The Word of God Is Not Bound

Carrying the Cross

2010-04-10T15:53:00.003-02:30

More words of wisdom from Pope Benedict. This is taken from A New Song for the Lord:

Faith is the community of the cross, and only on the cross does it become complete. The place of final nondeliverance is the place where redemption really emerges. It seems to me that we have to relearn this piety of the cross in an entirely new way. It had appeared to us as too passive, too pessimistic, sentimental -- but if we do not practice the cross, how will we be able to carry it when it is imposed on us? A friend of mine who was dependent on kidney dialysis for years and had to experience how his life was gradually slipping away from him once told me that as a child he especially loved the stations of the cross and liked to do them later in life as well. When he learned of the awful diagnosis, he was at first stunned, but then it suddenly occurred to him: What you have always prayed is now becoming serious; now you may really accompany him and be taken up into the way of the cross by him. In this way my friend regained his serenity, which radiated from him right up to the end and let the brilliance of faith shine forth for all to see. To express it with [Romano] Guardini's words: We have to relearn "what kind of liberating power lies in overcoming oneself; how suffering which is inwardly accepted transforms a person; and how all essential growth not only depends on work, but also on freely offered sacrifice."

'Hierarchy' means 'sacred origin'

2010-04-06T18:09:00.005-02:30

In my last post, I quoted Cardinal Ratzinger (as he was then) from his book Salt of the Earth, in which he responds to questions from his interviewer, Peter Seewald. Here is more from the same work.

Seewald poses this question: "Why must the Church continue to operate even today with authoritarian methods and be organized according to "totalitarian" structures? ... You can't go around demanding a sense of fellowship and then operate yourself predominantly with accusations of guilt, laws, and a pointing finger." Ratzinger gives a long, thoughtful response. I won't quote the whole thing, though it is well worth reading, but only pick out the points that particularly struck me.

He starts with this word 'hierarchy', which could be translated either by 'sacred rule' or by 'sacred origin', since the Greek word arche has both meanings. Cardinal Ratzinger holds that the second translation is probably the correct one. So it is not a question of power, but of making present something whose origin is in God; it doesn't come from us. He says: "... the category that corresponds to the priesthood is not that of rule. On the contrary, the priesthood has to be a conduit and a making present of a beginning and has to make itself available for this task. When priesthood, episcopacy, and papacy are understood essentially in terms of rule, then things are truly wrong and distorted....the origin of hierarchy, in any event its true meaning, is not to construct a structure of domination but to keep something present that doesn't come from the individual. No one can forgive sins on his own initiative; no one can communicate the Holy Spirit on his own initiative; no one can transform bread into the presence of Christ or keep Him present on his own initiative. In this sense, one has to perform a service in which the Church doesn't become a self-governing business but draws her life again and again anew from her origin." He concludes: "When it [the priesthood] is lived correctly, it cannot mean finally getting one's hands on the levers of power", as one might construe from the comments of some feminists who argue for women's ordination, "but, rather, renouncing one's own life project in order to give oneself over to service." And the image the Pope uses for this priestly service is the humble gesture of Christ at the Last Supper, when He washed the feet of his disciples.

In response to the last part of Seewald's question, the pontiff has this to say: "Part of that [service] ... is to reprimand and to rebuke and, thereby, to cause problems for oneself. Augustine illustrates this in a homily in the following terms: You want to live badly; you want to perish. I, however, am not allowed to want this; I have to rebuke you, even though it displeases you. He then uses the example of the father with sleeping sickness whose son keeps waking him up, because that is the only chance of his being cured. But the father says: Let me sleep, I'm dead tired. And the son says: No, I'm not allowed to let you sleep. And that, he says, is precisely the function of a bishop. I am not permitted to let you sleep. I know that you would like to sleep, but that is precisely what I may not allow. And in this sense the Church must also raise her index finger and become irksome. But in all this it must remain perceptible that the Church is not interested in harassing people but that she herself is animated by the restless desire for the good. I must not allow you to sleep, because sleep would be deadly. And in the exercise of this authority she must also take Christ's suffering upon herself. What ... gives Christ credibility is, in fact, that he suffered. And that is also the credibility of the Church. For this reason she also becomes most credible where she has martyrs and confessors. And where things go comfortably, she loses credibility."

Succisa virescit

2010-04-01T17:36:00.005-02:30

This Latin phrase is found on the coat of arms of the Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino, founded by St. Benedict himself circa 529 A.D. It means, in literal translation, "having been cut down, it fluorishes", an apt epigram for an abbey that has been destroyed and rebuilt four times, most recently after the bombardment it suffered in the Battle of Monte Cassino in World War II. The idea is drawn, I believe, from viticulture; that's why 'succisa' is feminine, agreeing with the understood noun 'vitis', 'grapevine', a feminine word in Latin. It's a well-known fact that grapevines must be cut back drastically, even brutally, every year if they are going to produce an abundant harvest of grapes. In the famous parable from the Gospel of John, chapter 15, Jesus applies the same lesson to us: "I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit. You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you." It's interesting that the words translated here by 'prunes' and 'cleansed' are in the original Greek text closely related: 'kathairei' and 'katharoi'. Pruning is a form of cleansing, in that it removes superfluous and irrelevant accretions to reveal the pure form beneath. Now vines don't have feelings, but if they did, we can imagine that pruning would be a pretty painful process. We don't usually think of cleansing as painful, but if you are really dirty, so that getting clean involves hard scrubbing, it's not so enjoyable either.

I've been reading "Salt of the Earth", a book based on an interview of Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI, of course) by Peter Seewald, a German journalist, back in 1996. This is the relevant passage:

"Not long ago I mentioned in a conversation with friends that here in the area around Frascati they are preparing to prune the grapevines and that they bear fruit only if they are pruned once a year, that pruning is a condition of fruitfulness. In the light of the Gospel, of John 15, that's immediately clear to us as a parable of human existence and of the communion of the Church. If the courage to prune is lacking, only leaves still grow. Applied to the Church, there is only paper,whereas no more life is brought forth. But let's say it with the words of Christ, who tells us: At the very moment when you think you have to possess yourself and defend yourself, precisely then you ruin yourself. Because you are not built as an island whose only foundation is itself. Rather, you are built for love, and therefore for giving, for renunciation, for the pruning of yourself. Only if you give yourself, if you lose yourself, as Christ puts it, will you be able to live.

This basic option has to stand out in all its starkness. It is offered to man's freedom. But it should still really be made plain that to live by making one's own claims is a false recipe for life. The refusal of suffering and the refusal of creatureliness, hence, of being held to a standard, is ultimately the refusal of love itself, and that ruins man. For it is precisely his submitting himself to a claim and allowing himself to be pruned that enables him to mature and bear fruit."

Just imagine if we could accept in this spirit all the suffering that inevitably comes to each of us on our pilgrim way to our true homeland, receiving it even with gratitude, seeing it as the pruning of which our egos stand so much in need. 'Succidi, virescemus', cut back, we will sprout up with even greater spiritual vigour. With an attitude like that, nothing in this world could really hurt us.

Words of Wisdom from GKC

2009-10-09T17:59:00.004-02:30

Over at The Catholic Thing (www.thecatholicthing.org), James Schall makes the following remark: "No students are more surprised than those who come across Chesterton for the first time. No one ever told them before that the very purpose of the mind is to make dogmas, to state the truth. Generally, they have been told that the mind exists because there is no truth, that truth is 'dangerous'. And I suppose it is in a way."

I just finished reading "The Catholic Church and Conversion", by G.K. Chesterton. If you've ever wondered where GKC's famous line about the Catholic Church being "the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age" comes from, it's the first sentence of Chapter 5 of this book. Here's a rather lengthy quote from near the end:

"... let the convert, or still more the semi-convert, face any one fact that does seem to him to deface the Catholic scheme as a falsehood; and if he faces it long enough he will probably find that it is the greatest truth of all. I have found this myself in that extreme logic of free will which is found in the fallen angels and the possibility of perdition. Such things are altogether beyond my imagination, but the lines of logic go out toward them in my reason. Indeed, I can undertake to justify the whole Catholic theology, if I be granted to start with the supreme sacredness and value of two things: Reason and Liberty. It is an illuminating comment on current anti-Catholic talk that they are the two things which most people imagine to be forbidden to Catholics.

"But the best way of putting what I mean is to repeat what I have already said, in connection with the satisfying scope of Catholic universality. I cannot picture these theological ultimates and I have not the authority or learning to define them. But I still put the matter to myself thus: Supposing I were so miserable as to lose the Faith, could I go back to that cheap charity and crude optimism which says that every sin is a blunder, that evil cannot conquer or does not even exist? I could no more go back to those cushioned chapels than a man who has regained his sanity would willingly go back to a padded cell. I might cease to believe in a God of any kind; but I could not cease to think that a God who had made men and angels free was finer than one who coerced them into comfort. I might cease to believe in a future life of any kind; but I could not cease to think it was a finer doctrine that we choose and make our future life than that it is fitted out for us like an hotel and we are taken there in a celestial omnibus as compulsory as a Black Maria. I know that Catholicism is too large for me, and I have not yet explored its beautiful or terrible truths. But I know that Universalism is too small for me; and I could not creep back into that dull safety, who have looked on the dizzy vision of liberty."

Rhinoceritis

2009-10-05T01:40:00.004-02:30

More good stuff from Chaput's book, "Render Unto Caesar" (highly recommended, by the way). He quotes Avery Dulles, Jesuit theologian and cardinal: "The greatest danger facing the Church in our country [anywhere in the West, really] is that of an excessive and indiscreet accommodation." Another name for this condition of accommodation, this "kneeling before the world" (Jacques Maritain's phrase), this submission to the spirit of the age, might be rhinoceritis. I'm not a great fan of theater of the absurd, and I've never read Ionesco's play "Rhinoceros", but I am familiar with Thomas Merton's discussion of it in his well-known essay, "Rain and the Rhinoceros."

The play is set in a small French village, where all the citizens contract a disease that causes them to metamorphose into rhinoceroses. All, that is, except Berenger, who witnesses his friend Jean transform before his very eyes. The last words Jean addresses to Berenger, before the mutation is complete and he loses the power of speech, are: "Humanism has expired! You are an old ridiculous sentimentalist." Berenger stands alone at the end of the play, the last human, surrounded by rhinos. And, as Merton comments, "To be the last human in the rhinoceros herd is, in fact, to be a monster."

Reverend John Hugo, an associate of Dorothy Day, described the spiritual state of too many Catholics of his time, in words that are even truer today: "Large areas of their lives are wholly unilluminated by their faith. Their ideas, their attitudes, their views on current affairs, their pleasure and recreations, their tastes in reading and entertainment, their love of luxury, comfort and bodily ease, their devotion to success, their desire of money, their social snobbishness, racial consciousness, nationalistic narrowness and prejudice, their bourgeois complacency and contempt of the poor: In all these things they are indistinguishable from the huge sickly mass of paganism which surrounds them." (Quoted from Chaput, p. 181). In other words, they've joined the herd.

Strong Catholic faith ought to immunize us from infection with rhinoceritis. We follow our Lord and Savior, not the rhinoceros herd. Are we monsters then? (I was going to entitle this post "We Monsters..."). In the world's eyes, maybe so. We certainly have to face the unpleasant fact that we'll often stand alone, and that we'll often fail. When it comes to solitary witness, we have some strong precedents to follow. I particularly like the story of Pope Liberius, who in the 4th Century defied a hostile emperor with the words, "The truth of the faith is not lessened by the fact that I stand alone." To quote Chaput once again:

"In one of their early confrontations, King Henry VIII taunted Bishop John Fisher, the great bishop-martyr of the English Reformation who remained faithful to Rome and opposed Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn, with this remark: 'Well, well, it shall make no matter ... for you are but one man.' Catholics face the world's same taunting today: the temptation to think that society is too far gone, that our problems are too complex for any of us to make a difference. But one person can always make a difference -- IF that person believes in Jesus Christ and seeks to do his will. We're not called to get results. We're called to be faithful." (p. 196)

Living our Christianity

2009-09-30T20:57:00.002-02:30

I came upon a good quote I'd like to share. It's from the Jesuit Henri de Lubac:

"In the last analysis, what is needed is not a Christianity that is more virile, or more efficacious, or more heroic, or stronger; it is that we should live our Christianity with more virility, more efficacy, more strength, and if necessary, more heroism -- but we must live it as it is. There is nothing that should be changed in it, nothing that should be added (which does not mean however, that there is not a continual need to keep its channels from silting up); it is not a case of adapting it to the fashion of the day. [The Christian faith] must come into its own again in our souls. We must give our souls back to it." (Quoted in Archbishop Chaput's book, "Render Unto Caesar", p. 108-109.)

"Julie and Julia" and Narcissism

2009-09-23T16:26:00.002-02:30

I saw the film "Julie and Julia" a few nights back. It was very entertaining, especially Meryl Streep's performance as Julia Child. The movie raises an issue that has often troubled me. For those who don't know the story, Julie is a frustrated author and amateur chef who decides to seek fulfillment through blogging about her project to cook her way through Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in the course of a year, 524 recipes in 365 days. She gets a little too obsessed with it all. At one point her husband accuses her of thinking that she is "the center of the universe", and that the fans of her blog will commit mass suicide if she neglects to post one day. So here I am, blogging away, wondering, "Isn't there something essentially narcissistic in all this?" I mean, I try to avoid the use of the first person singular pronoun as much as possible (this post and the previous one are exceptions!), but even so there is a subtext, sometimes rising to the level of conscious thought, but often not, that says, "See how clever I am! I have such interesting insights, such original ideas!"

As I grow older I become more and more convinced that humility is the key to all the virtues and an unshakable foundation for happiness in this world and the next. By humility I primarily mean forgetfulness of self. The narcissism that infects our culture is a major reason why so many people are so unhappy today. And I'm not immune. Anyway, I struggle with that. Pray for my soul!

Christina Lake

2009-09-21T16:35:00.002-02:30

Well, I'm back blogging again after a lengthy hiatus that included a relocation from one end of the country to the other: from St. John's, Newfoundland to the little town of Christina Lake in south central British Columbia, an area known as the West Kootenays, to be more precise. The family owns beachfront property at the southern end of the lake. Sitting on our deck, my view of the water is framed by two weeping willows. They were saplings when my father planted them, back in the fifties when he acquired the property, but they are immense things now. The trunks are close to fifty feet apart, yet the upper branches of the two trees almost touch. In front of the one on the east there is a small garden, and buried in that garden is an urn containing my mother's ashes (God rest her soul). That's where she wanted to be. For us, that is sacred ground.

I love to sit out on the desk just at the hour when evening is fading into night. That's when the bats come out. Fascinating, extraordinary creatures! Some of them spend the daylight hours under the eaves of our house or the tiles of our roof. I've never seen them up there, but they leave an unmistakable sign of their presence on our deck below, which I dutifully sweep away in the morning.

And then full night comes on, and when the weather is clear, the sky is a panoply of cold sparks. There's Ursa Major, the North Star, Cassiopeia, a thousand thousand other stars and constellations whose names I never learned, all seeming about to break into song from sheer exuberance of being. The night sky is closer, more alive here than anywhere else I've ever lived.

Julia Lavia. Requiescat in pace.

2009-07-21T14:25:00.003-02:30

My step-mother passed away on Monday, July 19, at 6:18 p.m., after a battle with brain cancer that was truly heroic. I felt blessed and privileged to be present at her passing. Please pray for the repose of her soul, and for the consolation of her family and friends.

O nations, hear the word of the Lord,
Proclaim it to the far-off coasts,
Say He Who scattered Israel will gather him,
And guard him as a shepherd guards his flock.
For the Lord has ransomed Jacob,
Has saved him from an overpowering hand.
They will come and shout for joy on Mount Zion,
They will stream to the blessings of the Lord;
To the corn, the new wine, and the oil,
To the flocks of sheep and the herds;
Their life will be like a watered garden.
They will never be weary again.
Then the young girl will rejoice and will dance.
The men, young and old, will be glad.
I will turn their mourning into joy;
I will console them, give gladness for grief.
The priests I will again feed with plenty,
And the people will be filled with my blessing.

Corruptio optimi est pessima

2009-06-29T11:06:00.005-02:30

"... There's something in natural affection which will lead it on to eternal love more easily than natural appetite could be led on. But there's also something in it that makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly. Brass is mistaken for gold more easily than clay is. And if it finally refuses conversion its corruption will be worse than the corruption of what ye call the lower passions. It is a stronger angel, and therefore, when it falls, a fiercer devil.

... But someone must say in general what's been unsaid among you this many a year: that love, as mortals understand the word, isn't enough. Every natural love will rise again and live for ever in this country [i.e., heaven]: but none will rise again until it has been buried.

... There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him. And the higher and mightier it is in the natural order, the more demoniac it will be if it rebels. It's not out of bad mice or bad fleas that you make demons, but out of bad archangels."

C.S. Lewis, from The Great Divorce.

I'm heading out to B.C. tonight to spend some time with my father and step-mother. The doctors are not giving her much time to live, two months at the outside. Please keep them in prayer. I may not have internet access at my father's place, so I don't know when I'll be able to post again.

"What a fearful thing it is to be a priest!"

2009-06-26T13:20:00.011-02:30

(This is my translation / paraphrase of the Holy Father's General Audience of June 23, 2009.)

Last Friday, June 19, the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and the day traditionally dedicated to prayers for the sanctification of priests, Pope Benedict inaugurated the Year for Priests, in association with the 150th anniversary of the death of St. John Baptist Marie Vianney. As a first symbolic act for this year dedicated to priests, the pope, entering the Vatican Basilica for Vespers, stopped in the Chapel of the Heart to venerate the relic kept there, the heart of St. John Vianney.

Divine Providence has brought together the two figures of St. Paul, whose year has just ended, and St. John Vianney. The lives of these two great saints were very different: Paul made a number of extraordinary missionary voyages to spread the Gospel, while St. John Vianney, a humble parish priest, received thousands upon thousands of the faithful without every leaving his small village. What fundamentally unites them is the total identification of each with his own ministry, with that communion with Christ that caused Paul to say: "I have been crucified with Christ. Now it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me" (Gal. 2,20). And St. John Marie Vianney loved to repeat: "If we had faith, we would see God hidden in the priest like a light behind glass, like wine mixed with water." One of Pope Benedict's aims in declaring this "Year for Priests" is "to help priests, and with them the entire people of God, to rediscover and reinvigorate an awareness of the extraordinary and indispensable gift of grace that the ordained ministry represents for the one who has received it, for the whole Church, and for the world, which without the real presence of Christ would be lost."

There is no doubt that historical and social conditions have changed since the time when St. John Vianney carried out his work. The sense of the sacred dimension of life is being lost more and more in our time, replaced by an idea of "functionality". Even in the thought of theologians, pastors, and those responsible for the formation of seminarians this occurs, as two conceptions of priesthood confront, even oppose each other. "On the one hand, there is a social-functional view that defines the essence of priesthood as "service", service to the community through the fulfillment of a specific function.... On the other hand, there is the sacramental-ontological conception, which of course does not negate the service character of the priesthood, but sees it anchored to the being of the minister and which believes that this being has been determined by a gift granted by the Lord through the mediation of the Church, a gift called sacrament" (J. Ratzinger, Ministry and Life of the Priest). This latter, sacramental-ontological conception, is linked to the primacy of the Eucharistic sacrifice, the other, social-functional conception, to the primacy of the word and of proclamation of the Gospel.

Pope Benedict stresses that the apparent tension between the two conceptions of priesthood can be resolved internally. As the Vatican II decree Presbyterorum ordinis asserts: "It is through the apostolic proclamation of the Gospel that the people of God are called together and assembled so that all ... can offer themselves as 'a sacrifice, living, holy, pleasing to God' (Romans 12,1). And it is by the ministry of the priest that the spiritual sacrifice of the faithful is made perfect in union with the sacrifice of Christ, the one and only mediator."

What does this primacy of proclamation actually mean for the priest? Jesus spoke of the proclamation of the Kingdom of God as the true object of his coming into the world, and his proclamation did not just consist of words. It included at the same time his actions: the signs and miracles that he performed indicate that the Kingdom is coming into the world as a present reality, a reality which ultimately coincides with his own person. In this sense it is proper to recall that also in the primacy of the proclamation, word and sign are indivisible. Christian preaching does not proclaim 'words' but the Word, and the proclamation coincides with the very person of Christ, ontologically open to the relationship with the Father and obedient to his will. Therefore, an authentic service to the Word asks from the priest that he aspire to a profound self-abnegation, to the point where he can say with the Apostle: "it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me." The presbyter cannot consider himself proprietor ('padrone' in Italian) of the word, but its servant. He is not the word, but, as John the Baptist declared, he is the 'voice' of the Word: "the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths."

Now to be the voice of the Word does not constitute for the priest a mere functional aspect. It presupposes a substantial 'losing of oneself' in Christ, participating in the mystery of his death and resurrection with the whole of his being: intelligence, freedom, will, and the offering of his own body as a living sacrifice. Only the participation in the sacrifice of Christ, his kenosis, makes the proclamation authentic. And this is the path that he must follow with Christ to arrive at the point where he can say to the Father along with Him: "may it be done, not as I will, but as You will." The proclamation, then, always implies the sacrifice of self, the condition that makes the proclamation authentic and efficacious.

An alter Christus, the priest is profoundly united to the Word of the Father, Who took the form of a slave. The priest is a slave of Christ, in the sense that his existence, ontologically configured to Christ, assumes a character that is essentially relational: he is in Christ, for Christ, and with Christ in the service of humanity. Exactly because he belongs to Christ, the priest is radically at the service of his brothers and sisters and the minister of their salvation, their happiness, their authentic liberation.

The saintly Cure of Ars often used to repeat with tears in his eyes: "What a fearful thing it is to be a priest!" And he would add: "How greatly to be pitied is a priest when he celebrates the Mass as if it were something ordinary! How unfortunate is a priest without an interior life!" Let us pray for all priests, that they totally identify themselves with Christ crucified and resurrected, and that they, like John the Baptist, may always be ready to "decrease" so that He might increase; that, following the example of the Cure of Ars, they might be constantly, profoundly conscious of the responsibility of their mission, sign and presence of the infinite mercy of God.

Dialogues of the Carmelites 3: Blanche and the Prioress

2009-06-23T11:02:00.003-02:30

...

Prioress: Whenever you like … But will you answer me now if I ask you what idea you have about the first obligation of a Carmelite?

Blanche: It is to conquer one’s nature.

Prioress: Very good. To conquer and not to force, the distinction is important. When one tries to force nature, one only succeeds in losing what is natural, and what God demands of his daughters is not to play act every day for His Majesty, but to serve him. A good servant is always where she ought to be, and never makes herself conspicuous.

Blanche: I only ask to pass unnoticed …

Prioress: Smiling, with a hint of irony.

Alas, one only reaches that stage after a long time, and to desire it too strongly in the beginning does not make it any easier to obtain … You are of a noble family, my daughter, and we do not demand that you forget that. Just because you have renounced its advantages, you ought not to think you can escape all the obligations that such a birth imposes, and they will seem to you, here, heavier than elsewhere.

Blanche makes a gesture of dismissal.

Oh, yes, you burn to take the last place. Distrust that feeling, my child … In wishing to descend too much one risks exceeding the measure. In humility as in everything, excess engenders pride, and that sort of pride is a thousand times more subtle and dangerous than that of the world, which is more often than not mere vainglory …

A silence.
What drives you to the Carmelites?

Blanche: Does Your Reverence order me to speak with complete frankness?

Prioress: Yes.

Blanche: Well, then, the attraction of a heroic life.

Prioress: The attraction of a heroic life, or that of a certain manner of living that appears to you – quite wrongly – to make heroism easier, to put it so to speak within arm’s reach?

Blanche: Reverend Mother, excuse me, I have never made calculations of that sort.

Prioress: The most dangerous calculations we make are those which we call illusions …

Blanche: I may well have illusions. I would ask nothing better than that I be stripped of them.

Prioress: That you be stripped of them … (she repeats the words slowly, with emphasis).
You will have to take charge of that yourself, my daughter. Everyone here already has their hands full with their own illusions. Do not imagine that the first duty of our way of life is to come to one another’s aid so as to make ourselves more agreeable to the divine Majesty, like those young people who share their powder and rouge before appearing at the ball. Our business is to pray, just as the business of a lamp is to give light. It does not come into anyone’s head to light a lamp in order to illuminate another lamp. “Every man for himself”; such is the law of the world, and ours resembles it a little: “Everyone for God!” Poor little thing! You have dreamed of this house like a timid child whom the servants have just put to bed dreams in her dark room of the salon with its light and warmth. You know nothing of the solitude to which a true religious is exposed to live and to die. For one finds a certain number of true religious, but much more often mediocre and lukewarm ones. Come, come! Here as elsewhere, evil remains evil, and the fact that it has been made from pure milk does not make cream that has turned any less nauseating than rotten meat … Oh, my child, it is not in keeping with the Carmelite spirit to grow soft and emotional, but I am old and sick, here I am very near my end, so I can well afford to be emotional on your account … Great trials await you, my daughter…

Blanche: What does it matter, if God gives me strength?

Prioress: What He wants to put to the trial in you is not your strength, but your weakness …

Silence.

The scandals of the world have one good thing about them, that they revolt souls like yours. Those that you will find here will disappoint you. All in all, my daughter, the state of a mediocre nun seems to me more deplorable than that of a brigand. The brigand can convert, and that would be for him like a second birth. The mediocre nun, though, she cannot still be born, she already has been, she has missed her birth, and except for a miracle, she will always remain an abortion …

Blanche: Oh, Mother, I would not wish to see anything but good here …

Prioress: Whoever voluntarily blinds herself to the faults of her neighbor, under the pretext of charity, often does nothing other than break the mirror so as not to have to see herself in it. For the infirmity of our nature demands that we discover first of all in others our own wretchedness. Take care that you do not let yourself be overcome by some sort of naïve benevolence which makes the heart soft and the spirit false.

Silence.

My daughter, people wonder what good we serve, and after all they can well be excused for wondering. We believe that, thanks to our austerities, we bring them proof that one can perfectly well do without the things they think indispensable. But for the example to have any meaning, they must still be sure that when all is said and done, these things are as indispensable to us as they are to them …
No, my daughter, we are not in the business of mortification, nor are we conservatories of virtue. We are houses of prayer, prayer alone justifies our existence, whoever does not believe in prayer can only consider us imposters or parasites. If we were to say this openly to unbelievers, we would make ourselves better understood. Are they not forced to recognize that belief in God is a universal fact? Is it not a very strange contradiction that humanity as a whole can believe in God, and yet pray to Him so little and so badly? They scarcely give him the honor of fearing Him. If belief in God is universal, should not prayer be just as universal? Well, my daughter, God has wished that it should be so, not by making prayer, dependent as it is on our free choice, a need as imperious as hunger or thirst, but by permitting that we are able to pray for others, ourselves in the place of others. So every prayer, be it that of a little shepherd boy who watches over his flocks, is the prayer of all mankind.

Short silence.

What the little shepherd does from time to time, at the prompting of his heart, we must do night and day. Not by any means that we hope to pray better than he does, not at all. That simplicity of soul, that tender abandonment to the divine Majesty that is for him an inspiration of the moment, a grace, and like an illumination of the spirit, we consecrate our life to acquiring, or to recovering if we had experienced it before, for it is a gift of childhood which more often than not does not survive childhood. Once childhood has been left behind, one has to suffer a long time to return to it, as at the very end of the night one finds again another dawn. Have I become a child again?

Saints Cyril and Methodius

2009-06-22T14:12:00.011-02:30

(This is from the Pope's General Audience, given Wednesday, June 17.)

Cyril and Methodius were brothers by blood as well as in faith. They have been called the "apostles to the Slavs". Cyril was the youngest of seven children, born to an imperial magistrate in Thessalonica in 826/827. He learned the Slavic language while still a boy. At the age of fourteen he was sent to Constantinople to be educated and to serve as a companion for the young emperor Michael III. Later, having decided against marriage, though a brilliant one had been arranged, he received holy orders and became librarian for the Patriarch of Constantinople. A little later, his desire for solitude led him to embrace the monastic life, but, his intellectual gifts being in demand, he was not allowed such repose, and was called to teach subjects both religious and secular. He fulfilled this task so well that he became known as "the philosopher". At about the same time his brother Michael (born around 815), after serving as an administrator in Macedonia, retired to a monastery on Mount Olympus in Bithynia. He took the name of Methodius (the monastic name had to begin with the same letter as the baptismal name).

Attracted by the example of his brother, Cyril withdrew to the same monastery to meditate and pray, abandoning his life as a teacher. But a few years later (around 861) Cyril was entrusted by the imperial government with a mission to the Khazari who lived around the Azov Sea. They had requested that a learned man be sent to them who could debate with the Hebrews and Saracens. Cyril, accompanied by his brother, went to Crimea and remained there a long time. While there, he learned Hebrew. He also sought out and found the tomb of Pope Clement I, who had died in exile there. When the time came for their return to the empire, they carried with them his precious relics. After they reached Constantinople, the two brothers were sent off once again, this time to Moravia by the Emperor Michael III. The Moravian prince Ratislao had directed a very specific request to him: "From the time when we first repudiated paganism, our people have observed the Christian law, but we do not have a teacher who is able to explain the true faith to us in our own language." The mission would soon prove to be a tremendous success. By translating the liturgy into the Slavic language, the two brothers would gain the confidence and affection of the people.

This, however, stirred up hostility among the Frankish clergy, who had arrived there earlier and considered the territory as under their own ecclesial jurisdiction. To argue the case, the two brothers were summoned to Rome in 867. Stopping in Venice, they became embroiled in a dispute with those who held the "three languages" heresy, as it came to be known. These people held that the only languages appropriate for the praise of God were Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. The brothers, of course, had a different view, which they vigorously defended. When they arrived at Rome, Pope Adrian II met them in a formal procession to receive with appropriate dignity and decorum the remains of Pope Clement. The Pope was well aware of the great importance of the brothers' mission. Tensions were already developing between the two halves of the Roman Empire, the western and the eastern, and the Pope envisaged the Slavs, who were very numerous in the territories in between, as a kind of bridge between the two, maintaining the unity of the Christians living on either side. Consequently he did not hesitate to affirm the mission of the two brothers to Moravia, accepting and approving the usage of the Slavic language in the liturgy. The liturgy in Slavic was celebrated in the Basilicas of St. Peter, St. Andrew, and St. Paul.

But while in Rome, Cyril became gravely ill. Sensing the near approach of death, he wanted to consecrate his remaining time to prayer in one of the Greek monasteries in the city (probably at Santa Prassede), where he assumed the monastic name of Cyril (his baptismal name was Constantine). He pleaded with his brother, who had since become a bishop, not to abandon the mission to the Moravians, and to return to that people. Cyril turned to God with this prayer: "Lord my God ... hear my prayer and watch over your faithful flock which you had entrusted to my care ... free them from the heresy of the three languages, gather all into unity and grant to the people you have chosen concord in the true faith and the right confession." He died on February 14, 869.

Faithful to the task imposed on him by his brother, Methodius returned to Moravia the following year (870) and also went on to Pannonia (now Hungary). Here once again he met with a hostile reception from the Frankish clergy, who imprisoned him. Even so, he did not lose heart, and when he was liberated in 873 he devoted himself with great zeal to the organization of the church, seeing to the formation of a group of disciples. It was owing to these disciples that the crisis that burst out following the death of Methodius on April 6, 885 was overcome: imprisoned, some of them were sold as slaves and were brought to Venice, where they were ransomed by an official from Constantinople, who allowed them to return to the lands of the Balkan Slavs. Received in Bulgaria, they were able to continue the mission started by Methodius, spreading the Gospel into the "land of Rus'". God in His mysterious providence had thus availed Himself of their persecution to preserve the work of the sainted brothers.

Cyril was passionate about the writings of St. Gregory Nazianzus, having learned from him the importance of language in the transmission of the Gospel. He introduced his own work of translation with the following solemn invocation: "Listen, all you Slavic peoples, listen to the word that comes from God, the word that nourishes souls, the word that leads to the knowledge of God." In fact, already some years before the request came from the prince of Moravia for a mission to his land, Cyril and his brother Methodius had been actively engaged, together with a group of disciples, in the project of gathering Christian dogmas into books written in Slavic. At that time the need was clearly seen for new written symbols, more closely attuned to the spoken language: thus was born the glagolitic alphabet [l'alfabeto glagolitico], which after modification, became known as the "Cyrilic" alphabet in honor of the one who inspired it. This was a decisive event in the development of Slavic civilization in general. Cyril and Methodius were convinced that a people could not believe they had fully received divine revelation unless they heard it in their own tongue and read it in their own alphabet.

Pope Pius XI, in his apostolic letter Quod Sanctum Cyrillum, said of the two brothers that they were "sons of the East, Byzantines according to their homeland, Greeks by birth, Romans by their mission, Slavs by their apostolic fruit". Their historic role was next officially proclaimed by Pope John Paul II in the apostolic letter Egregiae virtutis viri, where he called them co-patron saints of Europe together with St. Benedict.

And all shall be well ...

2009-06-19T14:01:00.003-02:30

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

-T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding (from The Four Quartets)

Silence, Mystery, the Mass

2009-06-18T11:50:00.010-02:30

The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply: Create silence! Bring men to silence. The Word of God cannot be heard in the noisy world of today. And even if it were blazoned forth with all the panoply of noise so that it could be heard in the midst of all the other noise, then it would no longer be the Word of God. Therefore create silence.

-Kierkegaard

A friend I've never met sent me a worderful gift -- Max Picard's book The World of Silence (Thanks, Rachel!) The writing is poetic in places, more or less aphoristic throughout, and I don't know what to make of some of it. It's the kind of writing that needs to be pondered, prayed over, digested slowly. The above quote from Kierkegaard closes the book. Picard has profound things to say, things that we all need to hear today. Here are some of his thoughts on prayer:

"God became man for the sake of man. This event is so utterly extraordinary and so much against the experience of reason and against everything the eye has seen, that man is not able to make response to it in words. A layer of silence lies between this event and man, and in this silence man approaches the silence that surrounds God Himself. Man and the mystery first meet in the silence, but the word that comes out of this silence is original, as the first word before it had ever spoken anything. That is why it is able to speak of the mystery.

"It is a sign of the love of God that a mystery is always separated from man by a layer of silence. And that is a reminder that man should also keep a silence in which to approach the mystery. Today, when there is only noise in and around man, it is difficult to approach the mystery. When the layer of silence is missing, the extraordinary easily becomes connected with the ordinary, with the routine of things, and man reduces the extraordinary to a mere part of the ordinary, a mere part of the mechanical routine.

... Prayer is the pouring of the word into silence. ... In prayer the region of the lower, human silence comes into relation with the higher silence of God; the lower rests in the higher. In prayer the word and therefore man is in the center between two regions of silence. In prayer man is held between these two regions.

"Elsewhere, outside prayer, the silence of man is fulfilled and receives its meaning in speech. But in prayer it receives its meaning and fulfillment in the meeting with the silence of God.

"Elsewhere, outside prayer, the silence in man serves the word in man. But now, in prayer, the word serves the silence in man: the word leads the human silence to the silence of God."

Part of the problem with the Novus Ordo, at least as it is most often celebrated, is that silence does not have sufficient space. And, as Picard says, one can only approach a mystery as awesome as the Eucharist in silence. Part of the attraction of the old Latin mass is that it makes abundant room for this necessary silence. It does what Kierkegaard suggests as a remedy for the world's ills: it creates silence. But a lot of people today, confronted with silence, are at a loss as to what to do. Silence bores them, perhaps even frightens them. This is a sad state of affairs. To paraphrase Kierkegaard, if I were a parish priest, I would try to instill in my congregation a love for silence. There is more than enough noise in the world outside. Let there be silence in Church.

Dialogues of the Carmelites 2: How Sister Constance Prepares for Death

2009-06-17T09:35:00.001-02:30

In the garden, some of the religious are harvesting. Constance is sitting in a tree eating the fruit.

S. Matilda: Anxiety has not made you lose your appetite, Sister Constance. But at that rate, I’ll never fill my basket.

S. Constance: What need do we have for all these provisions? Perhaps we’ll all be dead before this fruit can spoil.

S. Matilda: And suppose we don’t die at all? I don’t have such a great desire to die, Sister Constance.

S. Constance: Oh! I don’t either! But if we put our lives in God’s hands, to decide whether or not we will die, what good is it to worry about what we will eat? We will never have a better opportunity for a bit of gluttony!

S. Matilda: Now there’s a strange way of preparing for martyrdom!

S. Constance: Oh! Pardon me, Sister Matilda. In chapel, at work, and in the great silence, I can very well prepare in another manner. This manner here is the way of recreation. Why shouldn’t both ways be good? And besides, at the end of the day, the office of martyrs is not to eat, but to be eaten.

Ars moriendi

2009-06-13T10:22:00.006-02:30

Man dies only once in his life, and as he lacks experience of the event, he bungles it. So that he may die successfully, he must learn how to die by following the instruction of experienced men who know what it means to die in the midst of life. Asceticism gives us this experience of death. (Florensky)

I've been thinking a lot about death lately. Several reasons for this, some of them personal. No need to go into that. What prompts this posting is an article written a few days back at The Catholic Thing, "Fear of Death", by Virgil Nemoianu. Reading it, I recalled something I'd read a long while back in Daisetz Suzuki's book, Zen and Japanese Culture (I've referred to this book before; see my posting on the Samurai and the cat). Suzuki quotes a story from a work entitled Hagakure, which translates as "Hidden under the leaves":

Yagyu Tajima no kami Munenori was a great swordsman and teacher in the art to the Shogun of the time, Tokugawa Iyemitsu. One of the personal guards of the Shogun one day came to Tajima no kami wishing to be trained in swordplay. The master said, "As I observe, you seem to be a master of the art yourself; pray tell me to what school you belong, before we enter into the relationship of teacher and pupil."

The guardsman said, "I am ashamed to confess that I have never learned the art."

"Are you going to fool me? I am teacher to the honorable Shogun himself, and I know my judging eye never fails."

"I am sorry to defy your honor, but I really know nothing."

This resolute denial on the part of the visitor made the swordsmaster think for a while, and he finally said, "If you say so, that must be so; but still I am sure of your being master of something, though I know not just what."

"Yes, if you insist, I will tell you this. There is one thing of which I can say I am complete master. When I was still a boy, the thought came upon me that as a samurai I ought in no circumstances to be afraid of death, and ever since I have grappled with the problem of death now for some years, and finally the problem has entirely ceased to worry me. May this be what you hint at?"

"Exactly!", exclaimed Tajima no kami. "That is what I mean. I am glad I made no mistake in my judgment. For the ultimate secrets of swordsmanship also lie in being released from the thought of death. I have trained ever so many hundreds of my pupils along this line, but so far none of them really deserve the final certificate for swordsmanship. You need no technical training, you are already a master."

Of course it is natural to fear and hate death. But even the noble pagans knew that this was something that should be and can be overcome. Suetonius tells us that on the night before he died, Julius Caesar attended a dinner party where the topic under discussion was "what is the best sort of death" (Caesar is supposed to have said, prophetically as it turned out, "Let it come swiftly and unexpectedly"). I can't say that that subject has ever come up at any party I've been to recently. (But then again, I don't get out much!) Part of the reason we fear death so much is that we keep it at a distance, push it away, refuse to think about it. It may sound morbid, but it really is a salutary spiritual exercise to "grapple with the problem" every day. It is in the Rule of St. Benedict that a monk should keep death ever before his eyes. It might not be going too far even to befriend your own personal death. After all, Francis of Assisi called her his Sister. You don't hate and fear your sister.

There is a body of Christian literature, mostly Catholic I think, on the Ars Moriendi, the art of dying well. It arose initially in Medieval times in response to changing conditions brought on by the Black Death. Perhaps this art is something that should be revived. The texts all exort the Christian that the best preparation for a good death is a good life: "Christians should live in such wise ... that they may die safely, every hour, when God will" (cited in Comper, The Book of the Craft of Dying and Other Early English Tracts concerning Death, New York, Arno Press, 1977). Clearly, the preparation for death is not something that can be put off until we are afflicted with old age or serious illness. A consistent practice of memento mori, mindfulness of death, is a necessary part of a truly Christian "art of living".

(More on this topic in my next post.)

John Scotus Eriugena: Salus nostra ex fide inchoat

2009-06-11T14:46:00.017-02:30

"What is philosophy but an expounding of the rules of religion whereby man humbly adores and rationally seeks God, the highest cause and the source of everything? (De predestinatione)

"No one enters heaven except through philosophy." (Annotationes in Martianum Capellam)

The Holy Father's general audience on Wednesday (June 10, 2009) was devoted to John Scotus Eriugena. Born in Ireland in the early years of the ninth century, he left his native land to join the French court of Charles the Bald, a center of cultural and intellectual life at the time. The date of his death is not known with certainty, but is thought to have been around 870.

Well-versed in both Greek and Latin, John had a particular interest in Maximus the Confessor and above all, in Dionysius the Areopagite. Throughout the Middle Ages, this author was identified with the disciple of Paul mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles (17:34), but he is now known to have been a Syrian living and writing in the fifth century. His works were translated by John the Scot, and so were made accessible to later theologians like St. Bonaventure. Convinced of the apostolicity of his writings, John devoted his life to deepening and developing his thought, to such an extent that sometimes it is hard to distinguish where we are dealing with the ideas of Scotus Eriugena and where he is merely transmitting the reflections of the Pseudo-Dionysius.

The theological work of John Scotus did not escape the censure of ecclesial authorities, on account of a radical Platonism that sometimes seems to draw too near to pantheism, even if his intentions were always orthodox. Among his many works, the Pope singled out De divisione naturae ("On the divisions of nature") and De hierarchia caelestia ("An Exposition on the celestial hierarchy of St. Dionysius").

Our author says: "Salus nostra ex fide inchoat", our salvation begins with faith. We cannot speak about God proceeding from our own conceptions, but from what God says concerning Himself in Sacred Scripture. But, seeing as God speaks only the truth, Scotus Eriugena is convinced that scriptural authority and reason can never contradict each other; he is convinced that true religion and true philosophy coincide. From this perspective he writes: "Any sort of authority that is not confirmed by true reason should be considered weak... There is in fact no true authority that does not coincide with the truth discovered by the power of reason ... Let no authority intimidate you or distract you from what right reasoning and contemplation lead you to understand. In fact, authentic authority never contradicts right reason, nor does the latter ever contradict true authority. Both without any doubt stem from the same source, which is the divine wisdom." We have here a courageous affirmation of the power of reason, founded on the certainty that true authority is reasonable, because God is creative reason. Erigena's profound passion for truth is clearly evident, as it also is in a passage not mentioned by Pope Benedict, where he claims that at the last judgment the wicked will suffer the worst punishment possible -- ignorance of the truth.

John Scotus repeats a point made earlier by St. John Chrysostom, that Scripture itself, though coming from God, would not have been necessary if man had not sinned. We must therefore deduce that Scripture was given by God with a pedagogial intent and out of condescension, so that man would be able to recall all that had been impressed on his heart at the moment of his creation "in the image and likeness of God" and which original sin had made him forget. Eriugena writes in the Expositiones: "Man was not created for the Scriptures, of which he would have had no need if he had not sinned, but rather the Scriptures -- woven of doctrine and symbol -- were given for man. Thanks to them, our rational nature can be introduced into the depths of pure and authentic contemplation of God." The words of Sacred Scripture purify our reason, a reason that has been a little blinded, and help us return to the memory of what we, inasmuch as we are the image of God, carry in our hearts, wounded as it is by sin.

Certain hermeneutical consequences with respect to Scriptural interpretation follow from this, and still today they can point out the right path for a correct reading of Sacred Scripture. It is a matter of uncovering the sense hidden in the sacred text and this supposes a particular interior exercise by which reason opens itself up to the sure route towards the truth. This exercise consists of cultivating a constant disposition to conversion. In order to arrive at a view into the depths of the text it is necessary to progress simultaneously in conversion of the heart and in conceptual analysis of the words. In fact it is only from the constant purification both of the eyes of the heart and the eyes of the mind that we can attain an exact understanding.

This path leads the thinking being to the very threshold of the Divine Mystery, where all our notions acknowledge their own weakness and incapacity and oblige us for that reason, with the simple power, free and sweet, of truth to always go beyond everything that has been and is continually being acquired. The adoring and silent recognition of the Mystery, which leads into a communion that makes one, is thus revealed as the one road to a relationship with the truth that is at the same time the most intimate possible and the most scrupulously respectful of God's otherness. John Scotus, making use of a vocabulary dear to the Greek Christian tradition, has called this experience towards which we are tending "theosis" or divinization, with so ardent an affirmation that it is possible to suspect him of heterodox pantheism. It is hard to avoid that feeling when faced with texts like this: "Just as iron becomes red-hot and molten in the fire so as to give the appearance that there is only fire present, and yet the two substances remain distinct, one from the other, so also we must accept that at the end of this world all of nature, corporeal and incorporeal, will manifest only God and yet remain integral in such a manner that God can in some way be comprehended while remaining incomprehensible and creation itself will be transformed, with ineffable wonder, into God."

In reality, the whole of John's theological thought is more evidently the demonstration of an attempt to express in words the inexpressible truths of God, based solely on the mystery of the Word made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth. All the metaphors he uses to indicate this ineffable reality shows how much he was aware of the absolute inadequacy of the terms we use in speaking of these things. And for all that there remains the charm and a certain atmosphere of authentic mystical experience that we can every so often reach out and touch in his writings. As proof of that, it is enough to cite a page from De divisione naturae which touches in the depths of our souls even we believers in the 21st century: "Nothing is to be desired", he writes, "other than the joy of the truth that is Christ, nor is anything to be avoided other than His absence. Indeed, this ought to be considered the one and only cause of total and eternal sadness. Take Christ away from me and no other good remains to me, nor does anything terrify me so much as His absence. The greatest torment of a rational creature is the privation and the absence of Christ."

Philosophy, poetry, music, silence

2009-06-11T08:16:00.004-02:30

"We should note also that the philosopher today, in so far as he is not a merely academic, a merely professorial philosopher, tends to draw nearer to the poet. All around us we can see a new emergence of a lost Atlantis from the depths. On this recovered continent, that unity which thought, as such, and poetry, as such, had in their beginnings is being recreated ..."

-Gabriel Marcel

"The sound of music is not, like the sound of words, opposed, but rather parallel to silence.

It is as though the sounds of music were being driven over the surface of silence.

Music is silence, which in dreaming begins to sound.

Silence is never more audible than when the last sound of music has died away."

-Max Picard

Tolstoy's last days

2009-06-09T08:00:00.004-02:30

I've been remiss in my postings the last week or so: very busy with tutoring, and almost all my free time has been taken up with some translation work I'm doing for Ignatius Press. More on that, perhaps, in a later post. Today, I'm prompted to respond to a piece that Ralph McInerny posted several days ago on the website The Catholic Thing, a piece entitled "The Marrying Animal". In it he says: "Tolstoy became a fruitcake as he grew older, his own marriage was more war than peace, and he fled to the local railway station where he died, refusing his wife admittance. He also wanted to reinvent Christianity." It seems that McInerny is unaware, and might be gratified to know, as I was, that Tolstoy very probably sought to be reconciled to Holy Mother Church in the last days of his life. I quote extensively from the chapter on Tolstoy in a book by Karl Stern entitled The Flight From Woman (I've posted on Stern before; his conversion story, The Pillar of Fire, is well worth reading):

"We have reason to believe that the dying Tolstoy, like Andrew, came back to the faith of Marie [referring to characters from War and Peace - A.]. During the course of his famous flight from home, some remarkable events occurred which are either minimized or entirely omitted by most biographers. After the old man left his home under cover of darkness (on the night of October 26th), only accompanied by his servant Duchan Petrovich, the first goal of his secret trip was the Optina monastery. This in itself -- considering the excommunicated, the sectarian -- is strange. In his younger years Tolstoy had made pilgrimages there. This time he went with the explicit purpose of talking to the Prior, Father Joseph. It seems that the porter did not answer quickly enough, and the aged poet, with the restlessness and impatience which characterized that entire episode of the flight, turned away to spend the night at the monastery's guest house. However, even there he left precipitously at three o'clock in the morning on the 29th (not without having properly signed his name in the guest book). In view of the idea we have of Tolstoy's later years it is equally remarkable that the next stop of his trip should have been a convent -- the convent of Shamardino. There Tolstoy's sister Marya lived as a nun. He intended to stay in Shamardino for about two weeks. Tolstoy had always maintained a particular affection for this sister, an affection which was mutual. Although it is held that Marie Bolkonska is modeled after Tolstoy's mother, it is possibly no coincidence that he gave her the name of his own sister.

However, Tolstoy could not stay at the convent because Alexandra, his daughter, came and warned him that his wife was about to track him down. (It is quite conceivable that Alexandra made him leave out of jealousy towards Marya.) At any rate, a few days later, when he was lying on his deathbed in the station-master's house in Astapovo, the Metropolitan of Moscow wired a paternal greeting which was witheld from the dying man. Moreover, the Holy Synod wanted to send Starets Joseph to Tolstoy's bedside, but the monk happened to be sick. Thus, in his place, a Father Varsonofy arrived from the monastery with the sacraments. In vain did he plead to be allowed to see the dying man. Tolstoy's entourage, particularly Alexandra it seems, felt that the sight of the priest would be too much of a shock. For the same reason Sonya was not admitted to the side of her dying husband, and it is moving to read how she pleaded, nearly crazy with grief and frustration, to be allowed at least to enter the room. ...

The fact that Tolstoy, under the premonition of approaching death, headed for the monastery to see the Prior, and then to the convent to see his sister, is most remarkable. Unfortunately, no record seems to exist of his last conversations with Marya. But a strong inference may be drawn from a note which Father Varsonofy wrote to Countess Alexandra Tolstoy, when he asked for permission to be admitted to the dying man's side: "You know that the Count had expressed in front of his own sister, your aunt who is a nun, the desire to see us and talk with us in order to obtain peace for his soul, and that he deeply regretted that he had not been able to fulfill this desire." The plea was received on November 5 and was refused. On the morning of November 8, 1910, Tolstoy died."

I pray that, in the end, Tolstoy found that peace which he sought. Requiescat in pace.

Pentecost

2009-05-30T22:50:00.005-02:30

καὶ ἐπλήσθησαν πάντες πνεύματος ἁγίου, καὶ ἤρξαντο λαλεῖν ἑτέραις γλώσσαις καθὼς τὸ πνεῦμα ἐδίδου ἀποφθέγγεσθαι αὐτοῖς.

et repleti sunt omnes Spiritu Sancto et coeperunt loqui aliis linguis prout Spiritus Sanctus dabat eloqui illis.

All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages as the Spirit gave them ability.

(Acts 2.4)

This is part of the Office of Readings for the Solemnity of Pentecost, taken from the treatise Against Heresies by St. Irenaeus:

The Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and strength, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of God came down upon the Lord, and the Lord in turn gave this Spirit to his Church, sending the Advocate from heaven into all the world into which, according to his own words, the devil too had been cast down like lightning.

If we are not to be scorched and made unfruitful, we need the dew of God. Since we have our accuser, we need an Advocate as well. And so the Lord in his pity for man, who had fallen into the hands of brigands, having himself bound up his wounds and left for his care two coins bearing the royal image, entrusted him to the Holy Spirit. Now, through the Spirit, the image and inscription of the Father and the Son have been given to us, and it is our duty to use the coin committed to our charge and make it yield a rich profit for the Lord.

More from the Holy Father's May 27 address on St. Theodore the Studite

2009-05-29T12:35:00.007-02:30

I left out some of the text of Pope Benedict's talk on Theodore in my last post. Here is the rest:

"The principle renunciations for Theodore are those requested by obedience, since each of the monks has his own way of living and inclusion in the large community of 300 monks really involves a new form of life, which he qualifies as "the martyrdom of submission." Also here the monks give an example of how much is required of us also. Because of original sin, the tendency of man is to do his own will, to submit everything to his own will. But in this way, if each person follows only his own self, the fabric of society breaks down. Only by learning to insert oneself into the common freedom, to share and submit oneself to it, to learn the law, that is, the submission and obedience to the rules of the common good and the common life, can society, and indeed the "I" itself, be healed of the pride of wishing to be the center of the world. In this way St. Theodore helps his monks, and us as well, with acute introspection, to understand the true way to live, to resist the temptation of setting up one's own will as the highest rule of life, and to preserve one's true personal identity -- which is always an identity involving togetherness with others -- and one's peace of heart.

For Theodore the Studite a virtue on a par with obedience and humility is philergia, the love of work, in which he sees a criterion for testing the quality of one's personal devotion: whoever is zealous in material commitments, who works assiduously, he argues, will be the same in spiritual matters. He does not allow a monk, under the pretext of prayer and contemplation, to be dispensed from work, including manual labor, which is in reality, according to him and to the whole monastic tradition, the means of finding God. Theodore does not fear to speak of work as the "monk's sacrifice", as his "liturgy", even as a sort of Mass by means of which monastic life becomes angelic life. By this means the world of work is humanized and a person through his work becomes more himself, and closer to God. A consequence of this singular vision should be borne in mind: exactly because it is the fruit of a form of "liturgy", the riches obtained from common labor should not serve the comfort of the monks but should be destined for the aid of the poor. Here we can all accept the necessity that the fruit of work be of benefit for all. Obviously, the work of the Studites was not only manual: the monks would have a great importance in the religious and cultural development of Byzantine civilization as calligraphers, painters, poets, educators of youth, school teachers, librarians.

While carrying out a vast range of external activity, Theodore did not let himself be distracted from what he considered to be strictly required by his role as superior: being a spiritual father to his monks. Never forgetting the decisive influence his good mother and sainted uncle had on his own life, he exercised a comparable spiritual direction with his monks. His biographer tells us that every day after evening prayer he installed himself at the iconostasis to listen to the confidences of all. He also gave spiritual counsel to many people outside the monastery. His Spiritual Testimony and his Letters put in relief this open and affectionate character of his, and show how from his paternity were born true spiritual friendships within and outside his monastery.

The Studite rule, known under the name Hypotyposis, codified a little after his death, was adopted with some modifications on Mount Athos when in 962, Saint Athanasius the Athonite founded the Great Lavra there, and in Kiev, when at the beginning of the second millenium, St. Theodosius introduced it in the Lavra of the Caves. Understood in its genuine significance, the Rule shows itself to be particularly current. There are today numerous opinions which attempt to undermine the unity of the common faith and incite a dangerous sort of spiritual individualism and pride. It is necessary to pledge oneself to defend and make grow the perfect unity of the Body of Christ, in which the peace of good order and sincere personal relationships in the Spirit are comprised.

Ashrayaparavrtti

2009-05-28T10:14:00.002-02:30

I learned a new word today, thanks to Mary Eberstadt at www.firstthings.com: ashrayaparavrtti is Sanskrit for "a sudden moment of life-changing insight." Just thought I'd share that!

St. Theodore the Studite (Pope Benedict's General Audience, May 27, 2009)

2009-05-27T23:33:00.008-02:30

Theodore was born in 759 into a pious and noble family. His mother Teoctista and uncle Platone, abbot of the monastery of Sakkudion, were venerated as saints. At age 22 he embraced the monastic life. Because of a rupture with Patriarch Tarasio over the latter's weakness with respect to the adulterous marriage of the emperor Constantine VI, he was exiled to Thessalonica in 796. Reconciled with the imperial authority the following year under the Empress Irene, he returned to Constantinople and took up residence in the monastery of Studios. From here he initiated the "Studite reform."

He became head of the resistance to the iconoclasm of Leo VI the Armenian, a new opposition to images and icons in the Church. The procession of icons organized by the monks of Studios unleashed the reaction against this policy. From 815 to 821 Theodore was scourged, imprisoned, and exiled. Finally he was allowed to return to Constantinople, but not to his own monastery. He established himself with his monks on the other side of the Bosporus. He died on November 11, 826, as recorded in the Byzantine calendar.

Theodore understood that the veneration of icons concerned the very truth of the Incarnation. In his three books, Antirretikoi (Rebuttals), Theodore made a comparison between the relations among the three Persons of the Trinity, where the existence of each of the divine Persons does not destroy their unity, and the relation between the two natures in Christ, which do not compromise in Him the unity of the Logos. He argued that to abolish the veneration of icons of Christ would signify the cancellation of His own redemptive work, from the moment when, assuming human nature, the invisible Eternal Word appeared in visible human flesh and in this way sanctified the whole visible world. Icons, sanctified by liturgical benediction and by the prayers of the faithful, unite us with the person of Christ, with his saints, and by means of them, with the heavenly Father and bear witness to the entrance of the divine reality into our visible, material world.

Another profound conviction of Theodore was this: with respect to secular Christians, monks assume the obligation to observe with greater rigor and intensity the duties of Christians. For this they make a special profession which pertains to the hagiasmata (consecrations) and is a sort of "new baptism" of which the action of taking the habit is the symbol. Characteristic of monks is the commitment to poverty, chastity, and obedience. Addressing his monks, Theodore speaks in concrete, at times even picturesque, terms of poverty as an essential element of monasticism from its beginnings and as a following of Christ, but it points out a path for all the rest of us as well. The renunciation of material possessions, the attitude of freedom from them, as also sobriety and simplicity, are in force in radical form only for monks, but the spirit of such a renunciation applies equally to all. In fact, we must not depend on material property, we must rather learn renunciation, simplicity, austerity and sobriety. Only thus can a society grow in solidarity and overcome the great problem of world poverty. And so in this sense the radical sign of the poor monk indicates also a path for all of us. When next he expounds on the temptations against chastity he does not conceal his own experiences and he demonstrates the path of interior struggle to final self-mastery and so to the respect of one's own body and that of others as temples of God.

The principle elements of Theodore the Studite's spiritual teachings may be summed up as: love for the Incarnate Lord, made visible in the liturgy and in icons; faithfulness to baptism and the obligation to live in the communion of the Body of Christ, understood also as a communion of Christians among themselves; a spirit of poverty, sobriety, renunciation, chastity, self-control, humility, and obedience against the supremacy of self-will, which destroys the fabric of society and peace of mind; love for physical and spiritual labor; spiritual friendship born from purification of one's own conscience, one's own soul, one's own life. Let us seek to follow these teachings which point out to us the road to true life.

Salus ex Judaeis est

2009-05-25T14:25:00.010-02:30

ὅτι ἡ σωτηρία ἐκ τῶν Ἰουδαίων ἐστίν.
Quia salus ex Judaeis est.
For salvation is from the Jews.
John 4:22

"The second person of the Holy Trinity, true God and true man, is of Jewish flesh received from the Jewish virgin -- as is the eucharistic body we receive, and the Body of Christ into which we are incorporated by baptism. It is said that when John XXIII, then papal nuncio in Paris, first saw the pictures of the piles of corpses at Auschwitz, he exclaimed, "There is the Body of Christ!"

(Richard Neuhaus, American Babylon, p. 172)

"Christianity ... is not defined by a moral or metaphysical "essence" but by the man of the cross, a permanently suspect character, forever a stranger of that strange people, the Jews. Through Jesus the Jew, we Christians are anchored in history, defined not by abstract ideas but by a most particular story involving a most particular people."

(ibid., p. 174)

"Nor can [the Church] forget that she draws sustenance from the root of that good olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild olive branches of the Gentiles. Indeed, the Church believes that by His Cross Christ, our Peace, reconciled Jew and Gentile, making them both one in Himself. (cf. Ephesians 2:14-16)."

(Nostra Aetate)

"Along the way to that fulfillment [in the New Jerusalem], Christians and Jews will disagree about whether we can name the name of the Lamb. And when it turns out that we Christians have rightly named the Lamb ahead of time, there will be, as St. Paul reminds us, no reason for boasting; for in the beginning, all along the way, and in the final consummation, it will be evident to all that the Lamb -- which is to say salvation -- is from the Jews. Salvation is from the Jews, then, not as a "point of departure" [quoted from a recent commentary on John's gospel], but as the continuing presence and promise of a point of arrival -- a point of arrival that we, Christians and Jews, together pray that we will together reach. In that shared prayer is the hope that Babylon is not forever."

(American Babylon, p. 182)

Just thought it would be good to keep all this in mind, in these days when the hideous face of anti-Semitism is more and more on display, particularly in Europe, but not only there.

The Samurai and the Cat

2009-05-23T19:47:00.012-02:30

This is from an 18th century Japanese work on swordsmanship. The whole thing can be found in English translation in Daisetz Suzuki's book, Zen and Japanese Culture (where I first saw it) or online at www.auburn.edu/~wilsoug/Neko_no_Mojutsu.html.

There once was a famous swordsman whose home was plagued by a particularly large, strong, aggressive rat. He sent his pet cat against it, but she was no match for the rat, and after being bitten, she ran off screaming. Next he called on the three local cats known for their superior skill in the art of rat-catching: the black cat, the tiger cat, and the gray cat. But when the three entered the room where the rat was, he glared at them fiercely, fended off their assault, and counter-attacked so furiously that he drove them from the house. The swordsman decided he would deal with the problem himself, and taking up his sword he went after the rat. But it moved with such speed that it hardly seemed to touch the ground, and even made a successful leap at his head. Dripping with sweat, he abandoned the fight.

Now he had heard of a cat in the neighboring village with a reputation for unsurpassed rat fighting ability, an almost mystical skill in the art. He sent for her, but when she arrived, he was disappointed, as there was nothing impressive in her appearance. Nevertheless, he sent her in against the rat. The cat entered the room nonchalantly, carelessly, not like one expecting to face a dangerous foe. But as soon as the rat caught sight of her, he become frozen with terror. A moment later, the cat came out with the rat dangling from her jaws.

That night a banquet was held, and the mysterious cat was given the place of honor. All the other cats wanted to know how she overcame that fearsome rat so easily, but first each gave an account of his own approach to ratting. The black cat stepped forward and explained how from his kitten years he had trained himself in speed, agility, and acrobatics, so that he could leap over barriers seven feet high and squeeze through narrow rat-sized openings. He was also very adept at pretending to be asleep, and pouncing immediately when an unsuspecting rat came within reach. But his physical skill availed him nothing against that extraordinary rat.

Next came the tiger cat. He had come to the realization that the important thing in fighting was to develop a powerful spirit, and he had trained himself in that. "I am now", he said, "in possession of the strongest spirit, which fills up heaven and earth. When I face an opponent, my overawing spirit is already on him, and victory is on my side even prior to actual combat ... But that old mysterious rat moved along without leaving any shadow. The reason is beyond me."

The gray cat set forth his views next: "I have for a long time disciplined myself in this way: not to overawe the enemy, not to force a fight, but to assume a yielding and conciliatory attitude ... I act like a curtain surrendering itself to the pressure of a stone thrown at it. Even a strong rat finds no means to fight me. But the one we had to deal with today has no parallel, it refused to submit to my psychical overpowering and was not tempted by my manifestation of a yielding psyche. It was a most mysterious creature -- the like of which I have never seen in my life."

The master cat's response to and criticism of their various approaches can be summed up very simply: the problem is self-consciousness. All of the other cats' techniques are conscious contrivances, and so not in harmony with the Way. "To make Nature display its mysterious way of achieving things is to do away with all your own thinking, contriving, and acting; let Nature have her own way ... and there will be no shadows, no signs, no traces whereby you can be caught; you have then no foes who can successfully resist you. ... But there is one most essential consideration which when neglected is sure to upset everything. This is: not to cherish even a speck of self-conscious thought.... When you are in the state of mind known as 'mindlessness' (mushin), you act in unison with Nature without resorting at all to artificial contrivances. The Way, however, is above all limitation, and all this talk of mine is far from being exhaustive as far as the Way is concerned.

Sometime ago there was in my neighborhood a cat who passed all her time in sleeping, showing no sign of spiritual-animal power, and looking like a wooden image. People never saw her catch a single rat, but wherever she roamed about no rats ever dared to appear in her presence. I once visited her and asked for the reason. She gave no answer. I repeated my query four times, but she remained silent. It was not that she was unwilling to answer, but in truth she did not know how to answer. So we note that one who knows speaks not a word, while one who speaks knows not. That old cat was forgetful not only of herself but all things about her, she was the one who realized divine warriorship and killed not. I am not to be compared to her."

What has this to do with us Catholics? This posting has gone on long enough, so I'll save my reflections for next time.

Some words of Pope Benedict from his General Audience, May 20, 2009

2009-05-22T12:43:00.007-02:30

“Il Memoriale di Mosè sul Monte Nebo è un sito di forte valenza simbolica: esso parla della nostra condizione di pellegrini tra un “già” e un “non ancora”, tra una promessa così grande e bella da sostenerci nel cammino e un compimento che ci supera, e che supera anche questo mondo. La Chiesa vive in se stessa questa “indole escatalogica” e “pellegrinante”: è già unita a Cristo suo sposo, ma la festa di nozze è per ora solo pregustata, in attesa del suo ritorno glorioso alla fine dei tempi.”

[The Memorial of Moses on Mount Nebo is a site of very powerful symbolic force: it speaks of our condition as pilgrims between an “already” and a “not yet”, between a promise so great and beautiful that it sustains us on the way and a fulfillment which goes beyond us, and which also goes beyond this world. The Church in herself lives this “eschatalogical and pilgrim character”: she is already united to Christ her bridegroom, but for now she has only a foretaste of the wedding feast, while she awaits his return in glory at the end of time.]

“In ginocchio sul Calvario e nel Sepolcro di Gesù, ho invocato la forza dell’ amore che scaturisce dal Mistero pasquale, la sola forza che può rinnovare gli uomini e orientare al suo fine la storia ed il cosmo.”

[On my knees on Calvary and in the Sepulchre of Jesus, I invoked the force of the love that flows from the Paschal Mystery, the only force that is capable of renewing men and orienting towards its end history and the universe.]

Chuang Tzu

2009-05-20T13:30:00.020-02:30

I've been looking through Thomas Merton's take on some of the writings of Chuang Tzu, the Taoist sage who lived in 3rd century B.C. China. (The last "Guess the author" was taken from Merton's book The Way of Chuang Tzu). His verses abound in paradoxes, anticipating some of the best sayings of later Zen masters. Merton explains his interest in this ancient Chinese master in his Note to the Reader:

"One may dispute the thesis that all monasticism, Christian or non-Christian, is essentially one. I believe that Christian monasticism has obvious characteristics of its own. Nevertheless, there is a monastic outlook which is common to all those who have elected to question the value of a life submitted entirely to arbitrary secular presuppositions, dictated by social convention, and dedicated to the pursuit of temporal satisfactions which are perhaps only a mirage. Whatever may be the value of "life in the world" there have been, in all cultures, men who have claimed to find something they vastly prefer in solitude."

This is why I love Thomas Merton. I would like to cultivate in myself this monastic outlook. Merton and Chuang Tzu are for me guides and helpers in this undertaking.

"... the whole teaching, the "way" ["tao" is often translated as "way"] contained in these anecdotes, poems, and meditations, is characteristic of a certain mentality found everywhere in the world, a certain taste for simplicity, for humility, self-effacement, silence, and in general a refusal to take seriously the aggressivity, the ambition, the push, and the self-importance which one must display in order to get along in society."

He mentions an essay by John Wu on St. Therese of Lisieux and Taoism (now THAT would be something worth reading!):

"The book of the Bible which most obviously resembles the Taoist classics is Ecclesiastes. But at the same time there is much in the teaching of the Gospels on simplicity, childlikeness, and humility, which responds to the deepest aspirations of the Chuang Tzu book and the Tao Teh Ching. John Wu has pointed this out in a remarkable essay on St. Therese of Lisieux and Taoism ... The "Little Way" of Therese of Lisieux is an explicit renunciation of all exalted and disincarnate spiritualities that divide man against himself, putting one half in the realm of angels and the other in an earthly hell. For Chuang Tzu, as for the Gospel, to lose one's life is to save it, and to seek to save it for one's own sake is to lose it. There is an affirmation of the world that is nothing but ruin and loss. There is a renunciation of the world that finds and saves man in his own home, which is God's world. In any event, the "way" of Chuang Tzu is mysterious because it is so simple that it can get along without being a way at all. Least of all is it a "way out." Chuang Tzu would have agreed with St. John of the Cross, that you enter upon this kind of way when you leave all ways and, in some sense, get lost."

Speaking of getting lost, here is one of my favorite poems from this book:

MAN IS BORN IN TAO

Fishes are born in water
Man is born in Tao.
If fishes, born in water,
Seek the deep shadow
Of pond and pool,
All their needs
Are satisfied.
If man, born in Tao,
Sinks into the deep shadow
Of non-action
To forget aggression and concern,
He lacks nothing
His life is secure.

Moral: "All the fish needs
Is to get lost in water.
All man needs is to get lost
In Tao."

Or, putting this into a Christian idiom, all a person needs is to get lost in the love, the mercy, the will of God. For, as Dante said, in His will is our peace.

"We laugh at life ..."

2009-05-17T15:40:00.006-02:30

(Macarius of Alexandria and Macarius the Egyptian (also called the Elder or the Great to distinguish him from his contemporary) were both hermits living in the desert of Scete in the 4th century. Some of the sayings of the Elder Macarius are recorded in the Apophthegmata Patrum, the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Both were great ascetic saints with power to expel demons. The following is part of a poem entitled Macarius the Younger, by Thomas Merton. I'm writing this from memory, so it's probably not exactly what Merton wrote.)

The two Macarii, both men of God,
Going to visit a brother,
Took the boat that crosses the river.
The boat was full of officers, rich brass,
With horses, boys, and guards.

One tribune saw the monks
Like a pair of sacks
Lying in the stern,
Ragged bums, having nothing,
Free men.

"You," he said, "are the happy ones. You laugh at life.
You need nothing from the world but a few rags,
A crust of bread." One Macarius answered, "Yes, it's true;
We follow God. We laugh at life, and we are sorry
Life laughs at you."

Then the tribune saw himself as he really was.
He gave away all that he had,
And enlisted in the desert army.

A Story from the Talmud

2009-05-15T09:01:00.005-02:30

(I saw a version of this in one of Walter Kaufmann's books, perhaps Tragedy and Philosophy. I can't remember for sure. I read most of Kaufmann's books back in the days before my return to the Church. But this story stuck with me. It always makes me smile.)

Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Joshua were debating a point of Law, and after long argument, neither could persuade the other. In frustration, Rabbi Eliezer said, "If the Law is as I say, this tree will show us", and immediately the tree jumped a hundred yards. But Rabbi Joshua said, "Strange behavior of a tree proves nothing about the Law." Then Rabbi Eliezer said, "If the law is as I say, this river will show us", and immediately the river reversed direction and began to flow upstream. But Rabbi Joshua remained unimpressed: "What does a river have to do with the Law?" Next Rabbi Eliezer appealed to a nearby wall: "If the Law is as I say, this wall will show us", and the wall immediately began to topple over. But Rabbi Joshua rebuked the wall, saying, "If two scholars debate a point of Law, what business do you have to take sides?" So the wall stopped in mid-fall. Out of deference to Rabbi Eliezer it did not straighten up to its former position, and out of respect for Rabbi Joshua it did not fall any further. Finally Rabbi Eliezer appealed to heaven, and a voice came down from above saying, "What do you have against Rabbi Eliezer? The Law is as he says." But Rabbi Joshua responded: "It is written in the Torah, "It is not in heaven". What does this mean? The Rabbis of old thoroughly discussed this passage and came to a consensus, which we all now accept, and ever since then, we no longer listen to voices from heaven, for You have already put it into the Torah that we should decide according to the majority." Now Rabbi Daniel was present at this debate, and it happened that some time later he encountered Elijah the prophet. He asked Elijah what the Holy One, Blessed be He, had said at that precise moment. Elijah replied: "God smiled and said, 'My children have won against me! My children have won!'"

No Abiding City

2009-05-14T13:04:00.016-02:30

οὐ γὰρ ἔχομεν ὧδε μένουσαν πόλιν, ἀλλὰ τὴν μέλλουσαν ἐπιζητοῦμεν.

Non enim habemus hic manentem civitatem, sed futuram inquirimus.

For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the one that is to come.

Hebrews 13:14

There is a nice play on words in the original Greek that the Latin and English translations don't capture. In the Greek, the words for "lasting" (menousan)and "future" (mellousan), translated in this English version as "the one to come", differ only in a single consonant.

There is a book entitled No Abiding City, written by a priest of the Order of Preachers. I believe his name was Bede Jarrett. I remember seeing in Dorothy Day's autobiography that she used to read this work to a dying friend, who drew great comfort from it. That piqued my interest, so I obtained the book through interlibrary loan and wrote out extensive passages from it in a notebook. Unfortunately, that notebook has gone astray. But one of the Dominican author's remarks that always sticks with me is that much of the suffering, the sadness, the discontent we experience in life comes from forgetting that we are pilgrims on the earth. The world can only wound us if we mistake it for home and try to settle down in it. And this is, as Father Neuhaus points out, an ever-recurring temptation: "Although all Christians are in exile,some are more at home in their exile than others. And some times and places are more home-like than others. This can be a great comfort, and a great temptation. The temptation is to unpack, settle down in the present, and forget about the pilgrimage" (American Babylon, p.120). St. Teresa of Avila encapsulates this idea of life as pilgrimage in her pithy remark: "Life is a night in an uncomfortable inn." Jarrett maintains that the pains and tribulations of life are robbed of half their sting if we bear in mind that we are on a journey. It is right and proper for pilgrims on a journey to be uncomfortable on the road. Jarrett addresses his reader with these words of encouragement, which must have been a great solace to Dorothy Day's friend (I'm relying on my memory here, so this is almost certainly not an exact quote, but you'll get the general idea): "You are sad, you are in pain? You feel that you cannot go on? Of course you can go on! It is only a journey. Of course you can go on. It will have an end. When you see the lights of your destination on the road ahead of you, it gives you strength to go on."

Let's keep our eyes on our destination, which is, as Father Neuhaus says, "not so much a place as a person," Jesus Christ, Our Risen Lord and Saviour.

Julian of Norwich, the hazelnut, and Finitum capax infiniti

2009-05-12T13:23:00.008-02:30

Once in the course of my teaching internship in a public school in a small rural community ("around the bay", as we say here in St. John's), I was guiding a level II English class through the mythological background to Sophocles's Theban plays. I don't remember the context, but the word "paradox" came up. I gave the class the etymology: it's from the Greek adjective paradoxos, meaning "contrary to expectation, incredible." As an example of a paradox, I talked about the phrase "Finitum capax infiniti" (the finite is capable of the infinite). This idea is usually associated with the Eucharist, but I've always mentally connected it with one of the "Showings" of Julian of Norwich. Lady Julian was a 14th century anchoress who had a number of revelations in which Jesus appeared to her and spoke to her. In one, he held something in the palm of his hand, a thing about the size of a hazelnut, something so small and fragile-looking that she was amazed, for, in her words, "me thought it might suddenly have fallen to nought for littleness." She wondered what this could be. And the reply came: "It is all that is made." And immediately Julian knew three things: God made it; God loves it; God preserves it: "It lasteth and ever shall, for God loveth it. And so hath all things being by the love of God."

Note the paradox here. Julian, as part of the creation, part of "all that is made", is the minutest of sub-atomic particles within the hazelnut. But at the same time, by the grace and power of God, she is carried outside the whole of the created order and looks down upon it from God's perspective. This image awes me; it shakes me to my core. I tried to convey to this class of sixteen-year-olds that they were walking, talking paradoxes -- finite beings that participate in infinity, capable of containing, embracing, the whole universe in their thoughts. I don't know if I brought in Blake's line about "holding infinity in the palm of your hand", or if that only occurred to me later. I got pretty excited about all this (I tend to do that; it's the Latin blood I inherited from my father). I'm sure they were all rolling their eyes, thinking "What is he going on about now?" But maybe I planted a seed that will germinate when the conditions are right. Or, more likely, it went in one ear and out the other. But we teachers live in hope.

Father Richard Neuhaus has a beautiful reflection on this paradox in the final chapter of his book American Babylon:

The Christian proposal is that in Jesus the unknown has made itself known in the finitude of space and time. Jesus says of himself, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." He is the human face of God. There is a wondrous phrase -- Finitum capax infiniti (The finite is capable of the infinite) -- that theologians have referred to in controversies over the Eucharist. In Jesus Christ, the infinite and the finite are one. If the infinite did not include the finite, it would not be infinite. In that case, what we call "the infinite" would be yet another finite thing, however great and glorious, because it would not include the reality we call "finite." But now God, the Infinite, has become a human being, so that, as the early fathers of the Church never tired of saying, we human beings may become God, meaning that we creatures will participate fully in the life of the Creator.

Guess the author #8

2009-05-12T12:03:00.004-02:30

The Man of Tao

The man in whom Tao
Acts without impediment
Harms no other being
By his actions
Yet he does not know himself
To be "kind", to be "gentle."

The man in whom Tao
Acts without impediment
Does not bother with his own interests
And does not despise
Others who do.
He does not struggle to make money
And does not make a virtue of poverty.
He goes his way
Without relying on others
And does not pride himself
On walking alone.
While he does not follow the crowd
He won't complain of those who do.
Rank and reward
Make no appeal to him;
Disgrace and shame
Do not deter him.
He is not always looking
For right and wrong
Always deciding "Yes" or "No."
The ancients said, therefore:

"The man of Tao
Remains unknown
Perfect virtue
Produces nothing
'No-Self'
Is 'True-Self.'
And the greatest man
Is Nobody."

(Two possible answers for this.)

Does Richard Rorty really matter?

2009-05-11T08:14:00.007-02:30

I'm inclined to answer in the negative. Rorty was a much-lauded American philosopher, recently deceased, who espoused what he called "liberal ironism". He wrote several books, including Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, which gives the fullest exposition of his ideas. Father Neuhaus devotes the greater part of a lengthy chapter to him in American Babylon, in which he does a masterful job of puncturing the pretensions of his ironist project.

What is liberal ironism, you might well ask? In a nutshell: "Liberal ironists, says Rorty, know that the Enlightenment project is dead, and what is most dead about it is the rationalist notion that there is reality "out there" that is intellectually apprehensible and that can provide certain knowledge about how the world is and what we ought to do about it. Liberal ironists know, Rorty writes, that there is no universally valid answer to moral questions such as, 'Why not be cruel?'" (American Babylon, p. 128).

The goal for liberal ironists is self-realization through conceiving one's life in terms of one's own "final vocabulary", a term Rorty uses for the words we use to individuate ourselves, to tell our life story. They want to be absolutely their own unique creation, free from any "inherited contingencies". What this means in terms of their attitude towards posterity is one of the most interesting parts of the chapter. Neuhaus says: "Although Rorty does not quite put it this way, his purpose -- the drive to self-creation by the achievement of utter novelty, the urge to be one's own judge, the struggle for liberation from inherited vocabularies -- is closely associated with sterility and death. It follows that successors are the enemy. Children entangle us with others, compromising our singularity. They are hostages to the future, thereby binding us to a future from which we would be free; and they are potential judges, thereby compromising our judgment of ourselves on our own terms" (p. 138-139).

In answer to his own question whether Richard Rorty is really worth all this attention, Father Neuhaus responds:

"I think the answer is yes. Not only because of his influence in our intellectual culture, but because, with rare relentlessness, he followed through on one possible response to our human circumstance in exile. His is a way of responding to that circumstance: Make it up as you go along; take ironic delight in the truth that there is no truth; there is no home that answers to our homelessness; defiantly (but light-headedly!) throw the final vocabulary that is your life in the face of nothingness. And if your neighbor or some inner curiosity persists in asking about the meaning of it all, simply change the subject. Such is the way of muddling through in an "Age of Irony." Richard Rorty matters because contemporaries beyond numbering, most of whom have never heard of Richard Rorty, are living their lives in the mode of the liberal ironism he depicted with such rare and chilling candor" (p. 162).

This is well said; almost thou dost persuade me. But there is so much other stuff to read! I don't think I'm personally up to the mental effort of trying to follow the twisted logic of a man who insists he has overcome logic, moved beyond it; who responds to charges of intellectual inconsistency with a shrug. (In this context, Neuhaus quotes Walt Whitman: "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself! (I am large, I contain multitudes)"). So I think I'll give Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity a pass.

John Damascene [Papal audience, May 6, 2009]

2009-05-07T13:38:00.016-02:30

Assuming that most Catholics share my opinion that the Pope is a very wise man, with profound things to say about the Catholic faith, I'm thinking about translating his Wedesday audience talks from Italian into English as a regular feature of my blog. As this involves a lot of time and effort, I'd appreciate some input on whether this would be a useful thing to do. No point going to the trouble if no one is going to read it!

Dear brothers and sisters,
I would like to speak today about John Damascene, a person of the first importance in the history of Byzantine theology, a great doctor of the universal Church. He was above all an eye-witness of the transition from the Greek and Syriac Christian culture, shared by the eastern part of the Byzantine Empire, to the culture of Islam which had made space for itself by means of military conquest in the territory habitually recognized as the Middle or Near East. John, born into a rich Christian family, while still a young man assumed an important office in the caliphate, an office perhaps held also by his father, responsible for economic matters. But very soon, dissatisfied with life in the court of the caliph, he took up the monastic life, entering the monastery of Saint Saba near Jerusalem. This was around the year 700. Never again venturing from the monastery, he dedicated himself with all of his strength to asceticism and literary activity, not disregarding a certain level of pastoral activity, borne witness to by his numerous "Homilies". His feast is celebrated on December 4. Pope Leo XIII proclaimed him a Doctor of the Universal Church in 1890.

He is remembered in the East particularly for his three Discourses against those who calumniate sacred images, which were condemned after his death by the iconoclastic council of Hieria (754). But these discourses were also the fundamental reason for his rehabilitation and canonization by the Orthodox Fathers at the Second Council of Nicea (787), the Seventh Ecumenical Council. In these texts it is possible to trace the first important attempts in the legitimization of the veneration of sacred images, by associating them with the mystery of the Incarnation of the Son of God in the womb of the Virgin Mary.

Moreover, John Damascene was among the first to distinguish, in the public and private devotions of Christians, between adoration (latreia) and veneration (proskynesis): the first can only be directed towards God and is spiritual in the highest degree, the second can make use of an image to address the one who is represented by that same image. Obviously, the saint can in no case be identified with the material from which the icon is made. This distinction soon became very important in giving a Christian response to those who were claiming that the strict prohibition of the Old Testament regarding the cultic use of images always and everywhere applied. This was also a topic of discussion of great importance in the Islamic world, which accepted this Hebraic tradition of the total exclusion of all religious images. Christians, on the contrary, in this context, had discussed the problem and found the justification for the veneration of images. The Damascene writes: "In other times God had never been represented in an image, being incorporeal and without a face. But since now God has been seen in the flesh and has lived among men, I depict what is visible in God. I do not venerate the material, but the creator of the material, who was made material for me and deigned to live in material and work my salvation through material things. For that reason I will not cease to venerate the matter by means of which salvation has been obtained for me. But I do not venerate it absolutely as God! How could something that has come into existence from non-being be God?... But I venerate and respect also all the rest of the material that has procured my salvation, in so far as it is full of holy energy and grace. Is not the wood of the thrice blessed cross material?... And the ink and the most holy book of the Gospels, aren't these things material? The altar of salvation that dispenses for us the bread of life, is this not material?... And, before all other things, is not the flesh and blood of my Lord material? I must either suppress the sacred character of all these things, or I must allow to the tradition of the Church the veneration of images of God and those of the friends of God who are sanctified by the name they bear, and who for this reason are inhabited by the grace of the Holy Spirit. Therefore do not offend against matter: it is not contemptible, because nothing that God has made is contemptible" (Contra imaginum calumniatores, I, 16, ed. Kotter, pp.89-90). We see that, because of the Incarnation, matter appears as divinized, it is seen as the habitation of God. It is a question of a new vision of the world and of material reality. God has become flesh and flesh has become in truth the dwelling place of God, whose glory shines in the human face of Christ. Consequently the urgings of the Eastern Doctor are still extremely relevant, considering the very great dignity that matter has received in the Incarnation, able to become, in faith, sign and effective sacrament of the encounter of man with God. John Damascene remains, therefore, a privileged witness of the cult of icons, which became one of the most distinctive aspects of Eastern theology and spirituality down to the present. Yet it is a form of devotion that plainly belongs to the Christian faith, to the faith in that God who was made flesh and made himself visible. The teaching of Saint John Damascene was thus introduced into the tradition of the universal Church, whose sacramental doctrine provides for the fact that material elements taken from nature are capable of becoming means of grace in virtue of the invocation (epiclesis) of the Holy Spirit, accompanied by the confession of the true faith.

In connection with these profound ideas John Damascene also posits the veneration of the relics of the saints, on the basis of the conviction that the Christian saints, having become participants in the resurrection of Christ, cannot be considered simply as 'dead'. In enumerating, for example, those whose relics or images are worthy of veneration, John specifies in his third discourse in defense of images: "First of all let us venerate those among whom God rested, he alone being holy who rests among the saints (cfr Is 57,15), like the Holy Mother of God and all the saints. These are the ones who, as far as possible, made themselves like God by their will and by the indwelling and the aid of God, who are truly called gods (cfr Psalms 82,6), not by nature, but by contingency, just as red-hot iron is called fiery, not by nature but by contingency and by participation in the fire. He says in fact: You will be holy, for I am holy (Lv 19,2)" (III, 33, col. 1352 A). After a series of references of this type, the Damascene was able to serenely deduce: "God, who is good and superior to all goodness, was not content with the contemplation of himself, but willed that there should be beings blessed by him who would be able to become participants in his goodness: therefore he created from nothing all things, visible and invisible, including man, a reality both visible and invisible. And he created him by thinking and realizing him as a being capable of thought (ennoema ergon), enriched with words (logo[i] sympleroumenon) and oriented towards the spirit (pneumati teleioumenon)" (II, 2, PG 94, col. 865A). And to further clarify the idea, he adds: "One must let oneself be filled with wonder (thaumazein) at all the works of providence (tes pronoias erga), praise them all and accept them all, overcoming the temptation to pick out in them aspects which seem to many unjust or unfair (adika), and admitting that the plan of God (pronoia) goes beyond the capacity of man to know and understand (agnoston kai akatalepton), while on the contrary He alone knows our thoughts, our actions, and even our future" (II, 29, PG 94, col. 964C). Plato, among others, used to say that all philosophy begins with wonder: our faith also begins with the wonder of creation, of the beauty of God who made himself visible.

The optimism of natural contemplation (physike theoria), of seeing in the visible creation the good, the beautiful, the true, this Christian optimism is not a naive optimism: it takes account of the wound inflicted on human nature by a freedom of choice willed by God and improperly utilized by man, with all the consequences of widespread discord that are derived from that. From here comes the need, clearly perceived by the theologian from Damascus, that the nature in which the goodness and beauty of God are reflected, having been injured by our trespass, has been "reinforced and renewed" by the descent of the Son of God into the flesh, after God Himself, in many ways and diverse occasions, had sought to show that He had created man not only for "being" but for "well-being". With passionate zeal John explains: "It was necessary that nature be reinforced and renewed and the road of virtue be indicated and concretely taught (didachthenai aretes hodon), the road that leads away from corruption and towards eternal life ... And so has appeared on the horizon of history the great sea of the love of God for man (philanthropias pelagos) ..." It is a beautiful expression. We see, on the one side, the beauty of creation, and on the other, the destruction wrought by human sin. But we see in the Son of God, Who descends to renew nature, the sea of the love of God for man. John Damascene continues: "He Himself, the Creator and Lord, strove for his creatures, passing on to them his teaching by example... And so the Son of God, existing in the form of God, lowered the heavens and came down...near his servants...accomplishing the newest thing of all, the only truly new thing under the sun, through which the infinite power of God was made manifest in fact" (III, 1.PG 94, coll. 981C-984B).

We can imagine the comfort and the joy that these words, rich in such fascinating images, spread in the hearts of the faithful. Let us also, today, listen to them, sharing in the same sentiments of the Christians of that time: God wants to rest in us, he wants to renew nature also by means of our conversion, he wants to makes us sharers in his divinity. May the Lord help us to make of these words sustenance for our lives.

"God is other, people"

2009-05-07T11:50:00.012-02:30

Richard Neuhaus reports the following anecdote of the late, great Cardinal Avery Dulles (requiescat in pace). Once when giving a talk at a parish church, the Cardinal noticed a large banner strung across the entrace that read "God is other people". His gut reaction was to take a magic marker to the sign and put an "emphatic comma" after the word "other". (Of course, he restrained himself.)

The attitude reflected in that banner, and the idea too frequently heard in a number of sermons, is that we find God in our fellow human beings or nowhere. It's almost as if, when asked what the greatest command of the law was, Jesus had answered: "Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, and all of your mind, and all of your strength; or, which is the same thing, love your neighbour as yourself." He didn't say that. Whether intentional or not, this kind of thinking can have the effect of directing us away from God and towards each other, towards ourselves. Now of course, "God is other people" is true in a sense. We serve God by means of loving service towards our neighbour: "What you do to the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you do to Me", said Our Lord. But this truth exists in tension with another, namely, that God is absolutely transcendent, infinitely surpassing our loftiest conceptions of Him: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:8-9). So we live in the tension between "God is other people" and "God is other, people". To embrace the first and ignore the second is to risk making what Father Neuhaus calls "the greatest of all category mistakes -- mistaking the creature for the Creator" (American Babylon, p. 100).

Father Neuhaus makes this point in the context of a discussion about the different forms atheism takes in our society. In a culture where bizarre neo-pagan spiritualities multiply at an ever-increasing rate, it's not always easy to tell who is and who is not an atheist. "Is a Zen physio-psychoanalyst an atheist?", he wonders. He continues:

"There are also curious twists and turns under ostensibly orthodox Christian auspices. References to transcendent realities are sometimes conflated with, and sometimes subordinated to, social agendas of great variety ... [this is where he inserts Cardinal Dulles's banner anecdote]. Whether under Christian or non-Christian auspices, many of the "spiritualities" in contemporary culture would seem to be elaborately religionized forms of atheism "(p. 100).

But we should also be cognizant of the fact that there are atheists worthy of our respect, "atheists in good faith", as Father Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher to the papal household, calls them. Neuhaus quotes him thus:

"The world of today knows a new category of people: the atheists in good faith, those who live painfully the situation of the silence of God, who do not believe in God but do not boast about it; rather they experience the existential anguish and the lack of meaning of everything: They too, in their own way, live in the dark night of the spirit. Albert Camus called them "the saints without God." The mystics exist above all for them; they are their travel and table companions. Like Jesus, they "sat down at the table of sinners and ate with them" (see Luke 15:2). This explains the passion with which certain atheists, once converted, pore over the writings of the mystics: Claudel, Bernanos, the two Maritains, L. Bloy, the writer J. K. Huysmans and so many others over the writings of Angela of Foligno; T. S. Eliot over those of Julian of Norwich. There they find again the same scenery that they had left, but this time illuminated by the sun.... The word "atheist" can have an active and a passive meaning. It can indicate someone who rejects God, but also one who -- at least so it seems to him -- is rejected by God. In the first case, it is a blameworthy atheism (when it is not in good faith), in the second an atheism of sorrow or of expiation." (Quoted on pp.104-105 of American Babylon)

More from American Babylon

2009-05-05T13:28:00.009-02:30

I can't remember where exactly (maybe in his book, Miracles?), but C. S. Lewis somewhere in his writings notes a certain incoherence in the philosophical stance of scientific materialism. Father Neuhaus in American Bablyon makes the same point in his usual inimitable manner:

"Yes, there are those who embrace simple-minded responses to the quandary [i.e., the mind-matter paradox]. In recent years, the "new atheists", as they are misleadingly called, such as Richard Dawkins, say that we human beings are nothing but "survival machines" and that what we call thought is nothing more than the product of neurosynapses in the pound of meat that is the brain. But, by their own account, they are programmed to talk that way, and, apart from our sympathy for their self-chosen plight, we need pay no mind to what they insist on describing as their mindlessness. Of course they protest that they are making an argument that has a claim upon our intellectual attention, but, try as we might, we cannot agree without denying the existence of the intellect that is the agent of our agreement" (p. 67-68).

My very first posting on this blog dealt with this sort of thing, and I don't want to repeat myself. Let me just say that for argument of any kind, scientific, ethical, theological, philosophical, whatever, to make sense, there must be a transcendent truth independent of human biology that we can access by means of our reason. This is possible because our minds are images of the Mind of the Maker, the source of all Truth. (And if we ever encounter extra-terrestrial intelligence, differences in biological makeup and evolutionary history will not be an insuperable impediment to our common pursuit of truth. Star Trek opens this Friday, so I had to throw that in!) Neuhaus expresses this idea beautifully: "The Catholic Augustinians ... were of the school of the logos , where it is understood that reason participates in the Mind of the Maker, and all that is truly real is love in response to the love by which all that is exists" (p. 72).

I love the way the man writes! I'll conclude this posting with one more quote that reinforces what was said earlier in a particularly compelling way:

"It is a striking oddity of our time that people who ground morality in choice are frequently the same people who claim that we have no choice. That is to say, they subscribe to the dismal idea that our lives and what we call our thoughts, purposes, and choices are all determined by matter in motion -- which is, finally, all that we are. At the same time, they subscribe to the idea of progress as the conquest of nature to, as Francis Bacon said, "relieve the estate of man."

"In short, we are completely captive to the nature we are determined to conquer. We are free to think and to choose, but our thinking and choosing is an illusion, since in reality they are no more than the transmission of impulses between the neurons of the "pound of meat" that is the brain. As the befuddled philosopher is supposed to have said, "As to the question of whether we have free will, we have no choice but to answer yes." This is self-referential contradiction and intellectual incoherence of a high order. It is at the core of the position that asserts with adamant certitude that there is no truth and that's the truth" (p. 77-78).

More on this in my next posting. (Oh, yeah, and the answer to the last "guess the author" is John Henry Newman. The passage is from one of his Parochial and Plain Sermons.)

Guess the author

2009-05-04T12:12:00.001-02:30

Let us not be content with ourselves; let us not make our own hearts our home, or this world our home, or our friends our home; let us look out for a better country, that is, a heavenly country. Let us look out for Him Who alone can guide us to that better country; let us call heaven our home, and this life a pilgrimage; let us view ourselves as sheep in the trackless desert, who, unless they follow the shepherd, will be sure to lose themselves.

By the rivers of Babylon ...

2009-05-04T11:10:00.007-02:30

First, a bit of history. Nabopolassar, the father of Nebuchadnezzar, laid the foundations for the Babylonian dynasty and empire in 626 B.C., and his son greatly extended it through conquest. Nineveh was taken and destroyed in 612 B.C. The kingdom of Judah was next, and Jerusalem was captured in 597. Nebuchadnezzar put Zedekiah on the throne as his proxy, at the same time exiling Ezekiel and thousands of others. In 586, the holy city was destroyed and almost all the remaining citizens were deported to captivity in Babylon. When Cyrus, king of Persia, conquered Babylon in 539, he permitted the Jews to return to their homeland to rebuild Jerusalem and, even more importantly, the temple.

The name Bablyon is the Greek version of the Akkadian Bab-Ilu, which translates as "gate of god". My fascination with languages prompts me to point out the similarities between 'Ilu', 'Allah', and 'Elohim', the words for God/god in Akkadian, Arabic, and Hebrew. The Hebrew word is plural in form (the -im ending), but is regularly used for God in the Hebrew Bible. For example, a recurring phrase is: 'ko amar Adonai Elohim Yisrael', 'Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel'. It might be a propos at this point to mention that in the Genesis account, Babylon is the place where the diversity of languages came to be. As we read in Genesis 11: "And the Lord said, "Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.... and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel..."

So Babylon, symbolically, is the place where there is no communication, or at least, a place where communication is confused. A place where misunderstandings abound. And where there is no real communication, there is no real community. But human beings were made for community. Hence we are out of place in the world, restless in Babylon, and we long for a homeland where all misunderstandings, all lies will cease, where communication will be perfect, where human community will be perfected through our common community with God. We are all exiles here, on pilgrimage towards that perfect community that awaits us in the New Jerusalem. Hence we are not to get too comfortable here. Babylon is no place to settle down: 'Here we have no abiding city'. This is one of the principle points Father Neuhaus makes in his book, American Bablyon. But side by side with this we are enjoined to work for the well-being of this place of our exile, just as Jeremiah counselled the Jews in their Babylonian captivity:

"Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat the produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters ... multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare."

There is an obvious tension here, of which we should all be ever mindful. And there is an important difference between our situation and that of the Jews in Babylon, one that Father Neuhaus tends to pass over. The Jews were exiles in Babylon, but the Babylonians weren't. The Jews longed for their ancestral homeland; the Babylonians were home. We are not allowed to recognize such a distinction. We are all, without exception, exiles here, even those of us who don't realize it, who feel quite at home in the world. So when Neuhaus says: "To seek the peace and welfare of Babylon is to seek improvement, and another word for improvement in 'progress'. Devotion to progress is devotion to the common good, including the good of those citizens of Babylon who seek no other city" (p.58), I feel like responding, "Yes, but the greatest good we can do for them is to convince them that they don't belong in Babylon, that no one belongs in Babylon." Changing the metaphor a bit, we are commissioned by Our Lord to convince everyone to come with us into the Ark that is the Church, an Ark that can give us safe passage home.

St. Joseph the Worker

2009-05-01T09:41:00.007-02:30

I know I said that my next few posts would be on Father Neuhaus's book, American Babylon, but today is the feast of St. Joseph the Worker, and I can't let that pass without acknowledgement. The Office of Readings for today (May 1) doesn't speak about St. Joseph specifically: there is instead a passage from Gaudium et Spes on the value and dignity of human labour. So I'll quote something from the Office of Readings from March 19, the saint's solemnity. This is from a sermon by Saint Bernardine of Siena:

"There is a general rule concerning all special graces granted to any human being. Whenever the divine favor chooses someone to receive a special grace, or to accept a lofty vocation, God adorns the person chosen with all the gifts of the Spirit needed to fulfill the task at hand.

"This general rule is especially verified in the case of Saint Joseph, the foster-father of our Lord and the husband of the Queen of our world, enthroned above the angels. He was chosen by the eternal Father as the trustworthy guardian and protector of his greatest treasures, namely, his divine Son and Mary, Joseph's wife. He carried out this vocation with complete fidelity until at last God called him, saying: Good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your Lord.

"What then is Joseph's position in the whole Church of Christ? Is he not a man chosen and set apart? Through him and, yes, under him, Christ was fittingly and honorably introduced into the world. Holy Church in its entirety is indebted to the Virgin Mother because through her it was judged worthy to receive Christ. But after her we undoubtedly owe special gratitude and reverence to Saint Joseph.

"In him the Old Testament finds its fitting close. He brought the noble line of patriarchs and prophets to its promised fulfillment. What the divine goodness had offered as a promise to them, he held in his arms.

"... Remember us, Saint Joseph, and plead for us to your foster-child. Ask your most holy bride, the Virgin Mary, to look kindly upon us, since she is the mother of him who with the Father and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns eternally. Amen."

Father Richard Neuhaus

2009-04-28T10:16:00.004-02:30

I recently finished reading Father Neuhaus's last book, American Babylon. I love that man. I always said to myself that if I ever got to New York, I'd go to one of his masses and listen to him preach. That will never happen now, sadly. I mourn his passing. I pray, I trust, that having fought the good fight, having run his race, he has reached the longed-for home, the goal he describes in such moving language: "The pilgrim destination is not so much a place as a person. How do Christians envision their final return from exile? It is the personal encounter and eternal dwelling with one who is no stranger, for we knew him in his humility and will then see him in his triumph. The finite, once receptive to the infinite, is now received into the infinite. Received, not absorbed or subsumed, for we continue to be creatures, but now creatures perfectly attuned to the love by which and for which we were made."

I'll be reflecting on his book in my next few postings. In this, as in everything he wrote, there is a lot to chew on. But today, I just want to quote the last two paragraphs:

"Throughout these pages, the proposal is that the whole creation groans for the glory that is to be revealed. With the resurrection of Jesus, a genuinely new world order has been inaugurated, and we are on the way, out from exile and on the pilgrim way toware the City of God. We are sustained on the way by faith's embrace of the presence in time of the End Time, who is the Alpha and Omega, the logos of all that has been, is now, and ever shall be. We are moving toward our destination, and our destination is moving toward us. At the very end of the very last book of the Bible are the words of Jesus, "Behold, I am coming soon." To which all the saints respond: "Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!"

"... we seek to be faithful in a time not of our choosing but of our testing. We resist the hubris of presuming that it is the definitive time and place of historical promise or tragedy, but it is our time and place. It is a time of many times: a time for dancing, even if to the songs of Zion in a foreign land; a time for walking together, unintimidated when we seem to be a small and beleaguered band; a time for rejoicing in momentary triumphs, and for defiance in momentary defeats; a time for persistance in reasoned argument, never tiring in proposing to the world a more excellent way; a time for generosity toward those who would make us their enemy; and, finally, a time for happy surrender to brother death -- but not before, through our laughter and our tears, we see and hail from afar the New Jerusalem and know that it is all time toward home."

Amen to that, Father! Richard John Neuhaus. Requiescat in pace.

Silence

2009-04-27T12:28:00.010-02:30

I've been trying to track down something I read in Thomas Merton a long time ago on contemptus mundi. No luck so far. But in the process, I came upon some wonderful passages in his book, Contemplative Prayer on the importance of silence. I'd like to share a couple of these. The first is from Isaac of Niniveh, a Syrian monk:

"Many are avidly seeking but they alone find who remain in continual silence ... Every man who delights in a multitude of words, even though he says admirable things, is empty within. If you love truth, be a lover of silence. Silence like the sunlight will illuminate you in God and will deliver you from the phantoms of ignorance. Silence will unite you to God himself ...

"More than all things love silence: it brings you a fruit that tongue cannot describe. In the beginning we have to force ourselves to be silent. But then there is born something that draws us to silence. May God give you an experience of this 'something' that is born of silence. If only you practice this, untold light will dawn on you in consequence .. after a while a certain sweetness is born in the heart of this exercise and the body is drawn almost by force to remain in silence."

Further on, Merton quotes one of the Desert Fathers, Abba Ammonas, a disciple of St. Anthony:

"Behold, my beloved, I have shown you the power of silence, how thoroughly it heals and how fully pleasing it is to God. Wherefore I have written to you to show yourselves strong in this work you have undertaken, so that you may know that it is by silence that the saints grew, that it was because of silence that the power of God dwelt in them, because of silence that the mysteries of God were known to them."

In relation to the subject of contemptus mundi and withdrawal from worldly attachments, this passage is not exactly what I had in mind, but it is very relevant (I'm quoting Merton himself this time):

"Far from establishing one in unassailable narcissistic security, the way of prayer brings us face to face with the sham and indignity of the false self that seeks to live for itself alone and to enjoy the 'consolation of prayer' for its own sake. This 'self' is pure illusion, and ultimately he who lives for and by such an illusion must end either in disgust or in madness.

"On the other hand, we must admit that social life, so-called 'worldly life,', in its own way promotes this illusory and narcissistic existence to the very limit. The curious state of alienation and confusion of man in modern society is perhaps more 'bearable' because it is lived in common, with a multitude of distractions and escapes -- and also with opportunities for fruitful action and genuine Christian self-forgetfulness. But underlying all life is the ground of doubt and self-questioning which sooner or later must bring us face to face with the ultimate meaning of our life. This self-questioning can never be without a certain existential 'dread' -- a sense of insecurity, of 'lostness,' of exile, of sin. A sense that one has somehow been untrue not so much to abstract moral or social norms but to one's own inmost truth. 'Dread' in this sense is not simply a childish fear of retribution, or a naive guilt, a fear of violating taboos. It is the profound awareness that one is capable of ultimate bad faith with himself and with others: that one is living a lie."

It's a very strong idea in monastic spirituality that life in the "world", if it doesn't actually force us to live a lie, does tend to keep drawing us up to the surface of things. We have to break contact at times if we want to get down to the depths of reality, where the encounter with God can occur. Again, Merton says this better than I can: "[the monk] plunges deep into the heart of that world of which he remains a part although he seems to have "left" it. In reality the monk abandons the world only in order to listen more intently to the deepest and most neglected voices that proceed from its inner depth."

Ambrose Autpert

2009-04-24T21:10:00.006-02:30

The subject of the Holy Father's general audience for this past Wednesday (April 22)was Ambrose Autpert (Ambrosius Autpertus in Latin), an 8th century monk and theologian. He was born in Provence of a noble family, and served for a time as an official in the French court of Pepin the Short. His duties also included acting as a tutor for the future emperor Charlemagne. After leaving the service of the French king, he made his way to Italy, where he joined the Benedictines. He wrote a number of theological works, some of which were wrongly attributed to St. Augustine or Gregory the Great. His most important work was a commentary on the Apocalypse in ten books.

Autpert saw the Book of Revelation as reflecting chiefly on the mystery of the Church. He was less interested, in his reading of this work, in the Second Coming of Christ than in what His first coming, His Incarnation, means for the church of the current age. He says: "Christ must daily be born, die, and be raised in us, who are His Body." In this, Mary is the model of the Church, and a model for each of us, because it is also through us that Christ must be born. It can be reasonably argued that Autpert was the first great Mariologist of the Western Church, anticipating later writers like St. Bernard in some of the formulations inspired by his love and veneration for the Blessed Virgin. At the end of his commentary, Ambrose addresses God in the following words: "When you are scrutinized by us intellectually, you are not uncovered as you really are; when you are loved, you are attained." Study is important, especially study of the Sacred Scriptures, but love has the primacy.

Another of his works that enjoyed great popularity in the Middle Ages is Conflictus vitiorum et virtutum (The Conflict of the vices and virtues). He describes a kind of spiritual warfare in which 24 pairs of vices and virtues contend, the vices trying to seduce the soul with subtle arguments, while the corresponding virtues strike back using, for the most part, the words of Scripture. In this conflict Autpert opposes cupiditas (greed) with contemptus mundi (contempt of the world). This is almost the defining virtue of the monk. (Thomas Merton has some profound things to say on this somewhere. I'll try to dig that up.) As the Holy Father explains: "This contempt for the world is not a contempt for creation, for the beauty and goodness of the created world and the Creator, but a contempt for the false vision presented and suggested to us by that very vice of greed, which suggests to us that "to have" is the highest value of our existence, what gives our life its seeming importance. And in this way it falsifies the creation of the world and destroys the world. Like St. Paul, Ambrose denounces greed as the root of all evil. He imagines the objections that the rich and powerful might raise, objections like: "We are not monks, the ascetic demands made on you don't apply to us." Autpert responds: "What you say is true, but for you also, according to your manner of life and the measure of your strength, must walk the steep and narrow way, because the Lord has proposed only two gates and two paths (the narrow and the broad gates, the steep and the easy paths); He has not indicated a third gate and a third path."

"But perhaps it is true after all"

2009-04-23T14:45:00.003-02:30

"An adherent of the Enlightenment, a very learned man, who had heard of the Rabbi of Berditchev, paid a visit to him in order to argue, as was his custom, with him, too and to shatter his old-fashioned proofs of the truth of his faith. When he entered the Rabbi's room he found him walking up and down with a book in his hand, wrapped in thought. The Rabbi paid no attention to the new arrival. Suddenly he stopped, looked at him fleetingly and said, "But perhaps it is true after all." The scholar tried in vain to collect himself -- his knees trembled, so terrible was the Rabbi to behold and so terrible his simple utterance to hear. But Rabbi Levi Jizchak now turned to face him and spoke quite calmly: "My son, the great scholars of the Torah with whom you have argued wasted their words on you; as you departed you laughed at them. They were unable to lay God and His Kindgom on the table before you, and nor can I. But think, my son, perhaps it is true." The exponent of the Enlightenment opposed him with all his strength; but this terrible "perhaps", which echoed back at him time after time broke his resistance."

(I quote this from Pope Benedict's book, Introduction to Christianity, written when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger. He in turn took it from the works of Martin Buber, a noted twentieth century Jewish scholar, perhaps best known for his work I and Thou.)

Saint Anselm, Bishop and Doctor

2009-04-21T10:28:00.004-02:30

Today is the memorial of Saint Anselm of Canterbury. He was born in Aosta (the first town on the Italian leg of the Via Francigena) in 1033. This is from today's Office of Readings, taken from his Proslogion:

"The light in which you dwell, Lord, is beyond my understanding. It is so brilliant that I cannot bear it, I cannot turn my mind's eye toward it for any length of time. I am dazzled by its brightness, amazed by its grandeur, overwhelmed by its immensity, bewildered by its abundance.

"O supreme and inaccessible light, O complete and blessed truth, how far you are from me, even though I am so near to you! How remote you are from my sight, even though I am present to yours! You are everywhere in your entirety, and yet I do not see you; in you I move and have my being, and yet I cannot approach you; you are within me and around me, and yet I do not perceive you.

"O God, let me know you and love you so that I may find my joy in you; and if I cannot do so fully in this life, let me at least make some progress every day, until at last that knowledge, love and joy come to me in all their plenitude. While I am here on earth let me learn to know you better, so that in heaven I may know you fully; let my love for you grow deeper here, so that there I may love you fully. On earth then I shall have great joy in hope, and in heaven complete joy in the fulfillment of my hope."

Saint Anselm, ora pro nobis!

Humility

2009-04-20T15:27:00.006-02:30

Archbishop Anthony Bloom has interesting things to say about humility in his book Beginning to Pray. He leads up to it by making a point that is not often heard: that the perceived absence of God (of course, He is never really absent) should be regarded as a blessing, for which we should feel gratitude. To come into the divine presence is to enter into judgement, a judgement most of us could not endure, a judgement that would be condemnation. We should pray like the Publican, aware of our unworthiness to come before God, pleading for mercy, asking that by His grace He might form us into people fit to be received into His Kingdom as friends. He puts it this way:

"What we must start with, if we wish to pray, is the certainty that we are sinners in need of salvation, that we are cut off from God and that we cannot live without Him and that all we can offer God is our desperate longing to be made such that God will receive us, receive us in repentance, receive us with mercy and with love. And so from the outset prayer is really our humble ascent towards God, a moment when we turn Godwards, shy of coming near, knowing that if we meet Him too soon, before His grace has had time to help us to be capable of meeting Him, it will be judgment."

This leads in to his meditation on humility. Not the false humility practised by those who constantly dwell on their sinfulness, and are quite pleased with their own piety. True humility is incompatible with feeling good about yourself, because it is incompatible with thinking about yourself at all. Self-forgetfulness is key. To paraphrase a thought of Simone Weil: it is not our business to think about ourselves, but about God. Leave it to God to think about us, trust in His care for us. This is the kind of humility we should pray for. Here is Father Bloom again:

"The word 'humility' comes from the Latin word 'humus' which means fertile ground. To me, humility is not what we often make of it: the sheepish way of trying to imagine that we are the worst of all and trying to convince others that our artificial ways of behaving show that we are aware of that. Humility is the situation of the earth. The earth is always there, always taken for granted, never remembered, always trodden on by everyone, somewhere we cast and pour out all the refuse, all we don't need. It's there, silent and accepting everything and in a miraculous way making out of all the refuse new richness in spite of corruption, transforming corruption itself into a power of life and a new possibility of creativeness, open to the sunshine, open to the rain, ready to receive any seed we sow and capable of bringing thirtyfold, sixtyfold, a hundredfold out of every seed... this is the weakness in which God can manifest His power and this is the situation in which the absence of God can become the presence of God. We cannot capture God. But whenever we stand ... outside the realm of 'right', only in the realm of mercy, we can meet God."

Icons of Mary

2009-04-18T11:45:00.004-02:30

I have great admiration and love for Eastern Orthodoxy: the beautiful, ancient liturgies of St. John Chrysostom and Saint Basil, the importance of monastic spirituality, icons, the strong Marian piety. These last two are combined in a meditation in one of the appendices of the book I talked about in my last blog entry, Beginning to Pray by the Russian Orthodox archbishop Anthony Bloom.

There are two basic types of icons of the Mother of God in the Orthodox Church. By far the most common is the one representing Mary with the infant Jesus in her arms, a picture of maternal tenderness, but also of contemplative awe and wonder at the Child Who is the Son of God, born for us, an offering to the Father for the remission of our sins. But there is a second type, where Mary is standing alone, her grief apparent less in her face than in her hands. They are 'hands of anguish', as Father Bloom calls them, placed in an anatomically impossible position in the example from the 17th century which he describes. Faintly visible behind her, in the distance on a hilltop, is a bare cross. The Mother, mourning, contemplates the loss of her only Son. Archbishop Bloom comments:

"When we turn to the Mother of God in prayer, we should realise more often than we do that any prayer we offer to the Mother of God means this: 'Mother, I have killed thy Son. If you forgive me, I can be forgiven. If you withhold forgiveness nothing can save me from damnation.' And it is amazing that the Mother of God, in all which is revealed in the Gospel, has made us understand, and made us bold to come to her with this very prayer, because there is nothing else we can say. ... We love her, we feel perhaps in her in a peculiar way we see the Word of God spoken by Paul who says,'My power is made manifest in weakness.' We can see this frail virgin of Israel, this frail girl, defeating sin in her, defeating hell, defeating everything by the power of God which is in her. And this is why at moments like persecutions, when indeed the power of God is made manifest in nothing but weakness, the Blessed Virgin stands out so miraculously, so powerfully in our eyes. If she could defeat earth and hell then we have in her a tower of strength and one who can intercede and save, and we mark the fact that in her there is no discrepancy with the will of God, that she is in perfect harmony with Him, by using a formula of prayer which we use only for God and for her, 'Save us'. We don't say 'Pray for us'."

"No one has greater love ..."

2009-04-17T10:10:00.003-02:30

I came upon the book Beginning to Pray during my brief stay with the Trappists in Oregon. It was written by a Russian Orthodox archbishop, Anthony Bloom, and has become something of a modern day spritual classic among Christians of all denominations. I thought I'd lost it, but pouring over my shelves last night at 3 a.m. (couldn't sleep!) there it was. It's a very slender volume, so easily overlooked. The introduction is an interview with the archbishop, who was a medical doctor before he became a priest: a very interesting guy! At the conclusion of the interview, he tells the following true story:

In the early days of the Russian Revolution, a small village that had been held by the Tsar's forces was captured by the Communists. A young woman, in her early twenties, knew that if she was captured she would be executed, since her husband was a man of some importance on the opposing side. So she took her two small children, four and five years of age, to an abandoned house, hoping to escape notice until she had a chance to make her escape. But there came a knock on the door, and here was a young woman, about the same age, whom she had never laid eyes on before, a neighbor. This woman's name was Natalie. Natalie asked the young mother if she was the woman the Communists were looking for. When she admitted that she was, Natalie told her, "You must flee, for they know that you're here, and they'll be along in a matter of hours to arrest you; you are to be shot." The woman looked down in despair at her two small children and said "How can I flee?" The other replied, "You can, because I will stay here in your place, and when they come for you, I will call myself by your name." "But you will be killed," said the mother. "Yes, but I have no children." Archbishop Bloom concludes the story thus:

"We can imagine what happened then. We can see the night coming, wrapping in darkness, in gloom, in cold and damp, this cottage. We can see there a woman who was waiting for her death to come and we can remember the Garden of Gethsemane. We can imagine Natalie asking that this cup should pass her by and being met like Christ by divine silence. We can imagine her turning in intention towards those who might have supported her, but who were out of reach. The disciples of Christ slept; and she could turn to no one without betraying. We can imagine that more than once she prayed that at least her sacrifice should not be in vain.

"Natalie probably asked herself more than once what would happen to the mother and the children when she was dead, and there was no reply except the word of Christ, 'No one has greater love than he who lays down his life for his friend.' Probably she thought more than once that in one minute she could be secure! It was enough to open the door and the moment she was in the street she no longer was that woman, she became herself again. It was enough to deny her false, her shared identity. But she died, shot. The mother and the children escaped."

A powerful story! It puts me in mind of Maximilian Kolbe.

Il Signore e vermente risorto, alleluia! A Lui gloria e potenza nei secoli!

2009-04-16T18:08:00.003-02:30

I like to look at the Vatican website on a regular basis, to work on my Italian (which is pretty weak!). The text of the Pope’s general audience appears there almost every Wednesday, and his Angelus / Regina Caeli address most Sundays, and while there are summaries in English, French, Spanish, etc., the full text of his talk is only in Italian. I’m hoping to get some practice in the spoken language this summer on the last leg of the pilgrimage. His Holiness always has some gems that I’ll make an effort to share, in the original Italian and in my translation. Here are a couple of passages, one from yesterday’s general audience, and one from the Regina Caeli for Easter Monday:

(Quoting Silvano del Monte Athos) “Gioisci, anima mea. È sempre Pasqua, perché Cristo risorto è la nostra risurrezione.”

(“Rejoice, my soul. It is always Easter, because the risen Christ is our resurrection.”)

“La sua risurrezione ha gettato un ponte fra il mondo e la vita eterna, sul quale ogni uomo e ogni donna può passare per giungere alla vera meta del nostro pellegrinaggio terreno.”

(“His resurrection has thrown down a bridge between the world and the life eternal, over which every man and every woman can pass to arrive at the true goal of our earthly pilgrimage.”)

The Unspeakable

2009-04-15T10:03:00.006-02:30

I came across this comment recently on thecatholicthing.org: "...lots of people who welcomed the Second Vatican Council's opening to the modern world, or were trained by those enthusiasts for the Council, think that taking some strong stances against that world now constitutes a step backwards", which presumably is meant to be a bad thing. It put me in mind of something of Thomas Merton's that I read a long time ago and have never forgotten: "Those who are at present so eager to be reconciled with the world at any price must take care not to be reconciled with it under this particular aspect: as the nest of the Unspeakable. That is what too few are willing to see." I went and looked up the context. It's in the Prologue to his book Raids on the Unspeakable :

"The Unspeakable. What is this? Surely an eschatological image. It is the void that we encounter ... underlying the announced programs, the good intentions, the unexampled and universal aspirations for the best of all possible worlds. It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience ... It is the emptiness of "the end". Not necessarily the end of the world, but a theological point of no return, a cllimax of absolute finality in refusal, in equivocation, in disorder, in absurdity, which can be broken open again to truth only by miracle, only by the coming of God ... This is precisely what it means to be a Christian; for Christian hope begins where every other hope stands frozen stiff before the face of the Unspeakable.

"... The goodness of the world, stricken or not, is incontestable and definitive. If it is stricken, it is also healed in Christ. But nevertheless one of the awful facts of our age is the evidence that it is stricken indeed, stricken to the very core of its being by the presence of the Unspeakable.

"Those who are at present so eager to be reconciled with the world at any price must take care not to be reconciled with it under this particular aspect: as the nest of the Unspeakable. This is what too few are willing to see."

Prayer request

2009-04-14T10:04:00.002-02:30

I received some bad news this morning concerning my father's wife Julia. Doctors have found a tumour in her brain that appears to be metastatic. Scans show spots in her lungs and liver as well. Please keep her in prayer.

The weightlessness of faith

2009-04-08T10:58:00.005-02:30

The ease of unbelief and the difficulty of belief lie on different planes. Unbelief, too, is a heavy burden, and in my opinion even more so than faith. Faith also makes man light. This can be seen in the Church Fathers, especially in monastic theology. To believe means that we become like angels, they say. We can fly, because we no longer weigh so heavy in our own estimation. To become a believer means to become light, to escape our own gravity, which drags us down, and thus to enter the weightlessness of faith.

From Salt of the Earth, by Joseph Ratzinger.

From the same source, here is a good meditation for Holy Week:

The theology of littleness is a basic category of Christianity. After all, the tenor of our faith is that God's distinctive greatness is revealed precisely in powerlessness. That in the long run, the strength of history is precisely in those who love, which is to say, in a strength that, properly speaking, cannot be measured according to categories of power. So in order to show Who He is, God consciously revealed himself in the powerlessness of Nazareth and Golgotha ... the least power of love is already greater than the greatest power of destruction.

I won't be blogging again until after Easter, so I want to wish everyone a prayerful, grace-filled Triduum.

Pastor Schneider

2009-04-04T14:34:00.005-02:30

Pastor Schneider was a Lutheran minister who died in Buchenwald concentration camp. Karl Stern tells his story in one of his books:

During a solemn ceremony in the camp Pastor Schneider refused to take his cap off to the swastika flag. He was dragged into the bunker, the ill-famed prison within the camp, which he was destined not to leave any more. For thirteen months he suffered the tortures of a sadistic form of separate treatment. Prisoners who temporarily shared his cell were overwhelmed by the spiritual greatness of this man. In spite of nourishment which was scarcely enough to maintain life, he refused, on Friday, the day of Our Lord's death, all food.

In front of the one-story bunker was the big gathering place at which prisoners had to appear twice daily, in the morning and in the evening, to be counted ... On the high feast days one would suddenly, during the quiet of the counting, hear the powerful voice of Pastor Schneider through the grates of the bunker. Like a prophet, he made a feast-day sermon, that is to say, he tried to begin it. On Easter Sunday morning, for example, we suddenly heard the powerful words: "Thus says the Lord: I am the Resurrection and the Life!" There the prisoners were, standing in long rows, stirred to the innermost by the courage and tremendous willpower of a man. It was as if a voice from another world were calling them, as if they heard the voice of John the Baptist from the dungeons of Herod, the mighty voice of a prophet calling in the desert. He could never say more than a few sentences. Then one heard the truncheons of the guards beating him, or the blow of a fist throw his tortured body into the corner of the bunker ... Since they could make no impression on conviction which was of the hardness of granite, they declared him a madman who had to be silenced by beating. For over a year he bore the tortures of the bunker, until even his strength succumbed to brute force. There was nothing whole on his entire body when he was carried dead from the bunker.

Pastor Schneider, ora pro nobis.

Tolstoy on women

2009-04-03T16:48:00.005-02:30

I keep finding good stuff by Karl Stern in my notebooks, things I had forgotten about. This story from his book Flight from Woman is too good to keep to myself:

Maxim Gorky tells in his Reminiscences of Tolstoy how one day a group of men, among them Chekhov, were sitting in the garden and talking about women. Tolstoy listened for a long time in silence, and then suddenly remarked: "I am only going to tell the truth about women when I am standing with one foot in the grave -- I shall say it, jump into the coffin, pull the lid, and then I'll say: 'Do with me what you want!'" ... Though a joke, there is one thing the scene and Tolstoy's remark convey -- a sense of mystery. If the truth about women is something a literary genius will keep until the moment of his death, there must be, besides an old man's sly crack, another implication -- the inexpressible, a kind of 'mysterium tremendum'.

(You see, women, what fascination you exert on us poor helpless males? You are all an awesome mystery to us!)

Guess the author #6

2009-04-03T12:03:00.005-02:30

(The answer to the last "Guess the author" (#5) is John Henry Newman.)

Then said our good Lord, asking: "Art thou well paid that I suffered for thee?" I said: "Yea, good Lord, blessed mayest thou be." Then said Jesus, our good Lord: "If thou art paid, I am paid. It is a joy, a bliss, and an endless liking to me that ever I suffered passion for thee. And if I could suffer more, I would suffer more."

Dialogues of the Carmelites

2009-03-31T14:50:00.005-02:30

What began as a Lenten project last year ended up extending into the late summer, but in August 2008 I finished my translation from the French of Georges Bernanos' Dialogues des Carmelites. Bernanos is a French Catholic author who died in the 40's, an author Pope Benedict has praised, and the Dialogues is probably his most famous work. A French composer whose name escapes me at the moment turned it into an opera that has been performed around the world. I have permission from the copyright holders in Paris to seek a publisher for my translation, but I've not had much luck so far (Ignatius Press wasn't interested; I'm still waiting for a definite answer from Angelus Press). I don't think I'll be violating any copyright laws if I publish a small excerpt here.

First, a bit of background. The play focuses on a Carmelite convent near Paris at the outbreak of the French Revolution. As the new regime comes down progressively harder on the religious, Our Lord's Agony in the Garden keeps resounding as a kind of leitmotif. One example: the main character, Blanche de la Force, a young daughter of the nobility who struggles with a terrible weakness in her emotional makeup, takes the name of Sister Blanche of the Agony of Christ.

In the following scene, the priest who serves the nuns (referred to only as the Aumonier in the French), and indeed all priests, have been declared outlaws and forbidden on penalty of death from exercising their priestly functions. He comes in disguise to one of the buildings on the grounds of the convent to celebrate Mass with the sisters and a few of the local faithful.

SCENE 7
We are at the Good Friday service, held in secret in a place on the grounds of the convent. A few faithful have gathered. It is night. Some men are on look-out. There are women and children present. The religious arrive without a sound. One of them prepares the vestments. The priest has not yet arrived. Outside, we hear one or two signal cries. The priest comes in. The children kiss his hands.

Chaplain: When I left you the first time, I hoped to see you again often. But the circumstances have been very far from what I had foreseen. I can say that they make my ministry more difficult with each passing day. From now on, each of our meetings will happen according to the good pleasure of God, and we will be obliged to thank Him for them as for a miracle. What do you expect? In less somber times, homage to His Majesty easily takes on the character of a simple ceremonial, too much like what one observes in honor of the kings of this world. I do not say that God does not accept homage of this sort, even though the spirit which inspires it is rather of the Old Testament than of the New. But it happens that He grows tired of it, forgive me this expression. The Lord lived and still lives among us as a poor man; the moment always comes when He decides to make us poor like Him, so that He might be received and honored by the poor, according to the manner of the poor, and so to find again what He knew long ago so many times on the roads of Galilee; the hospitality of the destitute, their simple welcome. He wished to live among the poor; He also wished to die with them. For it was not as a Count at the head of the men of his household that He walked towards death, that is, towards Jerusalem, the place of His sacrifice, in those sinister days that preceded Easter. It was among poor people who, very far from dreaming of defying anyone, made themselves small, so as to pass unnoticed for as long as possible … Let us now also make ourselves small, not, like them, in order to escape death, but in order to suffer it, if need be, as He Himself suffered it, for He was truly, as Holy Scripture says, the lamb that was led to slaughter. We are going to proceed now with the adoration of the Cross.

The priest departs, after having promised the nuns that he would return on Easter day.

"...the greatest force in the world"

2009-03-27T12:24:00.003-02:30

One last excerpt from Karl Stern's account of his conversion, chosen almost at random (nearly every page of this book contains some thought-provoking idea, some striking anecdote, something worth passing on):

"The Church mirrors the facets of History. The Gospel is always the same. But the life of the Gospel in the turmoil of the fourth century is seen in St. Augustine. The life of the Gospel at the height of the Middle Ages ... is perceived in St. Thomas. In the nineteenth century, the century in which the human mind began to rule systematically the material forces of the universe, the Church began to extol the Little Way, the mystic life in hidden "little people." This is the only logical answer to the threat of a coming managerial age. Christ always has the appropriate answer, and He gives it in His saints. I have mentioned how great intuitive geniuses, such as Goethe and Tolstoy, perceived the mystic significance of the "little people". The Church, quite independently, has emphasized the same point. But in doing so she only re-emphasized one aspect of her eternal doctrine. Every century the Church takes a red pencil and underlines certain words of the Gospel, words which happen to fit the occasion. "Many thoughts", says Father Sossima [in Dostoevski's Brothers Karamazov, I believe. -A],"seem to lead us into a state of doubt. Particularly when we see the sins of men we ask ourselves: 'Shall we tackle all this by force or by humble charity?' Always decide in favor of humble charity. Once you have decided in favor of it you will conquer the whole world. Humble charity is a terrible force; it is the greatest force in the world; there is nothing like it ..."

More from The Pillar of Fire

2009-03-23T09:37:00.008-02:30

In the Foreward to his book, Karl Stern makes an interesting observation about conversion stories:

"To write the story of a conversion is a foolish undertaking, for the convert, the "turned-around," is a fool. He is a fool in the sense in which Saint Paul uses this word. All stories of conversion appear to have something subjective-arbitrary, some tragic secret. The communication contains something incommunicable. Even the story of St. Augustine, told by a powerful spirit in the crystalline, translucent atmosphere of the Mediterranean, contains that foolish, devious something, the element of dark solitude.

"All true love is subjective and unique, and at the same time creates communion. Here, as always, love of the sexes is an image of divine love. There is something about falling in love which cannot be re-experienced by the outsider; it is something lonely: the lovers leave everything behind them. Yet love is not true love when it is only unique and lonely; it must also create community. The Tristan and Isolde of Wagner are abandoned to death but the Tamino and Pamina of Mozart enter through the Gates of Life. What is true of those who love is also true of those who know. It is no coincidence that in Hebrew the word Yadoa is the word for knowing and for the physical consummation of love.

"In spiritual love the two forces of solitude and community create power like the two poles of an electrical element. If the Christian religion were lived only in the cell of a Saint John of the Cross, it would become something lunatic and asocial. And if it were concerned only with the existence of the parish, it would soon resemble any business concern. In religion, if we must share the horrible cosmic solitude of the night of Gethsemani, neither must we refuse to belong to the multitude which is fed on bread and fishes.

"Seen 'from outside' a conversion is something adventurous and anarchic. We know from the story of poor Don Quixote how foolish it looks for someone to take ideas so seriously that he really rides away from home. However, the fact that the first voyage of Columbus appeared like a gigantic Quixoterie did not disprove the existence of the sought-for continent. If there are certainties, one must be able to find them.

"That one simple question, whether Jesus of Nazareth was God incarnate, becomes increasingly decisive between people, as history moves forward. Dostoievsky once said that it is the one question on which everything in the world depends. The answer to this question cuts into human ties and seems to reflect even on the nature of inanimate things. What if all that is folly in the eyes of the Greeks, and scandal in the eyes of the Jews, is Truth?"

Words of Our Lady to Venerable Mary of Agreda

2009-03-20T10:29:00.003-02:30

(Yesterday was the feast of St. Joseph. I didn't get an opportunity to post yesterday, but I wanted to publish something to encourage devotion to the patron of this blog, so here it is a day late (mea culpa!).)

"The children of the world are ignorant regarding the privileges and rights which the Most High has conferred on my holy spouse, and the power of his intercession with the Divine Majesty and with me. But I assure you, my daughter, that in Heaven he is most intimate with the Lord, and has great power to avert the punishment of Divine justice from sinners. In all trials seek his intercession, because the Heavenly Father will grant whatever my spouse asks."

"On the Day of Judgment, the condemned will weep bitterly for not having realized how powerful and efficacious a means of salvation they might have had in the intercession of St. Joseph, and for not having done their utmost to gain the friendship of the Eternal Judge."

Ma k'lal hatorah?

2009-03-20T09:55:00.006-02:30

At the end of his book describing his conversion to Catholicism (see previous post), Karl Stern includes a letter to his brother, a leader in the Kibbutzim movement in the early days of the state of Israel. One remarkable passage in the letter always sticks with me, and I want to share it.

"People who do not believe in Revelation are irked by the idea of a God as represented in the Bible. They say that He is anthropomorphic. They want a philosophical God, if any. However, the specifically Jewish idea is not so much that God is anthropomorphic but that Man is theomorphic. There is an ancient discussion of the Rabbonim, I believe it is Talmudic, in which the question under consideration is: 'Ma k'lal hatorah?' ('What is the fundamental principle of the law?') One Rabbi says: 'Love thy neighbour as thyself,' but another counters: 'There is a more fundamental one -- He created Man in His image.' This means that Man in the original idea of creation is God-like. If that is true there must be in God something to which the idea of Man is analogous. The Christian idea is a little more specific, and calls the something in God of which Man is, in a mysterious fashion, an image, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. But she is only a little more specific about it than the Jews. Just meditate for a moment on that rabbinic discussion and you come quite logically to that explicitly Christian notion of God. The idea of the Incarnation is nothing alien grafted upon the tree of Jewish tradition. The Jewish spirit is profoundly incarnational."

"Man is theomorphic". I have never seen the idea expressed quite so simply and powerfully before. Of course, the same thing was said in a different way, by St. Irenaeus, I think, when he said, "God became man so that man could become God" or words to that effect. And there is also that passage in John's Gospel (10:34) where Jesus says: "Is it not written in your law: I said you are gods?" It gives me a certain amount of pleasure to think how close we really are in our beliefs to our Jewish brothers and sisters (whether most of them know it or not).

Guess the author #5

2009-03-18T11:23:00.004-02:30

(The answer to the last "Guess the author": John Bunyan, from Pilgrim's Progress)

To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.

Pillar of Fire

2009-03-18T10:51:00.003-02:30

I like conversion stories. I'm fascinated by the myriad ways God's grace leads people to the Catholic Church. Karl Stern's story, as recounted in his book, Pillar of Fire, is of particular interest for a number of reasons. First, he is an eloquent writer whose crystalline intelligence shines through on every page of his prose. Stern is a man of many parts: medical doctor, accomplished musician, published novelist. He was also a Jewish medical student in Germany in the 1930's, at the time when the Nazis were beginning their rise to power, which lends a certain pathos to his story: most of his family, many of his friends were executed outright or died in concentration camps. Stern and his wife escaped to Canada, and settled in Montreal,where he was received into the Church and where he spent the rest of his life.

Stern was once a devout Orthodox Jew. Reading some of his observations and musings, I was struck by how deeply our Catholic faith is rooted in the rich soil of the faith of Israel. One of the Pius popes (Pius XI, maybe?) once said, "We are all spiritually Semites," a fact for which I give thanks to God.

A few sample passages follow (I will have more in subsequent blogs).

"... a chance remark made by the young man who conducted our Sabbath afternoon Bible class [particularly struck me]. I think it was at the time when we discussed those particularly "Messianic" chapters of Isaiah. He said: "You know, occasionally, when you contemplate these two thousand years of Galuth [dispersion] without even any remote hope of return {remember that this was written before there was a state of Israel - A.}, you are almost inclined to wonder whether Jesus was not the Messiah after all." For "Jesus" he used a dark word which orthodox Jews occasionally use, perhaps out of some superstition. Of course, he discarded the thought ... but ... it stuck with me. My immediate reaction, perhaps already on the basis of my experience, was: "How do you know he wasn't?"

"If the divinity of Christ was an error or a lie, certain formative forces which radiated from this very idea and fertilized the depth of the soul were impossible to explain. In a certain inverted and paradoxical sense Tolstoy was right. For without the divinity of the Messiah the simple piety and heroic sanctity of some of our peasant maids were somehow unthinkable, but so were Chartres and Grunewald, and Bach and Mozart."

"One of my great teachers in Medicine used to say that in order to be a scientist you have to have only one talent -- to be astonished at the proper time. Pascal was astonished at an obvious and simple fact. Just as the Prophets had predicted it, the fruit of Israel had burst at a definite historical moment, the seeds had been flung to the far corners of the earth and had brought forth plants a thousandfold."

Just one more:

"If a Hasidic mystic and a follower of St. John of the Cross could know one another, not separated by a barbed wire of social and political prejudice but in a spirit of charity, they would be amazed how akin they are in their striving."

"It seemed I saw the Tree itself ..."

2009-03-14T13:40:00.005-02:30

"... I beheld, sorrowing, the Healer's Tree
till it seemed that I heard how it broke silence,
best of wood, and began to speak:

'Over that long remove my mind ranges
back to the holt where I was hewn down;
from my own stem I was struck away,
dragged off by strong enemies,
wrought into a roadside scaffold.
They made me a hoist for wrongdoers.

The soldiers on their shoulders bore me,
until on a hill-top they set me up;
many enemies made me fast there.
Then I saw, marching toward me,
mankind's brave King;
He came to climb upon me.

I dared not break or bend aside
against God's will, though the ground itself
shook at my feet. Fast I stood,
who falling could have felled them all.

Almighty God ungirded Him,
eager to mount the gallows,
unafraid in the sight of many:
He would set free mankind.
I shook when His arms embraced me
but I durst not bow to ground,
stoop to Earth's surface.
Stand fast I must.

I was reared up, a rood.
I raised the great King,
liege lord of the heavens,
dared not lean from the true.

They drove me through with dark nails:
on me are the deep wounds manifest,
wide-mouthed hate-dents.
I durst not harm any of them.
How they mocked at us both!
I was all moist with blood
sprung from the Man's side
after He sent forth His soul.

Wry wierds a-many I underwent
up on that hill-top; saw the Lord of Hosts
stretched out stark. Darkness shrouded
the King's corse. Clouds wrapped
its clear shining. A shade went out
wan under cloud-pall. All creation wept,
keened the King's death. Christ was on the Cross.

....

'Now, my dear man, you may understand that I have suffered to the end the pain of grievous sorrows at the hands of dwellers in misery. The time is now come that men on earth, and all this marvellous creation, shall honour me far and wide and address themselves in prayer to this sign. On me the Son of God spent a time of suffering. Therefore do I now tower up glorious beneath the heavens, and I have the power to save every man who fears me. Formerly I was made the worst of punishments, the most hateful to the peoples -- before I opened to men, the speech-bearers, the right way to life.

Behold, the Prince of Glory then exalted me above the trees of the forest, the Keeper of the Kingdom of Heaven; just as He also, Almighty God, for the sake of all mankind, exalted His mother, Mary herself, above all womankind.

I now command you, my dear man, to tell men about this sight ... But every soul on earth who intends to dwell with the Lord shall come to the Kingdom through the Rood.'"

Selections from "The Dream of the Rood", translated from Old English by Michael Alexander.

The oldest version of this remarkable poem, one of the earliest extant examples of Old English verse, consists of 15 lines carved in runes on the Ruthwell cross, a stone cross in Ruthwell, Scotland, that has been dated to the early 8th Century. The unknown author may have been a contemporary of Bede the Venerable. In fact, the cross was made after the return of Bede's abbot from Rome. He had been attending the festivities there in 701 connected with Pope Sergius I's miraculous discovery of a piece of the True Cross.

The later, expanded version of the poem, and the original source of the selections quoted above, is found in manuscript in the Vercelli Book, in the library of the cathedral of St. Andrew in Vercelli, Italy. Also to be found in the manuscript is a poem entitled Andreas, on the life of my patron saint, Saint Andrew the Apostle, and another, Elene, on St. Helena, the mother of Constantine, whom tradition remembers as the one who found the True Cross. Some variants of her legend hold that she was a British princess (it should be noted that Constantine was born in York). All three poems, together with some sermons, are in the West Saxon dialect of Old English. The book is believed to have been written in the late 10th Century. Some scholars have suggested that the fuller treatment of the rood poem found in the manuscript was prompted by the fact that King Alfred (Alfred the Great), when he was in Rome in 885, was given a relic of the True Cross by Pope Marinus.

Vercelli, at the foot of the Italian Alps, is a city on the Via Francigena, the route that numberless pilgrims from England, including several Saxon kings, took to reach the Eternal City, the See of St. Peter. There were so many of these pilgrims that Rome had a Saxon quarter. As readers of this blog know, I intend to follow in the footsteps of these ancient pilgrims this summer, Deo volente: from Canterbury, England all the way to the Vatican, on foot. Prayers, please, for blessings on this planned pilgrimage.

Eritis sicut Deus

2009-03-10T13:33:00.004-02:30

Anthony Esolen has profound things to say about love, freedom, and our contingent nature in his meditation on Dante's Divine Comedy, published in this month's edition of First Things (March 2009). This merits extensive quoting:

"...All things, says the psalmist, declare that 'he made us; we did not make ourselves.' Even the atheist must agree that we did not make ourselves. The statement expresses contingency and dependence, and these are plainly discernible by reason. I did not come into the world self-made. Indeed, I came into a world already present for me to enter: an intelligible world, not a congeries of arbitrary and unrelated forces. Had there been no such world, I would not have existed.

"To claim, then, that we did make ourselves would be to deny the real contingency of our beings -- which would also be to deny the web of relations into which we have entered by our being and without which we must cease to be. Deep at the heart of this denial is the prideful sin of ingratitude. We see that we are provided with what we could not have provided for ourselves: not only the material conditions that support our existence -- our food and drink, the care of our parents -- but the fact of our existence itself. Yet we respond with a lie. We repeat what Satan implicitly affirms at the bottom of hell [Esolen says 'implicitly' because in Dante's Inferno, Satan does not speak; indeed, as the author of this peice points out, it is almost as if he is 'sublingual'], the loneliest words ever uttered: "I am my own, I am my own! My mind is my own, to fashion what truth I shall please. My body is my own, to dispose of as I please. My will is my own. I rise -- by my power. I exist -- by my power."

Towards the end of his article, Esolen talks about the force that breaks the power this lie has over us, that opens our eyes to the truth of our contingent existence: love. It is the case again of ubi amor, ibi oculus, 'where there is love, there is seeing',the subject of the last posting. To this truth revealed to us through love the only appropriate response is humble gratitude:

"Love opens our eyes, allowing one contingent being to reveal the mysteries of beauty to another. But it also gives us wings, prompting the intellect to soar in contemplation of that beauty. Throughout the Divine Comedy, Dante's beloved Beatrice has been preparing the pilgrim for the ultimate and yet infinite flight, to see the Beloved face to face.

"In harsh contrast is the vision of Satan and his trinitarian heads. They are seamed together, but incongruously. There is no harmony among them, as there is no interaction among the traitors he gnaws. No community, no exit from the self. "Hell is other people," said Sartre, and he was correct in this sense: If for you hell is other people, then you are in hell, and so are your fellow traitors.

"Satan's lie, then, is also Satan's mistake. He who is not God wants to be God, to rise by his own power and be his own. But God is his own precisely in his love -- in his being for. "You should be as gods," Satan says to Eve, and he unwittingly speaks the truth. We should be as gods, and we can be, in gratitude and humility and love. For the outpouring of a grateful heart, which loves because it receives what it has not deserved, reflects the exuberant power of God, who loves into existence beings whom he does not need. And the self-emptying that is essential to love -- the humble willingness to acknowledge that, as we did not make ourselves, we do not exist for ourselves -- reflects the plenitude of God, who in his creation deigns to put himself at the disposal of the contingent beings he loves.

"He is the cup that runneth over -- in love. He can be sung about; he can be prayed to. If we would be laws unto ourselves, Dante would say, we must wisely and freely embrace the laws of our contingent being, obeying them as an obedient and beloved son cheerfully obeys his father, growing into the father's authority by deeper and wiser and freer acts of obedience. And in obeying those laws we will find ourselves great-souled, able to love one another. We should be as gods."

Ubi amor, ibi oculus

2009-03-07T13:25:00.002-03:30

Reading a collection of essays by Theodore Dalrymple, a British doctor and writer, I was struck by the following passage in a piece entitled “What the New Atheists Don’t See”:

“A few years back the National Gallery held an exhibition of Spanish still-life paintings. One of these paintings had a physical effect on the people who sauntered in, stopping them in their tracks; some even gasped. I have never seen an image have such an impact on people. The painting, by Juan Sánchez Cotán, now hangs in the San Diego Museum of Art. It showed four fruits and vegetables, two suspended by string, forming a parabola in a grey stone window.

Even if you didn’t know that Sánchez Cotán was a seventeenth–century Spanish priest, you could know that the painter was religious: for this picture is a visual testimony of gratitude for the beauty of those things that sustain us. Once you have seen it, and concentrated your attention on it, you will never take the existence of the humble cabbage – or of anything else – quite so much for granted, but will see its beauty and be thankful for it. The painting is a permanent call to contemplation of the meaning of human life, and as such it arrested people who ordinarily were not, I suspect, much given to quiet contemplation.”

Such is the power of great art, the power to transform ordinary people, at least while they are in its presence, into contemplatives, the power to transform everyday objects into tokens of grace, ‘charged with the grandeur of God’, and so pointing to a transcendent reality. In this sense, all great art is ultimately religious, even if the subject of the work is not explicitly so.

This resonates with something else I recently read in an article in the March 2009 issue of First Things, “Surprised by Calvin”. The article starts off with the view of C.S. Lewis and Fr. Andrew Greeley on the sacramental character of the world: simple worldly pleasures, objects, events, and people are ‘revelations of grace’. Richard Mouw, the author of the article, quotes Greeley and comments: “Indeed, Catholic theology of the sacraments is ‘both a result and a reinforcement of a much broader … view of reality’ – a view in which the created world around us serves as a kind of metaphor for heavenly things. The things that make up our very ordinary existence, Greeley tells us, ‘hint at the nature of God,’ and they even serve to ‘make God in some fashion present to us.’”

In the same article, Mouw relates that Josef Pieper, a great Catholic thinker and Thomist philosopher, used to give talks in a sculptor’s studio to a group that would gather there on a regular basis to listen to him. On one occasion he recounted that the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras once asked his students the question, “Why are you here on earth?” Anaxagoras gave the answer, “To behold.” Mouw comments: “Pieper applied Anaxagoras' comment to the artistic task, but it also applies more broadly. We honor the Creator’s purposes when we engage in beholding, in that special kind of ‘seeing’ that, as Pieper puts it, is directed to more than ‘the tangible surface of reality.’ This kind of seeing, Pieper further observes, must be ‘guided by love’ for – and here Pieper quotes an ancient saying – ubi amor, ibi oculus (roughly, “where there is love, there is seeing”).”

“Where there is love, there is seeing”; and everything that we see points beyond itself, and directs our minds to the One Who is the source of all love, all beauty.

Guess the author #4

2009-03-05T13:50:00.003-03:30

(The answer to the last "Guess the author" is William Blake. The verses are from Auguries of Innocence.)

He that is down need fear no fall;
He that is low, no pride;
He that is humble, ever shall
Have God to be his Guide.

I am content with what I have,
Little be it, or much;
And, Lord, contentment still I crave,
Because Thou savest such.

Fullness to such a burden is,
That go on pilgrimmage;
Here little, and hereafter bliss,
Is best from age to age.

Pilgrimmage is going to become more and more an object of reflection in this blog as July approaches, since my buddy T.N. and I are planning on doing the Via Francigena, from Canterbury ad limina apostolorum, to the precincts of the apostles, the Vatican, this summer: the whole distance on foot, with backpacks!

The Mantle of Mary

2009-02-28T22:25:00.004-03:30

Fair is the hue of your mantle, Mary --
(Take me to shelter, take me to hide!)
"From the deep skies of heaven it drank all its color,
In the deep pools of Heaven my mantle was dyed."

Fine is the cloth of your mantle, Mary --
(Take me to shelter, take me to hide!)
"Ah, careful was the carding and careful the spinning,
And piteous the shearing of my dear Lamb's side."

Warm is the web of your mantle, Mary --
(Take me to shelter, take me to hide!)
"It is woven of rare wool, woven of fair wool --
The soft white fleece of my Lamb Who died."

Draped like a queen's is your mantle, Mary --
(Take me to shelter, take me to hide!)
"Yea, God hath exalted His handmaid, Who made me
Mother of His Word and His Spirit's bride."

Full are the folds of your mantle, Mary --
(Take me to shelter, take me to hide!)
"That all generations be shielded and succored,
The cloak of their Mother is a deep cloak and wide."

Ah, wrap me around with your mantle, Mary --
(Take me to shelter, take me to hide!)
"Child of my sword-pierced soul, I shall guard you,
Little blood-brother of the Crucified."

--by Patrick O'Connor

I came upon this in the scriptorium of a Trappist monastery in Oregon (Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist Abbey, in Lafayette, to be precise) during my brief period of Observership there. I had never seen it before, and I have not seen it since. But it struck me so much that I had to note it down. It's not great poetry, by any means, and I know nothing about the author aside from his name. But the Marian piety, the child-like trust, the tenderness of it never fail to touch my heart and leave me deeply moved. I especially like: "That all generations be shielded and succored, the cloak of their Mother is a deep cloak and wide."

Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

Reflections on Ash Wednesday (1 day late!)

2009-02-26T10:13:00.004-03:30

Scrutemur vias nostras et quaeramus et revertamur ad Dominum.

(Let us search our ways, and seek, and return to the Lord.)
- Lamentations 3:40

A wise man once said, "The one principle of Hell is: I am my own" (anyone know who?). Ash Wednesday is a good day to reflect on the fact that we are NOT our own; the ashes are a brand, marking us as the flock belonging to our Master, the Good Shepherd. We have all been bought and paid for with an awesome price.

"Sin needs both definition and acknowledgement. But if neither occurs, it remains, with its effects, on our souls and those of our neighbors. The classical authors teach us to look to our own wills when things go wrong. The cross of ashes -- "Remember, Man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return" -- is placed on the forehead of laity and on the crown of the monk's head. Ash Wednesday does not point to itself. But it does point, first to the man who needs to repent, then to the redemption in which alone repentance has its meaning in forgiveness."
- Father James V. Schall, S.J.

"What, I ask, is more wonderful than the beauty of God? What thought is more pleasing and satisfying than God's mercy? ... The radiance of the divine beauty is altogether beyond the power of words to describe."
- St. Basil

This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

-From Ash Wednesday, by T.S. Eliot

Solitude

2009-02-19T14:36:00.003-03:30

"If only men could see more deeply, they would find what a treasure is hidden in solitude and everyone would run to it."

- Dom Johannes Lanspergus, Carthusian

"Tout le malheur des hommes vient d'une seule chose, qui est de ne pas savoir demeurer au repos dans une chambre."

("All the unhappiness of men can be attributed to one thing, namely, not being able to sit quietly alone in a room.")

- Blaise Pascal

"It's easier not to be a Christian than to be a Christian today ..."

2009-02-15T15:08:00.005-03:30

I heard this, or words to this effect, in a video, spoken by an Anglican clergyman, the guy who started the Alpha Course, as a matter of fact. (For those who don't know, the Alpha Course is sort of a new take on C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, but on DVD.) Of course, in one sense he's right. To live your Christian faith openly is to set yourself up for ridicule and contempt from strident secularists who believe religion in general, and Christianity especially, is laughable or downright dangerous. At the very least, you'll get funny looks and embarrassed silences from co-workers or fellow students if you stand up for Church teachings on any of the hot-button issues in the culture wars (you know the list: abortion, gay marriage, etc.). It's hard to get more counter cultural than the Catholic Church.

But in a more profound sense, he's wrong. The Gospel is "Good News": "For God so loved the world, as to give his only begotten Son; that whosoever believeth in him, may not perish, but may have life everlasting"; "I am come that they may have life, and may have it more abundantly"; and one of my favorite passages: "Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light." A life without faith, now THAT is difficult, THAT is a heavy load to carry.

For the reality of life on earth is that no one escapes suffering. Probably the best expression of this idea is among the oldest, written by the first and greatest poet of the Western world, Homer. In Book 24 of The Iliad, Priam, king of Troy, comes by night to the Greek camp. He comes as a suppliant to Achilles to ransom the body of his son Hector. Achilles addresses him: "Ah, unhappy man, many indeed are the evils you have endured in your heart. How could you bring yourself to come alone to the ships of the Achaeans, to meet my eyes, I who have slain your sons many and noble? Of iron, surely, is your heart. But come, sit, and let us allow the woes in our hearts to rest, despite all our sorrow; for no profit comes from chill lament. For so have the gods spun the thread for wretched mortals, that they should live among sorrows; and they themselves are without care. For two urns are set on Zeus' floor of gifts that he gives, the one of ills, the other of blessings. To whomever Zeus who hurls the thunderbolt gives a mixed lot, that man meets now with evil, now with good; but to whomever he gives only the baneful, him he makes to be degraded by man, and evil madness drives him over the face of the sacred earth, and he wanders honored neither by gods nor by mortals." Homer knew that no one gets only blessings. A mixed lot is the best we can hope for.

The "why" of human suffering is a deep mystery. But I've always thought that the argument that human suffering proves that there is no God as Christians conceive Him, all-powerful and all-good, looks at things from the wrong end. The reality is that no one gets a pain-free life ("It is right it should be so; man was made for joy and woe"). The practical problem is: how do we cope? And it seems intuitively obvious that faithful Christians have resources for dealing with pain, physical, emotional, and spiritual, that nonbelievers don't have. Maximilian Kolbe transformed the horror of a starvation bunker at Auschwitz into the serenity of a chapel. Paul Miki and his companions, whose feast we just celebrated on Feb. 6, preached and sang psalms while dying on their crosses. It was reported that "joy glowed on all their faces". Almost the last words Paul Miki spoke were addressed to his torturers: "My religion teaches me to pardon my enemies and all who have offended me. I do gladly pardon the Emperor and all who have sought my death. I beg them to seek baptism and be Christians themselves." Immaculee Ilibagiza forgave the Hutus who hacked her family to death with machetes and turned her own life into a living nightmare during the Rwandan genocide (her story is movingly told in her books Left to Tell and Led by Faith.) Their Catholic faith brought them peace and joy in the midst of their terrible suffering. This is powerful testimony to the truth of Christianity.

So to those who say that suffering proves there is no God, I say it proves the opposite. Faced with suffering such as few of us will ever experience, which most of us can barely imagine, the people I've named and countless others turned to God, gave Him their pain, and received in return His consolation and the strength to persevere and to forgive. Anyone can experience this. God's grace is available to all who approach Him with their troubles, doubts, pains, and problems. Try it! All it requires is an attitude of prayerful openness and humility. And bear in mind: "If it tarries, wait for it, for it will surely come."

Guess the author #3

2009-02-14T21:48:00.003-03:30

(The answer to the last "Guess the author" was Blaise Pascal. The passage is from Pensees .)

Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.

It is right it should be so:
Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know
Through the world we safely go.

Guess the author: #2

2009-02-10T18:38:00.000-03:30

Ainsi je tends les bras à mon Libérateur qui, ayant été prédit durant quatre mille ans, est venu souffrir et mourir pour moi sur la terre dans les temps et dans toutes les circonstances qui en ont été prédites ; et, par sa grâce, j’attends la mort en paix, dans l’espérance de lui être éternellement uni ; et je vis cependant avec joie, soit dans les biens qu’il lui plaît de me donner, soit dans les maux qu’il m’envoie pour mon bien, et qu’il m’a appris à souffrir par son exemple.

Translation :
And so I stretch out my hands to my Liberator, who, having been predicted for four thousand years, came to suffer and die for me on earth at the time and in all the circumstances which had been predicted concerning him; and, by his grace, I await my death in peace, in the hope of being eternally united to him; meanwhile, I live in joy, whether in the good things which it pleases him to give me, or in the ills which he sends me for my good, and which he has taught me to suffer by his example.

(The answer to the previous Guess the Author: St. Thomas More. The answer to the bonus question: Czeslaw Milosz.)

Guess the author: #1

2009-02-06T14:16:00.001-03:30

Give me thy grace, good Lord, to set the world at nought,
To set my mind fast upon Thee, and not to hang upon the blast of men’s mouths;
To be content to be solitary, not to long for worldly company;
Little and little utterly to cast off the world
And rid my mind of all the business thereof …
Gladly to be thinking of God, piteously to call for His help,
To lean unto the comfort of God, busily to labour to love Him;
To know my own vilety and wretchedness;
To humble and meeken myself under the mighty hand of God;
To bewail my sins past, for the purging of them, patiently to suffer adversity;
Gladly to bear my purgatory here, to be joyful of tribulations;
To walk the narrow way that leadeth to life;
To bear the cross with Christ …

To have ever afore mine eye my death that is ever at hand;
To make death no stranger to me …

To have continually in mind the passion that Christ suffered for me;
For his benefits uncessantly to give him thanks …

To think my most enemies my best friends, for the brethren of Joseph could never have done him so much good with their love and favour as they did him with their malice and hatred.

These minds are more to be desired of every man, than all the treasures of all the princes and kings, Christian and heathen, were it gathered and laid together all upon one heap.

(I’ll give the answer in the next post.)

Pity the poor atheists …

2009-02-06T14:13:00.000-03:30

By their own reckoning, no matter how brilliant they are, no matter how much knowledge they accumulate in their lives, be they ever so long, all that learning dwindles to insignificance compared to the vastness of their ignorance. They will die in ignorance, and that will be that. The more ardently they burn for the truth, the more tragic their life of unrequited love must appear, even to them. It’s not surprising that atheists are at risk of succumbing to relativism, or even outright nihilism.
But for us who believe in the One Who said “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” not only do we love the Truth, but the Truth loves us back. Our Lord has promised, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” If we are faithful and persevere in faith, hope and charity, we can look forward to the time when we “will all be taught by God.” Father Richard Neuhaus (God rest him!) used to say that human beings are hardwired for truth. It is in our nature to long for the truth. That longing can be, and for the faithful will be, fully satisfied.
It’s interesting to me that some of the more famous atheists out there now are scientists. The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce wrote: “The only end of science, as such, is to learn the lesson that the universe has to teach it. In induction it simply surrenders itself to the force of facts. But it finds … that this is not enough. It is driven in desperation to call upon its inward sympathy with nature, its instinct for aid, just as we find Galileo at the dawn of modern science making his appeal to il lume naturale …” In his book The Last Word, Thomas Nagel finds Peirce’s views “entirely congenial”, yet he is troubled by their “alarmingly Platonist” tone. He goes on: “They maintain that the project of pure inquiry is sustained by our “inward sympathy” with nature, on which we draw in forming hypotheses that can be tested against the facts. Something similar must by true of reason itself, which according to Peirce has nothing to do with “how we think”. If we can reason, it is because our thoughts can obey the order of the logical relations among propositions – so here again we depend on a Platonic harmony.” (p. 128-9).
Why is this view “alarming”? Nagel explains: “… it is hard to know what world picture to associate with it, and difficult to avoid the suspicion that the picture will be religious, or quasi-religious … even without God, the idea of a natural sympathy between the deepest truths of nature and the deepest layers of the human mind, which can be exploited to allow gradual development of a truer and truer conception of reality, makes us more at home in the universe than is secularly comfortable. The thought that the relation between mind and the world is something fundamental makes many people in this day and age nervous. I believe this is one manifestation of a fear of religion which has large and often pernicious consequences for modern intellectual life.” (130).
Nagel has the honesty to admit: “I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers … I don’t want there to be a God: I don’t want the universe to be like that.” (130). Atheism as wish fulfillment. That’s a nice twist! Here’s another one, by a famous poet, a Nobel laureate:
“Religion, opium for the people. To those suffering pain, humiliation, illness, and serfdom, it promised a reward in the afterlife. And now we are witnessing a transformation. A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death – the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged.”
(Bonus question: guess this author! Answer next time.)