Bearing Fruit

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.

The Desk Chair Review of Books

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

Through the Lattice

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.

Stop That Cameraman … He’s Swiped My Soul

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

Day Sixty-Five

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.
 

Humiliation Incarnate

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? 

The Desk Chair Review of Books, continued

The Christian State of Life
by Father Hans Urs von Balthasar

May I please begin this review by saying that The Christian State of Life should be required reading for every vocation director, director of seminarians, and spiritual director involved in helping others to discern God's call. I say this not because it offers practical advice on making the choice (there are plenty of perspectives on this already) but because of the grand, sweeping vision of the whole of Christian life that it presents. It might be called a work of "vocational theology," if such a term existed, one which is deeply immersed in the Scriptures (especially the Gospels) and the unique re-presentation of the longstanding mystical tradition presented by St. Ignatius of Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises. If the subject is of interest to you in the least, I would get ahold of a copy from the library (they're hard to find right now, as Ignatius Press is apparently between printings) and read the first sixty and the last forty pages. If they whet your appetite, start again from the beginning and take notes as you go—it's helpful for keeping track of where he is in the overall structure of the work.

Balthasar begins with a treatment of "love in the abstract," a long catalogue of the qualities of love as it is in itself and not as human persons are capable of it. The author reveals himself here as a disciple of the mystics, most especially Bernard. The pages read like a gloss on Bernard's sermon on love, in which he writes,

Love is sufficient of itself, it gives pleasure by itself and because of itself. It is its own merit, its own reward. Love looks for no cause outside itself, no effect beyond itself. Its profit lies in its practice. I love because I love, I love that I may love.

Balthasar is infused with the same intoxicating fervor of the immensity of love, and he takes utterly seriously the commandment to love the Lord with all one's mind, heart, and strength. One has the sense here of being in touch with the Love that is the source of all things, and it's hard not to be drawn into such contemplative intensity. This passage constitutes a real examination of conscience for the reader, and certain phrases ring out with clarity many weeks later: "Love does not ask what must be done, but what can be done; the first is not a question that love asks."

The states in life are rooted in God's original call for humanity to be in relationship with him through loving obedience, generous poverty, and fecund purity. This is the state of our first parents. Balthasar treats the "original state" with the sort of naivete (if one can call it that) of a practiced exegete who has come full circle to the text once again by way of the many insights of scholarship; he approaches Scripture with a refreshing straightforwardness that unlocks the secrets of Scripture not as a critical examiner but a disciple. With this method, he dives into the Scriptural accounts of the creation and fall in order to shed light on the redemption and the Church as the continuation of Christ's mission.

Balthasar then examines minutely Christ's own "state of life" and that of his mother in order to demonstrate how the present possibilities for the Christian life are rooted in their one "stand" in the Father's will. These sections draw on Balthasar's Trinitarian and Christological theology, subjects few of us have the knowledge to master, but they nonetheless place the life of discipleship firmly within the context of the Trinitarian life and the whole economy of salvation. (This subject was the material for my term paper, one of the most difficult and rewarding papers I've written so far, and I would be glad to share it with anyone who's interested in looking more closely at the subject.)

After a lengthy examination of the states of election and the secular state (i.e. the state of the vows and the ordinary "lay" state) and their relationship to one another, Balthasar takes a close look at the ministerial priesthood and where it fits within this whole economy. I can say very little about this, as my research forced me to put my time in elsewhere, but suffice to say I will be returning to it in the very near future to explore his insights. What is most intriguing is what he does with the concept of priestly service as one of representation and sacrifice; it reaches its perfection, of course, in Christ, but for the reason that here priest and victim are one. Balthasar concludes from this that the most perfect sacrifice (and therefore the sacrifice Jesus himself offered) is the one in which one surrenders even the consciousness of love in the performance of it; everything one does, then, becomes the impartial performance of a purely formal, external act. Some of his most stirring words are to be found in this section (though I may be partial to the subject). Particularly notable is the justification for the Church's authority, which Balthasar perceives to be constituted by the very unworthiness of those who exercise it:

No human way of life is ever totally adequate to the greatness of the divine mission conferred with the priestly office. For how can any human person be worthy to impart the word 0f God? How can he be permitted to dispense the grace of God, to say in the name of God's Son: 'This is my body' or 'Your sins are forgiven you', to bind and loose in such a manner that his action is ratified in heaven? Only the consciousness of an incurable unworthiness that reaches to the very depths of his being can be the halting response to the call to such a ministry. This is true even if the one so called strives in duty and in gratitude to let his whole being be re-formed in accordance with the ministry bestowed on him by God himself. This mark of absolute imparity between person and office is the beginning and end of the Church's authority. It helps him who is charged with the office to bear it and him who must obey it to look beyond the person and even the weakness of the minister to the divine character of what he administers.

The final section of the book is a treatment of the nature of the "call" itself, its recognition, and the possibility to reject or accept it in freedom. Other commentators, based on a more precise reading of Balthasar than my own, would quality some of his harsh language regarding the need to follow one's vocation; I defer to that judgment as a whole, with the qualification that such incentives (exaggerated as they may be) are necessary for a generation of Catholics largely ambivalent to the question of radical discipleship. The lack of commitment to forms of religious life and the ministerial priesthood—and even to the married state—would suggest that among the many other factors that undermine readiness to "follow the Lamb wherever he goes", the lack of insistence by our pastors that vocational discernment is a necessity for every single Christian is one of the most disheartening. The last fifteen pages of Christian State of Life will certainly make you take a serious look at your own discernment!

On the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica

For our homiletics class, I prepared and delivered this homily to my seminarian brothers this past week. I've touched it up a bit here and there but it's substantially the same as it was delivered. Being that the Feast of the Dedication of the Cathedral Church of the Bishop of Rome doesn't exactly speak to a whole lot of people, I tried to work in the significance of this event for the history of the Church.

As to how it was received: my professor said that the greatest thing about my reflection on this gospel passage was that I'd written a paper on it. He then said the worst thing about it was that I'd written a paper on it. What can I say ...

_______________________________________

Jesus' words in today’s Gospel were used to charge Jesus at his trial. They are dangerous words. To the Jews of the time, they could be explained away as the ranting of a deluded maniac at best; at worst, they were treason and blasphemy deserving the penalty of death.

This, of course, is a very different sort of understanding than the usual one. We usually hear it described as the exercise of righteous anger. Jesus, they say, was correcting the sinful use of the sacred precincts of the temple for transacting business, and the Jews were just steamed because he called them out on their failure to reverence the sacred.

Well, not exactly. Since this event took place near Passover, there were literally tens of thousands of pilgrims coming to the Temple to participate in this feast, and there was simply no way each of them could bring their own lamb or kid to sacrifice all the way from home. It would have made an already chaotic situation unbearably messy. So, in order to fulfill their religious obligation, they had to purchase animals on site. And they had to pay the Temple tax, but they couldn’t use coins with the image of Caesar—so they needed to change their money into a currency that could be used for sacred purposes. There was a suitable place ready-made to provide for these needs already—the huge plaza known as the Temple Mount, recently completed under the patronage of Herod (the “46 years” it took to build the “Temple” actually refer to this architectural modification to the Temple building itself).

So what was Jesus getting at if this wasn’t about shoveling manure next to the Temple?

Contrary to what we often hear, this incident should not be referred to as the “Cleansing of the Temple” but the “Abrogation (or Rejection) of the Temple.” The words that accompany Jesus’ actions explain why this is. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” What the Jews do not understand, but which the later Resurrection fully clarifies, is that Jesus is speaking “of the temple of his body.” In effect, John is saying that Jesus puts his own person on par with the Temple; indeed, he’s going even further than that: he himself makes the Temple obsolete. He is now the definitive dwelling place of God among men. Jesus’ Resurrection passes judgment on the Temple and its rituals. It declares that HE is the full revelation of the Father’s love to the world, NOT the Temple.

You can understand why the earlier Gospel writers didn’t put this claim on the lips of Jesus himself, but phrased it as a charge by his accusers during his trial. It didn’t exactly contribute to Jewish-Christian relations! Only John attributes them to Jesus himself—after a healthy distance between Jews and Christians had come about some decades after the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70.

We read in the seventh chapter of the Acts of the Apostles that the elders and the scribes brought charges against St. Stephen for “speaking blasphemous words against Moses and God,” and for constantly “saying things against this holy place [i.e. the Temple] and the law [i.e. the Torah].” For they had heard him claim that “this Jesus the Nazorean will destroy this place and change the customs that Moses handed down to us.”

These ideas weren’t incidental to the Gospel; they were on the lips of our savior and the first martyr within hours of their deaths. They were of such importance that they clearly found their way into the Church’s proclamation almost immediately.

So those early Jewish converts to Christianity knew the radical decision it took to follow Jesus. Everything had made sense until this Jesus guy had come along. Within a few decades of the Resurrection, Christians and Jews no longer worshipped together. Family members were set against each other by their decision to resist or join this new way of faith. Jews were worshipping side by side with Gentiles. Everything was new. Faithful Jews despised them; the Jewish authorities persecuted, imprisoned, and killed them, thinking they were rendering service to God. Converts from Judaism to Christianity were no longer covered under the legal allowance for religions older than Rome, because Christianity was considered a new religion—and so the Romans could legally persecute them as well. And for all practical purposes it was like they had broken with the thousand years of tradition that stretched from Moses to Judas Maccabeus. These Jewish convents must have asked themselves again and again, “what in God’s name are we doing?”

Fast forward two hundred and fifty years to the dedication of the church of St. John Lateran. Things couldn’t look more different. Christianity isn’t being persecuted and reviled because the emperor, Constantine, has become a Christian. Sixty years after that, Christianity would be the official religion of the entire empire. In just a few hundred years, this despised and persecuted religion had flooded the Roman Empire.

Imagine the joy of the Christian people on receiving the news that what had been withheld from them for so long was finally being granted. It was the granting of a wish soaked in the blood of the countless martyrs, known and unknown, throughout the hundreds of years of Christian existence. If they had been at a loss for words, they might have prayed with today’s Psalm:

The Lord of hosts is with us;
our stronghold is the God of Jacob.
Come! Behold the deeds of the Lord,
the astounding things he has wrought on earth.

For us, the basilica of St. John Lateran stands as a reminder of their joy. It’s easy to lose sight of this memory underneath the many layers of meaning this church has acquired in the 1700 years of its existence. We have to hold fast to its meaning for us as a monument to the faith and radical commitment of all those who staked everything on Jesus’ promise that the gates of hell would not prevail against his Church.

And what fueled this faith? What was the source of their commitment? It was what came to mind every time they asked that question, “what in God’s name are we doing?” It was the conviction that each disciple had to follow his crucified master. They knew that if they were to be the dwelling place of God on earth, the Temple of the Lord, they had to be chiseled, and shaped, and smoothed in order to be fitted into their appointed places within this Temple. They were living stones willing to undergo the process of transformation, as the Scriptures encouraged them:

Come to him, to that living stone, rejected by men but in God's sight chosen and precious; and like living stones be yourselves built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

1 Peter 2:4-5

While for some this meant heroic acts of generous, self-sacrificing love, for the ordinary people of the time it simply meant having an extraordinary love for God and neighbor.

So it’s very appropriate that this feast day follows only a week after the celebration of All Saints. It is another reminder that we have inherited absolutely everything we need to be extraordinary in love. Are we making use of that inheritance, or do we behave like spoiled children who are ungrateful when every need has been provided for them?

The seminary should be what the Christian community could be. There are all sorts of men here that constantly inspire me with their curiosity, their enthusiasm, and their conviction. Seek those men out. Befriend them. Try to be that kind of man for your brothers. Allow God to stretch your desire for his kingdom. Believe with every fiber of your being that the Holy Spirit is here, now, speaking to you in the Scriptures, giving you desires for faithfulness and glory, of which you had never dreamed? Are you willing to desire things that because of your weakness are so impossible that they become a manifestation of God’s power in the world?

There will come a time when our posterity will think upon us as we think upon our own fathers in the faith. What will the Christian people yet to come say about us? Will they remember our extraordinary love? Will they remember and rejoice over the revelation of God’s power that took place through our weakness? Will they be glad that we weren’t content to rest on our laurels and live off our savings? Will they recognize that we didn’t float with the current and allow the secular humanist agenda to compromise the Gospel? Will the Church flourish on account of our faithfulness?

We are standing on the shoulders of giants. And if we don’t love more than most, if we’re not even able to do the little things with great love, we have to ask ourselves:

What excuse do we have?

The Desk Chair Review of Books, Continued

The Autobiography of St. Margaret Mary

I'll just come right out and say it: this book is disturbing. I'm not sure how else to sum up the reaction I have to this autobiography, though it is "offensive to pious ears" (as the theological notes would put it). Allow me to qualify this assessment: "disturbing" can be said in many ways. It is certainly disturbing on the level of spectacle; the saint performs some outrageous penances to overcome her sensitive nature, one of which was struck from the record as unfit to mention. Yet her story also stirs up something in me that justly accuses me of complacency, of coldness to the love of God and the unfathomable desire of the Sacred Heart to unite humanity to itself. I believe Margaret Mary is a saint and is now enjoying the fruits of reward tilled by a lifetime of confusion and suffering that perpetually conformed her to her suffering savior, but part of me wants to hold back from completely ratifying it as worthy of general consumption. Perhaps Pope St. Gregory the Great's adage applies here:

Those things are ours that we love in others, even if we cannot imitate them, and what is loved in ourselves becomes the possession of those who love it. Therefore, let the envious consider the power of charity, which gives us credit for the results of another person's work, without any effort on our part.

This "bond of charity," perhaps, is what one must keep in mind when hearing St. Margaret Mary describe the suffering she endured (and sought) in her all-consuming pursuit of perfection at the hands of her Lord.

Now, that being said, in the judgment of the Church, this woman is the recipient of private visitations that have been ratified by popes. My concern here is articulated best by a short piece on self-love by then Cardinal Ratzinger in a little book I highly recommend: The Yes of Jesus Christ. The relevant excerpt:

Man—every man and woman—is called to salvation. He is willed and loved by God, and his highest task is to respond to this love. He must not hate what God loves. He must not destroy what is destined for eternity. To be called to the love of God is to have a vocation for happiness. To become happy is a ‘duty’ that is just as human and natural as it is supernatural. When Jesus talks of self-denial, of losing one’s own life and so on, he is showing the way of proper self-affirmation (‘self-love’), something that always demands opening oneself, transcending oneself. But this necessity of going beyond oneself, of leaving oneself behind, does not exclude genuine self-affirmation. Quite the contrary: it is the way of finding oneself and ‘loving’ oneself. When forty years ago I read for the first time Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest the last words of this suffering soul made an indelible impression on me: it is not difficult to hate oneself; the grace of all graces would however be to love oneself as a member of the Body of Christ...

The realism of this statement is obvious. There are many people who live in conflict with themselves. This aversion to oneself, this inability to accept oneself and to be reconciled with oneself, is far removed from that self-denial that the Lord wants. Those who cannot stand themselves cannot love their neighbor. They cannot accept themselves ‘as themselves’ because they are against themselves and are bitter as a result, and the very foundation of their life makes them incapable of loving.

What I wanted to convey was that the kind of egoism Ratzinger rightly condemns ought never to seek justification in the lives of saints like St. Margaret Mary. Read her story, but imitate her only out of love of the Lord and not hatred of self.

Id Quod Volo

(That Which I Desire)

It's been too long since I posted so I'd like to make an update . . . Currently I'm going through an Ignatian retreat / formation period in Omaha and will be here until the end of August. Thus far it's been classes, classes, classes, and an 8-day silent directed retreat that ended only this past weekend. It's been incredible.

The feeling is like driving by a little patch of woods on the way to work day after day after day without ever noticing what's there, or even having the thought cross one's mind to be interested. In the blur of racing by on some mission to stave off boredom, it was nothing more than more brush and bracken in need of development. And then one day you are led through it and shown a little glade where in the middle of a busy suburb there is quiet, stillness, beauty, and peace. But not peace as the world gives. Peace of the sort meant to satisfy the deepest longings of the human heart, needs that cry out to heaven for satisfaction. There, scales fall from the world's face and the face that lies behind it is there, to be looked upon. There, the fragmented and incomplete knowledge I labor to accumulate is united in a supremely glorious being-known. There, being known is nothing to be feared, for it is the knowledge of the one whose relentless love is more devoted to me than I am to myself; were it not for this love, I would not exist. It is not my lovableness that calls down this love upon me. I am lovable because I first am loved.

Needless to say I've soaked in a lot of idiom and jargon here that never appealed to me before, but I've had to take it up to speak of what's been happening in me. To me. There's a good humiliation in that. All the soft God-talk I've always found uninteresting (and perhaps I've even despised it) is now all too common on my own lips. Now, I realize is that all along I've been listening in on a conversation about things I've never experienced. What sounded like empty emotional tripe was the attempt to put into words, in whatever inadequate way was available, the infinite love of God.

I stand corrected.

Look for some more book reviews coming up, including Mark Twain's Joan of Arc and Stephen Barr on Modern Physics and Ancient Faith.