other than being

Homily for The Immaculate Conception

2011-12-08T14:07:00.001-06:00

Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night with acraving for applesauce? We have tastes that we’ve had all our lives. It turnsout that the food our mothers ate while we were in the womb helps determine ourpreferences. There were some studies where one group of expectant mothers weregiven a bunch of carrots and asked to eat some every day for nine months. Theother group of mothers was asked to avoid carrots. After the babies were born,they were all fed mushed carrots. The children whose mothers ate carrots smiledand happily ate the carrots. The children whose mothers did not eat carrotsfrowned and pushed away the strange-tasting new food. We learn a lot from ourparents.

So it is a little sad to look at the portrait of our firstparents, Adam and Eve. There is shame, a feeling that no one wants to feel. Theyhide from God, the one person no one should ever need to hide from. In theirdialogue with God they show their sinful pride, and in their denials ofresponsibility, they learn how to lie. God carries on the dialogue in a similartone; there are curses and punishments for their transgression. This is ourfamily inheritance. We inherited original sin from Adam and Eve; we havecommited our own personal sins after their example. We find ourselves wrestlingwith desires we do not want. We doubt the plain truth that should be obvious.And we fall into false habits of thinking wrongly.

If we were in God’s position, it might be tempting to giveup, to start all over again. Maybe God should have destroyed our free will. Butinstead, God has a better plan to reverse the curse of Adam and Eve.

We see the portrait of Mary, our new mother, mother of theChurch. She has the kind of spiritual wisdom of someone who has suffered thevery worst of what humanity has to offer. But Mary is young and innocent, asshe is a woman of paradox, virgin and mother, sinless but saved. Mary’sportrait is a mirror image of Adam and Eve. Instead of shame before God, Marysits innocently at prayer. Not hiding from God, Mary is fully present to herLord. She is not proud, though she alone has reason to boast; she is humble.She does not deny God’s plan, but she accepts it. And God responds; in place ofcurses and punishment, Mary receives benediction upon benediction and blessing.

She is able to be so holy because she was conceivedimmaculately, protected from the first moment of her existence, surrounded aswith a shield, a halo of holiness. No corruption from the world could touchher. She has been preserved from inheriting original sin, and by a singulargrace, she never fell into personal sin throughout her life. All this was givenher because God knew that she would say Yes, that Christ would be born, andthat Christ’s suffering on the Cross would earn for Mary the same merit thatbrings us salvation.

How beautiful, our mother. She is the ideal disciple, theperfect follower of Christ that we so deeply long to become. She SEES thepresence of God in everyone. She does what is right and good, having receivedthe infused virtues that make her capable of living the holiest of human lives.She is at peace, in the Garden with her God.

She was preserved from sin so that her yes would mean yes.So that when the angel announced to her the good news, she could say yes,completely, absolutely, never wavering, never pulling back from the divineembrace. Her Yes enables Christ to join the divine and human nature in his ownperson.

This is poetry. Eve was born of Adam’s side, and the newAdam is born of the womb of the new Eve. The Church then is born from thewounded side of Christ on the cross, where blood and water flowed out. Mary ismother of God, and Mary is the Church.

What of this Church? This church, the chapel we are in, iscold, and half empty. The beautiful ikon of the Immaculate Conception is nolonger here, although her statue remains. The sacristy was emptied of chalicesand chasubles. Even the tabernacle was emptied during the summer when no onelived here. They put up extra doors around the first floor of the building, tokeep people away. I’ve been through it, and the whole building is a mess; thereis debris and junk lying everywhere.

The building is a symbol of the Church in Belgium, theChurch in the US, and the Church in the whole western world. We are bruised andshaken. We are reduced in prestige and influence. Due to the sins of ourmembers, especially the clergy and the hierarchy, good people easily doubt thetruth of the Church, which they once easily believed. We are threatened withirrelevance, and the truth we teach goes unheeded. So many things have beentaken from us.

There is one thing that was not taken, however. They leftbehind a blessing that is more original than the Eucharist. This blessinghearkens back to the moments before God created the world. Silence remainedhere, the sacred silence in which God dwells.

This church is like a wounded soldier taken from thebattlefield and allowed to rest in a hospital bed. In rest and silence, shebegins to heal. You and I are here again celebrating the Eucharist in thischapel. A group of priests and lay students moved into the fifth floor. Slowlythis chapel is coming back to life.

This happens because it doesn’t ultimately depend on us.There is nothing anyone on earth could ever do to destroy the Church. The Churchis indefectibly and unfailingly holy. No matter what sins are commited by hermembers, the Church is holy, because God loves his spouse. God loves his bride,and he has entrusted her with the great treasury of his truth and hissacraments. God’s love and his gifts make us holy.

This is true of the Church, it is true of us. We disagreewith Luther and Calvin; we are not totally depraved. There is a part of us thatalways and forever remains holy, immaculate, that no sin can destroy orcorrupt. That is the silence in our souls, the Holy of Holies, where Goddwells.

Let us thank God for holiness that does not depend on us.

Solemnity of All Saints

2011-11-01T17:34:00.000-05:00

Men and women and children lying in a bed of pain. Widows,widowers and orphans of natural disaster. Peaceful protestors persecuted bypolice. And millions and millions of modern day martyrs. These are the men andwomen whom Christ calls blessed. And if we look with the eyes of faith, we maysee how they are blessed even now in their suffering. For God has redeemedhuman suffering through Christ. But Christ promises more than presentblessedness. Christ promises future, glorious, eternal blessedness in heaven.Our journey to heaven is long and dangerous. Our road may bend so far offcourse that we want to give up.

A woman stopped me on the street and asked if it ispermissible for catholics to be cremated. I wondered why she was asking. Shetold me that she has had back pain for years, and that she has become addictedto her pain medication. This addiction put her in years-long depression. Shesaid her body betrayed her. And she wanted it to burn.

I told her this is the only reason that catholics should notbe cremated, out of anger and spite for their bodies. We are all eventuallybroken. And tomorrow we will commemorate those whose bodies lie in the dust ofdeath. But today we celebrate that our bodies are sanctified by Christ whochose to become incarnated in a body like ours. And our bodies are destined forglorious resurrection. The journey is long, but we have help.

We have help in the great company of saints. This is a trulyChristian doctrine, for our God is no concept, but a person, a community of persons.And again by the incarnation, we are all of us baptized, and the whole world wehope, knitted together into the Body of Christ. So we become part of theGodhead in the person of Christ! The body of Christ is a many faced and manysplendored thing.

The communion of saints is not only the love and unity thatthe saints in heaven share with God and each other. It is also communion of thesaints with us, the Church on earth. And we are in communion with the sufferingsouls in purgatory. Grace flows through the Church like blood through the body;grace comes from heaven to revive the members of the body of Christ that havebeen bruised or broken.

If you have a headache, you can ask St Theresa of Avila forhelp. For anxiety and mental problems, look to St Dymphna. If you are a studentor a teacher, ask St Thomas Aquinas for wisdom. If you are suffering poverty,ask St Macrina. If you are a lost cause, or you know a lost cause, go to theApostle Jude. And if you are caught in a storm, which is likely tonight, ask StScholastica for help.

Did you know that the first successful blood transfusionwasn’t between two persons? In 1667 a british doctor took blood from a lamb andgave it to a sick boy, and the boy lived. It is a great coincidence, or nocoincidence at all, that he should have been saved by the blood of a lamb. Theblood that flows through the Body of Christ is the blood of the lamb. We havethe life of the sacraments to help us on our way to heaven. We have help, andso we have hope.

We hope for heaven! There is only one sacrament in heaven. Wehave no need of reconciliation, for we will all be reconciled to God. Nor arewe married, in the earthly sense, because each of us will be wedded to the Lambof God. And each of us shares in priesthood, either the priesthood of all thebaptized, or the ministerial priesthood of the clergy. And everyone is baptizedand adopted into Christ. Nor is there need for the anointing of the sick,because there is no more sickness, pain or death. But there is the Eucharist.

When I try to imagine heaven, this banquet of the lamb, Iimmediately think of Jan van Eyck’s Lammsgot in Ghent. And I wonder, what ifthis were painted not in a Flemish hillside, but here in the town of Leuven.Leuven is a wonderful setting to imagine the heavenly Jerusalem. We alreadyhave the altar in the center of the city, and there the slain but living lambwould preside. But the walls of St Pieter’s would have to be expanded,stretched out beyond the ring road. Because there is no special place set asidefor worship, the whole city is the Temple of God. You can see the cooks fromAlma dropping their serving spoons and falling on their knees in adoration. Youcan see the professors opening their mouths in awe before the Lamb, andstudents, no matter what subject they study, finding the fullness of truth andwisdom in this worship!

There is no disruptive repair work, since everything isalready perfect. There is no need for police, because there is no crime. Andevery room is sound proof, so we can get sleep through the students revellingat night. Saint Lucy is there, with her eyes back in their sockets. And Johnthe Baptist, too, with his head re-attached. And children who suffered polio,they are jumping and running through the streets. The depressed and the anxiousjoin the angels as they sing for joy for all eternity.

This liturgy is here, it happens here, around this altar, asthe heavenly liturgy joins to earth. We adore the Lamb, in communion with allthe saints.

The Greatest Commandment

2011-10-22T16:33:00.000-05:00

30th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

The Lord be with you! – And with your spirit!

A reading from the Holy Gospel, according to Matthew – Glory to you, O Lord.

When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees,
they gathered together, and one of them,
a scholar of the law tested him by asking,
“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
He said to him,
“You shall love the Lord, your God,
with all your heart,
with all your soul,
and with all your mind.
This is the greatest and the first commandment.
The second is like it:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”

The Gospel of the Lord. – Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.

Everyone wants to know. What is the ONE THING that explains everything else?

In two days the Catholic University of Leuven will host a public lecture by the most renowned physicist of our day. Stephen Hawking has titled his lecture, the Origin of the Universe. He is sure to draw a large crowd. Everyone wants to know. What is the ONE THING that explains everything else?

Physics is where many intelligent people look for truth, since indeed physics gets at some of the most fundamental realities of the universe. But if you follow physics at all, you know that physics faces a crisis, and it's been unsolved for close to a century. First, you have the world of everyday objects, like apples, billiard balls, and planets. Sir Isaac Newton applied his fantastic mind to understanding the laws that undergird our everyday world. Inertia, acceleration, gravity; we know how these things affect the world around us. We can mathematically determine, to an astonishing degree, exactly what is going on, and what will happen next.

But then complexity and chaos intervened. Looking beyond the visible world, entering the atomic, subatomic, and sub-subatomic level, all our classical laws break down. In the strange world of quantum mechanics things are not what they seem. One particle may be in two or more locations at once. Particles communicate with each other faster than the speed of light. Particles are actually waves; and wave are actually strings. And everything exists in ten dimensions.

But which theory is the actually correct one, which theory is true? Physicists dream of a unified theory of everything. One law that explains the rest. And in that way, physicists and Pharisees are twins separated at birth. The world of the Pharisee is the Bible; the Law of Moses, the books of the prophets, and the wisdom writings. The Law of God covers everyday contingencies. Do not oppress foreigners, since you used to be foreigners in a foreign land; do not extort money through super-high interest rates, or you will become poor. The world of Law is familiar; cause and effect, merit and punishment. Then you have another world, the world underneath the Law: the world of the prophets where up is down, sinners get off scott-free, and the just man suffers death. We know these two worlds, too. The world outside, where time is money, money is power, and power is god. And there is the world inside, the world inside the Church, where 'sorry' works miracles, bread and wine are flesh and blood, and you and I are precious and holy before God. But we live in both worlds, each of us, and life is confusing and contradictory.

One of the Pharisees asked Jesus, which verse of Scripture is the most important? What single lesson do I need in order to understand everything else? Jesus in his mercy gives his answer. You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart.

I have heard too many people warn me that Love is not a feeling; love is a choice, a matter of the will, not of the heart. But Jesus quotes Moses' command, which came from the LORD: Love with your whole heart; hole kardia. In my own life I know that my will is so often not enough; if my heart isn't in it, it's not happening. It's like getting up in the morning. What's your reason for getting out of bed? Is it because your internalized authority figure is yelling at you in your head, or because your heart is in it, and you love your life? Both motivations will work, but which would you prefer?

Now, loving God with your whole heart changes you, or so I've glimpsed in the sweetest moments of prayer. Falling in love with God feels much the same as falling in love with anyone, which makes sense because our God is personal. What happens when you fall in love? I think we should ask our newlyweds. Isn't it like carrying your beloved with you wherever you go, whatever you do? Even when you are not with the beloved, you think about them all the time. At first it's all you can think about. That is loving with your whole mind. As love matures we don't think any less about the beloved, we simply grow so adept at thinking about them that it happens automatically, like breathing. The beloved is inside us no matter how far away they may actually be. The proof comes, sadly, at death. When a beloved is lost to physical death, the lover undergoes all the throes of falling in love all over again. The beloved is in your face, and for a long time you can't do anything because this person is all you see, all you feel, all you know. Widows and widowers never forget the beloved; grief ministry works when the lovely face that has haunted, (or rather 'inspired' is a better word that means the same thing), when the lovely face that has inspired us for so long settles down and moves to our side, then mourners can continue in their lives, with a new sense of their beloved's constant presence. Love demands our whole heart, whole mind, and whole soul; if it demands less than all of us, it is not love worthy of God.

But Jesus has more to say. He answered the biggest question, What is the ONE THING that explains everything else; or rather, What is the ONE THING that makes life worth living? The answer is love. But we are a complicated sort of people, and somehow it is possible to be a good person and yet never love. It is possible to go to mass every day of your life, devote half the day to prayer and meditation, submit to a spiritual father or mother, and yet not know the love of God. Sad, and true. But Jesus has more to say.

Not one law, but two. Not a simple answer, but a deeply simple answer that cuts through all mendacity and legalism. It may be possible to fool ourselves that we love God, when truly we've never escaped the confines of our ego. But, by grace, it is impossible to love your neighbor in the nitty gritty of life, and not to grow step by step into the image of God in which we were created. No first-time dad has walked away the same old kid after changing his first diaper! No righteous newly-ordained has maintained his arrogance in the face of his first penitent! And no pompous little princess has withheld her tears from a friend who was weeping!

Love subverts legalism. Love overturns pride. Love complicates life, but love brings us face to face with the ONE THING, the ONE PERSON who understands, undergirds, supports, inspires, and loves absolutely every person!

Love is the answer.

Dedication of the Lateran Basilica

2010-11-09T02:07:00.001-06:00

Do you not know that you are the temple of God,
and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?
If anyone destroys God’s temple,
God will destroy that person;
for the temple of God, which you are, is holy.
1 Cor 3:16-17

Jesus answered and said to them,
“Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.”
John 2:19

One summer Sunday morning, perhaps 15 years ago, my pastor unlocked our parish church of Saint Ann to prepare for the day’s liturgies. To his surprise he found the tabernacle pulled out of its setting in the high altar. The tabernacle was empty, having been forced open and ransacked.

Our congregation arrived some time later for mass, and we discovered the news for ourselves. Our priest explained that we would still celebrate mass today, in this church, although special permission had been required from the bishop. Some weeks later, with the tabernacle repaired and restored to its place, my parish celebrated a rite of re-dedication. Our church had been desecrated by the crime that took place there, but the destruction of the temple is never the last word in the church.

Destruction and renewal form the pattern of our lives, weaving the loose threads of joys and sorrows into the tapestry of the paschal mystery.

Where there is destruction, there is soon to be renewal and re-creation.

Perhaps something in us, in the world, calls out for destruction. Structures of sin and prejudice, systems of violence, and cycles of every sort of viciousness, along with idols and false-gods. Destroy these false-temples, and God will destroy the false-self that built them.

Allow a single crack to form in the delicate edifice of sin, and the mere whisper of God’s voice will bring it tumbling down.

(Photo from dedication liturgy of Klášter Nový Dvůr, Cistercian abbey in the Czech Republic.)

The problem of “essential being”

2010-11-08T07:37:00.001-06:00

Stein’s philosophical magnum opus, Finite and Eternal Being (Endliches und Ewiges Sein, 1934-36), unfolds in three sections. In the first section, Chapters 1-3, Stein takes an “Augustinian” approach by turning inward to the interior life of the soul, or consciousness. She investigates the phenomenon of “joy” as a foil to make her fundamental metaphysical distinctions, e.g. act and potency, being and be-ings (Sein und Seiendes), etc.

In the example of my experience of joy, such as when receiving a bit of good news, we can distinguish between the experience itself, i.e. the coming to pass of an experience, and what (quid, was) comes to pass. My experience is a joyful one; my experience is of joy. There is more joy in the world than my joy (hopefully!), so my experience of joy is not the sum of all possible joy. When I experience joy, my experience bears the marks of joy, or works according to the structure of joy itself.

Stein makes the classical distinction between essence and existence, and she is far from alone on this account. For Thomas Aquinas and Edmund Husserl (the two thinkers that Stein wishes to synthesize in her own philosophical project), we can identify what is the essence of an object or experience, as distinguishable from the existence of that object, or the experience itself.

What makes my experience understandable as joy relies on the condition that my joy shares the same structure as joy in itself, i.e. the essence of joy. The question of whether and how these “essences” can be said to exist falls under the broad topic of nominalism, conceptualism, and realism. A nominalist would argue that there is no such “thing” as an essence; what we call “essence” is only the name that we use as a kind of shorthand to refer to several experiences, and our naming is totally arbitrary. Conceptualists allow that there is an underlying structure to things and experiences, but deny that these structural elements actually exist in reality. Realists allow both that essences refer to meaningful structure or content, and that “there is” something like an essence in reality.

For Plato, or at least the exaggerated accounts of Platonism, the essences, or ideas or forms, exist in an ideal realm all their own, such that the visible, tangible world is a mere (poor) copy of the ideal essences or forms. Another kind of realism is espoused by Thomas Aquinas, whereby we can say that there is identical structure underlying a group of objects which belong to the same species, but the actual contents of those structures are unique in every individual instance. According to this view, every cat is a cat because every cat exists according to the underlying structure we call cat. Each cat manifests what is essential to being a cat. The essence amounts to a list of qualities. Stein, however, posits that there is a kind of being proper to essences, a kind of being in reality which exceeds that of a list of properties.

She characterizes this kind of being as one of rest and abiding, whereas “actual” being is more active, and prone to change. There could be no actual being without the priority of some essential being, since everything that is is something, and every something is such because it has the essence or structure of such.

To my naive and developing reading, Stein’s distinction of essential and actual being works according to the essence/existence distinction. Existence means to stand out, and one could argue that this implies a kind of action or activity. Essence, however, connotes an unchanging whatness that underlies all the changes that an object may undergo. Although plants begin as a seed, then grow to comparatively enormous sizes, and likewise undergo several radical changes, we can point to every moment of a particular plant’s existence and call it by the same name; this plant has always been this plant, even though at one time it was only a seed, and now it is rather tall, and now it has shed its leaves, etc. The difference between essence and existence, in this example, suggests itself as timeliness. Existence is timely; one can distinguish between the (ever changing) present, the past and the future. Essence, however, can be conceived without the concept of time; it is timeless. The essence is now what it was before, and what it will be later, such that we need not posit a timely character at all.

Stein raises a number of questions by proposing that essences are according to their own mode of being. My intention is to uncover the sources, connections, ramifications, and potential motivations behind Stein’s position on essential being.

Proposing Edith Stein

2010-10-02T07:41:00.007-05:00

Having returned to Leuven to take up doctoral studies in philosophy, the topic of Edith Stein's philosophy keeps popping up as a potential dissertation.

Edith Stein -- Convert, Nun, Martyr

Complicating life

2010-03-10T20:32:00.002-06:00

How do you get conservative and liberal Catholics to make peace with each other?

Our seminary's guest speaker last night, Fr. Bob Schreiter, C.PP.S, never used these two words in his talk, liberal or conservative. He referred instead to a much larger and longer-lasting dynamic between two visions of the Church. Both visions are orthodox and worthy; both visions need each other. Each looks to change the world, but by two different means. The first group, which identifies more with Gaudium et Spes, seeks to engage the world and speak the Gospel in every land. The second group, which identifies more with Lumen Gentium, seeks to draw the world to conversion by celebrating the fullness of truth subsisting in the Catholic Church. I like to think of the difference in terms of "Peter and Paul," where Peter in Jerusalem, Antioch and finally Rome tends to the internal life of the Church. Paul, on the other hand, travels out to far-flung corners of the world to evangelize and establish the Church in other lands. Peter looks within, Paul looks without. Simplistic, but helpful.

Schreiter's talk focused on the increasing polarization in recent times, not only in our Church, but throughout the world. Globalization exposes the peoples of the world to so many other cultures that everyone feels pressure to "identify oneself," to distinguish my culture from your culture. He refers to the sociological concept of hyper-differentiation; cultures differentiate themselves from all others by way of more and more radical outward signs. So we see the differentiation between red states and blue states. The problem with this distinction is that it paints with too broad a brush everyone in a particular state. Every state, Schreiter comments, has a varied voting history. Culture is far more complex than the "branding" that we tend to ascribe to ourselves and our peers. Our peers, then, become our adversaries.

We see this in the Church in the US, when more traditional Catholics side against more progressive Catholics. You can tell so much about a priest, we imagine, by whether and where he wears clerical garb. If a priest wears his collar to the grocery store, then obviously he's a neo-conservative traditionalist! Or maybe not. Isn't it more complicated than that?

The problem here is not the tension between inward-focused ministry and outward-focused ministry. The solution, therefore, is not to annihilate the "competition," as if the TRUE CHURCH were filled only with people who think exactly as I do. No, the Church is broader than such a narrow vision of catholicity.

The problem, as I see it, rather is the externalization of these tensions. The ethos of hyper-differentiation takes what should be a nuanced concept, radicalizes it, and paints a whole swath of the culture with this brush. It is an oversight to imagine the Church in such stereotypical caricatures. There's no such thing as a totally outward-facing Church... that vision dissolves into social-work. Likewise, a purely inward-facing Church would turn out gnostic elitists who distort the Gospel.

A healthy Church keeps this tension between inward and outward, without totalizing any particular approach. Is it not true that healthy individuals, too, are so much more complex than the caricatured identities of the news-byte media culture? Every person bears these same tensions within him/herself. The goal should not be to "resolve the conflict," but to "transform the conflict" as Schreiter argues.

It would seem that a first step toward amicable relations with our adversaries would be to acknowledge the interior paradox of myself. No matter how "conservative" or "liberal" I portray myself, I am a hypocrite. This is the positive value of hypocrisy! No one is a pure stereotype, and that is good news! If we recognize that the tension between inward- and outward-focused ministry is at work in me, then surely we will have empathy for our "adversaries." Our "adversaries" then become similarly complicated persons working out the tensions of life as best they can.

In the end, we need each other. We are each other.

"Do the Gospel to the people!"

2009-10-10T20:24:00.000-05:00

This week the eminent preaching professor, Rev. Dr. Paul Scott Wilson, of the United Church of Canada, roused the local community of seasoned and yet-to-be preachers with an exhortation to reclaim passionate proclamation.

Here are some paraphrases I wrote down during his lecture, and my explanatory comments below them:

Only if God gets in the text is it truly Scripture.

Dr. Wilson urged the preacher to find God's action in the Scriptural text. Even the story of David and Goliahth, in which the Lord does not feature as a prominent figure, explicitly, only belongs in the Bible if it was God who guided the stone that David threw. Preachers intent on Scriptural accuracy can bog themselves down in commentaries, to the point that they tend to lecture on the Scripture rather than preach it.

The preacher is authorized to do the deed, not to explain it.

Scripture becomes the living Word of God in our proclamation. There is more to preaching than teaching. Preaching does require a certain amount of teaching, but it must also be complemented by proclamation, else the homily may feel stale. What's the point of a mere lecture on the scripture text for Sunday? The Lord is ready to jump out into the congregation through the preacher's proclamation, so why hold back? The Scriptures do something, and our proclamation of the Gospel is one way that God may act in the world.

Proclamation is sacramental: Jesus speaks his word to the people - so, do the Gospel to the people!

Preaching changes lives, even when the preacher him/herself falls short of the ideal. The Word of God spoken and proclaimed in the assembly makes God powerfully present to the people. Sacraments, and sacramental actions, effect the saving action of God in the world. Don't just tell people what the Gospel says, but make it happen here and now for us.

Preach God, not the people - preach the Gospel, preach Grace.

Look for God's action in the text, and God's action in our world today. It's plenty easy to find trouble in the Bible and in the world. (Trouble is Wilson's special word for human predicament and human need, e.g. our moral failures and our inability to save ourselves). Most sermons stop at the trouble. The preacher will tell us what's wrong, and then tell us what we should do to fix it. God's people are starving, so give alms and volunteer at the food pantry! But, this message falls short and usually adds a burden to the people, rather than offering them the Gospel.

God's action, however, transcends and perfects our human situations and abilities. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Even in the midst of the war, God was reconciling fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. Finding and proclaiming God's action lifts us up and empowers us to do what needs to be done. Don't simply moralize about serving the poor, show me how God is already working through others to serve the poor, and then I may feel empowered to join in that work. Show us how God is already at work, and this will empower us to participate in the Kingdom, rather than leaving church with yet one more burden to carry.

Not all of Scripture is Gospel, but all Scripture points to the Gospel.

Certainly, preaching on some grim passages of the Bible makes it hard to point to God's merciful action. Even though not every line of Scripture is explicitly good news, every line indeed points to its fulfillment in Christ. Christ is the fulfillment of the Law, and so every moral command, every sin, every tragedy points to the Cross and the Resurrection. Go there in your preaching!

Connect this Gospel story to the whole Gospel.

When the end of the sermon draws near, look for a way to connect this snippet of the Gospel with the larger Gospel story. Every Sunday recalls the Resurrection, so every Gospel text points to the final victory. Go there, and link this text with the larger story.

And finally, a few words on stories:

There are four types of stories, personal, local, Church, and world.

Every story needs to focus on people. The human story involves God breaking in to the story.

To this end, every story needs a quotation; let us meet the person in the story.

The story of God's action in the world lets us see God in the ordinary.

This story is often the dream of what the world would look like if God's will were done!
Thank you Dr. Paul Scott Wilson for your encouraging words on proclamation.

The Red Tent, by Anita Diamant

2009-09-28T09:30:00.001-05:00

A. Diamant. The Red Tent: A Novel. New York: Picador, 1997.
Diamant brings a brilliant imagination to the creative re-telling of the Jacob/Joseph cycle in Genesis. Through the lens of Dinah, a relatively minor figure in the biblical narrative, Diamant finds poetic license to fill in details and back stories of characters.

This idea is not new; targums in the time of Jesus were Aramaic re-tellings of the Hebrew bible that were more than mere translations. We can imagine that the written story in the biblical text is like a condensed distillation of a much larger tradition of story-telling.

What we have preserved in the text, then, begs for continual interpretation, much of which might involve filling in the gaps and adding more human texture to the stories. Diamant has done this, although not without her own biases. Telling a patriarchal narrative through the eyes of a minor female character affords a new perspective that was too often either not present or perhaps suppressed in the official tradition.

We hear Diamant speaking modern-sounding ideas of women’s liberation, birth control, and gender studies in the idiom of ancient culture. By situating her story so early in the Genesis text, and beginning with the background of Laban’s family, Diamant weaves in numerous pre-monotheist themes.

Like the brilliant film of Ingmar Bergman, The Virgin Spring, Diamant paints a portrait of a culture on the verge of moving from paganism to monotheism. Jacob himself brings the Abrahamic tradition back to his father’s homeland. The tradition continues and develops as Jacob passes his father’s stories down to Joseph. Following the narrative to Egypt, Diamant gets another chance to show off the differences and similarities between Abrahamic monotheism and paganism.

Diamant is firmly rooted in the Abrahamic tradition, but never shies away from portraying the other, more ancient, traditions in positive light. Indeed, Diamant could perhaps not imagine what monotheism means except in relation to polytheism. All of this happens through the narrative, and Diamant does not offer theological treatises on the history of religion. What we find, more interesting than such a treatise, is a sympathetic account of how various traditions work alongside each other within the same individual.

Jacob, the patriarch who will bestow the blessing, and who passes on the stories of his father Isaac, does not understand himself as a monotheist in pagan territory. Rather, all of these traditions work within him like a tapestry. The same becomes even more true for Joseph, who hears the stories of his mother, and the stories of his father. This poetic image, of carrying within the stories of mother and father in a creative tension, informs Diamant’s main purpose.

We cannot forget the mothers and sisters and daughters of our stories. They are more than incidental figures, and the stories move to their critical points most often precisely by the catalyst of a woman’s intervention. Although we have received patriarchal distilled texts, we must fill in the missing details and find the inner stories of courage that our mothers have passed on to us.

Modernism and the Spirit of Vatican II

2009-09-27T09:00:00.012-05:00

Modernism and the Spirit of Vatican II

To traditionalist ears, when Pope Benedict XVI describes the historical-critical method of exegesis as “indispensable”[1] to understanding the Scriptures and arriving at a faithful portrait of Jesus of Nazareth, the Church sounds modernist. Previous to the mid-20^th century, the use of these modern exegetical methods were virtually banned under Providentissimus Deus (1893), until Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943) gave its fiat to modern exegesis. What changed over the course of these 50 years? Much has already been written on this subject, and I would highlight only two avenues of explanation. First, the historical context changed; in 1893 the fruits of historical-critical exegesis were undermining confidence in the Church’s interpretations of Scripture. By 1943, however, advances in archaeology and ancient history made any thorough exegesis that excluded historical criticism woefully inadequate.[2] The Church realized, perhaps, that the tide had shifted irrevocably, and one must now learn to speak the modern scientific languages, although cautiously.

Second, this caution is rather the key element, such that prior to DAS an eager exegete could easily utilize the modern method and arrive at conclusions against not only traditional views on inerrancy, but also against essential understandings of the historicity of the events of salvation, the constitution of the Church, the reasonability of belief in revelation, etc. By 1943, however, the Church discovered that some exegetes could use the new methods in tandem and synthetically with traditional interpretations without compromising either their scientific method or their orthodoxy. The rehabilitation of Marie-Joseph Lagrange is the prime example of the Church recognizing in her loyal sons a way to accommodate the modern world without losing the traditional faith.[3]

There is an apparent contradiction between the Church’s disapproval of modernism at the turn of the 20^th century and the, albeit cautious, acceptance of many modern notions by the mid-20^th century.[4] The appearance of contradiction has led some to disavow the legitimacy of the II Vatican Council, the modern popes, and all the changes in the Church since 1963.[5] Ignorance and poor scholarship often account for this radical traditionalism. As I began researching the possible link or lack thereof between the spirit of modernism and the spirit of Vatican II I found myself in a mire of radical traditionalist polemic.[6] Many Catholics, young and old (but very few in between), believe that the Church has gone astray in the spirit of Vatican II. They charge it is the spirit of modernism that animated, if not the Council Fathers and the documents, then at least the interpretation and implementation of Vatican II. The Oath against Modernism was in effect until one year after the close of the Council, so every Bishop and priest peritus had taken the oath, presumably sincerely.[7] Angry authors (whose venue is restricted mostly to private printing presses and the internet) find so many parallels between the heresy of modernism and the spirit of Vatican II that they fear the Church has gone astray, while they alone are left to carry on the true Tradition. Likely, these authors should not be taken too seriously as reliable historians or theologians. Their numbers, their zeal, and their idealism, however, prompt me to investigate the real or perceived connections between modernism and the spirit of Vatican II. One example of polemic will suffice:

"What are we to believe? Are we to believe that those who voted in favor of the ‘counter syllabus’ documents of Vatican II which were intended to ‘correct’ the pronouncements of Pope Pius IX and Saint Pius X (and presumably the pronouncements of Popes Gregory XVI, Leo XIII, Pius XI, and Pius XII as well) violated the Oath Against Modernism which they all had taken? That they forgot their oath? In either case, it is difficult to accept that God the Holy Spirit would watch over and guide the violating or the discarding of an oath taken to God. At the very least this implication would seem to cast serious doubt on the very legitimacy of the Vatican II "counter syllabus" documents that, according to Cardinal Ratzinger, were intended to ‘correct’ or ‘counter’ (‘reverse’ might not be too strong a word) teachings which all the participants in Vatican II were oath-bound to uphold." [8]

Modernism, too, has its equally dogmatic proponents today in a minority of ultra-liberal Catholics seeking Church reform according to democratic, radical-feminist, evolutionist, and immanentist ideologies.[9] Spurred on by the apparent reversal of fortunes for modern ideas as presented and eagerly interpreted in the documents of Vatican II, some liberal Catholics are equally distressed by such developments as the recent motu proprio giving universal indult for the so-called Tridentine Mass under the 1962 revision. The Church is backsliding, they might say, and has lost sight of the one true way to re-achieve relevancy in the modern world: accommodation.[10] Both of these positions, neo-traditionalism and neo-modernism, can co-exist without much impact on either the Church at large or on each other due to the overwhelmingly pluralistic environment of post-modernism.

Modernists and Traditionalists are linked; both wish to return, in some way, to the perceived glories of the past, the Church triumphant. Traditionalists want to retrieve a recent past that, perhaps, never was so glorious as they imagine. Modernists, on the other hand, looking to a similarly near philosophical past, seek not to destroy the Church, but to restore its relevance to the modern world by appropriating the Church to modernity. Both approaches are inappropriate. The orthodox position maintains its traditions in light of a 2000-year memory while at the same time paying heed to the signs of the times, as a matter of survival and new evangelization. History affords another example of this apparent contradiction, in the area of religious liberty. Both Lammenais (in his later work with L’Avenir)[11] and John Courtney Murray advocated religious and civil liberties; yet, the former left the Church, and Murray, though temporarily censured, was an influential peritus at the Council. The difference? Perhaps the most basic difference is the historical context; in Lammenais’ time the progressive support of religious liberty would have been surrender in the ongoing war whose outcome was unknown. By Murray’s time, the situation had already been so deeply altered that a new approach to religious freedom became necessary. It was a fact that in Murray’s time there was no possibility of returning to an ancienne regime; the new approach was a matter of survival. To understand more fully the shift in thought we need a rough sketch of the modernist crisis and the development of the spirit of Vatican II.

Roughly speaking, the Church in the Middle Ages had achieved a great synthesis of theology, philosophy, history and politics that suited the times and let the faith flourish. As the modern era dawned, the Church treasured her traditions and protected them against certain modern developments in theology, history, philosophy and politics. The Church had nothing against progress per se, but the modern experiments of religious liberty in the French Revolution, and of the historical-critical method applied to Scripture while barring the possibility of the supernatural, had been a failure in the eyes of the Church.[12] Scholasticism would continue to hold the banner in the Church, while the rest of the world grappled with Luther, Descartes, Kant, Darwin, etc.[13] Some Catholic thinkers, however, inspired to reconcile the Church with the modern world, steeped themselves in modern thought. Applying historical-critical methods first to scripture, then to the Church, the modernist’s results proved to contradict too much of the Church’s tradition, although they attempted to remain faithful to the Church.[14] The Church responded with apprehension, then condemnation and even paranoia.[15]

The Church was not opposed to modernity, per se. Leo XIII (1878-1903), although reserved, took no serious action against modern Catholic thinkers. It was Pius X (1903-1914) who recognized the threat such liberalism posed to the authority of the Church. His efforts to stamp out Modernism were highly effective, even if at the expense of some intellectual freedom.[16] Several encyclicals were issued, most notably Lamentabili (1907), which listed 65 so-called modernist propositions, which were thereby “condemned and proscribed,” and a long, systematic treatise titled Pascendi Dominici gregis (1907). The pope acted quickly, stamping out heresies that were yet to be formulated, but which were contained incipiently in the impulses of certain scholars, such that, “the Holy See […] understood quite well the full implications of Modernist ideas, including some which the Modernists were not as yet ready to acknowledge.”[17] Outspoken critics were excommunicated and a series of secret sodalities were set up to watch for signs of heresy in others.[18]

The 1911 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia’s article on Modernism warns the pious against over-indulging their heresy-hunt:

"Not every novelty is to be condemned, nor is every project of reform to be dubbed modernist because it is untimely or exaggerated. In the same way, the attempt fully to understand modern philosophic thought so as to grasp what is true in such systems, and to discover the points of contact with the old philosophy, is very far from being modernism. On the contrary, that is the very best way to refute modernism." [19]

Another pre-Vatican II commentator, expositing the dangers of Modernism to the English Catholic people, recognizes that the subject matter of any author’s work was not the sole indicator of modernism, but the spirit in which it was written. In the era of the Oath against Modernism (1910-1967), when faithful Catholics were on the lookout for traces of Modernism in priests and professors, Bampton warns that, “underlying the doctrines of Modernism there is the spirit of Modernism.”[20] Indeed, what one looks for is the attitude toward the Church itself: “The name modernist then will be appropriate only when there is question of opposition to the certain teaching of ecclesiastical authority through a spirit of innovation.”[21]

Much later, after Vatican II, after the Oath was replaced with a milder promise of fidelity, commentators recognized that the hunt for modernists was almost vain. The Church described Modernism only to condemn it, even before it became something of a school. Apart from Loisy, Tyrrel, and a handful of others, there was no vast Modernist plot. After the swift condemnations and the establishment of greater order in the Church, outsiders wondered at this strong reaction to what was probably not so threatening:

“At its peak of influence, modernism was an intellectual movement involving at most a few thousand avant-garde Catholics in France, Germany, England and Italy. The church nonetheless moved to suppress it as if a phalanx of Luthers were in its midst.”[22]

These thinkers stood in stark contrast to that other quarter of Catholic intellectualism: neo-scholastics, whose work was promoted by the Church (cf. Aeterni Patris, 1879). Neo-scholastics were not ultra-traditionalists; they sought to take up and continue the work of theology and philosophy where it had left off, before it had swerved into modern errors: the scholasticism of the late thirteenth century. An ultra-traditionalist scholastic would be pressed to accept every element of the medieval system; neo-scholastics stripped away the medieval science that had grown on the essential foundation of medieval metaphysics. The neo-scholastics kept the metaphysics and epistemology, while ignoring other elements. This school of thought, however perennial and perfect it may be in itself, could not keep pace with the demands of modern thought. Even with an eye to absorbing and updating itself to modern advances, neo-scholasticism was overall cautious in its approach. The dominance of this school up to the mid-20^th century created a kind of Catholic intellectual ghetto, locked on the inside to keep out modernist (and progressive Protestant) ideas. R. R. Reno sums up the situation well:

"The defining feature of Catholic thought from 1850 through 1950 was the considered and well-argued judgment that all modern solutions—from Descartes to Locke, from Kant to Comte, from Rousseau to Mill, from Schleiermacher to Hegel—had failed. Instead, the Catholic tradition argued, the basic structure of the Thomistic theory of knowledge and the Thomistic account of nature and grace provided a lasting solution. This reasoned judgment—and not some amorphous "fear of modernity" that contemporary church historians too often adduce—animates the notorious (and to my mind accurate and prescient) Syllabus of Errors of 1864, with its lists of mistaken "isms." The same judgment about modernity shaped the documents of Vatican I and gave intellectual confidence to the anti-modernist campaign in the early twentieth century." [23]

Quietly growing, however, during the Church’s response to modernism was the seed of reform and the Second Vatican Council. While staid and stolid theologians repeated their scholastic tropes to students, a new generation of Catholic thinkers tried something new. This time, however, the new theologians were not modernists, though they were often accused as such. This new school, Nouvelle Théologie, sought not to discard traditional thought, but to understand modern advances from within the tradition. The Church herself eventually recognized in these new theologians a proper way toward reform and modern reconciliation. Instead of reconciling the Church to modernity, new scholars attempted to reconcile modernity to the Church. Indeed, scholars later understood that the root of the modernist crisis was not modernity.

The problem was one of attitude or orientation. In fine, the traditionalists had a perhaps superficial and limited understanding of tradition, while the modernists had an equally limited vision of aggiornamento. The nouvelle théologie scholars instituted the method of ressourcement to expand the vision of tradition as far back as possible. This expanded traditional horizon suited itself perfectly to the historical methods flourishing in non-Catholic circles. Thus, what became the orthodox position rested on a deeper appropriation of both impulses: ressourcement and aggiornamento. Vatican II and its accompanying optimism and intellectual confidence sprang partly from this current.

Thus, to traditionalists, the II Vatican Council, and the popes springing thence (even Benedict XVI was a peritus at the Council), are seen as modernist. The conflation of modernism to aggiornamento highlights the legacy of a too-successful reform. Contemporary traditionalist critics of Vatican II do not seem to recognize the legitimate difference that allows the Church to carry on in modernity without being either blindly traditionalist or modernist. Neo-modernists, likewise, have inherited an intellectual orientation that assumes historical method and applying it arbitrarily to the Church and her traditions. The problem here lies in the foundation of modern philosophy, which is skepticism and subjectivism, which must bracket faith from the discussion at the start. Once faith has been closed off as a possibility, it cannot return as the product of deduction or, perhaps, even from the datum of inner experience, which the modernists held as the truest religion.

This difference has been highlighted in the shift from Providentissimus Deus to Divino Afflante Spiritu, and briefly in the evolution from Lammenais to John Courtney Murray. One can also find such a sea change in the development from neo-scholasticism to nouvelle théologie. If Scholasticism’s memory stopped short of Descartes, Modernity was characterized by an almost dogmatic assumption of Cartesian and Kantian bases. Many modernists cut their philosophical teeth on Kant;[24] and these related rationalist assumptions rendered the historicity of faith and the possibility of proof for God’s existence impossible. Some modernists were highly optimistic about the possibility of reconciling Catholicism with Kant, in a spirit of, what has been described as a “shallow” eclecticism, seeking to integrate every system of thought.[25] Neo-Scholastics, therefore, shy away from Kant and avoid him except perhaps to challenge his presuppositions. As a result, the neo-scholastics found themselves in a Catholic enclave unable to speak the language of other philosophers and theologians who were heavily influenced by Kant. In the spirit of nouvelle théologie Karl Rahner takes up Kant, but through the eyes of Thomas.

Rahner, then, is also a neo-Thomist, but not in the sense of the neo-scholastics. When Rahner reads Kant he does not, therefore, ‘take it or leave it’ whole and entire; rather, by a careful selection of insights Rahner is able both to benefit from and critique Kantianism. Rahner enters Kantianism with his faith to such a degree that Kant poses little threat to him. What Rahner does, then, is not to adopt Kant’s framework and apply this critique to theology. Rahner, instead, out-‘Kants’ Kant by using his own method to step backward from his dilemma. If Kant, as a rationalist and idealist, excluded the knowability of both the spiritual world and the material world, since both are external to the human mind, then Rahner questioned how Kant could have confidence in any knowledge beyond himself.

Kant was constantly looking at phenomena and asking what are the conditions for the possibility of this, which question Rahner applied to knowledge, noumenal or phenomenal, of any external reality. The answer, Rahner (at least in this cursory summary) argued, was that without the external world in which the human person finds himself, there could be no knowledge at all. His help, to a traditionalist’s delight, however, came not from post-modernity,[26] but from Thomism! Rahner applied Thomas’ dictum whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver to the question of human knowledge, as Thomas did, but with an eye to escaping Kant’s idealist world. Thomas’ point, in Rahner’s hand, was that if a person is an embodied spirit (the mode of the receiver/knower), then her knowledge must conform to and be received through this medium. Since I have a body, therefore, I cannot know anything apart from the data that the body affords in sensation. Rahner thus delivered a way out of Kantian idealism back into Aristotelian realism and offered a dramatic prelude to his sacramental theology at the same time.[27]

Rahner’s waning relevance for young theologians, however, serves as an example of a too-successful reform. As Reno points out when describing the fate of Lonergan, another nouvelle théologie scholar:

"Lonergan was part of the Heroic Generation [nouvelle théologie] that rebelled against the limitations and failures of their teachers—for the sake of the deep judgments about knowledge, freedom, and grace that they shared with their teachers. And the end result was perverse. After effecting a revolution against the limitations of Neo-Scholasticism, Lonergan seems to have contributed to the emergence of a new and impoverished theological culture in which his own commitments and insights are unintelligible. What he achieved could not be integrated into the contemporary theological scene." [28]

Interestingly and ironically then, it was a dogmatic reception of modern philosophy that eroded the possibility of understanding Church doctrine dogmatically. Less polemical and more synthetic thinkers, endeavoring to remain faithful to the tradition, take the best of modern philosophy and leave behind those elements destructive of dogmatism. Now, there is a difference between merely discarding unwanted elements, and sympathetically reviewing them for understanding. There have been knee-jerk reactions on both sides of the debate. The traditionalists have eschewed anything smacking of modernism, even if it is merely modern and not modernist. The Church, for a time, was likewise suspicious of, not so much modern developments, but the application of certain ideas to scripture, doctrine, ecclesiology, etc. Ratzinger himself has commented on this turn of events, the apparent reversal of Church teaching:

"Let us be content to say here that the text [of the Vatican II documents, especially Gaudium et Spes] serves as a counter syllabus [of errors, 1854] and, as such, represents, on the part of the Church, an attempt at an official reconciliation with the new era inaugurated in 1789." [29]

So, in recent times, counting Vatican II and many of the brightest bishops since then, the Church has embraced the mission of evangelizing the modern world. To evangelize a people, one must speak their language, and translate the scriptures for their understanding. Now, a line must be drawn. The Church has learned, having past the time of Pius X, to understand more fully what are our essentials, and how to adapt our language without denying the core. This, of course, is an ongoing process, not only for our times, but also since the beginning and until the end of time. The development of doctrine need not be a modernist notion, especially when one’s theological memory extends to the early Church.

Bibliography

Bampton, J. M. Modernism and Modern Thought. London: Sands, 1913.

Benedict XVI, Pope. Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration. Translated by Adrian J Walker. New York: Doubleday, 2007.

Davies, Michael. Partisans of Error. Long Prairie, Mn: Neumann Press, 1983.

“Ecclesia Militans: The Oath Against Modernism and the Spirit of Vatican II.” http://www.geocities.com/militantis/oathvatican2.html (accessed December 1, 2007).

Forni, Guglielmo. The Essence of Christianity: The Hermeneutical Question in the Protestant and Modernist Debate (1897-1904). Atlanta, Ga: Scholars Press, 1995.

Heaney, John J. New Catholic Encyclopedia. Detroit: Thomson/Gale, 2003.

Hitchcock, James. “Catholic Modernism.” International Catholic University. http://home.comcast.net/~icuweb/c03400.htm (accessed November 30, 2007).

McCarthy, Timothy. The Catholic Tradition: Before and After Vatican II, 1878-1993. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1994.

McKee, John. The Enemy Within the Gate: The Catholic Church and Renascent Modernism. Houston, Tx: Lumen Christi Press, 1974.

Montagnes, Bernard. The Story of Father Marie-Joseph Lagrange: Founder of Modern Catholic Bible Study. New York: Paulist Press, 2006.

Rahner, Karl. Hearer of the Word: Laying the Foundation for a Philosophy of Religion. New York: Continuum, 1994.

Ratzinger, Joseph. Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987.

Reardon, Bernard M. G. Roman Catholic Modernism. Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press, 1970.

Reno, Russell R. “Theology after the Revolution.” First Things, May 2007.

Shaw, Russell. “Under the Ban: Modernism, Then and Now.” Crisis Magazine, September 4, 2007.

Time Magazine. “Triumph of Modernism.” July 28, 1967.

Vermeersch, Arthur. “Modernism.” Catholic Encyclopedia, 1911. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10415a.htm (accessed October 13, 2007).

[1] Benedict XVI, Pope, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, tran. Adrian J Walker (New York: Doubleday, 2007), xvi.

[2] John J Heaney, New Catholic Encyclopedia, "Modernism" (Detroit: Thomson/Gale, 2003), 754.

[3] Cf. Bernard Montagnes, The Story of Father Marie-Joseph Lagrange: Founder of Modern Catholic Bible Study (New York: Paulist Press, 2006), 116-130.

[4] Russell Shaw, “Under the Ban: Modernism, Then and Now,” Crisis Magazine, September 4, 2007, 16.

[5] Ibid., 17.

[6] Cf. Michael Davies, Partisans of Error (Long Prairie, MN: Neumann Press, 1983); “Ecclesia Militans: The Oath Against Modernism and the Spirit of Vatican II,” http://www.geocities.com/militantis/oathvatican2.html (accessed December 1, 2007); John McKee, The Enemy Within the Gate: The Catholic Church and Renascent Modernism (Houston, Tx: Lumen Christi Press, 1974); John F. McCarthy, “Is Modernism Still Active in the Catholic Church? (Part 1),” Living Tradition: Organ of the Roman Theological Forum, http://www.rtforum.org/lt/lt110.html (accessed November 30, 2007).

[7] New Catholic Encyclopedia, "Modernism, Oath against."

[8] “Ecclesia Militans: The Oath Against Modernism and the Spirit of Vatican II.”

[9] Shaw, “Under the Ban: Modernism, Then and Now.”

[10] But, who accommodates whom?

[11] Cf. Singulari nos, 1834.

[12] Russell R Reno, “Theology after the Revolution,” First Things (May 2007): 13.

[13] Timothy McCarthy, The Catholic Tradition: Before and After Vatican II, 1878-1993 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1994), 42-3.

[14] Guglielmo Forni, The Essence of Christianity: The Hermeneutical Question in the Protestant and Modernist Debate (1897-1904) (Atlanta, Ga: Scholars Press, 1995), 61-3. Indeed, much of Loisy’s work aimed at preserving the intellectual influence of Catholicism, even if it meant relinquishing the Church’s divine commission.

[15] Heaney, New Catholic Encyclopedia, “Modernism,” 755-6.

[16] Bernard M. G Reardon, Roman Catholic Modernism (Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press, 1970), 63.

[17] James Hitchcock, “Catholic Modernism,” International Catholic University, http://home.comcast.net/~icuweb/c03400.htm (accessed November 30, 2007).

[18] Heaney, New Catholic Encyclopedia, “Modernism,” 756.

[19] Arthur Vermeersch, “Modernism,” Catholic Encyclopedia, 1911, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10415a.htm (accessed October 13, 2007).

[20] J. M. Bampton, Modernism and Modern Thought (London: Sands, 1913), 10.

[21] Vermeersch, “Modernism.”

[22] “Triumph of Modernism,” Time Magazine, July 28, 1967.

[23] Russell R Reno, “Theology after the Revolution,” First Things (May 2007): 13.

[24] Bampton, Modernism and Modern Thought, 117, quoting Sabatier's Esquisse, 359.

[25] Heaney, New Catholic Encyclopedia, “Modernism,” 752.

[26] Rahner was a student of the early Heidegger.

[27] If I am embodied, then all spiritual knowledge must be mediated through flesh; hence, sacraments work in the same way: God (Spirit) works through flesh (Christ’s humanity) to reveal himself and draw humanity into divine life. Cf. Karl Rahner, Hearer of the Word: Laying the Foundation for a Philosophy of Religion (New York: Continuum, 1994).

[28] Russell R Reno, “Theology after the Revolution,” First Things, May 2007, 16.

[29] Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 381-2.

Divine Liturgy of the Byzantine Rites: Saturated Phenomenon

2009-09-26T09:00:00.003-05:00

Saturated Phenomenon: Orthodoxy interprets and re-presents the Revelation of the life of Christ, the event of Salvation and the means of Theosis. What we learn at the school of the Divine Liturgy is not only orthodox theology of the early ecumenical councils, but Christ himself as an event. As one professor has pointed out concerning the Creed, the orthodox position holds open the rational tension and refuses to dissolve the formula in favor of either the human or the divine.

Theology, whether Scripture, Liturgy or teaching, bears the weight of the incarnation. In order to stay true to the incarnation, however, theology must retain an open space in which God may speak mystery. Again, this is not a vague feeling of mystery or a platonic ecstasy of contemplating the forms. Instead, orthodox theology speaks mystery to mystery, speaks Christ to Christ (cosmic speaks to corporate) so that what we do and that to which we are drawn in the Divine Liturgy is nothing alien.

As members of Christ the Liturgy gives us a place to be more fully Christian and thus to be drawn up into the heavenly realm, or maybe to find it has come down to us and saturated our world. Since the Creed maintains the tension between human and divine which is the heart not only of orthodox theology about the incarnation, but is the essence of the incarnation itself.

Constantly referring to the Trinity is not only a matter of re-enforcing orthodoxy and rooting out heresy. By invoking the thrice-holy name, the church draws the mind to contemplate the ineffable mystery. The mystery invoked by words leaves open a space for communion beyond words. God is not limited by his names or by our doctrines, no matter how orthodox.

Yet, the orthodox symbols of faith are just as sacramental as the dynamic and endlessly-interpretable Scriptures, or the icons of human and angelic faces that draw us into relation with transcendent personages who engage us beyond image toward likeness, or the architecture and design of the worship space which is microcosm of whole cosmos.

By approaching these symbols our minds are eventually overloaded as meaning overlaps meaning and memory hyperlinks with anamnesis and chronos overflows into kairos. The mind cannot take it all in, and so must surrender on some level and allow itself to be transported.

Only orthodoxy can achieve this; every heresy shuts out mystery, the more esoteric it seems at first the more humdrum it turns out to be in practice, familiar as sin. Orthodoxy is a sacrament of Christ, who precisely in his ordinary humanity hands us over to the divine and thus reveals us to ourselves in God.

When western commentators explain our liturgical symbols they do them harm unless their words are more than description and become poetry. Yet, even poetic commentary would miss the point of the liturgy, because what matters perhaps is not our rational or even aesthetic appreciation of symbols, but the action of God through the symbols on us and our actions toward God through the symbols.

Just as the early Church could distinguish canonical scripture based largely on its traditional usage in liturgy, so too orthodox liturgy is distinguished by its ability to bring the worshippers into every aspect of Christ’s life.
Christ is in the community, and the liturgy, like scripture, is there to help reveal that living presence. Christ did not lecture the apostles, but he loved them; and in the liturgy what matters is the presence of Christ and he will do the rest.

Divine Liturgy of the Byzantine Rites: Orthodoxy

2009-09-25T09:00:00.003-05:00

Orthodoxy: The Divine Liturgy is not concerned primarily with imparting a vague feeling of mystery, however, but with Orthodoxy. The Liturgy teaches, so do the icons, the Scriptures, the architecture, the gestures, the whole organic drama. Teaching more than concepts, however, the church building is the heavenly court and not the scholarly classroom.

Orthodoxy means right worship so that the Liturgy is indeed Divine, at least insofar as it is worship fitting to God in Christ. There is a sense, evident to the neophyte, that the Divine Liturgy is God’s work more than our work. An analogy can be found in the reverence of Scripture. Scholarship and common sense tell us that men/women wrote the Scriptures, yet they for the eyes of faith they are more than merely human words.

Try as we might, non-inspired literature does not deserve the same reverence we accord to Scripture, because we discern God’s hand working through the human authors. Even though we wrote the Scriptures, and we read the Scriptures, we sense that God speaks through them more clearly than through any other written documents. It is easy for an unenlightened mind to imagine, then, the Scriptures literally as God’s Words which came down from Heaven.

Reading the Scripture is a sure means of Revelation, orthology, because through them God can speak. The proper interpretation of Scripture yields an authentic Revelation of God. So too the Liturgy, orthodoxy, when celebrated rightly yields an authentic exposition or revelation or experience of God. Just as the early Church sifted through and discerned the canonical scriptures amid the throng of gospels and epistles, so too the Divine Liturgy became canonical.

We see in the Divine Liturgy a snapshot of the ancient Church’s liturgy and theology, although there have been some developments up to and beyond the 11th century. The Divine Liturgy works and there is no need to reform it or allow spirits of change to update it according to the signs of the times. To the western liturgical mind this mood is both appealing and repulsive because it speaks either of the unchanging nature of God or the unbending rules of mortal men.

If the liturgy is the work of man, as in the west, then it must need constant reform so to continuously mirror man’s changing needs. If the liturgy is the work of God, however, as perhaps in the east (and in the west until 1970?), then we must constantly adapt ourselves so to enter again into fruitful communion with the God whose liturgy we attend. Was this western notion always present? As one of my friends noted, after the Council one could see man’s fingerprints on the liturgy, whereas before we treasured the liturgy as a precious treasure passed on through generations.

Of course, the Council Fathers reverenced the liturgy as a gift given over (tradition) and their reforms were meant to remove excesses and restore what had been lost, or hidden rather, through centuries of slow addition. Somewhere along the way, however, priests and people got the idea that the liturgy was eminently malleable and should be suited and made relevant to every occasion.

What is orthodox to this mindset, then, except any liturgical action that suits my individual passing taste of the day. The liturgy has sometimes become an expression of the liturgist rather than a revelation of God, and it is good for Latin’s to experience a more ancient form of their own liturgy. Because the Divine Liturgy was fine-tuned by saints, who are we to dabble?

Divine Liturgy of the Byzantine Rites: The Use of Symbol

2009-09-24T09:00:00.003-05:00

Symbol: We can look at the icons and read the texts and meditate on the shape of the building, but all this is merely a handshake, an introduction that leads beyond itself into a relationship. Once we acknowledge a person as our friend, then the friendship can carry on; knowing his name and biography is only the beginning which informs what comes later. So too when we look at an icon, and are puzzled at first by what we see, we inquire with a person or a book or we analyze with our natural understanding.

The temptation is to believe that once we know what this color signifies, what this gesture means, why Christ has big ears, why John the Baptist sometimes holds a chalice, etc., then we can move on from the icon to something else, having solved the riddle and gained the lesson.

As analytic Westerners we want to understand and move on, conquer and categorize, learn and then forget. Learning the meaning of the symbols of the Liturgy is one way to understand it, but it cannot be the only way. My Ukrainian Orthodox grandmother never studied iconography, but when I told her, as the fruit of my academic study, that we don’t look at icons so much as through Icons God looks at us she could beautifully say, I never heard it put that way, but I can’t help but think how true it is.

We can participate in the Liturgy without being a liturgist, we can understand without knowing. My tendency is rather to analyze and discover and categorize before or after or during the Liturgy and treat my own interpretation as the real essence of the experience because this can be written down and retold. Have I really participated in the Liturgy, then, or have I only observed it as an uninvolved spectator? Can I swim without getting wet, or can I divine the essence of water without drinking it? Certainly not.

Will I have a better backstroke if I study first, or appreciate the drink more if I know the chemistry first? Perhaps. What if I didn’t have to understand it all right now, but I had 20 years or so to let it sink in? Through perseverance I would have grown into the kind of person who can be moved by entering the Church as a holy place, find the saints really are my friends, without ever trying to force the feeling or make do with mere meditations.

The thing about a symbol, an effective symbol, is that it speaks for itself. The short-lived function of the Mass Commentator tried to explain everything that happened at Mass, as if the mystery could be condensed into a subtitle. Explaining the symbol tends to rob it of its potency and reduce it to a sign that isn’t even very interesting. Once you read a sign you can forget about it and move on.

A symbol, however, invites you back again and again because it is at once familiar and strange. The icon works the same way, it is familiar because it shows a human face, but it is strange because the perspective is wrong and the features exaggerated. So too the building, it is a court where people gather to see the king, but it is also strangely decorated and configured.

When you look someone in the face, however, you do more than discover some facts; when you enter someone’s home, you do more than impinge on their territory. In both instances the subject/object relation falls away and suddenly you are drawn in.

Divine Liturgy of the Byzantine Rites: A Sense of Mystery

2009-09-23T09:00:00.002-05:00

Mystery: As a relatively infrequent observer of the Divine Liturgy, though having been exposed regularly but without catechesis from my youth, familiarity with the Divine Liturgy remains obscured by culture shock. One feels like an amnesiac entering his old home as if for the first time where everything is new, yet vaguely familiar, and in this way, more important and visible than before.

Familiarity can breed boredom and a sense of competence and mastery, even in the liturgy. Sunday Eucharist, daily Eucharist, have become memorized and one can anticipate the priest’s words silently without effort. Walking into the Divine Liturgy, however, one is at once lost and at home, albeit someone else’s home, or an old home we had long since left, occupied by a new family.

The sense of mystery that one feels in the Divine Liturgy comes not only from novelty but from within the spirit of the Liturgy itself. For the Divine Liturgy is by turns transparent and opaque, revealing and concealing, orderly and chaotic, planned and spontaneous, human and divine. If one has studied the Liturgy beforehand, and knows the basic order of things, then the action can seem too slow, moving unhurriedly toward the expected climax of Communion. One becomes impatient with the repetitive litanies while the priest vests and prepares the gifts, something which should have been done in the sacristy, and not while the people are waiting. Yet, the Liturgy does not exactly begin on time since there is no specified time to begin or end.

The priest begins his preparations with his fellow ministers even before the people arrive, and people arrive at all different times, carrying on their own introductory rites of addressing and kissing icons like old friends. When it is ready, not when the clock strikes, the priest makes the formal beginning and the Cantor/Deacon never lets up his singing so that we might pause for a moment and reflect. Instead, everything moves along quickly, but because of the repetitions and circuitous routes and multiplication of gestures, the Liturgy feels longer than necessary.

The mind wanders, the worship aid closes, and all we can do is watch the priest carry on his seemingly private ministrations. Even in the vernacular we do not understand all his words, or rather, why he said them at this time. The words are all intelligible, but do they make sense in this point, is the order of things askew, didn’t he just do that 20 minutes ago, why do it again?

In frustration the mind has to give up trying to order and streamline the process, and instead surrender to watching. Without knowing it we are watching the whole drama of Christ, from birth to ministry to death to resurrection to ascension played out symbolically not only and not even in words. The fact of speaking becomes more important at times than the actual words.

The gestures become meaningful in relation to the identity of the priest as priest and the people as people. The furniture becomes not more useful but symbolic in a grander scheme than form and function. The building takes on cosmic dimensions and all we can do is watch and say our prayers and wait for the priest to come back and bless us again.

The liturgy is basically the same every time, and yet we cannot grasp it and walk away with a single lesson or rational account of what just happened. The icons and words and gestures, though instructive, beckon us to a deeper participation than simply learning or deciphering.

"The Challenge of Jesus," by N.T. Wright

2009-09-22T16:37:00.000-05:00

The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering who Jesus was and is. N.T. Wright (1999)

Wright interprets Jesus’ ministry of the Kingdom to be enacted not only through parables but also through symbolic action. The Kingdom as understood in 1st century Judea was not either/or but both/and politics and eschatology, communal and personal. The three components of Jesus’ Kingdom ministry (the end of exile, the call of a renewed people, and the eschatological dimension of disaster and vindication for Israel) were taught strongly by Jesus’ actions involving symbolic places.

When Jesus heals the blind and deaf and lame, onlookers must have recalled Isaiah 35 and thus found a symbolic interpretation. By ‘reconstituting’ these individuals, Jesus symbolized the restoration of the whole of Israel as resulting from the return from exile. Jesus’ kingdom message stressed this return from exile through a radically different approach to Roman occupation. By preaching on turning the other cheek and walking the extra mile Jesus offered an alternative to violent revolt and escapism. By cultivating the Jewish people as the salt of the earth and the light of the world through symbolic teaching and actions, Jesus furthered his kingdom message.

When Jesus gathers around himself a core group of twelve and a larger following who have left all to follow him, he symbolically calls people to a renewed life centered around him. The healings also play a role here since those who have been healed are thus enabled to re-enter community life. ‘Working’ on the Sabbath and breaking food/purity laws further mark out Jesus’ group as a new religious/political sect within Judaism whose function is to leaven the whole and thus let God’s light shine through Israel.

By cleansing the Temple, Jesus did more than act out of zeal for his father’s house. Jesus’ temporary disruption of Temple business symbolized and prefigured the destruction of the Temple, an eschatological sign of God’s Kingdom. By his ministry of healing and reconciliation Jesus showed the presence of God in Israel corresponded with his personal presence to the people, not tied exclusively to the Temple. All this meant that a new time was dawning, both religiously and politically.

By replacing the traditional practice of Torah with his own interpretation, emphasizing mutual forgiveness, again Jesus symbolically preached eschatological fulfillment. The forgiveness teaching was not only an ethical demand but a political one that would re-shape Israel as the renewed exemplar (God’s elect) by which the nations would come to worship God. This renewed status would vindicate Israel even in the midst of political occupation, by rising above the this-for-that justice also practiced by the Romans.

Why do you hide your face, O God?

2009-09-21T22:29:00.002-05:00

"Why do you hide yourself in a time of trouble?" (Ps 10.1)

Why do you hide your face from me? This question could come from a baby whose a little tired of playing peekaboo. The game is funny at first, but it turns scary. The same with I Got Your Nose. Once someone's uncle forgot to give the nose back, and the kid later sued for damages. The Psalmist too is a little tired of God playing peekaboo. We saw God's face when he saved us from Pharaoh, but now that we have a city, a king, taxes, a standing army... it feels like God has disappeared. Now there is crime and corruption, violence and infighting, ideology and stagnation. Where is God now to protect the weak and oppressed? Where is God when your uncle steals your nose? Why does God hide his face in times of trouble?

This Psalm is a cry to God to establish justice in the land. In his book on Social Justice in the Hebrew Bible, Bruce Malchow concludes that this Psalm, and others like it, were written not by the poor and oppressed members of society themselves, but by the upper class. The Psalmist is someone who grew up in affluence, whose heart is now broken by witnessing the injustice of poverty. Feeling helpless, the Psalmist turns to God.

The Psalmist complains to God, accuses the Lord of negligence, hoping to rouse the Lord of Armies into action. The Psalmist says, Look, don't you see what's going on? Why do you hide your face? There are cunning people devising crafty schemes to rob the poor and make them poorer! (Has anything changed?)

The Psalmist has a warrant for boldness. Times are tough. And, if God is our God, and if we are a blessed nation, then there should be no injustice. The Psalmist blames God, and this question comes up everyday. Why God? It's the question of Theodicy. Why does God let bad things happen to innocent people? Why doesn't God swoop down to stop evil? So we ask again, Why does God hide his face in times of trouble? Many worthy answers have been attempted throughout history.

First you have the "Tapestry" theodicy, famously proposed a few years ago by a Rabbi. Life is a complex tapestry, weaving people and events together in intricate and mysterious ways. From our limited human perspective, behind the veil, as it were, we only see the messy back side of the tapestry. And that's our human condition in this life. In heaven, though, we will see the beautiful side of human life, where suffering makes sense.

Another theodicy is the human freedom argument. God permits human evil because he values the supreme good of human freedom. God desires so much for us to love him freely that he is willing to put up with our bad choices, too. And then there is the light and darkness, chiaroscuro theodicy. You can't appreciate the light until you've lived in darkness. So God permits evil to occur so that we may be more grateful for God's good gifts. These theodicies teach us hard-won wisdom, but they leave us wanting for something more immediately satisfying.

The Psalmist, as a person of privelige, takes a similar approach to injustice. Near the end of the hymn, the Psalmist's tone changes from accusation to hope. Things are bad now, but things will eventually get better. The Psalmist retreats into a glorious vision of the end times, which while theologically accurate, fails to change the situation now. What about now? Why, God, do you hide your face in times of trouble?

What strikes me about this Psalm, is that if this is really the king of Israel complaining to God, why doesn't the king do something about it? How does God hear this accusation? Why does God hide his face in times of trouble, we ask? Maybe God asks us, Why do you, O Israel, pull back and hide yourself in times of trouble? Whether a king or a kid, we all have some power. We're the rulers, the judges, the legislators... we're mothers, fathers, managers, preachers, teachers, friends, brothers, sisters, strangers with a smile... Maybe God wants to tell us that we make the difference. We want God to act, but maybe God is waiting for us to meet him half way.

The Lord might want to remind the Psalmist that when the Lord called Israel out of Egypt, yes, there were miracles, frogs from heaven, parting seas, pillars of fire, and all the wonders we could ask for. But has Israel forgotten about Moses and Miriam and Aaron and the elders of Israel, and the brave little children who marched into the sea? The people of God do not need to hide from trouble. The glorious figures from our past stepped into the breach, into the messy middle of pain and suffering, and together with God they saved the nation.

Perhaps while we are waiting for God, God is waiting for us. God does not delay in his love... God only waits for us to do in him what God alone can do in us.

Why does God hide... why do we hide?
When we show ourselves, God will show Godself.
If we Act for Justice, then God will guarantee our risk.
If we Risk our life, then God will save us.
If we Leap in Faith, then God will support us.
If we Step out for the poor, then the Lord will step up for us.
If we Stretch out our hand, then the Lord will work new wonders.
If we Raise our voice, then the Lord will shout to the hilltops.
If we Change our world, then God will change us.
If we Change ourselves, then God will change our world.
If we dare to Live boldly, then God will live abundant life in us.
Why do we hold back in times of trouble?
The Lord says, Have no fear, for I am at your side.
When we open our eyes we see God waiting to take our hand.

For God is our strength, and we trust in him. In Christ God has swooped down to be born on the earth to step into the human drama, to teach us by example how to be the good neighbor, how to die and rise again. In Christ there is no dilemma between loving God and loving neighbor. The two tablets of the Law are fused, in Christ, the hypostatic union, the human and divine dance in perfect union. Heaven and Earth are the warf and woop of the tapestry.

Our time today might be like that awkward moment at a junior high mixer, where no one steps forward to choose their partner and so no one is dancing. In the dance with God there is no hiding. We are the Body of Christ. We are his hands, his feet, his voice, his heart. Why do we hold back? There is nothing to fear. Alone we can do nothing, but through the Church God will do all things.

There is nothing to fear.

Between persons

2009-09-21T17:50:00.003-05:00

The human person is not an isolated monad, but a nexus of interdependent causal relationships between persons and perhaps personalized objects or activities. The social nature of the human person is not an add-on after-the-fact of birth, but the necessary precondition for conception and life. I'm still put somewhat ill-at-ease about what even this theory (systems theory) might say anthropologically; certainly, we exist in relation, but what is the nature of this social web? Is it "composed" of "particles"?

Certainly, the breathtaking vision of dynamic relationality adds something of mystery and dignity to the "particle," all the while somehow diminishing, perhaps, the individual's essence or identity.

In terms of history, though... pre-Modern thought was the childhood, modernity was the adolescence of struggling to assert a singular, differentiated identity in opposition to the inherited structures of meaning, and now post-modernity faces the mode of healthy ongoing resolution of the struggle of differentiation... how to re-integrate authentically into the human system, having discovered that only there do "I" make any sense... "I" longs for the "we," not in a childish way of nostalgia, but seeking the matrix or field of relationality that will stabilize the energy of the free-radical, whose trajectory, if left to itself, might float off into oblivion.

Obedience

2009-09-10T06:55:00.003-05:00

Every year the Oblates of the monastery have a theme for reflection. Each month a monk will go to a different meeting of Oblates, and together with prayer and socializing, there will be a discussion or a talk about that year's theme. This year the theme is Obedience. Obedience is one of the vows that Benedictines profess, indeed all religious and even diocesan priests and deacons promise obedience to their bishop. Obedience is not a popular topic, and it's hard to find a book, or even a chapter in a book, on the spiritual value and meaning of obedience.

In the past, and in our time also, obedience has been abused. Individuals who feel insecure in themselves might too readily offer their obedience to a kind of guru who would use their willingness to achieve their own ends. Even apart from these radical failures of obedience, there is another reason that this promise might leave a sour taste in our mouths. As children we are usually called to obedience, to our parents, our teachers, to almost everyone.

When our parents told us to do this or that, and as children we did not understand the reasons why, we may have perceived an unspoken "threat." What would happen if we did not obey? Would we be punished, be given a time-out? Or would we simply feel the pain of disappointing the most important person in our lives. Especially to our youngest minds, the pain of disobedience and disappointment may have seemed like death itself. If our caregiver shows displeasure in us, even the slightest way, what did we think would happen? Would we survive, would we be fed and clothed and loved ever again?

Naturally, our parents never intended their children to feel so threatened. The power differential is too great, however, for even the most loving discipline to be taken without the utmost seriousness. Perhaps later we learn that even though we disobey, that we are still loved, that lesson takes years and years to learn. Now, transpose this image of the disappointed parent onto God, and you have the makings of a "problem with authority," or a distaste for the concept of obedience.

While this distaste, especially for post-modern thinkers, is perfectly understandable and legitimate, I think we're missing out on some essential element. Saint Benedict's treatment of obedience, written in the 5th century, has much to teach us about ourselves. Perhaps for monks and nuns, the question of obedience is a bit easier than for oblates. After all, monks and nuns have an Abbot or Mother who has been elected by the community and chosen by God, someone who is explicitly trustworthy not to betray or misuse the obedience promised to him or her. Even so, all obedience given to superiors is really given to God, so says Benedict.

Somehow, because of the incarnation, and perhaps God's sense of humor, we obey God by "obeying" our neighbor. Obedience, however, even in relation to God, I propose, is not about mindlessly and fearfully doing whatever someone tells us to do.

Obedience frees us from getting trapped inside ourselves, and it opens us up to the love of others, drawing us outside ourselves into community and communion with God. All obedience to others can be undertaken rightly as obedience to God, provided we obey out of reverence for God. There are many poor reasons to be obedient, and when we are weak or powerless, then our obedience may be abused. We need to practice discernment to discover God’s will, and so obedience to God may call for disobedience to others, as in when we are tempted to sin.

While it is not, perhaps, inappropriate to obey God out of fear of punishment, I believe that God desires us to to love him freely. What are the main points for Oblates; or, rather, what must Oblates do to live in obedience fruitfully? First, understand obedience as a loving relationship with God, involving humility and respect and awe and admiration. Second, understand that the will of God is mediated through human community, and so obedience to God is practiced as loving service to our neighbor. Third, discover concrete ways of service that I am called to carry out daily.

Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle

2009-08-30T09:03:00.001-05:00

Teresa’s writing style quickly disarms her readers; recognizing that she writes as a spiritual mother to reformed Carmelites, she presumes no special privilege for herself. She calls herself “dumb,” and she in no way belittles her sisters. In her discussion on the way to prayer, reflecting on how God grants his benefits to whomever he wishes, regardless of their merit, she admonishes her readers not to regard themselves as better than others on account of their spiritual progress. If they are indeed far advanced in the spiritual life, they owe it not to themselves, but to God’s gratuity. I think it rather appropriate that this warning appear in the first mansion, since it seems to be the common temptation. I remember myself feeling haughtily superior to others who seemed ignorant of the spiritual life, and Teresa’s injunctions would have been helpful to me at that point when I was just beginning to desire growth in prayer. It was not Teresa, however, but John of the Cross who chastised me for my pride. He spoke with love, surely, but in such a way that, for me at that time, created more problems than it solved. Teresa’s approach, self-effacing and humble, does not negate John’s style, although I would have appreciated hearing her voice of gentle advice rather than John’s stern indictments of beginners.

As to the metaphor of the soul as a crystal castle, Teresa has all the insights of an existentialist when she writes that there are many ways of “being in” a place. Indeed, she acknowledges that we are already “in” the soul, for we are our souls. But we can distract ourselves, always standing outside ourselves, like a guard who cares not for the interior of the castle he protects. Teresa links this phenomenon, I think, to the desert monastic tradition, although briefly, when she speaks about the man who is always preoccupied with his thoughts. The truth of this, that it is possible to be in a place without “being there,” manifested itself vividly to me today. I walked into my cell, but I was imagining what my new cell would look like. In my mind’s eye I saw the new cell, the bed, the desk, the chair, how I had simplified my possessions, the color scheme I had chosen, and a myriad other trifling things. I stood in my cell with my eyes closed, but I was not there; I was upstairs, in another cell, totally ignorant of my true surroundings. And then I opened my eyes, and reality flooded back. Suddenly presence shifted and I started to “be in” my cell, to dwell here and now.

And, you know, the most amazing thing one eventually learns about fantasy? No matter how grand and complex, they pale in comparison to the present moment. Why do we seek shadows, when the source of light is right behind us? Perhaps the present moment, rich though it may be, is too heavy and painful to bear at times. We all need some “defense mechanisms,” some viable temporary escape. Yet, it is possible to become lost in these escapes, and almost to forget where we came from. In maturity, I imagine, one may find the strength to bear the truth, even when it is hard. And who is our hero in this regard? Christ on the cross, refusing to escape.

Escape, however, becomes more attractive in our sin. The second mansion describes the soul in sin, and to face our own neediness in humble self-knowledge is a frightening prospect the further from reality we have wandered. Like eyes grown dim through hours of sleep and darkness, the soul in sin or illusion winces at the light, finding it painful, and quickly shutting itself up again to escape the nuisance. The day has already come, however, and eventually we must rise from rest; the eyes adjust to the light, but slowly. Perhaps the soul in sin, too, can enter into itself, expose itself more and more to the Light, in degrees and stages. The concept of stages in the spiritual life, or several mansions arranged like layers of a fruit with sweet goodness inside, corresponds to the gradual awakening of the soul. Virtue, too, grows in degrees, by dint of grace and practice. Teresa’s metaphor of the interior castle works on all these levels to help the reader become aware, by way of analogy, of what she already is and where she lives.

Rethinking the principle of identity

2009-03-08T10:47:00.005-05:00

Descartes' dictum, cogito ergo sum, could be said to inaugurate the modern era in which the reali s identified as the thinkable. It would take many years for Hegel to put it bluntly: the rational is the real; the real is the rational. Post-modern deconstructionists have been right at least in their good zeal to tear away at the fortress of this mindset. People like Heidegger, Marcel, Derrida and Marion have sought the fissures in our experience that reveal an other-than-being and other-than-rational, all the while maintaining that these liminal experiences are nevertheless very real indeed.

The so-called identity of being and knowing did not begin with Descartes, but I believe it took on a narrow meaning after him. Parmenides, the pre-Socratic thinker, curiously declares that "the same for thinking and for being." As a grad student I wrestled with Heidegger's indictment of the identity of being and knowing. I sought to reclaim something good from the tradition, to demonstrate that metaphysics is not always a dead-end. Rahner's philosophical anthropology, and the Thomistic ontology on which it is based, seemed an apt example of transcendence within metaphysics.

My thesis focused on a critical dialogue between the post-Kehre Heidegger and the early Karl Rahner. On the one hand, you have Rahner, a transcendantal neo-thomist seeking to ground his philosophy of religion in an updated version of neo-platonic "emanatio et reditio."

This philosophy of religion wants to open the way to a possible revelation from an unknown God. To do so, Rahner relies on the age-old identity of being and knowing. In other words, as beings who can know, human beings can hear/know the revelations of God because everything that is, is knowable. Nothing that exists is unknowable, because the fields of being and knowing are coextensive.

Being and knowing relate to each other as aspects of the emanation and return of being. Every being is self-present, and thus is given over for appearance and knowledge. Every being goes out and returns to itself, thus making itself knowable, and at the same time, a real being.

On the other hand, Heidegger critiques the metaphysical tradition based on its false understanding of the identity of being and knowing. Metaphysics, for Heidegger, has usually misplaced its attention by focussing either on the being or on the knowing, grounding one in the other. Heidegger wants to retrieve the originary sense of this identity qua relation.

No longer interested merely in one or the other dyads of this relationship, Heidegger tries to think the relationship itself. Identity is characterized by "the same," as in the fragment from Parmenides: "the same is thinking and being."

In my imagination, Heidegger would criticize Rahner for being so metaphysical and onto-theo-logical. Rahner's philosophy grounds knowledge in being in such a way that Being is reduced to entities. Heidegger wants to go backward and conceive of identity in terms of itself, such that being and knowing are together constituted as themselves through belonging. Being and knowing are what they "are" because they are the same and yet different.

I defended Rahner against the deadly charges of onto-theo-logy, since he seemed to leave room for transcendence. I still think this is true. I think every philosopher of metaphysics, when s/he is most true to experience, leaves a door or a fissure in even the most logical of systems. Deconstructionists want to discover these fissures and go through them. In a way, we should follow their lead.

It seems to me now that perhaps the whole notion of identity of being and knowing needs to be rethought. What does one mean by thinking? If one means the positive string of logical propositions, each following upon the other with deductive certainty, then I disagree. There is more to thought than what can be described in purely logical terms. The field of meta-logic deals with this question, whether there is truth that some form of logic cannot express. I wonder. Perhaps we need a new understanding of what logic is all about.

The same goes for being; what do we mean by being? If we mean the positive appearance of stable entities against a similarly stable and positive field of illumination, then perhaps we again leave too much out. There is more to reality than what can be seen and defined, but that doesn't make things any less real. I'm interested of late in Michel Henry's phenomenology of the hidden, of what is interior, of what is never oriented to give an appearance of itself. Intentionality itself, however useful for gaining access to being beyond sedimented concepts, perhaps leaves out those areas of reality that are never given to be objects of intention.

Are being and knowing coextensive? Can we know everything? Can everything that exists be in some way known? Good questions.

Constant Prayer is Awareness

2009-03-04T19:31:00.002-06:00

The desert monks went to the wilderness to seek God in constant prayer. They were following St. Paul's injunction to "pray always." There are different types of prayer, however, and one cannot constantly be engaged in liturgical or vocal or meditative prayer. The practicalities of life, and our human nature itself, demand that prayer and work alternate according to a living rhythm.

There is a kind of prayer that one may cultivate until it is almost constant. This prayer, or perhaps, readiness for prayer, is the awareness of God's life beyond and within his creatures. God's life reverberates in the words of Scripture, read in a spirit of prayer and awe. God's life vibrates in his creation which is ever new and overflowing with energy. God's life shines forth in the life and death of the Christ, who continues to live both in heaven and on earth in the person of his Church, of which we are members. God's life lives in us.

Yet, we forget this life. And our thoughts cover over the silence in which this awareness would flower. Perhaps that is why the desert monks grew to realize that their thoughts were the biggest obstacle to constant prayer. They grew vigilant over their thoughts, watching for them as if waiting for a fish to take the bait.

They watched their thoughts so that they could get behind them, not because they were so fascinating in themselves. Their thoughts, however useful and necessary for so many activities, kept getting in the way of their prayer. Perhaps it is best when words and prayer are consonant, but this is not always guaranteed.

The desert monks glimpsed God beyond their thoughts, and thus knew that God was not their conceptions of him. God was more than their thoughts. In fact, I am more than my thoughts; you are more than your thoughts. The world is more than our thoughts. Even thoughts are more than thoughts, right?

The desert monks hoped to grow more constantly aware, not of their thoughts, but of the presence that exceeds thought. So many things become possible in this awareness, and one feels more alive than ever.

Consider this, thoughts about the future are never as satisfying as the current moment; the future, a mere thought, pales in comparison to the now, as a shadow to a tree.

Loss of power

2009-03-01T13:06:00.000-06:00

A few weeks ago, much of southern Indiana and Kentucky were without power, St. Meinrad included. We had to bear the cold, work in the day light, light candles, bundle up, stoke fires, and sit in silence for a while.

With the electricity cut off, silence began to reign all around. No more constantly whirring motors, which you don’t even notice until they’ve stopped. If you didn’t need the electricity to survive, if you could find food and enough warmth, the power outage was a blessing in disguise. Of course, there were those whose lives depended on electricity in such cold weather, and much was lost in the aftermath.

Loss of savings, loss of jobs, loss of influence also spell loss of power for just about everyone. What does God want to teach us right now? How much do we really need? How much of our country’s excess wealth contributed to a loss of spiritual awareness?

In this season of Lent, we take the opportunity to fast and pray a bit more than usual. As one of my professors recently noted, fasting is the privilege of the wealthy. The poor fast all the time; and perhaps they pray more purely, too. Fasting, praying, and giving alms. We could all use some alms nowadays. If everybody gave, wouldn’t we all have enough?

Being there

2008-12-15T21:45:00.002-06:00

Kierkegaard, in The Concept of Anxiety, distinguishes between two moods of solitude. On the one hand, you have enclosing reserve, which feels rather isolating and suffocating. It is the feeling of having a secret which cannot be told to anyone. The person in this mood is closed in on himself, breathing his own air over and over again, slowly suffocating from staleness and the sense of no exit.

On the other hand, you have what Soren calls inwardness, which is also a mood of one who is alone, self-reflective, quiet... but somehow also fresh and vibrant. He feels an inner expansion, a communion with the transcendent within himself. He is alive, yet alone.

The transition from the first to the latter is an earth-shattering revelation. One at first feels trapped, as if the whole universe is a shabby wooden shack of his own fabrication. The walls are caving in, the ceiling is falling down, the world is literally falling apart. And then it happens. The walls fall down, the ceiling flys off... the world is opened. He thought he was in a cabin floating in space, but now finds himself in a deep canyon, an expansiveness too vast to see all at once.

But there is perhaps another mood, one that starts with inwardness, and ends with community.

This mood passes through the idolatry of the self-made universe, through the awareness of transcendence, and into the uncharted territory of human connection.

One looks around at the others in the room, and sees them as if we were all standing in a wide circle, holding the edges of a blanket together. We are all connected. We all share the same reality, whether we choose to participate or not.

If he pulls on his small corner, he feels a tug from another end, and finds a thousand knowing glances smiling back at him. Hello.

Holding on to give away

2008-12-03T11:10:00.001-06:00

In this semester’s elective on Marriage Counseling, we’re reading about the concept of differentiation. Basically, you have to have a “self” before you can give yourself away in love.

Our culture likes to imagine that intimacy means two people become one person. In practice, this tends to result in see-saw relationships: there’s only enough reality to go around for one of us to be real at any moment. I borrow my sense of self from you, and while I’m borrowing it from you, you have handed it over to me.

What if instead of the see-saw model of intimacy, we had two complete persons relating to each other. But I grow closer to you by “holding on” to myself, not betraying myself in order to feel validated by an external source. Do I “love” you in order to possess you?

If I am to give myself away, I first need to have a “self” to give away. As long as I hand over my integrity for the sake of safety or validation, I have and know myself less and less. If I have myself first, then I can give myself away, and the more I give, the more I have.

Small Talk

2008-10-28T11:36:00.003-05:00

Small talk used to bother me. Don't I have better things to do, loftier subjects to talk about?

How do we cultivate deep conversations? I had the strangest experience this summer in hospital ministry, that when people talked about the weather or their cabin in the mountains, they were sometimes talking about their spiritual crises at the same time.

Small talk can be the handshake that leads to deeper things.

Small talk can be the analogous sharing of unspeakable realities.

Small talk can speak of love and friendship without ever using those words.

Small talk means I'm interested in spending time with YOU, no matter what we talk about.

Small talk can be the sacrament of poetry; it looks like mere bread, but what's really happening here?

"Did you hear about that storm? It really did a lot of damage to the whole neighborhood."

"Yeah, that was an awful storm, we didn't need that. It was a disaster."

"That's right; and people got hurt, but that's the weather. Sometimes it passes you by, sometimes you get caught in it; it's always somebody's turn."

"I hear you; we can't run from life, it will catch up to us; I'm sorry you're sick here in the hospital, and I can't imagine how it's hurting you and your family. Life doesn't seem fair, but like you said, sometimes we get caught in it."

"But it's only drizzling now..."

"That's right; the sun is starting to come out. Would you like to pray now?"

"Please."

Praying with Icons

2008-10-12T14:10:00.002-05:00

Apart from the immense artistic, historical, or even theological value of icons, there is another dimension that makes them holy windows. When you look at an icon, you look through the icon into the eternal reality it represents.

The same mystery makes the Roman Catholic or Byzantine Catholic or Orthodox eucharistic liturgies so potent. We do not simply remember an event, and stir our emotions to make-believe it is happening again. No, we enter into the event itself.

So at the Eucharist we find ourselves immersed in the reality of Christ's life, suffering, death and resurrection. So in icons we gaze into the eyes of Christ, his mother, or some other saint who so shone with the light of Christ that we clearly see Christ in them.

One could learn a great deal about icons, their history, their artistic qualities, the doctrines they teach, etc. But without the growing awareness of God mediated through the icon, the liturgy, the sacraments, then, icons would remain only intriguing and curious, rather than mysterious and awesome.

How do we let this experience happen, if indeed it is possible? Let the icon teach you; it is still, be still yourself; it gazes at you, gaze back at it; in it a hand is raised in blessing toward you, receive its blessing.

The funny thing is, the icon itself fades away once the reality appears.

Humility and Exaltation

2008-08-17T14:30:00.002-05:00

Humility is a quality of the wise who have learned from life that no one can save himself. For years and years we can maintain the illusion that life's blessings are my dessert and my due. Only when some crisis hits do our minds get put to confusion, and our self-reliance crumbles to dust. We need God. We need each other.

The only way to get out of the turning treadmill of our sins is to let God save us. Every effort to do it on our own, to earn God's love, to rid ourselves of slanted desires, ultimately fails without God's grace.

Grace is a true gift. We cannot take it from God's hands, like plucking an apple from a tree. We must receive Grace as a gift. We must wait until providence ripens the fruits and drops it in our lap, good measure and flowing over.

Humility is human openness to God's Grace.

Humility is our willingness to be acted upon by God the gardener, planted, pruned, watered, and cherished. We can't make ourselves humble by hitting our head against the wall of our own willfulness, striking ourselves with penitential blows. Instead, humility signifies our surrender, as God takes away our hostile weapons and picks us up as children in need of healing and love.

Only then, by humbling ourselves, letting go, surrendering to God's love, can we grow beyond our limitations. Those who exalt themselves will be humbled; those who try to go it on their own will fail. Those who humble themselves will be exalted; those who surrender to God will be lifted up as beloved sons and daughters.

Benedict's teaching on humility points out the milestones along the way of following Christ.

Retreat on Humility: Intro

2008-08-12T08:39:00.003-05:00

Next week I'm scheduled to give a retreat on Humility and the Rule of Benedict. All summer I've been thinking about this topic, and now I have a week to put it down on paper. So, here I'll be practicing some of the main ideas of the retreat before an "audience."

Humility sounds like a bad word today; we think of authorities trying to squash individuality and creativity by promoting humility and meekness. Christ was humble, however, and he calls us to be humble as children (Mt 18:1-5) so as to enter the Kingdom of heaven. Humility can be thought of as Christlikeness, as Michael Casey points out in "A Guide to Living in the Truth: Saint Benedict's Teaching on Humility." Margaret Funk adds that humility is THE Christian virtue, just as "enlightenment" is the ideal for Buddhists. So, there's good reason to meditate on humility in our Christian life.

Saint Benedict devotes the largest chapter in his Rule to the topic of Humility, Chapter 7. His teaching did not spring up out of nothing, but must be read in view of the monastic tradition before him. Firstly, there is the scriptural basis for humility, and references to this virtue abound in the New Testament. The desert monastics emphasized humility also as an ideal for contemplatives to be like Christ.

John Cassian (ca. 360-435) collects teachings on humility, and organizes a series of signs that one is progressing in this virtue. As my novicemaster Fr. Harry points out, Cassian's ideal of humility was the Abbot Pinufius. Pinufius was highly honored and esteemed as the abbot of a large community. One day he fled away from the monastery to take up residence in another community where he was unknown. He did not tell anyone of his status as abbot, and was treated to simple, humble manual labor. A radical example of humility, and hard to follow. By thus humbling himself, however, Pinufius grew in all the virtues and led a life of apostolic love.

Later, before Benedict writes his Rule, the unknown author of the Rule of the Master takes over Cassian's teachings on humility. The Master's vision is of a difficult ascetical climb up the ladder of humility. The monk is supposed to humble himself in various ways, and only in heaven will he find his reward and exaltation. This vision of humility does not attract us today.

Benedict copies much of the Master's chapter on humility, but edits most of the talk of heaven. In his Rule, Benedict has a practical and attainable description of the ladder of humility. The reward of humility comes even in this life, when a monk finds that love "which casts out fear" and enables him to do good things out of love rather than fear. This treatment of humility leads to a more humane level of humility, even if some of his examples rankle us today as excessive.

Solitude or Isolation

2008-07-13T19:41:00.003-05:00

In her chapter on Solitude in "At Home In The World: A Rule Of Life For The Rest Of Us," Margaret Guenther distinguishes between healthy solitude and deadening isolation.

It seems the spiritual life requires some element of separation from others, a flight into the metaphorical desert, at least from time to time. We can resist being alone because it makes some of us squirm. We might also feel guilty for taking time "just for ourselves." Perhaps we feel pressured by our culture to spend every waking moment with others, chatting them up and socializing. Many would rather avoid any lengthy time alone.

Then there are the introverts who seem to thrive on solitude as a way to recharge their batteries. Whatever our temperament, we have something to learn from being alone at times.

Even when we are alone, however, the time may feel poorly spent. From my experience I can also distinguish between fruitful solitude and uncomfortable isolation. The difference is whether the way I spend my time alone makes the world seem smaller or bigger.

When I sit at the computer for much longer than I need, reading news articles and researching topics, looking for entertainment and window-shopping, then the world seems to get smaller. I seem to forget everything except what's on the screen, until the whole world seems to fit in a 14" rectangle.

The most liberating moment of my day usually occurs when I turn off the computer. If I pick up a book and start reading, then quickly the world begins to expand again. All of a sudden I am not in a box, but I'm in a room, in a house, in a city, connected to others, embedded in the flow of history, in the presence of God's all-embracing love.

I don't know exactly why turning off the computer and picking up a book makes such a difference for me. Perhaps I use the internet as a way of self-hypnosis to pass the time. Perhaps books feel more earthy and substantial, and thus bring me back to reality.

What makes your time alone feel either suffocating or liberating? And, why do we so often opt for suffocation?

"Cutting" and healing

2008-04-28T22:02:00.001-05:00

Lots of young people "cut" themselves, literally, to the point of bleeding. You know this already; it's been in the news and lots of popular media already. Why do they do it? Pain; interior, psychological, subconscious pain.

Pain is a mystery. It brings us back to ourselves and makes us face some uncomfortable truths which ultimately liberate us.

One of the attractions to cutting is that it creates a wound that will heal. As we watch the wounds of our flesh heal we may begin to experience, by a kind of sympathetic imagination, the healing of our inner wounds.

To bring the subconscious to the surface through a symbolic act that is more than merely symbolic, i.e. it actually does something to us, reveals a sacramental imagination.

We experience the need for symbolic, sacramental mediation of spiritual and subconscious truth. If we don't attend to our souls, life finds away. When we are in pain, that pain is a signal to us that we need to stop what we're doing, find the source of the pain, and fix the problem.

Sometimes fixing the problem is as easy as removing a splinter or walking off a pulled muscle. Sometimes, however, fixing the problem never gets started because we can't locate the place where it hurts. It hurts all over, it hurts inside. We can't get there without mediation.

Sacraments mediate the deeper reality of God's life through ordinary human experiences, like eating, washing, talking. Through the simple and visible the mysterious and spiritual work and penetrate us. In the sacraments, heart speaks to heart, God speaks to us, on a level far below our ordinary level of understanding.

Words only go so far; we need ritual. And if the culture doesn't provide rituals that are authentic and deep and life-changing, then our young people will seek them out and create new forms for themselves.

The Church provides a plethora of such authentic rituals, far more than the seven major sacraments. We need to convince our young people today that indeed healing is in Christ, and Christ is in his Church. We can't convince them with words. WE have to invite them. We can't teach them the truth; we have to undergo and experience the truth ourselves in such a way that it becomes apparent in our lives.

Young people are the naturally most spiritual among us. The primal energies that stir inside them are closest to the surface in the young. Monastic life is likened to a new innocence, wherein we begin to experience life in all its beauty and complexity at a level too deep for words. We have already been there; we have been teenagers. Now we must dare to enter the mystery again. For, indeed, mystery is our homeland.

Keeping it together

2008-04-05T21:04:00.003-05:00

In different situations we may often feel, especially when young, that we are playing different roles. None of these roles, or perhaps only one, feels quite like home, like our true selves. Indeed, different situations call for different responses. We should act somewhat differently in the supermarket than we do at church, differently in a cemetary than at a family picnic.

As we mature we seek a stable identity, something that will keep all the various parts of our lives together. Stability of heart, then, the monastic virtue that flows from persevering in the monastic way of life until death, gives us a name. Our name comes from God; we are called by name; discovering this name is the process of discernment of vocation.

So, who are we, really? The question must be asked from time to time, although dwelling on it obsessively may reveal a basic insecurity masking itself as pride or vanity or self-interest. Despite this risk, I think we should continue to ask this question, as a sort of negative theology, to keep the mystery of personhood alive. It is too easy to answer the question who am I too easily, too quickly, too definitively, as if no further answer or reflection is necessary. Idols are born of certainty where certainty does not belong.

Apart from our aspirations, our shame, our self-deceptions, there is a part within us that has never sinned (is this true?), that has never been false, that has never forgotten God. Is it not this part which calls to us when we are sick of ourselves, the world, our feeble attempts at communion? The still center of our lives survives all vicissitudes. Like the young man in James Joyce's Araby, do we not bear our chalice bravely through a throng of foes? And how easy it is to make an idol of this as well, to mistake passing things for eternal truth, to identify with the static and miss the voice it conceals.

We find ourselves by giving ourselves away, giving up the search, and instead living in the here and now. Committing ourselves to the people and ideals that our state of life offers provides the path toward transcendence, through particulars. God in the ordinary. Do we really believe it?

Christos anesti - Alethos anesti!

2008-03-23T09:22:00.001-05:00

Christ is risen - He is truly risen - Alleluia!

Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer all this so as to enter into his glory?

Was it not the fear of death, or rather the foolish games we play to cheat death, that started all this suffering in the first place?

Adam and Eve snatched at the fruit so they could be like gods, granting and taking life as they saw fit. God told them the sin would kill them; the devil told them the sin would save them. When they took the fruit, they were grasping at salvation but only reaching sin.

Christ changes everything. The divine and human person who grew in Mary's womb destroyed the limitations of earthly reality that before could only point to God's transcendent glory. Now, Christ, true God and true man, brings glory down to us and makes the impossibly bright radiance of his face visible to us.

Christ as a man knew the limitations of his mortal body. Christ as the Son of God was life and goodness itself. By reaching death, Christ brought salvation to all of us. For death could not hold the Word of life.

Death too, still inevitable, holds no power over those who live in Christ. Though we die, though we sin, though we mourn, though we grow dim in faith, Christ lives in us. Alleluia! Everything is changed now. Living in Christ, we have nothing to fear.

Alleluia!

2008-03-23T09:06:00.000-05:00

Christ has died and descended to the depths of Sheol to free the captives; He rises gloriously, trampling down death by his death. Christ, risen from the dead, dies now no more; death no longer has dominion over him. Alleluia! Christ is risen, truly risen, Alleluia!

Here is no illusion, no fable told by defeated disciples. The women at the tomb early on the first day of the week were astonished, and Peter and the other disciples thought they were mad, yet hoped. We see the risen Christ in the breaking of the Bread, and as we eat his body and drink his blood he lives in us and will raise our mortal bodies also on the last day.

Here is no deception; the power of death has been overturned by the Christ who let himself be killed as a Passover lamb. Death died when it swallowed the Word of Life whose seed bursts forth from its tomb to everlasting, ever pure life that will know no end.

Here is redemption of suffering and death, redemption of all the little ones who are first in the Kingdom. In his Passion Christ showed his true self as one of the least, maimed and broken, sorrowing and despairing, reviled and betrayed, suffering and dying. He is the king of all who have been abused by the power of the world. He confounds the wisdom of the world with the folly of the Cross.

Here is the salvation of human flesh, with which God clothed himself in becoming man, which now shines transfigured and renewed, mortality has put on immortality. Human flesh has grown in stature to match the glory of the loving soul which animates it. In the redemption of our flesh, the resurrection of our body, of which Christ is the first fruits, the first born of a large family, no longer will spirit and flesh be opposed. No longer are we to be enslaved to sin.

Here is the foretaste of eternity, the awesome new work God has done, on this his eighth day of creation. God has blessed fallen humanity, restoring us to paradise, giving us to eat of the tree of eternal life, so that we may be ever more like him. Knowing evil we now know goodness in it's great benediction which is laughter and blessing and tears and fulfillment.

Here, now, we find the meaning to our lives. What was only foreshadowed by the mysterious elements of the Hebrew Covenant has now come to fuller light. Now the fallen soldiers of Pharoah rejoice with the patriarchs as they find reconciliation in the Christ they each longed for in their own way.

Here, now, this event rings out through all time, refreshing what is tired, giving hope to what is mournful, affirming whatever is good and holy. Alleluia, Christ is risen, we rejoice and are glad on this day, Alleluia!

Originally posted 04/08/07

Dark Night of the Soul

2008-03-05T19:37:00.004-06:00

Before we discover the spiritual dimension of our lives, we have already been involved in a very intense spiritual quest. When we fell in love, when images of starving children broke our heart, when we stayed up all night consoling a friend, when we got lost in the secret world of a novel that seemed to be written especially for us... we were seeking and finding and loving God in all this.

There is another side; we have also spent hours and hours in front of a TV, we have stuffed ourselves with pepperoni pizza, we have spent hours feeling threatened and envious of someone, we have been rejected or misunderstood by the very person we hoped would finally love us for who we are... we have been emptied. Our search for God has dead-ended.

Some of the things that used to please us now seem vain and empty; the thrill is gone, we have burned all the marrow out of these dry bones. Then, we might seek God explicitly through a spiritual life. We try fasting once in a while; we hold back an angry comment; we get up earlier so we can have a few extra moments to pray. We are now ascetics.

When we begin the spiritual life, we make a thousand discoveries a day. Everything is Grace, everyone is Christ. The thrill returns, life is better than ever, the sun rises and we fill with tears of joy. Our heart was empty, so we tried to fill it. Nothing fit, everything was too small, too fleeting. Now we have found God and he fills our hearts to overflowing.

Sooner or later, though, it feels like we are empty again. We go to Scripture, and it says nothing today. We go to prayer and we feel no sweet sensations, no chills down our spine. We read our favorite passages from the book that saved our life, and we don't recognize that person anymore. Where is God? Is this the dark night? Indeed.

If our heart was full of God before, why do we feel empty now? We realized that before our spiritual exercises, everything we tried to put into our hearts, placing it on God's empty throne, was all idolatry. Then we cleared our heart of idols, and let the True God enter. He did, he sat on his throne; we could see him, hear him, taste him. He was there whenever we called. But now he seems absent; his throne is empty again. We are tempted to bring back the idols, since at least we could make them bless us from time to time.

We are not in control of God's love for us; we can't make him stop, and we can't make him conform to our short-sighted desires, either. Time passes. Something happens. God is here again, but not as we expected. The throne in our heart still seems empty, but we remember how in the Temple God's throne too was an empty space. Our heart looks empty. God doesn't fit inside our hearts anymore. Now our hearts are in God. We can't go anywhere without finding God.

God makes himself small so that he can enter us. God enters us and fills us and bursts the wineskins until we are swimming in a sea of his presence.

N.B. Some of us are reading about contemplation; this week we looked at John of the Cross and the Dark Night of the Soul. This is my reflection on John's theology of prayer.

Stability, a vow of many layers

2008-02-16T22:06:00.000-06:00

I've been reading about grief ministry lately. When a spouse of 30 years dies he/she leaves untold devastation. The widow(er)'s world disappears from under her feet. He no longer knows what to do with himself. She has not forgotten who she is, but that person too is no longer viable. Our relationships define us more deeply than we often know until separation makes the point painfully clear.

Here in the monastery we have no spouses; our lives are shared with a host of people; fellow monks, family, friends, students, parishioners, oblates, retreatants, guests, etc. Our stability is rooted more in the place, the community, the tradition, than in any single individual. Whether married or monastic, whether we know it or not, our stability is ultimately rooted in Christ.

Taking the incarnation and the theology of the Church seriously, moreover, means that everyone is Christ, and every event centers on him alone. Everyone is rooted in Christ, yet we need to commit ourselves to a particular place, particular people in order to delve more deeply into the life of God.

We are in danger of losing sight of stability, our firm foundation in the faithfulness of God, the indelible seal of baptismal character, the unquenchable desire of God to love and know us. To lose stability is to lose not only our center in God, but also to lose ourselves, our right relations to others and our home. Stability affords us a home, a family, and a name. Without stability, we are lost.

Benedict called on his monks to make the promise of stability first, because without it there can be no monastic life, no conversion, no obedience. The first layer of stability grounds the monk in a place, this monastery, here and now and none other.

Stability of place draws us deeply into the life of the local community. These monks are my brothers, whether I would have chosen each of them or not. Like in every close living situation, monks can annoy each other without even trying. When I am annoyed, the temptation is to run away. There are lots of exits to choose from. The disgruntled monk could actually leave the monastery, or he could pretend to stay while his heart wanders elsewhere; he could also simply stay in his cell and withdraw from community life.

It takes time to get to know people, and first impressions tend to give way to the truth. If I am open to the truth of another person, then I will begin to look past the obvious faults and talents. Underneath our social exteriors lurk many layers of other selves, some of them more authentic than others. At root, however, glimpsing once in a while through several layers at once, we see Christ.

Now the monk is enmeshed, entangled, involved not only in the place and its traditions, but the community and its inner life. With a home and a family the monk discovers his deeper identity in and through them. Sometimes we would rather be someone else, or 20 someones, because there is simply too much energy, passion, creativity, power, life within us to do everything, love everyone, learn everything that our infinite hearts desire in just one lifetime, in just one place. In other words, we seek transcendence.

The incarnation of the eternal Word of God in particular human flesh and worldly space and time and culture and conditions and history explodes the possibilities of human life. We transcend, therefore, through the particulars, the (intra)personal, the sacramental. Rooted in this place the monk finds himself in God.

Empty and Full

2008-02-06T09:29:00.000-06:00

Lent begins with a day of fasting. Fasting teaches us a valuable spiritual lesson. When we are full, we are empty. When we are empty, we are full. The emptiness of our stomachs calms our body and opens our mind. We understand the psalmist now:

As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God? (Ps 42)

Being empty we become open to another level of the experience of God. Or, we might simply get bored and seek out distractions. So, there seems to be an empty emptiness (boredom) and a full emptiness (the presence of God). The difference between the two is a mystery to me. It is unfortunate that when we begin to feel empty we only feel bored, and we might give up too soon. If we hold on and wait for the Lord, will he come to us?

Would we recognize him when he comes? What if he is already here?

A Short Advent Retreat

2007-12-20T17:55:00.001-06:00

I recently gave a short retreat on Silence to a small youth group youth who visited the Hill for an overnight and endeavored to remain silent. They were most receptive and eager for hearing a monk talk about silence, a practice that he should well understand. I had some trouble preparing my conferences, not knowing whether I had too much to say or not enough.

It seems there are two kinds of silence: empty and full. These correspond to two types of sounds: meaningless and meaningful (noise versus speech). The practice of silence enriches one's spirituality when it is full and meaningful, although we also need to empty ourselves and fast from meaning.

The Introduction to a helpful new book about contemplation, Into the Silent Land, describes how a self-hating prisoner began to accept and respect himself, feeling less pain and hatred, no longer inflicting bodily punishments on himself, after a month of practicing twice-daily periods of silence. Something about the silence brought him closer to God.

At first, silence is boring. This is the empty silence, the silence that empties us, takes away many of our distractions. I can be distracted by music, talking, the humming of a heater, any noise or even meaningful sound. My inner voices can also distract me, as when one tries to fall asleep but the day's stresses keep the mind racing.

Once I am emptied, a difficult task not easily accomplished, then I must wait. I must wait for God to come and fill my silence with his silence, his word that is beyond words. There are two misconceptions about this moment, the leap from mere silence into silent prayer.

The first misconception is that I should be able to make God appear and make me feel his presence just by doing the right thing, practicing the right techniques, having the right intention. God is a person, not a candy dispenser. So, we can wait here in empty silence for a long, long time without ever feeling God's interior presence. Whether we pray is our decision; whether we are blessed with interior union is God's grace.

The second misconception is that I am really waiting for God to do something, to enter me and bless me, as if God were totally absent from my life until that special moment of union. Prayer of union, contemplation, I think, is more about having our eyes opened to see God's presence, our ears cleared to hear his beautiful silence, which was always already there. We can never ultimately be so totally separated from God that he has forgotten us. If God has forgotten us, would we even continue to exist?

God is already here. God is not only here, though, he is also out there, or other than me, other than any representation or feeling or idea or thing. Prayer is neither simply following that right formula, nor making God bless me, nor waiting for something to happen that is not already happening despite my blindness to it.

The full silence is that space between two people after they have proposed and accepted marriage. The moment is full of meaning, which they cannot utter except by embracing and immediately dying to self in total gift to the other. Prayer is just like this. The thing is, we are the bride, and God is making his proposal now.

Divine Liturgy and Orthodoxy

2007-12-16T14:20:00.000-06:00

The Divine Liturgy is not concerned primarily with imparting a vague feeling of mystery, however, but with Orthodoxy. The Liturgy teaches, so do the icons, the Scriptures, the architecture, the gestures, the whole organic drama. Teaching more than concepts, however, the church building is the heavenly court and not the scholarly classroom. Orthodoxy means right worship so that the Liturgy is indeed Divine, at least insofar as it is worship fitting to God in Christ. There is a sense, evident to the neophyte, that the Divine Liturgy is God’s work more than our work.

An analogy can be found in the reverence of Scripture. Scholarship and common sense tell us that men/women wrote the Scriptures, yet they for the eyes of faith they are more than merely human words. Try as we might, non-inspired literature does not deserve the same reverence we accord to Scripture, because we discern God’s hand working through the human authors. Even though we wrote the Scriptures, and we read the Scriptures, we sense that God speaks through them more clearly than through any other written documents.

It is easy for someone to imagine, then, the Scriptures literally as God’s Words which came down from Heaven. Reading the Scripture is a sure means of Revelation, orthology, because through them God can speak. The proper interpretation of Scripture yields an authentic Revelation of God. So too the Liturgy, orthodoxy, when celebrated rightly yields an authentic exposition or revelation or experience of God.

Just as the early Church sifted through and discerned the canonical scriptures amid the throng of gospels and epistles, so too the Divine Liturgy became canonical. We see in the Divine Liturgy a snapshot of the ancient Church’s liturgy and theology, although there have been some developments up to and beyond the 11^th century. The Divine Liturgy works and there is no need to reform it or allow spirits of change to update it according to the signs of the times.

To the western liturgical mind this mood is both appealing and repulsive because it speaks either of the unchanging nature of God or the unbending rules of mortal men. If the liturgy is the work of man, as in the west, then it must need constant reform so to continuously mirror man’s changing needs. If the liturgy is the work of God, however, as perhaps in the east (and in the west until 1970?), then we must constantly adapt ourselves so to enter again into fruitful communion with the God whose liturgy we attend. Was this western notion always present? As one professor recently noted, after the Council one could see man’s fingerprints on the liturgy, whereas before we treasured the liturgy as a precious treasure passed on through generations. Of course, the Council Fathers reverenced the liturgy as a gift given over (tradition) and their reforms were meant to remove excesses and restore what had been lost, or hidden rather, through centuries of slow addition.

Somewhere along the way, however, priests and people got the idea that the liturgy was eminently malleable and should be suited and made relevant to every occasion. What is orthodox to this mindset, then, except any liturgical action that suits my individual passing taste of the day. The liturgy has sometimes become an expression of the liturgist rather than a revelation of God, and it is good for Latin’s to experience a more ancient form of their own liturgy. Because the Divine Liturgy was fine-tuned by saints, who are we to dabble?

The Byzantine Liturgy

2007-10-22T16:37:00.000-05:00

We can look at the icons and read the texts and meditate on the shape of the building, but all this is merely a handshake, an introduction that leads beyond itself into a relationship. Once we acknowledge a person as our friend, then the friendship can carry on; knowing his name and biography is only the beginning which informs what comes later. So too when we look at an icon, and are puzzled at first by what we see, we inquire with a person or a book or we analyze with our natural understanding. The temptation is to believe that once we know what this color signifies, what this gesture means, why Christ has big ears, why John the Baptist sometimes holds a chalice, etc., then we can move on from the icon to something else, having solved the riddle and gained the lesson.

As analytic Westerners we want to understand and move on, conquer and categorize, learn and then forget. Learning the meaning of the symbols of the Liturgy is one way to understand it, but it cannot be the only way. My Orthodox friend never studied iconography, but when I told her, as the fruit of my academic study, that we don’t look at icons so much as through Icons God looks at us she could beautifully say, I never heard it put that way, but I can’t help but think how true it is. We can participate in the Liturgy without being a liturgist, we can understand without knowing.

My tendency is rather to analyze and discover and categorize before or after or during the Liturgy and treat my own interpretation as the real essence of the experience because this can be written down and retold. Have I really participated in the Liturgy, then, or have I only observed it as an uninvolved spectator? Can I swim without getting wet, or can I divine the essence of water without drinking it? Certainly not. Will I have a better backstroke if I study first, or appreciate the drink more if I know the chemistry first? Perhaps.

What if I didn’t have to understand it all right now, but I had 20 years or so to let it sink in? Through perseverance I would have grown into the kind of person who can be moved by entering the Church as a holy place, find the saints really are my friends, without ever trying to force the feeling or make do with mere meditations. The thing about a symbol, an effective symbol, is that it speaks for itself. Trying to preach by explaining everything that happens at Mass sounds as if the mystery could be condensed into a subtitle. Explaining the symbol tends to rob it of its potency and reduce it to a sign that isn’t even very interesting.

Once you read a sign you can forget about it and move on. A symbol, however, invites you back again and again because it is at once familiar and strange. The icon works the same way, it is familiar because it shows a human face, but it is strange because the perspective is wrong and the features exaggerated. So too the building, it is a court where people gather to see the king, but it is also strangely decorated and configured. When you look someone in the face, however, you do more than discover some facts; when you enter someone’s home, you do more than impinge on their territory. In both instances the subject/object relation falls away and suddenly you are drawn in.

Vows and the Kinds of Monks

2007-09-08T11:25:00.000-05:00

In his Rule for Monks, Saint Benedict (c. 480) writes,

It is well known that there are four kinds of monks.
The first kind are the Cenobites:
those who live in monasteries
and serve under a rule and an Abbot. (Chapter 1)

Benedict asks these monks, who are just starting out in the monastic life, to make three vows. The Benedictine vows pre-date the other religious orders, and so are unique to us as monks: Stability, Fidelity to the monastic way of life, and Obedience.

These strong monks live in community; they are cenobites (from kenos, common, and bios, life). It's not enough to live together, we need to make some kind of commitments, too, to shape our lives according to the life of Christ. If you don't make these vows, or you make them and break them all the time, Benedict has other descriptions for you.

The second kind are the Anchorites or Hermits:
those who,
no longer in the first fervor of their reformation,
but after long probation in a monastery,
having learned by the help of many brethren
how to fight against the devil,
go out well armed from the ranks of the community
to the solitary combat of the desert.
They are able now,
with no help save from God,
to fight single-handed against the vices of the flesh
and their own evil thoughts. (Chapter 1)

To be a hermit is a good thing; Benedict himself started out as a hermit. Maybe it's not a good idea to become a hermit too early, though, if you are too young and not tested and trained in the spiritual life. Being a monk involves a lot of spiritual warfare. Hermits are expert soldiers who face the demons alone in the desert. If you go out too early, too young, too green, you'll fail.

When a young man (or middle-aged) man leaves the community to be a hermit, and he's not ready to be one yet, maybe he's running away from something. I think these hermits are afraid of their vow of obedience. Without an Abbot, without brothers, who can you listen to? Who can tell you when you've gone off the deep end? To whom can you be charitable, all alone out in the desert?

The third kind of monks, a detestable kind, are the Sarabaites.
These, not having been tested,
as gold in the furnace (Wis. 3:6),
by any rule or by the lessons of experience,
are as soft as lead.
In their works they still keep faith with the world,
so that their tonsure marks them as liars before God.
They live in twos or threes, or even singly,
without a shepherd,
in their own sheepfolds and not in the Lord's.
Their law is the desire for self-gratification:
whatever enters their mind or appeals to them,
that they call holy;
what they dislike, they regard as unlawful. (Chapter 1)

This third kind of monk is never good, and they're not really monks. They want to pretend to be religious, but they have no discipline. They do whatever they want, and say that's what's right for them (sound familiar, moral relativism?). On my account, Sarabaites (sera-bay'-ites) break the vow of Fidelity to the monastic way of life. They're never challenged, they never grow, they never become monks.

The fourth kind of monks are those called Gyrovagues.
These spend their whole lives tramping from province to province,
staying as guests in different monasteries
for three or four days at a time.
Always on the move, with no stability,
they indulge their own wills
and succumb to the allurements of gluttony,
and are in every way worse than the Sarabaites.
Of the miserable conduct of all such
it is better to be silent than to speak. (Chapter 1)

This last kind, the worst kind, the Gyrovagues (jy'-roh-vaygs) break their vow of stability. They never stay in one place long enough to make a commitment, to do any work, to learn to love people. They think everyone likes them because it's easy to be nice to a stranger. The thing is, however, that they don't love, really love, anyone, and they're always superficial.

Stability is the first vow, the ground for the other vows, and if you break it you're the worst kind of monk. We've all got a little bit of the false-hermit, the Sarabaite, the Gyrovague in us. That's why it's hard to keep our promises and live according to the Gospel. Keeping promises is always hard, because we never know how circumstances will change, how I will change, how the other people will change.

As beginners we are wise to follow Benedict's good counsel and make and keep all three promises. If we do that, we will come to learn that God's presence, that for which we long and seek with our whole being (in our best moments, anyway), is already here, already committed and faithful to us.

Art and prayer

2007-08-04T22:12:00.000-05:00

Art can reveal within us hidden levels of meaning and feeling. I remember wanting to write an essay in 8th grade on how music creates moods. I'm a mood-aholic, and music is a good way to get into a different space.

Recently I took an unintentional oversight as a grand insult; the world was black, and people were hateful. Soon I heard the explanation; the world was light, and people were beautiful. Schizophrenia? Maybe just an example of how mood colors the world.

I'm not advocating an idealism where the truth of reality resides primarily in my mind. But there is more to the world than what we see. How we see it is equally important. Art can help us see and experience the world in a different way.

Prof. William Desmond, from Louvain, said in a class that good art sticks with us and changes the way we live. Good art uncovers truth, and when we have seen/experienced it, we begin to see truth in other parts of our lives.

Art can't replace experience; you can't become a poet only by reading poetry. Art, however, can enable you to see the poetry of what before seemed trite, ordinary, or ugly. Art, culture, enlarges our minds and hearts.

A Monastic Observance

2007-07-31T17:37:00.001-05:00

This is my monastery's informational video about Benedictine life for men discerning their vocation.

Discernment Mistakes

2007-07-30T17:31:00.000-05:00

Lots of young people spend years discerning a religious vocation. They read websites, visit monasteries and priories and convents, pray long and hard to find God's will, look for signs from heaven, and often become disillusioned about certain aspects of church.

Discernment is hard. At least, it seems harder today. JPII writes about this issue in Pastores Dabo Vobis at length. I spent about seven years discerning my vocation until I finally found my way into Saint Meinrad Archabbey.

Along the way I spent time with other Benedictines, the Dominicans, the Jesuits, and the local Diocese. I vacillated between being too sure of my vocation and having no idea whatsoever. Two things I learned from the whole process: God loves me, and I hardly knew who I was.

As long as you don't believe, really believe, that God loves you, like me you might try to choose a vocation to punish yourself. I'm not a gregarious person, it takes time for me to warm up to people, and I need a lot of time to myself to keep things together. So, why on earth would I want to be a diocesan priest, whose primary work, after proclaiming the Gospel, is building community? I wanted to live in a parish because I knew it would be hard for me.

In other words, I knew there had to be a Cross somewhere in my vocation, and I wanted to choose it. Being a diocesan priest would have pushed me to develop my personality and become outgoing and other-centered (now after two years in the monastery I know that being a monk also brings you out of yourself). The fact that I felt desolation around so many aspects of parish life didn't convince me. That desolation, to use a term from Ignatian spirituality of discernment of spirits, was a sign from God that I don't belong in parish ministry.

Joining the monastery seemed selfish because the life was so well suited to me that it seemed too good to be true. God can't be calling me to be a monk, because that would make me happy... see the problem with this logic? God does love us that much, he wants us to find him, and finding him makes even horrible events bearable and redemptive.

A taste for nostalgia

2007-07-19T21:44:00.000-05:00

Nostalgia.

During my summer vacation I had a chance to visit my alma mater the University of Scranton, in Pennsylvania.

As a college student I lived quietly and introspectively, walking around campus talking to God casually. It was a good time.

There were also lots of distractions, and I would spend hours on the internet (has anything changed?) and sometimes seek out classmates for talks or trips.

This Jesuit university helped me live a semi-monastic life. I studied, or at least attended class, lots and lots of philosophy classes. I had a great room-mate, so there was friendship, and opportunities for community and solitude whenever I wanted.

It was easy to stay up all night writing a paper, working out ideas, etc. It was also easy to sleep-in the next morning (a wonderful habit I enjoyed even in my first year as a seminarian, much to the formation staff's chagrin).

My prayer life was like a roller-coaster; the highs were brilliant, effusive, seemingly mystical ecstasies of joy and contentment. I wrote poetry, bad poetry, about the secret sublimities of silence and solitude, the beautiful world I found beneath the surface of things. Some of this was idle fantasy, some of it good spirituality, but mostly I was (am?) self-centered.

The problem of self-centered-ness dawned on me while reading John of the Cross' Dark Night of the Soul and I remember sitting in my room, alone, pounding on the wall, wondering how can I lose myself, die to myself, get over myself? It never occurred to me on my own that self-transcendence required other people! Who could have figured that out?!

I walked down the Commons, pictured above, aimlessly wandering, clearing my head, around 10pm one night, talking to myself (as was/is my custom). The library was open, I walked up some stairs until I was tired, and meandered among the stacks. Still absorbed in my thoughts my fingers ran across the books and I stopped. Without looking I reached out and grabbed a random book.

Opening the book to any page I read about newcomers to the spiritual life making no progress because they attempt to conquer God and themselves by will power alone, never seeking counsel or the company of others, relying solely on their intellect to raise them up to God. It was how I interpreted Chapter 51 of The Cloud of Unknowing.

Wow. God interrupted my life and showed me the way to go. I remembered all my philosophy papers, and suddenly saw they all eventually returned to the same idea: freedom, truth, Being, is incarnate in the world, in people, not in abstract ideas. The lesson was clear, I was teaching myself (or so I thought) that to be true to myself I had to go out into the world of men from which I disdainfully retreated almost instinctively.

Taking this insight out of context, however, I entered a program to become a diocesan priest, where surely I would be forced to incarnate myself, risk myself, become free and get over myself in selfless service to the people of God. That project failed, however, and I don't belong in the parish. Afraid to retreat again, but drawn by great longing for God in the monastery, I entered the monastic life as a beginner, novice.

What did I find? Air to breathe, and a human rhythm of solitude and community and works of teaching/preaching in the world. Here I can be alone, but also to be a good monk I must be a good community member. The community, then, calls me also to go out and speak and minister and suddenly freedom has found me.

Hunger for God

2007-07-19T09:30:00.000-05:00

The monastic life can be one big hunger-strike.

We eat in moderation, and try to avoid snacks. We rise early and often tired. We sing plainly and not always on key. Our art is simple and unimposing. We go about our day with a certain silence. We wear simple clothing. We retreat to our individual cells and usually no one comes knocking. We limit our use of Internet, TV, games, etc.

In a word, we are often hungry for more food, more talking, more sleep, more modern music, more entertainment, better clothing, more friends, etc. [I didn't even mention celibacy.]

When you're hungry you appreciate your food even more. Your senses grow keener, more sensitive. You become grateful for whatever you have.

When you are physically hungry, you begin to notice that you are spiritually hungry, too.

When you are spiritually hungry, you begin to search for any scrap falling from Heaven. You begin to listen, with the ear of your heart, for any sign from God. You begin to wait and hope in longing expectation, watching for God like a servant watches for his master (more like a son watches for his father to return).

Be hungry, then you will know what it means to be satisfied.

The liturgy conference

2007-06-29T19:29:00.000-05:00

The plan was to hold a Divine Liturgy in our byzantine chapel, but there were not enough servers and no cantors to pull it off. The priest, however, a fellow monk, gave us a wonderful presentation on the liturgy of the Eastern churches.

Icons make most sense when seen in their 'natural habitat,' i.e. a church and its liturgy. The chapel was filled with incense and I played a chant cd from the monks of Chevetogne, the candles were lit, and people were filled with expectation.

The priest came in and explained some of the symbolism. The church space is divided into two sections; the world and heaven. They are separated by a screen covered with icons. But, in the middle of this wall between heaven and earth is a door.

In the main section of the church we find people milling about, there are usually no chairs, so things can be chaotic. We find ourselves in small groups, and also next to strangers; we have brought our selves with us into the church. And the icons. There are icons in this part of the church; the saints and angels surround us, though we do not see them.

The priest enters into the church clothed in black, as Christ was born yet unrecognized by the world (think the Prologue of John's Gospel). The priest acts as Christ in the liturgy, and he can go through the doors to heaven and come back out again, the mediator and the link.

Entering through a side door in the iconostas the priest ceremoniously vests himself in the garments of the liturgy. Every piece has a different meaning and function.

During the liturgy the priest never sits; he has no chair either. He brings the gifts of bread and wine, before they are consecrated, and walks through the throng of people, holding them up. As he walks he collects the people and their lives; all of us will be offered to God on the altar today.

The liturgy is essentially unchanged since the 3rd century. Like the traditional images, we do not get bored with the same thing every time because we are entering into mystery. The liturgy, the icons, they transcend us and what we might want to put into them.

The icon retreat; idolatry conference

2007-06-26T07:48:00.000-05:00

Before I forget, let me tell you about the third conference, the one on Icons and Idols, or how to tell the difference. After the second conference I heard a comment that perhaps I seemed less animated when talking about prayer than during the first conference on Sacraments. So, maybe I should put more energy into it, which was easy since I started to wake up around 9am (after being up since 5am).

The difference between Icons and idols, I said, was that an idol will tell you only what you want to hear, only what you have already put into it. An Icon, however, if it is truly a window into Heaven, will bring you into new places, deeper insights, unexpected graces. Plus, an Icon can challenge you.

Why is it hard to see Icons as they really are though? Why do we need to read books and attend retreats to help us see what is behind the Icon? Aside from learning symbolism, technique, traditions concerning Iconography, I feel the best way to 'see' an Icon is to slow down, open yourself, and imbibe the image. A background knowledge of symbols, colors, gestures, etc. is important and helpful, but not nearly so much as Faith.

The Icon we meditated upon this time was that of the Hospitality of Abraham, also called the Old Testament Trinity. This Icon depicts through symbols the truly unimaginable: the inner life of the Trinity. Now, the Trinity is not a thing, not an object, but it is a mystery of Faith. This iconographer (Rublev, in particular) took up the tradition of portraying the Hospitality of Abraham in Genesis when three angels visited him and announced Sarah's future child (a prophecy they disbelieve; Sarah hears it and laughs). Abraham offers them a meal to the strangers and shows hospitality.

Even before Christians started combing the Hebrew Scriptures for images of Christ, Hebrew rabbis had already understood these three angels to represent God. Now, the Hebrew God is One, only one, not three. So, these other two angels were the 'powers' in the world that were partners or agents of YHWH's creation.

The Christian doctrine of the Trinity is hard to say, but this Icon illustrates sublimely and simply what a dozen textbooks could hardly describe: the Trinity is an act of community. We see the middle figure, it (not he or she, there's no way to tell gender here) is larger than the other two. Does this make it God the Father? Rowan Williams in his book The Dwelling of the Light says we should not consider these three figures as exactly corresponding to persons of the Trinity. The Trinity is not a club of three guys who decided to make a joint venture.

The middle figure, however, is dressed as we find Christ dressed in other iconography. This figure looks to the second figure, on the left of the image, so our eyes move from the center to the left. Christ looks toward the Father, Christ is the Way to the Father; when we see Christ he moves us along to his Father.

This figure's shape, however, curves and our eyes are led down and over to the figure on the right, moving in an arc. The Father sends the Spirit into the world after Christ's Ascension. This figure mimics the gesture of the middle figure, and looks toward it, so our eyes move once again to the figure in the center. The Spirit was sent to remind us (Church) of all that Christ did, and so to continually deepen our understanding of the Revelation that is Christ.

Our eyes never rest on one spot; they keep moving in this circle, circling about and never stopping. The Trinity is not three static individuals, but more like three persons who are so involved and loving each other that they are one God, a real communion and unity.

That being said, another insight here is that the table at which they sit has four spaces, not only three. This last space is open, and we are invited to join them at table and enter into the very life of God. Sublime.

The icon retreat; second conference

2007-06-21T13:04:00.000-05:00

Since I could hardly sleep the night before, Saturday morning I was sluggish to get in motion. This conference was called Icons and Prayer. The main idea was to talk about silence and contemplative prayer, how icons are often silent and still images.

Because icons are quiet and still, not noisy and full of action, you have to approach them with an interior calm. I tried to mimic this interior calm with a smoother delivery, reading off the items from my handout and mildly explaining each point.

I spoke calmly about a silence that enlarges our hearts, opens a space where meanings go deeper than words. The problem with a spirituality that works only with words is that we can tend toward literalism, unless we have a poetic imagination in full gear. We live in such a way that we have to skim the surface of things, skating by to make sure things just work, with little time to ponder deeper or double meanings.

Icons taken literally are boring. Even when you add in a knowledge of symbols and technique, icons are still hardly worth the great fuss some people spend over them. It takes a receptive attitude of faith and inner awareness to see what an icon is really revealing. Once we're in this space suddenly faith makes sense in new ways.

The order is faith seeking understanding, and in this space of silence where words can hardly tread, we find poetic, mystical insights into the mysteries of our faith. See this icon of Christ the Teacher, Christ Pantocrator (Ruler of All), Christ of Sinai. His expression is uncanny. One side of his face is gentle and welcoming, the other side seems to look right through me, as if he knows me more than I care to admit even to myself. One hand holds the Gospel, the teaching of Christ, the eternal Law of love. This law convicts us as well as inspires. The other hand is a gesture of blessing, gift, total acceptance, unconditional love.

Meeting someone is more about the words we exchange, but the glances also. We can't really look strangers in the eye too long, it's uncomfortable. Even close friends are hard to look at for too long, and children make this a game, a staring contest where you have to laugh or turn away. Looking directly into someone's eyes reveals too much, and the intensity of this scares us. If you look long enough you'll either laugh, cry, get angry, or fall in love. That's what the eyes can do, without a single word.

We can know and love someone only as deeply as we know and love ourselves, and this includes God and neighbor. We set out looking for God, or looking for ways to serve the Other, but we end up finding ourselves. Once we know ourselves in relation to God, to the Other, then we truly know ourselves. This is the self whom we can give away in loving service in answer to the absolute call of love we call vocation.

Icons speak at this level of truth, and we have to get there before the icon will begin to make sense.

The icon retreat; first conference

2007-06-20T10:25:00.000-05:00

I recently gave my first retreat here at the Guest House; about 20 people showed up and I was slated to talk about 'Praying with Icons.' I had chosen the topic months ago despite limited knowledge about iconography. Filled with interest, however, I set about reading several books on the subject. I tried looking at icons, then praying, then trying to pray with the icon. As long as I was forcing it nothing happened.

One day I was reading a book of reflections on icons of Christ by Rowan Williams ("The Dwelling of the Light") and he started with the icon of the Transfiguration of Christ. Suddenly the icon became more real than the rest of my room, and I was pulled into the timeless event, seeing Christ with the eyes of his disciples shine with divinity.

A lovely experience, something that doesn't come along every day, and now I felt ready to give the icon retreat. When the day came (Friday, the first day of a three-day weekend retreat, with five conferences) I was nervous and tried to read everything all over again quickly. I had practiced my little talks on myself aloud and felt worried that I wouldn't have enough to say.

I walked into the room and found myself surrounded by friendly people who were willing to give me a chance; this was my first time giving a retreat, so I wasn't too sure how to proceed. I told them the story of how I began to appreciate icons, how I had to wait for the right icon, the right moment before it all 'clicked' and came together for me.

The first topic was Icons and Sacraments which I intended as a quick intro to how icons work to reveal God (based on sacramental principles, German Idealism, the theology of the Trinity, Aquinas and Neo-Thomist symbol theory, and whatever else I could pull in). I got carried away and spent 90 minutes on the topic before I stopped to ask for questions and noticed the time. It was wonderful, getting caught up in the moment, putting aside my carefully crafted outline, and beginning to speak extemporaneously.

I felt alive giving this retreat. The best part is that I had always dreamed of being in this moment, and now that it was finally happening, it was better than I had hoped. The good stuff for me on this retreat wasn't so much the information I presented, but the letting go and living in the moment of thinking and feeling on your feet in the presence of real people.

I find it easier to be myself and be outgoing when there is a structure and my role is clearly-defined (I don't do well at parties). Yet, the whole experience was exhausting. I could hardly sleep that night. I felt confident for the next conference, and I was excited to think about what can happen when people seek God together.

Preaching to change the world

2007-05-21T08:36:00.000-05:00

At least three things are necessary to preach a meaningful theological anthropology in today’s culture: 1) a minister who understands himself broadly and deeply in the context of culture, history, the Christian hermeneutic; 2) the discernment of signs to find and describe those catabolic elements of contemporary culture which denigrate the human person and to show forth their substantive ends; 3) a working knowledge of the Kingdom of God experienced in the very situation of those to whom he preaches, the ability to name Grace and enlarge people’s self-understanding.

The first requirement means that preachers of Christian anthropology must themselves first live and experience the anthropology they wish to communicate; nemo dat quod non habet. Unless the minister can translate his abstractions into pastoral reality, his people will recognize him as aloof and perhaps fake. While the good preacher must convict himself also in every teaching moment, he too must show and live the response which he seeks to inspire in the people.

It is not enough for a priest, however, to have a high self-appreciation, no matter how poetic or cultured the expression of it may be. The priest must, rather, know himself only and precisely in relation to the people he serves, and in them also to find Christ. Christ’s story must become his story and his people’s story; and, Christ’s story is never simple or finished or isolated, but expands and enlarges the people to/about whom it is told.

The second requirement refers to the minister’s prophetic role as he stands before the community and reveals the dangerous path which the people follow, himself always included and erring. Despite the strong appeal of modern and post-modern ideas of self, God, community, fulfillment, the priest must understand philosophically, if not practically, the hidden aims and deleterious effects of the culture of death. Many false anthropologies pollute our minds; we believe things unknowingly we should blush to speak aloud.

The minister must detect and understand these hidden heresies within the community, and especially within himself. Having discovered them he can disclose their true meaning and true end, naming and calling them out, so that the community may more clearly understand their predicament. Naming the heresy makes its reform and removal possible.

The third requirement works like the second, whereas effective preaching of a meaningful theological anthropology means establishing the Kingdom of God here and now, or rather, letting the Kingdom show itself in the midst of the elect. It cannot be enough to know about the Kingdom, one must find it, live it, sustain it by enlarging the people’s culture until they grow along with the priest into the full stature and measure of Christ. A meaningful anthropology is nothing unless it is life in Christ, conversation in the Kingdom, the new Creation of God’s elect.

Grace is everything

2007-05-21T08:33:00.000-05:00

Grace is everything; everything is Grace, practically speaking. Grace is the movement toward God, bringing man to know, love and serve the Creator. Grace is the action of God, in the world, in the soul. Grace, then, is movement toward God, inspired by God, for the sake of the person. Redemption and Salvation are Grace, meaning likewise revelation, Incarnation, sacrament.

Everything is Grace because everything can speak of God, or rather, God can speak and reveal Godself through anything. Anything in creation is a medium of Grace, since Creation is an act of Grace. Creation is not a single act, but a continuous sustenance, redemption, new creation. Sacraments are moments of special communication of Grace, when the action of God becomes explicit and yet retains its tensile, mysterious transcendence. All events, though, can be sacramental as they may communicate Grace, i.e. reveal God’s presence. The person and the community channel Grace as they resemble God.

Grace is perhaps an enigmatic siginifier insomuch as it may serve as a lense through which to see all things; whenever we describe or experience an event, we may also discuss the Grace of that event. Sin, then, can be described in terms of Grace as a turning away, refusal, clotting of the flow of Grace. Yet, Grace is not some substance which some containers hold and others spill. Neither is Grace any kind of thing which can be described and put aside. Grace, then, is also the meaning of an event that opens onto the horizon of God. Life is impossible without Grace, yet without revelation, Church, sacraments, Incarnation, we remain woefully unaware and misinterpret events as if God’s love were not true.

Grace is not only the action of God to create, sustain, redeem life, but also the event of man’s turning back to God in thanksgiving for Grace. Grace is conversion from sin, error, poor anthropology. Although fear and self-hatred may inspire outward change, they signify only inner decay, and these are not the actions of God’s love for humanity. Grace, though, is the gratuitous love that inspires men to love God, by revealing Godself and God’s action in the world, and thus moving men to service in their vocation.

Vocation as a man’s life of love for God is not only a gift of the man, but foremost a gift of God. Grace is a gift for which any just return is impossible. Grace is unmerited and thus only freely given for the sake of humanity. Yet, Grace does not destroy freedom or the possibility of sin. Neither can Grace cause sin, which is a philosophical bind if one imagines Grace as irresistable.

Grace gives but does not force; Grace persists, but does not insist on its own way. Grace, then, is as much withdrawal as it is gift (for there can be no gift without withdrawal; that is insistence). Grace is God’s hope in us, then, as God pours himself out and waits to be picked up or passed by. Once anything becomes Grace for you, everything becomes Grace. Until then, God hopes.

Undefining the Person

2007-04-30T11:29:00.000-05:00

On a recent, rare trip outside the monastery, I purchased two small books, one on Freud, the other on Quantum Theory. These books essentially say the same thing. The more we try to know and pin-down reality, the more confused and mysterious our concepts must become.

This goes back to the question of determinacy and the friendly debate Jeff and I had over indeterminacy and overdeterminacy. The major insight for Freud (all the reasonable objections aside, I'm not buying into Freudianism in any way) is that the stable human personality struggles for identity between an unstable, dreamlike id where anything goes, and the strict, authoritarian super-ego where ideals rule. Who I am is not so easily identifiable, since there is a lot going on inside me that even I am not aware of because it is unconscious or preconscious. Is this are hard idea to sell? Don't we use these terms already?

Quantum theory kinda (forgive me) says the same thing about our model of the physical world. What we think we know about how things work really doesn't work when we move to the sub-atomic level. Our easy equations and Newtonian formulae don't apply to atoms (whatever they are) or whatever stuff lies beneath appearances. The more you try to determine, understand the appearances, the deeper you dig, the more ridiculous your theories sound. Our world doesn't work like a precision-crafted watch. There's a lot more going on than we can either observe directly or even fit into our models of reality.

The cool thing for spirituality is that these post-Enlightenment scientific 'discoveries' do not threaten us, do not prove that 'god is dead' or that the Church is 'wrong' or that bodily resurrection is hooey. Instead, post-Enlightenment science only threatens Enlightenment science, values, spirituality; modernism dies by post-modernism. The Church was here before modernity, so whatever was not merely fashionable in the Church and her spirituality likewise remains true. The old stuff has come back into style.

Freed from Enlightenment, modern notions of personhood, we can discover anew the truth about ourselves. The truth about ourselves in written in us, in our bodies (Theology of the Body) and in our hearts and minds. We seek the truth, and once we understand that truth is more than arithmetic, then we may see the truth that was there all along.

Who are you? I am a man made for others; I cannot know myself in a vacuum or as isolated on an island. I am more than what my resume can illustrate, more than my tax return (if I had one) can say, more than what I even think I know about myself. This is a person for whom God is real and worth seeking. This is a person for whom the resurrection of the body is meaningful. This is a person who can pray, who must pray, for whom prayer is the air he breathes.

Novice lessons

2007-04-22T19:57:00.000-05:00

Virtue is not following rules out of fear. Love animates true holiness, though this side of paradise we also operate out of fear most of the time to some degree. We are holy to the degree that we love God; love changes us more beautifully than fear or self-will is capable.

We love God to the degree that we are aware of Him. Being aware of God does not mean closing the gap between knowledge and ignorance of God. We can know advanced metaphysics, post-structuralist strategies, and mystical aphorisms, and yet not be aware of God. Likewise, we can be aware of God and not even know his Name. We love God to the degree that we are aware of God.

Although we seek God we first find ourselves, and then God once we have grown out of self-hatred. In the silence of prayer something reveals us to ourselves, and we must face it, bringing it to God. God will meet it, meet us, and slowly transform us. God redeems our past the way a victory redeems lost lives, or how peace redeems victories' their dark side. The more we know ourselves, the more we know God in our lives.

The more we know of ourselves, and we let God redeem us, the more we come to accept ourselves, accept Redemption and unconditional love. When we accept love, we find ourselves, and only when we find ourselves can we give ourselves away and forget ourselves. Seeking God will reveal ourselves and how God has serendipitously acted in our lives. Once we see God's presence in our past, sufferings are less bitter, fleeting pleasures less powerful, old wounds less hurtful, new life more hopeful.

Once we accept ourselves we will accept others; once we stop judging ourselves we will stop judging others. Accepting ourselves does not mean excusing guilt, but taking full responsibility, and hoping less in my own innocence but only in God's mercy.

John Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV

2007-04-05T09:58:00.000-05:00

Holy Sonnet XIV
Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy:
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

How we wish God would indeed simply overpower us and change us and make us his own and let it be done once and for all. If only God were a magician who could enthrall us, hypnotize us to do his will, smelling sweets when there is none, dancing when there is no tune. Then we would be over the courtship and into the wedding feast, no longer chasing and dreaming, but now dancing and living with our beloved.

We may say this poem is powerful, but there are several kinds of power. A poem has a different power than a shouted speech or a push from behind. When deconstructionists do their thing to metaphysics I think they often confuse the quality of power and presence at work in Western metaphysics with the kind of power and presence we find in fascism and overbearing technological frameworks.

Heidegger, and other critics of technology, argue that the alienation of humanity from truth and authenticity which technology often occasions flows out of metaphysical underpinnings. Technology has a power that never relents, always presenting and challenging us, even as we constantly challenge technology to push the limits of things. At some point being/matter/reality protests against technology's insistence on ever more precise determinations. Even as we attempt to split atoms into smaller and smaller particles, the nature and reality of these particles become ever more elusive and slippery.

The uncertainty principle is one example of this, and I think it's a protest from within beings themselves against the infinitesimal dissection we seek. How do we achieve this dissection which seeks a determination? We use power, we collide particles against each other until they break apart and then we try to watch the sparks. At some point, splitting the atom, to put it crudely, results in a terrible release of power, a nuclear explosion. Heidegger feared that by our insistent use of insistent technology we might, I speculate, lose the tenuous control we have and find ourselves duped and lost.

The power of poetry is not the power of technology, of presence and metaphysics. Indeed, even the power of metaphysics is not the power of what we suppose metaphysics to be. There is a poetry that breaks in and unsettles not only our reductionist attempts to squeeze metaphysics into a few formulae, but also our technology. Poetry precedes an event, describes an event, the reading of it is an event. Somehow by reading it the heart of it becomes real, even more real yet less describable than the poem itself.

The difference between the written words of the poem and the experience of the poem is something akin to the difference between heretical onto-theo-logy and prayer that both unsettles and settles our restless hearts.

God's Weakness questioned

2007-04-03T07:10:00.000-05:00

Caputo's book The Weakness of God bothered me on some level. I couldn't reconcile his theology with the possibility of Jesus' physical resurrection. Nor could his philosophy attribute any but poetic and hyper-real meanings to other miracles.

Now, my faith doesn't rest on miracles. Even if we could command God to make a miracle (that would be witchcraft, not Grace) we would not have to believe in it. If it's physically observable it's open to various interpretations. If we can observe it, then it's observable, then it's 'natural' and therefore isn't super-natural, or so the arguments run. I think that's too high a benchmark for miracles.

Caputo's hyper-realism and poetics of the event work for me on a deep level when it comes to the Eucharist or to other sacraments. What is the immediate, scientifically valid, observable difference between the Host before and after consecration? None. Is there a difference? Yes, and Caputo gives us a way to talk about this kind of hyper-reality where meanings change but appearances do not.

Again, what's the observable difference between a Christian and someone not-Baptized? None if we're talking about snapshots (one can discern this difference in how the person lives their life, hopefully, but not always!). If we're talking Events as multivalent phenomena, then we have a good starting point to explain changes in meaning and signification and substance and essence and value and spirit, etc.

But, what about the physical resurrection of Christ!?! Come on, surely this is too important and too visible a miracle to relegate to poetry. Even if we can imagine 'water into wine' is an allegory for changing hearts and minds, but not actually changing water into wine, then fine. Can we still be passionate Christians and not believe and affirm in Christ's resurrection?

I think Caputo would object because resurrection seems like a great display of power, and our weak God has no power to intervene in nature, but only to change meanings and make blessings and call us unconditionally to justice. Even the Incarnation would work for Caputo's thought (though a friend who has heard him speak doubts his belief in the Incarnation also), the Resurrection is a deal-breaker for me!

Maybe I'm too conservative, maybe I should forget about joining the Emerging Church! Where's my pitchfork, I want to start a Crusade! Ah, resurrection has nothing to do with worldly power! Resurrection is the ultimate subversion of worldly power, whose greatest power is the ability to execute capital punishment. Jesus was not merely resuscitated, the way thousands are every week after missteps in surgery or a heart attack. Merely resuscitated people have to die again.

Jesus' resurrection, however, is somewhere between a resuscitated body and a free-floating spirit or ghost. Jesus is not a zombie. Jesus is not a ghost. St. Paul says Jesus is a 'spiritual body,' whatever the hell that means! It seems like one way to imagine it is a body (remember the wounds are still there, Thomas saw them) but that does not insist on its own presence.

I think the resurrected Jesus, glorified Jesus, is 'there' when we are ready, willing to find him. Unlike me, my body speaks for me whether you like it or not, there is presence without my willing it. I'll think more about this.

The Weakness of God

2007-03-31T13:52:00.000-05:00

While on retreat I read John Caputo's book The Weakness of God. A Theology of the Event. This book aims (in my interpretation) to speak positively about God in the Christian tradition to post-modern deconstructionists. Most often deconstruction is tied to atheism, and indeed most deconstructors 'rightly pass as atheists' like Jacques Derrida. Broadly, many post-moderns find theodicy obscene. Theodicy is a justification for a good God in an unjust world where evil occurs. People die in floods, peoples die in ethnic cleansing, and where is God when this is happening?

The situation questions two presuppositions about God: God is good, and God is all-powerful. If God is good, then God should not want to see innocents suffer. If God is all-powerful, then God can intervene in the world to enforce God's will. But, 'bad things happen to good people,' so either God is not good, or God is not capable of stopping it. Caputo affirms that God is good, yet too weak to enforce the good by might.

What many post-moderns find so disturbing is the image of God as all-powerful, as the ground of Being, as the first cause (causa sui), the most real being (ens realissimum). If these images are true, then why doesn't God intervene so that either hurricanes don't happen, or they're 'steered safely offshore' where they won't hurt anyone? And, if God made everything, why is there evil in the first place? Did God make a mistake, did God make evil?

These are hard questions, and I would suggest, if you feel up to it, to read Caputo's book. If you have 'lost faith' in God because of the obscenity of innocent suffering, then this book will help you understand God in a thoroughly amazing way. If, however, you somehow retain faith in God and goodness despite innocent suffering, and you're not a sado-masochist on a power-trip, then this book will challenge your traces of metaphysical thinking (like it did for me).

Caputo does an excellent job distinguishing between the Name of God, which can be a weapon in the hand of zealots, versus the Event of God, which like a weak force is a call that does not insist. You find yourself in an event when the impossible takes place, like gifts without exchange or economy, or true hospitality, or unconditional forgiveness. The Kingdom of God is a way of living here and now that subverts and "polyverts" the power-systems of the world. The event is poetic, and more real than simply material reality. The event is like the whispering theophany of God on the mountain.

By distinguishing a weak force and event from a strong (rouged) theology and power heirarchies, Caputo introduces his divine an-archy where water is turned into wine, the sick are healed, and a man is raised from the dead. Now, God does not accomplish these things either literally or through force, but by poetics and the impossible. A theology of the event beautifully expresses what we mean by the mysteries of faith, the conversion at Baptism, the polyvalent 'action' of Christ in the Eucharist, forgiveness, and many other integral pieces of Christian life.

I'm left unsatisfied, however, because I can't wrap my mind around how Jesus could have actually been resurrected in Caputo's Kingdom. Caputo doesn't explicitly treat of Jesus' resurrection, but does look at John's account of the raising of Lazarus. For Caputo, it's not that Jesus raised Lazarus from the tomb, but that he raised the spirits of Martha and Mary, transforming the lost time of suffering into hope and recapitulated joy. That's a beautiful story, because what would be the real point of raising an ordinary man from the dead, since he would have to die again, and death is an inescapable part of life.

By way of inference I imagine that Caputo would say much the same about Jesus' own resurrection, but a lot hangs on this being a real, historical event, a physical, bodily resurrection. Surely there is more to Jesus' resurrection than resuscitation, and lots of good books of late to read on the subject. If Jesus' resurrection were only spiritual, then what does that say about the value of the body? Certainly there is a difference between Jesus' earthly body and his glorified body, but there is also a real link.

We are Christ's glorified body, the Eucharist is Christ's glorified body, and such a body is a 'spiritual body' as St. Paul describes but can't explain. Maybe I'm still too much of a metaphysician, but I want to believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ. I don't think you need an all-powerful 'electric generator' idea of God to accomplish this resurrection. Isn't this more a subversion, transformation, benediction on creation than an act of raw might? Life itself isn't about power but something else; power usually does more to diminish and destroy life than create and animate it.

There is a middle ground between the abused god of power-hungry theology and the weak-force of Caputo's event which we call God. Maybe this weakening of God serves a more strategic role, balancing out the abused powerful god with the weak God whose Kingdom has no kingdom, no army and no borders to enforce. We need more words to describe kinds of presence, being, goodness.

Silent Retreat

2007-03-31T09:58:00.000-05:00

I just arrived home from a week-long silent retreat in Kentucky with my seminary classmates. We spent the week in silence and prayer, with individual 'retreat direction' once a day from our retreat directors, one of a group of Ursuline religious women. There was little structure; mass wasn't until 11am, so there was time to sleep (I love sleep).

At breakfast one morning I looked around at all my classmates. It was one of those blessed moments when you can see something in people. Usually in these moments I see someone's brokenness, their need and thirst for God, that missing word they need to hear to be joyful. This time I saw their light, their goodness, their beauty as children of God seeking to do his will. And I loved them. (It probably helped that we were in silence all week!)

When I was discerning my vocation I wanted to be and do everything. I wanted to be a missionary, a parish priest, a monk, a hermit, a Jesuit, a Dominican, a Benedictine. I saw the goodness in all of these, and wanted to have 10 lives to serve Christ. It seemed like a pain and difficult choice to choose only one vocation, one overriding charism.

We want to do it all, but we have only one life. We want to be every good thing, but we have some gifts and not others. Our particularity is God's blessing, since he loves us each uniquely, and we are all quite different people. If you have met identical twins you know how different even similar people can be. God gets to live through each of us, and the more fully we live the one particular life we have been given, the more fully God lives in us and through us.

I had the same desire growing up; I wanted to be a doctor, a lawyer, a priest, a physicist, a photographer, a musician, a teacher, a father and husband. Saying Yes to one of these means saying No to many others. But that is growing up, and everyone has to make choices. Something happens at a certain time to make the choice easier: falling in love.

You can have a 'crush' at a distance, gazing at your 'beloved' from the other side of a classroom, and never even talk to that person. Falling in love, being in relation, takes time, takes lots of conversation, and you learn a lot. You learn about the other person, but you also learn about yourself. When you get closer you can find that you still admire and find beauty, but now you can say whether this one is right for me.

The idea here is Incarnation. Although Jesus could have been born anywhere, at any time, God had to choose one place, one time, one mother, one family into which Jesus would be born. The same is true for us, not only our births are conditions of history, but our whole lives. I think we can sometimes hold back from living because we want everything to be perfect. So, we wait for the 'right moment' and until we have the 'right skills' and the right things to say before we do anything. This betrays a lack of self-confidence perhaps. What we do in good faith is more than 'good enough' but 'just right' precisely because it is particular and not universal.

Gabriel Marcel believed that marriage was a perfect example of this. From the outside it may look like the couple spiral down in to detail and practicality, losing sight of the universal and the transcendent. On the inside, however, the amazing fact is that the more attention you pay to detail, the more deeply you live your life, the greater opening you find to God. All those little details, which seem to hinder abstraction, become doorways of Grace.

This is sacramental thinking. To find God, the spiritual, the poetic meaning, the Grace of a situation, I dive into it, get my hands dirty in the stuff of life. Abstractions can quickly become empty and shallow when they have no connection to real life. I always wanted to leave reality, my bodily confines, in order to find God. But, God is there in the quotidian, the day-to-day of life, wrapping infinity in finitude. Think of the Word of God wrapped inside the Virgin Mary. She bore her creator. And so do we.

Reading webpages or books

2007-03-20T06:58:00.000-05:00

I don't know about you, but it's easy for me to fall asleep reading a book, but almost impossible if I'm reading from the computer. Maybe this means I'm more interested in computers than books, but I hope not. I think one difference is between passive and active displays. You need external light to make a book work, but an LCD will shine like a dim mirror all the time.

Books need constant 'uncovering' to read; paperbacks always want to close themselves, so you need to keep them open with constant pressure. The book wants to conceal itself; if you want to read it, you have to dance with it.

Computers demand attention; the bright light shines out, looking for someone to capture in its anonymous gaze. The only way to conceal the monitor is to turn it off; even screen savers beckon our attention. Even though an image can be static on the screen, it's actually being re-imaged every fraction of a second (true for CRTs, less true for LCDs which seem more like tiny colored flashlights that are always on).

What's true of computers is doubly true for TV and film because it is a constant stream of moving images and sound, crying out for our undivided attention (yet it is easy to fall asleep during TV for many people).

What I want to say is this: self-lit screens fill space; other-lit pages open space.

A book opens up a space that wasn't there before; as you read you can easily lift your eyes away for a moment to daydream, then return. Screens keep pouring out information even when you're not there, when you close your eyes, when you try to get a moment to think.

Screens propagate the metaphysics of presence through technology. Books and print media are comparatively shy. That shyness opens a space for us to live, while screens try to fill every emptiness and prevent reflection.

Oh yeah, this relates to how we may live 'contemplatively' in an inner world of rich meaning in union with God. Screens are like the chattering mind that hates silence and can never listen; books are like the receptive mind that, though full of stuff, creates a space for relationship and listening.

Philosophy is good for the Church

2007-03-12T19:36:00.000-05:00

Heidegger wanted to free Philosophy from a narrow metaphysical framework, and thought Christianity was the culprit of this cancer in thought. A certain kind of metaphysics is indeed dangerous for thought, when it reduces the so-called 'ontological difference' between Being and beings. You know you're in metaphysical territory when God is conceived as an 'ens realissimum' which acts as ground of all beings and the upper limit of their possibility (see Heidegger's lecture, "Der Onto-Theo-logische Verfassung der Metaphysik"). Indeed, in this territory God becomes an object whose transcendence extends only from the floor to the ceiling of 'things.' This is onto-theology. This is indeed a danger for Christians/theists who philosophize.

Christianity originates from Hebrew foundations, however, for which Greek philosophy was of little merit. It wasn't until perhaps Paul preached in the Areopagus of Athens, attempting to preach the Hebrew Messiah to Greek thinkers, that Athens and Jerusalem met and began to mingle theo-logically. This early start should be remembered, however, lest we think that somehow Aquinas were responsible for the whole onto-theological mess that was Hegel. Hegel came a long time after Paul, though, and even Aquinas successfully avoided the pitfalls of restrictively metaphysical thinking.

Strictly speaking, theology that takes a metaphysical turn, in the narrow, Heideggerian sense of metaphysics, is in danger of no longer being theology but theosophy. Theosophy is more like magic than 'speaking carefully in the presence of God.' There are good ways to be a theistic philosopher, and there are many bad ways to reduce God into another object of inquiry and scientific study. The philosophy of Christians need not be overtly theological, or even subversively so, but only should avoid getting in the way of theology when it comes. "He must increase, I must decrease," says John the Baptist as Jesus appears.

So philosophy can be theology's handmaid or her evil stepmother who relegates her to mopping floors when she deserves to dance with the Prince. (I'm in a childish mood today.) Three good (there are more, whom you could not tell by reading them necessarily) Catholic philosophers to look at: Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Luc Marion, and John Caputo. Another Christian who is also a philosopher is Merold Westphal. A religious mind can be a great asset to philosophy, for certainly one who truly prays knows how to seek wisdom.

Seeking new innocence

2007-03-12T15:23:00.001-05:00

Maybe its the child's innocence that makes him/her ready to see the Kingdom of God. I don't innocence to mean only 'without sin' but also a little naive. Children especially have the capacity to wonder, to be rocked back on their feet by simple things. Another thing about innocence though is sensitivity to pain; think how much more scraped knees hurt when we were children than it might now. At least children are more honest, they'll cry about that pain instead of masking it. Of course maturity is a good thing, and the ability to bear pain patiently a valuable 'survival' skill.

There's much more to losing one's innocence than what we think of when we read that phrase. I am no longer innocent when I see things the way I want to see them, instead of the way they 'really are.' Maybe the most naive and innocent belief is that there is a way things 'really are' and that I can see it. It's not that children don't question or aren't curious (why is the sky blue... why... why? ad nauseaum) but that they believe there is an answer. How often do we find what we're looking for only to put it away and try to find it again. This is a game we play with our virtues.

Kingdom dwellers are not merely credulous, believing whatever they fancy and seeking illusion to entertain them. Think how wonderfully sensitive children are to 'phony' adults; yet, they recognize the truth of a smile when they see it. Only great disappointments with ourselves or others will teach us not to trust what we want to believe about the world. And so, with our skepticism and our logical validity tests, we begin to see the world through our own expectations and experiences and not what might really be there. We begin to impose our small interpretations, sometimes self-pitying, sometimes self-aggrandizing, onto the world around us. Now people can become objects, and mere objects more than any person for us.

We get flipped around as we personify objects and objectify persons, because then we have some control over the situation. Children are happy not to be in control, though, trusting in their (hopefully) good parent(s) to gather them safely to the end of the day. I wonder how we can find our innocence again after we've lost it?

Doubting Thomas

2007-03-05T17:35:00.000-06:00

Caravaggio 1573 – 1610

What's a heretic?

2007-02-26T06:55:00.000-06:00

Heretic is a word we don't use too often today. You can dissent from lots of Church teachings without technically being a heretic. To be a heretic, technically, you have to deny something really big, like the divinity of Christ or that God is Trinity. What does it really mean to be a heretic, though, in the popular sense?

Most of the time I read this word when people call themselves heretics because they refuse to conform to organized religion, or to give full assent to dogmatic decrees from the Church. They take pride in being heretical because it proves them closer to the Truth than anyone who claims special access to God because of their dogma.

Now, dogma is the real sticking point, and we don't understand this word too well, either. Popularly, falsely, dogma means a statement that defines God or something to be believed without doubt or question. So, a dogmatic person, as we use the term pejoratively, would believe it were raining if the Pope said so, even if it were not. To me, this kind of dogmatism is closer to heresy than any heretic.

The problem is that we think dogmas define the undefinable. Of course God cannot be defined, especially when 'God' is a cipher for that transcendent mystery that ever eludes our fleshly minds. Dogmas and doctrines don't close the discussion, they keep it open. Heresy, on the other hand, closes the discussion by deflating the mystery. Take the Christological controversy for example.

Simplified for a blog post: with Nicaea we affirm that Christ is fully divine, fully human, and fully one person with two natures. Now, when you think about it, this doesn't quite make sense! Yet, this is the dogma, the doctrine, that which if you believe, supposedly you inhabit a 2-dimensional world. This 'definition' of Christ barely traces an outline of the mystery, and does not at all reduce Christ to simple, convenient ideas.

It's much easier and more attractive to believe that Christ was only human (then we don't have to worship him or take him too seriously), or that he was only divine (then we don't have to follow his impossible example). These heresies reduce Christ to something easily defined, and easily ignored. The true doctrine, however, keeps the mystery alive and open.

The mark of a healthy mind is openness to new things. Mystery is always new, even when you have studied it for years, it surprises you because it keeps you in touch with a person and not with any mere idea. Heresy shuts off the possibilities, solves the problem, and lets you move on, unfettered by the burden of the cross.

What makes us so mysterious?

2007-02-09T11:30:00.000-06:00

There's something more to us than meets the eye, or natural reason alone. Even with the help of divine faith, the human person may be understandable but not fully known and exhausted of mystery and interest. Maybe it's the fact that we are free persons, able to make choices that makes us mysterious; you never know what he might do next, that sort of thing.

Or are we mysterious because much of what we think or mean is invisible and hardly open to objective investigation? What goes on inside my head is pretty private; even with scientific tools you couldn't 'read' my thoughts. You might be able to know whether I'm feeling pain or falling asleep, or even that I'm reading poetry. But could you know how I was feeling, the various levels of meaning I was experiencing, the symphony of emotion that plays notes and instruments even I can hardly identify?

Of course, there is also the unconscious. Somewhere in the murky depths of my mind lie all kinds of forgotten memories and unspoken assumptions and irrational fears and fantastic dreams and untapped powers for good and ill. Even I don't know myself well enough to say, Problem's solved, let's get down to harnessing this machine for my purposes. No, I remain a mystery to myself and sometimes I don't know why I do the things I do.

I am a mystery to you, also, because no contract or written agreement can exhaust the depths of meaning and possibilities that occur between two people. Even if you've known me my whole life, and I've shared my deepest secrets with you, and you are well-versed in many psychological theories and cognitive models, there's something aloof about the individual. Part of this is not knowing exactly what the other is thinking or feeling, another part is the subjective nature of our inter-subjective conversation.

Then, you have the longing for the infinite, expressed in our desires for self-transcendence. It's not that we simply want to get over ourselves, but that we want to go all the way past limits and achieve pure, infinite, limitless being. I desire the limitless, therefore I know the limit and I intuit what going beyond might be like. There is something more than observable and measurable about us. Part of this is our longing for God, another part is God's indwelling among us.

There are questions about what it means to be a human person that cannot be answered by empirical science alone. We are all philosophers, and we all dream, if it's even the remotest possibility shrouded with eternal doubt, we want to be theologians, too. We thirst for God because something about our lives is always incomplete unless it opens out onto an infinite horizon. Our capacity for God, capax Dei, makes us mysterious, more than unsolvable problems which may one day yet be solved.

Our intentionality seeks the ultimate object, which is no object at all. And, so we walk and run continuously on our search.

Forgetting the Absence of the Presence of God

2007-02-08T11:29:00.000-06:00

Here's a long quote from G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man (1925). He's talking about how maybe the polytheistic pagans of ancient (and modern) times were in sincerity more monotheistic, but that they experienced the absence of the One God rather than his presence. The presence of God makes itself felt in Revelation and Incarnation, and today is Scripture and Sacrament, hence, Church.

I suspect an immense implication behind all polytheism and paganism. I suspect we have only a hint of it here and there in these savage creeds or Greek origins. It is not exactly what we mean by the presence of God; in a sense it might more truly be called the absence of God. But absence does not mean non-existence; and a man drinking the toast of absent friends does not mean that from his life all friendship is absent. It is a void but it is not a negation; it is some thing as positive as an empty chair. It would be an exaggeration to say that the pagan saw higher than Olympus an empty throne. It would be nearer the truth to take the gigantic imagery of the Old Testament, in which the prophet saw God from behind; it was as if some immeasurable presence had turned its back on the world. Yet the meaning will again be missed, if it is supposed to be anything so conscious and vivid as the monotheism of Moses and his people. I do not mean that the pagan peoples were in the least overpowered by this idea merely because it is overpowering. On the contrary, it was so large that they all carried it lightly, as we all carry the load of the sky. Gazing at some detail like a bird or a cloud, we can all ignore its awful blue background; we can neglect the sky; and precisely because it bears down upon us with an annihilating force it is felt as nothing. A thing of this kind can only be an impressing and a rather subtle impression; but to me it is a very strong impression made by pagan literature and religion. I repeat that in our special sacramental sense there is, of course, the absence of the presence of God. But there is in a very real sense the presence of the absence of God. We feel it in the unfathomable sadness of pagan poetry; for I doubt if there was ever in all the marvellous manhood of antiquity a man who was happy as St. Francis was happy. We feel it in the legend of a Golden Age and again in the vague implication that the gods themselves are ultimately related to something else, even when that Unknown God has faded into a Fate. Above all we feel it in those immortal moments when the pagan literature seems to return to a more innocent antiquity and speak with a more direct voice, so that no word is worthy of it except our own monotheistic monosyllable. We cannot say anything but 'God' in a sentence like that of Socrates bidding farewell to his judges: 'I go to die and you remain to live; and God alone knows which of us goes the better way.' We can use no other word even for the best moments of Marcus Aurelius: 'Can they say dear city of Cecrops, and canst thou not say dear city of God?' We can use no other word in that mighty line in which Virgil spoke to all who suffer with the veritable cry of a Christian before Christ: 'O you that have borne things more terrible, to this also God shall give an end.'

Seeking self-transcendence

2007-02-05T13:25:00.000-06:00

We all want to go beyond ourselves in some way, to forget ourselves, to grow and change and become something better, more like an ideal we imagine. The trouble is, 1) that we fail at this much of the time. We set goals and don't quite make it. We make promises to change our behavior and we fall in the same ruts. We all know what this feels like, and our drive to get beyond our limitations pushes us forward, and we find a strength that wasn't necessarily there before.

So, sometimes we succeed and we reach our goals, keep our promises, change our lives. The new problem, though, is 2) that even when we succeed we long for more. Is there any achievement we can make that upon its completion we would be utterly content? If so, would we cease to be ourselves in this new state of being? Instead, don't we always want to carry on, to go even further?

Even when we have matured to the point that we long less for quick pleasure or material possessions or a good reputation, our longings are never satisfied. Even when we have matured to long for the good of another person, and we concretize this longing in the form of a public, religious vow, as in marriage, are we ever finished? Do we ever get enough when we seek the good of the other?

Won't we go to extreme lengths to satisfy our longings, whether it's excessive exercise and dieting or all-night vigils at a death bed? And is this even enough? Some might conclude here that the point of human life, then, is longing, the search, and not the particular goal we have in mind. If that is the case, and I think there's something to that, then should we not aim at a goal we know is truly beyond us?

Mystery is a way of describing some inexhaustible reality that captivates us. Mystery is not an excuse for ignorance, the way many religious leaders might shrug off serious inquiries and doubts with the flippant answer, It's a mystery! Mystery invites more and more investigation. But what kind of investigation is appropriate? I think we need to approach mysteries not like fixing a car but like learning to write poetry.

If you work logically you can fix your car, and if you're thorough who can tell the difference between your work and a mechanic's? But with poetry, even if you get words to rhyme or fit in a meter, the end result will likely not be poetry or even pretty if you approach it all too logically. Poetry is an alternate and valid way of describing and finding and communing with truth. A poem may be true but not literal or logical.

Mystery, poetry, these are ways to get beyond the mere appearances of things and into their meanings. There's not simply one meaning or one answer. We find ourselves facing a horizon, not just a distant goal. A horizon, though, stretches out all around us, and we can never see it all at once. If we move closer to the horizon, part of it moves away from us, and we can never actually get to the end of it.

We can chase after it all day long and never get there. Yet, depending on the worthiness of our chosen horizon, we will be all the more motivated to continue. Sometimes going the way is as close as we can get to arriving. So, we continue and move on.

Praying with silence

2007-02-04T21:48:00.000-06:00

When we pray, is it simply to ask for help or complain about our problems or intercede on someone's behalf? What about thanking God, or praising God? All these forms of prayer are good and integral, none should be excluded on principle, for all flow from love. We could go on and on talking to God, but we'll eventually get distracted or tired or annoyed at the traffic outside.

What if we listened to God? What if we expressed our longing through silence, because it's too big and important for only words? Could we begin to 'pray always' as Paul recommends, if it's not words we pray by but our whole person? Don't the words lose their taste as soon as they fall from our lips? Silence intensifies love. The most powerful exchanges involve no words.

We need our imaginations to pray and understand God most of the time. But none of our words or images can exhaust the totality of the reality of God; there's always something more. This is because God is a person, not a thing with which we have a mechanical relationship. Rather, we have a personal relationship, and we can never get enough of God.

Silence opens up into a space where words only point. In silence we move closer to the horizon of our capacity for God, as we are filled with a presence that overwhelms us and is gentle at the same time. It's not enough only to stop talking, we must listen, which means opening ourselves up to the unexpected and mysterious about the other.

In silence we neither achieve anything nor impress anyone through eloquence. Yet, silence can satisfy and intensify our longing at the same time. Living our days necessitates a great deal of words and action, but if we can punctuate the day with silence, the simple things take on new meaning for us. In silence we bring nothing to God but our attention and our physical presence, and we may eat and drink from his delight without cost and without money (Isaiah).

Can we attain absolute knowledge?

2007-02-04T21:35:00.000-06:00

In order to address a statement such as, “the fact that we are embodied beings means that we can never possess absolute knowledge,” one must first be clear as to which ground upon which one stands; for the statement will be affirmed or denied differently from different traditions. Rather than sketch a survey of likely responses by several traditions, I will argue from and for a specific tradition. But first we must make clear what are the broad possibilities of answering, making such a definite statement so ambiguous after only a few moments’ meditation.

The statement is most obviously true for philosophers of empirical science, for here “absolute knowledge” refers to a complete catalogue of facts about the universe. In this case, our condition of embodiment creates a limited perspective, and other limits are imposed by the state of technology, etc. Yet, even here a major metaphysical presupposition is made: that there is a privileged discourse and way of knowing, and it is only our limited possibilities as thinking animals that prevents such an absolute knowing. If all knowing is within a paradigm of thought, scientific discourse, then by our own reliance on language we will never reach an ideal knowing.

This mention of ideal knowing brings me to my own argument. As long as “absolute knowledge” means a kind of ideal, unlimited, non-linguistic comprehension of all reality, then the statement is true. By the fact of our own incarnate being we are limited, historical, factical, perspectival knowers with no direct access to an ideal knowledge. We are now in phenomenology; our knowledge of anything is perspectival. A Husserlian, though, might say, as a kind of Platonist, that by an eidetic reduction we come to knowledge of the essence of things. This essential knowledge is of an ideal nature; in all our finite grasping we intend something universal. In this idealistic sense, then, absolute knowledge is possible. The idealist, however, in order to achieve this ideal and absolute knowledge inevitably transcends his finite, incarnate self and is elevated into the ideal realm itself. This does not address the statement at issue, however; for it denies the first part – our fact of embodied being.

It is my argument, with a blend of Aquinas, Marcel and Rahner, that it is only by the fact, not despite, of our incarnate being that we may attain to absolute knowing in the sense of knowledge of the absolute – truth, wisdom. Of course, it will be objected that “absolute knowledge” is not co-terminous with “knowledge of the absolute.” Yet, I argue that the type of knowing I suggest fulfills existentially the conditions of absolute knowledge – the subject could say, “I have absolute knowledge” to his own satisfaction. Absolute knowledge here cannot mean strictly empirical facts about the world. This empirical knowledge, even if complete, does not fulfill the conditions of absolute knowledge, for it has excluded moral, poetic and philosophical knowledge – what we tend to call ‘truth.’ Absolute knowledge must include these human truths in a way that exceeds the type of knowing a book or a computer may suggest, i.e. a catalogue of facts. The experience of knowing this way is readily present to all persons, but philosophically it is difficult to describe.

To support my claim I will draw out a metaphysical anthropology, using Aquinas and Marcel, with the philosophy of religion of Rahner in mind. Thomas poses the question whether man may know anything without reference to the phantasms, sensory data, worldly received knowledge. At stake in this question is whether man may know God (or angels, or moral truth, or anything ‘spiritual’ or ‘ideal’) in a positive way: a direct, absolute, ideal, apophatic way. If he answers Yes, then our statement in question is false – and our embodied nature does not preclude absolute knowing. If Yes, then we all ought to become Platonists or Hegelians. Aquinas answers, and I agree, No, there is no knowledge possible without the phantasms, reference to our bodies. His argument for this answer is that the human person is a union of body and soul, corporeality and spirituality, real and ideal, etc. It is by our nature as incarnate souls that all our knowledge is always, necessarily, both physical and spiritual. His backing is the principle, “quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur” – whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver.

We are halfway to my point. If all our knowledge is both ideal and real, particular and universal, then it is still unclear whether absolute knowledge is possible for us. The door closed by empirical philosophy and science, however, has been unlocked – let us attempt an opening. For empiricism, any absolute empirical knowledge was impossible, by our limitations of body; also, any knowledge of the absolute was excluded (as the absolute was excluded even as a possible existing object).

My claim is that absolute knowledge is possible by the fact of our incarnate being – we are more than just flesh. I turn now to Gabriel Marcel, that theistic existentialist, to continue this metaphysical anthropology. As a philosopher, Marcel eschewed the dialectic and systematics of Hegel and many others, for they lost sight of the primary datum of all philosophy: the fact that we are incarnate beings. Hegel, for Marcel, assumed an ideal perspective which was not his own – he took god’s eye-view of history, as if he were the locus and source of all intelligibility. Marcel, however, prefers a concrete approach to philosophy – instead of attempting to transcend our mortal bodies in order to attain apophatic awareness; we must rather “dig in” to our experience as embodied beings. For him, too, then, it is by the fact of our embodied being that absolute knowledge is possible. What is meant by absolute knowledge here, though, cannot be validated by any other than the individual. In this sense it is a Mystery (used in Marcel’s sense: that which cannot be known except also in reference to ourselves; as opposed to the anonymous facts of science).

As embodied spirits there is something of the absolute in us, as well as the factical. We ourselves as beings belong to the absolute field of knowing. It is indeed this spiritual aspect that gives us access to any knowing at all. Yet, by our incarnate nature, even knowledge of ourselves is impossible without reference to the physical. This is true also by another Thomistic principle: the idea of knowing as "emanatio et reditio subjecti in se" – the going out and returning to ourselves. When I know a chair, I have an idea of it that came from my senses. In sensing I go out of myself into the world and come back to myself with this idea. The idea is both spiritual and physical. So too if I were to know God, it would happen through symbols and the creativity of the mind. Yet, to the knower, something absolute is communicated through this particular knowing.

Because I am a spirit also I am open to spiritual things – knowledge. If I am open to being, then I am absolutely open to all being, Being. As open to all being, the being of beings, all things which are are possible objects of knowing. In this identity of Being and knowing (Parmenides, Cusanus, Schelling, Hegel, Heidegger) as a being I am open to all being, thus to all knowing. If I am open to being because I am incarnate being, then by the same fact am I open to absolute knowledge. I can say, then, that in so far as I am in being, then so far am I also in knowing. By this principle of the identity of Being and knowing, absolute knowledge is possible if absolute being is possible. What would it mean for me to know absolute being?

First, reflect that by the fact of thinking or questioning absolute being at all, that this is a possibility open to me. For Heidegger, as a being, Dasein is that opening to Being – indeed, Dasein is constituted by its relation to Being as the one who is open to Being, receives Being, cares about Being, hears and responds to the call of Being. And for Heidegger, as for Marcel, Rahner and Aquinas, this call of being is lived out only in our factical existence. If our incarnate being were a hindrance to absolute knowing or being, then the question of its possibility could never be posed.

The fact that Dasein is the place of Being is true because of, not in spite of, our factical, worldly existence. If we have found our access to absolute knowing through absolute being, then what is our access to absolute being? For Marcel, and I agree, this access is in the absolute commitment to the Other in Creative Fidelity. Very briefly, Marcel arrives at Creative Fidelity by a number of steps. First, one recognizes that our incarnate being constitutes us as intersubjective. Then, realize that the other cannot be known except in reference to myself. In this way the other is a mystery – as such, he and I are open to each other. This mutual openness calls me to Disponibilité, by which I enact my openness to the other through simple acts of kindness and sharing. In the course of these magnanimous relations I open myself more fully to certain individuals, constituting myself in some I-thou relations. These more profound I-thou relations place a deeper call on my being, and I respond. The relation has grown more concrete, more personal, and deeper. Yet, I feel the call to go even further – I feel the call to commitment to the other, to place the other alongside me. This call is absolute – it demands my whole self; it is an infinite call. Because of my openness to the being of the other I ground myself in a total commitment of Creative Fidelity to the other. For the individual who responds in this way a wonderful access to being has opened up – the openness and the call have grown exponentially by my increasing response. In this particular commitment he feels open to and alongside of or within absolute being. To the observer, however, only a simple love story of marriage has unfolded; and, to this impartial observer what the man experiences as absolute being, appears as a descent into a death by details.

In this example from Marcel we see also what Thomas means by sacraments: a mundane reality becomes access to the absolute. We see now that it is because and through our nature as embodied beings that absolute knowledge is possible. If it is possible to us, then it will be so only through our nature, not by some false idol of the ideal person. Our conditions for absolute knowledge are quite different now than when we began. We see that a catalogue of physical facts that is absolutely complete is only a small part of an absolute knowledge; indeed, such a catalogue is unnecessary. Such a catalogue of particulars is obsolete because it is only a simulacrum of that to which we already have access: the universal. Would not a complete catalogue of particulars be equivalent to a universal? Yet, we avoid certain errors of false Idealism by locating access to being not in the ether or some super-human mystical experience; rather, being meets us where we belong, where we already are: in the world as incarnate beings. If this notion of absolute knowledge still seems incomplete, remember two points: First, I argued that by these reasonings the knowledge to which we come would be existentially sufficient for that particular knower – here we are only describing from without what may only happen within the individual. Second, what would be the merit of an apophatic, absolute knowledge of everything in all detail? What about the impossibility of absolute determination stemming primarily not from our factical nature, but from the things themselves? I argue that absolute knowledge is possible in and through an authentic existential experience. Certain over-determinacies spring up in reality, even empirical science. The kind of absolute knowledge that an empiricist seeks is inherently impossible, thus not a thing at all. We are capable of absolute knowledge, not simply in the sense that we may fulfill our finite capacity (yet falling short of an ideally absolute knowledge) – but absolute knowledge absolutely by the fact of our openness to being and the identity of being and knowing.

A brush with atheism

2007-01-29T19:24:00.000-06:00

It happens subtly and suddenly. You start reading essays that Jesus is a myth, that belief in miracles is rationally irresponsible, that metaphysics is an illusion, and before you know it you've got a crisis of faith. Even if you've tackled all these problems before, you can still get caught up in a mindset inimical to faith.

Despite your rational doubts, you still pray, and intuitively believe at a deep level, though your thoughts run contrary to faith. You want to believe, and you wonder if this is enough, or if you haven't been deluding yourself all along because of the good feelings your religious beliefs incited.

Now those good feelings are gone, and even though you think you're closer to the truth you feel farther from yourself and from that mysterious quality of life that previously defined you. Now you are a rationalist, materialist, naturalist, or nihilist or atheist or agnostic or free-thinker.

You go back to your sources, the good journal entries from a time of strong faith, you try to pray more intensely, but the depressing absurdity of a life without ultimate meaning haunts you. You try in vain to prove the tenets of your faith to yourself, based on your own understanding of history and science and psychology. But all these attempts seem to fail because your critical mind has pithy and superior devil's advocate responses that crumble your confidence.

So, you try again to argue yourself into faith and you fail again. Finally you give up, dissatisfied, and try to comfort yourself with a nap or chocolate. What went wrong? First, maybe we went about this the wrong way. Why did I do this alone, why didn't I ask a spiritual friend for advice? Why didn't I participate in liturgy and community?

I think the bigger pitfall was trying to restore faith on the same level at which it was attacked, the level that died. If one can be argued out of and into faith through pathetic internet essays (like this one), then what kind of faith is that? The problem isn't with science or reason or material reality; these were always the same whether faith is operative or not. The problem was taking a narrow view, a reductionist view.

You first got into trouble by rationalizing your faith, which left you with rationalism and no faith. Then, to get out of the mess, you tried to fideize your reason, and build what is really an inter-personal, spiritual relationship (faith) on an individual, objective set of logical propositions. Faith and reason do not ultimately contradict, but you can't sacrifice one for the other. Nor can you base on on the other, certainly not reduce one to the other.

Just as suddenly and subtly you find yourself remembering an old insight from Heidegger's What is called Thinking. Heidegger writes that although the sciences calculate and analyze, they do not think because they forget the ground on which they are based. Science and observation would not be possible except that being gave itself over for observation. There is... something there, and why should it be there? Science has no answer, we merely take for granted that there is, es gibt, da sein.

Okay, this is not a fully-reclaimed faith yet; Heidegger does not one a Christian make. But, Heidegger does drag you back to another ethos, where mystery is not code for not-yet-solved, but rather not-fully-comprehensible and infinitely knowable. Subtly you are back in an ethos where faith in the unseen seems a rational response to the mystery of being.

Maybe one day, in this realm of natural religion and natural mysticism, you find yourself astonished by a presence or spirit in a liturgy or a friend or a sudden prayer or Scripture. Actually, a casual reading of 2 Corinthians opened my eyes again to something which animated Paul to write the way he did. I wanted now to be in touch with whatever inspired him, enthused him. All of a sudden, I was hungry for a faith that was bigger than me, and bigger than the criticisms reason will inevitably and rightly throw at it.

I think this is about the relation between faith and reason, but I don't have any conclusions yet. This is something of my experience over the last few days. I felt distraught and tempted to atheism for a while, when suddenly something broke through and called me back to myself. I didn't ignore reason or stuff it into a corner so my irrational faith could flourish. Instead, I remembered Being, the mystery of being, and that opened the way of metaphysics and somehow God made his way through that crevice.

Isn't it foolish for God to live among us?

2007-01-24T10:57:00.000-06:00

The Incarnation is as much a scandal today as it ever was; still a stumbling block for faith. We would much rather believe in a Christ who was blessed by God, but not really God himself. We would much rather believe in a Christ who was a Spirit, God speaking to us, but not really a man who had to sleep and eat and suffer temptation.

Atheists and mystics alike have the wonderful sensibility that God would have to be greater than whatever we can imagine or comprehend. Even Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, admitted the possibility of a god-reality that is more fantastic than anything anyone has ever dreamed. The problem with this, however, is that God does not wait for us to find him, or count on us to be smart enough to glimpse him. Instead, God reveals himself to us when we're not quite ready.

The incarnation is God's revelation, and it catches us off guard. It's not what we were expecting. How could this man be God? He looks just like everyone else! Yet, God entrusts the treasure of his presence to fragile vessels. Somehow God has the humility not only to speak through a prophet or inspire leaders through mystical experiences. God humbles himself all the way until he is one of us, dying from sin, until finally sin kills him. (The Resurrection of Christ in his glorified body makes his presence universal, it changes the fabric of reality, and confirms our intuition that we are ultimately immortal in Christ.)

Can we believe that God cares so much about us, that he loves us, even though we have to suffer through so much, that he would come to us and experience it all with us? God is ultimately incomprehensible, but he has made himself continuously comprehensible to our senses, our feeble minds and our heavy hearts. Go ahead, be with the Body of Christ, the person of God incarnate in a myriad of ways. You'll never exhaust his presence. Bring more than tools, however, to observe.

It's rather rude to psycho-analyze our friends all the time and never really be with them or empathize. Even though we think we understand our friends because we have this model of their problems, we don't know them at all until we make room for them in ourselves. We need to re-learn how to be with other people, how to be present to them and let them be present to us. Until then, the presence of Christ, in the Eucharist or in others or even in ourselves, won't make any sense to us.

Living with science

2007-01-23T11:28:00.000-06:00

A question we have to ask ourselves is whether science and the scientific method is an adequate and desirable way to arrive at truth in all areas of our life. Certainly science is good and necessary and we should all know how to think critically and calculatingly. We all need to know how to doubt our presuppositions and search for better answers. We all should grasp the scientific method and apply it to many kinds of problems in our daily life.

Does the scientific method work when I ask the question, Who am I? Or, Who are you? Or, Who is God and did he really become a human person? We can certainly attempt to answer these questions scientifically, and we will get answers. The answers are definitive; we can describe ourselves through physical, observable characteristics. Even psychologically, though a soft science, we can understand ourselves and other people and our desire to have a big god figure watching out for us. It all makes sense. The question is answered.

Or are we really content with these answers? Are they the whole truth? Certainly they are true, but is that all there is? I believe most of us would rather that there is something more to reality than what can be scientifically observed. An old professor of mine was a strict materialist and had intriguing but disappointing answers for why he was married and loved his children. It is evolutionarily advantageous. My actions are not free, they result from spontaneous and unpredictable changes in my brain on the subatomic level. This is what he believed. Of course, in a way, it's true.

But it's not the whole truth, or else we would be satisfied with his answers. Even if we believe there is nothing more than what the scientific method can demonstrate, we act as if there were a real meaning to love and life and pain. We are personally invested in our lives and the lives of others; this is a fact that we cannot escape. We need to recover a more adequate understanding of reality that does justice to the reality we know yet cannot exhaust with description.

The difference between the scientific mindset and a mystery-imbued mindset like the Sacramental Imagination at work in the Catholic Church stands on accepting or rejecting the invisible as real and important. Mysteries are not simply puzzles or problems that we will eventually solve. To solve a mystery is to walk away, but mystery confronts and invites us because it is a reality bigger than us. Mystery is the reality in which we find ourselves, and as such, we can never become impartial observers with an objective understanding. We can't ignore the mystery of our lives or explain it away.

As soon as we think we've solved it, uncertainty pops up its mysterious head. Science knows better than to hunt for absolute certainty, and science has learned to live with doubt about its own completeness. We can take a cue from this and extend it. Science knows it can never prove anything, but it keeps on investigating because we have a natural curiosity. Science has long since moved to the realm of the invisible to explain visible things. Religion has always done that. Now the question is, Whose version of the invisible Truth will I accept?

We often have the audacity to believe that my version of the truth is the Truth, that I have a superior access to reality through my thoughts and feelings that outweighs what any community might try to tell me. We know how to avoid dogmatism and group-thinking and brain-washing and the herd-mentality all too well. We avoid these excesses (which are wrong) so well that we go overboard and we forget how to live in a community of faith, what authority really is, why historical developments matter.

The process of developing a living spirituality in the Catholic tradition while taking seriously the post-modern context we live in involves a conversion toward community. If we are the Body of Christ, then I should like to get to know us and spend time with us and know myself in relation and as a true member of us.

When I became a novice...

2007-01-22T08:21:00.000-06:00

On Friday we received two novices into the community to begin their year of discernment. In addition to receiving the monastic habit, novices are also given the traditional monastic haircut. Saint Meinrad is one of the few places that continues this tradition. At the very least, it keeps the novice from running away for a month!

That's a picture of me on the day of my investiture, wearing the corona tonsure. Having a radical haircut may seem silly or archaic, but it serves as a rite of passage into something new. The exterior change should signal an interior one. The monastic life requires constant conversion.

Part of this conversion is conforming yourself to the monastic way of life, the customs of the house, monastic traditions. In a monastery there are lots of family traditions that get passed on. From one perspective these are a bunch of rules, but in another light they are just the way we do things. As a novice I had the self-expectation that I could fulfil all these rules and be the perfect monk. Of course, I failed.

I failed when I rang the wrong bells or put out the wrong numbers for the liturgy or came late to Mass. If you're a perfectionist like me, making mistakes feels especially embarrassing and foolish. The beautiful thing, however, is that God doesn't demand some constant adherence to external practices. Every novice makes mistakes; that's not failure. Giving up or hating yourself for your faults is a bigger failure in monastic life than oversleeping.

I think we want to follow the rules because we think we can earn our salvation that way. As long as I do everything I'm told, and a little extra, and don't make any mistakes, then God will have to accept me and make me a monk, and everyone will love me, too. The truth is that God has already accepted us. Seeking God is the monk's task and vocation, not virtue for the sake of virtue. The novitiate helps rid us of pride.

Good Friday: The Absence of God

2007-01-21T19:02:00.000-06:00

Good Friday 2006

Between Fundamentalism and Atheism

2007-01-20T11:15:00.000-06:00

I've been reading an article by Sam Harris on Beliefnet where he argues against religious moderation. As I understand him he would rather Christians embrace the consequences of their faith and affirm the literal meaning of the Bible. Moderate Christians will not do this, however, because they know, he suggests, that their religion is false. His Christian interlocutor responded earlier that moderate Christians are those who have allowed doubt to integrate with their faith.

I'm all for living in the tension between doubt and faith. There is another way, however, to stand between fundamentalism (intellectually and even morally irresponsible) and atheism. Harris attacks the literal interpretation of Scripture by citing the late 19th century papal encyclical Providentissimus Deus of Leo XIII which insists on the Holy Spirit as dictating the whole of Scripture. What Harris forgets is that this document is more nuanced than the simple quote he provides. Since 1893 the Catholic Church has undergone a dramatic development of doctrine concerning the interpretation of Scripture.

Today we accept many of the methods advanced by Protestant scholars utilizing the historical-critical method. From this we gain a certain objectivity about the Scriptures, how they were written, what literary forms were used, who wrote them, what can be taken literally and what was meant to be allegorical or hyperbolic. Readers today, so far from the original cultures which produced these ancient texts, approach the Scriptures at a certain disadvantage. We don't know how to read them.

Writers in the early Church, the fathers of the Church of the patristic era, however, had a mystical and vividly symbolic understanding of Scripture that would make any fundamentalist scream. Some how the patristics were able to get at the sensus plenior, the fuller sense of Scripture. It's not simply that some passages are not meant to be taken literally. The early Church understood her Scriptures with mystical meanings.

The deeper, more honest approach to Scripture for Christians is not fundamentalism, as Harris suggests. We need to retrieve a more symbolic imagination to understand what the Scriptures mean, rather than what facts or predictions they make. The middle ground between fundamentalism and atheism is not only moderation between blind faith and blind doubt. We need to find ourselves in the midst of a larger tradition that can interpret Scripture because she is its guardian.

Scripture makes sense only in the context of a believing Christian community which stands on the foundation of tradition passed on from the Apostles down through the ages to their own pastors. Attend a Catholic Mass and you will hear preached a tradition that seeks the wisdom and not merely the literal truth of Scripture.

Seeking God

2007-01-19T11:27:00.001-06:00

I think we desperately want to find God, have an experience of God. It's not enough to believe in God's existence. Neither is it enough to have spiritual experiences independent of the question of God. The problem is that we go about it in the wrong way, fundamentally. We want God to reveal himself to us as individuals and not as a community.

Basically we strive for something beyond our reach. Whether we want to achieve a super-human ideal or earn far more than we're worth, we seek to go beyond ourselves. We feel trapped in our subjective, individual consciousness with independent, relative, incommunicable meaning and value.

Prayer can be our endeavour at self-transcendence, just as we try to forget ourselves through fantasy, luxury, sexual excess, alcohol, etc. Or, prayer can be our encounter with the Triune God who calls us out of our nothingness and into the Body of Christ. Only someone else can draw us outside ourselves. Fantasy and selfish pursuits of pleasure eventually bury us more and more in our small, boring lives.

We are made for each other, and made for God; we exist truly and only in relation to others. Even when we are introspective (a valuable and necessary skill for the spiritual life) and seek to be alone, we may start talking to ourselves, since we only know ourselves through others.

Meditation as mindfulness of my states of consciousness goes only halfway to prayer; and, prayer needn't always be meditative or mindful. If we separate ourselves from our thoughts, emotions, body, environment, then we are even further from other persons. Prayer is not an escape from society, but entering deeply into its heart, which is the meeting place between all humanity and God.

Seeking God is more than finding ourselves. Yet, only by going beyond ourselves, responding to the call to communion with the Other, can we begin to know ourselves as indeed we are known by God. There is a balance between losing yourself and separating yourself from reality. Losing yourself by being drawn into communion delivers you back into yourself because at once you realize here is where you truly live.

God does not deliver us to a foreign land of fantastical paradise. Instead, the Kingdom of God is already begun, and we are near to it. Seeking God reveals the meaning of things in relation to the ultimate meaning of everything.

Thoughts on belief

2007-01-17T19:49:00.001-06:00

I think scientists/atheists find fault with Christianity not at first because we believe in fantastic things. Many scientific theories are quite fantastic and complex and require a great leap to grasp and accept. No, the problem with Christianity from this perspective is in the irrefutability of their truth claims. Christians believe, period. There's no required method to test and go on doubting. For science there can be no irrefutable claim; the greatest victories of science are perhaps to disprove something. In fact, can science prove anything, even though it does rest on principles of verifiability and method and the scope of determinable reality, and refuses sometimes to acknowledge, and always to question these principles.

Christianity, or any faith, does not operate with this method of doubt. I think we can refer to Davidson's anomalous monism and apply it here (as a PhD dissertation at HIW is currently attempting) to say that when I pour a cup of coffee we can talk about the macro-physical dimension, chemical, sub-atomic, psychological, sociological, historical and spiritual dimensions. All these dimensions can be understood independently of each other. The common view is that there is a heirarchy of these dimensions, and the more truthful one explains the lower one. Eventually you end up trying to explain everything either through quantum mechanics as the ultimate explanation (but not meaning) of reality, or you accept that there's more going on than any one or even 100 discourses can describe in any event.

I can find meaning and beauty in the aroma of coffee as I pour it into a cup; I can find spiritual significance by way of either analogy (God's love pours out gratuitously like an unending flow of hot, fresh coffee) or directly (God's love keeps everything together and buzzing with potential). When I apprehend the spiritual meaning of an event I need not to question it's validity but to delve into even deeper meaning. The truth of the experience has already proven itself to me.
Now, experiences of prayer do not necessarily prove anything. Atheists can meditate and become ecstatic just as well as any religious mystic. Religion teaches morality, but it is not the sole teacher. Atheists think we can hold onto something of religion as long as we use only the good, positive parts like ethics and supererogation. But we don't need religion to be good people; even though I believe conversion and purity of heart is possible only by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit is not tied only to religious rites. But religion persists, I believe, because it offers meaning and ultimate value. Even Buddhism with the state of Nirvana offers a form of being far beyond the death of my body, even my consciousness, in which I find myself already participating unconsciously. Heaven is not only a child's dream, but the affirmation of the adult's deepest truth that his love can never die. We know that when we love our loved ones never ultimately die, and neither do we. We know this, and heaven affirms what we wish to be true explicitly because we know it to be true implicitly. I cannot love with my whole heart and yet be satisfied with plain mortality, even of myself, but especially of the beloved.

The literal claims of religion are attacked by atheism because they are untenable, because they can never be proven. In reality, though, can they be disproven? Isn't there a splinter of doubt that remains for the scientists. What if, indeed, in this one instance, a miracle really did happen. I know they're not happening right now, but what if one time, for a special person, they really did? The truth of Christianity does not ultimately rest on the miracles (though one can make a strong argument for Christ's bodily resurrection as a sine qua non miracle belief for Christians). Rather, we begin by relying on authority, then testimony of personal experience, then the intrinsic beauty of the ideas, then the inner experience of assent, then as a habit of faith. As William James writes, perhaps there are some claims that have no evidence until you believe them. Then, once you have begun to believe, irrational as it seems, suddenly the truth of your belief becomes apparent.

I don't think we can be argued out of our religious beliefs; they operate on a personal level that science cannot ultimately touch because it must be non-personal and objective. We should be shaken by scientific and atheist challenges to our belief; if our belief is shaken, we have the opportunity to re-discover on a deeper level what we truly believe, what is worth believing. I think there's much more to say of this subject, but I'm just rambling now.

Escaping the 'metaphysics of presence'

2007-01-02T11:48:00.000-06:00

A friend asked me what I like most about the monastery. Aside from not having to pay bills, I answered that we're not dominated by any metaphysics of presence here. A metaphysics of presence is a philosophical catchphrase that has a practical meaning for me: a way of being/thinking/living that focuses on what is immediately physically, visually, or mentally present to the individual, giving little or no credence to whatever is 'absent' or in oblivion.

A practical example: someone who never shuts up because he's afraid of his own silence might be living out of a metaphysics of presence. Another example: watching TV for hours without a break can saturate your experience with a never-ending stream of images.

I think it's hard to think or be with yourself in such situations. It separates us from something that we need for sanity and spirituality. The monastery can be a haven of space where there are gaps between activities and room for thought or recollection.

It can be as simple as walking slowly. Like I said in an earlier post, walking slowly can help open you up to the subtle forces and meanings of things around you and within you. It's good to slow down our thoughts, too.

Silence opens up a space that we immediately want to fill with anything at hand. A key to spiritual practice is to learn to love silence and some open, empty space. What we learn as we open ourselves to prayer is that within this apparent absence and nothingness there emerges another form of presence.

We are present to ourselves and to others in more subtle ways than bricks and dogs are present to us. There is an inwardness that needs few words and few gestures to communicate a depth of feeling and meaning, especially when we are with our beloved. Being alone opens the same avenues of self-knowledge which is equally difficult to maneuver as any romance.

As they say, God's light is as darkness to us, and God's absence is another form of God's presence. Attuning ourselves to the way we are present yet not present to ourselves, revealed yet still concealed, opens us up to a deep way God might reveal Godself to us.

Address to an Atheist, part 1

2006-11-26T15:55:00.000-06:00

Nota bene: this is an excerpt of a paper I wrote for class this semester. I write this as if to Richard Dawkins, author of the recent book, The God Delusion, which debunks religion through science. Although not scientists, I think philosophers (and pseudo-philosophers) have something to say on this subject. I write with the background of Cardinal Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity (trans. J.R. Foster, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1969, 2000) and a graduate course I took at the Catholic University of Louvain on the philosophy of science by Prof. dr. Jaap van Brakel in 2003 and his book Philosophy of Chemistry, Between the Manifest and the Scientific Image (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2000).

The similarities of Faith and Science
Both are forms of belief, involving presuppositions that bear out in one’s life. If belief can be understood to entail not only explicit propositions but also implicit presuppositions that guide how one sees the world, then science too is a kind of belief, though more in terms of its presuppositions. The belief of science is that only repeatable, observable phenomenon are in the pool of what can be known; truth is objective and available to all who care to investigate. This belief shapes the way the scientist sees the world by bracketing out other explanations for events, closing off the possibility of supernatural explanations, and discounting the value of personal, subjective truth.

Religion and faith hold as presuppositions that the visible world is not the sum of reality, that knowing truth is not about propositions but more a matter of inwardness. Belief is unavoidable; there are certain existential questions about the value of life and the meaning of existence that cannot go unanswered. Although science is intrinsically limited to the visible world and should have nothing to say on non-scientific questions, many ascribe to the doctrine of scientism. Scientism is a belief that science can be an all-encompassing worldview, replacing religion. Scientism reduces man to his visible parts, and strips him of the value he placed on his freedom (an illusion), his consciousness (an evolutionary construct), and his emotions (biochemical pathways that evolved to propagate and protect our genes). Faith, however, takes a wider view and values exactly that which science brackets.

Both ask one to believe in invisible ideas as true reality. Faith is clearly interested in things unseen, and relies on reflective ways of knowing and revelation to apprehend the spiritual dimension of reality. Modern science has become more mystical, in the sense of hidden, since its upper-level branches deal with mostly unobservable matters. Some of these things can be observed through tools, but many more are elements of improvable-because-unobservable theories.[1] The emerging awe of the elegant universe opens the pathway to evangelization through beauty.

Science rests on the self-disclosure of Being as the ground of truth, but forgets this claim in the wake of facts. Despite the adventuresome spirit of science that can even be violent toward reality in its zeal for closer observation, such observation is made possible only by the prior self-revelation of beings. Faith relies on the self-disclosure of Being, and waits in that open space for the self-revelation of God. The difference between faith and science here is whether the self-disclosure of Being is forgotten or memorialized. Science can know things only because things disclose themselves to man. Science, as an impersonal, objective method, conceals the observer because he is irrelevant, while faith recognizes that God can reveal himself only to a person who stands in his subjectivity.

[1] Subatomic particles, energy and forces, time, space, the beginning of the universe, a multiplicity of universes, hidden dimensions, superstrings, etc.

Address to an Atheist, part 2

2006-11-26T15:53:00.000-06:00

Nota bene: this is an excerpt of a paper I wrote for class this semester. I write this as if to Richard Dawkins, author of the recent book, The God Delusion, which debunks religion through science. Although not scientists, I think philosophers (and pseudo-philosophers) have something to say on this subject. I write with the background of Cardinal Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity (trans. J.R. Foster, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1969, 2000) and a graduate course I took at the Catholic University of Louvain on the philosophy of science by Prof. dr. Jaap van Brakel in 2003 and his book Philosophy of Chemistry, Between the Manifest and the Scientific Image (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2000).

The Rationality of Christian Faith
The world is knowable only because it is being thought by God. Since Christian faith memorializes the self-disclosure of Beings as an attitude toward reality, it understands that meaning precedes facts: reality is meaningful even before we impose any meaning onto it. Faith seeks first to uncover this meaning rather than create it. While science also seeks to understand reality, it cares little for meaning but mostly for utility and predictability. God is not an idea that comes after the fact of reality, but God is the author of reality, because God thinks reality into being. Being comes from thought, not vice versa. Faith, revealed religion, is not a late layer of meaning cloaked over ambiguous facts; rather, faith involves an awareness of the meaning of reality which is there even before any facts arrive to demonstrate it.

Science is about knowing-making, while faith is about standing-understanding. Ratzinger argues from the history of ideas that there are two distinct, necessary but irreducible, ways of meeting reality: the Heideggerian distinction of calculative and reflective thought. Science, in being calculative, concerns itself with what it can know, with any factum, or whatever can be made, faciendum. This worldview starts from the prior restriction that only what can be seen or grasped can be known.

Faith, however concerned it is with facts and history, essentially operates on a different plane, that of the meaning of being. Being is the one thing (not a thing, factum at all) that man does not make and cannot make for himself. Instead, man finds himself already thrown into a context of history which calls him to make certain basic decisions about reality. These decisions, also conceived as presuppositions, form the basis of a worldview, of a belief. Belief is inevitable. I cannot make myself, so questions of the meaning of my self cannot be answered by calculative thought. Reflective thought, however, calls me to take a stand and place my trust in something or someone prior to me.

Belief, then, is inevitable. Belief appears to science as something dreamt up by man because its source and ground cannot be measured or seen, and certainly cannot be manipulated. The beauty of Christian faith is that this ground on which we stand is not a faceless idea or an impersonal force, but the person of Jesus Christ, the logos. The logos, the word, is not a key to deciphering the puzzle of reality, but Christ is the meaning of reality in himself. Understanding and knowing matters of faith is not like scientific knowledge; rather, it is being in relation to another person. Belief is a kind of love, communion of persons.

Address to an Atheist, part 3

2006-11-26T15:52:00.000-06:00

Nota bene: this is an excerpt of a paper I wrote for class this semester. I write this as if to Richard Dawkins, author of the recent book, The God Delusion, which debunks religion through science. Although not scientists, I think philosophers (and pseudo-philosophers) have something to say on this subject. I write with the background of Cardinal Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity (trans. J.R. Foster, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1969, 2000) and a graduate course I took at the Catholic University of Louvain on the philosophy of science by Prof. dr. Jaap van Brakel in 2003 and his book Philosophy of Chemistry, Between the Manifest and the Scientific Image (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2000).

I Believe in the Scandal of the Incarnation
Atheism is a concern for the question of God’s transcendence. Passionate atheism and negative theology have a lot in common: both strive to protect God from simple identification with whatever can be seen. God cannot be known by science if God is a person who invites us to communion. Atheism works in tandem with mystical theology that denies of God any sensible quality. Mystical theology does not deny God but that God is the things we use to represent and understand God[1].

The Incarnation of Christ is a blessed scandal, making for transcendence in immanence. While science indirectly defends the transcendence of God, Christianity poses a real problem for the would-be-believer scientist. Even though what has been said opens the way, I believe, for a scientist to affirm validly the existence of God, and even to discover this presence within himself, Christianity requires a radical leap. The incarnation of Christ takes all the grandeur and elegance of the transcendent God and smacks it down into the arena of human affairs. With the incarnation, transcendence emptied itself into immanence. Now, facts bear the burden of revealing God not through simple negation, but by positive mediation.

The scandal challenges not just our ideas of what God is, but also what is our relation to God. The incarnation happens because God wants to reveal himself to us precisely in the manner that we can understand: the visible world of human history. There is an old Thomistic axiom, whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver. Since man is capable of both calculative and reflective thought, comprised of body and mind, positive knowledge of God must be mediated through visible signs.

The incarnation means that science and faith must speak to each other because they realize that they co-exist in the same person, on interconnected planes of being. The incarnation bridges the gap between the visible and invisible, body and mind, calculative and reflective, man and God. God now has a human face. It is not a question of either science or faith, but both together. The question of miracles bears this out: miracles are not scientific impossibilities but layers of meaning found within observable phenomena.[2]

Faith cannot convince science of its authority. Faith can only plant the question of what if science is not a complete method for arriving at truth, what if Truth is a person? In that silence of thought, when the scientist has the chance to be himself as he really is, how he really lives and must live as a loving person, faith can grow. The scientific atheist acts as if he believes in God by the value he places on human life, the beauty of scientific knowledge, and the truth of reality that shines out even before he goes to look for it with his flashlight.

[1] In his work, Mystical Theology, Pseudo-Dionysius denies that God is father or son or spirit or being or nothing. It is true, in analogical ways, that God is Father, Son, Spirit, Being, but also God is not these things, not just these things. These things are more our ideas of God than God himself, who in himself is totally other.

[2] Miracles can be investigated by science, and science can describe all sorts of things that seemed to have no other explanation but divine intervention. The truth is, however, that observability and even explainability does not rule out divine meaning. The plagues in Egypt probably all have natural explanations, but that is not the point. The point is what is the meaning of these events for our relationship to God? I am no less a feeling being because science can identify chemicals that coincide with my emotions. Mental events are both scientific and interior; we can ‘observe’ the same event from different viewpoints. The topic of miracles could be a paper in itself.

Slow down a little

2006-11-05T11:19:00.000-06:00

Faith is a relationship with the invisible God. God does reveal himself through Scripture, the Tradition of the Church, the teaching of the Church, liturgy, art, creation, science, and all forms of human experience. Yet, God is still invisible; God is not something out in our field of vision we can quickly see and categorize and pass over to the next thing. God is not the dessert at the end of our sensory buffet.

Instead, like meaning and values and emotions and ideas, God is invisible. It's not obvious to believe in God, but it takes an effort of will. We must slow down and listen in order to hear the silent God, in order to see the invisible God. When we slow down we begin to see and hear things we completely overlooked before. God speaks through these small things.

When we slow down we let the full force of being, the weight of things, and their meaning, impact us. We become receptive to reality instead of constantly trying to produce and shape and improve it. The world continues to turn even when we stop trying to hold all the pieces together ourselves. We are not the center. When we slow down it becomes more obvious where we stand in relation to God, our neighbor, and ourselves.

Slowing time moves us away from chronos or that calculative time of seconds and milliseconds where everything can be broken down into smaller particles. Slowing time moves us into kairos, that other Greek notion of time when we lose track of time and we seem to drop out of time. We enter into God's time and suddenly we have a new perspective on everything. This is what can happen in prayer, too.

Try walking around somewhere slowly, and listen to what is around you. Let things slow until you can hear your thoughts one at a time, and your emotions have room to grow into themselves. In this new space there is also room for us to hear and feel the movements of our soul which are deeper than our thoughts and emotions. This is a place of truth.

Be kind to one another

2006-11-04T13:02:00.000-06:00

At vigils this morning the second reading struck me hard; it was on kindness by Frederick Faber (unknown to me previously). Faber wrote that our ability to notice faults/evil in others often causes more harm than good. We like to think that our observations about our neighbors are witty or clever, but really they are sarcastic and destructive.

He recommends that we take a kinder interpretation. It sounds superficial at first, but I think there's something here. Faber asks how often have our simple dismissals been false (he's an idiot because he couldn't answer that question or she's cruel because she didn't forgive him, etc.) when in fact the situation was much more complicated. Things are seldom so simple as they seem.

Instead of jumping to conclusions and erring on the side of sarcasm and making rash judgments against each other, we need a kinder approach. Kindness shouldn't ignore the bad/poor qualities in our neighbors, but it tries to see them in the best light possible. Indeed, how easily we can forgive and excuse our own malicious deeds as stemming from character flaws, force of habit, internal weakness. Or don't we often say, it didn't hurt anyone?

Can we extend the same courtesy to others? The kinder interpretation takes more factors into account and allows for a richer, deeper, even more attractive understanding of other people. In the end, I think we would rather believe our kinder interpretations. It would make us more pleased with life in general. It would help us to appreciate and have compassion and even get along with our wicked neighbors.

Believe or doubt, or both?

2006-11-03T14:40:00.000-06:00

In a previous post I mentioned how maybe unbelievers who cared passionately about their level of credulity might be closer to religion that a half-hearted, or worse, half-minded believer who was either fundamentalist or fideist. We can't divide people along the lines of believers and doubters. The believers have doubt, and the doubters do believe in something.

Is it a weakness for a believer to begin doubting her faith? Does it mean she's close to losing faith, or worse, going to hell? Hardly. Doubt, for me, is a sign of robust faith, insofar as 1) faith is a relationship with a real person, and 2) doubt is the humility to admit our inability to know God as much as we would like.

If faith is a relationship rather than a set of propositions to which I say credo, then what matters in good religion is keeping the channels of communication open, staying honest about one's relationship with God. What earthly marriage survives if the spouses only speak to each other according to plain formulas and never really mention their feelings or ask questions or express concern? Faith, like a good marriage, admits for an occasional argument, question, or even betrayal. Love withstands these trials because it is concerned for the other person and not with completing a checklist of signs of a good relationship.

Doubt arises at crucial moments in our lives; our faith is being tested. Up until the moment of doubt we felt secure, everything fit into our picture of the world and of God and of ourselves. Everything was great until we stubbed our toe, or our parent died. Something heavy and real bumps into our carefully crafted picture of God and tramples it to pieces; we are left in doubt, we feel at risk and insecure. This is a good thing; we have two alternatives now. Either we can cling desperately to a broken image of God that no longer works. Or, we can move ahead and ask God what this all means now.

We use symbols to communicate with each other, and especially with God. Sometimes those symbols, like analogies, break down at a certain moment. If we find that english isn't enough to communicate with a native Korean, then we find another way to communicate, we don't ignore the other person. We always have room to grow in our faith, our understanding of God. When we were children a certain idea of God worked for us; now that we are adults that image of God won't work. Doubt signals the possibility of growth.

In order to know God God must reveal Godself to us; we have no easy access to the mystery of God, or even the mystery of ourselves. It takes a community of faith, an old, tried tradition to help us find adequate symbols. Our faith is not about finding the right answers, its about staying in touch with the right Person. God, like any other person, is never so simple as to be one thing and one thing only and all the time. God has the humility to be for us what we need him to be. Doubt is that middle space where we have to make a choice: is there someone behind the mask I've been talking to? We desperately want to believe that there is.

And, indeed, there is; but we can only know that if we believe. Doubt, and believe.

Are we really sinners?

2006-07-17T18:55:00.000-05:00

Or are we born innocent, and stay that way unless we rob a bank?

Good preaching, like that of Billy Graham, often follows a familiar pattern:

There's something missing in your life
(read: you are a sinner)
You've been looking for happiness
(read: you long for salvation)
But you just can't get it right
(read: you need a savior)
And Jesus is the answer.

Not much has changed since the early Church on this account, I think because all these things are true. The real hurdle for a good preacher is not making Jesus an attractive figure or painting a pretty picture of life as a Christian. Rather, we have a hard time believing that we need a savior, that we can't do it on our own, or indeed, that we are sinners.

What is a sinner, anyway? From the above it only seems that sinners are unhappy people. Unhappy people need to read a good book, take up a hobby, deepen friendships, meditate, or go to counseling to get happy, right?

If we are all sinners, though, aren't we all supposed to be unhappy, except for those who found Jesus? On the contrary, we meet very happy people everyday. Mostly they're on billboards, but we know they're out there.

Maybe with our long lives, high standards of living, technology and easy access to information we don't feel that unhappiness, or that lack of something special, or that guilt too easily anymore.

Adding to this loss of guilt is the therapeutic model that understands much of our sins as compulsive behaviors stemming from unconscious motives, childhood trauma, or bio-chemical imbalance. True, all these are true. Yet, isn't there something fundamentally missing?

Even for the ardent believer, or for the religious monk, or the mystic, there is always a lack, room for something more. Some agnostics, certainly not all, certainly not anyone who reads this blog, might be satisfied with what they have because their horizons are rather small. If your whole world is sports and chewing gum, you're not really aware of standing over an infinite precipice, and you don't care what's holding you up or keeping you from falling.

It's not so much that we are incredibly guilty of incredible sins. Maybe it's a matter of awakening ourselves to what is missing. Missing not just in our lives, but in all of human existence. And, missing not only for the infidels but even more so for the "righteous" and the mystic.

Any Christianity that offers a solution to all your problems, even your finances, offers more than they can deliver. God can never be contained or controlled by our prayers or ideas or churches. And, that is the point of religion. Religion is mostly humanity's fumbling response and jumbling answer to the overwhelming mystery of a God who speaks to us.

God is always beyond the horizon, always other than what we can name, always more, yet always less in a way. Awareness of sin feels more like being in the presence of mystery, awful, regal, ineffable mystery. It's feeling small, and maybe a little dirty, but definitely wounded, before that Other presence, which is so great, and so small, and simply beyond our comprehension.

Yet we feel drawn to it. Drawn to the horizon, drawn to explore, drawn to listen for a possible revelation from the God we hope exists. And because we are drawn to go further than ourselves, there is something of "losing your life" and embracing death, or "picking up your cross" in the search for God. That is where sin, or lack, or wound makes itself known, in the place between right now and that future of hope where God is.

I don't know what I'm talking about, maybe I should edit this later into something coherent.

Why doesn't God answer my prayers?

2006-07-01T11:03:00.000-05:00

Having a website is cool, especially when you get to read the statistics of how many people come to your site. The truth is, not many people come here. Those who do arrive usually do so through Google. What are they searching for; I mean, what are YOU searching for? Apparently, most people who read this site have typed the question, 'why doesn't God answer my prayers?'

Perhaps this is not always a detached, philosophical question but a groping attempt to make sense of something difficult. Why do we pray? What do we expect to get out of prayer? I just finished writing an essay on the theology of prayer of John Henry Newman and Hans Urs von Balthasar. These august theologians, certainly not removed from the realities of the human situation, despite their academic success, take an entirely different approach to prayer. For them, and most "professional pray-ers" the question isn't why God isn't a certain way. Rather, they wonder how is it possible that one can pray to God at all, that God can speak in a way that one may hear. What a wonder, what a grace, how beautifully we are made.

Jesus admonishes his disciples not to worry about the morrow, what you will wear, what you will eat. The contemplative disciple receives the privilege of finding Jesus here and now, in whatever circumstance approaches them. It is like floating, watching the busy world speed by in anxiety as you and the beloved converse with sighs too deep for words. All this is lovely, but when you grow ill, or stub your toe, or your friend has a serious accident, all this seems to float away, leaving you to face the harsh reality of life.

The truly wonderful message of Christianity is that no longer must we face curiously the dialectic between resting in God's love and playing a part in human drama. When life intervenes over our prayer life, even though we may have previously known God's overarching providential care, we feel alone and helpless. In prayer, though, when all the rest can be forgotten in good conscience, God is with us and nothing else matters. The Incarnation of Christ, though, ends the polarity of these two possibilities: either God is pure spirit and to know him is to forget your body; or, God is of the world, and to know him you must attend to all that appears in the flesh of human drama.

The Incarnation, rather, lets the world enter contemplative prayer, and so find its blessing. Likewise, the contemplative must now live in the world, and so be blessed by it for here and now are the same here and now of Christ's fleshly existence. Christians still experience periods of elation followed by periods of dryness, and many theories and insights abound. Whether it's the dark night of the soul leading you to love God and not his consolations, or it's God writing straight with crooked lines, or it's seeing only the back, messy side of the tapestry. In any case, there is, by the grace of the Cross, a potential for good in all human suffering. Not that we should seek it out so to benefit from it. In the same way, Paul warns us not to abuse our freedom as children of God who are exempt from the Law, not to sin only so that grace may abound all the more.

When you come to prayer, seek not to change God's mind on some matter. Instead, open yourself to be simply there with the king who holds all things in his power, who knows how it all turns out in the end, and whose arresting gaze leaves us speechless, like the martyrs or the lamb who opened not his mouth.

A rambling response to a comment...

2006-04-24T11:46:00.001-05:00

Jeff said...
Your discussion of layers reminds me of our tour of the Vatican Necropolis, where, space being constrained and records being short-lived, tombs were frequently criss-crossed, overlapped, or sometimes displaced by one another. Such is often the world of ideas. Conflicting opinions are like bodies competing for the same space in the Necropolis. Yet as Christians we know that territorialism is hardly befitting the dead; how silly that families fight over a hole in the ground while the souls of their childrens' corpses already enjoy the luxury of a Heavenly Mansion! So also, beneath petty and unexamined ideological trench-warfare, lies a Truth that is One and uncontradicted yet free and alive, that purifies worldly error without compromising the "polymorphous" beauty of the natural world, which is its declension.
22 April, 2006 00:29

Respondeo, dicens...

There was a good article in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly by Caputo called the Hauntological Hermeneutic musing on Kierkegaard's (literally Church-yard, cemetary) habit of visiting a cemetary on his lunch break and thinking about the dead's situation.
He thought it was obvious that just under the surface there were no privileged places, no special access to truth granted by one's earthly religion. Being a devout Christian gave you no advantage, he thought, in the afterlife, at least in terms of knowing God (the issue of salvation aside).

Our multi-faceted ways, however leading to a single Truth, do not lead to the same conclusions or the same doctrinal positions in the end. What I want to say is an echo of Verhack's Adv. Phil. of Religion class. There he attacked the post-modern notion of religious plurality that suggests each tradition contains something of the Truth or a piece of the Truth, and if we put them all together we will arrive at Truth itself. Well, maybe not, he thought.

For Verhack, this attitude toward truth was an inverted modernism, with its dogged attempt to discover the indubitable, the Archimedian point on which to found one's philosophy and thus move the world by it according to your own interpretation of reality.

I agree with Verhack in spirit in the weariness over myths of a pure, sublime Truth resting under the surface of our multiple trains of thought and traditions. Notice the univocal mind asserting itself here.

Indeed, Truth is One, but I believe this Unity is that of a Person and not of an object; the unity of a mystery with itself rather than that unity of a being with its appearance.

I'm not sure what I'm trying to say, but I want to agree with you that the world's bickering over ideology and nuance is a matter of poor translation of one's experience of Truth more than of true disagreement or dis-harmony in the Godhead.

Though, perhaps Truth, like persons, and not just their declensions, are indeed necessarily polymorphous. I think we need a fluid understanding of essence and existence, identity and difference, which will transcend any trace of nominalism and point back by way of analogy to the way we know ourselves as both true and false, black and white, here and there, now and then, good and bad, rich and poor, etc.... all at the same time and in similar ways.

Truth is thus, I believe, and these layers should not be too quickly discarded in our search for the core. Else, if we leave behind the layers, unless we are to find nothing in the center, there will always be another layer, that is, another shroud or veil which certainly reveals much more than it conceals. It is this back-and-forth of reveal/conceal and epistemological games of tag that bring us close to God, for to get close we should always be approaching and never resting with what we have concluded to be the ONE Answer; then, the dialogue is over, whether we have been duped to believe in our victory or conceded loss.

How many layers are there?

2006-04-14T08:57:00.000-05:00

While I was processing into church with my community a while ago it occured to me how many different impressions or interpretations could be made of this event. On the one hand, seeing a bunch of monks solemnly process into church might stir some pious emotions and ready one to pray. Or, such a sight could be ridiculous to some, and boring to most others. It might be, though, that one and the same person experiences all these impressions at once.

In the old Misalettes, guide books for the mass, there used to be lots of explanations of the various symbols and gestures at mass. For instance, we knew that the color green meant growth and fecundity and life; red is like blood and stands for martyrdom or the Passion; white is a color of resurrection; blue is for Mary, and so on. Or, when the priest approaches the altar it is like Jesus approaching Calvary. These books told us what everything meant. Of course, there was room for many more interpretations besides the ones given in the books.

It seems to me that in order to be religious today one is well-equipped to have a poly-morphic mind (See Don Ihde's book Experimental Phenomenology). A mind that sees many layers and sides of a situation is more apt to appreciate the various levels of meaning which occur in an event or a text. We can imagine the opposite, a one-sided mind, someone who can only see the world in terms of a single analogy: the boring man who talks only about baseball, even when he talks about his marriage or his faith; the boring academic who interprets all other authors in the light of her new book, etc.

The world today gives us a plenitude of options to understand and interpret events, though something of a realism, scientific realism, is given first priority. There is a conceit in many of us that although many interpretations are possible, one one is the truth, only one is right. It is true, though, that for many situations, multiple interpretations are right at the same time, and are useful in different ways. There are times when we need to exclude whatever we cannot see. And there are times when we must rely on intuition because sufficient evidence is lacking.

So, there is a spectrum of how well people can sift through and manage alternate, even competing, interpretations of reality. You have the boring people, the one-sided, univocal thinkers. Then, in the middle you have the potentially-religious-yet-still-practical people who can live in the world of technology while still being a thoughtful spouse or friend and finding transcendent meaning in their life. These people can pray, and work, and play in a variety of keys. Then you have the other extreme: the schizophrenics, as we popularly understand it. These people have a hard time sifting through all the possible interpretations of reality, and they can hardly choose or determine what is real and what is their imagination. These people seem to have no foothold, and what is true one minute may be false the next.

So, if you find it hard to pray, or find it hard to accept religious statements because they seem to conflict with the latest scientific research (the historical Jesus project, for example, which destroys many people's conceptions of Christ), then maybe you can practice at what it's like to be religious by working on your art appreciation skills. Go to a museum and look at paintings that are not immediately intelligible. What do they mean to you? We have to sit with something for a while, carry on a dialogue, and somewhere in the middle of that back-and-forth there arises what we know to be truth. Yet, this truth is hardly communicable in the standard sense. If we tell a stranger that this painting is about my mother, then they are apt to disbelieve us, to suspect us of schizophrenia even! This kind of truth is personal, which doesn't mean that it's exactly relative. Personal truth can also be community truth, and this truth can be real truth. The difference is that unlike reading the results of scientific experiments, we cannot gain or perceive this truth by reading someone else's results. We have to find the results for ourselves.

Foiled Fantasy

2006-01-21T14:46:00.000-06:00

A common trait among young men seeking to enter the monastery, myself included, is a lofty, romantic image of monastic life. I used to imagine, hope and dream, that as a monk so much struggle with sin and doubt and laziness would evaporate in the heat of the hooded habit. Needless to say, sin and its struggle remain in me.

It was not so much naivete (but there was plenty of that) which fueled my romantic optimism about monks but rather something remarkably good and cherished: the palpable, exhilarating, healing sense of the presence of God. When you first visit the monastery, if you are so disposed and many small happy accidents land in your favor, you can be overwhelmed with an experience of the divine.

I had such an experience when I lived for a month at Mount Saviour Monastery in upstate New York. The monks made an open invitation to men 18-35 who wanted an immersion in a primitive monastic experience. If you want an example of flowery, purple prose full of trite images and cliches then look to my journal during that month! At the time, though, the monastery was heaven and I, while not an angel, became party to something grand.

The honeymoon euphoria of prayer lasted just under three weeks. During that time it was not that I prayed, but that prayers welled up inside me and I spoke in words and verse I could hardly remember later. God was real, God was love, God was God. Then, something happened. Was it the reminder of my sinfulness which, despite all these consolations still gripped me? Or was it that novelty wore off and the daily routine bored me? Was it that God had withdrawn from my senses to draw me closer to Godself? Was it that I was deceived and God did not exist?

For whatever reason, the honeymoon was over. It turned me off to monasticism for a while, but I still harbored the hope that somewhere, if I just choose the right path, God would rush in again and save me from plain existence. [These fantasies of escape actually block our openness to finding God. Searching for God in esoteric, private, special experiences can cut us off from reality. --But this should form part of another post.]

Now that I've been a novice for almost half a year (a small achievement) the illusions of conversion without cost, prayer without effort, and mercy without sin tempt me less and less. The good news is that when you least expect it God comes round again. I think our good experiences of God rely more on a good imagination than on good virtue, not to say prayer is an illusion. Yet, in a sense, whenever we feel that God is so close, that God is this or that, we are only half right.

God is always also other; if I forget to remind myself, then God makes it clear. It is God's otherness, though, that makes a relationship with him possible. If God were not other then God could not empty himself of his glory and be for us as a man in the incarnation, as Christ. Nor could God humble himself to be for us in each other, in sacrament, in water, as food and drink, even as love unless God were also and moreso the ineffable Other who eludes us not as punishment but by our limited nature. When God seems distant, do not only ask how have I sinned, but also, how is it that I ever have conceived of God so terrible and great, wholly other.

Already, not yet

2005-11-06T10:14:00.000-06:00

When the priest at Mass says, The Lord be with you, some great chasm opens up between the already-present Christ here among us in community, and the long-awaited Christ-Messiah of the Second Coming who transcends our familiar formality of pious prayers. We walk a thin line between the too-soon proclamation of the Gospel when to the stranger in pain we make exhortation of God's praise, for surely if we suffer, God loves us very much. The same unrealistic trite sounds when, on the other side, we make our half-hearted, too-late 'conversion' and we hear from Christ, I know thee not.

Down to the practical... When it comes to church-going two seemingly opposing camps set up to vie for our allegiance. How do these groups criticize each other? Caricature helps make clear: On the one hand you have the fellowship and communitarian enthusiasts who join hands and sing hymns but often celebrate themselves more than God. On the other hand you have the pharisaical liturgists and cold-hearted conservative rule-followers who perform elaborate liturgies seeking to honor God but walk away no more Christ-like than when they arrived.

The following thought occurred to me at mass this morning. If the one side emphasizes community over transcendence, the other seeks transcendence instead of community. Both escape the reality of a Christian community, however. For, an honest gathering of ordinary people will necessarily manifest great suffering, both in personal lives and what we may inflict on our neighbor. Pain pushes the point that we are not our own, that without God we can do nothing, and only by seeking God, and being open to God's transcendence, respecting his otherness and glory. No community is perfect, and only when we recognize our sins, our ongoing sinfulness, the often absurd rejection of Grace in favor of something more 'pretty' and petty, the more we yearn for God to save us.

Salvation, it would seem involves transcendence, because only something/someone beyond our feeble powers can rescue us. It is this personal need and longing for God that, at best, inspires the liturgical and devotional worship of a mighty God. Yet, if it is truly God we seek, then God will come down to touch our lives. Here the challenge is to realize that God has made us for each other AND for God's self. True salvation is never individual, but always takes place in and with and even through the community. Transcendence brings us not only in touch with God, but it does so precisely by drawing us out of ourselves. The sin and sinfulness from which we long to be released boils down, in some simplification, to self-centeredness, being caught-up in our own fantasy worlds.

Both camps, or at least their obviously flawed caricatures, lack contact with reality. On the one side, we want to enjoy each other's company and forget about the difficulties of life, or imagine that God will magically solve our problems if only we hold hands and pray something catchy. Or, on the other side, we want to find God alone, make God our personal possession, keep the Grace of Redemption to ourselves, in an alluringly exclusive Jesus-n-me relationship. The personal intimacy of private spirituality will give way eventually to community, if it is authentic.

Made for Winter

2005-11-02T18:18:00.000-06:00

O, the wonderful melancholy mood of November! How delightful is the gray sky, the cold, but not biting, breeze across the face, the changing leaves, the dusky afternoons and gloaming mornings. I'm tired of thinking about my sins, about my faults, about my self. Leave this behind, wonder at God, remember Him.

Yes, Lord, I do remember you, for I am always in your sight, always in your mind, always in your thoughts and in your love; let me never forget, remind me of your glory lest I forget it and seek your shadows.

It is you, O Lord, that I seek, for even in fullest flowing of communion, even in highest sublimity and deepest poetry you escape our words, though we and the whole world be soaked in your dew, even then, especially when you are nearest.

For, there in the nearness of your approach the distance of your withdrawal is nearest to the veil of our understanding. We can but reach out and touch you, through the veil, as you withdraw lest we die in the face of your glory.

You have wonderfully made us, and everyday you bring out more good gifts and no hand can hold them all. Lord, you have made me for winter, and I rejoice as others weep. For, in the cold and the dark desert there you are, there we meet, alone, like two friends away from the feast to catch a breath despite the cold.

Yet out in the cold air we see our breath's spirit in the air, so we see and know our soul most definitely. None else come out here, it is too cold. We are alone, our hearts melt and in each other's embrace the passion of love burns away all frost of indifference.

Guest as Other?

2005-10-22T11:30:00.000-05:00

We look to the East with eager longing for the coming of the Savior in glory. Our longing stretches out farther than we can see, so it goes to the horizon and beyond into unknown territories of faith and hope.

Lo, see one coming from the East, coming over the horizon, bearing in her arms a child. Look, it is a guest, and she comes heavily laden to the monastery for a time of rest and retreat. She is the 'other' and in her we infallibly meet Christ the guest, as we ever long for the second Coming.

Each guest is already and not yet the Christ of our holy longing. So, to her we stand open, available to her needs. Yet, this porosity to alterity has limits; for, indeed it is Christ we welcome, the image, though tired or wounded or affable or annoying, of God, the inner person of Christ. Not the 'outlaw' or the spirit of worldliness do we welcome, except they be transformed in our ethos. For, as Benedict writes, we are to pray with the guest before the kiss of peace to defeat the devil's deceptions.

What are these deceptions? Could it be that openness to otherness is not an absolute value, such that complete openness to any other is always a good thing, ethically and ontologically? I recollect some lectures in Leuven on Levinasian openness which was shown to be problematic. The professor went, why should I open myself to my neighbor; what might he ask me to do, what terrible demand might he make on me? In the extreme, to harm someone, myself or even him. The benefit of openness is self-transcendance.

Yet, note that this benefit of self-transcendance is not assured in its results. For, to use an old metaphor, we can go beyond ourselves both up and down, both to heroic virtue and demonic deception. Something to consider; proving the Derridean aporia of hospitality. More later.