into and preserve the dignity and freedom of our own person and that of others.

What Are They Talking About?

The Chief Rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, has shown in a very detailed and profoundly moving study that the attack we are currently experiencing on the true structure of the family, made up of father, mother, and child, goes much deeper. While up to now we regarded a false understanding of the nature of human freedom as one cause of the crisis of the family, it is now becoming clear that the very notion of being – of what being human really means – is being called into question.

He quotes the famous saying of Simone de Beauvoir: “one is not born a woman, one becomes so” (on ne naît pas femme, on le devient). These words lay the foundation for what is put forward today under the term “gender” as a new philosophy of sexuality. According to this philosophy, sex is no longer a given element of nature, that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society. The profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious. People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves.

Address to Roman Curia, December 21, 2012

Reflection – So today and next time we wade into the thickets of controversy, the section of the talk that got all the pundits and activists buzzing furiously away. The whole idea of gender and its meaning comes under a searching study here, and so it should.

Theorists and activists have worked hard to dismantle the obvious meaning of gender and sexual identification, based on body morphology (I trust I don’t need to spell out the details to anyone, right? I don’t really want this blog to get caught in your spam filters…)

Essentially, there are males and there are females, and you know, you really can spot the difference by looking at them hard.

Well, all of that has been cast aside in progressive thought. Body morphology has been decisively uncoupled from gender identity. There are men in women’s bodies, women in men’s bodies. Not every transgendered person seeks gender-reassignment surgery—some women-in-men’s-bodies like their bodies just the way they are. Nor does it have any connection to sexual desire: there are men-in-women’s bodies who also identify as homosexual, hence being sexually attracted to men, but as a man-in-a-woman’s body.

So gender identity has nothing to do with body morphology. Nor does it have anything to do with sexual attraction. The question must be asked: what are these people talking about?

Is it some stereotyped view of male and female characteristics? Men are logical, brave, mechanical and violent; women are emotional, caring, intuitive, and sweet? Somehow I do not think the post-modern theorists of gender are advancing gender theories redolent of the 1950s. But what on earth do they mean? Since they want to entirely restructure society based on their gender theories, I think we have a right to insist they explain themselves, no?

What is it to be male, to be female? If it is not to do with the body structures you were born with, and not to do with the personality traits you exhibit, and not to do with who you are sexually attracted to, what on earth does it have to do with?

To be clear, my own belief, founded on both common sense and religious faith, is that while allowing for the vanishingly rare exception of actual hermaphroditism, gender is body morphology, and the grand human adventure is to live as a man or to live as a woman within the psycho-social-familial context you have been given.

As soon as we reject what has been given in favour of some increasingly elusive and abstract notion of gender, we reject humanity as an object of dignity and respect in favour of endless social engineering and experimentation.

In short, and in conclusion for today, let us begin to answer the question of what is a male, what is a female by accepting the given of it (human genital differentiation) and living out our human dignity—the call to love, to give, to commit one’s life to the other—from that basic given reality of our human being.

Where We Learn to Be Human

Despite all impressions to the contrary, the family is still strong and vibrant today. But there is no denying the crisis that threatens it to its foundations – especially in the western world. It was noticeable that the Synod repeatedly emphasized the significance for the transmission of the faith of the family as the authentic setting in which to hand on the blueprint of human existence.

This is something we learn by living it with others and suffering it with others. So it became clear that the question of the family is not just about a particular social construct, but about man himself – about what he is and what it takes to be authentically human. The challenges involved are manifold.

First of all there is the question of the human capacity to make a commitment or to avoid commitment. Can one bind oneself for a lifetime? Does this correspond to man’s nature? Does it not contradict his freedom and the scope of his self-realization? Does man become himself by living for himself alone and only entering into relationships with others when he can break them off again at any time? Is lifelong commitment antithetical to freedom? Is commitment also worth suffering for?

Man’s refusal to make any commitment – which is becoming increasingly widespread as a result of a false understanding of freedom and self-realization as well as the desire to escape suffering – means that man remains closed in on himself and keeps his “I” ultimately for himself, without really rising above it. Yet only in self-giving does man find himself, and only by opening himself to the other, to others, to children, to the family, only by letting himself be changed through suffering, does he discover the breadth of his humanity. When such commitment is repudiated, the key figures of human existence likewise vanish: father, mother, child – essential elements of the experience of being human are lost.

Address to the Roman Curia, 21 December 2012

Reflection – Well, it is time to wade into the field of controversy again. These remarks by the Holy Father before Christmas occasioned a fair amount of heat and not too much light these past weeks. A group has petitioned the White House to name the Roman Catholic Church a ‘hate group’ on the strength of them, and the chattering classes have been… well, chattering away about the Pope and his horrible hateful words.

My take on it is to actually present what the Pope said in full, and talk about it. And this is what I will do for the next few days or so on this blog. I call this method of presentation ‘journalism’, which is an increasingly rare commodity in the world today. So here we see that the Pope upholds the family as the fundamental place where human beings learn to be human beings, by living and suffering with others.

And what does it mean to be a human being? To commit oneself to the task of love and laying down one’s life for others. By entering into commitment, opening oneself up to real risk, to real self-giving where there is no ‘escape clause’, no easy out. To open oneself up to other people and really throw one’s lot in with them.

All of this is essential to the nature of humanity, and to the nature of ‘family.’ And when commitment vanishes as a real aspect of marriage and parenthood—when no fault divorce is the norm, or common law arrangements—then the vital core of our humanity is lost.

Freedom only attains its goal when we use our freedom to freely bind ourselves to the other in love. Freedom is only ‘free’ when it is consummated in this binding in love. One might say, with full Chestertonian paradox, that freedom is perfected by slavery.

It is in the family, with all its human wounds and human imperfections and sufferings, that we learn this basic structure of human life, that we learn that we are made to give ourselves to the other and not take that gift back no matter what. And that is why it is so crucial to defend and uphold the life of the family in the world today.

Making Haste

Let us go over to Bethlehem: as we say these words to one another, along with the shepherds, we should not only think of the great "crossing over" to the living God, but also of the actual town of Bethlehem and all those places where the Lord lived, ministered and suffered. Let us pray at this time for the people who live and suffer there today. Let us pray that there may be peace in that land. Let us pray that Israelis and Palestinians may be able to live their lives in the peace of the one God and in freedom. Let us also pray for the countries of the region, for Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and their neighbors: that there may be peace there, that Christians in those lands where our faith was born may be able to continue living there, that Christians and Muslims may build up their countries side by side in God's peace.

The shepherds made haste. Holy curiosity and holy joy impelled them. In our case, it is probably not very often that we make haste for the things of God. God does not feature among the things that require haste. The things of God can wait, we think and we say. And yet he is the most important thing, ultimately the one truly important thing. Why should we not also be moved by curiosity to see more closely and to know what God has said to us? At this hour, let us ask him to touch our hearts with the holy curiosity and the holy joy of the shepherds, and thus let us go over joyfully to Bethlehem, to the Lord who today once more comes to meet us. Amen.

Homily, Midnight Mass, 2012

Reflection – I’ve got a doozy of a cold right now, which drains one’s creativity like nothing else, I have noticed. At the moment, with all due apologies to the Holy Father,  the only thing I’m ‘making haste’ for is my bed, as soon as I can reasonably get there.

 

But I did want to finish this wonderful homily, as the Christmas season does officially wrap up with the feast of the Lord’s baptism this weekend. And so I simply, and mercifully briefly, leave you with Pope Benedict’s words, in hopes that I will feel better tomorrow and in consequence have something to say about something! (I really do feel lousy right now...) God bless you.

How Far is it to Bethlehem?

Once the angels departed, the shepherds said to one another: Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened for us (cf. Lk 2:15). The shepherds went with haste to Bethlehem, the Evangelist tells us (cf. 2:16). A holy curiosity impelled them to see this child in a manger, who the angel had said was the Savior, Christ the Lord. The great joy of which the angel spoke had touched their hearts and given them wings.

Let us go over to Bethlehem, says the Church's liturgy to us today. Trans-eamus is what the Latin Bible says: let us go "across", daring to step beyond, to make the "transition" by which we step outside our habits of thought and habits of life, across the purely material world into the real one, across to the God who in his turn has come across to us. Let us ask the Lord to grant that we may overcome our limits, our world, to help us to encounter him, especially at the moment when he places himself into our hands and into our heart in the Holy Eucharist.

Homily, Midnight Mass, 2012

Reflection – Going across ‘the purely material world into the real one’ – I do love this Pope and his way of putting things.

We were just talking a little bit about this at MH yesterday. We are reading, as we often do at this time of year, the classic book The Reed of God, by Caryll Houselander for our post-lunch spiritual reading. She was writing about how we don’t know Christ, even after 2000 years, how we tend to cut him down to a size and shape convenient or fitting to us. How, of course, what we then have is not Jesus but an idol made in our own image and likeness. How we have to be vigilant to read the whole Gospel, not just the parts we like, and continually allow ourselves to come before this Christ who is not comfortable and convenient, but who is the real God.

She puts it all with much greater elegance and beauty, of course (if you haven’t read that book, you have really missed out on a gem, by the way). But it seems to me that this is what Pope Benedict is saying when he talks about ‘going across’ to Bethlehem.

God is real – reality Himself – but to enter that reality always is an ascetical act on our part. It always implies the simple, frank acknowledgment that our own reality is partial, limited, bound by our own subjectivity, insufficient for our needs. To go across to Bethlehem means to enter into mystery, to bow before a Reality that is not ours, that we did not make, that we certainly do not understand all that well, and to allow that Reality to shape our reality, instead of the other way around.

I don’t think any of us would really have done it that way, if the world’s salvation was up to us. We would have gone for a show of power—shock and awe them into repentance!—or perhaps just a simple unveiling of God’s infinite beauty—we’ll make ‘em love God!

But… a baby born in hiddenness? A child growing up in an obscure village? A man hanging on a cross? A Church made up of sinners and fools, carrying this salvation to the nations? A host and a chalice holding the very life of God under the appearance of bread and wine?

No… we wouldn’t have done it that way. Too hard. Too mysterious. Too much can go wrong (and has!). But God did it that way. And this is the real world, the Bethlehem to which we are to continually go across to. The path of childlike faith, abandonment, obedience, and suffering love. God’s path, not ours. How far is it to Bethlehem? Not very far, if we choose to go there.

If God's Light is Extinguished

Linked to God's glory on high is peace on earth among men. Where God is not glorified, where he is forgotten or even denied, there is no peace either. Nowadays, though, widespread currents of thought assert the exact opposite: they say that religions, especially monotheism, are the cause of the violence and the wars in the world. If there is to be peace, humanity must first be liberated from them. Monotheism, belief in one God, is said to be arrogance, a cause of intolerance, because by its nature, with its claim to possess the sole truth, it seeks to impose itself on everyone.

Now it is true that in the course of history, monotheism has served as a pretext for intolerance and violence. It is true that religion can become corrupted and hence opposed to its deepest essence, when people think they have to take God's cause into their own hands, making God into their private property. We must be on the lookout for these distortions of the sacred. While there is no denying a certain misuse of religion in history, yet it is not true that denial of God would lead to peace.

If God's light is extinguished, man's divine dignity is also extinguished. Then the human creature would cease to be God's image, to which we must pay honor in every person, in the weak, in the stranger, in the poor. Then we would no longer all be brothers and sisters, children of the one Father, who belong to one another on account of that one Father. The kind of arrogant violence that then arises, the way man then despises and tramples upon man: we saw this in all its cruelty in the last century.

Only if God's light shines over man and within him, only if every single person is desired, known and loved by God is his dignity inviolable, however wretched his situation may be. On this Holy Night, God himself became man; as Isaiah prophesied, the child born here is "Emmanuel", God with us (Is 7:14). And down the centuries, while there has been misuse of religion, it is also true that forces of reconciliation and goodness have constantly sprung up from faith in the God who became man. Into the darkness of sin and violence, this faith has shone a bright ray of peace and goodness, which continues to shine.

Homily, Midnight Mass 2012

Reflection – Well, this is all so very well put and clear (and longer than usual!) that perhaps my contribution is not so needed today. We do see here a very clear, very straight-forward answer to the commonplace observation that religion causes violence and war.

Namely: so what does the absence of religion cause? And this is not just a tu quoque argument (translation: you guys are just as bad!). Rather, it is a strict logical analysis. People say that monotheistic religion causes violence and hatred. When monotheistic religion is removed from the picture, there should be then reduced violence and hatred. This is simply not the story of the 20^th century, certainly not in Europe. Atheistic communism and Nazism killed tens of millions between them.

Human dignity rests on our divine origin and goal, or it does not rest securely at all. And where human community and human decency fail, as happens constantly in this fallen world of ours, divine grace must come to our rescue. And it has, repeatedly and beautifully, in the lives of nations and of individuals.

 

And this is Christmas, in depth and in essence. Not the ‘cute’ story of the baby and the shepherds; not the trimmings and tinsel; not (certainly) the frenzy of buying and consuming. All of that is good and proper, but in depth and in essence it is God coming to be with His people to redeem us from the sword, from hatred, from violence. This is our hope; I argue most sincerely and seriously that it is our only hope. But it is a secure and certain hope, so we can have great joy in this. See you tomorrow.

Overflowing Happiness

There is another verse from the Christmas story on which I should like to reflect with you - the angels' hymn of praise, which they sing out following the announcement of the new-born Saviour: "Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased." God is glorious. God is pure light, the radiance of truth and love. He is good. He is true goodness, goodness par excellence. The angels surrounding him begin by simply proclaiming the joy of seeing God's glory. Their song radiates the joy that fills them. In their words, it is as if we were hearing the sounds of heaven. There is no question of attempting to understand the meaning of it all, but simply the overflowing happiness of seeing the pure splendour of God's truth and love. We want to let this joy reach out and touch us: truth exists, pure goodness exists, pure light exists. God is good, and he is the supreme power above all powers. All this should simply make us joyful tonight, together with the angels and the shepherds.

Homily, Midnight Mass 2012

Reflection – Oh, this is truly a lovely homily! From the reflections on ‘no room’ at the inn, no room for God, no place for God in our lives and hearts, now we move to what it looks like when God is given room, given His full room, when God is worshipped.

It is joy, beauty, song, goodness. Too often we (and I most definitely include myself here) get a bit racked up with the suffering and sorrow aspect of life. We can easily place just a leetle too much emphasis on the reality of the cross, of death to self, of the struggle with God and with neighbor, the passion of love.

It’s understandable – all that is real, after all, and nothing quite grabs our attention like suffering. But we have to remember that these are not the ultimate realities. And the whole business of giving our lives over to God, of echoing Mary’s fiat, of giving Christ room to grow to full stature—this is not so we can live our lives nailed to a cross!

It is so we can live our lives in perfect joy and gladness. It is so that we can move steadily towards that day ‘when the whole world sends back the song, which now the angels sing.’

Heaven is all joy, all song, all light and love. It is so utterly crucial for us to get this: a life lived for God and God alone is a good life. It is a joyous life. It is a beautiful life. This is so utterly opposite to so much of our modern thinking. To many, the happy joyful life is the life immersed in sensual pleasures or wealth or the exercise of power. But none of that really delivers joy, not real joy, not for long.

Joy comes with love. Joy and peace are the fruit of love, and the only way to live a life of joy and peace is to live a life of love. And yes, in this world love means sacrifice and at least some suffering, but that’s not the point of the exercise.

God is good for us. To worship God is good for us—factually, it is our good. And the song of the angels, the beauty of the manger scene, the adoration of the shepherds and the magi all show us the beauty and goodness of this truth. As we move on from Christmas into the following weeks, let’s not fail to learn what all these mysteries are trying to teach us.

Making Room

There is no room for God. Not even in our feelings and desires is there any room for him. We want ourselves. We want what we can seize hold of, we want happiness that is within our reach, we want our plans and purposes to succeed. We are so "full" of ourselves that there is no room left for God. And that means there is no room for others either, for children, for the poor, for the stranger.

By reflecting on that one simple saying about the lack of room at the inn, we have come to see how much we need to listen to Saint Paul's exhortation: "Be transformed by the renewal of your mind" (Rom 12:2). Paul speaks of renewal, the opening up of our intellect (nous), of the whole way we view the world and ourselves. The conversion that we need must truly reach into the depths of our relationship with reality.

Let us ask the Lord that we may become vigilant for his presence, that we may hear how softly yet insistently he knocks at the door of our being and willing. Let us ask that we may make room for him within ourselves, that we may recognize him also in those through whom he speaks to us: children, the suffering, the abandoned, those who are excluded and the poor of this world.

Homily, Midnight Mass 2012

Reflection – I want to reflect a bit personally today on this section of the Pope’s homily (and the peanut gallery says, ‘And this is different from your usual blogging how?’). My life as a priest in Madonna House, on top of the normal and utterly central sacramental and liturgical ministries every priest does, is in this year of 2013 basically divided into two works.

I am a writer, and I am a spiritual director. In my latter capacity I simply spend an awful lot of time sitting and listening, listening and sitting. The joys, the sorrows, the everyday problems and the life-shaking crises, the spiritual questions and problems of a wide range of people come to me in this daily work that the Lord has asked me to do.

What’s it for? What good is it? People come, they tell me their problems, I might give a little bit of advice, and I pray with them and bless them. I don’t have a magic wand, or a medicine cabinet full of appropriate drugs, or a bank account full of money to throw at the problem (like that always helps). And indeed it is not unknown that people will come to a director month by month, year after year, with roughly the same problems and struggles. Even the most self-assured and faith-assured spiritual director is occasionally going to wonder just what the point is of this particular exercise.

The Pope’s words in this homily struck me in this personal way because I think he precisely expresses what the point is, at least as I understand it, of spiritual direction, but then in the larger sense, of spiritual life, spiritual growth, spiritual striving. It is this: ‘that we may become vigilant for his presence, that we may hear how softly yet insistently he knocks at the door of our being and willing… that we may make room for him within ourselves, that we may recognize him also in those through whom he speaks to us: children, the suffering, the abandoned, those who are excluded and the poor of this world.’

It is not about getting all our problems solved. It is not about getting our act together. It is not about ‘shaping up.’ It is not about any of that. It is about growth in vigilance to hear God, to see God, to recognize Him and respond in love to Him. It is about making room for God in the inn of our hearts.

Sometimes in spiritual direction a primary task is identifying the clutter that is crowding out the manger and suggesting some basic culling and rearranging to free up some space. It is a matter of making a little bit of space so that the baby Jesus can slip in there… and once in there, start to grow, start to take up more space. Next thing you know, more culling and rearranging is needed. A child, a youth, an adult takes up more space than that little baby.

At each step, the heart must be emptied, and only what is still of value put back into it. Finally that baby, that man, that Christ is crucified in the person. A crucified person takes up the maximum space—stretched out, fully extended. Sooner or later, God asks for all the room in our hearts. We thought we could give Him a little corner, a manger to rest in, but now He’s taken over the joint. He wants it all, and will not rest until He has it. He’s like that.

It seems to me that the role of the spiritual director is primarily to help move furniture around, haul things off to the dump, knock down the occasional wall, and constantly and at all times remind the person that it’s all about Jesus, all about making room for Him in our hearts, our lives, and learning to see Him in all things, all situations, all people, especially the ones who demand our love and call us to sacrificial generosity and service.

This is what spiritual life is all about, and this is what I try to serve in my priestly ministry and life.

No Room at the Inn (and, Yes, It is Still Christmas)

Again and again the beauty of this [Christmas] Gospel touches our hearts: a beauty that is the splendour of truth. Again and again it astonishes us that God makes himself a child so that we may love him, so that we may dare to love him, and as a child trustingly lets himself be taken into our arms. It is as if God were saying: I know that my glory frightens you, and that you are trying to assert yourself in the face of my grandeur. So now I am coming to you as a child, so that you can accept me and love me.

I am also repeatedly struck by the Gospel writer's almost casual remark that there was no room for them at the inn. Inevitably the question arises, what would happen if Mary and Joseph were to knock at my door. Would there be room for them? And then it occurs to us that Saint John takes up this seemingly chance comment about the lack of room at the inn, which drove the Holy Family into the stable; he explores it more deeply and arrives at the heart of the matter when he writes: "he came to his own home, and his own people received him not" (Jn 1:11).

The great moral question of our attitude towards the homeless, towards refugees and migrants, takes on a deeper dimension: do we really have room for God when he seeks to enter under our roof? Do we have time and space for him? Do we not actually turn away God himself? We begin to do so when we have no time for God. The faster we can move, the more efficient our time-saving appliances become, the less time we have.

And God? The question of God never seems urgent. Our time is already completely full. But matters go deeper still. Does God actually have a place in our thinking? Our process of thinking is structured in such a way that he simply ought not to exist. Even if he seems to knock at the door of our thinking, he has to be explained away. If thinking is to be taken seriously, it must be structured in such a way that the "God hypothesis" becomes superfluous.

Homily, Midnight Mass, Christmas 2012

Reflection – Well the secular world has long moved on from Christmas, which ended at midnight December 25. There was nothing more to buy at that point, and buying and selling is the true driver of secular Christmas. But in the Church we have one more week of the Christmas season, so let’s keep the holly and mistletoe up here at LWAGS and pour another round of eggnog. It is still Christmas.

And so this beautiful homily from midnight Mass, which I would have gotten around to blogging earlier if I hadn’t been away so much this season, is still quite topical. I love the way Pope Benedict links the ‘no room at the inn’ with our modern world’s studied indifference towards God. One of the pitfalls of living in a place like MH is that the young people who come here already, by definition, have an interest in or at least an openness to God. He has a  place in their thinking, or they wouldn’t have found their way to us. We can forget how very foreign all that is to so many today.

On the long train ride back from Halifax I picked up a copy of ‘Canada’s national newspaper’ – essentially our version of the New York Times for youse Americans (and no, I’m not going to dignify it with a name). Faced with 30 hours of traveling, I’ll read anything. On one of its back pages it has a regular feature anyone can write for, a sort of do-it-yourself column. The author of the one I read was a young man essentially agonizing over the meaning of life and his long (25 year!) quest to discover this meaning. He detailed all the different ideas he had come up with for what life might be about, and the inadequacy of them all. He was in a state of some despondency.

Now, at no point in the column—not even in passing, not even to dismiss it—did he so much as broach the idea of God, of religion, of Christ. It was as if that dimension of the question didn’t even suggest itself to him. It was really very striking to me, coming back from a university student conference where 200 of his peers had just given their lives to Jesus. Talk about no room at the inn!

Some of my younger directees have assured me that this is fairly normal. For many young people, God and religion just are not on the menu, not something to even be considered. Even driven by despair, even seeing the futility of all human quests for meaning, as this young man had, there is no room for God. Better to despair than bow down in worship, I suppose.

Meanwhile it is Epiphany, when these wise men, these masters of human learning and lore, did just that—bowed before the foolishness of God which surpasses all human wisdom, the day when ‘those who had worshipped stars learned through a star to worship you, O Sun of Righteousness,’ as the Byzantine hymn puts it.

 

So it is worth taking this last week of Christmas to ponder with the Pope these matters, and in that to make room for God in our own minds and hearts. And that’s quite enough—too much, really—for one day. See you tomorrow!

Comments Moderated Now

I meant to mention that I've had to install comment moderation on the blog now. There was an abusive profane comment posted over Christmas which I didn't catch for a couple of days because I was travelling. I really cannot have such material appear on the blog, so comments will have to pass my sharp moderator's eye now before appearing.
Anyhow, I don't get that many comments on this blog, and I will try to check them regularly. I apologize for the inconvenience to my regular commentors who I enjoy and appreciate very much. It is unfortunate that this is necessary, to say the least.

Faith Gives Us Something

[This follows up on yesterday’s post on faith as substantial reality]. To Luther, who was not particularly fond of the Letter to the Hebrews, the concept of “substance”, in the context of his view of faith, meant nothing. For this reason he understood the term hypostasis/substance not in the objective sense (of a reality present within us), but in the subjective sense, as an expression of an interior attitude, and so, naturally, he also had to understand the term argumentum as a disposition of the subject.

In the twentieth century this interpretation became prevalent—at least in Germany—in Catholic exegesis too, so that the ecumenical translation into German of the New Testament, approved by the Bishops, reads as follows: Glaube aber ist: Feststehen in dem, was man erhofft, Überzeugtsein von dem, was man nicht sieht (faith is: standing firm in what one hopes, being convinced of what one does not see). This in itself is not incorrect, but it is not the meaning of the text, because the Greek term used (elenchos) does not have the subjective sense of “conviction” but the objective sense of “proof”…

Faith is not merely a personal reaching out towards things to come that are still totally absent: it gives us something. It gives us even now something of the reality we are waiting for, and this present reality constitutes for us a “proof” of the things that are still unseen. Faith draws the future into the present, so that it is no longer simply a “not yet”. The fact that this future exists changes the present; the present is touched by the future reality, and thus the things of the future spill over into those of the present and those of the present into those of the future.

Spe Salvi 7

Reflection – This is really so very beautiful, even if we have to wade through unfamiliar Greek, Latin, and German vocabulary to get to it. Sometimes, it’s worth it.

Faith gives us something. That alone is worth pondering, eh? What does faith give you? Not on the level of subjective feelings, but objective reality. Not the promise of pie in the sky tomorrow and forever, but here and now today—what does faith give you? I think this is one of those questions we should have a ready answer for. Do you?

Because, of course, the world may question this, and may at times deride this idea. To it, faith can be either an irrelevancy, an exercise in juvenile magical thinking, or a heavy moralistic burden. What objective reality—what earthly good—does faith deliver to us?

Faith gives us the living presence of God, a substantial reality that comes to us daily, Who we can touch and embrace and be embraced by. Faith gives us God as food and drink in the Eucharist, and as mercy poured out in Reconciliation, and as the very life of the soul continually through the indwelling of the Spirit.

Faith gives us, then, an orientation of our life towards this God and His kingdom. Faith shapes every action we take, every day of our lives, towards this kingdom. In other words, faith gives us hope, and hope is not some airy-fairy yearning for an imaginary cloud-cuckoo paradise. Hope gets us off our duffs and into the fray of life, to lay our lives down for the sake of this kingdom which is not ours yet, but which the presence of God assures us will be one day.

Faith gives us, then, a way of life that is already an extension of this future kingdom. The kingdom begins now, today, in you and me insofar as we receive the gift faith brings. In other words, faith brings us love, a life lived for others, laying down our lives in service and friendship, in works of mercy and in compassion for the ‘least of our brothers.’

Not one bit of what I am describing here is abstract or subjective feeling or some ethereal hocus-pocus. Because of faith our lives can be transformed, here and now, into an expression of the Gospel, ordered towards the eternal reality of heaven but lived in such a way as to bring the heavenly life down to earth, ‘on earth as it is in heaven,’ as we pray every day.

This is what being a saint is all about, and faith ultimately delivers to us the road to holiness. Insofar as we believe, receive faith’s gifts, and live from those gifts, we become saints, and the light of God shines forth anew in the darkness of the world. There’s nothing else worth doing in this life, you know. So let’s try to live our faith today and let hope and love guide all our choices today.

Intensely Advent

In the eleventh chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews (v. 1) we find a kind of definition of faith which closely links this virtue with hope. Ever since the Reformation there has been a dispute among exegetes over the central word of this phrase, but today a way towards a common interpretation seems to be opening up once more. For the time being I shall leave this central word untranslated. The sentence therefore reads as follows: “Faith is the hypostasis of things hoped for; the proof of things not seen”. For the Fathers and for the theologians of the Middle Ages, it was clear that the Greek word hypostasis was to be rendered in Latin with the term substantia. The Latin translation of the text produced at the time of the early Church therefore reads: Est autem fides sperandarum substantia rerum, argumentum non apparentium—faith is the “substance” of things hoped for; the proof of things not seen.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, using the terminology of the philosophical tradition to which he belonged, explains it as follows: faith is a habitus, that is, a stable disposition of the spirit, through which eternal life takes root in us and reason is led to consent to what it does not see. The concept of “substance” is therefore modified in the sense that through faith, in a tentative way, or as we might say “in embryo”—and thus according to the “substance”—there are already present in us the things that are hoped for: the whole, true life. And precisely because the thing itself is already present, this presence of what is to come also creates certainty: this “thing” which must come is not yet visible in the external world (it does not “appear”), but because of the fact that, as an initial and dynamic reality, we carry it within us, a certain perception of it has even now come into existence.

Spe Salvi 7

Reflection – OK, this may seem all very technical and dry, full of obscure points about language and long quotes in Latin and references to (horrors) Thomas Aquinas. The blog reader may be tempted to come back tomorrow when I am doing something simpler. Despair not – I come to make all things clear, if they are not yet so.

Basically, it means that we all live our lives in Advent, even as we celebrate the season of Christmas, prepare now to celebrate the Epiphany (the feast of the ‘appearing’ of God), and from there launch again into Ordinary Time and before we know it the Lent-Easter cycle.

Nonetheless, our Christian life here and now is intensely an Advent matter. Advent is the shortest of all seasons, yet it is the whole season of our life. That is, we are all pregnant, be we male or female. We all bear within us a life, an embryonic life, a beginning of a life that is very real, as real as can be, but very hidden. The condition of Mary in her nine months of pregnancy is a close analogue to the condition of the Christian through our years of life on this earth.

The ‘thing’ is already present—this thing which is the life of Christ being lived in our own lives. But it has not appeared yet, except in the precise same sense that those who have eyes to see recognize the life of the child in the swelling of the womb of the mother.

It really is the same sort of thing. Those who have eyes to see can recognize the signs of Christ’s life in the life of a disciple as it grows. Charity, mercy, generosity of heart, quickness to forgive, courage in bearing witness, steadfastness in bearing burdens, peace, joy—all of these are sure signs of Christ’s life growing in a human heart. When someone has been ‘very pregnant’ in their lives—showing!—we might call them a saint after they die.

But of course those who do not have eyes to see can deny all of the above, just as those who (alas!) do not wish to acknowledge it can deny the life of the child right until the moment it is born. I don’t mean to blog about abortion in this post, but we can see here an added dimension to the already tragic assault on human life: to refuse to admit a reality until it is seen in full blocks us off from the whole life of faith in its essential nature.

The life of faith, this hidden interior life of God in us, is so very much like pregnancy. We bear within us a life that is not our own, that our own autonomous will did not create of itself, that is a fruit of God’s coming to us and his faithful love for us. This life will appear in the fullness of time in the blessed life of the saints in heaven. But it is already real, already wanting to grow and expand and stretch us, perhaps cause us some discomfort and pain, even, but always in service of this new life blossoming in us.

 

Let us long, then, for the appearing of God in our lives and in our world, and in the world to come when all shall be made manifest, the eternal epiphany of our God in glory and joy.

The Truth of Man

To bow low before a human being to win his favour is indeed unfitting. But to bow low before God can never be unmodern, because it corresponds to the truth of our being. And if modern man has forgotten this truth, then it is all the more incumbent on Christians in the modern world to rediscover it and teach it to our fellow men.

Spirit of the Liturgy, 206

Reflection – Well, it’s good to be back, both in MH Combermere where real winter arrived in my absence (-21 C today!), and at LWAGS to resume a new year of blogging for the glory of God. Happy New Year (belated) to everyone, and let’s pick up where we left off, eh?

It’s nice when my Randomized Ratzinger Quote Generator™ coughs up a quote that is so perfect liturgically and in view of my own recent activities. Here we are approaching Epiphany rapidly, and we have a quote about bowing low before God. I am just coming back from a conference that was intensely missionary in spirit, calling the young attendees to become missionaries to the modern world, and here we have a quote about being just that.

So, CCO RiseUp was quite the experience. I came back from it rather sick and croaking at everyone (‘for someone who’s lost his voice, you certainly are talking a lot’ was a comment made to me by one of my travelling companions. It takes a lot to shut me up.) 30 hours travelling each way by train and car was a bit exhausting, and the days were full of talks, worship, ministry and lots and lots of personal encounters. We all got back tired but happy.

It was fantastic. Anyone out there reading this who has any presence of CCO in your vicinity (this is Catholic Christian Outreach, a Canadian Catholic university mission group, for those in the rest of the world), get involved with them. Help them, financially if you can, since each CCO missionary has to raise his or her own salary. Send searching young people their way. If you are a searching young person, look for them. They have a simple, brilliant, proven-to-work way of introducing the basic Christian proclamation to young people, bringing them to commit their lives to Christ, and then calling them to embrace the missionary call of the Church. They are, truly, awesome.

Anyhow, the whole experience was very much about what Ratzinger writes of so powerfully above. The truth of our being, which never changes from age to age, and which we urgently need to embrace ourselves and communicate to others. Bowing down low before God in worship, and out of that bowing low, receiving his Spirit so as to go out to the ends of the earth to bring his love and mercy to the world, starting with our next door neighbours, preferably.

But it starts with bowing down low. It starts with a communion of love that is not a relationship between equals, but an encounter of our littleness with his greatness, our weakness with his majesty, our nothingness with him who is everything.

This is the profound core truth of humanity, and the one who shows us this truth is Mary, the Mother of God. The modern world wishes to establish a mode of human life without God-we call it secularism; she is our response to the modern world in this fool’s dream it has. As De Lubac put it in The Drama of Atheist Humanism, “Man cannot organize the world for himself without God; without God he can only organize the world against man. Exclusive humanism is inhuman humanism.”

When we lose our core human reality of being open to the Absolute, to that which utterly transcends not only ourselves but all created reality, that opens us up to eternity and infinity, that which is above and before and beyond all that is—when we lose that, we are reduced to nothing more than an animal that can do sums and build stuff.

It is the very act of worship, of bowing down, of humbling ourselves before God, of abasing ourselves before the Mighty One that paradoxically establishes us in our human dignity, the true greatness of the human person, the reality of who we are and what we are made for—communion with the One who is Lord of all and who desires to establish us in royal dignity in his eternal kingdom.

So… come let us adore Him, Christ the Lord.