{flat}land

Him You Will Hear

2012-01-29T20:29:00.001-06:00

Homily for the 4th Sunday of Ordinary Time

What does it mean to have authority? To speak with authority?

"Authority" is a loaded word in today's world. We don't like to recognize or submit to authority. Typically we see the authority of others as a threat to our own freedom. Over and above this general human tendency, as Americans we tend to look critically toward authority—with apologies to Lord Acton, "authority corrupts, and absolute authority corrupts absolutely".

So that kind of authority isn't always positive. But there's another kind we recognize—the kind that comes from within. It's the authority of someone who speaks with conviction, from experience. We are much more willing to submit to this kind of authority. We get a sense of a person's access to truth, of having "been around" and gaining perspective through the school of hard knocks. We encounter this all the time, especially in those who have authority on account of what they've suffered—war veterans, mothers against drunk driving, cancer survivors, recovering addicts, what have you.

I think there's still a third sort--the authority that comes with being given a mission, of being grasped by something (or Someone) and responding with everything we have. A young woman by the name of Maria accompanied the Kansas delegation to the March for Life and spoke to us of her experience in sidewalk counseling with women in front of abortion clinics. She was a young, intelligent, articulate, attractive personality that clearly had some success in convincing women that it was not in their best interest to abort their own child. Her presentation was engaging and convincing. You might get the impression that she had come up with this idea on her own--saying to herself: here I am, a good listener, compassionate, generous, and convicted about this particular issue. I know, I'll become a sidewalk counselor!

Yet the reality is quite different--as I spoke with her afterwards, it became clear that this was most definitely not something she dreamed up for herself. Quite the contrary--she would be physically ill in the days and hours leading up to the morning on the sidewalk. These women, these unwanted babies, aren't her problems; but she makes them her own out of love for Christ. She spoke with an unassuming authority that was extremely compelling.

So, in what sense did the Gospel writer want us to understand Jesus' authority?

In the first place, we have to acknowledge Jesus' authority went far beyond a simple authoritative tone of voice, or speaking convincingly. He backed up his words with signs and wonders—in a sense, no one would've taken him seriously otherwise, given that he was subtly claiming divinity. For the way in which Jesus "spoke with authority" here meant not quoting a respected scholar of the law or referencing a venerable tradition of interpretation, but making himself the source of truth.

As we well know, this was more than startling—he was, in a very real sense, claiming to be God in terms his contemporaries would have understood unambiguously. "You have heard it said…. but I say …" A good Jew would never speak in that way—it would be blasphemous to point to anyone other than God as the source of truth, yet Jesus claims this very thing!

It had to be more than just a subjective kind of authority. In fact, Jesus is the one promised by Moses in our first reading, a prophet chosen from "among the people", one that they will listen to.

You may have noticed in the reading that the prophet is promised because the people cannot endure the direct experience of God's self revelation on Mount Horeb. God appoints someone to speak on his behalf, so that the people are not overwhelmed by the "great fire" of God's glory. (What a great poetic way to refer to God--a "great fire"!) In the Bible, the result of seeing God face to face is death. The appointed "interpreter" is precisely what is meant by the biblical term "prophet": not so much someone who predicts the future (though it may involve this), but a mediator, someone who is able to endure direct communication with the Most High.

We need a mediator, not because we are deaf, but because the rawness of God's presence would annihilate us. Think of prophecy, of mediation, as something like the earth's atmosphere. The sun illuminates and warms our planet, but it also emits enormous quantities of radiation extremely hostile to organic molecular structures. Direct exposure to the sun's rays would lead to the rapid annihilation of most every living thing on earth. Yet the atmosphere (the ozone layer, etc.) absorbs that radiation while letting the light and heat through. So it is with prophetic mediation.

It was God's plan to ensure that through Christ's mission, that mediation would continue even after his ascension. He gave his own authority to his apostles, on whom he founded his Church. The voice that rebukes the demon and forgives sins had one single message to deliver: love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength, and your neighbor as yourself; the promise of resurrection and eternal life is contained therein.

It is a commandment that is infinitely simple, but as anyone who has tried to live it out knows, it is also infinitely difficult. Yet it is not only possible for cloistered nuns and monks taking a vow of silence but in the everydayness of our mundane lives. So St. Paul points out in our second reading—not dismissing the married vocation as a distraction from serving God, but pointing out how some worldly people go about their lives seeking to please everyone but God. He says clearly: Each of us has a gift from God, by which we are able to serve him undividedly, with a whole heart, with integrity.

The Church preserves that message and speaks in Christ's name, calling the world from darkness into the light of love of God and neighbor. We ignore that voice at our own peril—picking and choosing what to believe and what to obey of what the Church proposes for a Christian life. We are called not to blind, irrational submission, but a trusting discipleship in which not only our minds but our hearts are active and engaged.

The Father's voice resounded above Mount Tabor at Jesus' transfiguration: this is my beloved Son, listen to him. Many listened, and obeyed; and followed him to the Cross. Many others found his teaching difficult and went their own way.

Christ says to us: this is my beloved Church, my bride: listen to her.

Lord, may we not be deaf to your voice!

2012-01-29T19:56:00.002-06:00

Because of her unique structure, the Catholic Church is perhaps humanity's last bulwark of genuine appreciation of the difference between the sexes.

--Hans Urs von Balthasar

Saint Teresa Benedicta (born Edith Stein) composed these essays in the years following her conversion to Catholicism but before her entry into the Carmel from which she was eventually deported to the Nazi death camps. During this interim period, Stein dedicated herself (among many other things) to an articulation of a theological vision of femininity that both recognized the myriad changes in how women were being regarded (and how they regarded themselves) as well as the theologoumena of Christian revelation. With the upheaval generated by the first world war and the subsequent recovery efforts enlisting the help of men, women, and children alike, traditional feminine roles were called into question. Women seemed capable of accomplishment in the very areas previously denied to them. Stein sought to sort out the wheat from the chaff and present God's plan for man and woman in the midst of this world turned on its head.

I came across this book during research for a talk on the Catholic Church's reservation of priestly ordination to men alone, and Stein does touch on the issue briefly, but I found her presentation of the meaning of a particular calling for the male and female sex insightful and profound. Her philosophical training obviously shines through here, though without obscuring her points in technical terminology--most of these essays are adapted from lectures delivered to women's organizations simply interested in sorting through the rhetoric of women's emancipation. She even resorts to sampling from literary forms in her pursuit of the feminine vocation, earning a big A+ in my book for referencing a character in Sigrid Undset's quadrilogy The Master of Hestviken.

Some might consider a book written in the 1930s hopelessly outdated for a contemporary discussion on woman, but the power of her perspective has a ring of truth about it that ought not be hastily dismissed. I would encourage anyone with an interest in the subject to dive in to her essays and take her seriously.

The Desk Chair Review of Books, Continued

2012-01-29T17:01:00.002-06:00

Armed with a gift certificate to the greatest bookstore I know, I browsed the shelves with a light heart, eager to take a risk to purchase something both worthwhile and unknown. A difficult task. The Swan Lake Trilogy beckoned to me in the children's books section (on sale, and it's always a good place for gifts for my godchildren). I picked it up because I'd read the author's name somewhere briefly and was intrigued, though I would've had little to say if anyone had asked me who he was or what he wrote. The heft of the book, its creamy textured pages and startlingly luminous illustrations demanded further investigation. I opened at random and came across this passage:

He had no desire to kill animals. This was owing not so much to compassion as to respect, for not even memory can conspire to make a smoother line than the track of a bird wheeling silently in the sunshine over blue water. And when deer step gingerly in the heather, their precision of motion is art, and that is not to mention the perfect rocketry of their escapes. Were they to go faster, the result would not be so pleasing, and were they to go slower, they would not appear to be nobly disciplining themselves against flight (p. 49).

My first reaction, after the initial exhilaration over such verbiage, was that Helprin pays very close attention to things. I was hooked.

I made my way through the book over the course of a month or so, reading before bed. The initial sense that this was not a book for children, or even for adolescents, was confirmed throughout my reading, and I would be hard pressed to argue what its intended audience might be. I suspect that, in the words of CS Lewis, Helprin found that the medium of a fairy tale best suited the tone of whatever it was he saw in his mind's eye, regardless of whether his readers were children. That the vocabulary and tone can at times overwhelm the narrative is a defect only in the sense that it causes Helprin to strike a discordant note here and there, like an exuberant prodigy improvising on the piano.

The trilogy follows the career of a girl banished from her royal inheritance by the intrigues of a usurper, in the first person and then through the perspective of those who accompany her. I found the plot to be tight, with few wasted excursions into descriptive whimsy (though it is here that his prose can be most delightful). He builds to climaxes that are surprising without being arbitrary in their unexpectedness, and knows when a chapter is over.

Van Allsburg's illustrations are full of grandeur and depth, capturing both climactic and simple moments with a remarkable eye for twilight. Before reading the book itself, I took a couple young boys age 3 and 6 through the plates, and both were captivated by the dozens of scenes lifted from the story. We guessed at what they could mean, and found ample material for imaginative prequels in the bright color and elegant forms they portrayed.

A great book? A classic? No. But a delightful find on a winter's day in Wichita, unanticipated and simple? Most definitely!

Liturgy

2012-01-09T13:37:00.000-06:00

From the latest issue of Second Spring:

"Liturgy is communal. We don't do it for the convenience, and still less for the entertainment of individual participants. The whole point of the liturgy is that individual participants are transformed into a different kind of being altogether. It's not the individual 'I' who takes possession of the gift of the Eucharist; rather, I am received into the Eucharist, transformed into someone whose existence is formed through self-giving relations with others, relations that are grounded in love and friendship. In other words, through liturgy we receive ourselves as a gift. This creates an order within our souls which orients us to making a gift of ourselves to others. It is only by doing so that we are able to be ourselves."

--Paul Grenier

Hitchens' Legacy

2012-01-06T12:01:00.002-06:00

Now that the dust has settled over Hitchens' headstone, more sober appraisals of his work have been finding their way into the press. In particular, I enjoyed this short reflection on Hitchens by John Haldane of St. Andrew's:

Hitchens is a case worth studying. He is more interesting than Dawkins because evidently more psychologically complex and humanly engaging. If we Catholics are right about God and humanity, why was he so wrong? Or, put another way, what can we learn from his attitude about how to understand our own religious claims and about how our lives reflect them? Hitchens pointed to the record of evil associated with Christianity and with Catholicism in particular. It is glib to reply that humanism has its own tale of terrors, and problematic if we also claim that religious adherence brings transforming grace. If I were to take up Hitchens’s campaign against religion it would be to ask again and again: “Where is your grace and your holiness?”

Read the rest here.

Incidentally, a wonderful quote from today's memorial of St. André Bessette:

Those who are cured quickly often are people who have no faith or little faith. On the other hand, those who have solid faith are not cured so quickly, for the good God prefers to allow them to suffer that they will be sanctified even more.

An excellent biography of his life can be found at catholicism.org

Faith as Joy

2011-12-23T18:07:00.000-06:00

Well, too many months have passed, but I'd like to send Christmas greetings to erstwhile readers of this blog and pass along some beautiful words spoken by our Holy Father to the Curia this week. They have been rolling around in the pope's heart for many years, as they sound strikingly familiar to some passages from the retreat he preached in 1988 to the Communion and Liberation priests (collected in the wonderful little book The Yes of Jesus Christ). He sums up the year, a highlight of which was the gathering of youth in Madrid:

Finally, I would like to speak of one last feature, not to be overlooked, of the spirituality of World Youth Days, namely joy. Where does it come from? How is it to be explained? Certainly, there are many factors at work here. But in my view, the crucial one is this certainty, based on faith: I am wanted; I have a task; I am accepted, I am loved. Joseph Pieper, in his book on love, has shown that man can only accept himself if he is accepted by another. He needs the other’s presence, saying to him, with more than words: it is good that you exist. Only from the You can the I come into itself. Only if it is accepted, can it accept itself. Those who are unloved cannot even love themselves. This sense of being accepted comes in the first instance from other human beings. But all human acceptance is fragile. Ultimately we need a sense of being accepted unconditionally. Only if God accepts me, and I become convinced of this, do I know definitively: it is good that I exist. It is good to be a human being. If ever man’s sense of being accepted and loved by God is lost, then there is no longer any answer to the question whether to be a human being is good at all. Doubt concerning human existence becomes more and more insurmountable. Where doubt over God becomes prevalent, then doubt over humanity follows inevitably. We see today how widely this doubt is spreading. We see it in the joylessness, in the inner sadness, that can be read on so many human faces today. Only faith gives me the conviction: it is good that I exist. It is good to be a human being, even in hard times. Faith makes one happy from deep within.

Christmas blessings to you all.

Between the Embers and the Stars, Occupation

2011-10-31T15:53:00.000-05:00

I tripped over this lovely quotation in a favorite book of mine, while searching for something else (serendipitous discoveries always satisfy).

It is not surprising that the rebelling children of affluence can be so easily persuaded that private property is the root of all evil and led to project as their vision of the Kingdom a condition they think “natural”—one in which the world would belong only to God or to an anonymous “all,” while each human, unburdened by possessions, would contribute his all to a common store while drawing from it what he thinks he needs. They will not be dissuaded by the recognition that animals in fact have their cherished belongings and defend them fiercely, nor by the nightmare of alienation which that vision has wrought among humans. A different truth presses in on them—the depersonalization of humans and nature alike by the quest for possession.

The conflict they are experiencing is once more the intrinsic conflict between love and instrumentality, though on a deeper level—the conflict of being and having to which neither the solution of poverty nor that of affluence can be consistently applied. We are incarnate beings: for us, having and being are inseparable. To be at all means to have a body and a place in the world which are my own.

Erazim Kohak, The Embers and the Stars

Pope Benedict on his Home Turf

2011-09-24T20:48:00.001-05:00

Some beautiful words from his closing Mass homily, in the Berlin Olympic Stadium.

“Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me ... for apart from me [i.e. separated from me, or outside me] you can do nothing” (Jn 15:4f.). Every one of us is faced with this choice. The Lord reminds us how much is at stake as he continues his parable: “If a man does not abide in me, he is cast forth as a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned” (Jn 15:6). In this regard, Saint Augustine says: “The branch is suitable only for one of two things, either the vine or the fire: if it is not in the vine, its place will be in the fire; and that it may escape the latter, may it have its place in the vine."

The decision that is required of us here makes us keenly aware of the existential significance of our life choices. At the same time, the image of the vine is a sign of hope and confidence. Christ himself came into this world through his incarnation, to be our root. Whatever hardship or drought befall us, he is the source that offers us the water of life, that feeds and strengthens us. He takes upon himself all our sins, anxieties and sufferings and he purifies and transforms us, in a way that is ultimately mysterious, into good wine. In such times of hardship we can sometimes feel as if we ourselves were in the wine-press, like grapes being utterly crushed. But we know that if we are joined to Christ we become mature wine. God can transform into love even the burdensome and oppressive aspects of our lives.

It is important that we “abide” in Christ, in the vine. The evangelist uses the word “abide” a dozen times in this brief passage. This “abiding in Christ” characterizes the whole of the parable. In our era of restlessness and lack of commitment, when so many people lose their way and their grounding, when loving fidelity in marriage and friendship has become so fragile and short-lived, when in our need we cry out like the disciples on the road to Emmaus: “Lord, stay with us, for it is almost evening and darkness is all around us!” (cf. Lk 24:29), then the risen Lord gives us a place of refuge, a place of light, hope and confidence, a place of rest and security.

When drought and death loom over the branches, then future, life and joy are to be found in Christ. To abide in Christ means, as we saw earlier, to abide in the Church as well. The whole communion of the faithful has been firmly incorporated into the vine, into Christ. In Christ we belong together. Within this communion he supports us, and at the same time all the members support one another. They stand firm together against the storm and they offer one another protection. Those who believe are not alone. We do not believe alone, but we believe with the whole Church. The Church, as the herald of God’s word and dispenser of the sacraments, joins us to Christ, the true vine.

A Poem for the Kids

2011-09-08T09:40:00.003-05:00

"At last, at last! Our prayers were heard!"
said Joachim to Ann.
"The Lord has blessed us with a child—
a child from His own hand."

They beamed and sang and waited long
within their little home
to welcome a new child at last
who'd be their very own.

Then one night Ann was sleeping fast
but had a troubled night;
for in her dream, an angel spoke
a promise full of light.

She woke and told her husband
that God had made a plan.
"Could we say 'no' to Heaven's King?"
said Joachim to Ann.

The little child that Ann would bear
another Child would bring
who by His love would save the world
and conquer death's dark sting.

"There beats a heart beneath your heart
that's destined for a sword;
beneath your heart a most pure heart
has magnified the Lord."

"... We never dreamed of such a gift,
so we can only trust.
What wonders! Why—the mother of
our Lord has come to us."

Ave Maria Purísima

Aki Iro

2011-08-27T21:13:00.006-05:00

Taking a break from regularly scheduled homily preparation to bring you some aki iro lyrics:

(Listen here.)

When the neck tie that hangs you
makes you feel just like some super hero,
When you build man-cave to isolate you from the world outside,
When four shiny wheels get you wherever you're heading,
While four speakers blare the soundtrack for the ride -
And the plans you transmit keep you in humble submission to
The forces at work behind your TV screen,
And you subscribe to the guide for the modern man's pleasure,
You've read them once and again, pretend you know what they mean, when they say:

"If you really want to be the champion
You’ve got to let us keep you tied up in mindless entertainment.
Be the good boy and know what to ask for,
Hide yourself away in a fortress of purchasable things -
And you'll never meet harm of hand gun or hand grenade,
Never be a victim of murder or foul play, no.

We'll kill you slowly and we'll kill you softly;
Knock you off with procedure and protocol."

After you send your kids out on their own,
you'll spend quality time with wife and a marriage counselor,
After you see your marriage sucked dry,
you'll spend quality time with wife & divorce lawyer,
After you lose your job after twenty loyal years
‘cause you cracked beneath the weight of the tension,
After you lose your hair from stress,
you'll buy hair plugs, transplants, and extensions,
After you find your friend of the hour
on the internet lonely guy services chat room,
After you order your infomercialized industrial microwave
advertised on television,
After you microwave your meal
and pop that bottle of extra strength valium,
After you get all tired out, you'll go snort a line,
After you snort a line, you'll perform aerobic yoga
with your spandexed friends on cable,
After you pull a muscle,
you'll order faith healing over the airwaves from the latest televangelist,
After you wash your black socks,
check your stock portfolio
you'll ride in an S.U.V. you can't afford,
And you’ll praise the lord ‘cause you’ll know that you’ve got
Nothing meaningful eating up your time these days.

Better than Nothing

2011-08-22T16:23:00.002-05:00

You know, I haven't updated this blog in... well, too long. And I had some great ideas for a really insightful, serious response to something I read in the New York Times (you do know that I read the New York Times, don't you?).

But it's a lot cooler to post a video featuring free runners, bikers, and skaters...

... That will also blow your mind.

The Desk Chair Review of Books

2011-07-29T18:08:00.001-05:00

A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay

Some essays by CS Lewis on science fiction mentioned this book as a "classic" of the genre, so I picked up a copy at a recent binge at Eighth Day Books down in Wichita, and it happened to be the first one I felt ready to crack. It was to be a prelude to a re-reading of Lewis' Space Trilogy, so I was ready for some similarities. Here's what I found: whatever imaginative vision Lindsay was given managed to be at the expense of his ability to tell a good story, develop characters, and write dialogue. A third of the way through, I had basically formulated my final opinion of the book, and what crossed my lips was probably the very idea that got Lewis to write his Space Trilogy in the first place: "Even *I* could do better than this." That Lewis was far more justified in saying it is beside the point.

In Lindsay's favor, I did stick with it to the end--though, on the other hand, I don't know that I would have if I was not curious about how it might have exerted some inspirational influence on Lewis' own work that would follow it a few decades later. Lindsay seems to lack the kind of totality that lends credibility to a story and promotes the suspension of disbelief; the whole thing seems like a poorly concealed vehicle for philosophical speculation. Quite honestly, I've had similar reactions to another of Lewis' favorites, George MacDonald, whose books Lillith and Phantastes managed to lose me after a few chapters. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and ascribe my lack of appreciation to an impoverished imagination, but there it is.

One of the most frustrating elements of the book is the author's complete lack of ear for names. Obviously, his intention was to create the impression of a wild and interstellar reality, but his formulaic attepmts at doing so just sound ridiculous, as if simply juxtaposing some discordant Anglo-Saxon or Welsh words is enough to startle the reader into extraterrestrial fantasy. Nightspore? Spadevil? Wombflash? You've got--GOT--to be kidding me! Combined with the fact that the main character (Maskull. Seriously.) only has a sequence of encounters with wandering individuals far from any kind of society makes the whole story feel far, far too contrived.

That being said, there are some good moments of imaginative creativity that felt something like insight, and even a couple of scenes in which the bizarre landscape can take your breath away (I'm thinking of the underground world experienced alongside Corpang). Having chewed through Lewis' Space Trilogy once again, I suppose I'm grateful to Lindsay for having written this book and influenced what came later, but I've no reluctance to throw away the rind in favor of the fruit!

View all my reviews

The Truth about the "West Bank"

2011-07-27T17:08:00.000-05:00

Recently, the Israeli Foreign Ministry released a short video explaining why what you hear about the West Bank / Palestine in the news is often a misrepresentation of the facts. Having spent some time in the Holy Land and observing some of the abuses directed against Palestinians (and especially Palestinian Christians) by the Israeli government, I'm no uncritical defender of the Israeli perspective. However, the video does set the history straight and reclaims some words that have been commandeered by the likes of the Huffington Post and other such mouthpieces for the Palestinian Authority.

h/t First Thoughts

Motherhood Is a Calling (And Where Your Children Rank)

2011-07-20T11:08:00.001-05:00

An outstanding piece on Motherhood and its Challenges that I plan on giving to every couple I counsel. Head over to DesiringGod.org and check it out:

Motherhood Is a Calling (And Where Your Children Rank)

Of Pastors and Pedophiles

2011-06-08T00:30:00.000-05:00

For all our political correctness and sensitivity training, Americans absolutely love to pronounce sentence on the failings of others.

I think it's a by-product of our political process: we are the descendants of political savants who put their lives behind the conviction that normal people exercising their God-given judgment could collectively govern themselves. Under our system, the people elect representatives and hold them accountable to their responsibilities to serve the common good. This requires that the electorate be reasonably informed about various matters of public interest and make judgments based on what they know so as to form an opinion and be persuasive.

Notice how much we enjoy exporting this process into other realms. Take sports, for instance. There are few discussions that can get as heated as those over the particular choices of certain players, coaches, or teams. Nourished by the machine-gunned commentary of sportscasters and ESPN commentators, countless sports bar arguments flow unabated by anything resembling self-restraint, nuance, or acknowledgment of multiple points of view. Getting through one of these conversations is often less a matter of real knowledge than the authoritativeness of the tone in which pronouncements are made. And if you happen to be the coach that makes a bad move, God save you from the curses on the lips of your unnamed and anonymous accusers.

Those conversations can be fun—I've enjoyed them myself in the past. But when something more serious than a first round draft pick or choice for starting pitcher makes its way into the public eye, the mob is all too quick to assemble and equip itself with the weaponry of indignation. In particular, the response to the issues surrounding the Catholic Church's handling of clerical sexual abuse cases seem to provide the context for a perfect storm of apodictic pronouncements that rise like a tsunami and spout from every headline, news ticker, and combox.

And well it should—the presence of broken, abusive, and compulsively pathological men in the Catholic priesthood should awaken a strong desire in everyone to ensure that children are preserved from the predations of such persons.

However.

I've been standing at some distance from the media conversation—you could say I've been distracted with other more pressing responsibilities over the last few weeks. But the news certainly made it to my ears, and it hurt. It's one thing to bear up under the suspicious glances and crude pedophile jokes, enduring it as part of the reality of priesthood today. It's another thing to see a priest credibly accused of crimes that should make even the most wanton turn away in disgust—and then step into the same public role. I put on the same clothing and perform the same rituals and basically stand in the same shoes as do the accused. It does make you look at things from a different angle (there but for the grace of God, etc.).

So the distance between me and the media bulletins has presented some different perspective on the question. I present these thoughts as a short rejoinder to those who are still reeling, and perhaps still seething, over the revelations about Father Shawn Ratigan these past few weeks.

Have you noticed how the outrage has been directed exclusively at Bishop Finn and his staff? Not one mention has been made of the (allegedly) reprehensible conduct of Father Ratigan himself—beyond the piling up of data with which to build a case against the diocese. The various advocacy groups are so swift to divert the narrative into their own predictable channels that we forget where the real scandal is to be found: the fall of a Catholic priest into a dark and horrible way of being that poisoned the lives of children as well as his own life—so deeply, in fact, that he sought to take his own life in despair over his actions. The actions of the bishop are, in comparison to this fundamental delict, secondary and derivative.

I make this point not to throw the priest under the bus and divert attention from the admitted imprudence of the diocesan response, but to humanize the target of our accusations and denouncements. It is very easy to allow anger to run unbridled when it is directed at an impersonal and imposing institution. When it's a monolithic corporate body as visible as the Catholic Church, I can easily feel justified in "letting them have it" because—well, they can take it. It could just as easily be Halliburton, or Monsanto, or the Government; as long as it's big, no stick is too ugly to beat it with.

But it's not as easy to give both barrels to the person standing right in front of me. It happens all the time, of course. We justify our cruelty by rationalizing it into candor, “telling it like it is.” All the same, it takes some determination to push aside that natural sense of compassion for our fellow human beings when we're face to face with them. And there are times when we push it aside to our peril.

I don't know Father Ratigan, but he went to my seminary and was ordained just a year or two before I started there. He walked on the same grounds, ate in the same refectory, sat in the same classrooms, and prayed in the same chapel as I did for the last five years. Many of the same men and women who were responsible for my priestly formation were responsible for his. He and I probably have many common memories of a good, holy, and enriching place.

That is a disconcerting thought for me as the wave of my own bewilderment and anger begins to crest. My defenses go up. In some way, I am associated with this man. I find myself torn between the entirely justified reaction of parents whose children were in harm's way, and this sense of compassion that presents itself when the more strident voices die down. My thoughts stray to times when I was younger and was caught out after some misdeed—some lie, some vandalism, some petty act of childish violence. That feeling of remorse, of wanting to take it all back, of realizing the consequences of my actions and finding them fearful is still tangible in me so many years later. And then I imagine that same feeling stoked white-hot by a thousand hostile pairs of burning eyes; the chorus of lips flecked with spittle and quivering with loathing; the forefingers jabbing into my sternum, fists clenched and barely restrained from swinging; the hissing and hoarseness of their voices; the platoon of polished lawyers ready to exploit my misdeeds against the community that gave me faith and nourished and supported me and loved me all my life, and then ordained me to serve in its name; no hope of ever returning to a normal existence, forever branded as a pervert and a deviant, eternally an object of fear and revulsion; and all of them standing there despising, despising, despising my wretched, hypocritical self, and me despising myself along with them for having done what I did—

—I'm not too sure I wouldn't have wanted to end it all, either. That is a dark, dark place to be, and I'm certain that the little imaginative taste of it that I had was a taste of hell.

Putting oneself in the shoes of an accused child molester is not a recommended exercise by any means, and what I've just written is probably hard for many to swallow. By putting it out there, I don't mean to imply that it is the only thing to consider, or even the most important thing. Undoubtedly, there are many more stories of anxiety, fear, and despair in the lives of the victims of sexual abuse and those who have to deal with the fallout and assist with the long and arduous process of healing. But it does have to be considered, and it's the one thing that I've not heard anything about these last few weeks.

What I want to say is this: Father Ratigan is a brother for whom Christ died. That fact has nothing to do with relaxing the standards of justice for him or those responsible for overseeing his ministry as a priest. However, when I look at the way in which this case was handled, and I see that there are some things that don't add up, I can only make wild guesses at why things panned out the way they did. My American upbringing kicks in, and I start formulating opinions and making them known... and then I am reminded that you and I will never get at the whole truth, treading as we do on the horizon of this story. That is enough to give me reason to believe that Bishop Finn wasn't just acting as a shepherd responsible for governing a diocese, managing and protecting the assets accrued by the sacrificial generosity of the faithful, and protecting the most vulnerable from abuse by a wayward priest. He was also acting as the pastor and father of that priest, doing what he could for the good of his name and his soul.

After all, that's what Bishop Finn—himself a priest—was ordained to do.

Whatever is mine, is His

2011-06-01T09:29:00.000-05:00

I couldn't possibly begin to express the weight of gratitude that presses down upon me this morning: the last guest homeward bound, the leftovers tucked away, my family exhausted but glowing, a "remember when" soundtrack on repeat in my head, the faces of friends new and old fresh in my mind's eye, a mound of generous gifts and envelopes that would fill the tomb of a pharaoh to overflowing...

... and the faintest trace of chrism on my palms. It is an unbearable weight, but it is a weight of glory.

The anointing of the Spirit, the Blood of the Son, and the loving gaze of the Father be upon you who were present and you who sent your prayers and wishes from afar.

+Ave María Purísima+

For those who inquired, the text of my homily is below.

Delivered at Holy Spirit Catholic Church
29 May 2011
Sixth Sunday of Easter

First Mass of Thanksgiving

Today’s readings are shot through with the Holy Spirit. Which is unusual; we’re not used to thinking about the Spirit or talking about the Spirit, even though He is so deeply involved in every moment of our existence. Even though it would be very imprecise to say that of the three persons of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit is the “closest” to us—whenever one is invoked, the other two rise up—still, it is in virtue of the sending of the Spirit that we can say God dwells within our hearts. We are, of course, the Temples of the Holy Spirit. Jesus refers to this promised Spirit in the Gospel today as the “advocate.”

“The Advocate.” It’s an English version of a Latin translation of a Greek word, “parakleitos”. It’s the word from which the word “Paraclete” is derived. That word He uses, “parakleitos,” it means something like “someone who is called up to stand along side you.” It was borrowed from the legal world: a courtroom word for “defense lawyer.” The “paraclete” stood beside you as your case came before the Judge and the case was read out against you. It also has the sense of a fellow mourner, someone who accompanies the grieving, and so “paraclete” is also where we get the word “comforter”. But “advocate” is what I’d like to hone in on this morning.

Recently the news cycle offered a really unexpected case of what it means to be an “advocate” in the Scriptural sense. The army and marines have been training certain dog breeds to serve as living bomb detectors in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they have proved to be incredibly successful. These dogs are unbelievable assets to soldiers under the constant threat of improvised explosive devices meant to kill and maim them on their patrols, and as you can imagine, the bond that develops between these dogs and their handlers is unbreakable. These animals accompany soldiers into incredibly dangerous situations and often save lives through their obedience and loyalty. They also are often killed in combat alongside their handlers.

One story in particular caught my attention. Last December, PFC Colton Rusk was on a patrol in the Helmand province in Afghanistan with several other Marines and his bomb dog, Eli, a black lab. Private Rusk had enlisted in the Marines right out of high school and had spent several months learning to work with Eli before deployment. War dogs undergo incredibly intense training along with their handlers, many of them learning to parachute out of planes into open water along with paratroopers or dive into tunnels to track down hidden enemy combatants. The training is long and intense in order to build trust and allow handlers and dogs to work together as a single unit before putting them in the field where lives are on the line.

In his letters home, Private Rusk described to his family how he had been eating his meals outside the mess tent with Eli while on deployment. He began this after another Marine had started a fight over the dog always following Rusk around and getting underfoot. They were absolutely inseparable.

So when Private Rusk was hit by Taliban sniper fire that day in December, Eli was the first to be at his side. When his fellow Marines rushed to his aid, they found Eli literally straddling Private Rusk with his body and ferociously driving off anyone that came near. In fact it was quite difficult for them to call off the dog in order to bring this soldier’s body home.

In a letter Private Rusk had written to his family not long before his death, he said of Eli: “whatever is mine is his”. Rusk had gotten to a point with this animal that was so generous that he identified this animal with his own self. And that generosity wasn’t draining or limiting him, but it nourished him, invigorated him, to the point that he regarded that dog as an extension of his own being, his own existence.

The Marines allowed Eli to be retired early in order to be adopted by Rusk’s family, and there was deep consolation for them to be able to love something their son and brother had loved so much. And in their love for this animal, they began to experience his presence with them in a mysterious way that only the heart knows. Private Rusk was 20 years old when he died.

There are a couple ways this seems to help us understand what is meant by an “advocate.” First, in terms of God’s relationship to us: the Advocate, the “paraclete,” does not make me invulnerable. Jesus’ promise is that the Spirit will be with us, not necessarily that it will prevent us from suffering or dying. But that promise extends even if we should die: he is there, with me, covering me with his own flesh and blood.

Second, that shift from a kind of itemized relationship that holds back here and there to one that recklessly abandons itself to giving and surrender to another is precisely the kind of thing the Paraclete Spirit brings about in our relationship with God.

The Goal of our life is to live with God forever. God, who loves us, gave us life. Our own response of love allows God's life to flow into us without limit.

To love God is to keep the commandments, yes. But a calculating, itemized keeping of the commandments is a kind of slavery. Recasting it into terms in which I can say “whatever is mine is His” lets God be a Father again: to provide from his means for my needs; to surprise me with his goodness, with little favors. In that kind of relationship, keeping the commandments isn’t a sacrifice, but just what I do because of who God is to me: a benevolent, caring, generous Father.

To be able to say “whatever is mine is His” and mean it is probably the closest colloquial definition of Christian perfection I know of. St. Ignatius Loyola crafted an intense program of preparation called the Spiritual Exercises that were built around forming people to live this very reality. Many of you are probably familiar with his famous prayer, the “suscipe,” which is a kind of culminating summary of his whole spiritual outlook:

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty,
my memory, my understanding
and my entire will,
All I have and call my own.
You have given all to me.
To you, Lord, I return it.
Everything is yours; do with it what you will.
Give me only your love and your grace.
That is enough for me.

If I could presume to supplement Ignatius’ prayer: he mentions the external goods, our material possessions, and our interior ones like our minds and our freedom, but he doesn’t mention a third kind of possession that is both: our relationships. They are with other people, who are exterior to us, but they reach into the profound depths of our own lives and incessantly touch upon our own happiness. Those, too, are part of our offering: my relationship with my parents, my brothers and sisters, my roommates, my spouses, my co-workers, my children, my teachers, my pastor, my neighbors. When these relationships are surrendered to God, they too become animated with his sanctifying presence and caught up into the worship of the whole world. I speak on particular conviction on this point because I saw it happening last night in my own backyard. Believe it: it’s real.

So as we all enjoy this moment of blessed Sabbath rest in the Lord, let’s make our offering count.... as we go about our tasks, we can be known as those who mean it when they say, “whatever is mine, is His.”

Gingersnap and the Licorice Whips

2011-05-05T21:57:00.000-05:00

The brief run we had ended last night. Posted for your enjoyment.

Firebomb your Frenemies

2011-04-30T10:23:00.002-05:00

GQ has an interview with Bavarian filmmaker Werner Herzog, director of such classics as Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Grizzly Man.

There is nothing glorious about making a film. It is an endless sequence of banalities.

A must read for film enthusiasts.

Bearing Fruit

2011-04-13T09:18:00.002-05:00

This tremendously insightful summary of the relationship of the religious life to married couples comes from The Christian State of Life by Hans Urs von Balthasar:

Thus both states [the "lay state" and the "religious" state] live by the same love: the love of Christ, which is the paradigm of every love. And both states are fruitful by virtue of this love because both bear in themselves the principle of fecundity—namely, love itself which is poured into our hearts together with faith and hope. For God was not content just to surprise husband and wife by a reward bestowed on them from without; it was also his will that the fruit of grace should issue in them from the love he had bestowed on them as their own: as their fruit and, at the same time, as his fruit for and in them. The more closely human love resembles God’s love, the more it forgets and surrenders itself in order to assume the inner form of poverty, chastity and obedience, the more divine will be its fruit: a fruit that surpasses all human fecundity or expectation. This fruit is bestowed in its unity on the state of election, which renounces by vow not only its own physical and spiritual fruit, but also, and more significantly, the privilege of seeing the fruit God may choose to send it. It abandons to God at the same time both its whole self and the outcome of its total self-surrender. For the Lord on the Cross did not see the fruit of his gift of self, but rather placed it in the Father’s hands so that, after he had risen from the dead on the third day, the Father might return it to him superabundantly. Christian marriage likewise shares in this fruit, both by the sacramental vow that leaves a priori to God the decision as to what physical and spiritual fruit he may choose to bestow and by being satisfied with whatever decision he may make. If Christian spouses are able genuinely to make this act of perfect self-giving, their limited community is opened to the universality of the Catholic Church, and their love, which seems to be focused on so narrow a circle, is enabled actively to participate in the realization of the kingdom of God upon earth.

Nevertheless, the Christian remains in all this a "layman." He is not transferred even by this special christological sacrament into the state of a qualitatively higher vocation. His life-form is not one that was newly instituted by Christ, but rather one that was already valid under the Old Testament and was supernaturally raised by Christ to the dignity of a sacrament. He is still bound to a form of physical self-giving that attains only in exceptional cases to a perfect resolution of all guilt-caused concupiscence. He cannot transfer to his children, who in their turn were born into the corruption of their race, the sacramental grace that has blessed his own marriage. Nor does his state confer on him the right to complete, in poverty, chastity, and obedience, the perfect holocaust, not only of the spirit, but also of the body, to which those in the state of election are called. This does not mean that he is a less worthy Christian than they are, for, even when God's gifts vary, his election bestows on each individual only what is best. Both states—the lay state, which achieves its fulfillment in the married state, and the state of election—condition one another and are intimately related to one another; not, however, as two equal and complementary halves are related, but as the special state, which emanates from the general one and returns to it by way of sacrifice and mission, is related to the general state that is a genuinely Christian state only because of the special state. This relationship reflects the basic law of the economy of salvation: that the Old Testament is both continued in and surpassed by—both incorporated into and superseded by—the New Testament; that the New Testament complements the Old Testament, yet is itself so new that only could have seen that it was already present in the Old Testament.

I Believe in the Resurrection of the Body

2011-04-12T06:57:00.006-05:00

Delivered at the John Paul II Newman Center
University of Illinois, Chicago
11 April 2011

On no point does the Christian faith encounter more opposition than on the resurrection of the body.

Most of us would find the above statement a bit out of proportion with our experience. Typically, when people find out we're Catholic, there's a list of grievances about as long as my arm, and belief in the resurrection of the body isn't one of them. I can't say I've ever had "bodily resurrection" come up in a conversation in an airport with a stranger about Catholicism. Even though we pray in the Creed "we look for the resurrection of the dead" together every Sunday, growing up I hardly ever thought about it, because really no one ever talked about it. What do we "look forward to" when we believe in the resurrection of the dead?

Let's go back to the beginning.

Interestingly enough, the above quotation came from a quite ancient source: these words were spoken not by the pope during his last Wednesday audience, or a well-known apologist, but by Saint Augustine, a bishop in North Africa 1600 years ago.

When they were spoken, Christianity had finally been legalized as a religion, and then made the official religion of the empire; and this 350 years after Christ. It is no exaggeration to say that our faith grew up in the shadow of the two religious giants of antiquity: paganism and Judaism.

In some sense it struggled to define itself over and against them; it is necessarily so, because Christianity is neither a more rigorous version of pagan practices nor a relaxation of Jewish monotheism. Even though Christianity shared some common characteristics with them, at the same time it transcended them both, and presented to the world something totally new.

And that “new thing” was really pretty simple: a man who claimed to be the Son of God was rejected by his people, executed by the Romans, only to rise from the dead. This vindicated everything He said and did. God had entered the world as one of us; Jesus really was God’s Son, and He had the power to forgive sins and to restore the world to friendship with God. His power extended even to power over death.

So obviously this concept of “resurrection” was at the core of the clash between Christianity and the world. The fact is, though, there was no shortage of opinions in the ancient world about what happened after death. Thus, the earliest preachers had to be very specific about what they meant by “resurrection,” because that word already had meanings in other contexts.

Paganism was pretty vague about the afterlife; the Greeks spoke of Hades, the Romans of Elysium, and so on, but this was often something more like a diminished life, a living death that was less alive than earthly existence.

Judaism had a wide range of opinions about the afterlife; the question of the resurrection was actually a hotly disputed point in the 1st century, and factions arose over the question. Popular Judaism had some grasp of the idea; in today’s Gospel, Martha’s act of faith in the resurrection on the “last day” alludes to this. But the belief was always something national, something specific to the Jews over against the pagans—a fulfillment of the promise we hear about in today’s 1st reading from Ezekiel. Resurrection entailed a return to the promised land, a restoration of Jewish political supremacy, and it almost always had a tone of a return to earthly existence mightily prolonged.

If you caught it, however, Jesus wants to push Martha further with that strange sentence: I am the resurrection and the life. Jesus recognizes that Martha still regards him as a wonder-worker, someone who “has God’s ear.” But Jesus is more than a wonder-worker or a prophet: He is God’s kingdom in person, and this is a kingdom that conquers death and sin. Martha points out that Lazarus has been dead for four days, and will probably already have begun to decay—John includes this to make it clear that Lazarus is really, really dead. No: there is no chance that this is human ingenuity at work here. This is God’s power.

Now, what Jesus performed at the tomb was not, strictly speaking, a resurrection, but what you might call a "resuscitation." Lazarus returned to normal, earthly existence, and eventually died. When Paul speaks in the second reading of the Spirit who “will give life to your mortal bodies,” he is alluding to something much more powerful than resuscitation—he is making a connection between what the apostles and hundreds of others witnessed in Jesus’ resurrected body, and our own afterlife and bodily resurrection.

The question of what our glorified bodies will be like has been around since day one. Paul has to answer this question in his first letter to the Corinthians:

"How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?" You foolish man! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel… What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable.

The connection between our present bodies and our resurrected bodies is something like the connection between an acorn and an oak—the oak is something much greater than the acorn, but in a way the full-grown oak is already contained within the acorn, and is simply a full development of it.

Of course this answer is less than satisfying. I don’t want to bore you with all the medieval speculation about what the resurrected body will be like, but there are a few basic ideas that we can guess at from what is narrated about Jesus’ appearances after the resurrection.

First, our bodies will be incorruptible—no longer subject to suffering, pain, disease, or death.
Our bodies will not be limited any more by space and time—think of Jesus’ appearance to the twelve in the upper room, when the doors had been locked.
They will nevertheless be real bodies—think of Thomas placing his hand in Jesus’ side, and Jesus eating fish and bread on the shore of the sea of Galilee.
Finally, our bodies will be completely subservient to the soul—a restoration of the original created order in which our not only our appetites and desires will obey reason, but even our organs and muscles and nerves.

Again, this is mostly speculation, and we're not bound to believe it as the teaching of the Church, but it does help to put some flesh on the idea of what “resurrection” means and helps to separate it from what it’s not. We have to remember that biblical language about our final state is symbolic—even John himself admitted that though we are children of God now, we do not know what we shall be.

One thing is certain however—our lives will be taken up into God’s own Trinitarian communion of love and that love will make us more alive, not less. It’s a good reminder to us that every single person we meet, every person on the street, every person who has been or will be born, the person sitting next to you here now, has the potential to become so magnificent, so exalted a creature, that if one of them was to appear to us now, our first instinct would be to fall down and worship it. There is nothing insignificant about our lives together. There is no insignificant person or conversation. All of it will be carried with us into eternity.

So on this 5th Sunday of Lent, looking forward to Easter, it’s good to be reminded of what we are about here—nothing short of resurrection and eternity. Everything about our discipleship—our prayer, our moral choices, why we receive the sacraments, our service to others, and our life together in this community is directed to this. And in closing, I want to put some perspective on that.

The Church has always read the story of the raising of Lazarus as a real historical event, but it has also understood it in a spiritual way, as a symbolic retelling of the lifting of a person out of sin. Biblically, sin and death are tied together—the one is the result of the other. The death of Lazarus is the death of the soul in sin—serious sin, what has tied us up, and extinguished the fire of life in us, stopped our breath, and stuffed us in the ground, alone, isolated, silent, and stinking.

But into that silence and death comes the Word of life: come out. Those words continue to call sinners from death to life through the ministry of the Church, and through our encouragement of one another. Let’s be attentive to the source of that word of life, calling us out of the tombs we’ve chosen to rot in. Think on a situation where you've been challenged or corrected. How did you respond to those words? Did you receive them as a call from the Lord to new life, or as an insult or an attempt to humiliate you? Even if the intentions of the one through whom those words come are not pure, that need not stop us from receiving them as if it were Christ breaking through our deafness to raise us to life with Him forever.

The Desk Chair Review of Books

2011-03-31T17:04:00.001-05:00

Mississippi Writings: Tom Sawyer/Life on the Mississippi/Huckleberry Finn/Pudd'nhead Wilson
by Mark Twain

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This review only covers the "Life on the Mississipi" portion of this edition.

A great book of memoirs of Twain's years as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, before levees and dredging and electric lights to guide boat pilots on their frequent voyages up and down the river. After becoming a famous author, Twain returned to the Mississippi (incognito at first) to learn how much things had changed in the 20-odd years he'd spent since his tour of duty on the river. The pilots of his day had to memorize 1,200 miles of twisting, turning, ever-changing river so as never to put their vessel in danger of sinking or running aground, and they had to be able to do so in all weather, at all flood levels, and all times of day or night. Such expertise perished with the proliferation of railroads, having been rendered unnecessary, and so Twain's remembrances are bittersweet as he recounts the most memorable of the many thousands of hours spent behind the ship's wheel mastering the art of piloting. Along with his many stories of life on the river and the outrageous personalities encountered along the way, he recounts his memories of the many river towns and how changes in commerce and even in the riverbed itself influences the communities that were nourished by the steamboat.

An excellent bedtime read that managed to hold my interest throughout--even the appendix of a few Native American myths that he'd overheard among his fellow passengers. If you enjoyed Two Years Before the Mast: A Sailor's Life at Sea, this one's less polished, but of the same genre and style.

View all my reviews

Uncle Remus is Not Expendable.

2011-03-24T09:27:00.000-05:00

In browsing for a nice gift for the baptism of a good friend's first child, I came across this monstrosity and found it necessary to share with you, that we all might stare open-mouthed together:

The folktales collected by Joel Chandler Harris from former slaves at the turn-of-the-century constitute a valuable contribution to African-American folklore. However, their usefulness has been weakened by problems with the heavy dialect with which they were written and with the narrator, Uncle Remus. Margaret Wise Brown's Brer Rabbit: Stories from Uncle Remus (Harper, 1941; o.p.) and Ennis Rees' Brer Rabbit and His Tricks (1967; o.p.) and More of Brer Rabbit's Tricks (1968; o.p., both Scott), all of which eliminated Uncle Remus, are excellent versions, but all, unfortunately, are out-of-print. This book steps in to fill the void left by those books. It is a retelling of six stories found in Chase's The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus (Houghton, 1955). These retellings are as spirited as the originals but without their drawbacks. They are written in standard English, which eliminates the pain of trying to figure out what all these "Bimebys" mean. Also, Uncle Remus is nowhere in sight to detract from the lively carryings on of Brer Rabbit and friends...

This picture book retelling should serve as a good introduction for younger children to this important piece of American folk culture. Certainly it's the best of all the editions now in print, and one that should be treasured.

If ever an Index of Forbidden Books was necessary, that time is now, and these gutted versions of Uncle Remus' Tales Not Told By Uncle Remus belong at the top.

The Desk Chair Review of Books

2011-02-26T08:49:00.001-06:00

On the Song of Songs I by Bernard of Clairvaux

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Though this is only the first of a four-volume work, Bernard is intriguing enough as a preacher to merit a few words. His sermons on the Song of Songs take some getting used to, being filled with allegorical theology intermixed with some intermittently strange imagery. What ultimately drew me in was the "ad hoc" quality of what Bernard preached to his monks, giving the reader a sense that he's eavesdropping on a conversation many centuries old. Of course, we only get Bernard's side of the dialogue, but the praise and reproach he offered his brother monks is none the poorer for that.

More on Bernard when I finish the series...

View all my reviews

The Desk Chair Review of Books

2011-02-04T17:30:00.002-06:00

I was somewhat skeptical that this book would be worthwhile, having been through the confessions a number of times and having Augustine's life story pretty much together in my own head. I thought an Augustine biography would be redundant, having already read the one written by the saint himself. For some reason, the stupidity of this attitude did not make itself aware immediately; fortunately, it only took the first few pages of Brown's book to disabuse me of my philistinism.

Brown's research is meticulous; he sculpts broad, arcing narratives within each section of Augustine's life, peppering the plot with abundant references to the man's letters and sermons, situating them within the rich context of provincial, African Christianity. The persistent and simultaneous tug of contemplative inclinations against pastoral, practical controversies within the flock is standard stuff of ancient ecclesiastical biographies, but Brown was able to get out of the way with enough tact to let the details of Augustine's personal story stand up in clear but ornate relief against the backdrop of 5th century Hippo, Carthage, and Rome. The two great controversies of Augustine's life--over Donatism and Pelagianism--stand like pillars on either side of his episcopal ministry, and I realized that prior to this biography I hadn't understood what was at stake in either of them, having approached them through an exclusively theological lens. Brown bestows a measure of flesh and blood on the controversialists, for which I am quite grateful. Learning of Augustine's own development, from an intense, almost rigorist neophyte to a venerable man of affairs deeply acquainted with the mysterious nature of human sin, softened the portrait of this brilliant and devoted Christian without diminishing any of his greatness. The melancholy of the crumbling late Roman empire overrun by invasion after invasion struck me with consistent force, and gave me a sense of the tragic feeling of futility that must have gnawed at those with responsibility to preserve and hand on civilization.

Augustine's literary executor, Possidius, said upon his death that "I think those who gained most from him were those who had been able actually to see and hear him as he spoke in Church, and, most of all, those who had some contact with the quality of his life among men." Having read this biography does little to ameliorate our lack of experience of him, but does inspire a deep desire to be faithful to the graces of one's own life, no matter where they lead, in confidence that the contribution one single person can make in all this madness is worthwhile, no matter how small.

Saint Augustine by 17th century Spanish artist José de Ribera

Mainstream Media Looks the Other Way

2011-02-01T06:32:00.002-06:00

Elizabeth Scalia reports over at First Things' On the Square that the mainstream media has utterly failed to address the Gosnell case (and others like it), comparing their cover-up to the very same complicity for which they have mercilessly condemned the bishops over the sex-abuse scandal:

So, allow me to ask the impolitic question I have hinted at elsewhere: in choosing to look away, in choosing to under-report, in choosing to spin, minimize, excuse, and move-along when it comes to Kermit Gosnell—and to this whole subject of under-regulated abortion clinics, the debasement of women and the slaughter of living children—how are the press and those they protect by their silence any better than the Catholic bishops who, in decades past, looked away, under-reported, spun, minimized, excused, moved-along, and protected the repulsive predator-priests who have stolen innocence and roiled the community of faith?

The whole thing is worth reading--brief and to the point.

Preach for Life

2011-01-27T20:55:00.010-06:00

Delivered at the John Paul II Newman Center at the University of Illinois
Sunday, January 23rd 2011

As many of you are aware, a number of us are tonight, having made the trip out to Washington to participate in the annual March for Life. It’s been several years since I myself made the march, and I have to admit, every anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, I’ve noticed a recurring heaviness of heart. This has led to a growing cynicism in myself over the efficacy of such demonstrations, and of the pro-life movement in general.

In my weaker moments, there’s an impulse to disgust over the futility of our work on behalf of the unborn, alongside all the political maneuvering from politicians, the electioneering, and most especially the slick and glossy rhetoric that’s used to distract us from one of the greatest human rights atrocities our country has ever known.

It’s true that there have been and continue to be advances, but we have very little reason to be complacent:

The steady decline in abortions since 1981 has leveled off in the last 5 years at just under 20 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age. That sounds like a pretty small number; but as you know, statistics don’t always capture the whole truth. For instance, the numbers are startling in more urban areas. Recently it was discovered that in NYC, 41% of all pregnancies except the ones that end in miscarriage end in abortion. That statistic for the country as a whole stands around 22%. That's right: 1 in 5 pregnancies in this country ends in abortion. Take a guess at the most dangerous place to be in the United States right now. Not in an airplane, not in a speeding vehicle driven by an intoxicated college student, not on the South side of Chicago at 3 a.m. No, the most dangerous place in our country is a mother's womb.

In more recent news, an abortionist in Philadelphia was arraigned and held without bail by a grand jury that charged him with eight counts of murder of babies born alive to unconscious mothers, as well as several women who died in his facility through gross medical incompetence. Even more shocking is the fact that the atrocities committed by this man against mostly poor, minority women and children were overlooked by the Pennsylvania Health Department for decades, who refused to inspect his facilities despite numerous well-substantiated complaints and the death of a patient under his care. The grand jury’s report found that the reason for such a horrendous situation was the Health Department’s refusal to inspect all Pennsylvania abortion clinics for, I quote, “political reasons” (p. 9).

It’s very easy to be disheartened by these stories of human depravity, this ability to commit unspeakable, heartless acts of cruelty for money and take a kind of sick delight in it all. It’s also very easy to be overwhelmed by the fact that in spite of a vibrant and popular pro-life movement, there are great numbers of people who think it a constitutional right to be able to kill children, to the order of 1.2 million abortions each year in the US.

And so there is great reason to grieve today. What rises out of today’s Gospel is a deep familiarity with Matthew’s reference to the people “dwelling in a land overshadowed by death.”

All this discouragement got me thinking about what it must have been like in the years leading up to the work of Dr Martin Luther King in the civil rights movement. A few months ago, I was doing research for a paper on the history of nonviolent resistance and the lessons it might offer to the contemporary pro-life struggle, and I was just captivated by the history of the Montgomery bus boycott and the sit-ins in Birmingham. In the years leading up to those inspired and noble attacks on the evils of segregation and discrimination, King had been deeply frustrated by what he saw was the inertia of the civil rights movement. So many leaders (black as well as white) had attempted to challenge discrimination, vocally and publicly, but nothing ever had enough momentum to make real progress. No one had been able to figure out what needed to change, and why the whites had so successfully been able to convince the black community that desegregation and equality was an impossibility—or at least something that would take many, many years to accomplish.

It took him a long time to comprehend that the reason behind the continued stagnancy of civil rights lay in the black community itself. He concluded that most blacks accepted the conditions of their lives as given, and had no expectation that anything would ever change. He traced the roots of this mindset to basically a “slave mentality,” the spiritual legacy of physical bondage.

He saw that it was just this interior bondage that had to be rooted out before it could be reflected in societal change.

And so Dr King saw that the parameters of the whole struggle had to be recast—the enemy was not just the “white mystique of invincibility,” but the inner “psychology of servitude.” It came down to dignity: King recognized true freedom was impossible without “a process of liberation attained by 1) the recognition of individual dignity and 2) the imposition of the claim that dignity asserts on the actions and policies of others.”

And so I have to wonder if my own cynicism about the March for Life isn’t slipping into the same kind of interior bondage—not to the culture of slavery but the culture of Death. (Maybe in the end they’re not so different.) Isn’t the lesson from the life of Dr King that a victory over the culture of death begins with a victory over my own interior darkness and death, which is fundamentally a spiritual reality, and a recognition that the dignity of others has a claim on me, whether or not society as a whole recognizes that dignity?

This is why pro-lifers are right to condemn the use of violence in the name of the defense of unborn life. Apart from the obvious self-contradiction it involves, using force in this struggle is not compatible with a recognition of the dignity of those we oppose. I think this is why the pro-life cause is so profoundly misunderstood by our culture. Pro-lifers are often represented in the argumentative context of the media and pop culture, as self-righteous, but our struggle has nothing to do with absolving ourselves by condemning others. That truth is brought out by Jesus’ call to repent on account of the nearness of the Kingdom of God.

We can never equate the line separating good from evil with the line between pro-life and pro-choice. No: that line runs right through the human heart, yours and mine included.

That does NOT mean the utterly silly cliche repeated so often in our society today: "judge not, lest ye be judged." There are few things more clear-cut than the taking of innocent life in the name of convenience. What it does mean is that we are to present ourselves to the Lord, who calls out to us today in our darkness: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” We are free to call others to repentance because we ourselves have tasted the bitterness of acknowledging our own sin. But we know that there is sweetness in it, too—sweetness, and light, and peace. There is healing for the repentant; Jesus still makes his way through this “Galilee of the Gentiles, proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, curing every disease and illness among the people”. He does it through His Church, and the sacraments of penance and healing. She can’t stop calling the world to repentance without negating the whole reason for her existence.

And so I ask two things of you today: First, I ask your prayers that God send us another Dr King—someone to lead us to that day when the dignity of human life will be reverenced by our laws from conception to natural death. Second, these words of Jesus are addressed to each of us today. Take a look at where that line between good and evil that runs through your heart is sitting, and expose the hidden part that needs healing.

For my part, I’m pretty sure God wants to work on my cynical inclinations. We each have some need, some weakness, some unsurrendered or forgotten bundle of death that we keep stepping around like that pile of dirty laundry between the couch and the desk. As we approach the altar to receive the Lord in the Eucharist today, there is good reason to open ourselves to the light and freshness that banishes all darkness and disease, that our weakness and death might become grace for ourselves and light for the world.

Convergence

2011-01-08T15:35:00.001-06:00

It was gratifying to read this in John Allen's recent interview with Francis Cardinal George:

One of the things I most miss as a bishop is hearing confessions. The conversations that take place in the sacrament of reconciliation are the most important conversations on the face of the planet. There you meet a soul in the presence of God ... I would very much like to make that ministry a large part of my life.

At the threshold of my own life of priestly ministry, I can honestly say that my early fascination with hearing confessions has not been diminished in the least: it is what I look forward to the most. Quite encouraging to hear a 74-year old priest say the same.

On Worship as Epiphany

2011-01-02T17:45:00.001-06:00

Homily outline for the Feast of the Epiphany
Delivered at Most Pure Heart of Mary Parish
Topeka, KS

For the last week, the Church has been lingering in Bethlehem, absorbed in the sight of the Child. Infinite greatness is here “dwindled to infancy”. We seek the eyes and heart of Joseph to witness this unfathomable mystery of divine love and condescension: to come into the world as a poor, vulnerable little baby.

But there is one facet in particular of this scene that the Church is drawing our attention to here. We are still in the Christmas season—today being the eighth day of Christmas—because there is so much more to take in than can be done in just one day. That is what we mean by “mystery”—something that so far exceeds our comprehension that we can keep coming back to it again and again and still get more.

So what is it that’s being held out to us today? It might be helpful to start with a review of what we might already know. Epiphany is a Greek word meaning “manifestation” or “striking appearance”. It’s associated in the liturgical year with today’s feast, along with the Nativity and the Baptism of the Lord—but this is the only one that we refer to exclusively as “Epiphany”. So we’re to understand that something important is being revealed to us today, something so crucial that the church names it the Epiphany.

We’re all familiar with the scene: the wise men come to present gifts and to adore the Christ child. Their decision to read the signs of the times and follow them wherever they led brought them to the most unimaginable place—the newborn king was not born in a palace but a cave used to shelter animals. The fact that the Magi were not of the Chosen people but from a faraway, Gentile country has traditionally been interpreted to mean that in this event, what is manifested is God’s intention to finally extend the offer of salvation fully to the Gentiles. God is the God of all, not just of Israel. That process of grafting onto God’s precious olive true the wild olive branches of the nations is what made possible our even being here in the first place. This gives us great reason to give thanks for the manifestation, the “epiphany” that took place so long ago.

But there’s something else important about the visit of the Magi. It’s easy for us to miss this more fundamental “manifestation” because it’s based not so much on who did come to pay adoration to the baby Jesus, but who didn't.

Here’s what I mean.

Scripture teaches us that the Child, God’s Holy Word, and therefore the very Person of God, can only be approached in an attitude of adoration.

There is no other way for it to happen. That is what it means to call out to God with a “pure heart”—a prayer that is untainted by self-interest or self pity. The pure heart prays for no other reason than that God is worthy of honor and thanks: "He’s worth it."

This is exactly what we mean when we call what we do at Mass or in the privacy of our prayer “worship”. That word, “worship”, comes from an old Germanic word that is something like what we would pronounce as “worth-ship”—the state of being worthy to receive honor.

What the magi have in common with every other person in the scene is this attitude of adoration and worship. The wise men seek nothing more than to offer gifts and present themselves as servants of the newborn King. Everyone else is excluded—the religious authorities, novelty-seekers interested only in a spectacle, and especially Herod who sees in Jesus only a threat to his own power. None of them have a pure heart, a worshipping heart. Their hearts are hardened.

Now, this idea of praising and worshipping God is something we Catholics can see as something abstract or just to be read out of a book, but we engage in this practice all the time, naturally, spontaneously, in our everyday circumstances. We love to praise what we enjoy or admire: whether they’re athletic feats, or a great performance by a classic band, or a great leader, or just someone who inspires or motivates us by their everyday excellence. We love to praise good things and good people because they’re worth it—they’re praiseworthy. And we feel the need to communicate to others the “worth-ship” of what we enjoy and admire.

But it’s also interesting to notice that in the act of praising things, we also enjoy them—not as a past memory, but a present experience. Praising and adoring makes present what we love, and in a way, manifests it.

That, I think, is the deeper truth of our feast of the “Epiphany” today: God is made present, God is manifested, in our adoration of Him.

If that is the case, then that puts what we are doing here, in this church today and every Sunday, in a whole new light, doesn’t it? Are the words we pray along with in the Mass just empty phrases that we’re repeating thoughtlessly, or words of praise that well up out of our hearts, which "throb and overflow" with love for the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Is 60:4, from today's first reading)?

If you find yourself in the second category, thank God, and keep it up. You already know better than I could ever tell you how the Spirit of God is active and bearing fruit in your life. Let Him continue to captivate and fascinate you, and draw you deeper into communion with Him--keeping in mind that we can’t hold to the ideal all the time, and that our life in the Spirit is constantly rising and falling. Don’t ever get discouraged.

But if we find ourselves are in the first category, asking ourselves what it is that we're supposed to be "getting out of this," let’s take some time today, on the first of the year, to set aside 15-20 minutes (or however long it takes) to do some soul-searching. What is it that’s holding me back from approaching the crib along with the Magi? Is this experience of emptiness when I worship at Mass God’s doing, or mine? How have I excluded myself from the stable by imitating the novelty-seekers? or the religious professionals who ruled out Jesus as the Messiah before ever setting eyes on him? or even Herod? They all refused to adore the Word made flesh on HIS terms. Have I deceived myself by acting as the Lord of the Truth rather than approaching the one Lord of Truth in an attitude of reverence?

Above all, let’s make our prayer together today count as if God’s manifestation to one another and to the world depended on it—which, in fact, it does. Let’s shed some of that self-consciousness that holds us back from putting some feeling into our words or by letting even our posture and our movements convey the reverence, joy, and love we want to offer to God.

Let’s respond to the Church’s call to Come and Adore Him.

A Christmas Thought

2010-12-24T15:42:00.000-06:00

And when we give each other Christmas gifts in His name, let us remember that He has given us the sun and the moon and the stars, and the earth with its forests and mountains and oceans--and all that lives and move upon them. He has given us all green things and everything that blossoms and bears fruit and all that we quarrel about and all that we have misused--and to save us from our foolishness, from all our sins, He came down to earth and gave us Himself.

Sigrid Undset

Merry Christmas to all!

Gosh, Were Our Ancestors STUPID.

2010-12-21T09:48:00.001-06:00

AL Daily linked to an interesting project over at Edge.org: a collection of now-disproven commonly held beliefs, scientific or otherwise. It was a fun exercise to guess at some of the presuppositions and pet peeves of the contributors based on the paragraphs submitted. There seems to be a wide range of respondents from many different disciplines, though there is certainly a bias toward standing aghast at some of the "scientifically driven" medical theories that were way, way off the mark.

One in particular caught my attention, not so much on account of its thinly veiled hostility to the influence of the churches on public policy (that sentiment was actually quite common, from what I found) but the preposterous inconsistency of his reasoning. Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán had some strong words about the reprehensible practices of phrenology and lobotomy:

Science affects people's lives directly. A scientific mistake can send you to jail or break your brain into pieces. It also seems to affect the kinds of moral stances that we adopt. Today, it would be morally reprehensible to send someone to jail because of the shape of his head, or to perform a lobotomy. However, 50 or 100 years ago it was morally acceptable.

Up to this point, I was in complete agreement. Specious and hastily adopted hypotheses that sow destruction or debilitation of human life in their wake are a tragedy of our modern era and a powerful counterweight to every breathless paean to The Cures That Science Will One Day Bring Us, Provided We Just Compromise On This One Little Point. But what came next absolutely floored me:

This is why we should spend more time thinking of practical issues, like scientific principles, scientific models and scientific predictions as a basis for public health and policy decisions, rather than guessing about what is right or wrong according to god's mind or the unsubstantiated beliefs presented by special interest groups.

I guess I'm not clear on whose idea lobotomy was. Is "driving an icepick into the eye socket to disconnect the prefrontal cortex" a recommended therapy in the Bible? Was this a medieval practice revived in the 1940s by a quack New-Age physiologist working out of his ashram, or the Nobel Prize-winning technique developed by Antonio Egas Moniz?

I agree that caution should be exercised... but you can't argue that religious influences have been the most heinous abusers of technological power in contemporary times. Speaking from a Catholic perspective, the byline is when in doubt, defer to human dignity--where dignity is understood not as the absolute right to self-determination but the incommunicable and incomparable value that belongs to a unique instance of God's creative love. Centuries from now, when civilization looks back in wonder at how we were able to justify to ourselves the taking of unborn human life as a matter of routine, where will the responsibility lay? At the feet of the Churches who insist that there is nothing that can outweigh innocent life, or the laboratories and clinics that proceeded with abandon, heedless of the human cost?

Anyway, if that doesn't convince you, maybe this will:

From the Abbot's Desk

2010-12-18T09:39:00.002-06:00

Working my way through the commentary of St. Bernard of Clairvaux on the Song of Songs has been a most rewarding journey (aided by the gift of the entirety of the extant sermons for my 30th birthday last year. . . you know who you are). I've been posting miscellaneous quotes that seem to have a standalone value without knowing just how they fit into the overall context. I've been posting them sans commentary, perhaps with emphasis here or there. Another worthy entry from the Mellifluous Doctor, some prudent counsel for those who undertake to guide the Church as priests or engage in her mission to the world (which just about sums all of us up):

At this point we need to be warned not to give away what we have received for our own welfare, nor to retain for ourselves what must be expended for others. For example, you keep for yourself what belongs to your neighbor, if along with your full endowment of interior virtues you are also adorned with the external gifts of knowledge and eloquence, and, through fear or sloth or ill-judged humility, smother this gift of speech that could be of help to so many, in a useless and even pernicious silence; for “the people’s curse is on the man who hoards the wheat.”

On the other hand, you squander and lose what is meant to be your own if, before you are totally permeated by the infusion of the Holy Spirit, you rashly proceed to pour out your unfulfilled self upon others; you contravene the law which says: “You must not put the first-born of your herd to work, nor shear the first-born of your flock.” You deprive yourself of the life and salvation which you impart to another if, lacking right intention and inspired by self- conceit, you become infected with the poison of worldly ambition that swells into a deadly ulcer and destroys you.

The man who is wise, therefore, will see his life as more like a reservoir than a canal. The canal simultaneously pours out what it receives; the reservoir retains the water till it is filled, then discharges the overflow without loss to itself. He knows that a curse is on the man who allows his own property to degenerate. And if you think my opinion worthless, then listen to one who is wiser than I: “The fool,” said Solomon, “comes out with all his feelings at once, but the wise man subdues and restrains them.”° Today there are many in the Church who act like canals, the reservoirs are far too rare. So urgent is the charity of those through whom the streams of heavenly doctrine flow to us, that they want to pour it forth before they have been filled; they are more ready to spek than to listen, impatient to teach what they have not grasped, and full of presumption to govern others while they know not how to govern themselves…

Bernard of Clairvaux
Sermon 19 on the Song of Songs

Holy Mother Takes a Stand

2010-12-08T10:55:00.003-06:00

From von Balthasar's Christian State of Life, in honor of today's Feast of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, patroness of our seminary and of the United States:

"You are all beautiful, and
there is no blemish in you"
(Song of Songs 4:1).
An outdoor fresco outside
the Pantheon in Rome.
In Mary is proof that one does not have to experience all the ways of the world in order to know them. She, the Seat of Wisdom, knows the whole truth about the fallen world, for she sees in the torn body and spiritual anguish of her Son what this world actually does and is. In God’s view, no further knowledge about sin is either valid or useful. Mary does not have to leave the contemplation of her Son to dispense her love, her assistance and her mediation on all the paths of earth. She does so because her Son has done so before her in eucharistic prodigality, and it is no more necessary for her than for him to alter her stand in God’s will in order to bend pityingly and efficaciously over all the world’s suffering and guilt. She is so pure and loving that she needs no cloister to remain undefiled by the world. Wherever she goes, she brings purity, love and heaven with her; her love is its own cloister. Every dividing wall between world and cloister, earth and heaven, falls as she approaches it. She teaches Christians to be fearless in their following of Christ, who does not hesitate to send his own among wolves and to expose them unprotected to the hostility of the world. Where a cloister does exist, it is not an invention of fear; like the whole state of election, it has a representative value as the manifest symbol of withdrawal from the world and the taking of a stand in God.

I just returned from a ceremony in which about a dozen of my brother seminarians finished the 30-day consecration to Jesus through Mary according to St. Louis de Montfort. It was an edifying and "pious" gathering, not in the self-conscious, preening way we normally use that word, but in the sense of a quiet, devoted act of love for the Virgin Mother and the Son she was given to bear.

Thank you, men.

The Census

2010-12-06T11:11:00.002-06:00

An excerpt from my Advent reading on St. Joseph, felicitously and fortuitously coinciding with our theological studies on Origen of Alexandria:

Journeying to Bethlehem for the census in obedience to the orders of legitimate authority, Joseph fulfilled for the child the significant task of officially inserting the name "Jesus, son of Joseph of Nazareth" (cf. Jn 1:45) in the registry of the Roman Empire. This registration clearly shows that Jesus belongs to the human race as a man among men, a citizen of this world, subject to laws and civil institutions, but also "savior of the world." Origen gives a good description of the theological significance, by no means marginal, of this historical fact: "Since the first census of the whole world took place under Caesar Augustus, and among all the others Joseph too went to register together with Mary his wife, who was with child, and since Jesus was born before the census was completed: to the person who makes a careful examination it will appear that a kind of mystery is expressed in the fact that at the time when all people in the world presented themselves to be counted, Christ too should be counted. By being registered with everyone, he could sanctify everyone; inscribed with the whole world in the census, he offered to the world communion with himself, and after presenting himself he wrote all the people of the world in the book of the living, so that as many as believed in him could then be written in heaven with the saints of God, to whom be glory and power for ever and ever, Amen."

Origen of Alexandria
Eleventh Homily on Luke
Quoted in Redemptoris Custos (Guardian of the Redeemer)
Post-Apostolic Exhortation of John Paul II
Promulgated on the Feast of the Assumption, 1989
(the Eleventh of his Pontificate)

Black Friday No More

2010-11-27T09:37:00.000-06:00

Going through the list of catalogs piled on the kitchen table and hearing about the deals some of my friends acquired, I was amazed by just how good it gets on Black Friday. Not being in a position to buy much, I've generally avoided the Black Friday shopping spree, but it struck me this year that a disciplined shopper with a firm and restrictive list of needed items might really make out pretty well. I'll have to wait until next year to test the theory, but until then, the rest of us might want to make sure the day isn't just an excuse to indulge our shopaholism.

Simple English Propers Project

2010-11-07T16:23:00.006-06:00

I just put up a button on the right column that links to the Church Music Association of America's campaign to raise money for the development of a public domain Roman Gradual in English--in other words, a book that will set to chant the various prayers of the Catholic Mass, allowing them to be sung by a schola in a "consciously sacred" English.

It's set up so that you can pledge money towards this eventually free resource for the benefit of English-speaking parishes around the world. Your credit card will not be charged until there are a total of $5,000 in pledges raised, and we are only 37% of the way there! Read more about the project over at the Chant Cafe.

I chipped in already . . . how about you?

[UPDATE 11/27/2010: Button removed, as the campaign reached its goal! Thanks to those who contributed, and be sure to keep tabs on the CCMA blog to get ahold of these propers when they are released.]

Epigenetics

2010-11-02T21:38:00.001-05:00

A couple of recent articles at the New Atlantis and Time Magazine have caught my attention on the admittedly abstruse subject of molecular biology.

What I understand this to be all about is that DNA is nowhere near as clear-cut as was originally supposed. The Human Genome Project meant to map the entirety of human genetic material and gain a complete understanding of what caused disease and dysfunction, as well as the processes that gave rise to organic diversity within the body. What has been discovered (and in fact was commonly known since the 1970s, but little attention was paid to it) is that the shape, arrangement, and cellular context of the DNA strands has as much to do with cellular function and genetic replication of proteins as the nucleotide bases of the DNA helix do. The level of complexity has been increased by several orders of magnitude--but what is most interesting is that it has provoked a re-evaluation of Lamarck's pre-Darwinian hypothesis, which insisted that species modification could happen in much less time than Darwin hypothesized (especially in times of stressful environmental factors). The giraffe could "stretch" its neck over the course of a few generations, whereas Darwin insisted (backing up his claim with strong scientific evidence) that such changes would take millions of years. Needless to say, the word being tossed about is "paradigm shift".

A little teaser for you:

When completed, the Human Epigenome Project (already under way in Europe) will make the Human Genome Project look like homework that 15th century kids did with an abacus. But the potential is staggering. For decades, we have stumbled around massive Darwinian roadblocks. DNA, we thought, was an ironclad code that we and our children and their children had to live by. Now we can imagine a world in which we can tinker with DNA, bend it to our will. It will take geneticists and ethicists many years to work out all the implications, but be assured: the age of epigenetics has arrived.

An admittedly popularized version of the concept, with the customary breathless predictions, but stirring nonetheless.

Michael Patrick Rosner, 1976-2010

2010-10-25T22:30:00.000-05:00

I wish for peace, I yearn for it and for nothing more. The man who is not satisfied with peace is not satisfied with you. For you are our peace, you have made us both one. To be reconciled with you, to be reconciled with myself, this is necessary for me, and it suffices. For whenever you set me in opposition to you I become a burden to myself. I am on my guard, and will neither be ungrateful for the gift of peace nor intrude sacreligiously on your glory. May you glory remain yours, O Lord, in undiminished splendor; all will be well with me if I shall have your peace.

Prayer of St. Bernard of Clairvaux

A Good Time Had By All

2010-10-17T19:28:00.002-05:00

This is Interesting

2010-10-03T22:10:00.001-05:00

And by "this," I mean this.

The Mellifluous Doctor, II

2010-09-27T17:06:00.004-05:00

You too, if you would make prudent progress in your studies of the mysteries of the faith, would do well to remember the Wise Man’s advice: “Do not try to understand things that are too difficult for you, or try to discover what is beyond your powers.” These are occasions when you must walk by the Spirit and not according to your personal opinions, for the Spirit teaches not by sharpening curiosity but by inspiring charity. And hence the bride, when seeking him whom her heart loves, quite properly does not put her trust in mere human prudence, nor yield to the inane conceits of human curiosity. She asks rather for a kiss, that is, she calls upon the Holy Spirit by whom she is simultaneously awarded with the choice repast of knowledge and the seasoning of grace. . .

But knowledge which leads to self-importance, since it is devoid of love, cannot be the fruit of the kiss. Even those who have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge, may not for any reason lay claim to that kiss. For the favor of the kiss bears with it a twofold gift, the light of knowledge and the fervor of devotion. He is in truth the Spirit of wisdom and insight, who, like the bee carrying its burden of wax and honey, is fully equipped with the power both of kindling the light of knowledge and infusing the delicious nurture of grace. Two kinds of people therefore may not consider themselves to have been gifted with the kiss, those who know the truth without loving it, and those who love it without understanding it; from which we conclude that this kiss leaves room neither for ignorance nor for lukewarmness.

From Sermon 8

On Waking Up In the Middle of the Night with a Runny Nose

2010-09-23T11:58:00.000-05:00

Me: [blowing my nose into the bedsheet] It's a good thing I have this big handkerchief here! This would've been a big mess otherwise.

Me: You idiot, that's not a handkerchief, that's a bedsheet.

Me: [sheepish] Well, at least it won't get all over everything now . . .

Me: You idiot!! Blowing your nose in a bedsheet means IT'S ALL OVER EVERYTHING

Through the Lattice

2010-09-19T15:25:00.002-05:00

From a sermon on the Song of Songs by Ronald Knox:

That voice at the window brings to my own mind a fancy which I have often had, which I suppose many of us have had before now, in looking at the Sacred Host enthroned in the monstrance. The fancy, I mean, that the glittering disc of whiteness which we see occupying that round opening is not reflecting the light of the candles in front of it, but is penetrated with a light of its own, a light not of this world, shining through it from behind, as if through a window, outdazzling gold and candle-flame with a more intense radiance. Such a visual impression you may have for just a moment, then you reflect that it is only an illusion; and then on further thought you question, Is it an illusion? Is it not rather the truth, but a truth hidden from our eyes, that the Host in the monstrance, or rather those accidents of it which make themselves known to our senses, are a kind of window through which a heavenly light streams into our world; a window giving access on a spiritual world outside our human experience?

... At the window, behind the wall of partition that is a wall of partition no longer, stands the Beloved himself, calling us out into the open; calling us away from the ointments and the spikenard of Solomon’s court, that stupefy and enchain our senses, to the gardens and the vineyards, to the fields and the villages, to the pure airs of eternity. Arise (he says), make haste and come. Come away from the blind pursuit of creatures, from all the plans your busy brain evolves for your present and future pleasures, from the frivolous distractions it clings to. Come away from the pettiness and the meanness of your everyday life, from the grudges, the jealousies, the unhealed enmities that set your imagination throbbing. Come away from the cares and solicitudes about tomorrow that seem so urgent, your heavy anxieties about the world’s future and your own, so short either of them and so uncertain. Come away into the wilderness of prayer, where my love will follow you and my hand hold you; learn to live, with the innermost part of your soul, with all your secret aspirations, with all the center of your hopes and cares, in that supernatural world which can be yours now, which must be yours hereafter.

Most appropriate given some of the influences on the name of this blog, meant to evoke the super-reality that lingers just outside our immediate existence, in the corner of the soul's eye.

The Desk Chair Review of Books

2010-09-16T21:18:00.004-05:00

Philosophy and Theology
by John Caputo

In an effort to renew the relationship between philosophy and theology, John Caputo traces the relationship between these rivals back to the source of the conflict between them. In the present day, philosophy and theology are commonly understood as different perspectives on the same set of questions. Philosophy is understood as driven exclusively by reason from its principles to conclusions, without reference to any external authority and universally accessible (at least in principle). Theology, on the other hand, makes use of rationality, but derives its foundational content from revelation, and is conducted by people already invested in the community defined by its belief. Attitudes about philosophy and theology are largely determined by whether they are seen as two modes of thinking that are mutually complementary and capable of coexisting “in the same head” or as defining two entirely different types of worldviews that are fundamentally at odds with one another.

The latter view being the more common, Caputo takes up the history of the conflict to discover its contours. In the Middle Ages, figures such as St. Anselm and St. Thomas exemplified harmony between reason and faith. Anselm proposed his ontological argument not so much as a proof for God but a way of “clarifying something intuitively obvious to all those who experience God in their daily lives.” Thomas was disposed to seek God more in outward, tangible manifestation. Under both accounts, faith sought understanding by way of the gift of reason. However, in this synthesis reason was subordinate to faith, and the rise of modern science in some sense proceeded as a backlash against faith’s supremacy.

According to Caputo, the development of modern thought allowed natural science to displace philosophy and enthrone itself in the cathedra once occupied by theology. Descartes severed the link between faith and reason with his foundationalist approach, building all knowledge on the certainty of the dubito and undermining the longstanding authority of theology to arbitrate valid insight. Reason was thereby elevated to unprecedented levels of independence and universality. Kant took this a step further by regarding philosophy as a mere “second order reflective science” that contributed nothing to the enterprise of reason; theology was to abandon historically mediated dogma and be constrained to the limits of reason alone. Finally, the atheist critiques of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche pushed theology into a romanticized interiority based primarily on feeling.

Caputo values the tutelage modernity offered to human reason, seeing the period as a traumatic transition to maturity. Nonetheless, he takes up Kierkegaard’s insistence that the overreaching scope of reason which sought to construct a totalizing system was faulty. Postmodernity emerged out of skepticism toward the Enlightenment project that arose from a recognition of the historically conditioned presuppositions of all reasoning. The paradigms of human knowledge, postmodernists insist, are not purely objective, but demand that facts be incorporated within plausible yet necessarily provisional accounts of reality. The effect of this awareness is to engender skepticism towards all-encompassing narratives.

The transition to postmodernity weakened the barriers behind which modernity had walled up philosophy and theology, giving them the chance to once again “assert their rights.” Wittgenstein saw each rational discipline as carried out according to its own proper rules that cannot be simply translated into some supreme way of knowing. Theology is just such a discipline, and the postmodern turn has given theology a credible voice again. The relationship theology has to philosophy is no longer one of hierarchy, with one exercising authority over the other, but of commonality, such that knowing and believing look more similar than ever before. For reasoning involves a reliance upon a kind of faith in the presuppositions of all thinking—such as the reigning paradigms of knowledge—while faith permits one to assume the pivotal interpretive “as” that bestows a perspective and a vocabulary with which to carry out the pursuit of insight. Philosophy and theology’s relationship isn’t so much “reason versus faith” as “philosophical faith along with confessional faith.”

The point is driven home with the example of Derrida. An Augustinian autobiographer who nonetheless “quite rightly passes for an atheist,” he refused to lay to rest the play between confident reason and inquiring faith. Caputo sees in this painful straddle a source of vital tension that nourishes a more vigorous and satisfying existence where philosophy and theology go hand in hand, as “fellow travelers” who “are not opponents but companions on dangerous seas, attempting to make their way through life’s riddles.”

The Erudite Doctor

2010-09-13T07:14:00.000-05:00

The order of redemption is therefore the radical reversal of the order of original sin: over against the ascent to God by man on his own powers (which results in the elevation of man, his assumptio, in God). In the Verbum caro factum est and in the way it was accomplished, namely by accentuating and emphasizing the difference between God and man, all of mankind has been shown the exact place at which and from which alone its old longing for apotheosis can be fulfilled. Christ is no “pointer,” no “perfected,” or “illumined,” or “spiritual” man, no “high sprinit,” or “great personality.” Rather, Christ is God in the nature of a “normal man”. From the paltriness of the human conceptus on: from the poverty of the crib, the invisibility and marginality of the thirty years as a manual laborer to the simplicity and fatigue of his life as an itinerant preacher, which was the only way he could obey his Father and fulfill his task, to the disgrace and torment of the Passion and the ultimate separation from the Father on the Cross and in death: Everywhere the stress is put on “nature.”

Of course not on a “naturalistically” understood nature, or on a “passionate love” for the “earth,” or on ecstatic and romantic association with the “human, all-too human.” Rather, this stress is always on that illusionless, simple and unpathetic nature, as in the “simple people” who know how to accept the harshness of existence along with the occasional joys that come their way, not making much fuss about either, experiencing and taking in a great deal, sacrificing themselves and wearing themselves out with work without taking overdue notice of it or thinking it is “anything special,” keeping back in the lower ranks as simply a matter of course, and finally departing from this world without leaving any visible traces in world history, never really understanding why they, of all people, should be “the first.”

Hans Urs von Balthasar

"The Fathers, the Scholastics, and Ourselves"

Cubans Have The Best Dolphin Shows in the World

2010-09-09T13:24:00.001-05:00

"Do you like dolphins?" Fidel asked me.

"I like dolphins a lot," I said.

Fidel called over Guillermo Garcia, the director of the aquarium (every employee of the aquarium, of course, showed up for work--"voluntarily," I was told) and told him to sit with us.

"Goldberg," Fidel said, "ask him questions about dolphins."

"What kind of questions?" I asked.

"You're a journalist, ask good questions," he said, and then interrupted himself. "He doesn't know much about dolphins anyway," he said, pointing to Garcia. "He's actually a nuclear physicist."

"You are?" I asked.

"Yes," Garcia said, somewhat apologetically.

"Why are you running the aquarium?" I asked.

"We put him here to keep him from building nuclear bombs!" Fidel said, and then cracked-up laughing.

Read the rest of Jeffrey Goldberg's account of his time in Havana over at the New Atlantic. It will make you laugh like it made me laugh. This guy reads like a Percy novel.

Sails Do Something To Me

2010-09-08T21:59:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted to the photoblog.

The Mellifluous Doctor

2010-09-07T19:59:00.002-05:00

If you look back on your own experience, is it not in that victory by which your faith overcomes the world, in “your exit from the horrible pit and out of the slough of the marsh,” that you yourselves sing a new song to the Lord for all the marvels he has performed? Again, when he purposed to “settle your feet on a rock and to direct your steps,” then too, I feel certain, a new song was sounding on your lips, a song to our God for his gracious renewal of your life.

When you repented he not only forgave your sins but even promised rewards, so that rejoicing in the hope of benefits to come, you sing of the Lord’s ways: how great is the glory of the Lord! And when, as happens, texts of Scripture hitherto dark and impenetrable at last become bright with meaning for you, then, in gratitude for this nurturing bread of heaven you must charm the ears of God with a voice of exaltation and praise, a festal song. In the daily trials and combats arising from the flesh, the world and the devil, that are never wanting to those who live devout lives in Christ, you learn by what you experience that man’s life on earth is a ceaseless warfare, and are impelled to repeat your songs day after day for every victory won. As often as temptation is overcome, an immoral habit brought under control, an impending danger shunned, the trap of the seducer detected, when a passion long indulged is finally and perfectly allayed, or a virtue persistently desired and repeatedly sought is ultimately obtained by God's gift; so often, in the words of the prophet, let thanksgiving and joy resound. For every benefit conferred, God is to be praised in his gifts. Otherwise when the time of judgment comes, that man will be punished as an ingrate who cannot say to God: “Your statutes were my song in the land of exile.”

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux
First Sermon on the Song of Songs

More on Human Evolution

2010-09-06T16:30:00.001-05:00

The Guardian has published of a book I'd like to check out at some point. Basing his theories of human evolution on the influence technologies such as cooking and baby slings have upon physical structure (and therefore on the potential for larger brain capacity), British archaeologist Timothy Taylor offers some interesting hypotheses:

After the switch to an upright posture, probably the biggest single anatomical change on the journey from apes to humans was the weakening of the jaw. In apes, the jaw is large and protrudes way beyond the nose. It is attached by muscle to a bony ridge on the top of the skull and has a force many times that of a human jaw. Recent genomics research has shown that a large mutation about 2.4m years ago disabled the key muscle protein in human jaws. We still have the disabled protein today, and that weakened jaw enabled a raft of innovations. The ape brain could not grow because of the huge muscle load anchored to the skull's crest, and apes cannot articulate speech-like sounds because of the clumsy force of their jaws. This mutation allowed the increase in human brain size and the acquisition of language.

But why did it happen? Wrangham maintains that it was cooking that led to the change. Cooked food does not need strong jaws. In genetics a function that becomes redundant always leads to the gene being disabled by mutations. Around 2.4m years ago an ape switched to mostly cooked food. In the fossil record, a new proto-human appeared 1.8-1.9m years ago: Homo erectus had a much larger brain and no crest on the skull, indicating that the weakened jaw muscle was now standard.

Read the rest over at the Guardian. I don't agree with all the author's conclusions, but I do find it of interest that many, many theories of human evolution are constantly being advanced. Recent genetic research seems to be offering new avenues for helpful guesses at the prehistory of homo sapiens, and it is fun to stay in the discussion on terms other than one's own. Thinking about things in a way different from my own certainly does assist in the ongoing task of broadening the mind.

h/t AL Daily

In other news, I've settled on the blog header that does the job right, and I'm sticking with it. Possibly for months.

An Old Fashioned Solution to a New Fangled Problem

2010-08-28T22:23:00.004-05:00

Well I've been fiddling with the header on this blog for some time trying to achieve a particular effect: having the viewer feel like he's looking through the plane of his own screen into a startlingly different dimension. It seemed necessary to tap into paperly metaphors to accomplish this, and so the last few attempts have made use of various ripping and tearing visuals. You may recall some of these:

But this one came up off the page, rather than sinking into it. So I pushed it down:

That, of course, looked more like scratching the stuff off the back of a lottery ticket than an a supersubstantial reality busting through the computer screen into your face. They kept coming up short, and I simply attributed this to my amateur knowledge of Photoshop.

So I looked up my graphic design buddy Dan, a fellow seminarian here at Mundelein, and asked him what he thought.

The conversation went something like this:

[I give a thorough and excessively detailed description of what I was trying to do, lasting approximately five minutes, expecting a fairly complicated answer involving filters, texture palettes, gaussian high pass edge flows, etc.]

Dan: Why don't you tear up a piece of paper in the way you want it to look and then scan it?

So that's what I did, and what do you know, he was right.

Looking at the final iteration, though, makes me wonder if I was right to put a drop shadow in there. The shadow makes it look like the supersubstantial reality is just another photograph, flat and lifeless like the gray in front of it. It's kind of unavoidable given the text in the frame, but still, would it look better without the shadow? Those of you that care about such things can give some feedback in the combox. (I thought about putting up a poll but I think that would be ridiculous given the time I've spent on this already.)

Sans drop shadow: click to enlarge

Bygone

2010-08-28T17:27:00.002-05:00

I had the chance to check out a dozen or so of the Tall Ships that were in Chicago this week, docked at Navy Pier. It generated some fun photos, which I'll be posting over the next few days and cross-posting at the photoblog (linked at the bottom of the page as well).

Pride of Baltimore

The Ground Zero Mezquita

2010-08-18T12:09:00.006-05:00

One of the first words I learned using the Rosetta Stone program as I prepared for my summer immersion in El Salvador was the word for "mosque." I was kind of surprised by this, but the Rosetta Stone has a way of inserting words that you'd never think were important into the Level 1 program--words like corcovear. I couldn't find it in the dictionary, so I asked a number of my Mexican, Colombian, and Peruvian friends what the word meant. They had no idea. What business does this program have teaching me words that Mexicans don't even know? I wondered. Turns out, it's more of a cowboy word--it means "to leap or gambol like an exuberant calf". The American who had lived in a little Salvadoran village for three years working for the Peace Corps knew the word, but the chilangos had no idea. Go figure.

Little did I know, mezquita was far more important than I realized at the time. Fortunately I picked it up pretty quickly. For one, it sounded much less intimidating than the English equivalent. "Mosque" is a heavy word in my own tongue, with that long, sonorous "o" that rises in the throat only to end in a hiss and a "thunk", the "q" driving the word into the roof of your mouth like the blade of a guillotine slamming home. Anglicized Arabic has all those "qu" formulations that look so odd; apparently the "k" just isn't good enough. It gives the impression that there's something about the word that just doesn't fit in our language. (At least it doesn't have the guttural apostrophe in there, like Qur'an.)

"Mezquita," however, has a light and playful sound, mostly nasal and dental sounds. It also distracts, like a mosquito. The fragrant BBQ seasoning is also called to mind, evoking memories of pleasant gatherings around the grill, smoke pouring from an outdoor oven plump with roasting meats. This is why I think our current debate about the proposed Ground Zero Mezquita should be conducted in Spanish. Everyone would be a lot calmer; it's harder to get in an argument while chewing mouthfuls of pulled pork and brushing away the insects on a hot summer's eve.

This occurred to me as I was brainstorming ideas for a thoughtful and measured post about what I thought was going on under the surface of this debate. But then I realized I have several evaluations to write before the end of my chaplaincy, and expending energy on this question wouldn't put me in a good spot to finish them on time. Also, the tone of the debate these days--degenerating into ever more shrill imprecations against the opponent's lack of enlightenment/common sense--doesn't invite measured, thoughtful contribution. There are plenty of other people making them (such as Douthat's column, "Islam and the Two Americas", or Carson Halloway over at Front Porch Republic pointing out the presumably willful deception on the part of our president); why risk falling short and ending up rolling around in the street with the gang-bangers?

Anyway, if this thing doesn't end up getting built, there should be plenty of other options for the struggling Manhattan Islamic community-builders (the two mezquitas that already exist on Manhattan island only blocks away from Ground Zero presumably aren't on the market just yet):

How about we just drop the "quita" and leave it at "the Ground Zero Mess"?

A Little More Shine on that Apple

2010-08-06T11:14:00.000-05:00

Apparently Steve Jobs sees Apple as having a "moral responsibility" to keep porn off their devices.

What a crazy statement to make this day and age. To take a clear stand against the destructive presence of pornography in our society is courageous enough--but to assert that any business has any moral responsibility at all beyond the demands of the market is even more so.

Read more about it on LifeSiteNews.com, as well as the original exchange generated through a late-night email volley with a gawker.com columnist. There's some salty language in there as well as some geeky back and forth about programming platforms but it's worth reading all the way through. Tate's final comments about the "Orwellian" tone of Jobs' aim to give iPhone users "freedom from porn" is incredibly out of touch--even MTV has run reality shows about the inescapability of porn addiction and the destruction it sows in the lives of its thralls. The struggle is mainstream, and even if Tate has been fortunate enough not to get addicted to the stuff, there are quite literally millions who have, and who also have the right to enjoy technology that does not feed into their weakness. Those who disagree can simply choose another phone. The indignant posturing of these kinds of people is simply ignorant.

I've been attracted to Apple for a while now given their excellent products, but I am really impressed by this little glimpse into what drives the company.

h/t First Thoughts

Automation=Evil=Must Die.

2010-08-02T22:15:00.003-05:00

So after spending an estimated 5,730 hours navigating automated phone menus in an effort to get the trivial pieces of information I’ve needed in various situations throughout my life, I’ve come to the conclusion that automated phone menus are going to be the downfall of our civilization.

It all started with a creative type, probably a liberal arts major-turned consultant who dreamt up the idea of the automated phone menu, allowing business, government offices, and customer service departments worldwide to eliminate call centers in lieu of some low monthly fee to be paid directly to him.
“Eureka!” he shrieked, knocking over his chair as he leapt to his feet, unsettling the cup of chai tea next to his legal pads of poetry and Great Business Ideas. “This automated menu could do wonders for businesses, government offices, and customer service departments worldwide, enabling them to reassign high-paid employees taking calls, thereby freeing up all sorts of assets to boost the economy and hyperinflate my bank balances!”

Well, I’m sure that guy did all right for himself, but it’s been one sad story of waste and disappointment for the rest of us ever since. Just try to estimate how many hours you’ve spent hitting “4” to manage your account, only to be dumped into a dead-end menu that has nothing to offer you in your moment of need and giving you no options to extricate yourself. * doesn’t work. # doesn’t work. *67 doesn’t work. Repeating obscene phrases at high decibel levels into the earpiece doesn’t work. All that’s left to you is to end the call and start again, or curse God and die.

I would imagine the ratio of total dollars saved by those who make use of automated menus to total dollars of employee productivity lost while navigating those labyrinthine systems and venting to their coworkers is on the order to 1 to 20. That’s not even close to what it would be if we factored in property destruction.

Maybe if that lady at the KC, MO Police Tow Lot hadn’t let her phone sit on hold for 25 minutes while toasting marshmallows over a fire fueled by the reams of meaningless paperwork offered in sacrifical homage to the pitiless and cruel Solemn Arbiter of Motor Vehicles by countless millions, I would be a free man today.

Red Man Solo Tour

2010-08-02T10:57:00.000-05:00

Red Man has been busy this summer! Check out a recent collaboration from the IPF cycle at the link below:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/video/video.php?v=502732718591

Once Twice

2010-08-02T07:07:00.005-05:00

The list of films that have made the cut of those worthy to be watched again is pretty short. Of those films, I only own a handful, and several of those were gifts. As I sit here and think about it, it’s hard to even justify watching some of those again—why watch when so many more must be sifted?

I suppose since it’s so short, it won’t be too hard to put them down here, in no particular order (though I must admit I’m leaving out the adolescent selections, as they’ve not remained with me into adulthood, and rarely stand up to a more mature scrutiny***):

“Master and Commander”—stepping into the lost world of the age of sail, with exquisite cinematography of battle sequences straight out of a Winslow Homer painting
“The Thin Red Line”—some have expressed frustration with the ponderous voice-overs, but Malick created something utterly fascinating with the cast of celebrities who fell over one another for bit parts in one of his films. The intensity of this film is achingly, painfully beautiful.
“Punch Drunk Love”—the first serious acting I ever saw Adam Sandler do. A truly funny film, alternately cross-eyed and sympathetic toward the quirky, neurotic cast. “I have a love that makes me stronger than you can imagine. . . I would just say ‘that’s that,’ mattress man.”
“The Dark Knight”—just watched it again at the beginning of the summer. While I am more inclined to side with reviewers that suggested it could’ve used some more judicious cutting, I stand by my fascination with this mythical story.
“The Big Lebowski”—delight in disorder.
“Children of Men”—I was shocked by how powerful this film was for me.
“Lonesome Dove”—a made-for-TV adaptation of McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize winner. An epic western that managed to capture the tragic side of the open range and its codes, tinged with glory.
“Princess Mononoke”—a Miyazaki anime feature, bizarre and outrageously imaginative, and masterful in the use of silence as the aura of the sacred.

I could go on. . . but the point is, not for much longer.

The most recent entry on this list is entitled, ironically, “Once”. What I have to say about it won’t make much sense unless you’ve seen it, so I wouldn’t bother reading further if you haven’t—besides, you should already be making your way to your Netflix queue to get ahold of it.

I was first turned on to this film by Barb Nicolosi’s review (back when her blog for her work with the screenwriting guild Act One was still up and running). The soundtrack proved to be the hook for her, and so it has continued to be for me. Piping it through my stereo last week inspired me to return to this little film, shot for cheap on the sooty, overcast streets of Dublin (though it could’ve been anywhere) . It tells the story of a busking guitarist who, meets a gal on a lonely street while cutting his chest open for everyone to see (lyrically speaking). Her musical talents quickly become evident to him, and they mutually ignite a unique creativity that helps the guy to record a demo of his truly talented songwriting, and for both of them to get their lives back on track, discovering what they truly want and living up to the situations in which they find themselves.

What unfolds is something like a cross between a musical and a documentary on music production; you almost expect the camera to cut to a face-to-face interview with the characters who then explain what they were thinking at the time and how crazy all that was and how they pretended to like the gal’s mother-in-law but really didn’t, etc. But of course, it never does, because these people are not being asked to step out of their subjectivity and feed it back to the viewer. They thrive in it, steeped in the confusion and ambiguity of their attraction to one another amidst deeper and more lasting commitments to other people. Neither is ever given a name, but these characters take on a warmth and charm that got me to root for them in a way I usually can’t when it comes to film (now novels, on the other hand. . . ).

This was clearest for me in the sequence when the Guy decides to record a demo before leaving for London. There is an amusing and kind of adventurous feel to the work that must be done in order to book a recording studio, including persuading a loan-officer-turned-songwriter to lend him the money to book a recording studio for a weekend. In a spare yet rich scene, the studio engineer skeptically looks on as the unimpressive cadre of backing musicians and immigrants prepares to record their first take. There was a rush of adrenaline as I watched them step up to lay themselves on the line. This guy was taking a real risk—the music wasn’t just a dream anymore, pondered morosely in the upstairs room of his da’s house. There was money on the line. There were consequences to this performance. And what comes forth from the various voices and instruments in that moment of risk is stirring. In unison with the engineer, who had settled in for a long weekend of coddling some amateurs, we realize that this is something good. They’re doing it, I said to myself. This is a moment each of these strange people has been preparing for. A moment of kairos, where time ceases to be a mere succession of “nows” and whirlpools into an axis of destiny—foreseen, intended, rejoiced over. And honestly, it was beautiful to see them doing it—musicians played by real musicians, who knew the thrill of being thrown together with unfamiliar players at a moment of truth, and who could therefore create a believable now-or-never moment that drew out of me an unconsidered, unrestrained, fist-pounding burst of tears. I said there and then, in a kind of prayer, This is real. This is real. This is real. I believed every second of it, rehearsed as it was, in spite of never having experienced any of that myself . . . yes, I believed every second. I drank it in through my eyes, thrust forward in the lazy boy, heart pounding like this was battle footage. Watching people making music.

This, my friends, is filmmaking.

In the bleary, waking unconsciousness of overwork, relationships evolve rapidly, and the film did a fine job of capturing the meandering, miscellaneous energy of creative collaboration in which the hours and days melt into one another. But it also managed to help me see the joyful rest on the far side of it. The Guy sits on the car hood, watching these familiar strangers goofing on the chilly beach as the sun rises, the fumes of a fresh success still swimming through him—a success that had nothing to do with recognition or payoff, but of the joy that came from being the lynchpin in the bringing into the world of something genuine, something marvelous in its exuberance and nuance. It is in this moment that the Guy is really, truly enviable—having stepped forward into uncertainty and the possibility of failure, he was proven worthy to proceed, worthy to have led these nobodies into somebody-ness.

They disband as quickly as they were assembled, without much explanation. So pass our successes, recognized perhaps only by a few. But those few matter to us. They matter deeply. “We cannot speak to ourselves the words we most need to hear.” Those who speak them may be deeply attached to us, like fathers; they may be nothing more than familiar strangers with an eye to see the goodness in what we do, and the credibility to speak with authority—like the recording engineer who almost becomes a part of the band he is being paid to assist. It is a deep mystery of human existence that we receive our flourishing not from within but from without. It is given to us as a gift, a word of love that confirms to us beyond any doubt that it is good that we, that I, exist.

The filmmakers should be very, very proud of this film, and I encourage whoever has gone ahead and read this post without having seen the film to take advantage of the first opportunity to do so.

*** I am not and never will be ashamed of my devotion to “The Last of the Mohicans” throughout most of my teens.

Everbody Mess Around

2010-07-27T23:16:00.000-05:00

What better way to get myself interested in blogging again? A redesign.

(Everybody's doing it.)

Fun!

Echoooooo

2010-07-19T12:46:00.002-05:00

To continue with some thoughts from an earlier post on technology, a recent review appearing in the City Journal is worth some of your time. It takes up the thesis of a "digital technology philosopher," a discipline in which I consider myself an amateur (in the etymological sense of the word--a lover). The man in question, William Powers, has released a number of articles on the subject, including a paper on the effect the Internet is having on print journalism ... supposedly excellent. I suggest you read the whole review yourself, and then follow up with some of the comments on First Thoughts, where I first came across the review. Some excerpts:

In my experience, judging from e-mail conversations I have, when you learned to write affects how you use the technology. The people who learned to write and discuss things before the invention of e-mail find it a great tool, because it creates a new mixture of conversation and letter-writing, with something of the speed of the first and the distance and reflection of the second. You can respond fairly quickly, but with time to measure what you say, check your facts, dig up good quotes, etc. But people who didn’t learn to write and discuss things then . . . tend to use it and similar technologies in the way it seems to encourage: to send short, pointed, undeveloped, often emotive and sometimes pointless, thoughts. The exchanges make a personal connection, which is probably all to the good, and communicate judgments and emotions, but not thoughts of any complexity.

A respondent brings up the very point that goes unasked with every new development: what do we bargain away in exchange for the gains we make?

Every breakthrough in communications technology involves the loss of some existing skill set, almost as compensation for whatever benefits accrue from the new technology. Writing tended to undermine our ability to memorize long stories, lists, poems, etc. Printing undermined calligraphy (and typing destroyed handwriting); television undermined the listening skills and imagination required for radio (or reading aloud). It’s a constant process of trading off one thing for another, and each generation has to judge whether the game is worth the candle.

Scarier than all these developments is the fact that there aren't too many of us even asking the question. At what point do we sell our birthright for a mess of pottage?

For further reading, you can pick up my somewhat lengthy comments on the issue of what effects technology has on our lives here.

Back in the Saddle

2010-07-13T09:28:00.001-05:00

Now that I've thoroughly alienated any regular readership I might have had, I figure it's time for a fresh start. Things have settled into their established patterns here at the hospital, and I'm hoping to start blogging again.

In the personal realm, the ordination has changed things in many, many ways. It really does "feel different" to be ordained a deacon, and I am pretty excited about the upcoming ordinations of my brother seminarians. I'm enjoying CPE a great deal, having been thrown into a fairly intense ministerial situation and finding my way through the grace of God, day by day. And I'm keeping up the reading, which I hope to share on the blog through another couple of entries in the Desk Chair Review of Books.

One recent article that called up memories of a recently read book was an interview with a British entomologist, Jeremy Nivens, on the NYT website. I became interested due to my recent enjoyment of an anthology of J. Henri Fabre's classic works, The Insect World of J. Henri Fabre. It seems that the possibilities for the advancement of human biology, the derivations of animal instinct, and the simple wonder at some of the most abundant (and complex) species on the planet was not retired with the passing of the wizened Frenchman nearly a century ago. He offers some interesting perspectives on his most notable discoveries:

You know, there’s this pervasive idea in biology that I think is wrong. It goes: we humans are at the pinnacle of the evolutionary tree, and as you get up that tree, brain size must get bigger. But a fly is just as evolved as a human. It’s just evolved to a different niche. In fact, in evolution there’s no drive towards bigger brains. It’s perfectly possible that under the right circumstances, you could get animals evolving small brains.

Interesting, no? I certainly haven't thought out all the consequences of this, but it does give the lie to some perspectives on human evolution. What "niche" is it that human beings have evolved to fill? What biological need is there for a city-building, novel-writing mammal? Food for thought.

It's good to be back.

We're All Out of Sticks to Hit You With

2010-05-18T13:21:00.003-05:00

We interrupt this frantic paper-composing to bring you some chuckles.

Cultures change. What is overlooked about the Crusaders, and the knights and nobility of the 10th century and thereabouts, is that they were very bloody-minded. They had been raised since infancy to devote themselves to fighting. They were very sinful. They particularly were into coveting wives. And they were very religious.

The fact that these things can be combined strikes the modern mind as bizarre. But you have to deal with it if you're going to understand these people. They would commit a horrid crime, and their confessor would say, "I don't know if you can ever get over that one. I don't know if atonement is in the books for you. But you better walk barefoot to the Holy Land and hope that that works."

And they'd go. And then come back and sin some more.

It takes some stretching to understand what motivated these people.

I don't know why, but that quote from this interview with Rodney Stark amused me a great deal. I hope you find a few minutes to read it all the way through.

h/t First Thoughts

Sex and Atoms

2010-04-22T19:01:00.005-05:00

The terms in the title of this post have very little to do with one another, and the article to which I’d like to draw your attention doesn’t link them much more meaningfully than using one as an adjective for another. Whether by that I mean “sexual atoms” or “atomic sex” must be discovered on your own.

A recent discovery of Front Porch Republic has proved to be a site thick with reflective offerings, the first of which situates the recent clerical scandals in the cultural context of our day. The result is a chewy piece of writing that comes off like a speech in a Dostoyevsky novel. The pacing is infectious; phrase builds upon phrase, the edifice rises, and crowds begin to gather. Turgid fragments clamber over one another only to resolve, of a sudden, into peaceful vistas of clarity:

Of all the worldly empires that sought after power and wealth, surely none appears so pathetic as ours: we do not require great monuments or a grand historical narrative of man overcoming weakness and desire to establish something greater than himself. We require only constant, super-saturating reminders that everybody is just a body that likes sex.

Anyone who has visited Italy would immediately recognize this shift, effected over centuries. There, the monuments constructed half a millennium ago—many of which have ever been surpassed—seem transparent at times, like reflections in a lingerie-shop window. They have not been defeated, but ignored as irrelevant. More than once, the thought struck me: we are incapable of sustaining such projects.

But as bad as things may seem, as overwhelming as the cultural forces arrayed against human flourishing may be, the author finds one, indefectible handhold: the goodness of creation.

Most of us live as isolated individuals whose daily life affirms the inconsequence of our actions, the meaninglessness of our role in any larger dramatic form, the blandness of our condition. And yet, within that individuated loneliness, before which all social institutions, from the family to the city, to the nation and the Church wither as mere “subjective” and inessential extensions of the Cartesian bedrock of our selves—within that atomic certitude, I say, we sense some ineradicable spark of consequence and meaning. While most of us root out and extinguish that spark as much as possible, it cannot be thoroughly dimmed so long as we retain a nervous system and therefore remain capable of the crude but inexplicable mystery, the ecstatic and superhuman but manipulable event, of sexual desire and satisfaction.

You may regard his optimism as naive. Well, read the rest to see why he’s convinced sex can save the world.

If I May Interrupt

2010-04-20T18:55:00.001-05:00

I would just like to point out to those of you who disagree with me:

A Light Kindled Against the Darkness

2010-04-09T13:30:00.001-05:00

The tide of anti-pope journalism among the news outlets of the world isn’t universal, and it was nice to find one such holdout in the column of Damien Thompson over at the Telegraph. The sorts of things I usually see on their site involve such ignorant claims as “Pope Appoints Opus Dei priest to Episcopacy As Revenge On Hollywood for The Da Vinci Code”. Mr. Thompson, while not one to dismiss the gravity of the scandal, has been forthright with some of the facts overlooked in this most recent debacle. Read about it at the following link, which pertains to the emerging scandal about financial malfeasance of the Legionnaires of Christ:

Pope Emerges as the Campaigner Against ‘Filth’

The Church in Bondage to Therapy?

2010-04-07T22:55:00.002-05:00

A recent “On the Square” web-exlusive at First Things makes for phenomenal reading. Not too long ago, Rod Dreher pointed out the findings of the University of North Carolina’s National Study of Youth and Religion. It summarized the general tone of American religious belief in three words: moralistic therapeutic Deism. The article linked below takes up just what is meant by the term “therapeutic,” something I’d guessed at intuitively before, but probably couldn't have pinned down precisely. John Buri makes it a little more specific. A sample:

Like the manager, the therapist is a specialist in mobilizing resources for effective action, only here the resources are largely internal to the individual and the measure of effectiveness is the elusive criterion of personal satisfaction. . . . Indeed, the very term therapeutic suggests a life focused on the need for a cure. But a cure of what?

The implications for ministry, preaching, liturgy (inculturation, anyone?) and evangelism are tremendous and far-reaching. I look forward to reading your comments after you read the whole thing!

Scandal

2010-04-06T11:43:00.002-05:00

Though the recent clerical abuse scandal that has broken in Germany and Ireland is once again wrenching the hearts of Catholics worldwide, the ramifications do not extend to the papacy--as the recent New York Times article has heinously alleged. I find the whole situation (and by that, I mean all of it) terribly nauseating, but Raymond De Souza's response to the NYT article reveals another dimension of the tragedy: the scurrilous character of the reporting. I would insist that anyone who has read the NYT article or heard it discussed read over De Souza's response immediately.

I think it's clear that the press isn't just getting things wrong here and there; they're getting it completely backwards.

The Kettlebell ...

2010-03-26T15:06:00.000-05:00

... is in the mail. I will break you, comrade!

Not To Get Political, But ...

2010-03-24T21:36:00.003-05:00

... I'm going to get political.

Cardinal George pointed to President Obama’s executive order that said “it is necessary to establish an adequate enforcement mechanism to ensure that Federal funds are not used for abortion services."
The need for such an order underscores deficiencies in the bill, Cardinal George said.
“We do not understand how an Executive order, no matter how well intentioned, can substitute for statutory provisions,” he said also.

Not having followed this particular battle very closely, I can only go with what Cardinal George said during his last visit to the seminary: this legislation represents a real step back in the pro-life cause, and no one really knows what is going to happen as a result.

Let's keep hopes high and expectations low. There is much work to be done on behalf of the weak and vulnerable of our society. Posterity will be our judge.

Read the rest of the USCCB's statement on the passage of this historic legislation.

News To Me

2010-03-19T13:01:00.002-05:00

The most interesting part of the New York Times’ review of “Greenberg” (opening in theaters this weekend) is the last line of the review:

“Greenberg” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Swearing, nudity, drug use, emotional violence.

The Motion Picture Society of America: Classifying Objectional Content With Specificity Since 1922.

Stop That Cameraman … He’s Swiped My Soul

2010-03-16T19:58:00.003-05:00

A recent article in The Medium column over at the New York Times caught my attention. Entitled "Framing Childhood", it is a self-critique of the modern parent's increasingly onerous hobby of capturing, organizing, processing, and publishing the digital images of one's progeny, beginning from the moment of parturition and never slackening. The author finds his own captivation with the endeavor slightly disturbing:

My own son’s first word for laptop, when he saw a woman plugging away at one at Starbucks, was the word he used for himself: “baby.” What else could the woman be doing so intently at a screen but what he saw me do—paging through picture after picture of him?

Makes you stop and think, doesn’t it?

Now, I myself have been the recipient of numerous "fresh baby" emails, all of which I am always delighted to receive (if a bit skeptical of the insistent exclamations at the child’s parental likeness). I would guess that most (if not all) my friends who are new parents have not fallen victim to the obsession detailed in the article above. However, I believe there is a certain value to examining the "limit cases" of an activity carried to an extreme so as to understand it for what it is; such reflection often helps us to strike a balance in the lived reality that would otherwise be unrecognizable by an unreflective participant. In other words, the fanatic devotee of image collection might offer some genuine insight into the casual use of photographic technology that most of us enjoy from time to time.

This catches my attention due in part to my recent travels. As someone who volunteered to take responsibility to photograph our pilgrimage on behalf of the whole group, I've had a chance to think about what photography does to how we perceive our surroundings and ourselves. It's become very clear to me just how powerful the photographic medium conditions our perceptions, both in positive and in negative ways. While such observations often take the form of a diatribe against innovation or technology, a more judicious approach is simply to raise questions that others do not. As the Dominican Fr. Marie-Dominique Philippe has put it, everyone is aware of what technology gives us; few ever pause long enough to ask what it takes away.

A casual remark made by a fellow seminarian who had gone on the pilgrimage the year before occasioned a real revolution in how I approached photography. He mentioned that although he'd never been trained to draw, the sheer intensity of his reaction to the places he was visiting impelled him to make an attempt to render them by hand. Such a thought has never, ever crossed my mind, even though I spent a good portion of my childhood trying to draw. I gave it up for a number of different reasons, but since that time, the thought of putting a pencil to paper in the attempt to capture a scene simply was not in the realm of possibility. While still in Bethlehem, I resolved to set aside the camera for a while and try my hand at drawing after a fifteen- or twenty-year hiatus.

What I discovered on account of my friend's comment was really remarkable. I'd found the camera lens an excellent window through which to contemplate the beauty of places and people, but my attempts at drawing revealed pencil and paper to be another such window. There was nothing remarkable in the first sketch I attempted, other than that it was a sketch that I drew. What was remarkable was the way it forced me to perceive differently. I wasn't deliberately producing a interpretation of the landscape I'd chosen to draw; yet as I tried (and failed) to capture it, it became clear that every stroke, every line, every shadow was an interpretation, a choice. To present what I saw, I had to select the details that would communicate to the viewer's eye the crucial form of the thing I was drawing. This became clear when I'd finally finished (or gotten too tired to go on): my drawing was a cluttered mess. My photographer's eye was fascinated with detail, but too much in a drawing overwhelms the subject and fails to evoke the form.

The end result was disappointing—but I had a drawing, not a photograph, and I'd spent hours studying the scene I was working on. Even now, months later, I can call it to mind effortlessly. On reflection, I noticed an experiential difference between observation for the sake of photographic composition and observation for the sake of drawing. Having invested myself in the art of amateur photographic composition, I was aware that there is more to a good photograph than just pointing and shooting. A photograph is the result of an intentional process that encompasses many different artistic abilities, from simple technical know-how to the mysterious art of storytelling. (This was, in part, what motivated the choice to keep a photojournal that only displayed a single photo to accompany the day’s account.) The abilities and limitations of the camera and its apparatus become something like the strings of a violin or the metrical structure of a poem—their characteristics are enlisted in the photographer’s attempt to communicate himself and what he sees. They become a vehicle for the delivery of artistic expression, and therefore of meaning. However, something was engaged in me by the attempt to draw that photography left dormant—so much so that the looking I was doing as an artist made the looking I did as a photographer seem like pure passivity. It felt like what I'd been doing all along was more like “looking” than actually seeing, as if I’d passed over the very thing I was looking for in my haste to search over as much territory as possible in pursuit of my goal.

Having gained this insight, it became a matter of training the eye and hand to observe and then mimic what was most fundamental to the form of the subject—easier said than done. I’m still working on it, obviously, but it’s as if I’ve experienced a small revelation of sorts. Even as I enjoy the fresh perspective, it’s also invigorating to look ahead in hope of future insight.

Anyhow, to return to the point, this experience of being forced to look at a subject differently is what Father Philippe may have meant by the sort of thing that is lost even as technological progress offers a great gain. Once we understand the tradeoff to which our artifacts force us to submit, we regard them less and less as the conditions of a fully satisfactory way of life; interestingly enough, this shift in attitude allows us to regard technology for what it is: a tool. The temptation nowadays is to see technological prowess as an end in itself, rather than a means to fully human existence. Once the human measure is jettisoned, technology becomes self-measured and therefore self-justified. That is to say, technology becomes our master.

An interesting exercise to get a sense of where we stand on this question is to take something we can’t imagine functioning without—something about which we’d ask “how would anybody manage to get along without this?”—and then try to imagine oneself doing just that: getting along without it. Better yet, set it aside and actually live without it; chances are, it’s not that hard to do, and when (if) you take it up again, it will be with a different attitude.

I’ve been asking this question about my cell phone lately. It’s clear that the possibility of having a phone on my person at all times is quite valuable, and will be especially so as a priest. But what is lost by this technological ability? Has anyone ever asked this question? Try raising the question with someone you know. Float it by them: “you know, I’ve been thinking about getting rid of my cell phone”. I did this just last night with a group of seminarians. You’d think they believed that prior to the cell phone, priests were permanently incommunicado and most people died alone and unabsolved for lack of a direct line to his pocket telephone. Of course, I know they don’t believe this, but the tone of their slightly disapproving responses was, “why wouldn’t you have one if you could?” Not to have one would imply some kind of lack of generosity on my part—which is entirely possible, but not automatically so merely in virtue of the choice to abstain from instantaneous and ubiquitous communication. Their response ultimately boils down to the very sentiment I pointed out earlier: “how could you function well as a priest without one?”

I’m not sure I know the answer to that question because I’ve not gone without a cell phone as a priest, but the guilelessness of my friends’ replies suggests that they haven’t considered the alternative, either. That makes me wonder just what might be recovered by dropping Sprint and signing back up for Southwestern Bell.

To return to the question of photography, then. Our time on pilgrimage was filled with some truly amazing sights. As a member of the photography team, I’d committed to keep a camera handy in order to record our pilgrimage in photos, so that we didn’t have 25 people all snapping away every time we moved to the next spot on the itinerary. Of course, this didn’t stop our inveterate “posers” from insisting on having a photo taken of each of them in front of each and every landmark, statue, vista, and pile of ancient rocks. What is it about people that want to be photographed in front of things? Most would say that it’s to record the memory—to “document,” as my aunt would say. But what if the preoccupation with getting the snapshot prevents you from ever really being present to the people or things you’re there to see?

With reference to what I mentioned above, it’s worth imagining what it would be like to travel without a camera. People did it for thousands of years and managed to “record their memories” just fine. Diaries and sketchbooks take more work, it is true, but travelers usually had more time back then. There was no rapid travel like we have now; if a fellow had both the time and the money to spare (a rare coincidence), seeing faraway people and places meant a commitment of months, if not years. It meant you had a chance to sit down and contemplate, to get to know people, to soak up another culture and another context—in other words, to be changed. There were none of the managed insertions to which we subject ourselves today; it was both more dangerous and more rewarding to see the world in days gone by. Now our travel is sealed up in resorts, tour buses, and the air circulation systems of airplanes. We are caught in the tension between enjoying unparalleled conveniences in travel and tourism, and scoffing at those very same conveniences for having obliterated any sense of remoteness or wildness from the places we’d never be able to visit otherwise. “Tourism” (an extremely recent phenomenon) has both enriched and cheapened the experience of seeing the world. It’s enough to make you want to spend three months barfing in the forecastle of a merchant brig during a nineteenth-century sea-crossing.

In our own days, the digital camera has occasioned the limitless multiplication of permanent records of people standing in front of landmarks to a hitherto unimaginable level. Gone are the days when anyone might think the camera robs our soul; quite the opposite. It’s as if we believed every time the ritual (sacrament?) of pose, focus, snap is enacted, the portfolio of the soul is enriched in its path to exhibition-worthy status. A recent editorial in the New York Times mused at this proliferation, remarking that

it feels, some days, as though the whole purpose of our species is to create a perfect simulacrum of the life we lead even as we’re leading it.

Susan Sontag—a writer with whom I was unfamiliar until composing this little essay you’re reading now—referred to the camera as “the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood,” a definition I am inclined to agree with at least in part. We feel enriched by the camera’s acquisitions, do we not? The photographer usually considers himself generous—a person who steps out of the action for the sake of posterity, for the sake of those present who will one day thank them for their archivism. A recent First Things commentator captured this attitude admirably while musing over his daughter’s wedding, during which his family’s requests for no photography were disregarded.

They sacrifice their ordinary presence at the mere wedding to become a selfless, invisible recording eye, as though they occupied some interstitial space between the sacred, but still physical one of the church and—what, exactly? The not-yet-embodied future? It strikes me that they think they are made angels by the camera, observers unobserved. But there they were, still in their bodies, perfectly visible to everyone.

His experience at least indirectly gets at what I began to sense during my time on pilgrimage. It wasn’t that the photographers were clumsy or obtrusive and needed to find more discreet ways to shoot. It’s more that the perpetual use of the camera had the subtle, even subliminal effect of inclining one to believe that an experience isn’t valid or valuable unless someone is there to photograph it. The father of the bride noted that his resentment went beyond the simple fact that their request for no photographs went unheeded:

Something had been changed, and a little more than images had been taken away. Instead of being in the form, we were being forced by their very presence to see it as an artifact, and the unity of our wills with the couple’s intentions was interrupted.

You might think that such an opinion is typical of a couple of stuffy, high-church aesthetes with nothing more to worry about than whether to trim the boxwood hedge along the drive to the carriage house in the shape of a train of elephants or just tear the whole thing out and put in dwarf Japanese maples. Yes, you might think that. But there might be another way of looking at it.

An interesting and unexpected correspondence between my private reflections and our class reading fell into my lap just a day or two ago. A reading assignment on St. Augustines De Trinitate explored some of the African Doctor’s imagery to explain the relationship between humanity and the Trinity. The chosen metaphor was the idea of spiritual vision. I began to sniff at something interesting when the author asserted, echoing Augustine, that

the vision of God will never be a passive or a voyeuristic vision.

Augustine goes into a detailed analysis of how spiritual vision is analogous to our earthly vision. Though he is operating on a much different understanding of what goes on in bodily seeing, the basic idea is that just as the eye and the object are united in the vision of the beholder in sensation, so is the soul of the blessed united with the God whom it contemplates. This “spiritual eye” must be cleansed and strengthened by a process of self-collection, a withdrawal from the longing for the variety of images which occupy the soul and draw it away from the proper object of its desire. This distraction is described with some rather vivid imagery in his autobiography, which he describes as a kind of spiritual hemorrhage:

I have been spilled and scattered. . . my thoughts, the innermost bowels of my soul, are torn apart with the crowding tumults of variety.

The spiritual vision is not strengthened by ascetic withdrawal from the world; rather, it is invigorated by the prolongation of its vision through the things of the world into an almost desperate longing for the things of God while surrounded with His creatures. This longing stretches the soul and increases its capacity for love, in which the final state of the saved consists and in which the fullness of earthly life participates here and now. Augustine likens the disparity between earth and heaven to the difference between a fleeting glance and an enraptured gaze—an analogy that draws its strength from the everyday reality we experience as sight.

Augustine then makes an interesting move. Is this analogy between physical and spiritual vision just an analogy, or does the very act of seeing well also prepare our spiritual vision in a mysterious way? Augustine’s answer is in the affirmative. Our capacity to properly apprehend creation is by no means irrelevant to our relationship with God. The article’s author summarizes Augustine’s attitude in a finely balanced counterpoint.

To look with the trained eye more deeply into visible things, and not to be preoccupied with possessing them, however, is a difficult and slippery task. . . one can easily slide either into devaluation of these objects, which effectively if implicitly ‘scorns the Creator,’ or into fascination with their surface beauty, and ‘to love this is to be estranged.’

Most interesting, given Sontag’s definition of the camera as the “ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.” Regarding photography, it’s clear that there is much more to the “preoccupation with possession” than a mere desire to own the content of the image! No; the human capacity for misdirected or overreaching desire extends far beyond the mere accumulation of property.

Yet in an even more remarkable turn, Augustine takes a more speculative turn and asserts that the eyes of the body in the resurrection will be the means of spiritual vision.

It is possible, indeed most probable, that we shall then see the physical bodies of the new heaven and the new earth in such fashion as to observe God in utter clarity and distinctness, seeing him present everywhere and governing the whole material scheme of things by means of the bodies we shall then inhabit and the bodies we shall see wherever we turn our eyes.

Preposterous? Maybe. Augustine himself acknowledged that his theory had no foundation in the Biblical testimony. But it does help to situate our earlier reflections on photography in a broader and more meaningful context. These aren’t the questions of highly-strung aristocrats or hair-splitting bookworms; when put in the right spirit, they can influence how we relate to one another and to God, fueling our desire for wisdom and a growth in love. A phrase from a wonderful little book written by the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin puts it far better than I ever could, so it is with his words that I’ll leave you:

We hardly know in what proportions and under what guise our natural faculties will pass over into the final act of the vision of God. But it can hardly be doubted that, with God’s help, it is here below that we give ourselves the eyes and the heart which a final transfiguration will make the organs of a power of adoration, and of a capacity for beatification, particular to each individual man and woman among us.

a m d g

Like I Never Left

2010-03-03T08:56:00.007-06:00

After innumerable train and plane rides, walking through strange cities in the rain with luggage in tow, and meeting up with a seemingly interminable catalog of remarkable and inspiring people, I am back. It's hardly believable that this trip of a lifetime, which has been a part of my imagination and hopes for years, has finally ended. Laying awake at 3:30 a.m. this morning, jetlagged and racing through all the things that need to be done to re-settle myself here at the seminary, an intense feeling of gratitude washed over me--with the sort of intensity that only comes when you're alone with your thoughts in the dark. Some days it's the sense that I need to engage in spiritual warfare and pray the Exorcism prayer of St. Leo; others, I'm just happy. Go figure.

Laying there on my back, suddenly acutely aware of how awash with blessing and grace I've been these last weeks and months, it was hard not to believe that I'm in exactly the right place with exactly what I need to live God's will. Part of that is probably the endorphin-like high I get when my sleep cycles are messed up, but another part is pretty sure that this little intuition is spot on. I'm thirty years old, and set to embark on the great adventure of my vocation, and such confirmations are incredible treasures. And it's not simply a pleasure at having seen wonderful things and been to wonderful places. Pilgrimage was difficult, though not on the day-to-day basis; our guides and faculty took care of most everything we needed (doing laundry was the only real problem we had to deal with ourselves). The real difficulty lay in the confrontation of realities of which I was aware but had never presented themselves as forcefully as they arise in that holy city.

Perhaps the greater challenge was, in a sense, taking a "break" from the identity of a seminarian. It was never intentional, but it required an interior effort to continue seeing myself--ourselves--as men in preparation for priesthood. All supports of this identity, both interior and exterior, were pulled away, and the edifice was left to stand on its own foundation. And I don't just mean things like wearing the Roman collar or being known by others as "a seminarian"—it was more that were were not able to exercise that identity in the normal ways, through outreach and apostolates which are such an integral part of our formation at Mundelein. As a result, questions about identity and motivation began to float to the surface. Why am I doing this? Am I freely choosing it or just going with the flow? What am I giving up? What am I gaining? Is this really what I want? Is it really what God wants?

There were definitely some days where I didn't know how to answer those questions. Toss in the fact that the Holy Land isn't exactly Catholic Disneyland, and you have a recipe for frustration and confusion of all sorts. The Church suffers from a chronic lack of growth due to the cultural and legal constraints placed on it, and the attrition that inevitably follows keeps the population at around 1.2% of the general census. Over the last fifty years, this percentage fell from 10% of the general population—meaning a net loss of over two hundred thousand. Stir in virulent and long-standing divisions within the Christian community—many of which are far beyond the lived experience of the typical Protestant-Catholic divide here in the U.S.—and what many visitors experience is not quite the overwhelming spiritual refreshment you’d expect. It feels more like a stab in the heart.

There's nothing like a trip to Rome to cure what ails you.

I was certainly encouraged and inspired by the beauty and grandeur of the churches we visited, and the relics of so many outstanding saints (we prayed before the relics of St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Francis Xavier, St. Philip Neri, and St. Peter himself, all in one day), some well known and revered, others of which I'd never before heard. I was bowled over by the frescoed naves bathed in light, opening up to a heavenly vision of angels and clouds and exquisitely posed figures absorbed in love and desire for the things of God, for His beauty and the peace it brings. I received sacramental absolution on the Feast of the Chair of Peter in a small wooden confessional in the transept of St. Peter's while a soaring hymn of praise swelled to fill the towering spaces that dwarfed us. The voices seemed to twist and dart playfully about the capacious dome, sidling down the fluted pilasters that sat on pedestals with footings the size of my room at the seminary. Each edifice was more spectacular, more opulent, more jubilant than the last. Inspiring as it all was, it wasn't giving the answers I was looking for.

The shadow of a hint of a clue to the answer came, as it usually does, in a far less dramatic setting.

We were invited out to dinner by a priest who happened to be studying for his doctorate in dogmatic theology at the Angelicum. Over delicious rigatoni and gnocchi, he related to us some of his experiences as a priest here in Rome, fully immersed in study and somewhat far removed from the daily pastoral responsibilities of a diocesan priest (a nice parallel to my own sense of having been cut off from what I'd been accustomed to doing and being as a seminarian). He spoke to us of a series of short conversations he'd had with a young man employed in construction there at the American priests' residence in Rome, and of the reflection over his responsibilities as a priest in those conversations.

Now, there was nothing deliberate about these encounters; he was a busy priest trying to finish his doctorate before departing the country and the Romanian fellow needed to work hard to keep his job, so there were no long soul-searching discourses being carried out. But the attention and effort this priest was putting into these brief conversations demonstrated a deep care for the good of this young man. It would've been easy for him to justify passing over the openings for a deeper exchange--the admissions that he'd been living with his girlfriend, for instance--and just telling himself that this wasn't the reason he'd been sent at great expense to Rome, or that it would be better to just build a relationship with the guy without launching into moralistic diatribes, or any number of perfectly reasonable trains of thought.

But he would ask himself, what if this is the only spiritual connection this young man will ever have? What if he's surrounded with people who will never speak to him of the grace offered to him in Christ? What if his only chance for a real encounter with Christ was to be on a scaffolding outside my window, and I missed it, or talked myself out of it, or just tried to ignore it? If not me, a Catholic priest, then who?

This priest carried something with him that didn't disappear when he was engaged in mundane tasks or urgent matters of importance—an awareness that each and every person that came into contact with him was, in some sense, his responsibility, and that responsibility trumped everything else that he was accountable for. In the midst of crafting a dissertation of some size, and all the deadlines and pressure that accompany this enterprise (not to mention offering hospitality to the droves of pilgrims passing through Rome and eager for a local connection), this priest was recollected enough to be attentive to the movements of grace that were eager to flow through us all, but find a conduit far too infrequently.

And there it was—the shadow of a hint of a clue to my answer. In my loss of identity, I'd turned inward, and there wasn't much there to sustain me, or even interest me, and that was scary. It catalyzed some unhealthy navel-gazing when the antidote was to be found in an attentive turn outward, to the other. It was then that I realized that on this pilgrimage, and by extension, during my time in seminary, I'd managed to lose sight of the mission.

Those years of missionary work with FOCUS all came back to me—the months of preparation, the fundraising, the Bible studies, the awkwardness and the discomfort with my situation, the fraternity, the breakthroughs, the disappointments were all sought or endured on account of the mission, the hope against hope that the casual encounter we all usually miss would be caught, and something good, something divine, would enter into the world. For all the struggle of those years, I realized that I missed it, because it had given form and purpose to my commitments. It was the principle and purpose of everything we were doing. It was the reason I wanted (and still want) to be a priest. For whatever reason, I'd lost touch with it. The consequences, while not drastic, certainly were real.

I'm glad we've got priests around like the one I caught up with that night. Oremus pro invicem.

Roma!

2010-02-22T03:39:00.000-06:00

Just a quick update for you all:

Tom and I have been in Rome for about a week now, and have enjoyed the cooler weather and fewer crowds that wintertime has allotted us. Accomodations are also much cheaper--we've gotten away with a double room with private bathroom for $65/night, right next to the railway station. My thoughts have been running to the vast differences between the Holy Land and Rome, the de facto Christian capital, and it is consoling to be here in this place where everything has the mark of Christendom upon it. It feels like somewhat of a panacea for the possible complexes one might inherit from spending two and a half months in Israel.

Anyhow, these are thoughts that I'd like to develop when I have more time. For now, it's off to the Pantheon! Check back soon for more in-depth reflections on what it's been like overseas, as well as thoughts on Pope Benedict's Truth and Tolerance (in which he grapples with the question of world religions).

Blessings!

Fun With Religion

2010-02-14T11:09:00.001-06:00

You know, our religion can be kind of crazy sometimes:

RELIQUARY, n.

A receptacle for such sacred objects as pieces of the true cross, short-ribs of the saints, the ears of Balaam's ass, the lung of the cock that called Peter to repentance and so forth. Reliquaries are commonly of metal, and provided with a lock to prevent the contents from coming out and performing miracles at unseasonable times. A feather from the wing of the Angel of the Annunciation once escaped during a sermon in Saint Peter's and so tickled the noses of the congregation that they woke and sneezed with great vehemence three times each. It is related in the "Gesta Sanctorum" that a sacristan in the Canterbury cathedral surprised the head of Saint Denis in the library. Reprimanded by its stern custodian, it explained that it was seeking a body of doctrine. This unseemly levity so raged the diocesan that the offender was publicly anathematized, thrown into the Stour and replaced by another head of Saint Denis, brought from Rome.

From Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary

Off to Rome!

Day Sixty-Five

2010-02-11T02:10:00.001-06:00

After a full morning of classes, we had the afternoon off until our appointment with the Latin Patriarch (a.k.a. Roman Catholic Archbishop) of Jerusalem. Unfortunately, he was whisked away to Rome, and this information was not made available to us until after we’d made our way through the freezing rain to the Patriarchate, just inside the Old City walls. Nevertheless, we had a chance to hear about what life is like for the local Church here on the ground from the lips of the chancellor, Monsignor William Chambly. We had a short Q&A and received many informative answers to our queries. As our short conversation made clear, it’s remarkable how the Church faces many of the same difficulties it does in the U.S. despite the disparity between the local culture and our own.

An example of this is priestly vocations. It has long been observed in the U.S. how priestly vocations are rare in more affluent societies; Israel is no exception. Of the 80 seminarians currently studying to become priests of this patriarchate, all but one come from Jordan or the West Bank—places where Catholics live as a tiny majority among a predominantly Muslim population in economically difficult circumstances. Israeli Christians tend to have greater financial security, and this seems to have caught the attention of young Catholic men here just as it has in our own land. Those that do not emigrate to find better opportunities abroad seem to be absorbed in whatever avenues of success are available to them here. The only Israeli seminarian is from Nazareth, and was just ordained a deacon December 18th in Beit Jala, just down the road from where we stayed in Bethlehem. Thanks be to God, the patriarchate has a relative abundance of vocations—80 seminarians from a Catholic population of around 80,000. For the sake of comparison, Chicago has about the same number of seminarians, but from a population of 2.5 million Catholics!

Our visit with the Chancellor provided us a bit more insight into the life of the Church here and now. Overall, the quality of the men and women of various religious and educational backgrounds who have come to speak with us has been extremely high. I’ve been impressed again and again by the level of commitment, insight, and breadth of knowledge they possess, and the nuance with which they articulate it. I suppose having the world’s attention on their every move does provide motivation to put their best foot forward.

Token

2010-02-09T12:06:00.001-06:00

Well, I'm not exactly "keeping up" with this blog, but an interesting article presented itself this evening and it's worth reading:

Christopher Hitchens on the non-Muslim use of the word "Allah" for God:

http://www.slate.com/id/2244045/

I do enjoy his writing...

The Flatlander Has a Mandate

2010-01-26T09:49:00.000-06:00

Check it out!

Pope Discovers Internet, Decrees That Priests Harness Its Coercive Powers

h't First Thoughts

In Pilgrimage news, we just got back from a phenomenal three-day excursion to Jordan. We toured some of the most phenomenal archaeological ruins I've ever set foot on. More soon!

Day Forty-Five

2010-01-22T02:35:00.000-06:00

Being here in Jerusalem has forced me to recognize how deeply religion is intertwined with politics and economics. To the Western mind so accustomed to the neat compartmentalization of these realms, the Holy Land seems like an embarrassing mess in which everything is compromised by its mingling with everything else. If only they could just keep these things separate, we think to ourselves, life would run so much more smoothly. And to some degree, these thoughts are correct—but we presume that "smooth" is equivalent to "better." To the culture of the Middle East, this is not necessarily the case.

The occasion for this reverie came about during my first walk to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, deep in the Old City. Our accommodations at the Notre Dame Center are situated just outside the massive walls built by Suleiman the Magnificent back in the sixteenth century. Passing through the “New” Gate (so named for its creation 150 years ago) reveals an entirely different community than the broad streets and well-planned efficiency of the modern city. Stone pavement covers streets barely wide enough to admit a small vehicle. Shops and restaurants crowd against one another in fierce competition for small advantages in visibility from the walk. Signage is compiled from a smattering of English, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic alphabets, and vendors call out to passers-by with rudimentary greetings that sound more like commands. Religious goods of every sort are piled onto shelves sagging with age, surrounded by clothing and Arabian carpets hanging in the open air. Shops tunnel away from the thoroughfare like caves in a hillside. Sitting far in the back, barely visible behind the rows of shining menorahs, silver-clad icons, dull brass samovars, and elaborate tapestries, the shopkeeper takes his ease among the valuables ensconced beyond the reach of the swift fingers of thieves. Nowadays, fluorescent bulbs cast a harsh blue light over the merchandise and its khaki-clad vendors, but it takes little imagination to see their turbaned predecessors trimming the oil lamps and candles whose yellowy moisture would’ve softened these strange and wonderful sights.

To reach the holy places, one must push through these layers of commerce like so many veils draped over the city, concealing its true shape and form beneath their thick folds. It troubled me at first, to see all these people profiting off religion (in their own indirect way), but then again, it’s always been this way: our neat compartmentalization of sacred and secular is the anomaly. Religion is the lifeblood of this city, in more ways than one—and if we may speak of advantages and disadvantages in this regard, it does seem to amplify the intensity with which religion is lived. That is the case whether it serves as a positive or negative influence, for here I am beginning to see just how religion (much like war and eros), brings out the best and the worst in people. There are the scam artists swarming like vultures, ready to pick off unsuspecting tourists; then there are the clerical squabbles over territory within a church, periodically escalating into brawls; and then of course the zealots, the terrorists, the fanatics who kill for God. On the other hand, there are the hidden lives of oblation and fidelity and peace, the “love at the heart of the Church” St. Thérèse longed to be—conditioned by human limitation and weakness, yes, but nonetheless descending into the mystery as best as can be done this side of the Styx.

Framed on either side by these rivals, the great mass of humanity makes its way the best it can, neither despicable in violence nor outstanding in virtue. Yet each of us carries in our heart the loyalties and loves that drive our choices, and are pleasing in the sight of God to the extent of their interiority and their simplicity. These merchants who ride the city like barnacles and who once troubled me do not exploit religion for base gain—there are mouths to feed and bills to be paid. They sell because there are people who buy.

That I am one of them should be no cause for consternation. And if I learn a little for my loss of coin, what grounds do I have for complaint?

Happy Birthday to Me

2010-01-17T09:51:00.000-06:00

"Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for ever species of sh*t that flies—my only talent—smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great sh*thouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall—on this my thirtieth birthday."

Walker Percy

The Moviegoer

Ever since I read this several years ago, it seemed like it was destined to commemorate in some form my own thirtieth birthday. It doesn't necessarily represent my own subjective state of mind, but I present it nonetheless. Thanks for the birthday wishes from those who sent them along.

totus + amdg + tuus

Day Forty

2010-01-15T11:05:00.002-06:00

Our travels have brought us to the most extreme northern portion of our pilgrimage. The day began with a visit to the headwaters of the Jordan river known as “Banyas,” an Arabic form of the original Greek name of Paneas. True to its name, this site was dedicated to the Greek nature god Pan, and a temple was erected in front of the cave from which the waters of the Jordan once sprang. In the decades prior to Jesus’ life, Herod’s son Philip rededicated the area to Caesar (and tacked on an honorific to himself in the process—hence, Caesarea Philippi was its Roman name). Scripture enthusiasts will recognize this name as the place where Jesus posed a remarkable question to his disciples: “Who do you say that I am?” Today, it is recognized as the place in which Peter made the first confession of Christ’s divinity, and in acknowledgment of which Jesus promised to build his Church upon the rock of Peter’s faith.

This event is all the more fascinating given the context of the conversation. Given that the city had long been a center of pagan worship of Pan (regarded as the son of Zeus), Jesus’ question is all the more meaningful. Against the backdrop of a deity resembling a bizarre mixture of man and goat, the God-man is revealed not as a monstrosity but as the ultimate harmonization of the Creator and the creature. In fact, it is in Christ that human beings most truly become what they are.

Continuing north into the occupied territory of the Golan Heights (taken from Syria in the Six-Day War of 1967), we lunched in a village peopled by a little-known population called the Druze. Their religion is quite peculiar to our Western minds—they subscribe to tenets of many different religions, but originally sprung from a Muslim context in the 10th-11th centuries. Most unusual is their belief in reincarnation—the current adherents of this faith are the same souls of the “enlightened” who first embraced it nearly a thousand years ago; consequently, one cannot join the Druze, but must be born into it. We enjoyed their traditional cuisine, partaking of sandwiches made from large, tortilla-like bread filled with yogurt, sesame, hyssop, and oil.

Situated on the border with Lebanon and Syria, the Golan Heights are a large sloping plain of volcanic rock overshadowed by the snow-capped Lebanese mountains. The most famous of these, of course, is Mount Hermon, or “the old white-haired man,” and we enjoyed a scenic view of these high-ridged mountains of Bashan so celebrated in Semitic song and lore.

Our accommodations at the Pilgerhaus have been outstanding, and in the evenings we’ve made the most of our opportunities here. Between swimming, beachcombing, hiking the nearby hills, and praying at the sites commemorating the primacy of Peter and the multiplication of loaves, our days are leisurely but rich. A number of us have made it a habit to watch the sun rise over the Sea of Galilee each morning, and we’ve been amply rewarded! Delicate clouds aglow with the most widely varied shades of ochre and gold float high above the lavender haze concealing the hills beyond the eastern shore.

While the waves lap with the rhythm of placid breathing, St. John’s narration of the resurrection appearance on the lakeshore presents itself to the recollected heart. It requires no stretch of the imagination to sit here among the apostles—John, Nathaniel, Thomas, James, and Peter, still dripping from his frantic swim to the beach once he realized that the man addressing them from the shore was Jesus, risen from the dead. The awe is palpable, and no one dares broach the question on everyone’s mind, for indeed “they knew it was the Lord” (John 21:12). Yet Jesus conducts himself as if there was nothing strange in his presence among them, tending to the fish cooking on the charcoal fire and the bread warming beside it. The calm that hangs over them as they sit on the dark basalt boulders eating the piping hot fish is first broken by Jesus: three times he asks Peter, “Do you love me?” In response to his threefold claim of devotion, Jesus almost nonchalantly reveals the way in which Peter was to die, for His sake, three decades later in Rome. Then, the foundations will at last have been laid, against which the gates of hell would not prevail.

Yet the reverie doesn’t last long. Obedient to the Lord’s invitation—“come, have breakfast”—we make our way back to the dining room, where hot coffee, European cheeses, and cold meats await us. We tuck in to our meal with the serene conscience of those who do whatever He tells them.

A Little Catch-Up

2010-01-10T09:05:00.002-06:00

The following are a few reflections offered in lieu of the normal journal entries I've been writing, since our last couple of weeks have been mostly classes in Bethlehem. Enjoy.

Sunday, 27 December 2009

DAY TWENTY-FIVE

(Feast of the Holy Family)

After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions; and all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. And when they saw him they were astonished; and his mother said to him, "Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been looking for you anxiously."
And he said to them, "How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be in my father's house?" And they did not understand the saying which he spoke to them. And he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them; and his mother kept all these things in her heart.
Luke 2:41-51

I came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled. . . Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division; for henceforth, in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against her mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.
Luke 12: 49-53

Meditating on the feast of the Holy Family, the above sayings from Luke’s Gospel may help to provide some depth to the somewhat two-dimensional portrait of the holy household that is often served up this time of year. The traditional images of Jesus, Mary and Joseph wrapped in a mutually benevolent gaze surely reveal something true about this unique home in Nazareth, but as we absorb the Gospels in the liturgy, we discover that such portraits leave out almost as much as they include. Within weeks of the child’s birth, the family is forced to flee to Egypt to avoid his murder at the hands of Herod’s soldiers. Though they eventually are able to return home and live normally, Jesus’ enigmatic sayings about his family even from a young age indicate that all is not as we might expect. What do we make of the confusion his relatives experience during his public ministry? St. Mark goes so far as to note their judgment that he was out of his mind (Mark 3:21). St. John records a gruff exchange between Jesus and his mother at Cana, when he addresses her as “woman”—the very name he will use for her again as she stands at the foot of his Cross. Jesus declares “blessed” not the womb that bore him but those who hear the word of God and keep it (Luke 11:28). And all along, Mary pondered Simeon’s mysterious words that this child that had brought her such joy would also lead to the piercing of her own heart (Luke 2:35).

Much ink has been spilled over how these sayings and stories aren’t as harsh as they sound, and I won’t attempt to rehearse them here. Yet there is some value in reflecting upon them as they stand, in all the bald force with which they first strike us. There is a sense in which these happenings are part of a long arc in which Christ seems to distance himself from his biological roots in favor of total faithfulness to the Father and his saving plan. That this is a painful process should not surprise us, but that it needs to happen at all is startling; is not the Holy Family the origin and sustenance of God’s new presence in the world? What need might there be to draw back from the homely supports to which he was entrusted as an infant?

The Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar offered an answer to this question, one that “suspends its judgment” on the Holy Family until the celebration of a subsequent feast, the Solemnity of the Mother of God on the first of the year. I’ll get into his answer more directly on the entry for that day (one week from now), but it’s worth spending a little time in contemplation of Son, Mother, and foster father. Von Balthasar sums up the more troubling side of the Holy Family as an alliance with Jesus’ mission:

The Virgin, harboring a mystery under her heart, remains in profound solitude, in a silence that almost causes the perplexed Joseph to despair. Incarnation of God means condescension, abesement, and, because we are sinners, humiliation. And he already draws his Mother into these humiliations. Where did she get this child? People must have talked at the time, and they probably never stopped. It must have been a sorry state of affairs if Joseph could find no better way out that to divorce his bride quietly. God’s humanism at once begins drastically. Those whose lives God enters, those who enter into his, are not protected. They have to go along into a suspicion and ambiguity they cannot talk their way out of. And the ambiguity will only get worse, until, at the Cross, the Mother will get to see what her ‘Yes’ has caused, and will have to hear the vitriolic ridicule to which the Son is forced to listen.

In other words, Jesus is drawing his family (and Mary above all) into the very same darkness and abandonment that he voiced on the Cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

I was struck by this during a recent talk on Christian-Muslim relations. The cultural situation here is far different from that of the United States; whereas we are accustomed to the thought of someone converting from one religion to another, here such things are simply not done. One’s faith community is everything—religious, yes, but also familial, social, and protective. To declare belief in a religion other than the one into which one is born is not simply to reject the religion, but to reject one’s community, one’s family, and all the support and guidance it provides. Hence, conversion means death—in the sense that a Christian who becomes a Muslim or vice versa ceases to exist in the hearts of their loved ones and the community. They are no longer welcome in the home. Their name is not even to be spoken.

Not surprisingly, this means very few people choose to change their beliefs from those of their upbringing. To us in the West, this seems highly coercive—even cruel. Nevertheless, the same pressures exist in our own land, though they are more subtle. The dramatic intensification of these pressures in the Middle Eastern culture highlight the real heroism it requires to “leave everything” and “follow the Lamb wherever he goes”, even in our own cultural milieu. The confusion and difficulty Mary and Joseph experienced inspire and encourage us to surrender to Christ the tensions in our own families, tensions that arise on account of our own faith and that of our loved ones. The Holy Family gives us reason to believe that the difficulties we experience are, in some mysterious way, meant to contribute to the mission of us all to pursue God’s purposes in the world. And so we must hear Jesus words anew:

If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple (Luke 14:26).

Friday, 1 Jan 2010

DAY THIRTY

(Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God)

Looking back to the feast of the Holy Family, and the periodically troubling relationship between Jesus and his parents, we can continue following the thread we picked up there to its final destination. Hans Urs von Balthasar focused intently upon this theme of the Gospels, and because all of Jesus’ family but Mary have disappeared at the end of his life, it is natural that Balthasar’s attention alights almost exclusively on this woman who figured so significantly at the Gospel’s beginning. Clearly, her significance does not fade. We pondered with her the mysterious prophecy of Simeon; we puzzled over Jesus’ almost casual dismissal of his parents’ concern over his disappearance for three days in Jerusalem. We accompanied her on the walk home after Jesus’ bewildering refusal to receive her and his other relatives during his public ministry. What are we to make of these?

“The sword gnaws at her soul; she feels as if bereft of her inmost self, as if the point of her life has been driven away. Her faith, which at the beginning received so many sensible confirmations, is plunged into a dark night. It is as if the Son, who sends her no news about what he is doing, has run away from her, yet she cannot simply let him go away: she has to accompany him, full of dread, in her night of faith. . .”

We have made a strange discovery: the source of Mary’s torment, first enunciated by Simeon, has paradoxically been revealed as the very son she had carried so joyfully to the Temple! Jesus himself is the first to turn a sword against her heart.

Christ gave himself up for the Church, “that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” (Eph 5.26-7). The Church in its purest kernel and most exalted radiance was present at the Annunciation, but it is a beginning as much as it is a culmination—the beginning of the lifelong process by which the singular graces of her mission might be brought to bear fruit a hundred-fold. And so, as Balthasar concludes, our bewilderment at her apparent mistreatment by her Son subsides into a calm and trusting confidence that the Lord knows what he is about:

“How else would she have become ready to stand by the Cross, where not only her Son’s earthly failure, but also his abandonment by the God who sends him, is revealed? She must finally say Yes to this, too, because she consented a priori to her child’s whole destiny. . . Only thus does she become inwardly ready to take on ecclesial motherhood toward all of Jesus’ new brothers and sisters."

A Brief Announcement From Our Sponsors

2010-01-01T11:30:00.001-06:00

You know, much as it pains me to say it, my life over the last few weeks could be a laptop ad. String together a few sequences of my computer use, slap some kind of "Empowering You To Be You" slogan on there, and call it good. This battered old IBM Thinkpad given to me by one of my father's co-workers has been a thoroughly useful companion--it's come in handy for entertainment on a transatlantic flight, for taking class notes, touching up the day's photos, snagging Spanish news podcasts off the internet, playing movies while I was laid up with a cold, compiling video clips, making international phone calls for pennies a minute, researching hostels in Rome, maintaining a budget in three currencies, purchasing European rail passes, and keeping my music collection on hand when I need some peace and quiet.

Part of me says I'd be fine without it--and I certainly would--but another is very, very glad that I Can Be Me... though I had to peel off my "Friends Don't Let Friends Decapitate Infidels" sticker off the back of the LCD before making my way into a local internet cafe. All for the best, I suppose.

Day Twenty

2009-12-29T05:50:00.001-06:00

Once again, we’ve been in study mode—two classes and another session with our instructor on Islam. Illness has begun to creep in among us, laying one of us out for a couple of days, and giving others unusually deep or wheezy voices that persist far beyond the morning; thankfully, most of us have to this point stayed reasonably healthy and functional. We are gearing up for the Christmas celebration here, and it has every promise of being an exceptional year (though for many of the American-born seminarians at least, it is the first year away from home and family for Christmas).

Our sessions on Islam have been somewhat frustrating, as Islam is a notoriously difficult belief system to lie out in systematic form. Part of our learning has been to absorb the vast and varied reality of the Islamic worldview and practice, very little of which makes immediate sense to adherents of western Catholicism. Islam is by no means monolithic—much less so than Catholicism, or even Christianity; when we ask what it is that Muslims believe about this or that issue, there is very little that an introductory session can offer to plumb the many interpretations that exist. As an analogy, imagine explaining what Christians believe about salvation to a friend unfamiliar with Christian doctrine, who could no more than guess at the meaning of the words “Protestant,” “Orthodox,” and “Catholic,” and who approaches religion as a vague mixture of magic and pop psychology. In many respects, we are worlds apart.

For these and many other reasons, the discipline of being here in the Middle East is difficult to sustain. It requires a perpetual restraint against gut reactions and generalizations; to step into this world is, for many of us, a more radical transition into unknown territory than ever before, and when in unfamiliar territory, there is a temptation to resort to accustomed modes of thinking. The culture, language, history, and temperament of the land and its people are truly unique, and while there are many points of similarity, the differences can often be startlingly broad. Simply adjusting to the fact that the Qu’ran is broadcast for general consumption at tremendous volume five times a day requires special flexibility and patience for those of us accustomed to the general secular tone of the West and suburban noise ordinances.

The countdown to our departure from Bethlehem is winding down, and many of us are hitting the shops to make our purchases before taking off. The shop owners have become familiar faces in our movement about the city, and the more savvy among us have become quite adept at discovering the finest goods at the lowest prices. Many of us have saved for months, if not years, for this trip, and there are ample opportunities to acquire fitting items to commemorate our pilgrimage and enjoy for years to come. A number of us intend to acquire chalices and other liturgical goods, and all of us are accumulating many gifts for friends and family. There is a sense that it’s very possible we will only be here once, and there’s no reason to let a good opportunity pass us by.

The Mystery Beneath her Heart

2009-12-24T14:08:00.000-06:00

A merry Christmas to all. Let's approach the mystery of the Incarnation together, with a hushed attentiveness to the reality that is only beginning to unfold in the world, even now, thousands of years later. Let us consider what manner of child this is, and what sort of woman is his mother:

The Virgin, harboring a mystery under her heart, remains in profound solitude. In a silence that almost causes the perplexed Joseph to despair. Incarnation of God means condescension, abesement, and, because we are sinners, humiliation. And he already draws his Mother into these humiliations. Where did she get this child? People must have talked at the time, and they probably never stopped. It must have been a sorry state of affairs if Joseph could find no better way out that to divorce his bride quietly. God’s humanism at once begins drastically. Those whose lives God enters, those who enter into his, are not protected. They have to go along into a suspicion and ambiguity they cannot talk their way out of. And the ambiguity will only get worse, until, at the Cross, the Mother will get to see what her Yes has caused and will have to hear the vitriolic ridicule to which the Son is forced to listen.

Hans Urs von Balthasar

On behalf of your friends and family members here in Bethlehem, you are remembered here in prayer this holy night.

Humiliation Incarnate

2009-12-19T06:00:00.000-06:00

Our first “official” day here in Bethlehem began with Mass in the Grotto of the Nativity. The Grotto is nestled underneath the Greek Orthodox portion of the Basilica, which is also the most ancient portion of the complex. The entire church has been built over the stone where, it is said, Jesus was brought to light. The grotto is clearly ancient, and as one descends down the steps rounded over with the awed shuffling of countless pilgrims, the air becomes warm and thick from the vapors of the lamps burning within the small, enclosed chamber. Here and there, the sooty black stones show through the gaps in the drapery and brocades that shimmer in the light of the dim flames. The eyes adjust and begin to discern dim shapes and faces on the walls dark with age. A marble altar draped with a curtain woven of gold and silver thread sits astride the stone, and so in order to reverence the holy place as the shepherds and Magi did so long ago, the faithful literally have to prostrate themselves as they approach. Our Mass was offered just a few feet away, on an altar built beside the stone on which the manger sat.

Clearly, one of the more obvious tensions here in the Holy Land is to be found at the holy sites themselves. Aside from the conflicts over jurisdiction between the Orthodox and the Catholics of the Latin, Armenian, and Ethiopian rites, the sheer number of people who come to visit presents problems of its own. A case in point was our own Mass, offered in a space barely large enough to fit a dozen of us and a priest—yet brazen visitors, either oblivious to or apathetic towards the Mass, elbowed their way over to the manger and snapped trios of flash photographs just a foot or two from Father Lodge as he proclaimed the Gospel! The hum of chatter and the shrill commentary of tour guides can often shatter any semblance of respect or humility before the mystery, and it is difficult for many of us to feel no small exasperation over what appears to be total disregard for the sacred nature of the place. Yet in some sense, their conduct is understandable; many of them have saved up for years to accomplish their life’s dream to visit the Holy Land, and they may only have a few minutes of their whirlwind tour to dedicate to each place. They will not be stopped! It is for us, who have the tremendous privilege to contemplate these places again and again, to yield to the less fortunate.

Yet is it not just the pilgrims who behave in discouraging ways; our own Elliot was confronted by a young Orthodox priest not much older than he. Elliot had been standing by the door to block access to the grotto for the few minutes we’d be celebrating Mass; this, we had observed, was common practice on the part of other groups who had celebrated their own liturgies in the grotto in days prior. Within minutes, this young priest came swaggering in, sarcastically demanded to know who was in charge. When Elliot gestured toward the priest celebrating Mass, this young man stabbed his finger into his chest, declared that HE was in charge, and told our fellow pilgrim to get out! Rightfully feeling that argument would only exacerbate an already ridiculous situation, he (and a few others along with him) complied. Observing this petty tyrant from just a few yards away, I was all rage and shame, bewildered that such a display of playground bullying should take place not six feet from the very site to which we’d come to offer worship. Those of us here for the first time couldn’t understand it; the more experienced shrugged it off as the way things are.

Yet, in some sense, this is the very mystery we have come here to contemplate. Is it not a fitting icon of the reality of the Incarnation itself? Are we surprised that the God who descended from His throne on high submits meekly to the mistreatment we are all too ready to offer him? Does not this shoddy icon melt into a glassy mirror, disclosing to us our own irreverence, our own disobedience, our own sin?

For Your Enjoyment

2009-12-12T04:56:00.000-06:00

New images are up at my personal photoblog (A Secret of a Secret), and a new series of photojournal entries and reflections will be posted on the official seminary site (A Seminarian's Tale). Both are linked above, and will be posting continuously for the next week!

Happy Feast Day, America

2009-12-08T22:58:00.002-06:00

On the Immaculate Conception:

The two dogmatic propositions entailed by the quality of Mary’s Yes, namely her virginity and her freedom from the original sin common to all men, are wholly a function of Christology. The latter affirmation, namely, that she “was conceived immaculate”, says nothing but what is indispensable for the boundlessness of her Yes. For anyone affected in some way by original sin would be incapable of such a guileless openness to every disposition of God. Her virginity, on the other hand, guarantees a christological fact: Jesus acknowledges only one Father, the one in heaven, as his own. This becomes evident in the response he gives as a twelve-year-old child in the Temple. No man can have two fathers, as Tertullian pithily and accurately says; therefore, the mother has to be a virgin. The point of this christologically motivated virginity lies, not in an antisexual, merely bodily integrity, as if it were an end in itself, but in Mary’s motherhood; in order to be the messianic Son of God, who can have no other Father than God, she must be overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, and she must say to that overshadowing a Yes that includes her whole person, both body and soul.

Hans Urs von Balthasar
Mary: The Church at the Source

On the Ground

2009-12-06T06:45:00.000-06:00

Well, we're here, safe and sound ... a bit jetlagged, but that's nothing a couple of rest days haven't been able to fix. The connection here is slow and tenuous so photos are going to be a luxury, I think. That's not for lack of subjects, however! The city of Bethlehem is a visual feast, and the weather has been outstanding thus far, enabling us to get out and enjoy the city (and its shrines) as we please. The following is a short journal entry for our trip over. More to come!

Wednesday, 3 December 2009

The first leg of our travels has brought us safely to Zurich. I can safely say that the eight hour flight was one of the more pleasant ones I’ve ever taken. We were offered most every amenity, including real silverware for dinner—though to my chagrin, I slept through the offering of the hot facecloth right before breakfast. A lamentable disappointment. Those unable to sleep whiled away the hours with the ample in-flight entertainment; Elliot managed a pretty convincing impression of a thirteen-year-old by playing Space Invaders games for hours on end, fueling his binge with one cup of apple juice after another. A Jewish man moved to the back of the plane to offer his prayers, wrapped in a white shawl and rocking back and forth on his heels while turned to face Jerusalem.

It’s a sobering thought to recall how difficult our 8-hour journey would have been even a hundred years ago. The rapidity of global travel has erased any real concept of distance we once had. Whether dining on hot chicken and rice over Newfoundland, sipping a glass of red wine with Iceland on the horizon, or enjoying a hot roll and chilled yogurt while the English Channel sails by under the wing, there is no question that our experience is a far cry from the ever-tossing, frigid, cramped accommodations enjoyed by the passengers of yesterday. I could almost picture them, green and shivering in the hold of a ship pitched over hard to leeward in a gale, terrified that the timbers would give way with each thudding wave that smashed into the bow. Friends, I very nearly pitied them as I spread strawberry jam onto the warm croissant in my lap and took a leisurely sip of hot, black coffee. The collective and sustained efforts of aviators, engineers, navigators, and entrepreneurs has whittled down the grueling, even life-threatening character of a transatlantic voyage to one night of mild discomfort offset by the consolation of any number of amenities at hand to keep the mind off the dreadful inconvenience of it all. There are days when I wonder if we wouldn’t be better off without the phenomenally advanced technology of our day, with all its tendencies to numb our souls and distract our consciences. Today was not one of those days.

Zurich is tidy and quaint, but as one of my fellow pilgrims put it, I’ve only got so much pilgrim juice in me, and there’s no sense in handing it out indiscriminately. It’s naptime at our hotel, a nice hot shower before dinner, then back on the plane this evening to Tel Aviv! Bethlehem, here we come.

On Pilgrimage

2009-11-30T23:35:00.005-06:00

I suppose you've noticed things are a bit different on the blog here. The changes are, in case you haven't guessed, meant to reflect my "pilgrim" status over the next three months. I hope you'll be back to visit soon, as I'll be making regular journal entries along with some thoughtful and well-crafted photos meant to emphasize quality and not quantity. Six other seminarians will also be posting journal entries and photos on the Official Seminary Journal, the link to which can be found above ("The Seminarian's Tale"). We're leaving on Wednesday, so good stuff will soon be forthcoming!

In the meanwhile, to tide you over until our first entry, I thought I'd share a little piece of artwork recently commissioned for a priest friend of ours. It's a bookplate, designed to be pasted into the inside front cover of a book, and identifies the owner in a distinctive way. These were all the rage back in the day, but as we hold our books cheap these days, this sort of investment hasn't caught on.

However, the fellow in question is quite the learned man, and is an earnest lender of books. What better gift than a bookplate? So we thought, and indeed it turned out better than I'd hoped. The very talented Matthew Alderman, a recent graduate of Notre Dame architecture, designed a custom drawing that we had printed using offset lithography (the same process used to print books).

The drawing is of Bishop Frederic Baraga, the first bishop of our friend's diocese. He was known as the "snowshoe priest" during his years of working with the trappers and natives, slogging from village to village with a seemingly indefatigable fervor. In his right hand, he holds a book entitled "Kije-Manito o Masinaigan," which if you knew Chippewa, you'd be able to translate as "The Holy Book of God," i.e. the Bible; you see, Baraga wrote the first grammar of the Chippewa language (which, interestingly enough, I was able to use to look up the Chippewa word for Bible... thanks GoogleBooks!). The fleur-de-lis in the moon symbolizes the Mother of God, to whom Baraga had dedicated the very first church he christened in the territory, according to a vow he'd made years before. The lily is also a common symbol of purity, and has been used in iconography for St. Aloysius Gonzaga, patron saint of youth as well as of the small Salvadoran village in which our friend served for three years before entering the seminary. The national bird of El Salvador, the torogóz, is reclining at the foot of the left stave, and a small hare is poking its head up above the roof (the Salvadoran nickname for the man was "el conejo").

But the finest detail is hidden to the untutored eye. This newly ordained priest had done a pilgrimage following in the footsteps of the saintly bishop, tracing a path from the first Mass offered in the mission to his tomb in the diocesan cathedral. You'll notice in the snow behind Baraga are footprints leading to the treeline. It might be hard to see, but there's a silhouette of a man standing in an opening in the trees, heading out to "follow in the footsteps" of the founding bishop of his diocese. All in all, a rich symbolic icon of the man we know, and hopefully an encouragement to hold fast to his priestly calling and pursue excellence through the intercession of his shepherd's predecessor!

Thoughts on Literature, Catholic and Otherwise

2009-11-23T17:37:00.001-06:00

Recently, a discussion among alumni of my undergraduate institution prompted some thoughts about how Catholic literature has affected us and our maturation in the faith. The following are my comments as they were sent out to the group.

As to how Catholic writing has influenced me, my instinct is to approach it from my current situation as a seminarian immersed in theological study. While on vacation—as I am now—my impulse is to set aside the often speculative and abstract world of theology in favor of the particular and concrete. My leisure time is characterized by an immersion in narrative. While on some level I see this as "recreation," in the sense that it recharges me to return to my studies with renewed enthusiasm, there is a fundamentally more important reason that I am drawn to fiction (especially the kind of epic fiction that takes up a person's story from life till death): it is an enfleshment of the beauty, goodness, and truth that is presented through academic study.
I find that stepping into a world where human persons are treated from a Catholic point of view renews my confidence that pressing into theology deeply is no obstacle to reality, but a doorway to it. Given the fact that so much of priesthood is the prophetic interpretation of the presence of God's grace in the lives of people who on some level or another are blind to it, being able to take up the language and imagery of the best of Catholic fiction would enable the priest to present that perspective in a convicted way. As one of my teachers puts it, the persuasiveness of religious language is derived from the conviction with which it is spoken and lived; anything that contributes to my ability to sustain and charm the lives of others (in the most positive, grace-filled sense of those words) should be an important part of my own life.

There was a time when I really wanted to study fiction, to read and write about it—I wrote my thesis on War and Peace. And the time I spend thinking and writing about fiction is very rewarding, but on the whole I've shifted to an attitude of enjoyment rather than intellectual intentionality. Not an unreflective, visceral enjoyment, but one that is ordered to the thing itself and not to what has been said about or in response to it. In a way, that has let fiction be fiction again, and allowed me to enter into it on its own terms rather than from an a priori system that has already determined what stepping into this author's world is to be and to mean—thereby sapping it of the sources of its own vitality and beauty.

Life hands us the raw material of our experience, but it's up to us to discover its meaning. Fiction is like experience with the meaning infused in such a way that the receptive reader can appropriate it—discover it—more readily. Good literature is something like a "school of life" in which we are trained in the proper ways of interpretation of our experience. Wasn't it Henry James who said that the morality of a piece of fiction depended on the amount of "felt life" in it? That's something like what I'm getting at—to "feel" life is to be sensitive to the depth of reality that impinges upon us at every moment. Catholic authors write from the perspective that this fundamental reality to which we are sensitive is God, and not just any version of Him, but a personal being that has acted and continues to act in the incarnate Word to address our deepest human need. That doesn't mean everything valuable in literature has to be explicitly related to a deeper religious faith, but that it must be true to reality, true to life. That includes true depictions of the nature of sin as well as of faith, goodness, and life well lived. I am reminded of the words of a Dominican by the name of Gregory Vann around the 1950s, I believe:

Again and again a great book or film or painting will be denounced as immoral while the mawkish, the moronic, the aesthetically meretricious will be extolled because its message is regarded as edifying or at least safe. In the end those who are docile to this sort of guidance acquire an affinity not with what is good and real but what is bad and false, not with genuineness and integrity but with the debased and ignoble. And the element of falsity in particular needs to be stressed: a novel, play, or film which communicates a profound insight into the nature of the church will be denounced because it contains a 'disedifying' portrayal of a priest; another book or film on a similar theme will be praised because it makes everything in the ecclesiastical garden lovely, even though this is a falsehood and the sentimentalized picture of religion in general is a distortion and falsification of the very stuff of religion. Grace builds on and in nature; it is no service to religion, and no part of prudence, to turn potentially mature human beings into morons, and we cannot claim to serve and worship truth if we acquiesce in or encourage the distortion or falsification of truth....

It's a bit strong, and may come across as haughty and snobbish, but I find I agree with his fundamental point. Catholics are more free to write the truth as they see it because, at bottom, it is the Word of Truth they serve.

For some better perspectives, I would highly recommend reading Flannery O'Connor's letters and essays. They're available in the Library of America edition of her novels, as well as an independent volume I think is entitled "Mystery and manners". Sometimes reading what she says about her writing is more fascinating than her writing itself. She carried on a number of different conversations with folks on any number of different subjects, including people who caught wind of her Catholicism and wrote asking for an account of the hope that was in her. A good introduction to her extra-literary endeavors is the "Modern Spiritual Masters" volume dedicated to her (though she would have found that title laughable).

Those are my thoughts, disorganized and vague though they be. That's what a spontaneous impulse to write on an overcast Sunday afternoon will do to you .... my, I do enjoy my vacations.

Nothing To See Here

2009-11-21T12:57:00.002-06:00

Human beings are weird.

Last night I was walking back to the parking garage after a huge gathering for Catholic youth at the Sprint Center in downtown KC, MO. 18,000 high school students packed into a dome right in the middle of the up-and-coming, revitalized downtown, with another several thousand connected through video link over at the convention center down the street. They were caught up in a frenzy of light shows, music, dance-skits, and a pretty stirring talk on chastity by Jason Evert and his wife. There were some pretty good points made about Christian virtue, modesty, and the hypersexualization of our culture, in such a way that they really did get across.

That made the recent article in the NYT on the androgynous trends in clothing all the more interesting. The most interesting comment being:

As if in this world one could EVER find a place in which to render oneself sexually neutral. There was a time when dressing as a child might have done that; now, it's a fixture of the porn industry that the women are to appear as young as possible. Few would argue that the line between "adult entertainment" and "abuse" is clear anymore.

Mingling men’s and women’s clothing, others argue, is like waving a flag of neutrality. “It’s a way of breaking down sexualized relationships, of getting people to relax,” said Piper Marshall, 24, who is an assistant art curator at the Swiss Institute in Manhattan. “I work with lots of male artists,” she added. “It’s important to find a common ground.”

The question becomes, when sex is everywhere, where do we go to hide?

Shucks, that Shore is Purty

2009-11-11T16:22:00.001-06:00

He'd ride sometimes clear to the upper end of the laguna before the horse would even stop trembling and he spoke constantly to it in spanish in phrases almost biblical repeating again and again the strictures of a yet untabled law. Soy comandante de las yeguas, he would say, soy y yo sólo. Sin la caridad de estas manos no tengas nada. Ni comida ni agua ni hijos. Soy yo que traigo las yeguas de las montañas, las yeguas jóvenes, las yeguas salvajes y ardientes. While inside the vaulting of the ribs between his knees the darkly meated heart pumped of who's will and the blood pulsed and the bowels shifted in their massive blue convolutions of who's will and the stout thighbones and the knee and cannon and the tendons like flaxen hawsers that drew and flexed and drew and flexed at their articulations and of who's will all sheathed and muffled in the flesh and the hooves that stove wells in the morning groundmist and the head turning side to side and the great slavering keyboard of his teeth and the hot globes of his eyes where the world burned.

From Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses

New Avenues of Creativity

2009-11-01T11:10:00.006-06:00

In preparation for our class pilgrimage to the Holy Land, I'm starting up a photojournal in the hopes of offering a daily image of some of the people and places we're privileged to visit during our 10 weeks there. In years past, most of the offerings have been a chronicle of "first-we-went-here-and-saw-this-then-we-went-somewhere-else-and-saw-some-other-cool-holy-stuff," so it's my hope to offer more of a creative window into the places we visit and our experience of them. Of course, the more I get to know my classmates, the more fascinated with their stories I've become, so you can expect to see some portraiture as well.

One image per day with a short entry, reflection, or commentary to accompany it seems the best way to accomplish my goal. The images I've already posted on the photoblog aren't exactly stunning, but part of this is meant to be a discipline and apprenticeship into the photographic craft. To this end, your comments, suggestions, and feedback would be much appreciated. As was noted in the recent Brothers Bloom:

A photograph is a secret of a secret. The more it shows, the less you know.

I'll continue cross-posting on this blog for those of you that are following it, but feel free to bookmark the photoblog directly. You can find it at the link below.

http://upyetnotnorth.aminus3.com/

We Want To Be Swarms

2009-10-30T09:11:00.005-05:00

Image Journal runs a good article every once in a while. Their latest, a short look at Rene Girard, is stupendous.

Contrary to the going rhetoric of the day, we don’t really want to be individuals. We want to be swarms.

Read the rest ...

A Secret of a Secret

2009-10-27T20:12:00.003-05:00

At Last, The Cavalry

2009-10-10T16:25:00.006-05:00

Senator Jim DeMint, member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has traveled down to Honduras and seen through the fog of propaganda and outright lies that have cast the "de facto" government of that country as just one more regime of rabid, power-hungry usurpers and thugs in the long tradition of Central American fascists (New York Times). Besides the 400 or so Venezuelans imported in by Chavez to agitate in favor of restoring his stooge, it appears as if the Senator encountered only one person who actually supports the treasonous ex-president:

Obama's ambassador to Honduras, Hugo Llorens.

This is, of course, in direct opposition to the legal investigation conducted by a senior legal analyst of the Library of Congress in August--AUGUST, as in two MONTHS ago--which concluded that what has taken place there is absolutely, completely, undeniably 100% legal.

Senator DeMint's article is worth reading, and thanks be to God that somebody in the U.S. government has gotten to the bottom of this insanity. Here's hoping that something reasonable will be done to put the world's unreasonable treatment of this loyal ally of ours to an end.

Greatest Show on Earth

2009-10-09T17:38:00.004-05:00

It's nice to see at least some finer distinctions being made in the popular culture (even as they're crafted in response to the precisionless rhetoric of that same culture). A great example of this is the review of Richard Dawkins' new book, written as a magnum opus of evolutionary argument, over at the Grey Lady:

Dawkins is aware that evolution is commonly called a theory but deems “theory” too wishy-washy a term because it connotes the idea of hypothesis. Evolution, in Dawkins’s view, is a concept as bulletproof as a mathematical theorem, even though it can’t be proved by rigorous logical proofs. He seems to have little appreciation for the cognitive structure of science. Philosophers of science, who are the arbiters of such issues, say science consists largely of facts, laws and theories. The facts are the facts, the laws summarize the regularities in the facts, and the theories explain the laws. Evolution can fall into only one of these categories, and it’s a theory.

Read the rest here.

Fake Media Picking Up The Slack

2009-09-27T18:27:00.004-05:00

So I'm just now catching on to this ACORN scandal, but I don't watch the news much anyway-- that I'm not up on the latest horror is no surprise. Apparently the mainstream news channels aren't exactly jumping on this. Jon Stewart (along with the rest of the world) seems to be a little frustrated:

(Head's up, PG-13)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

The Audacity of Hos

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Healthcare Protests

I do have a little more respect for Jon Stewart, now. But what's with the people in the studio? They aren't laughing at any of the jokes. Makes you wonder who goes to these things.

After my summer in El Salvador listening to news outlets spreading all manner of ridiculous slander about the nonexistent "coup" in Honduras and serving as little more than a propaganda outlet for ChavezWorld, there's no question in my mind that we are not up against incompetence here ... it's a premeditated, direct assault on the truth.

All in the name of doing the right thing, of course.

NPH Short

2009-09-19T19:59:00.005-05:00

During my summer at NPH, I often asked myself if I was putting undue pressure on the kids by carrying my camera around. Other than the fact that they consistently bombarded me with requests for a photo, and then a viewing of the photo, and then another shot to fix what they didn't like about the first one, I did wonder if the camera was serving more as a barrier than a window.

Then, one afternoon, I just turned it on. And this is what I got.

Excerpts From the Diary of an Orphan in Training - Part Three

2009-09-17T18:12:00.011-05:00

Three weeks after returning to the States, the process of sifting and sorting my experiences has gotten fully under way. Between tackling the organization of teen weeks’ worth of photos and video footage I’d accumulated, reuniting with friends who have lived at and understood NPH El Salvador, and the almost agonizing solitude of a 5-day silent retreat, those kids have been almost constantly on my mind. The frustration of being so far away was worst when reviewing the videos I’d taken of Carmen, the little girl I’d decided to sponsor; I’d never, ever grown so attached to a baby as I did to her. A number of times I simply had to stop watching, so intense was the desire to simply be there as she struggled to stand up or walk. They tell me that she’s already running about Casa Niño Jesús on her own; my insides twisted up when I thought of how much she’ll have grown by the next time I see her, and each day how much I am missing. I felt like a father poring over the few mementos of his young family he had to console himself in his time away.

As a Catholic seminarian contemplating a life of celibate commitment, such sentiments may seem out of place, but a summer spent with this gran familia could not have done more for me to put in perspective the meaning of spiritual fatherhood. In spite of the limited time commitment I was able to make, I sensed an interior freedom to commit emotional energy to the pequeños in a way that lined up with the sorts of exterior commitments I was (and am) preparing to make. Their eagerness and receptivity to the meager affection I had to share depleted my reserves even as they drew forth more and more in ways that, upon reflection, surprise me.

Yet I experienced another dimension of this relationship through the receptivity that was, in a real sense, forced upon me by the inability to communicate fluently. The outlets through which I’d presumed I’d be able to “give” were depleted rather quickly; it wasn’t long before I sensed that I didn’t have much to offer to this flourishing little community. With time, it was almost as if by allowing them to take a genuine interest in me—and demonstrating to them that I appreciated that interest—that something in them was satisfied.

The clearest case of this was a young man, only 14, who arrived at NPH with his three younger siblings not too long after I did. He entertained the other children in the clinic by roughing up his younger brothers, who were almost as big as he was, with preposterous wrestling moves and holds, flying leaps and whatever the Salvadoran equivalent to “cry uncle!” would have been. Throughout the summer, we’d cross paths often, and it was always a project to keep up with his rapid and slangy Spanish. One evening in the clinic, we got a little wild (I think the nursing staff was always too polite to chew me out for winding the kids up right before bed) and he fell on his rear after I boosted him up into the air for the last big jump of the night (“seriously, now, this is the last one”). More out of embarrassment than pain, he crawled under the bed like a whipped animal and refused to come out. For a long time after that, I found it hard to believe he was as old as he said he was.

The last day I had to spend in the clinic was the Sunday before I left. I spent the whole afternoon playing with the kids and letting them run around and take pictures with my camera. My young friend was there again with a broken arm—he had a knack for having too much fun. While I was off in another corner of the room, he got one of the others to hold the camera and recorded a short goodbye message to me. I curse the microphone on that camera that picked up every single decibel of background noise while muddling his already rapid words into a slurry of vowels, but in a way, everything that needed to be communicated was present on his face. In his short adios I saw the man within the boy—direct, earnest, and self-confident enough to communicate his affection and gratitude without embarrassment or awkwardness. It is an ironic gift that the most lively token of my friendship with a young man I habitually regarded as a child is a 25-second glimpse of the man who, with the help of NPH, he is one day to become.

Father Wasson was known to have said, “The most important thing is that my children practice charity, because if they love, they will be loved.” Strange as it may seem to say it, my only boast is that I was a recipient of the love of these young men, women, and children—and that by God’s gift, they were better for it. What a strange, wonderful, storybook place this is, where the famous paradox of St. Francis stands on its head: it is in receiving that we give.