Aramis of the 4 Mass'keteers

Entering the Biblical Story during Advent

2011-12-10T17:06:00.004-06:00

During class Father Albert Haase, OFM referenced a remark he made in his book, Living the Lord's Prayer - The Way of the Disciple and I was awe-struck by it. The remark was: "Remember your suffering. It need not be in vain. It can become the womb of compassion." The womb is a place where something is in the process of being birthed - a place where something is formed. Fr Albert goes on to say, "Compassion makes us aware of who we truly are as it bonds us to others in relationships."

Interestingly, the word religion is a derivation from re-ligare: meaning, "to bind back." As we are beings in and of and for relationships - and as we are always falling in and out of relationships we, by nature are religious beings patching ourselves back together. And so I was struck by how suffering works in all this and how compassion is connected.

Richard Rohr, when lecturing on suffering and pain says; "If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it." So at our point of suffering we are weaving these two strands of thoughts together and our choice says a lot about our faith. For how we deal with our suffering is the incubator of choice - we either are being transformed through our suffering or it is a source of transmitting the suffering on to others.

During the Advent season we are ever reminded of Our Lord and how He came to awaken in us a self-donating transformation of suffering.

Link HERE for a powerful Advent reflection by my friend Gerry Straub, sfo. Gerry will be coming to Bloomington-Normal the first part of April 2012. We are lining up a couple presentations during his stay with us so we will let everyone know when we nail down the specfics.

Gerry begins his reflections with this Oscar Wilde quote:

“Jesus understood the leprosy of the leper, the darkness of the blind, the fierce misery of those who live for pleasure, the strange poverty of the rich, the thirst that can lead people to drink from muddy waters. He penetrated the outward shell of things and understood that whatever happens to another happens to oneself, and whatever happens to oneself happens to another.”

These words make a connection - they link us to one another and they do it through suffering. It seems to be that we would do well to embrace our suffering and the embrace another in their suffering. Another friend, Gil Bailie talked about suffering this way:

Jesus says take this cup, which is the cup of suffering. We don’t have to be melodramatic about it; there is suffering in our lives. The suffering that I should understand as redemptive is my suffering. The sufferings that I see other people undergoing I should not think that I am going to take it away, I won’t be able to, but I can be present with them in that suffering so they can feel that they are not alone in that suffering and perhaps feel the truth of the situation which is always, always, always that Christ is in it with them. They may not be able to experience that unless they know that I am in it with them. That act of being present with them may be their only entrée to the discovery that Christ is in it with them. Being in that suffering with others, and of course, that sometimes means helping to relieve the suffering, is our responsibility...

See link HERE to get the transcript of Gil's talk on entering the biblical story.

There seems no better time at which to enter the biblical story then now, during Advent. One last link HERE to read an Advent selection from Father Alfred Delp.

The Grace to Listen to the Lord’s Words

2011-12-01T16:25:00.000-06:00

Today’s Magnificat meditation is from Fr. Alfred Delp, SJ who was a German Jesuit priest condemned to death by the Nazis in Berlin, Germany. What powerful words he speaks here - we should let them sink in and penetrate us to our very being for these words have the power to transform.

“The Grace to Listen to the Lord’s Words”

That God would become a Mother’s son and that a woman could walk upon this earth, her body consecrated as a holy temple and tabernacle for God, is truly the earth’s culmination and the fulfillment of its expectation…

Oh, that this was granted to the earth, to bring forth such fruit! That the world was permitted to enter into the presence of God through the sheltering warmth, as well as the helpful and reliable patronage of her motherly heart!

The gray horizons must light up. Only the foreground is screaming so loudly and penetratingly. Farther back, where it has to do with things that really count, the situation is already changing. The woman has conceived the Child, sheltered him under her heart, and has given birth to her Son. The world has come under a different law. All these are not merely one-time historical events upon which our salvation rests. They are simultaneously the model figures and events that announced to us the new order of things, of life, of our existence…

At a deeper level of being, even our times and our destiny bear the blessing and the mystery of God. The most important thing is to wait, to be able to wait, until their hour comes…

Let us pray for the openness and willingness to hear the warning prophets of the Lord and to overcome the devastation of life through conversion of heart.Let us not shun and suppress the earnest words of the calling voices, or those who are our executioners today may be our accusers once again tomorrow, because we silenced the truth.

Once again, let us kneel down and pray for keen eyes capable of seeing God’s messengers of annunciation, for vigilant hearts wise enough to perceive the words of the promise. The world is more than its burden, and life is more than the sum of its gray days. The golden threads of the genuine reality are already shining through everywhere. Let us know this, and let us, ourselves, be comforting messengers. Hope grows through the one who is himself a person of the hope and the promise.

Advent is the time of the promise, not yet the fulfillment. We are still standing in the middle of the whole thing, in the logical relentlessness and inevitability of destiny…

The sounds of devastation and destruction, the cries of self-importance and arrogance, the weeping of despair and powerlessness still fill the world. Yet, standing silently, all along the horizon are the eternal realities with their ago-old longing. The first gentle light of the glorious abundance to come is already shining above thing…This is today. And tomorrow the angels will relate loudly and jubilantly what has happened, and we will know it and will be blessed if we have believed and trusted in Advent.

"Am I my brother's keeper?" (Gen 4:9)

2011-11-27T07:34:00.004-06:00

From The Magnificat to the Front Page.

The Magnificat Sunday, November 27, 2011

Since the days of your ancestors you have turned aside from my statutes and have not kept them. Return to me, that I may return to you, says the LORD of hosts. But you say, “Why should we return?” (MALACHI 3:7)

Although we know that Christ has not in fact left us since the resurrection, we often experience his absence from a world that has not yet fully owned him and from lives not yet fully free from the hold of sin. During Advent, we pray for his promised return in the fullness of salvation, as the sun, never absent from the universe, returns at dawn after the long hours on night.

To the front page that begs the question, How powerful are our actions ushering in Advent?

How much crazier can Black Friday get?

Pepper-sprayed customers, smash-and-grab looters and bloody scenes in the shopping aisles. How did Black Friday devolve into this?

As reports of shopping-related violence rolled in this week from Los Angeles to New York, experts say a volatile mix of desperate retailers and cutthroat marketing has hyped the traditional post-Thanksgiving sales to increasingly frenzied levels.

The wave of violence revived memories of the 2008 Black Friday stampede that killed an employee and put a pregnant woman in the hospital at a Walmart on New York's Long Island.

The violence has prompted some analysts to wonder if the sales are worth it, and what solutions might work.

One shopper said, "If I'm going to get shot, at least let me get a good deal."

It seems that we humans wake up only The Day After Trinity unable to recognize the trajectory of our misplaced desires that inevitably leads to violence. What does it take to break the cycle?

Back to the reflection from The Magnificat:

"At a certain point in life, the profound desires and cravings of our heart reach a point of eruption. Yet, at the same time comes the awareness that we cannot bring about what we want - we do not have inside us what is needed to fulfill and satisfy our longings. And so, with our infinite yearnings we turn to the Infinite and cry, "Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down." Our experience of helplessness before the fact of our boundless human need moves us to ask for fellowship with God's Son, Jesus Christ the Lord. The nature of our desire assures us as we enter into Advent that we are not lacking in any spiritual gift as we wait for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ. "The Lord of the house is coming." "Be watchful! Be alert!"

Must read the following (and please do yourself a favor and link below on the title and read the entire message):

Waking Up to Ourselves by Father Alfed Delp

The deepest meaning of Advent cannot be understood by anyone who has not first experienced being terrified unto death about himself and his human prospects and likewise what is revealed within himself about the situation and constitution of mankind in general.

This entire message about God’s coming, about the Day of Salvation, about redemption drawing near, will be merely divine game-playing or sentimental lyricism unless it is grounded upon two clear findings of fact.

The first finding: insight into, and alarm over the powerlessness and futility of human life in relation to its ultimate meaning and fulfillment…The second finding: the promise of God to be on our side, to come to meet us.

Being Scene- the Self and the Sound of Two Hands Clapping

2011-11-26T15:27:00.000-06:00

Link HERE to view the 2 videos from Dominican School of Philosophy & Theology April 2011.

You Must Make Your Choice

2011-11-26T15:16:00.000-06:00

C.S. Lewis from Mere Christianity

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God."

Tell Us No More Enchantments, Clio

2011-11-25T16:34:00.001-06:00

Someone from Northern Ireland looking a bit more closely at Clio.

In the ancient Greek world, Clio was a goddess whose name meant 'to praise' and whose celebrated symbol was the laurel wreath symbolising glory. Her role was to ensure that remembering the past awakened zeal to emulate illustrious deeds. These 'heroic' deeds were violent but, where once they were life-giving, bringing order out of chaos, today they may stimulate cycles of destructive violence. We in Northern Ireland know something of Clio's power to foster violence and even when affronted by bloodshed we may re-enact it, not only as memorial but also in practice.

...

Gil Bailie quotes American poet Howard Nemerov: "Tell us no more enchantments, Clio. History has given and taken away; murders become memories, And memories become the beautiful obligations: As with a dream interpreted by one still sleeping, The interpretation is only the next room of the dream."

Another Green Chri$tma$ or Could It Be that Christmas has Another Meaning?

2011-11-25T10:52:00.007-06:00

This morning pre-dawn, on the day we call Black Friday, observing the full parking lots at all the major retailers it looks like we are in store for another green Chri$tma$. You know..., folks seem to get all warm and fuzzy about Christmas; they even criticize the trend of political correctness discouraging references of Christmas in work, schools and public areas, and yet, they go merrily along getting sucked into the marketing of deviated desire. Take a few moments to link to the story of Stan Freberg's "Green Chri$tma$" allowing let it soak in, remembering that the song came out 53 years ago. Have we bowed down to our wonderful market economy, by allowing it to clothe us as "consumers" into the false transcendence, swallowing up this song, laughing all the way to the bank?

"I did some stuff for Dupont and they said, 'Well, we know about the prunes and pizza rolls, but have you ever taken on a really serious client?' and I said, 'Other than God?'" -- Stan Freberg

Link here to read The Story of Green Chri$tma$.

"Do I have to tie my product into Christmas?" Crachit asks. "Christmas has a significance, a meaning!" "A sales curve!" Mr. Scrooge responds. "Christmas has two s's in it and they're both dollar signs!"

"I listen to that now, and it's like I did it last week. I'm amazed that it holds up all these years." Freberg says. "The interesting thing is that after that record, both Coca-Cola and Marlboro came to me to do ad campaigns. And this is after the president of Capitol, Lloyd Dunn, said, 'Well, I'll tell you one thing, Freberg. You'll never work in the advertising business again.' I was just getting started in the field."

Ironically, Green Chri$tma$ may have marked the turning point in Freberg's career as he shifted his professional focus from radio in the late 1950s to advertising in the 1960s. Freberg went on to a storied career in advertising winning numerous awards and accolades for humor in advertising.

Green Chri$tma$ resonated with listeners but rankled advertisers on Freberg's show. "This record, of course was an attack on the over commercialization of Christmas.," Freberg says. "And when it first came out some sponsors refused to pay for any of their commercials that were programmed within five minutes of my record being played. They felt that my record negated their commercials." So critical was the business of radio and advertising that Green Chri$tma$ received no commercial airplay prior to 1983.

While Freberg is hailed as visionary for his biting brand of satire skewering everything from pop culture to the history of the United States of America it is Green Chri$tma$ that brings out a funny and sad reminder of how twisted we have allowed Christmas to become.
[End of excerpt]

Link here to view a great video rendition of Stan Freberg's Green Chri$tma$.

Thank goodness Thanksgiving Day is over & we can get back to our worship

2011-11-25T08:42:00.001-06:00

Driving to mass early this morning I was met with throngs of cars jamming the byways all leading to the big-box stores. It gives you wonder... No, it is not wonder anymore, for the reality of what really matters to us is plain as the noses on our faces, as the fight to be first in line to get that "MUST HAVE item cheapest" reigns. Viewing our 'mob' actions through the lens of mimetic theory one begins to realize the power of mimetic contagion.

The Muppits have a way of being a mirror to us, as Animal sings of being abandon by Mama and Dada who have been swept up by the crowds at the big box store and Miss Piggy summing everything up so well, "nothing really matters, but moi... Anyway the wind blows..."

Cleansing of the Temple - Father John Tauler, O.P.

2011-11-18T15:28:00.001-06:00

And when Jesus had done this He spoke to those who sold doves and said: "Take these things away." It was His will to cleanse His temple. It was as if He had said: I am the owner of this temple, and I alone shall dwell in it and be master of it. And what is this temple in which God alone shall rule with all power and according to His own will? It is man's soul, which He has created in close resemblance to Himself, according to His word: "Let us make man after Our image and likeness." (Gen. 1, 26) And this likeness of man's soul to God is so close, that nothing else is to be compared with it for close resemblance to Him in Heaven or on earth. This is why God will have our soul free and clear of everything but Himself alone, and when that is done He is well pleased to make His abode there alone.

Who were those that bought and sold in the temple, and who are they that do so now? And take notice that I am to speak only of those buyers and sellers in the temple who are good people, and who are nevertheless scourged out of His temple by the Lord; not gross sinners or such as are consciously in a state of mortal sin; and yet they are buyers and sellers. They are souls who, indeed, guard against grievous sins, and would do good works for God's glory; they fast and pray and keep vigils and do other good things. But what is their motive? It is that God would in return do good things to them, bestow on them the favors they wish. They are, therefore, self-seekers; they are merchandisers with God, as anyone can see. They give that they may get. They must traffic with our Lord. And meanwhile in all their trading with God they are self-deceived. For what is there of all they possess and trade with but God has given it to them? God owes them nothing, no matter what they may give Him or do for Him. Whatever they are, they are from God; whatever they have, they have from God, and are nothing and have nothing of themselves.

Hence I say again, God owes them nothing for all they may do for Him or give Him. He has given them all they have willingly out of His free grace, not on account of their works or gifts. They have nothing of their own to give Him; no power of their own bestowal wherewith to work for Him, as Christ says: "Without Me you can do nothing." (John 15, 5) How dull and foolish are such men to think that they really trade with the Lord! They perceive the truth of Divine things scarcely at all, and hence the Lord scourges them out of His temple. Light and darkness can have no fellowship. God in His very essence is truth and light, and when He enters His temple He drives ignorance and darkness out of it, revealing Himself in all His brightness. When truth enters in and is recognized, then trafficking must go out; truth can tolerate no trafficking with God. God is not selfish, but in all His works He is free, being directed wholly by perfect love. And thus acts every man who is united to God. In all that he does he is free and unselfish, acting purely from love, never asking why and wherefore; that is to say, never seeking his own, but only God and His glory; and in all this God is working in him.

And let me insist: As long as a man in all his good works seeks or desires as his controlling motive what God may give him as a recompense, so long is he like the traffickers in the temple. If thou wilt be quit and done with all such trafficking, then do all the good that thou dost for God's praise alone, and stand as entirely free as if there were to be no return made thee. Then thy good deeds become entirely spiritual and Godlike. Then are all traffickers driven out of the temple of thy soul. God alone dwells in the soul of a man that in his good works takes Him and Him alone into account. This is then the purifying of the soul from all self-seeking, God and His honor becoming the end and purpose of all.

But this Gospel points out to us a yet higher grade of disinterestedness. For there are some who have a pure intention in their well-doing, and yet are hindered from attaining a high state of perfection; namely, those who keep up a less blameworthy traffic with creatures, like those dealers in doves whose chairs the Lord overthrew in the temple. The traffic in doves was well meant at first, and yet it was unseemly; and it became the occasion of avarice rather than a help to worship of God in the temple. So it is with some men, who have an upright intention and serve God without self-seeking. Yet they still yield to a feeling of ownership in their good deeds. They insist on doing them in a certain sense mechanically, and strictly according to time and place and number and routine, and according to specified plans, and this hinders their coming to the hest spiritual state. They should hold their souls free from all such things, just as our Saviour Himself did, and be ever ready to begin anew, without waiting for certain times or going to certain places. They should give themselves over to the guidance of the heavenly Father just as Christ did; yea, obedient to the least intimation of His holy will, determined on one thing only to be perfectly under the loving influence of His fatherly heart. Thus one is led to a life of the truest perfection, unhindered by methods and arrangements of his own, only anxious to yield instantly, and, as it were, to the beck and nod of God's will; and in the same spirit to return God's gifts back again into the heart of our Lord Jesus Christ with all praise and thanksgiving. Then it comes to pass that all hindrances to spiritual progress are taken away; from such a soul even the doves and their venders are expelled — all sense of proprietorship whatsoever, even that which is least blameworthy, is done away, and a man seeks himself in nothing at all. Our Lord is determined that no one shall make any disturbance in His temple; He will permit no running about here and there, as St. Matthew tells us. Which means that a spiritual man must purify his motives, until they are clear of every obstacle that may divert him from advancing even a single step in perfection.

And when this purification of the temple of the soul has been accomplished, and all ignorance and proprietorship are cleansed away, then God's work in it shines so beautiful and so bright that it excels the glory of any other of His creations. No beauty can outshine that of such a soul, save only the uncreated beauty of God Himself, whom it resembles more than any other creature can. No angel can be like it; not even the highest of them; for, though it has much resemblance to it, it is yet not quite like it. For to the progress of an angel there is now, in a certain sense, a limit fixed as to the beatific vision, whereas this soul can continue to grow more and more perfect as long as it lives in time.

Suppose a man who is still in this life gifted with the virtue of a certain angel; his freedom and his opportunities are such as to enable him to advance every instant beyond the angel in perfection. God alone is free with uncreated liberty, and so is the soul free, but not in uncreated liberty; and herein is there a peculiar resemblance between God and the soul. And when the soul departs this life, it is absorbed in light uncreated — in God — then it must attain to union with Him by full knowledge of Him. And this, as we have already shown, is begun by our Lord Jesus Christ, when He enters the soul and drives out of it the buyers and sellers, and begins intimately to speak to it.

Dear children, rest assured that if any one undertakes to speak in the temple — that is, in our soul — except Jesus alone, then does Jesus immediately become silent. He no longer feels at home there; indeed, it is now not His home, for it entertains strange guests and holds converse with them. Not only so; but if Jesus is to speak, the soul itself must be silent, and do nothing but listen to Him. The moment it sits still and listens, He begins to speak. What does He say He says, “I am: I am the Father's Word.” And then in the same Word thus spoken the Father Himself speaks, the entire Divine nature is heard — all that is God, all that God's Word is to God's self, perfect in self-knowledge and infinite in power. God is infinitely perfect in His utterance to the soul, for the Word He utters is Himself; it is the Second Divine person of the God head, of the same nature with the Father.

And in speaking this Divine Word, God utters all reasonable beings in created existence, thus forming them like unto His uncreated Word, as It ever dwells within Him. All the brightness of created intelligences is made after the image of the glory of this uncreated Word of God. And this resemblance consists essentially in the capability the created soul has of receiving, by Divine grace, God's uncreated Word: ye I, even the very Word that is God, receiving It as It is in Itself. This was all uttered by God, when He divinely spoke His infinite Word in the God-head. Now, one might enquire: Since the Father has thus spoken His Word, what does Jesus speak in the soul? Dear children, I answer you by recalling what I have already said of the manner of His communication: He speaks and reveals His own self, and that includes all that the Father has spoken in the Divine act of uttering the Word, all being now addressed to the soul according to its capacity to receive it.

First, He reveals the Father's supreme majesty in the soul, in His sovereign and immeasurable power. And when the soul feels and perceives this almighty power in God's Son — feels itself made a partaker of that power in all virtue and in perfect purification, so that neither joy nor sorrow nor any other created force can unsettle its peace; then in that Divine power it rests, strong against all adversaries, great or little.

In addition to this, the Lord reveals Himself in the soul in infinite wisdom — in the very Divine wisdom that He is Himself, that in which the Father knows Himself with His almighty paternity; and, again, the Word that is wisdom itself and is one essence with the Father. When this wisdom is united to the soul, all doubting and all straying away is stopped, and all spiritual darkness vanishes, and the soul is placed in the clear light that is God's self. It is now as the prophet said: "In Thy light we shall see light." (Ps. 35.10) That is to say: Lord, all light is seen in the soul in the light that Thou art. Thus God is known in the soul by the light that God Himself is. And thus is Wisdom known by the light of Wisdom Itself; and with it the soul knows itself and all things else that it knows. Thus, again, by this wisdom is known God's fatherhood in majesty, His essential unchangeableness, and His Divine and indivisible unity.

Thirdly, Jesus reveals Himself within the soul with infinite love, with sweetness and abundance of love welling forth from the Holy Ghost, and overflowing into the heart, all docile and receptive of its rich streams. Yes, it is by means of the Love that Jesus is that He reveals Himself to the soul and unites it to Himself. It is this sweetness that causes the soul to flow into itself, and then to overflow beyond all creatures—melted by Divine grace, given power to return again into God its first fountain and origin. Then the outward man bows down obedient to the inward man — obedient unto death; then are both the inward and outward faculties at peace with each other in God's service.

May God grant us this happy state; may He expel and destroy all hindrances in us in both soul and body, so that we may be made one with Him in time and in eternity. Amen.

Letting the pain in - Father Richard Rohr

2011-11-10T16:45:00.000-06:00

Initiation or victimhood (blame game)

2011-11-10T15:52:00.000-06:00

Put on the meekness of Christ

2011-11-08T16:50:00.000-06:00

Lenten sermon delivered March 2007 by Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa in the presence of Benedict XVI and officials of the Roman Curia. The Pontifical Household preacher delivered the reflection in the Mater Redemptoris Chapel of the Apostolic Palace.

Put on the meekness of Christ

By their nature the beatitudes are oriented toward practice; they call for imitation, they accentuate the work of man. There is the danger that we will become discouraged in experiencing an incapacity to put them to practice in our own lives, and by the great distance between the ideal and the practice.

We must recall to mind what was said at the beginning: The beatitudes are Jesus' self-portrait. He lived them all and did so in the highest degree; but — and this is the good news — he did not live them only for himself, but also for all of us. With the beatitudes we are called not only to imitation, but also to appropriation. In faith we can draw from the meekness of Christ, just as we can draw from his purity of heart and every other virtue. We can pray to have meekness as Augustine prayed to have chastity: "O God, you have commanded me to be meek; give to me that which you command and command me to do what you will."

"As the elect of God, holy and beloved, put on the sentiments of mercy, goodness, humility, mildness ("prautes"), and patience" (Colossians 3:12), writes the Apostle to the Colossians. Mildness and meekness are like a robe that Christ merited for us and which, in faith, we can put on, not to be dispensed from pursuing them but to help us in their practice. Meekness ("prautes") is placed by Paul among the fruits of the Spirit (Galatians 5:23), that is, among the qualities that the believer manifests in his life when he receives the Spirit of Christ and makes an effort to correspond to the Spirit.

We can end reciting together with confidence the beautiful invocation of the litany of the Sacred Heart: "Jesus meek and humble of heart, make our hearts like yours" ("Jesu, mitis et humilis corde: fac cor nostrum secundum cor tutum").

This and a number of reflections by Father Cantalamessa refer to René Girard. Like most all his works he demonstrates the need for a Christ-centered anthropology as what Pope John Paul II strived to put forward.

The Matrix - The Pill Scene

2011-10-22T10:15:00.000-05:00

Coming Home - John Adams

2011-10-21T16:21:00.003-05:00

Robert Hammerton-Kelly wrote, "Revolutionary democracy imports the fiction of rationality to obscure its sacrificial structure," and yet the Gospels continue to break in on us, shedding more and more light on "the stone that the builders rejected," that is the founding violence our world is built upon.

The Matrix - Father Barron

2011-10-21T16:10:00.000-05:00

The Scapegoat explained by Father Barron

2011-10-21T16:08:00.002-05:00

Feast of St Francis & Revisiting St Bonaventure

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

These words of Dr. Robert Moynihan from Inside the Vatican magazing caused me to revisit my posts on St Bonaventure. Hope you enjoy.

October 4, 2011

Feast of St. Francis of Assisi

This was the prayer of St. Francis:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury, pardon. Where there is doubt, faith. Where there is despair, hope. Where there is darkness, light. Where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console; to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love. For it is in giving that we receive. It is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Amen.
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Who was St. Francis?

Who was St. Francis of Assisi, really? Was he just a sort of superficial "hippy" who preached to birds? No. Quite the contrary...
More than 700 years ago, on February 24, 1209, St. Francis, then 27 years old, heard a sermon that changed his life. The sermon was on Matthew 10:9. Christ there tells his followers they should go forth and proclaim that the Kingdom of Heaven is near, taking no money with them, not even a walking stick or shoes for the road.

Inspired, Francis decided to devote himself to a life of poverty. Clad in a rough garment, barefoot, and, after the Gospel precept, without staff or scrip, he began to preach repentance. This why he became known as "il poverello," the "little poor man," and why it is said that he married no ordinary woman, but "Lady Poverty."

But this was not the only remarkable thing about Francis. Toward the end of his life, in a mystical vision, he became the first person in the Christian tradition to receive the "stigmata," the wounds of Christ himself, making him, in a sense, a living copy of his crucified Lord. Tthis is the reason Francis was called by his follower, St. Bonaventure, "the angel of the 6th seal."
===================================
The "Root of All Good"

Francis would have agreed with the phrase of St. Paul: “The love of money is the root of all evil.” ("Radix omnium malorum cupiditas est," Letter to Timothy, 6:10) If the love of money is the root of all evil, what then is the root of all good? Francis proposed a seemingly outrageous answer: the love of poverty is the root of all good.

Why so? Because he saw that, for one who loves poverty, all the desires of this world fall away. No longer is there a desire to gather gold and silver and nickel and copper coins, or dollars, euros, rubles and yen, all the paper currencies, or bonds and stocks, or interest rate swaps and options, or jewels, or the works of master artists.

No longer is there a desire to amass these "goods" at any cost, including trickery, deception and cheating -- including the knowledge that some other men and women may be left destitute and miserable in the process. Rather, there is a desire to preach repentance to all, and the common good for all the sons and daughters of God, for all men: the good of peace, and justice, and wisdom, and humility.

And Francis is an example that following this path does not mean a man or a woman must quiver and crawl, without the power and the trappings of power so well known in our world. Being humble, loving poverty, does not have to mean being weak. In fact, the way of Francis -- the way of Christ -- is the strongest way a man or a woman can live, and the most long-lasting, for it builds peace in this present time, and it leaves a testimony for all ages to come, as Francis's life has, and it reaches even unto eternity. It is a prophetic way to live...

The Sixth Seal

And this applies to St. Francis, because many in his time, and since, have believed that he was actually a type of prophet, a man who in himself spoke and fulfilled prophecy. What prophecy?

In the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible -- and arguably the most enigmatic -- an aging John of Patmos describes a mystical vision granted to him concerning the future of human history, and of that history's final end (to be brief, that end is a wedding; human history, in this vision, in the Bible as whole, ends in a marriage between the Lord and his spouse, who is mystically the Church, gathered from all nations, from the farthest ends of the earth). John's vision begins when he sees a scroll "sealed with seven seals" of wax so that unauthorized people cannot open the scroll and read it.

Then, each one of the "seven seals" is opened, revealing an apocalyptic event. The opening of the first four seals release "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse," each with their own specific mission (some identify these as the Antichrist, War, Famine and Death).

(The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, an 1887 painting by Victor Vasnetsov. The Lamb, very small with a golden halo, is visible at the top.)

The opening of the fifth seal releases the cries of those martyred for the "word of God." The sixth and next to last seal initiates a time of cataclysmic events. The seventh seal reveals seven angels with trumpets who sound the trumpets to end all time.

What does all this have to do with Francis? Everything.

Because we know that St. Bonaventure, the great Franciscan theologian who lived in the generation after Francis, believed that St. Francis was, in fact, "the angel of the sixth seal." Bonaventure wrote this in his life of St. Francis, the Legenda Major, and told this to his brothers in conversation.

"Don't Hurt the Earth!"

Here is what John in Revelation says about the 6th seal (I have bold-faced the passage which Bonaventure believed refers to St. Francis): Revelation 6:12-17; 7:2-4

12 And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; 13 And the stars of the heavens fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.

14 And the heavens departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. 15 And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; 16 And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb: 17 For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?

2 Then I saw another Angel rising from where the sun rose, carrying the seal of the Living God. He thundered to the Four Angels assigned the task of hurting earth and sea, 3 "Don't hurt the earth! Don't hurt the sea! Don't so much as hurt a tree until I've sealed the servants of our God on their foreheads!" 4 I heard the count of those who were sealed: 144,000! They were sealed out of every Tribe of Israel...

The Seal -- the Stigmata

On or about September 14, 1224, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, while he was praying on Mt. Alverna, and keeping a forty-day fast in preparation for Michaelmas (September 29), Francis had a vision as a result of which he received the stigmata.

Brother Leo, who was with Francis at the time, wrote: "Suddenly he saw a vision of a seraph, a six-winged angel on a cross. This angel gave him the gift of the five wounds of Christ."

From this moment on, St. Francis was in pain. He lived two more years. Suffering from these stigmata and from an eye disease, he was brought back to a hut next to the Porziuncola where his religious journey had begun. He died on the evening of October 3, 1226, singing Psalm 141. Hence his Feast Day today, Octiber 4.

Bonaventure and the Sixth Seal

About 30 years later, St. Bonaventure climbed Mt. Alverna. Bonaventure sought to discover a mystical way to reach God: "as much as possible be restored, naked of knowledge, to union with the very One who is above all created essence and knowledge."

In 1259, St. Bonaventure had a cell made at the sanctuary near the spot where St Francis experienced the stigmata. It is now the Chapel of St Bonaventure. Not long after, Bonaventure wrote his Life of Francis, seeking to transpose Francis into a universal prophet sent to the entire Church.

Francis was, in fact, in a mystical way, Christ, Who had returned to restore the Gospel life. Bonaventure saw Francis as the angel of the sixth seal, the third in the line of the great triad of prophets, after King David and the Apostle Peter; the Old Law (David), the New Law (Peter), and the New Law recovered (Francis) -- the one who ushered in a final age of world history.

Pope Benedict, Francis, Bonaventure, and the Angel of the Sixth Seal

Pope Benedict XVI is very familiar with all this. He studied Bonaventure in depth for his dissertation in the 1950s. And he is still making references to to these matters today. During his General Audience on March 10, 2010, dedicated to Bonaventure, Benedict made the following comments about the stigmata of St. Francis and St. Bonaventure:

"Of his writings, I would like to mention only one, his masterwork, the Itinerarium mentis in Deum, a 'manual' of mystical contemplation," Benedict said. "This book was conceived in a place of profound spirituality: the hill of La Verna, where St. Francis had received the stigmata. In the introduction, Bonaventure illustrates the circumstances that gave origin to his writing:

"'While I meditated on the possibility of the soul ascending to God, presented to me, among others, was that wondrous event that occurred in that place to Blessed Francis, namely, the vision of the winged seraphim in the form of a crucifix. And meditating on this, immediately I realized that such a vision offered me the contemplative ecstasy of Father Francis himself and at the same time the way that leads to it' (Journey of the Mind in God, Prologue, 2, in Opere di San Bonaventura. Opuscoli Teologici / 1, Rome, 1993, p. 499).

Benedict continued:

"The six wings of the seraphim thus became the symbol of six stages that lead man progressively to the knowledge of God through observation of the world and of creatures and through the exploration of the soul itself with its faculties, up to the satisfying union with the Trinity through Christ, in imitation of St. Francis of Assisi.

"The last words of St. Bonaventure's Itinerarium, which respond to the question of how one can reach this mystical communion with God, would make one descend to the depth of the heart:

"'If you now yearn to know how that happens (mystical communion with God), ask grace, not doctrine; desire, not the intellect; the groaning of prayer, not the study of the letter; the spouse, not the teacher; God, not man; darkness not clarity; not light but the fire that inflames everything and transport to God with strong unctions and ardent affections. ... We enter therefore into darkness, we silence worries, the passions and illusions; we pass with Christ Crucified from this world to the Father, so that, after having seen him, we say with Philip: that is enough for me' (Ibid., VII, 6).

"Dear friends," Benedict concluded, "let us take up the invitation addressed to us by St. Bonaventure, the Seraphic Doctor, and let us enter the school of the divine Teacher: We listen to his Word of life and truth, which resounds in the depth of our soul. Let us purify our thoughts and actions, so that he can dwell in us, and we can hear his divine voice, which draws us toward true happiness."

If we would seek God, then, and if we are to imitate Christ, and Francis, and pass through the apocalyptic events unfolding around us -- always unfolding, until the end of the world -- we must "ask grace, not doctrine, desire, not the intellect; the groaning of prayer, not the study of the letter."

This is the path of poverty which is indicated to us on this great feast day.
===========================

I Received the Living Waters & Held Them in a Stagnant Pool

2011-09-14T15:28:00.002-05:00

YOU WHO QUESTION SOULS

You who question souls,

and you to whom souls must answer,

do not cut off the soul of my son on my account.

Let the strength of his childhood lead him to you,

and the joy of his body stand him upright in your eyes.

May he discern my prayer for him,

and to whom it is uttered, and in what shame.

I received the living waters

and I held them in a stagnant pool.

I was taught but I did not teach.

I was loved but I did not love.

I weakened the name that spoke me,

and I chased the light with my own understanding.

Whisper in his ear.

Direct him to a place of learning.

Illuminate his child’s belief in mightiness.

Rescue him from those who want him with no soul,

who have their channels in the bedrooms of the rich and poor,

to draw the children into death.

Let him see me coming back.

Allow us to bring forth our souls together

to make a place for your name.

If I am too late,

redeem my yearning in his heart,

bless him with a soul that remembers you,

that he may uncover it with careful husbandry.

They who wish to devour him have grown powerful on my idleness.

They have a number for him, and a chain.

Let him see them withered in the light of your name.

Let him see their dead kingdom from the mountain of your word.

Stand him up upon his soul, bless him with the truth of manhood.

- Leonard Cohen

Reason Must be Conquered by Revelation Part IV

2011-08-27T16:50:00.089-05:00

"While meditating upon this vision (Francis receiving the stigmata), I immediately saw that it offered me the ecstatic contemplation of Fr Francis himself as well as the way that leads to it." - St Bonaventure from the Prologue of, "The Journey of the Mind to God."

Click here to view my 1st post. My 2nd post here and to link to my 3rd click here.

This is my 4th and final post in this series on Saint Bonaventure's "The Journey of the Mind to God."

While reading Bonaventure’s book, the Holy Spirit had me revisit a book I had read about a year ago, "St. Francis and the Cross: Reflections on Suffering, Weakness, and Joy." This book was born of a 3 day retreat for Franciscan priests held at Mt Alverno. The book ends with a meditation by Marco Bove that I wish to share along with some reflections of mine that will be in (parenthesis):

Francis basically remained a poor man, a man who lived by faith and who gave his life totally to God. Such a man does not make calculated plans and does not seek security in what he has, who he is, or what he knows. The Father is the source for everything, and the poor man places his trust completely in God. (He abides in the Other – reflecting his true subject being made in the image and likeness [Gen 1:26] – Love.)

One does not maintain such an inner attitude without a struggle and without intense suffering. When Francis arrived at Mt Alverno, he was full of many doubts: about himself, the trail he was blazing, the order he had founded, the choices he had made, the future, and his responsibility in regards to all this. (He is seeking the approval of others – he is experiencing humanity’s fallen nature – reflecting the restless subject.)

Like Jesus, Francis also sought the Father's will. Gradually God led him to the total gift of himself, to the experience of the cross: "My Father,... not as I will, but as thou wilt" (Mt 26:39). Herein lies the meaning of the stigmata. It is the external manifestation of something that occurred in the heart, so as to enable Francis to say with St Paul, "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Gal 2:20). (Here we insert Bonaventure's contention that true reason must abide in prayer so as to accept the cross [out of love] and thus over-coming restless reason which always gets stuck in an endless loop leading humanity back to the cross - love over restlessness.)

The inner struggle leading up to total surrender often assumes a form of resistance in the life of the believer. In opposition to the weakness and the foolishness of the cross are the wisdom and power of the world, which are rooted in a quest for clarity and efficiency based on expediency. But Jesus' cross is not based on any human criteria, and even less on any criteria related to expediency, efficiency, or effectiveness, because God's strength and wisdom are revealed through Jesus' cross. (His throwing off the myth of power allows God to strip him of the restless subject, that which seeks the approval of others, thus becoming a new life – an authentic image and likeness of his true Subject – participating in a reciprocity of love in praise and gratitude.)

St Bonaventure, a Doctor of The Church, was a great scholar and leader. He was dedicated to the art of reason and made great efforts to reconcile reason with revelation. In "The Journey of the Mind to God" St Bonaventure expressed what he came to know through his meditation on "crucified" Francis, which was that reason, centered in the heart, grounded in faith, can make intelligible Christian conversion, though in and of itself, reason does not necessarily lead to conversion.

In chapter 7 he beckons us to enter into the mystery of the stigmata - giving no heed to ourselves, as if we humans were substantial or sufficient beings in and of ourselves, rather he challenges us to embrace our poverty giving all...

"to the Gift of God, that is to the Holy Spirit. Little or nothing should be attributed to the creature, but everything to the Creative Essence - the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And thus, with Dionysius, we address the Triune God: 'O Trinity, Essence above all essence, and Deity above all deity, supremely best Guardian of the divine wisdom of Christians, direct us to the supremely unknown, super-luminous, and most sublime height of mystical knowledge. There new mysteries - absolute and changeless mysteries of theology - are shrouded in the super-luminous darkness of a silence, teaching secretly in the utmost obscurity that is manifest above all manifestation; of a darkness that is resplendent above all splendor, and in which everything shines forth, of a darkness which fills invisible intellects full above all plenitude with the splendors of invisible good things that are above all good.'

"So much let us say to God. To the friend, however, for whom these words were written, we can say with Dionysius: 'And you, my friend, in this matter of mystical visions, redouble your efforts, abandon the senses, intellectual activities, visible and invisible things - everything that is not and that is - and, oblivious of yourself, let yourself be brought back, in so far as it is possible, to unity with Him Who is above all essence and all knowledge. And transcending yourself and all things, ascend to the super-essential gleam of the divine darkness by an incommensurable and absolute transport of a pure mind.'"

A good teacher on Bonaventure is Pope Benedict XVI. He writes in, Great Teachers that Bonaventure once explained his decision to become Franciscan:

"I must confess before God that the reason which made me love the life of blessed Francis most is that it resembled the birth and early development of the Church. The Church began with simple fishermen, and was subsequently enriched by very distinguished and wise teachers; the religion of Blessed Francis was not established by the prudence of men but by Christ."

Benedict went on to quote Bonaventure painting an image of Francis in these words:

"a man who sought Christ passionately. In the love that impelled Francis to imitate Christ, he was entirely conformed to Christ."

and as he goes on in the book to quote and describe how Bonaventure engaged the argument between reason and theology:

"...real theology, the rational work of the true and good theology has another origin, not the pride of reason. One who loves wants to know his beloved better and better; true theology does not involve reason and its research prompted by pride, [but is] motivated by love of the One who gave his consent" and wants to be better acquainted with the beloved: this is the fundamental intention of theology. Thus in the end, for Saint Bonaventure, the primacy of love is crucial... for St Bonaventure the ultimate destiny of the human being is to love God, to encounter him and to be united in his and our love. For him this is the most satisfactory definition of our happiness.

Today we can look back and see the trajectory of Bonaventure’s reflections - from the Crucified and Risen Christ to Francis and into the future where Henri de Lubac (1896-1991) a French theologian, wrote in "The Discovery of God":

"(There is) no real knowledge without mystery. And no man without God."

From the ending of "St. Francis and the Cross: Reflections on Suffering, Weakness, and Joy" Marco Bove suggests how Francis came to reflect this new life in Christ. Leaving Mt Alverno, after receiving the stigmata, Francis went straight to Umbria and the Marches on a long preaching tour. His biographers say that he was deeply inspired and very enthusiastic. The composing of the “Canticle of Creatures” followed and in it Francis highlights the key to a journey of faith: praise and gratitude. Bove commented that in the "Canticle” Francis expresses a new way of being in Christ which is:

“to stand before the Father and to face life itself. Praise bursts forth from the heart of a man who lives by grace and by grace alone, from the heart of a man who can only express gratitude through his life and through his words.”

So from the Crucified and Risen Christ to Francis receiving the stigmata – a place where reason is conquered by revelation – we touch on what it means to be human. It boils down to a question of desire* or will to be a subject – and our freedom to choose how to fulfill that desire.

Christian conversion, represented by Francis, is a true transformation of that desire – it is discovering the model whose relationship to the true God is such that in following That Model one enters into a life in which prayer and transcendence is central - where the Real Other in one’s life is God and this is radically different from a life where that is not the case.

One gets a sense that through his intense contemplation on Francis receiving the stigmata, Bonaventure saw that reason, left to itself, leads to the Cross, which illuminates our darkness, our violence. And thus we find Bonaventure, throughout the book, using reason as he talks about faith, but in the end he insists that reason must have a prior source of grounding – reason must be conquered by revelation - as he was keenly aware of the limitation of philosophy; that reason only exists as long as there are differences. Once left outside the love of God, we humans rubbing up against each other long enough, will unravel, much like the fractions within the Franciscan order that Bonaventure was dealing with; just like what Francis was struggling with prior to his visit to Mt Alverno. In time, this unraveling of reason will result in both, a crisis of culture as well as a crisis of the individual, thus destroying all differences – throwing everyone into sameness – a frenzied mob expelling reason - where the only source of truth now comes from The Voice on the cross: “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34)
.
We find throughout Bonaventure’s book insights, like a flicker, a glimmer of something more, a precursor if you will, for which no expression had yet been found and which we are only now beginning to grapple with, and that is how the self – what it means to be a person – is bound up in a Trinitarian and anthropological troth.

Indeed, the Lord Jesus, when He prayed to the Father, "that all may be one. . . as we are one" (John 17:21-22) opened up vistas closed to human reason, for He implied a certain likeness between the union of the divine Persons, and the unity of God's sons in truth and charity. This likeness reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself. – Gaudium et spes, 24

And so Bonaventure closes out his book countering the "false-self" of reason, which was perfectly exemplified by Pilate's empty philosophical question, "What is truth?" with a clear and realistic expression of Franciscan spirituality – living for the Something Greater. I invite you to the cave of Francis and ask you to engage in a Franciscan form of centering prayer - one that is not so much an "inner" journey, as if to locate the essence of yourself within, but rather one in love modelled on Francis imitating Christ, as he was entirely conformed to Christ.

If you should ask how these things come about,

question grace, not instruction;

desire, not intellect;

the cry of prayer, not pursuit of study;

the Bridegroom, not the teacher;

God, not man;

darkness, not clarity;

not light, but the wholly fire

which inflames and carries you aloft to God

with fullest unction and burning affection.

This fire is God,

and the furnace of this fire leads to Jerusalem;

and Christ the man kindles it

in the fervor of His burning Passion,

which he alone truly perceives who says,

"My soul chooses hanging and my bones death" [Job, 7, 15].

He who chooses this death can see God because this is indubitably true:

"Man shall not see me and live" [Exod., 33, 20].

Let us then die and pass over into darkness;

let us impose silence

upon our cares, our desires, and our phantasms (imaginings).

Let us pass over with the crucified Christ

from this world to the Father [John, 13, 1],

so that when the Father is shown to us

we may say with Philip:

"It is enough for us" [John, 14, 8];

let us hear with Paul:

"My grace is sufficient for thee" [II Cor., 12, 9];

let us exult with David, saying:

"My flesh and my heart have grown faint; Thou art the God of my heart, and portion forever" [Ps. 73, 26].

"Blessed be the Lord God of Israel from everlasting to everlasting; and let all the people say:

So be it, so be it! Amen! Hallelujah!" [Ps., 106, 48].

(*Desire not from a psychological or what we usual think of as 'individual craving', but rather an anthropological understanding based on "all desire is a desire to be," it is an aspiration, the dream of a fullness attributed to the mediator.)

We dare NOT let go of this intense self-interest

2011-08-27T14:06:00.001-05:00

From The Magnificat

Graces of the Parable of the Talents

Sooner or later, each of us has to be confronted with the terrifying truth (or blissful truth, according to our faith) that we have nothing, nothing whatever, to go on or to rely on except Jesus. In all other areas of life our own efforts and activity are crucial and we have to be thoroughly adult; but where the very heart of reality is concerned, where we stand vis-à-vis God, there we are only children. No other state is appropriate or possible. Our fears, complexities, scruples, complacency and conceit come from not fixing our eyes on him who is our way, our truth, and our life. By nature, we tend to be fascinated by our own selves, even in our miseries. We dare not let go of this intense self-interest, feeling that if we do we will just dwindle into othingness. We dread the void, dread the feeling of being spiritually inadequate. So we look around, in the name of prayer, for ways of diverting ourselves from simple, trusting exposure to Love. “O foolish and slow of heart to believe” (Lk 24: 25) that God is who God is! “Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not winnow” (Mt 25: 25). Jesus knew the human heart and its pitiful caricature of God. No wonder we cannot trust that one! No wonder we shirk encounter!

Sister Ruth Burrows, O.C.D.
Sister Ruth Burrows is a Carmelite nun at Quidenham in Norfolk, England. She is the author of a number of best-selling books.

The Access to Heaven is through Desire

2011-08-27T12:36:00.004-05:00

From The Magnificat

Staying Awake through Our Desire

Yes, Christ did ascend upward and from on high sent the Holy Spirit, but he rose upward because this was more appropriate than to descend or to move to left or right. Beyond the superior symbolic value of rising upward, however, the direction of his movement is actually quite incidental to the spiritual reality. For in the realm of the spirit heaven is as near up as it is down, behind as before to left or to right. The access to heaven is through desire. He who longs to be there really is there in spirit. The path to heaven is measured by desire and not by miles. For this reason St Paul says in one of his epistles, “Although our bodies are presently on earth, our life is in heaven.” Other saints have said substantially the same thing but in different says. They mean that love and desire constitute the life of the spirit. And the spirit abides where its love abides as surely as it abides in the body which it fills with life. Does this make any more sense to you? We need not strain our spirit in all directions to reach heaven, for we dwell there already through love and desire.

The Cloud of Unknowing
The Cloud of Unknowing was written in Middle English by an unknown mystic of the fourteenth century.

Distractions appear as the opposite of prayer

2011-08-27T12:18:00.001-05:00

From The Magnificat

It is difficult to love and to be loved as one would like. It is painful to realize that there are whole areas in the life of the mind that will never be revealed. Every man, one day or another, becomes aware of his poverty as a creature. And since this experience is a crushing one, the natural temptation is therefore distractions, or, as Pascal said, diversions. There is an “impatience with one’s limitations,” a natural temptation that urges us to flee before such limitations. We experience a fear in coming face to face with them, and this fear arises again and again inside us. Distractions, therefore, appear as the opposite of prayer, a refusal of our real condition, an evasion of it in favor of illusion, dream, mirage (recall man’s pursuit of different kinds of drunkenness: evasion by the flesh, art, sports, etc.).

However, the first moment of true prayer occurs in the experience and awareness of one’s limitations. We do not know what our real needs are, and we must learn them all over again each day. In this sense, prayer has the value of pedagogy, it is the great pedagogy of God. While evasion and distractions draw us away from the road to real happiness, prayer brings us back to what is most authentic in man’s quest for happiness. “The truth will set you free.” Prayer makes us free; it preserves what is most fragile and most precious in us: the integrity of our desire, that desire which, in final analysis, is nothing but the need for God. This is what prayer preserves in us, and must teach us every day, this need for God, which is the distinctive, most profound trait that separates man from the animals. Man is the only being who turns to God to obtain what is lacking for his own fulfillment. - Father Bernard Bro, o.p. Father Bro is a French Dominican priest, a distinguished theologian, and the author of many books.

Reason Must be Conquered by Revelation Part III

2011-08-06T14:18:00.014-05:00

My third reflection in this series on Saint Bonaventure's "The Journey of the Mind to God" focuses on chapters 3 & 4 and what appears to be a miscalculation which has led many astray by narrowing our notion of what constitutes a person.

After revealing how to "see" God in all that is around us, now in chapters 3 & 4, St Bonaventure challenges his own premise of writing this book, which is based on the revelation that Christ reveals, with a meandering into human reason tied to Plato and then adopted by St Augustine, as he gives thought to: What does it mean to be human? Or how might we best understand what a human being is? In this third step on the journey to God, St Bonaventure, consistent with St Augustine and Richard of St Victor, brings us to a precipice where he has us "reenter" ourselves. Bonaventure warns that there are risks, sighting how the mind, memory and intellect (the 3 powers we possess within ourselves) can obscure God, to the point of deception, saying that, "you will be able to see God through yourself as through an image, indeed, to see through a mirror darkly." [I Cor., 13, 12]

To grasp how treacherous a reentry can be check out this clip as the news commentator explains the degree of difficulty facing the crew and control center.

G. K. Chesterton observed how important it is to account for the trajectory (looking both ways) of an idea; "If some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made in human happiness." One only needs to see the sad reality of our personal and social world today to notice that we have made those huge blunders, due in part by our justification of a turn inward. St Bonaventure's reentry by way of reason, following in the footsteps of St Augustine's notion of entering into yourself, inadvertently lent itself to what has turned out to be a bankrupt concept of what constitutes a "person" in the modern day world of psychology and counseling, thus emptying the reality of "personhood" revealed by Christ of its original grounding in dialogue and relationality.

In a 1990 article that appeared in Communio titled, "Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology," Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger writes:

"... God who is in dialogue, stimulated the concept 'person'... In God, person means relation. Relation, being related, is not something super-added to the person, but it is the person itself. In its nature, the person exists only as relation."

The article continues:

"I believe a profound illumination of God as well as man occurs here, the decisive illumination of what person must mean in terms of Scripture: not a substance that closes itself in itself, but the phenomenon of complete relativity, which is, of course, realized in its entirety only in the one who is God, but which indicates the direction of all personal being. The point is thus reached here at which there is a transition from the doctrine of God into Christology and into anthropology."

Cardinal Ratzinger continues:

"... if it is true, however, that Christ is not the ontological exception, if from his exceptional position he is, on the contrary, the fulfillment of the entire human being, then the Christological concept of person is an indication for theology of how person is to be understood as such... In Christ, in the man who is completely with God, human existence is not canceled, but comes to its highest possibility, which consists in transcending itself, ... Christ is the directional arrow, as it were, that indicates what being human tends toward... and implies "being on the way" in the manner of human history."

Romano Guardini’s observation in his book, "The End of the Modern World" is apropos bringing us back to revelation and 'a calling' that conquers reason and is analogous to St Bonaventure's meditation on St Francis receiving the stigmata on Mt Alverno:

With the coming of Christ man’s existence took on an earnestness which classical antiquity never knew simply because it had no way of knowing it. The earnestness did not spring from human maturity; it sprang from the call which each person received from God through Christ. With this call the person opened his eyes, he was awakened for the first time in his life.

In a presentation that my friend Gil Bailie made at the 2005 Vatican conference: The Call to Justice: The Legacy of Gaudium et spes 40 Years Later he shared this about Augustine's inward turn:

For all the confusion to which it inadvertently contributed, the saving feature of Augustine's (and Bonaventure's) inward turn was that, like Trinitarian interiority, it was premised on communal, not a self-contained subjectivity... Where Augustine (and Bonaventure) turned inward in order to find God, the Western thought turned inward in search of a self-sufficient source of knowledge, truth and identity.

The slippery slope of the inward turn, as it attempts to locate the concept of person at some place "in" the psychic inventory, has proven to be a major hurdle to what is the most essential, radical and counter-intuitive element in Trinitarian thought - the relationality of God revealed by Christ. Though both Augustine and Bonaventure fashioned 3 'powers' (memory, intelligence, and will) to the human mind paralleling the relation of the three Persons to the divine essence, their inward turn unfortunately brought with it an implosion and 'self-centeredness' that we in the Western world find ourselves buried under today.

Christ unveils self-sufficiency as a myth revealing humans as interdividuals like mosaics: we are beings that are fashioned in and by diverse relationships. The difference between the romantic myth of 'individual' and the anthropological revelation of 'interdividual' revealed by Christ is like the difference of someone hiding a light under (or in) a bushel versus someone placing a light on a stand. Another way of saying it is if you look at a stained glass window of an old cathedral from the street - from outside, you will only see pieces of dark glass held together by strips of black lead (the turn inward). But if you cross the threshold and view it from inside (embracing yourself as creature, God's instrument), allowing the light to shine through, you will see a breathtaking spectacle of colors and shapes.

The appropriate inward turn, revealed by Christ, provides an ever expanding view of God's love and sacrifice for us. I thought this video clip apropos to help visualize the saving feature of Augustine's and Bonaventure's turn inward seeking God rather than conceiving of a subject as contained within itself.

The Journey of the Mind to God was born out of Bonaventure's meditation on the stigmata of St Francis. Bonaventure saw the imprinting of the wounds of the Crucified on St Francis as his union with Christ - a final emptying or dying of his self - thus like St Paul, he could say: "With Christ I am nailed to the Cross. It is now no longer I that live, but Christ lives in me." [Gal. 2:20]

So the seeking of God through yourself is not about any self-help, self-love, self-esteem or self sufficiency, rather, reentry is the sacrifice of the very self we cling to "revealing your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory." [Col. 3:3-4]

I re-post Bonaventure's words as he meditated on St Francis receiving the stigmata:

Living for the "SOMETHING GREATER"

If you should ask how these things come about,

question grace, not instruction;

desire, not intellect;

the cry of prayer, not pursuit of study;

the Bridegroom, not the teacher;

God, not man;

darkness, not clarity;

not light, but the wholly fire

which inflames and carries you aloft to God

with fullest unction and burning affection.

This fire is God,

and the furnace of this fire leads to Jerusalem;

and Christ the man kindles it

in the fervor of His burning Passion,

which he alone truly perceives who says,

"My soul chooses hanging and my bones death" [Job, 7, 15].

He who chooses this death can see God because this is indubitably true:

"Man shall not see me and live" [Exod., 33, 20].

Let us then die and pass over into darkness;

let us impose silence

upon our cares, our desires, and our phantasms (imaginings).

Let us pass over with the crucified Christ

from this world to the Father [John, 13, 1],

so that when the Father is shown to us

we may say with Philip:

"It is enough for us" [John, 14, 8];

let us hear with Paul:

"My grace is sufficient for thee" [II Cor., 12, 9];

let us exult with David, saying:

"My flesh and my heart have grown faint; Thou art the God of my heart, and portion forever" [Ps. 73, 26].

"Blessed be the Lord God of Israel from everlasting to everlasting; and let all the people say:

So be it, so be it! Amen! Hallelujah!" [Ps., 106, 48].

In Our Weakness We Shall Become One With Him

2011-07-26T08:28:00.002-05:00

This meditation from The Magnificat reflects on how radically different Christian spirituality is to modern day secular psychology where it is all about self - loving yourself. What makes the righteous shine is not about first loving your self but truly loving our all loving God who shines forth upon His children, His Grace and Blessings. At mass this morning, Father asked us to thank all the wonderful grand-parents leaving their imprint and tradition on us. In this thankfulness we see how we really are - a weaving of many relationships - we are more inter-dividual, being molded and shaped by our relationships along with the Holy Spirit than we are separate and 'individual' like pseudo-psychology would make us out to be.

What Makes the Righteous Shine

What then have we to do? We must realise that God is our tremendous lover, that he is our all and that he has done all our works for us. We must believe in God and not in ourselves; we must hope in God and not in ourselves; we must love God and not ourselves. As Saint Augustine told us, there is one man who reaches to the extremities of the universe and unto the end of time. We have to enter into this one man - this one Christ - by faith, hope, and charity. We have to find our all in him. He is our full complement and our perfect supplement. No matter how weak we are, he is our strength; no matter how empty we are, he is our fullness; no matter how sinful we are, he is our holiness. All we have to do is to accept God's plan - to say as Christ said coming into the world: "A body thou hast fitted to me; behold I come to do thy will, 0 God." We have to accept the self, and the surroundings, and the story, that God's providence arranges for us. In humility we must accept our self - just as we are; in charity, we must accept and love our neighbour just as he is; in abandonment, we must accept God's will just as things happen to us, and just as he would have us act. Faithful compliance with his will and humble acceptance of his arrangements will bring us to full union with Christ For the rest, let us gladly glory in our infirmities, that the power of Christ may dwell in us. In our weakness and in our love we shall thus become one with him, and there shall be one Christ loving himself.

DOM M. EUGENE BOYLAN, o. ClST. R.

Dom Boylan (+ 1963) was a monk of the Cistercian Abbey of Mount Saint Joseph, Roscrea, Ireland.

Reason Must be Conquered by Revelation Part II

2011-07-23T15:55:00.010-05:00

I did not originally intend to create a series of posts reflecting on Saint Bonaventure's "The Journey of the Mind to God" however as this is the second post on the book, and I am only through chapter 1, I got a feeling that I will be posting more reflections.

From the notes: "Saint Bonaventure follows Saint Augustine in his conception of history as a most beautiful drama, composed by God and acted by mankind.(1) The beauty of this drama and its meaning, however, can be grasped only through faith and on the basis of revelation. But since we are in such a position that we can witness only a small part of this drama, we need Holy Scripture to raise us to a point from which we can view and comprehend it in its entirety — from the creation of the world to judgment day."(2)

WOW! Gazing into this mystery is truly a challenge for any of us, especially if we are using only our reason, and that is why Bonaventure insisted that we see that reason must be conquered by revelation.

(1) "conception of history as a most beautiful drama, composed by God and acted by mankind."

My friend Gil Bailie gave a weekend retreat with Franciscan Father Richard Rohr in the '90s and out of that retreat came a number of tapes and tape sets. I particularly love, "Entering the Biblical Story at the Eucharistic Table" - so much so that I transcribed it. In this talk Gil refers to this "most beautiful drama, composed by God and acted by mankind:"

Jesus never claimed to be operating on his own. He even says in John’s Gospel, “If I had come in my own name you would believe me, but because I have come in the name of the one who has sent me you don’t believe.” We are asked to be like that. We are asked to re-present Christ to the world. To be actors in the great drama – like von Balthasar’s ‘Theo-drama’, a magnificent orchestration of the grandeur of the Christian drama in history - and so the language of drama is appropriate – and the language of re-presenting it to the world, in however way, even though we are all clay vessels, we are all clumsy, we’re all fallen and sinful, we don’t do a very good job of it, despite our clumsiness God knows how to use leftovers and misfits – in fact our clumsiness is part of it, our failures to do it are part of it.

We are called; we are incorporated; we are deputized to receive into our lives - personally and with our communion with one another - the spirit of Christ, and to step into the world and absorb all the anxieties, uncertainty and the confusion and be part of the light of Christ in the world.

In another section of the tape Gil continues:

So we take our lives, and this is our supreme privilege, we must not see this as some kind of melodramatic act of renunciation, it is the source of our freedom, to take our lives, thank God for them because it is a gift to us, and break them or let them be broken and give them away. And then, Jesus says, “do THIS in memory of me.” Do what? Do this in memory of me. Not just the gesture, of course we do the gesture; of course the Real Presence, but when Jesus says, do THIS, He is talking of something much more vast then that. He means doing that which the gesture represents – being Christ in the world. ...

... It is at the Eucharistic table that we receive this gift and are nourished for the journey to go back out into the world and be Eucharistic people - be Christ to the world, absorbing that unforgivenness and being people who are not there on their own, but rather people who are saying with Paul, "I live now not I, but Christ lives in me."

I am always blown away by his reflection... Ah, wait now, we have one more part to the original reflection.

(2) The beauty of this drama and its meaning, however, can be grasped only through faith and on the basis of revelation. But since we are in such a position that we can witness only a small part of this drama, we need Holy Scripture to raise us to a point from which we can view and comprehend it in its entirety — from the creation of the world to judgment day.

Again reread the words of Bonaventure from my last post that ring so true: There is something greater.

Christ instituted the Mass so that we can enter into His Mystery - This Drama. The Mass was not conceived in the language of modern day 'me-ism' rather we are first opened and prepared to receive the Liturgy of the Word (likened this to a willingness to sacrifice yourself) and then we actually enter into the drama - we take our part as actors in the Liturgy of the Eucharist.

Wondrously and mysteriously, The Story is presented and re-presented to us so as to jar our memory, the memory for which Christ asks us, "Do THIS in remembrance of me," so that with the opportunity, given to us at each Mass, we can shout 'yes' or amen and actually participate in it's trajectory so that "we can view and comprehend it in its entirety — from the creation of the world to judgment day."

At every Mass we are encouraged to repeat Mary's 'yes' and to enter into THIS Journey - to make our life apart of THE Story. Saint Bonaventure's book is retelling this very journey to God.

So memory matters! We improve our memory through repetition and ritual and it is here that humankind enters the drama within the Mass.

AMEN!

Reason Must be Conquered by Revelation

2011-07-15T17:11:00.010-05:00

In a class on the updated Mass I find myself constantly going back to Lk 11, 29-32 and that there IS Something Greater than... (myself) Here. Then on the feast day of St. Bonaventure appearing in The Magnificat was this reflection and also found here: The Journey of the Mind to God .

Living for the "SOMETHING GREATER"

If you should ask how these things come about,

question grace, not instruction;

desire, not intellect;

the cry of prayer, not pursuit of study;

the Bridegroom, not the teacher;

God, not man;

darkness, not clarity;

not light, but the wholly fire

which inflames and carries you aloft to God

with fullest unction and burning affection.

This fire is God,

and the furnace of this fire leads to Jerusalem;

and Christ the man kindles it

in the fervor of His burning Passion,

which he alone truly perceives who says,

"My soul chooses hanging and my bones death" [Job, 7, 15].

He who chooses this death can see God because this is indubitably true:

"Man shall not see me and live" [Exod., 33, 20].

Let us then die and pass over into darkness;

let us impose silence

upon our cares, our desires, and our phantasms (imaginings).

Let us pass over with the crucified Christ

from this world to the Father [John, 13, 1],

so that when the Father is shown to us

we may say with Philip:

"It is enough for us" [John, 14, 8];

let us hear with Paul:

"My grace is sufficient for thee" [II Cor., 12, 9];

let us exult with David, saying:

"My flesh and my heart have grown faint; Thou art the God of my heart, and portion forever" [Ps. 73, 26].

"Blessed be the Lord God of Israel from everlasting to everlasting; and let all the people say:

So be it, so be it! Amen! Hallelujah!" [Ps., 106, 48].

In my formation studies with the SFO I gleaned that for Bonaventure, divine revelation, not human reason, is the way to God. God is to be revealed, not reasoned. Truly there IS Something Greater than... (myself) Here [Lk 11, 29-32]. Bonaventure's emphasis on revelation does not mean that we do not make use of reason. Bonaventure plainly demonstrates that devotion has to be prior to mere intellectualism.

I believe that Rome's revisions of the word use at the Mass is challenging us to move out of the false notion that we only represent an independent 'self' and enter more fully into the Mystery just as Bonaventure says, "(W)e may come to think that mere reading will suffice without fervor, speculation without devotion, investigation without admiration, observation without exultation, industry without piety, knowledge without love, understanding without humility, study without divine grace, the mirror without the divinely inspired wisdom." (P.4). On the other hand, Bonaventure tried to be well-balanced in his reasonings, that is, being scholastic without leaving the realm of monasticism; being religious and spiritual but also intellectual.

In whatever Bonaventure wrote he intended to awaken us all to the One Reality: that there is something greater than... (myself) here. Reason has to be conquered by revelation. Contemplation can not stop on the first or second level, where the rational soul contemplates the outer world and itself but recognizing that it is not complete in itself. The true and final contemplation is when the soul sees beyond the outer world and itself; when it ascends with the whole of creation above itself. There IS Something Greater than... (myself) Here!

So I contend (with Bonaventure's help) that the revised wording of the Mass challenges us all to enter more closely, more reverently and more humbly into this Mystery of Sacrifice, Real Presence and Communion. Suddenly the words, "Lord, I am not worthy" ring so powerful.

The HEART of the Matter

2011-06-28T10:31:00.000-05:00

Athos passed this early morning and I thought the meditation of the day suited him well. Peace and all good.

From The Magnificat June 28, 2011

Let us push straight to the heart of the matter. What is the core, the central message of the revelation of Jesus? Surely it is of the unconditional love of God for us, for each one of us; God, the unutterable incomprehensible mystery, the reality of all reality, the life of all life. And this means that the divine love desires to communicate its holy self to us. Nothing less! This is God’s irrevocably will and purpose; it is the reason why everything that is, is, and why each of us exists. We are here to receive this ineffable, all-transforming, all-beatifying love. Well-instructed Christians know this notionally but, alas, few know it really. And here I must add an important reminder that knowing it “really” does not imply “feelingly.” To know really – or really to know – means living that knowledge, living out of it. It means that our way of looking at things, our attitudes, out actions arise from this knowledge. Of this real knowledge we use the word faith. This must give us pause and make us very cautious to claims to faith. “Of course I have faith!” We can feel quite indignant if someone implies otherwise! My experience tells me that real faith is rare and it is best we acknowledge this so that we may really work at believing.

Basing ourselves, therefore, on what Jesus shows us of God (and we Christians have only one teacher, Jesus the Christ, who is our way), we must realize that what we have to do is allow ourselves to be loved, to be there for love to love us.

- Sister Ruth Burrows, O.C.D.

A Dragon's Tale

2010-11-12T16:11:00.002-06:00

I was recollecting this story by Marjorie Thompson today and I discovered that the movie of CS Lewis' book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader will be coming out next month. Awesome. Before you get swept away by the movie check out this little piece called, A Dragon's Tale. And below I have a link to a great Radio Theatre Drama of this very segment of the book.

A Dragon’s Tale*

by Marjorie Thompson

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. His parents called him Eustace Clarence, and his schoolmasters called him Scrubb. I can’t tell you how his friends spoke to him, for he had none… Eustace Clarence liked animals, especially beetles, if they were dead and pinned on a card…. Deep down he liked bossing and bullying; and though he was a puny little person who couldn’t have stood… in a fight, he knew that there are dozens of ways to give people a bad time…

So begins The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third Narnian Chronicle by C. S. Lewis. What follows is a story from that world – a story of lions and dragons, a story of transformation.

To begin with, Eustace Scrubb had no imagination and no patience with his cousins who did. He taunted and pestered them because they childishly believed in a land called Narnia, ruled by a lion named Aslan, whom no one in the world but the four of them had ever seen. Scrubb prided himself on being unsentimental, scientific, and cultured; others might have described him as rude, boring, and haughty. Having been raised on Plumptree’s Vitaminized Nerve Food, Scrubb’s tastes were, in fact, deplorably narrow. It took little to turn his delicate stomach and sheltered eyes. To be quite bald, Eustace was the world’s original “wimp.”

Imagine, then, the poor lad’s dismay when the “fictitious” land of Narnia suddenly became a living reality, and Scrubb found himself affected by the very Magic he had ridiculed with such disdain! I am sorry to report that when this took place, the boy’s already ungracious character became absolutely unbearable. He made out his cousins, and everyone else in Narnia, to be ogres; he refused to take responsibility for anything in the course of their adventures; he insisted on viewing himself as the only sane individual; and he expected exceptions to be made on his account alone – assuming that he always got the short end of the stick, no matter how civil, even generous, the others were to him. So there you have Eustace Clarence Scrubb, for better or worse – and mostly, I’m afraid, for worse.

As the story progresses, the adventurers’ ship survives a devastating storm and finds harbor on an unknown island. Eustace, unaccustomed to work, creeps off to take his ease while the others set to repairs. He manages to get thoroughly lost and ends up in the valley of a dragon! Now the dragon itself is scarcely a cause for alarm; Eustace comes upon the elderly creature just in time to watch it expire. Then the real adventure begins. A blinding rain drives Scrubb into the dragon’s cave; and there, as his eyes grow accustomed to the dark, Eustace realizes that the sharp objects he is sitting on are not rocks. They are crowns and rings and heavy necklaces – all gold and precious jewels!

Of course, you and I would know right away that a dragon’s cave is filled with treasure; but Eustace had never read the sort of books that tell you these things. Gazing at the sheer magnitude of riches, his eyes grew large and his hands grew itchy and his heart filled with desire. “They don’t have any taxes here,” he astutely observed. But he had no sooner slipped a heavy gold bracelet over his arm when fatigue overtook him. He fell asleep on the treasure heap, and when he awoke, he discovered to his utter horror that he himself had turned into a dragon! Lewis writes, “Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard, with greedy, dragonish thought in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.”

Time out. Is sin a word you have trouble identifying with? I suppose most of us don’t really like to call ourselves “miserable sinners,” or sing and mean “a wretch like me.” I once knew a woman who told me, “I hate the prayer of confession in our worship service; I can never identify with all those awful things we say about ourselves. I’m not like that; I live a good life.”

Perhaps many of us feel this way. One thing seems clear to me: that sin results in a certain blindness to the truth of our condition – the condition of being alienated from God, from one another, and from our deeper self. Sin is not simply a matter of the wroungheadedness of particular thoughts or deeds. Sin is a deeper orientation of life from which all of us suffer. If we have trouble recognizing our basic brokenness, might it be that this difficulty itself is a sign of our disease?

Eustace saw himself as an intelligent and superior sort of person; others could see his tragic flaws more clearly. In effect, Eustace’s character was beastly all along, but he couldn’t recognize it until it got so inflated that it took visible form. Then he could see his beastliness reflected back to him.

What prevents us from seeing our tragic flaws? Certainly we want to be perceived as good, as right, as intelligent, as attractive. We often feel as if we should be all these things at all times; so, whether we think we are or not, we expend a great deal of energy trying to prove to others and to ourselves that we are. These very human patterns have other names: pride, envy, anxiety, defensiveness, rationalization, and self-justification, to name just a few. Each has a way of blinding us to our real predicament. We all indulge in such protective illusions at one time or other, individually and as communities – even nations. Fortunately, there are mirrors around. Sometimes we catch our reflection and, for a moment, see ourselves as others see us.

When Eustace realizes that he has actually become a monster cut off from the human race, he begins to look back on his life with different eyes: “An appalling loneliness came over him. He began to see that the others had not really been fiends at all. He began to wonder if he himself had ever been such a nice person as he had always supposed. He longed for their voices.”

When we recognize our inner distortions and see how they have cut us off from real relationships, we too discover a deep longing for human community. We often want to refashion our behavior to fit our changed perception and attitude. But at this point, most of us will find that the desire to change and the capacity to change are not evenly matched.

Paul speaks with hard-hitting honesty in Romans 7: “though the will to do good is there, the deed is not. The good which I want to do, I fail to do; but what I do is the wrong which is against my will… it is no longer I who am agent, but sin that has its lodging in me…”

I know what the old apostle is talking about. One of my weaknesses is procrastination. Suppose I have a major task ahead, and I promise myself I will start working on it early, both for quality and sanity’s sake. As the time approaches, I invariably find myself placing far less urgent tasks before the critical one – checking the mail, watering the plants, clearing off the desk. Any little excuse will suffice. I am aware of indulging my avoidance but can hardly resist the urge to put off the real work until pressure reaches a critical peak of discomfort.

Your “Achilles’ heel” may be different: perhaps overindulgence in food or TV; perhaps a habit of being sarcastic or critical despite a hundred self-administered lectures on biting your tongue. Each of us has at least a few areas where “willpower” just doesn’t carry enough voltage, no matter how we try to convince our actions to fall in line.

“Miserable creature that I am, who will rescue me from this body doomed to death?” Paul’s anguished cry is born of just such human experience. But Paul has an answer for his own existential question. It is the same answer discovered by our young friend, Eustace – turned – dragon, who now wants nothing so desperately as to become himself again. Not only is he odious to himself; he is a burden to his Narnian friends who must take him with them on their continued voyage – and however will he fit into the ship?

At this critical point – when the desire to change is real, but the capacity is not – Eustace meets Aslan, the great lion, “Son of the Emperor over Sea,” who saved Narnia back in the days of the White Witch. Eustace does not know who Aslan is, but senses his authority, fears him dreadfully, and obeys without hesitation when the lion bids him follow.

Aslan leads Eustace a long way to a mountaintop garden, in whose center lies a wide well of pure, clear water. Eustace longs to bathe in it, but the lion first commands him to undress. Our dragon friend succeeds in tearing off his outer skin and scales, rather like a banana peel. But when he approaches the water, his reflection still reveals a dragon skin. Twice more he scratches off his rough and wrinkled suit, and twice again finds himself yet encased in the vestment of a beast.

Then Aslan speaks: “You will have to let me undress you.” Eustace later recalled the experience in these words:

The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right to my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff come off.
… Well, he peeled it right off – just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt – and there it was, lying on the grass, only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobby looking than the others had been. And there I was as smooth and soft as a peeled switch. Then he caught hold of me – I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on – and he threw me into the water. It smarted like anything, but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and … I found that all the pain had gone. And then I saw why. I’d been turned into a boy again… After a bit, the lion took me out and dressed me.

Eustace Clarence Scrubb will tell you from experience that you cannot achieve your own inner transformation. We can neither take off the old skin of sin, nor re-dress ourselves in righteousness. That is why, in the words of one of our familiar hymns, we ask God to “re-clothe us in our rightful mind.” Our desire to change is a necessary preparation for the painful but wonderful process of being changed by God’s grace. When Christ strips us of our dragonish self, he goes much deeper than we do – right to the heart. Real change means giving up much of what we assume is natural to us. That’s why we cannot do it ourselves; we simply do not see how radical the surgery needs to be, and even if we did, we would be powerless to perform it. Yet the pain of this radical transformation quickly becomes joy as we see and feel genuine health emerging underneath.

Eustace found that he was a boy again, although a boy with a much improved character. His old self was fast withering away; a new person, his true self, was now free to emerge. But if his encounter with Aslan marked a fundamental change of heart, it did not yet mean that Eustace was perfect. The end of his story is an apt reminder to each of us of the ongoing character of transformation:

It would be nice, and fairly nearly true, to say that “from that time on Eustace was a different boy.” To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still many days when he could be quite tiresome. But … the cure had begun.

It takes time for our new self in Christ to be fully realized. But if you have ever tried to change yourself and been disappointed; and if you have then given yourself over to the One whose love alone can transform us; and if you have seen even some part of your life turned around through the mystery of this encounter, then you, too, can be sure that the cure has begun. Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory!

Prayer: Lord, thank you for loving us even when we are beastly; for your patience when we are tiresome and blind; for your stern yet tender love which longs to heal us from this painful disease called sin. Help us to see our need; to desire your touch; and to receive your transforming love, offered to us through Christ our Lord. We pray in his name. Amen.

* Article appeared in the March/April 1991 Weavings publication

To listen to this section of CS Lewis book click on link below.
The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader Radio Theatre Drama - Part 9

Understanding Our Epistemological Tools Have Been Bequest to Us by the Enlightenment

2010-08-26T11:27:00.002-05:00

The following is my transcribing a talk in 2002 by Gil Bailie on René Girard's influence to modern thought.

In the Preface to his book, "Insight," Bernard Lonergan writes of the ideal detective story in which the reader is presented with all the clues yet fails to spot the criminal.

He may advert to each clue as it arises. He needs no further clues to solve the mystery. Yet he can remain in the dark for the simple reason that reaching the solution is not the mere apprehension of any clue, nor the mere memory of all them, but a quite distinct activity of organizing intelligence that places the full set of clues in a unique explanatory perspective.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson went on a camping trip. After a good meal and a bottle of wine they bunked down for the night and went to sleep. Some hours later, Holmes awoke and nudged his friend. “Watson, look up at the sky and tell me what you see.”

Watson replied, “I see millions upon millions of stars.”

“So what does that tell you?” asked Sherlock.

Watson pondered for a minute. “Astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo. Hierologically, I deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three. Theologically, I can see that God is all powerful and that we are small and insignificant. Meteorologically, I suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow. What does it tell you?”

Holmes was silent for a minute and then spoke. “It tells me someone has stolen our tent!” (Author unknown)

We live in a world where we employ the epistemological tools that have been bequest to us by the Enlightenment where they require us to think about the world in terms of politics, economics, sociology and psychology, etc. These tools do provide a certain amount of information but there are things going on right now which cannot be accounted for in those terms.

What René Girard has done is help us to understand how we came to know what we know and that there is something underneath these interpretive tools we have that has given rise to them and that thing is the biblical tradition.

There is a parallel between the tent in Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson joke and the veil of the temple that was rent from top to bottom at the death of Jesus on the cross. It is at “that” moment when something changes and forms of illumination are available and the human race begins to move into new territory of knowing.

On one level we can describe this as the “aha” moment for an individual, but on another level the human race begins to move into this cumulative “AHA” experience where a “quite distinct activity of organizing intelligence that places the full set of clues in a unique explanatory perspective” has become available.

One more joke, this is a pulpit joke:

There is a story of a pastor in a small, rural congregation. For some years, the physical plant of the church had been deteriorating and he did not have in his budget nearly enough to paint the church. He remembered that one of the members of the congregation was a professional house painter, so he paid him a little visit. In the course of the chat the topic of the need of the church came up and a little while later this man agreed to paint the church for his cost when he had time. So that was agreed upon. Of course, he came in the middle of the week when nobody was there. He came and started to paint the church. He painted around the bottom and then he built the scaffolds up and then he thought to himself, I could reduce my cost if I watered the paint down a little bit and it would go on faster. This would allow him to get done faster and get to more paying jobs sooner. So as he went up the church he kept thinking that logic and higher he got he thought, now who is going to be able to tell this high, so he thinned the paint down more and more. He got up to the bell tower and he thins it down even more and it is going on very nicely and he gets close to the top when he looks for in the horizon and sees this huge dark thundercloud coming this way. He thinks I had better get this job done before it starts to rain. So he thins the paint down even more. But the storm comes quicker than he thought and suddenly there is lightning and rolling thunder coming out of these dark clouds. He gets very anxious, and suddenly the storm is right on top of him and he notices that he is at the highest point in town. He panics and he grabs the scaffolding and prays, God please don’t let me be struck by this lightning. Suddenly the storm calms and there is this voice from heaven that says, “Repaint and thin no more.”

There is a point to this as we are always repainting the church. We Christians are always trying to understand this thing that has happened to us (whether on the road to Emmaus or Damascus). We are constantly trying to get to the bottom of it. It is a journey and so we need to realize that we are always representing Christianity in the historical context of our age and the challenge that each age presents to us calls us to draw out of that inexhaustible reservoir of Truth, new things that we didn’t know or could not have known without of that challenge. That is why we should never complain about the fact that the world rejects Christianity, that’s what it is paid to do! Our job is simply to respond to that rejection in a way that embraces the ‘no’ that the world has uttered and bring it into the affirmation. And so we are constantly re-painting and we should stop thinning. The re-painting that has been going on in the modern world in recent decades has been a thin, thin, thin version. There is no need for that. One of the things that René’s work does is that it gives us a robust and ‘thickly’ theological understanding premised on and in many ways assimilated with an anthropological understanding of the cross and the Christian mystery.

Christians stubbornly clung to their language even when it could be said they really didn’t understand it. (And the sad thing is that, now when we are about to acquire the intellectual means for understanding the terminology, a failure of nerve has set in and many Christians are abandoning the terminology.) - John W. Dixon, Jr.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

There has arisen in our time a most singular fancy: the fancy that when things go very wrong we need a practical man. It would be far truer to say, that when things go very wrong we need an unpractical man. Certainly, at least, we need a theorist. If your aeroplane has a slight indisposition, a handy man may mend it. But, if it is seriously ill, it is all the more likely that some absent-minded old professor with wild white hair will have to be dragged out of a college or laboratory to analyze the evil. The more complicated the smash, the whiter-haired and more absent-minded will be the theorist who is needed to deal with it.

René is neither impractical nor absent-minded, but we have had airplanes smashing that have smashed not for mechanical reasons but because of human calculations. That is all the more reason the need to have someone to help us understand the nature of human conflict – violence.

MYTH & memory

2010-01-07T13:29:00.003-06:00

Violence Unveiled by Gil Bailie: Chapter 2 starting on page 33.

MYTH

When the chorus in Agamemnon says, “The rest I did not see, nor do I speak of it,” it virtually defines myth. The root of the Greek word for myth, muthos, is mu, which means to close or keep secret. Muo means to close one’s eyes or mouth, to mute the voice or to remain mute. Myth remembers discretely and selectively. Myth closes its eyes to certain events and closes its mouth. The agencies for the muting and transmuting of the remembered past are the Muses, and the term muse is derived from the same root as the word myth. In Greek mythology the Muses are the daughters of Memory (Mnemosyne). The Muses make it possible to remember the past fondly or heroically, but they do so with fog filters. (The Latin verb mutare means to change.) The Muses bring into being music and museums, but not, in the first instance, for purely aesthetic or merely archival purposes. The cultural archive and anthems that the Muses preserve represent the mythological remembrance of things past. The poet Hesiod says of the Muses that “they are all of one mind.” As widely varying as the Muses’ artistic interests may be, beneath this variety, and behind it, lies something about which they are “all of one mind.” The Muses inspire poetry, epic, sacred music, tragedy, comedy, erotic verse, and history, but all these are permutations of the past events which, if Hesiod is to be trusted, they memorialize with one purpose. That purpose is buried in the etymology of their name. The Muses make culture possible by providing it with its myth — an enchanting story of its founding violence. But most myths contain at least faint traces of the violence they otherwise mask. By paying more careful attention to these traces, things mythologically remembered can be recollected with greater clarity.
In the New Testament, mythos is juxtaposed both to Logos — the revelation of that about which myth refuses to speak — and to aletheia — the Greek word for truth. Aletheia comes from the root, letho, which is the verb “to forget.” The prefix a is the negative. The literal meaning, then, of the Greek word for truth, aletheia, is “to stop forgetting.” It is etymologically the opposite of myth. The gospels tell of a perfectly typical story of victimization with astonishing insight into the role religious zeal and mob psychology played in it. Most importantly, and contrary to all myth, the story is told from the point of view of the victim and not that of the righteous community of persecutors. Thus the passion story breaks decisively with the silence and circumspection of the mythological thought. The Gospel truth gradually makes it impossible for us to keep forgetting what myth exists to help us forget. It thereby sets up a struggle between the impulse to sacralize, justify, or romanticize the violence that generates and regenerates conventional culture and the impulse to reveal that violence and strip away its mythic justifications. Fundamentally, human history is a struggle between myth and Gospel. Literature, as it has developed in Western culture, is neither myth (muthos) nor truth (aletheia), it is the textual arena in which the two struggle for the upper hand. What myth conceals, what literature alternately conceals and reveals, and what the Gospel decisively reveals are the social dynamics that produce what Girard calls “the essential complicity between violence and human culture.”
...
Myth — and the primitive religious cosmology it narrates — mutes the victim’s voice. It fills the eyes and nose with incense, and the ears with incantations. When the myth is firmly in place, even those closest to the victims, the ones most likely to resist the myth’s intoxications, concur in the ritual. While the myth holds sway, those under its spell are unwilling or unable to recognize what they are doing. “The rest I did not see,” they say, “nor do I speak of it.” In return for making conventional culture possible, myth silences the victim’s voice and veils the victim’s face. In his book on crowd behavior, for example, Gustave Le Bon says this of the Jacobin ideologues of the French Revolution:
Dogmatic and logical to a man, and their brains full of vague generalities, they busied themselves with the application of fixed principles without concerning themselves with events. It has been said of them, with reason, that they went through the Revolution without witnessing it.

This is what myth and the associated structures of what Girard calls the primitive sacred do. They make it possible to participate in, observe, or recollect certain violent events without having to actually witness them in any morally significant sense.

God provides opportunities...

2009-11-07T09:49:00.004-06:00

"Let me ask you something. If someone prays for patience, you think God gives them patience? Or does he give them the opportunity to be patient? If he prayed for courage, does God give him courage, or does he give him opportunities to be courageous? If someone prayed for the family to be closer, do you think God zaps them with warm fuzzy feelings, or does he give them opportunities to love each other?" - "God"

Check out this site regarding the movie, Evan Almighty.

The San Damiano Cross hanging over Athos

2009-07-21T13:31:00.003-05:00

Charley

2009-06-10T16:41:00.000-05:00

Aramis - Jeremy Irons in Man in Iron Mask

2009-05-15T13:29:00.000-05:00

Man in black

2009-05-15T12:51:00.002-05:00

Prayer - the consummation consists in wonder at God

2008-05-18T08:07:00.002-05:00

Meditation of the Day

How to Make the Transfiguration Last

Evagrius says, “Prayer is purity of the mind, the movements of whose prayer are not interrupted except once the holy light of the Trinity has shone out in the mind. “ For he says, “prayer is cut off by means of wonder at the light.” Thus the consummation consists in wonder at God, as we have said, and not in the continual stirrings of prayer. The person who has entered the place of the Mysteries remains in wonder at them, and this is the true prayer which opens the door to the treasures of God, allowing those who seek to have their fill of all they need. “Freely have you received, do yourselves give freely” too to everyone you wish. How could anyone dare to say of those who have been given authority over wealth, to give it as if it were their own to everyone they wished, that they are knocking at the door like beggars asking for alms to meet their needs?

No; rather they distribute life, raise the dead, convey hope, give light to the blind; “you are the light of the world,” he said: “I will give you the keys.” You are no longer someone who asks, for you have acquired authority – as though over what belonged to yourself – to bind and to loose, in this world and in the age of ages. How can such a person prostrate himself at the door and beg like a vagabond, seeing that the keys to the treasury are already placed in his hands, enabling him to take and give, have life and provide life?

John the Elder ( + c. early eight century) was a monastic writer of the East.

h/t Doctors of the Catholic Church and Magnificat

Entering the Biblical Story -- Gil Baile

2007-10-10T13:46:00.007-05:00

Entering the Biblical Story at the Eucharistic Table
A talk given by Gil Bailie

We should ask more fundamental questions then we ask, and one of the fundamental questions that we should ask is, ‘why are we here?’

Why are we here?
The question itself is like looking at the “The Starry Night” or looking into the Grand Canyon. Why are we here? Even if we don’t have nice neat little answers for that, and I think we Christians have some answers, but if we don’t have nice neat little answers for that, we can’t let go of that question and we must ask it explicitly, because that question will be answered. The world will provide an answer for it and the answer that the world provides will be a silly shallow one. And we will not even notice how silly and shallow it is, because we will not have even noticed that it is the answer to THAT question, because we won’t have heard the question.

The stock answer to that question that the world provides is that we are here to be as comfortable as we can be for as long as we can live. And that is the white-collar nihilism – that is to say it is a world-view that is not even as lively and entertaining as, eat, drink and be merry. It is a kind of terrible grim, make-the-best-of-it-till-you-die world-view. But we don’t even notice how terrible and grim and nihilistic it is because we did not ask the question explicitly and therefore the answer that we operate with is one that has never been brought to our attention, it is just the operating system.

Why are we here?
I have been talking in these presentations about ‘the story’ - reclaiming the story, as we are always forgetting the story and rediscovering it at new levels. Perhaps one of the impressive instances of this occurs in Luke’s Gospel after the crucifixion and resurrection, it is the ‘Road to Emmaus’ story. It is a marvelous story of disciples who had their messianic expectations shattered by the cross – it has all failed and what they see is failure and disillusionment, and for them their story has ended. There was a lot of hope, but the hope has died, the story is over. They are leaving Jerusalem because Jerusalem has become a hostile place. Jerusalem is where the drama of the story took place, and they have given up on it and they are going away. Jesus meets them on this journey. He begins talking with them and they say, ‘haven’t you heard about these things?’ Jesus says, ‘what things,’ to get them to talk. So they go on about what happened and how their hopes had been dashed by the cross. Then it says in Luke, he explained to them how all the scriptures had prophesied all these events.

There is a wonderful poem by William Stafford and it goes like this,

When God watches you walk, you are/
neither straight nor crooked. The journey stretches out, and all of its reasons/ beat like a heart. Coming back, no triumph, no regret, you fold into the curves,/
left, right, and arrive. You touch the door. The road straightens behind you./
It is now. It has all come true.

Our lives meander all over taking different turns, running into dead ends and reverses and suddenly, with God’s grace we arrive at where we are going. We touch the door and the path straightens out behind us. I have a friend who says that if I met myself back when I was 20, he would not recognize me, but I would recognize him. Well, the door for us is the Cross and the scriptures straighten behind us. When we touch that, then we go back and read it again. We read it for the second time and we see its destination, we see its final full revelation about God and about us and both of them are shocking. It is shocking what we do and it is shocking how merciful and all loving God is. Jesus explains this on the road to Emmaus in one verse and then they sit down in the village of Emmaus and break bread. When they break bread they recognize him. They don’t recognize him up to that moment.

Here now the story and the breaking of the bread come together. The disciples on the road to Emmaus are lost and they don’t have a story and Jesus intercepts them and with a few depth-strokes of his brush paints them the picture, tells them the story, which includes the cross, and therefore the story not only can go on, but now has a center. They returned to Jerusalem, which is the place of the promise and it is from Jerusalem that the mission must proceed out to the ends of the world. So they come back and become part of the story and they become part of Luke’s story in Acts, which is the story of the church going out to preach the Gospel to the world.

It brings together the story and the Eucharist in such a powerful way. I have a principle that is that the Biblical text should not be interpreted more than more than 30 feet from the Eucharistic table, or they should only be interpreted on the way to the Eucharistic table, keeping in-line with the Emmaus story. Can we take these texts out and bring them over and plop them on a seminar table at the university and get it? I don’t think so. Good work is done there, but the real understanding – the real truth of these inspired texts takes place in proximity of the Eucharistic table.

I want to talk about the Last Supper and then I want to talk about the Eucharist.

The disciples, as you know, are slow, no slower than we are. We look a little better than they do because we had the Gospel for 2000 years, but they are pretty slow. Another friend of mine refers to the disciples as being ‘25 watts and dimming’.  They never get it. Most of all they never get it when He talks about the cross. Before the cross, the reason why they don’t get it is because the cross destroys the blockage that keeps them from understanding. They are still living inside the world which the cross is going to explode. Jesus at some point realizes that they cannot get it until sometime after the cross. And at that point he begins to say things like this, ‘I am going to say these words, you are not going to get it, just remember them.’  Just remember them and at some point the nickel will drop. The only time they get it was when they once say to him, teach us how to pray, because at that moment they recognize that that is who he is and they want to be like that.

So Jesus has very little time. He gets to Jerusalem and it looks like the hour is approaching. There is no more time for sermons – there is no more time for explanations – there is time for very little, what is he going to do? It is very important to Jesus that he leaves them capable of receiving the truth, which will be available to them after the cross. So what does he do? He has a pass-over meal. And the pass-over meal is about getting out of Egypt. Some of what I am going to do below will be in a campy/Monty Python way…, but I think that there is something incredible here that we have not come to grips with.

I am going to reverse the order – let us start with the cup. He takes the cup and He says, “This is the cup of my blood which will be shed so that sin may be forgiven.” He is interpreting the cross. This is the cup of my blood, which will be shed so that sins may be forgiven. Now remember, when Jesus shows up, we humans have always had a way of taking away sins. We take away sins by putting it on the back of our scapegoat, getting rid of it and feeling righteous. Jesus is about to destroy that way by showing us the face of the innocent victim. What happens if he destroys that system and walks away and does nothing else? What happens, and in some extent is what is happening, which is, we begin to choke on our own unforgivenness, which is a synonym for resentment and virtually a synonym for sin. Unforgivenness, the world is filling up with unforgivenness. When we look out and read the morning paper and we see the 6 o’clock news we see this ignorance and sin and insensitivity and all of the rest of it. Sometimes we establish some sort of moral stance about it, but if we look at it as Christians what we see is this crying out of this massive unforgivenness. All the terrible things and we probably evoke Columbine High School perhaps too often at this point, but all the terrible things that are going to happen in the future are going to be committed by unforgiven people.

And Jesus has thrown everything off by destroying the system that used to take away the sins of the world on the cheap at the expense of the scapegoat. And so the unforgivenness festers, and festers. Jesus is now giving us another way of taking away sin. The Biblical God is not going to take away sin with a wave of the wand. Why? This has to do with the whole theodicy question, ‘why does God allow all the terrible things to happen in the world?’ God is not going to take away sins by the wave of the wand because that would rob us of our freedom and our dignity. God wants love and love has to be freely offered. And if you are going to create enough freedom so that love can be freely offered you are going to have to live in a world made perilous by what people do with that freedom. You cannot have it both ways. God has put all his bets on love, and therefore on freedom and therefore, what we do with that freedom can be a catastrophe, but God is not going to take away our sins by robbing us of our freedom because it would rob us of our covenantal love for our Creator.

How is He going to take it away then? He will take them away instantly if we ask that they be taken away. All we have to do is, first of all recognize our sinfulness, our complicity, that is to say, hear the cock crow and ask for forgiveness. The key is to ask for forgiveness. And we can’t ask for forgiveness until we recognize our sinfulness. And we can’t recognize our sinfulness until we go to the pit of that little machine that use to wash it away and we see what we have been doing. We hear the cock crow and we have that moment of conversion.

And so His blood is shed so that sins may be forgiven, not taken away on the cheap, but forgiven because we have recognized them and asked for forgiveness. And then Jesus says, “Take this and drink it. This is my blood.” He goes back to the question which Jesus asked about His own passion when people asked him, ‘who is going to sit at your right hand?’ He asks, “Can you drink the cup that I am going to drink?” That question is asked at the end of Mark’s Gospel – at the Eucharist in Mark’s Gospel it said He gave them this cup and they all drank of it, and they all died a martyr’s death. It is that kind of implication.

In the Eucharist we are offered that cup, why? It is because we are incorporated into the forgiving mission of Christ. When Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel, you have the keys to the kingdom whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven and whose sin you retain, they are retained - we should understand how significant this statement is. It seems silly to introduce a baseball metaphor at this point, but if a pitcher lets a couple guys on base and the manager decides to put in another pitcher, and somebody gets a hit and those guys come in, they are on the ERA of the pitcher who got pulled out. When Jesus says, whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven, whose sins are retained; they are retained. He is saying, I think, all the unforgivenness that you could have solved and didn’t is on your ERA – it’s on your record. You are in charge of all the unforgivenness that you could forgive and don’t. Can you drink this cup? Can you drink this cup? What does it mean to drink this cup in order that sins might be forgiven?

All this means, I think, is that we must be able to step into that place, not that we are going to become martyrs, most of us do not have the courage for it, but martyrs in another way. The word means to witness. Simply to be the kind of person who when something begins to swirl, when the melodrama gets set in motion, when accusations are made we can, at the risk of our own reputation, our own standing in the community, our own livelihood whatever it happens to be, can we step into the breach and absorb some of that animosity and break up the little knot that is forming? Not by going in as John the Baptist would do and fighting it back in the other direction. But simply by stepping into that world and absorbing that tension (like the old Rolaids commercial, absorbs 47 times its own weight in access stomach acids…). Can we be the kind of people that can move into that place, and drink the cup and be part of Christ forgiveness? The world is going to choke on its own unforgivenness if we don’t. That is our role in the world. This is not cheap forgiveness. The forgiven one has to hear the cock crow, and we shouldn’t go around being lily-white liberals that we are forgiving easy and never being part of the cock crowing. People have to hear the cock crow - we have to hear it. Jesus, when He forgives people, He always says, “go, and sin no more.” It is not forgiveness on the cheap. So it is a subtle process, it requires character and dignity and courage and most of all it requires an enormous moral generosity. So Jesus is inducting us into service for history in a world which is going to now increasingly be deprived of its old mechanism for taking away its own sins on the cheap. He is bringing us into this mission of taking them away in such a way that not only honors our dignity and our freedom, but also rehabilitates us.

And then, remember I am reversing the order, Jesus takes a loaf of bread and he says (now I am going to ham it up a little bit), ‘We all came here tonight to get out of Egypt - and you all want out of Egypt, we are all in some Egypt largely of our own making,’ Jesus says, ‘you want to get out of Egypt, let me tell you how to get out of Egypt.’ He takes a loaf of bread and says, “This is my life.” You have to remember we are talking about Jews here; we are not talking about philosophers. Body means life. This is a big difference between Jews and philosophers, and as I said before that with the disciples being ‘25 watts and dimming,’ it is amazing that Jesus didn’t throw up his hands half way through it all and leave them all and go the Alexandria and get some PhD’s. , but he didn’t and that’s very important…this is the faith of fishermen…this is the faith of Mary, the 15-year-old who said, ‘Let it be done unto me according to Thy Word.’ So her son having learned a good deal of this on her knee no doubt says, this is my life, you want to get out of Egypt, watch carefully. No more sermons, just this. Watch this – this is my life – you take it, give thanks for it, because it is not yours. Now take your life, receive it as a gift, give thanks because it is not yours – it’s a gift, and then you break it and give it away. And the ‘25 watts and dimming’ crowd are looking at each other asking, what did he say?

Jesus says, okay, I know you didn’t get it, I got a few more minutes here; let me go over this again. You see this? This is my life! This is what you people have been following me around for the last 3 years trying to get a piece of, now I am going to give you a piece of it. This is my life; this is what you want. If you want out of Egypt, this is how you do it. There is no other way out of Egypt. It is the most radical, the most costly, the most liberating thing there is. You receive your life as a gift – it does not belong to you – it’s on loan. And you give thanks for it. And the one who gave it to you wants it back, but he wants it back as a free gift. So you give thanks for it, then you break it, or let it be broken, and you give it away. And if you do these things you are inducted into this great mystery, we call the body of Christ. The incarnation is still happening. You and I have the privilege of being a tiny part of it. The major event of the incarnation is something we both celebrate and enter into at the Eucharist, over and over again. We receive the cup, we drink the cup that Jesus drank at his passion and we take upon ourselves this commitment to be the ones who stand into the breach so that sins might be forgiven. We learn that our life is not our own and that it can be broken and given away. In that we are set free and made happy in spite of whatever sufferings we might experience.

Flannery O’Connor was getting an award in New York one time and she had to get all gussied up from her farm in Georgia to go to this award banquet. It was all literary and religious people sitting around eating dinner, there was a conversation going on at her table about theological symbolism of the Eucharist, and Flannery O’Connor is just eating away not saying anything. After a while her silence became obvious and so one of the people who were particularly lively in the conversation turned to her and said to her, “Ms O’Connor, what do you think about the symbolism of the Eucharist?” She glared over the top of her glasses and said “If it is just a symbol, the hell with it.”

It is very important to remember Jesus didn’t say, ‘take this and figure it out.’ He said, ‘take it and eat it.’ There is a huge mystery in the Eucharist, but it is I think, the mystery of our induction into the body of Christ - into the communion of saints – into the work of Christ in history.

So Jesus says, ‘take this and eat it, this is my body. Take this and drink it, this is my blood.’ People thought that the early Christians were cannibals, but it is interesting, the first sacrifice in anthropological terms, was almost certainly cannibalistic. We don’t need to get into that at this time, but there is something amazing about the Eucharist in that it harks back, in some prime mortal way, to the most primitive human event, the founding of primitive religion in sacrifice and cannibalism. In addition, it prefigures the final culminating event of human history, which is the messianic banquet.

So we have this piece of furniture, and we don’t know quite what to call it anymore, we call it an altar and then sometimes we call it a table, what is it? It must always be both. It is a table that used to be an altar. It is an altar up until the veil of the temple is rent from top to bottom. But we must never forget that it is a sacrificial altar – that there is no alternative to sacrifice. The only question is what kind of sacrifice is it going to be? In Jesus’ re-interpretation of it all, it is the anticipation of the messianic banquet and the induction of us all into the body of Christ. So this piece of furniture and the ritual we celebrate around it is absolutely at the throbbing heart of the Christian mystery. This piece of furniture is like the wardrobe in Narnia – you Episcopalians will always know Narnia better than any other denomination – it’s the wardrobe in Narnia where you enter into the story – the real story – where the story becomes vivid.

For much of my presentation so far I have talked about story, recovering the story in scriptural terms, and of course we have to do that. But there is this place where we actually enter the story. We don’t just learn the story, and say the story, but we become actors in the story; we begin to perform the story. And I don’t think we should be too self-conscious about that kind of language. Refer to the unbelievable central passage from Paul, “I live now not I, but Christ lives in me.” We have to take that at face value. One has to say about that what Flannery O’Connor said about the Eucharist, if it is just a symbol, the hell with it. It is not just a symbol. Christians are here to be incorporated into the work of Christ in history.

Jesus never claimed to be operating on his own. He even says in John’s Gospel, “If I had come in my own name you would believe me, but because I have come in the name of the one who has sent me you don’t believe.” We are asked to be like that. We are asked to re-present Christ to the world. To be actors in the great drama – like von Balthasar’s ‘Theo-drama’, a magnificent orchestration of the grandeur of the Christian drama in history - and so the language of drama is appropriate – and the language of re-presenting it to the world in however way, even though we are all clay vessels, we are all clumsy, we’re all fallen and sinful, we don’t do a very good job of it, despite our clumsiness God knows how to use leftovers and misfits – in fact our clumsiness is part of it, our failures to do it are part of it.

We are called; we are incorporated; we are deputized to receive into our lives - personally and with our communion with one another - the spirit of Christ, and to step into the world and absorb all the anxieties, uncertainty and the confusion and be part of the light of Christ in the world. Having had the rug pulled out from under us as Jesus has done, without our stepping up as Christ-links, the world is going to go to hell in a hand basket. And we see that happening in many parts of the world today.

Jesus says take this cup, which is the cup of suffering. We don’t have to be melodramatic about it; there is suffering in our lives. The suffering that I should understand as redemptive is my suffering. The sufferings that I see other people undergoing I should not think that I am going to take it away, I won’t be able to, but I can be present with them in that suffering so they can feel that they are not alone in that suffering and perhaps feel the truth of the situation which is always, always, always that Christ is in it with them. They may not be able to experience that unless they know that I am in it with them. That may be their only entrée to the discovery that Christ is in it with them. Being in that suffering with others, and of course, that sometimes means helping to relieve the suffering, is our responsibility. Mother Teresa once answered a journalist’s comment, “…but you’re not suffering.” She said, “I am not worthy.” So all of us in this room have suffered, and some of us a great deal, but those who have suffered the most are worthy of it. And those of us who have suffered less must have admiration for those, and we must try to be there so they can feel God’s present.

We are called to bring forgiveness into the world, being there with people who are suffering from their own unforgivenness and being simply an agent in the presence of whom people can begin to feel forgiveness. Forgiveness is a great mystery; it is not some sanctimonious thing that somebody who has it gives to somebody else. It is a spirit that infects us – it always has an infecting agent. There is always somebody who brings it in and introduces it into a situation of unforgivenness, and it is our Eucharistic responsibility to be about that business. In order to be able to be about such business, we have to experience the kenosis (meaning: a self-emptying) of Christian discipleship. So we take our lives, and this is our supreme privilege, we must not see this as some kind of melodramatic act of renunciation, it is the source of our freedom, to take our lives, thank God for them because it is a gift to us, and break them or let them be broken and give them away. And then, Jesus says, “do THIS in memory of me.” Do what? Do this in memory of me. Not just the gesture, of course we do the gesture; of course the Real Presence, but when Jesus says, do THIS, He is talking of something much more vast then that. He means doing that which the gesture represents – being Christ in the world.

I will give you a treat; in my presentations to high school students I tell them a poem by Rumi, a 13th century Sufi. The poem goes like this:

Be like one, who when he walks into the room, luck shifts to the one who needs it.
Be like one, who when she walks into the room, luck shifts to the one who needs it. I usually say it 10 times because it is easy to remember if you have heard it 10 times. Then I retranslate it.
Be like one, who when he walks into the room, the one left out feels less lonely.

I think that is what drinking the cup is all about, so that sins might be forgiven; so that the knot might be broken; so that the animosity might be absorbed or dispersed; so that the healing and forgiveness might be brought into this situation where unforgivenness is about to get the upper hand. Be like one, who when she walks into the room, the one left out feels less lonely.

It is at the Eucharistic table that we receive this gift and are nourished for the journey to go back out into the world and be Eucharistic people, be Christ to the world, absorbing that unforgivenness and being people who are not there on their own, but rather people who are saying with Paul, I live now not I, but Christ lives in me.

Then there is a little passage of a book on Revelation by William Riley, Irish Biblical scholar who passed away a few years ago that I would like to leave you with. He has a wonderful way of helping understand our work in the church and it also comes out of our Eucharist mandate. He says that Christ often calls us to failure, not success just as He Himself was called to the Cross. “The marvelous religion teacher, the hard working bishop who manages his diocese well, the mother of a family strongly rooted in the faith have done no more works than the dedicated religion teacher whose classroom is like a drudgery, or the zealous and caring bishop whose administration is constantly criticized or the loving mother whose family, despite her efforts, have all abandoned the Church. In many ways the last three have received a higher calling.” Isn’t that amazing? We are called to move into that place of brokenness and to take up our cross. And to do it in such a way that the world hears the cock crow, and that the world feels the forgiveness of God. And that the world recognizes that we are not doing it on our own, or that we are not doing it because we are nice, or morally superior. We are doing it because Christ has laid His Hand on us.

This is the end of the talk.
The following are from the question and answer period after the talk.

Q: The difference between suffering and pain is a matter of choice. Pain is not choice; you are inflicted in some way. Suffering implies a choice. Can you elaborate on this?

Gil: Pain is something that happens to you and that suffering is a choice when you say yes to it. This is something on Christian redemptive suffering. We have so much to learn from so many people of different faiths. I was in dialogue a few months ago in Milwaukee with the Tibetan monk that taught the Dali Lama, it was a great privilege to be in this man’s presence. It was Christian – Buddhist dialogue, which is mostly an exercise in politeness, but we did have dinner together so we did get a little beyond it there. One of the things one has to realize is some of the essential differences we have. The Buddha was trying to avoid suffering by withdrawing desire by essentially, and I know this is a clumsy way to put it, by sequestering desire, by closing it down somehow. The Buddhist recognizes that the problem is desire that is very good, so do we Christians, or at least we should or we used to before we threw Augustine out. But for Christians it is not to shut down desire and it is not to avoid suffering. For Christians it is to awaken desire and turn it toward its proper object. Turn it away from all the fancy glitter things that distract us toward God. And because we humans need to see the face of God, we absolutely needed the incarnation. Jesus gives us that incarnation so that our desires, and we are not talking about the goofy kinds of raw desires, but our longing, like metal filings can be re-oriented in the right way, so that our desire is awakened. This is what Dante is all about, awakening that desires and turning it to all kinds of mediators: Beatrice, the Beloved, Sister Immaculate, John of the Cross, whoever it is, awakened by all kinds of mediators and directed back to its true source. Augustine starts the Confessions with the first paragraph he ends it with, “We are restless until we rest in Thy.” We take that restlessness which is our desire, we don’t try to shut it down, we turn it toward its proper object and we understand that suffering can be redemptive. That is really powerful. When you recognize that this can be redemptive, not just for me, because if it is for me than it goes back to this little project of me getting into heaven, elbowing my way in. But my suffering can be redemptive to somebody on the other side of the planet – to somebody in another age. And this is what prayer can do. We have to believe these things because they are true. We use to have as little Catholic children in the playground we would say prayers or we would offer up our suffering to the poor souls in purgatory, which now today everyone has a little condescending smirk, but it is absolutely true. Our suffering can be redemptive not just for us, but maybe not primarily for us, but for others. It is a great gift and once you recognize that, suddenly this pain has dignity and vocation.

Q: Can you talk about the mechanism of violence and anthropology?

Gil: When the 19th century anthropologist went out, by the way I am talking anthropology – I have a definition of anthropology that I haven’t told you yet. Anthropology is the study of cultures by people who no longer have one.  And you will notice that it was invented by the west about 200 or rather 150 years ago. Somebody once said about poetry; don’t write a poem unless you have to and you could say the same thing about anthropology. Don’t invent the science of anthropology unless you have to. We had to about 150 years ago. And the first anthropologists went out and started studying these other cultures and they came back with all sorts of data and they sorted through it and they said ah-ha! All over the place, wherever you look we have these dying and rising gods. We have these stories that are very interesting. There is a crisis; and there is a death; and there is reconciliation or a resolution or some kind of resurrection. They were all Enlightenment people so that means they didn’t know squat about religion, so they had this insight – the insight was Christianity was just another myth. And that idea was so radical at first that only the academics talked about it. That was before academics became famous and had press conferences. Then it trickled out and people started studying these things and it comes into the modern times, and I don’t want to scapegoat because I have read these people and gleaned a lot from their work, but Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell and all those people for whom Christianity is just another dying and rising myth. Gradually that language seeps into the church. Only in the last 30 years have we Christians started talking that way; unbelievable that we would talk that way.

Okay, anthropologists said that Christianity is just another myth because it is exactly the same thing as what they discovered all over the world. And we Christians said, no, no, it is not the same thing - ours is different. Oh yea, the anthropologists asked, how is it different? Well,..., ah,…, ah,…, well, you see, nails hurt more or something like that. We tried to account for it in whatever way or we fled the scene. René Girard said, NO. You have to begin there. You have to say YES, you are right. If you want to recover Christianity’s universality, you don’t flee from that revelation you a firm it. Yes of course it is structurally identical to all of that. It had to be: it has it be, because all of that is a telling of the story that is false. All of that tells you the story from the point of view of the victimizing community. You get the crisis; you get the death; and you get reconciliation, but you never get the innocence of the victim, NEVER. Christianity presents something that is structurally identical and reverses the whole valence by creating a community of people who come together because they have heard the cock crow; they have seen the innocence of the victim; the scales have fallen from their eyes; they have seen the idolatry of the world and they have begun to see the face of the living God. So it has to be the same. And this is what I was trying to say earlier, when the world says no, we don’t counter that with some kind of over-against: yes, yes, yes – no, no, no like some chant in the school yard. We go deeper into the mystery until we can bring up an affirmation that brings in that negation that can affirm that negation itself, which is exactly what happened in this example of Girard saying yes, it is the same.

Banished from Eden - Raymund Schwager - Chapter 4

2007-08-31T15:30:00.002-05:00

Banished from Eden
Original Sin and Evolutionary Theory in the Drama of Salvation
By Raymund Schwager, SJ

Chapter 4
Human Self-Reflection and Universal Responsibility

The doctrine of original sin must be based essentially on the Bible and church tradition. However, the reception and understanding of a Christian doctrine in a given period depends to a considerable degree on how it is related to the world view that is dominant during that period. Is the doctrine’s deeper structure compatible with that world view? Does it function as a constructive challenge, or does it merely appear as a vestige of an earlier, outmoded world view? In view of these problems we have attempted in the preceding chapters to engage in a thorough exploration of a new understanding of imitation (mimesis), of evolutionary theory and of questions associated with procreation. Already in the introduction, however, we saw that the essential difficulties with the doctrine of original sin, which began with the Enlightenment long before Darwin, originate in the ‘dogma’ of modernity (Latour) that holds that nature and freedom (history, social order) must be separated. Since this separation has again become problematic in light of the most recent research, we deliberately left the question open as to whether and how far we could follow that theory or ‘dogma’ of modernity. In the preceding chapters a clear answer has emerged, which I want to summarize and then proceed to make it more precise through an explicit series of reflections on the connection between evolutionary theory and the ‘dogma’ of modernity.

The Organism as Memory

The theory of evolution initially made accepting the idea of a first human couple being responsible for the whole history of human sin seem implausible for many. However, the same theory also indirectly had another and quite different effect, namely that the Enlightenment separation of the eternal truths of reason and the contingent truths of history was rendered problematic and out of date. According to evolutionary theory, accidental events may permanently imprint an organism and enter in to its structure or into its ‘essence’. Evolutionary theorists speak therefore of 'frozen accidents’. Out of this background every organism can be understood as a living memory, which preserves countless accidents, bifurcations or ‘decisions’ in the course of cosmic and biological evolution and passes them on. Accidents presuppose, of course, a common structure for which the contingent event is either meaningful or meaningless or harmful. Conversely, however, the accident can also change common structures and make a determinative imprint on them for the future. The universal or the structure on the one hand and the particular or the accidental on the other hand are therefore not separate realities, but both are bound together by a ‘tangled hierarchy’ (Dupuy).

Not only the body and its functions should be seen as a living memory but also the spontaneous reactions and forms of behavior of animals. Even normal dispositions of our conscious human behavior turn out to be ‘remembrances’ that were imprinted by earlier stages or accidental occurrences in the evolution of the organism. Of course, these traces of earlier occurrences are not stored up and transmitted in a conscious way, but in the gene pool. They show how particular events can enter into the nature of an individual.

If the organism is understood in light of the evolutionary theory as living memory, there are few objections against the Christian doctrine of original sin from this point of view. If it is part and parcel of evolution that individual events are preserved and transmitted, it is not implausible any more that negative decisions from the beginning of human life are being passed on until today. Certainly there is an essential difference between those many ‘decisions’ within evolution which directly affected the gene pool and moral decisions at the beginning of humanity. For this reason we have attempted to show, on the one hand, that moral decisions could have had at least a long-term effect on the gene pool; on the other hand, we have explicitly dealt with the question of freedom and the supernatural calling of all humans in connection with the theory of evolution. Thus the doctrine of original sin, in spite of its obvious peculiarity, enters into a positive resonance with the evolutionary world view, for it posits that events long past continue to have effects as an enduring heritage in us. Whether we are dealing with more than a resonance depends of course on whether the hereditary transmission that affects the gene pool can be brought into an inner connection with the imitation that influences behavior.

Propagation and Imitation

The Council of Trent says of original sin that it is transmitted through propagation (procreation) and not through imitation. The continued effect of negative behavior through imitation is easily accessible to modern thinking. Yet the inheritance of a moral quality is scarcely accepted. Due to the modern separation of freedom (sin) and nature (propagation), this idea could only be seen as a mythological amalgamation of categories that have nothing to do with one another. But this suspicion of mythology at work was gradually rendered questionable in the course of our investigations. According to Girard, deeper imitation precedes reflective knowledge and it absorbs the influence of models in 'quasi-osmotic immediacy'. This biological metaphor for the description of imitation or mimesis indicates that the latter is deeply rooted in nature and should not be seen in opposition to it. Tomatis shows further that imitation begins already in the mother’s womb. The influences the fetus absorbs from its mother affect its further growth and especially the development of its brain. This influence begins already at conception. Finally, genetics shows that conception is only possible because the male and female gametic cells create copies or imitations of themselves, which can then fuse, and also growth ensues through a continuous copying or imitation of information in the fertilized ovum.

From conception, through growth under absorption of sensuous impressions, to imitation of moral acts, there is thus a continuous process. Imitation is completely grounded in natural processes and nature proves to be a communicative development from the very beginning, a development which gradually opens up to freedom. Procreation and imitation should therefore no longer be played off against one another. Yet, the question of freedom requires further clarification.

Freedom and Preset Nature

Christian tradition has always understood man as a creature of freedom, even if the Augustinian doctrine of predestination made the Western understanding of freedom problematic in part. But the concrete possibilities of action were very limited because freedom was perceived in the context of an order which was preset by an unalterable human and extra-human nature, which was in its turn grounded in the free creative will of God. In accord with this view, one usually also regarded social institutions as previously given by nature and thus as directly or indirectly given by God.

Within western history the struggle between Caesar and pope in part brought the preset order into question. The long-standing crisis between Church and political authority made the Reformation possible, which caused a deep rift in western society. This opened new ways in which the natural sciences and Enlightenment thinking could originate and gradually develop. The theoretical separation between body and soul (Descartes), and somewhat later between nature and freedom, untied thought on freedom from the bonds of nature for the first time, and at the same time turned nature into an object that could be manipulated at will. This development initially had consequences primarily in the social realm. In place of trust in the political authorities established by God, the idea of self-determination by the peoples (democracy) appeared, and in the toil of work one saw no longer a punishment decreed by God for original sin (see Genesis 3:17-19), but the possibility for the self-realization of one’s own life and for the improvement of mankind’s future (Marx). Progress in science and technology finally led to the gradual substitution of machines for many forms of human labor and to new forms of worldwide communication. In this way expanded windows of opportunity and previously unknown possibilities of creative action were developed.

However, the devices humans produced (machines) exerted feedback effects on them in complex ways. People imitated these as new models in their thinking and began to conceive of the human body according to the model of machines. So humans were no longer simply conducting research but they became the object of investigation and manipulation. The effects of research on humans appear most clearly in the increasing possibilities for changing one’s nature through genetic manipulation. There is now a direct connection between theoretical insights into evolution and the practical possibility of altering one’s genetic inheritance.

What humans earlier thought most definitely to be preset, the environment and their own bodies, turns out to be a product of a construction process in which they themselves can intervene, at least subsequently, and they can do this ever more strenuously. The preset is thus no longer untouchable, but becomes something provisional that can be formed and changed. To be sure, this possibility does not hold for every individual person, for whom most things remain simply given, now and in future. Yet it certainly holds for human society as a whole, which created these modern possibilities and pushes them continually further. In earlier times there used to be a dialectic between individual and society, but in the meantime a third reality has appeared, technology, in which many already see the decisive subject of history. Through technology nature is more and more integrated into the realm of human action, while men are molded according to the demands of the technological world. Already in our day there is talk of a ‘third Copernican revolution’, whose aim is not to make nature serve man but rather to adapt the human organism to a changed environment and social order. ‘The human person who has turned into a subject and who, as subject, developed the natural sciences for the mastery of the world has now become the changeable object of technology.’ The separation of nature and freedom was thus from the very start only a theoretical separation, which in reality led to a previously unknown interpenetration and fusing of nature and history and set in motion a process whose outcome we cannot yet perceive. We are thus within a ‘tangled hierarchy’ that is becoming ever more universal: on the one hand, humans form society and create technologies so as to master the processes of nature, while on the other these processes and technologies form and master their human ‘masters’ more and more. What used to be nature, increasingly becomes the objectification and materialization of free decisions, which in their turn are subject to the increasing coercion of processes imposing their own more powerful order.

The philosophical tradition of the western world has always seen human freedom in connection with the human ability to return to oneself (reditio in seipsum). This capacity remained, however, very formal because of the limits preset by nature. Karl Rahner, referring to modern thought and Christian experience, has expressly emphasized that freedom is not simply an external human capacity by which man can choose between different possibilities. To the contrary, freedom concerns his entire existence and is a ‘total and finalizing self-mastery of the subject’. It is ‘first of all “freedom of being”. It is not merely the quality of an act and capacity exercised at some time, but a transcendental mark of human existence itself.’ ‘By the fact that man in his transcendence exists as open and in-determined, he is at the same time responsible for himself. He is left to himself and placed in his own hands not only in his knowledge, but also in his actions. It is in being consigned to himself that he experiences himself as responsible and free.’ Rahner holds that this transcendental freedom has to execute itself through concrete objectifications throughout the full length and width of the space-time of historical existence. This occurs above all through humans taking an evaluative stance toward their own history of freedom by interpreting it and thereby endowing it with its final meaning. ‘Freedom always concerns the person as such and as a whole. The object of freedom in its original sense is the subject himself, and all decisions about objects in his experience of the world around him are objects of freedom only insofar as they mediate this finite subject in time and space to himself.’

Rahner developed his doctrine of freedom chiefly in light of Christ’s total surrender of his life and in regard to the Christian task of deciding about one’s own salvation or damnation. However, he also referred to the modern possibilities of self-manipulation: ‘What is new in this issue is therefore not that man is faber sui ipsius [maker of himself], but that this fundamental constitution of man is manifested historically today in a totally new way. Today for the first time man’s possibility of transcendental self-manipulation irreversibly takes on a clear and historically categorical form.’

The word self-manipulation could suggest that these modern possibilities should on principle be judged negatively. But if freedom is the total and finalizing self-mastery of the subject, then this can hardly be true. In fact, the modern possibilities of self-manipulation provide the anthropology of total self-determination with an empirical meaning. As long as the environment, other people, and one’s own body were understood as fixed and preset by nature, a strange distance remained between transcendent freedom in its openness to the absolute and the self’s concrete acts of execution by means of very limited objectifications. Only when much of the preset material could be understood as objectifications of prior history and prior instances of freedom, did self-mediation become more comprehensive; a complete self-mediation could then become conceivable when humans become able to take a stand toward their entire earlier history. Biological research is at present occupied with fully decoding the human genome, and in a few years it will have attained this goal. When this occurs, human nature will not only become more transparent, but it will become possible for humans to engage in a new way with their entire past. Everything that has been built up in the process of life over hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of years is opened up to their access. With the possibility of changing our inheritance from the past, new dimensions for the future also open up. Thus an immanent possibility of total self-determination emerges. Even if immense dangers are bound up with this potential self-determination, nonetheless the new possibilities and tasks are commensurate with the Christian understanding of freedom as total and finalizing self-mastery.

The newly accessible ranges of freedom were obviously not available to humans before, yet they were already addressed in a historical-symbolic fashion in the Jewish-Christian history of revelation. This occurred not only in the narration of original sin, but also through the eschatological-apocalyptic oracles of judgment and through Jesus’ unique surrender of himself for all of us in an apocalyptic context. The intention of the history of the fall in paradise was to make clear that phenomena such as oppression, the hardship of labor, and death, which earlier must have seemed naturally or mythically determined, must be judged differently from a biblical point of view: the apparently natural is to be interpreted as the consequence of prior human failure. Likewise the eschatological-apocalyptic oracles of judgment intended to establish a connection between human sins and the entire course of history, which to most men and peoples appeared to be determined by nature of fate. In the context of its own time the Bible could of course speak to this question only in a form of historical-symbolic metaphor and only for faith could it be understandable in some fashion.

However, the transformation processes that were meanwhile awakened in the world by the Christian message led gradually and through complex stages to the point where today the issue in question has become a concrete object of knowledge. We can now establish empirically that freedom and the human potential of transformation extends into areas previously thought to be predetermined. From this standpoint the doctrine of original sin is thus anything but an outdated concept. In fact it proves to be a fundamental, though largely symbolic emergence of a problem which only now has taken on an immediate empirical dimension. The preset, human and extra-human nature, is the product of an earlier history and earlier bifurcations, and present decisions will become what is preset for coming generations.

At the same time this insight makes it evident that freedom cannot be completely understood either from the standpoint of the isolated subject nor from that of the I-Thou relation, but must be seen in the context of human society and history in their entirety. This way all objectifications of freedom become preconditions for other free acts, which in turn are the preconditions for future decisions. The long and complex process of the self-construction of human nature and human society, which hitherto has proceeded unconsciously for the most part, has now become self-reflective. Individual self-reflection, accessible to earlier human individuals within certain limits, has developed into a comprehensive process of self-reflection, which can only be fulfilled by humanity as a whole and in view of its final destination.

Since the end indicates something about the beginning, one may infer from the contemporary and imminently foreseeable possibility of free intervention in our genetic inheritance that already, in the self-construction of this inheritance, there were potentials for bifurcations (accidents), and that these potentials became, on the first level of self-reflection, authentic freedom. A retroactive freedom, which is possible from a standpoint anticipating the end of history, consequently suggests openness in all evolution and an analogous freedom in the beginning of humanity. In this regard it makes sense that freedom in its radical form as total self-determination cannot be a matter pertaining just to the individual or any group, but is a task of all mankind. All individual attempts toward self-reflection and freedom must complement one another toward an all-embracing self-reflection in which humanity intervenes in its own nature and determines itself with regard to its future and final destination. Viewed in this way, the doctrine of original sin no longer comes across as an odd curiosity in today’s world. Together with the eschatological-apocalyptic oracles of judgment and the doctrine of the universal redemptive death of Christ it proves in fact to be the first and decisive articulation of that universal process of self-reflection and self-determination moving toward finality which now has become an empirical challenge and task. But if freedom is a universal process, it also becomes clear that each individual subject is more determined by the free acts of others than by his or her own self-determination. Freedom turns out also to be an affliction, something that the traditional doctrine of original sin has always known.

We are clearly not in a position to evaluate more precisely how far the already foreseeable possibilities of transformation or manipulation will actually extend into the future and how they will be used. The historical-symbolic narratives of the Bible certainly intimate significant possibilities, which should at least arouse us in these days to thought experiments in order to prepare ourselves for developments that could occur. In the book of Revelation the time up to the end is seen predominantly negatively and is described as an anti-Christian reign by means of two beasts. The first beast embodies political power, while the description of the second is that it has the appearance of a lamb but speaks like a dragon. It thus resembles the Church, the creature of the lamb, but it represents something quite different. The second animal serves the first one, erects an image for it, and possesses quite extraordinary powers: ‘It was then permitted to breathe life into the beast’s image, so that the beast’s image could speak and could have anyone who did not worship it put to death’ (Revelation 13:15). In this prophecy it is striking that the second beast not only pretends to possess miraculous power and so leads men astray, but it is actually able to breathe the breath of life into the dead image. It therefore has at its disposal quite extraordinary powers and imitates precisely what God did in the creation of the first humans (Genesis 2:7). How the biblical writer could come to the point of ascribing such powers to an idolatrous force may remain open for now. In the modern context, however, his prophetic utterance at least gives rise to the question of whether the sciences, with their instinctive quest to imitate the Creator, could in fact succeed in becoming the ‘creator’ in his stead. Looking from the standpoint of the Revelation of John we cannot, in any case, exclude this possibility from the outset. In this prophetic thought experiment the sciences should by no means be associated unilaterally with an anti-Christian regime. In an earlier chapter I considered as a hypothesis and thought experiment the quite different possibility that modern genetics might succeed in removing negative elements that had entered the genome through sin in the course of human evolution. The sciences appear to be an extremely two-edged sword that can lead to utterly new forms of both good and evil.

According to Revelation the anti-Christian character of the second beast consisted particularly in the fact that it would lead all inhabitants of the earth to worship the image of the first beast, and it kills all who don’t comply. If the sciences should one day succeed in creating life, evil would lie in the pressure humans felt to worship the work of their hands. They would hardly be able to see any longer that the power of the second beast finally comes from God.

What the sciences will be able to achieve in the near or distant future, we do not know precisely or at all. But from a biblical standpoint we cannot exclude the possibility that humans, by means of their self-transformation, will become able to intervene and penetrate more deeply into nature, as we can realistically foresee at the present time. Even the idea that humanity might one day encompass even what was formerly simply given, nature and the cosmos, and at least change its direction, may no longer be rejected a priori. The ‘dogma’ of the modernity, which would separate nature and human history and which so deeply influenced modern theology, thus loses any profound basis.

‘Evil’ in Evolution

The question of how one should judge evil in an evolutionary view of world greatly occupied Teilhard de Chardin, and he became convinced that the doctrine of original sin should be construed out of the background of the laws of evolution. Since evolution, in this view, strives gropingly from multiplicity in pursuit of unity, there are tendencies toward backslides that inevitably occur. ‘In such a system, which advances by tentative gropings, the laws of large numbers make it absolutely inevitable that every step towards order is paid for by failures, by disintegrations, by discordances: the proportion of these depends upon certain cosmic constants which it is impossible to determine, but to which it would certainly be useless to claim to fix a priori an upper limit beyond which one could say that the world was corrupted or evil.’

Modern knowledge of genetics has led still a step beyond what was available to Teilhard in his time. It shows that relapses and disintegration are not simply unavoidable. Errors in the reproduction of the genetic programme now prove even to be necessary for progress to occur: ‘The most perfect capability of replication is, however, its “only-almost-perfection”. Without imprecision, i.e., without accidental errors, any development would be impossible. Errors of replication and subsequent selection of “fitting” changes are the motor of the growth of organic patterns.’ Besides errors in genetic replication great catastrophes, such as those that killed off about half of all living beings 250 million years ago or that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, prove also to be important steps on the way toward human beings. It was every unfortunate for those immediately affected, but it had a positive effect in evolution.

This view is compatible with the Christian doctrine of creation and has great resonance with the doctrine of redemption. That is to say, if a free creature (human being) is to become possible, the world must fulfill a double condition. There must be great regularity in it so that the free creature can find its way and orient itself through the recurrence of similar or like experiences. The laws of the world must, however, have simultaneously a certain openness and indeterminacy. Though this may lead easily into accidents and catastrophes, it in turn makes possible real, free decisions on the part of the creature without a suspension of the laws of nature.

Modern insights which can be summarized by the catchword symbiogenesis furthermore show that not only accident was a motor of progress. Evolution also required a process of ‘unification’. Precursors of cells completely coalesced and so enabled genuine leaps in evolution, even if many unsolved problems still remain for us with regard to macro-evolution. Also, sexuality was quite significant, since through it distinctive genetic material was repeatedly fused and combined anew. Alongside accident, which tended in a destructive direction, there were consequently strong forces of unification at work in evolution. This does not simply refer to physical and chemical forces. Animals that mated, struggled for food or defended their territories always did this without thinking of their genes or the corresponding chemical reactions. They reacted in this way because they were governed by corresponding drives. Drives were thus a decisive force in evolution. If animals were only physical-chemical machines, it would have been all the same to them whether they were dismembered (became extinct) or not. An evolution of life can only exist where there is also a drive to live, as seen in the behavior of animals that fight for their existence and survival. Where, however, self-assertive drives are at work, interaction necessarily comes about: cooperation, competition, and fighting. Life in the animal realm offers precisely this picture: besides forms of complex cooperation there is a continual struggle for survival. This is especially clear among those animals that are closest to us humans. So it is that among certain species of apes sexuality serves not merely for reproduction, but also for lessening of conflict, indeed for ‘reconciliation’. In the same vein we find here precursors of human battle which means that fighting not only a matter of momentary self-defense but of long-term ‘planned’ destructive action against enemy groups.

For our immediate sensitivity, the natural struggle for life can seem brutal and totally ‘evil’. But against this negative impression one has to consider first of all, that the struggle for life itself has a goal and serves the function of self-control. Moreover, besides the struggle there are likewise forms of cooperation which are even more numerous. Above all, however, the problem appears in a completely different light if we look again at nature from the standpoint of human freedom. Freedom – understood as possibility of choice – presupposes, as we have already seen a dimension of openness and accident in pre-human nature, and thus also the possibility of negative developments. Self-determination (freedom of being) belongs also to freedom in a deeper sense, and in nature this corresponds to (evolutionary) self-development. The concrete expression of this self-development is the life-drive with its manifold forms of cooperation and struggle. If the image of the watchmaker does not dominate our understanding of creation, but rather the image of a true creator who through continuous influence confers on the creature the ability to own his own being and engage in his own actions and self-development, then the deeper meaning of the life-drive becomes clear. It turns out then to be the necessary precondition and the root out of which freedom may develop.

We have already mentioned that Teilhard wanted to understand original sin in light of an evolution that proceeded groping and struggling. In dependence on ecclesial tradition he designated relapses within evolution as ‘the tinder of sin’ (fomes peccati) or as the provocation to sin, and in this connection he interpreted original sin as the actualization of the sparking of this tinder: ‘The specifically human Fall is no more than the (broadly speaking, collective and eternal) actualizing of this ‘fomes peccati’ which was infused, long before us, into the whole of the universe, from the lowest zones of matter to the angelic spheres.’

Now if the actual sparking of this tinder of sin had been ‘absolutely inevitable’ in the human realm, as a quotation of Teilhard we referred to earlier could suggest, speaking of true freedom, and thus also of sin, would be invalid. Yet since it is this very freedom that endows the life-struggle in nature with a deeper meaning, such a conclusion would destroy any explanation for the hardship within evolution. If, on the contrary, the destructive tendencies within evolution are understood only as a stimulus of sin, and if original sin is interpreted in this frame of reference, then both the specific character of sin is preserved and its rootage in pre-human evolution is clearly seen. From this point of view we also realize that the concept of original sin is anything but an exotic idea. It, in fact, enables us to conjoin antithetical aspects of our contemporary world view and experience. On the one hand it maintains the concern for freedom and just in that way lends deeper meaning to the evolutionary world view. On the other hand it explains why forms of behavior we feel are evil in the animal realm can reappear among us humans in sharpened form: in the animal realm they are actually natural, but in the human realm they are evil precisely because they have their origin in freedom as well. They may not be minimized or excused because of our animal past.

Universal Responsibility and Redemption

The concept of solidarity is a central element in modern humanistic and ethical thought. This concern already took a particularly radical and universal turn in The Brothers Karamazov by F.M. Dostoevsky. In this work the seventeen-year-old, severely ill Markel, brother of the Elder Zosima, finds life to be like paradise in spite of a burning fever. He says to his mother, ‘Mother darling … there must be servants and masters, but if so I will be the servant of my servants, the same as they are to me. And another thing, mother, every one of us is guilty toward all men, and I more than any.’ His mother asks how he could have sinned against all men. Markel answers, ‘Mother, little heart of mine … my joy, believe me, every one is responsible to all men for all men and for everything. I don’t know how to explain it to you, but I feel it is so, painfully even. And how is it we went on living, getting angry and not knowing?’ E. Levinas has often cited the sentence, ‘Every one is guilty toward all men, and I more than any’, and he sees in it a central element of his own ethical philosophy. Starting from a radical personalist thinking, Levinas advocates an ‘ethics of heteronomy that is not a servitude, but the service of God through responsibility for the neighbor, in which I am irreplaceable’. The true I is ‘the one who, before all decision, is elected to bear all the responsibility for the world’.

This view is relevant to our reflections on original sin and redemption insofar as it poses the question of freedom. Here we are not dealing with an isolated and so-called ‘autonomous’ subject, but one understood in the framework of all humanity and thus in the context of universal responsibility. However, a perspective such as this is not at all self-evident today, and the concept of a universal partaking in guilt and responsibility must face up to a massive challenge. The largely dominant thought about system thinking and the naturalistic positions that wish to interpret life solely as a matter of physical and chemical processes scarcely allow a place for true solidarity. Moreover the multifaceted experiences of the autonomous workings of the modern world give rise to the impression tat human society has become transformed into a huge machine. It is no longer free decisions that seem to determine the world, but constraints of the system.

Against this tendency of thought and feeling, it may be objected of course that it is precisely a new development within the ‘world-machine’ which again raises the question of responsibility. Modern society has – in multiple ways – created the possibility of self-destruction and thus has placed the most urgently vital alternative before mankind. In view of this overwhelming fact that is evident to everybody who wants to be well informed, human beings can scarcely assert with conviction that they have no responsibility. Rather the question must be raised in the opposite way: is the responsibility facing them not too great, so that it demands too much of them? Levinas’ ethical philosophy brings up exactly the same question. How can the human being actually bear responsibility for the whole world without breaking down under an unbearable burden?

H. M. Enzensberger grants a central place to this question in his study Aussichten auf den Burgerkrieg (Views on Civil War). He describes how modern mass media confront us daily with so much misery, injustice, and violence in the world that we are no longer able to truly expose ourselves to all these impressions but must protect ourselves inwardly. He therefore draws the conclusion that there is no longer any infinity universal claim upon us. The idea of a universal responsibility would only make sense if conjoined with the idea of being all-powerful like God. But this would be pathological arrogance. For him it is therefore time ‘to take leave of moralistic fantasies of omnipotence’ and to familiarize ourselves with the concept of limited responsibility.

Enzensberger’s enquiry should be taken seriously, for the narrative of the fall in paradise shows that the attempt to be like God actually belongs to the core of the story of sin. Since this attempt, as we saw in the previous chapter, does not have to appear directly at the forefront, it can easily be concealed behind a pious or high ethical demand. Isn’t the idea of universal responsibility just such a deception? Isn’t this the appearance of a high ethic that covertly claims the status of being like God?

Before we proceed further into this question, we must briefly consider whether the same temptation occurs today in other ways. Nietzsche posed this question in his usually brilliant and simultaneously naive manner with brutal frankness. In Thus Spole Zarathustra he has his hero speak to his friends: ‘But to reveal my heart entirely to you, my friends: if there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god! Therefore there are no gods.’ It would be unbearable not to be the highest or greatest. There must be nothing beyond man. Instead, the latter becomes the new creator, and so he must have the heart to create the ‘Overman’: ‘Once you said “God” when you gazed upon distant seas; but now I have taught you to say Overman. / God is a supposition; but I want your supposing to reach no further than your creating will. / Could you create a god?- So be silent about all gods! But you could surely create the Overman. / Perhaps not you yourselves, my brothers! But you could transform yourselves into forefathers and ancestors of the Overman: and let this be your finest creating.’

The departure of God led in Nietzsche’s poetic fantasy to the human being who is creative creator. Doesn’t an actual feature of our social order today correspond to this dream from the nineteenth century? Though the social order will hardly attempt to create the Overman in a straightforward fashion, it certainly intends more and more to improve man, as he has been so far, through conscious interventions. We have already seen that modern society is self-reflective. It more and more stamps and forms its own members and not merely on the cultural place, for it even interferes in their very organisms. Admittedly people today – to use again Nietzsche’s language – are certainly only the ‘parents and forebears’ of man to come. If, however, science should succeed in creating artificial life, which on the basis of the Bible cannot be excluded a priori – as we have seen – wouldn’t men understand themselves as the true alternative to the creative divine will? Would the creative will of the humankind that had become the Overman not take the place of the former Creator God?

The most profound problem is that we don’t stand before coarse alternatives, but before distinct possibilities which – on the surface – are very close to one another, yet in actuality lie worlds apart and thus call for a very subtle and spiritual gift of discernment. In the light of evolution, especially in the light of the radical mandate of freedom contained in the Christian message, one cannot reject out of hand the tendency of humans to re-make themselves and to assume a new attitude toward evolution and cannot judge it as sheer mimicry of the creative work of God and as satanic. But at the same time we cannot overlook the fact that the self-reflective process of modern society imitates man in particular, insofar as he is a physical-chemical organism. So this tendency inclines more and more toward substituting the living person, this feeling, suffering, rejoicing, and therefore incalculable creature, for another that is more controllable and thus more predictable. This being would perhaps blend in even better with the (ant colony) state, but this means it would have largely lost its spiritual dimension. So today we face not only the possibility that humanity is brutally annihilating itself, but we also see a tendency emerging that humans would do away with themselves in a much more subtle and ‘peaceful’ manner: by transforming themselves and worshipping this process as a divine creation.

Since we now recognize such tendencies, they summon us to a correspondingly great responsibility. With that we have, however, arrived where our reflections already were. The problem has only got worse through the new sphere of questions. Humans are, on one hand, challenged to a universal responsibility for themselves and the future, while on the other hand they seem completely overwhelmed by this responsibility. We face a dilemma, though not a hopeless one. The new dilemma corresponds precisely to the one that Anselm of Canterbury already pointed out nearly a thousand years ago in his doctrine of redemption (Cur dues homo). Starting from cultural and religious concepts of his time, he advanced through different stages of deepening thought to a radical concept of freedom in which he emphasized human dignity and defined freedom as the mandate ‘to act out of oneself’. This resulted in the conclusion that humans themselves must rectify the evil that they perpetrated through sin, but at the same time they are unable to do so. However, Anselm did not stop at the dilemma, but he drove his conclusions relentlessly further. Regarding this impossible obligation human beings must either despair or there must be a God-Man who as human does what humans must do and also, as God, is able to do it. We are compelled to an analogous conclusion today. If we do not intend to despair and become inwardly resigned because of the magnitude of the problem, we have to hope for deliverance.

Already in the preceding chapter theological arguments led us to the conclusion that the problem of sin can only be adequately comprehended by looking back on it from the salvation in Chris, the overcoming of sin. Now the secular problem of modern society has led us to a similar result. As long as we approach the problem of evil solely from our human perspective we get lost in a world of contradictions. Problems and challenges appear before our eyes, and we immediately see that we will never be equal to them. The orientation and trust in the meaningfulness of our lives can be sustained only if we are allowed to place our hope in redemption.

But how is redemption to be understood with respect to the problem as sketched? Since modern society has become self-reflective to a radical extent and since the most pressing problems appear in this context, redemption too must be understood as self-reflective in some manner or the other. Only in this way will it have healing effect in the ‘wounds’ of modern society. A dramatic soteriology would probably do justice to this challenge. It would highlight first of all that the biblical history of salvation began with an orientation toward those fruits of salvation that were likewise important in an analogous fashion in the animal realm. Just as territory and progeny largely determine behavior there, so the covenant of God with Abraham begins with the promise of land and descendants. From this point of departure a dramatic history proceeds gradually through ever new experiences and disappointments to a radical transformation of the original idea of God and so also to a new understanding of the original promise. From a later standpoint the beginning takes on a completely new meaning. Within this process of transformation and self-reference Jesus himself initiated a self-reflective process with his proclamation of the nearness of God’s reign. What he initiated through his message was soon out of his hands. It developed effects on its own power and soon its reverse effects hit him with their full weight. But this reaction did not throw Jesus off his course. He used this very massive and violent backlash to live out the ultimate consequences of his own message. He gave himself nonviolently for those he sought to win, though they collectively expelled him. The only means still at his disposal was that in dying he entrusted his case to the heavenly Father and Judge in whom he had placed his hope from the beginning. The Father did not, in spite of Jesus’ experience of abandonment, leave him to his fate, but awakened him to new life and elevated him to his right hand. Together they sent that Spirit who continued to the work begun on earth and who at the same time retroactively clarified that Jesus’ entire work of salvation, indeed the whole creation, had begun in the power of this Spirit.

Faith in a redemption understood in this way liberates us first of all from desperate attempts, bound up with fantasies of omnipotence, to find a simple recipe enabling us to get a better grip on the enormous problem of modern society. Living out of this faith, it suffices to build our trust – in the discipleship of Jesus – on the nearness of the true God, to keep track of the world process with spiritual discernment, and in doing so to trust that faith itself will initiate its own process affecting the world. It may well be that something important might get out of control, have a contagious effect, backfire on us, and once more destroy positive beginnings. But if the beginning is actually the result of faith in the God who is near, we may hope that this God will awaken new life out of the collapse of our efforts and through his Spirit establish once again beginnings that we cannot foresee. So on the one hand, much of the world process can be integrated anew into the community of faith thanks to the profound guidance of the divine Spirit, and the negative autonomy of the world can at least be broken up piecemeal. If anti-Christian tendencies nevertheless dominate the world and the apocalyptic beasts still largely prevail, which is quite possible, then there is still the hope that godless regimes will destroy themselves in the long run. Above all, however, we know in faith that true and complete salvation is promised to us only through death, as Jesus’ way shows us, as eternal life with God. Salvation in a Christian sense can only be expected in passing through mortal conflicts.

The ‘we’ of which I have just spoken is the community of believers in Christ, the Church (and the churches). It is called to understand itself as an alternative community, and as such it must not be conformed to the autonomy of this world. The community of Christ only remains true to its vocation and meaning as long as it publicly presents a clear alternative, and at the same time avoids false conflicts. Since the self-reflective process of modern society, which reaches deeply into nature and the human organism, may not be judged negatively by the Christian doctrines of creation and redemption, we can no longer deduce ultimate norms for those trusting in the God who is near from a Nature which is preset and ostensibly eternally the same.

Natural justice has not become questionable simply due to social changes. Nature itself has been drawn into the comprehensive process of creative self-construction, as God intended regarding his free creatures, and so it is subjected to change. The norms of the alternative community can consequently be only those given us in the biblical revelation. The directives of the Sermon on the Mount seem to be crucial, for they sketch the new life in the imminent reign of God and thus in the alternative community. This goal, however, is always by far, indeed decisively, ahead of the way of life that the concrete ecclesial community is able to live out. The Sermon on the Mount is both goal and critique of what is actually lived and can be lived out in a Christian way of life. Therefore it spurs on the church community, not to fall back on past experiences so as to set itself against the forward-pushing, self-reflective process of human society, but to lay hold of the forward-looking possibilities of the kingdom of God so as to engage in critical discussion with ever new experiences in world society.

In the reciprocal process by which the community of believers builds itself up we have t discover the basic tenets of the Sermon on the Mount ever anew, understand them more precisely, and experience them as enhancing our life. Only out of such experience can we evaluate in each case what is reasonable for the faithful in a given situation and what exceeds their powers. The experience of powerlessness is and remains essential to Christian life. It alone preserves the community of believers from pride and enables them to know existentially that they are dependent of God’s guidance in all things. It gives them clear knowledge that they themselves, as long as they live on the earth, continue to need redemption.

To surrender means to offer him my free will, my reason, my own life in pure faith.

2007-08-19T11:10:00.000-05:00

tip to Doctors of the Catholic Church and Magnificat

I want you all to fill your hearts with great love. Don’t imagine that love, to be true and burning , must be extraordinary. No; what we need in our love is the continuous desire to love the One we love. To possess God we must allow him to possess our souls. How poor we would be if God had not given us the power of giving ourselves to him; how rich we are now!

How easy it is to conquer God! If we give ourselves to him, then God is ours, and there can be nothing more ours than God. The money with which God repays our surrender is himself. We become worthy of possessing him when we abandon ourselves completely to him.

Total surrender consists in giving ourselves completely to God. We must give ourselves fully to God because God has given himself to us. If God owes nothing to us and is ready to impart to us no less than himself, shall we answer with just a fraction of ourselves? Should we not rather give ourselves fully to God as a means of receiving: God himself? I for God and God for me. I live for God and give up my own self, and in this way God lives for me.

To surrender means to offer him my free will, my reason, my own life in pure faith. My soul may be in darkness. Trial and suffering are the surest test of my blind surrender. Surrender is also true love. The more we surrender, the more we love God and souls. If we really love souls, we must be ready to take their place, to take their sins upon us and expiate them in us by penance and continual mortification. We must be living holocausts, for the souls need us as such.

Blessed Teresa of Calcutta (+ 1997 ) won the Nobel Peace Prize and founded the Missionaries of Charity.

St. Maximilian Kolbe, Martyr of Charity

2007-08-17T13:23:00.000-05:00

Feast Day - August 14th.

Click here to see more on St. Maximilian Kolbe

The Gift of Self - Gil Bailie -- tape 4 excerpts

2007-07-31T15:58:00.000-05:00

The Gift of Self by Gil Bailie tape 4

For more than 500 years, Western culture has been wrestling with how to retain the moral, social, cultural, scientific and intellectual by-products of the biblical tradition while sidestepping the 2 earth-shaking revelations that are at the heart of the New Testament and that are ultimately responsible for all the beneficial side-products. These 2 revelations are:

1) the sacrificial nature of all human institutions, culture and religion and
2) the mimetic nature of human subjectivity.

To the extent that these 2 revelations surface almost everything that is familiar to us socially and psychologically is called into question and is destabilized. The remarkable thing is that the New Testament writers had very strong intuitions in this respect. They saw that the Gospel was going to have an amazingly destabilizing effect and it was going to unleash forces toward which we would have to exercise an enormous responsibility if we were to avoid catastrophe.

So we are in the mist of a cultural crisis – a cultural crisis not just another cultural crisis but a crisis of culture itself. This crisis is irreversible because our way of concluding this crisis has vanished – we have been unable to arrest it by invoking the traditional methods for conclude it – namely, a sacrificial event in which all of our social and psychological confusions would be alleviated as we join unanimously in our violent expulsion of the victim. We have done that many, many times in the modern era – the modern era, in a way, began with these convulsions in which we tried to do that and it hasn’t worked and so the crisis continues to spread and cause social and psychological instability.

There are 2 things that I have tried to track as 2 separate things here: the cultural breakdown and the psychological repercussions of it. There are 2 biblical revelations that are coming to the surface, they are:

1) The sacrificial nature of all human institutions, culture and religion and
2) The mimetic nature of human subjectivity.

So much of what goes on in our world is an effort to thwart the recognition of these 2 things. And that is partly because all of our social and psychological reflexes are formed on the bases of the myths that the biblical revelation deconstructing. It is not as though we are being hypocritical. It is because there is a deeper kind of resistance to these 2 revelations. The questions raised by these 2 revelations are the 2 oldest questions in the biblical tradition namely; how to live without sacrifice and secondly, whom to imitate? These are the 2 fundamental biblical questions:
1) How to live without sacrifice, and
2) Whom to imitate?

The biblical tradition says; we are made in the image and likeness of God: which means to be truly human we have to, as closely as we can, approximate the model, in whose image and likeness we have been made; and secondly, the biblical tradition, at the heart is the prophetic utterance, is that we must live without sacrifice. We must do what Abraham did; we must renounce the morally unacceptable forms of sacrifice, and if need be in the interim, which is to say, in history as we progress away from the most morally troubling forms of sacrifice, to rely on forms of sacrifice that are not morally troubling for us at that time. They will become morally troubling for those who come after us so that we are always coming on to the historical scene at a moment when we recognize the moral problem of the forms of sacrifice that our ancestors used and for which they felt no moral misgiving. In history, we are having to live with less and less sacrifice and that is as it should be because as the biblical tradition has its cultural affects we are forced to live with less and less sacrifice.

So these are related questions: how to live without sacrifice and whom to imitate? And they are related for ultimately whether one can live without sacrifice or not depends on whether the model one is imitating is a human idol whose divine status is the result of the religious transfiguration of human violence on one hand; or on the other hand, truly divine. It is funny that this question seems almost amusing to us – Is the God we worship really the God or is it some kind of myth? In a way we never ask that question anymore.

George Steiner defines modernism as “the sum of impulses and psychological intellectual configurations in which the enormity of the question of the actual existence of God is experienced only fitfully or in metaphors gone pale.” In other words, we don’t think of it as a major issue – some people believe, some people don’t, some people of this or that god in their head, and so on… Everybody is entitled to their own belief which of course they are, but we never confront the significance of the question anymore. Steiner defines modernity as that age in which it is not regarded as a primary question. You could say that modernity is the age in which the significance of these 2 revelations has begun to be felt and which has tried to interpret the crisis which is upon us because of these 2 revelations in ways that keep us from really seeing what is happening.

It is over-simplistic, but as this is a kind of review so maybe over-simplistic can be allowed. There is one very subtle maneuver that made it possible for us to avoid both the revelation about the sacrificial nature of culture and religion on one hand; and the revelation about the mimetic nature of subjectivity on the other. By substituting the “individual” for the victim at the heart of western culture’s moral and social experience we were able to veer ever so slightly out of the direct path of the biblical revelation. Protecting the “individual” was a kind of Enlightenment project – a Western project. It is a very good thing and we are very happy it happened. Protecting the “individual’ became our primary moral imperative and unleashing the social and psychological power of the “individual” became our main source of cultural energy.

Now the biblical tradition is concerned with the victim and the victim is always the one left out and in Western cultural history the “individual” is always the one who is distinct from the crowd – that is the definition of the “individuality” in the West – is someone distinct from the crowd. There is an inherent connection between the victim and the “individual” but by shifting our primary cultural attention away from the victim which is where it is in the biblical tradition toward the “individual” which is where it is in the Western tradition we move slightly away from the heart of the revelation. This move was of great benefit to the modern world in a way. All of the great moral accomplishments of Western culture in the last several hundred years have to do with defending the rights of the “individual.” So it is very significant – we are pleased that it happened. But it just means you can slightly distort the biblical revelation and still get a whole lot of cultural progress out of it. So there is a genuine liberation going on.

The problem is that the “individual” as envisioned by Western humanism is psychologically implausible, sociological problematic and morally ambiguous. This is partly what is surfacing in our time.

The point I (Gil) want to make is that when we first began to realize the radical nature of the biblical revelation and how fundamentally they challenge our conventional notion of culture and our own subjectivity we tried to capture the emancipating power of the biblical revelation in terms which were secular and generic. That unleashed a tremendous moral force in the Western world – a very positive thing for the most part, at least in its early stages, however it avoids the secularized and generic version of the biblical moral imperative – it has an emancipating power, but it avoids the moral, spiritual and religious challenge that the biblical tradition embodies.

A New Testament example from the Gospel of John where Jesus talking to the Jews who believe in him and he says, ‘you think your father is Abraham, but really your father is a liar, the father of lies and a murderer from the beginning.’ In essence He goes on to say that He has renounced that father in obedience to My Heavenly Father. Right there He defines the issue: the issue is this cluster of social and psychological reflexes, which are basic this world whose structure is based on violence and mythology – the mythologization of human violence. Your god, He says, is a liar, a father of lies and a murderer from the beginning, meaning that they are inhabiting a conventional cultural arrangement that the father, in the metaphor here, goes coherence to that whole system. And Jesus says, I’m standing outside that system – completely outside that system – and I am able to stand outside that system because I am standing in identification with and obedience to the True God and not the transfigured god of human violence. The god generated by all archaic religions is the god of transfigured human violence. Jesus is saying, I am standing in fidelity to the True God and therefore I can see what you cannot see because you are still caught up in it. The people to whom Jesus is speaking then say, now we know you must be possessed. As soon as He talks about His Heavenly Father they said, aah, you’re possessed because you are talking about this other god… I (Gil) would say that we moderns are in something like that same situation vis-à-vis the biblical revelation. And we don’t realize how apropos the New Testament tradition is to the crisis that we are in. We try to ward off the revelation that it contains.

Conversation between primarily Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Rene Girard in, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World…

Last week I said that the modern crisis resembles the first stage of either an ancient cultural crisis which would end in scapegoating or the ritual re-enactment of such a thing which would end in a blood-letting sacrifice (usually with an animal victim). In other words, the modern crisis looks to those who have been doing their homework like the preliminary stage of a sacrificial crisis. So what Girard and Oughourlian noticed was that the modern crisis looks a lot like that – the difference is that we have no sacrificial way of bringing it to a conclusion. We have had sacrifices aplenty – scapegoating episodes aplenty in our world, matter of fact, that is what our world is, nothing but that – but they never resolve the crisis. So, water, water everywhere – not a drop to drink – sacrifices everywhere and no resolution to the crisis – that is the world we live in.

As the crisis proceeds however it causes more and more social and psychological undifferentiation. The nature of the crisis is that it dissolves structures – so social structures; taboos, prohibitions, institutions, hierarchies, etc – and psychological structures; that have to do with what is me and what is you and what is conscious and unconscious, the thing that gives coherence to the “individual” the person – those too get dissolved.

Oughourlian says, “Psychologically the processes of mimesis (mimetic desire) involve modifications in the state of consciousness. In the process that leads from the sacrificial crisis to its paroxysm (its final sacrificial conclusion) the participants’ state of consciousness is deconstructed (destabilized). It would be unthinkable for example for the scapegoat to be assassinated if everyone kept full awareness.” So that the early stages of the crisis dissolves the social and psychological structures that prevent the later stages of the crisis from happening. We know that when a mob phenomenon happens somebody can walk into it and being perfectly lucid, more or less, and the next moment get caught up with the frenzy of the crowd. The mimetic phenomenon has a dissolving effect on our psychological structure.

So Oughourlian says that it would be unthinkable, for example, for a crowd to kill a scapegoat unless people had their consciousness dissolve by the mimetic processes of the crowd. He goes on, “This point is confirmed by various rituals that attempts to reproduce changes in the state of awareness for those taking part, so that the end result will be violent unanimity.” He says if you look at the rituals of archaic societies you realize that they do this, they have a crisis and in that crisis the psychological and social resistance to the blood-letting that the crisis leads to, these resistances are broken down. You could say that this is for good reason in the sense how the old order held itself together – for as Oughourlian says, the murder of the victim calms everything down. So the murder of the victim calms everything down – it brings back full consciousness and lucidity – so it founds or re-founds culture. By the death of the victim it establishes difference – the victim delivers the crowd, who killed him, from the psychotic structure, and by this act restructures their consciousness. In other words, the victim makes it possible for all the madness to suddenly to become meaning and for culture to begin again with a new or renewed set of cultural distinctions and prohibitions and social differentiations. So the lamb slain since the foundation of the world makes culture possible and makes it possible for culture to rejuvenate itself.

Girard says that the mimetic process does not in our world unfold in the light of day, in crisis that involves the whole community and attains a level of paroxysm in near frenzy so that the victimage mechanism can be unleashed.

In other words, the victimage mechanism not only, do not work, but for the most part, desire (the compulsive preoccupation with the other) operates at a slightly lower level, so that they are not triggered. Every once in a while they are triggered, but they don’t work even when they are triggered. It is like a slow burn as opposed to a forest fire – something smoldering away are the effects of mimetic desire on our culture are ravenous in a way but they are below the threshold of what we would call ordinarily crisis. Occasionally when they cross the threshold and it is perfectly obvious that what we have on our hands is a crisis, but for the most part it happens below that threshold. But even below that threshold, especially since we don’t reckon with it at all, it is having a terribly pernicious effect on our social and psychological life.

Girard continues, “On the contrary, in the modern world the mimetic process dominates relationships between individuals in a subterranean fashion employing forms that possess sufficient permanence to appear to both partners in the guise of well differentiated and individualized traits of what was first called character and later reinterpreted as symptom.”

What he means by that is that relationships are suffering from the mimetic crisis. This comes as no surprise – How many marriages survive? – social destruction that we see out there just below the threshold at which we would call it a crisis. The threshold may have been raised because if we were to go from 1955 to 1994, like that (snap of the fingers) everybody would call it a crisis. But because we have come here gradually we don’t notice it much. It still flares up once in a while but we label it a managed crisis. So the mimetic crisis is now a managed crisis – it is managed by Wall Street by and large because mimetic desire is the engine of our civilization, so we are managing this crisis and it is producing all kinds of economic miracles, and so on. But it is having a tremendous effect on our social and psychological lives. This is the price we are paying for what is going on.

Girard says that at first the people involved in this crisis are able to manifest something that is well differentiated and individualized enough to be regarded as character and only much later in the crisis is it re-interpreted at symptom. We used to talk about a person having character. And then after that we talk about a person being a character. And then after that we talk about a person having a characteristic. And then where does it go from here?

In the early stages it seems like these traits are so inherently part of the person that we refer to them as the person’s character. In other words, we don’t see the other-ness of the subject at all. We don’t see the other who is in the background of that subjectivity. If you are Paul, Jeremiah or Jesus the other, that is in the background of your subjectivity is right there and acknowledged, you know it and everybody else knows it, it is not hidden at all. But in the early stages of the modern crisis there is a subjectivity whose other-ness, whose constituting other is somewhere else – not visible at all and therefore we can regard that person’s subjectivity as being his or her character. Later it becomes more obvious that there is something of a theatrical nature to character. That is to say, it seems to be concerned with the others – it looses its original ‘essence’ and becomes preoccupied with others. So then we talk about someone who “is” a character. And someone who “is” a character, as opposed to someone who has one, is somebody who is already aware of his or her effect on others – others are looking at him or her. And then you get to the question of developing characteristics in the sense of Don Quixote reads the chivalrous romances of Amadis de Gaula and he decides to be like Amadis de Gaul and to imitate his characteristics. And finally you get to the symptom of the breakdown of psychological subjectivity itself.

Personality, in the modern/popular sense of the term, which is like somebody who “is” a character – who has personality, is a mild version of the psychological distress, the later stages of which we call hysteria. One of the things that happened in the modern world is an explosion of personality. This is like the economic miracle – the economic miracle that is generated by mimetic desire in our world is powerful and the parallel to that is the emergence of “interesting personality” and the interest IN such “interesting personality.” Suddenly we have a world filled with “interesting personalities” – whether they are really interesting is another question, but the fact that we have personalities is to be noted. What Gil is suggesting in that personality in that popular sense is simply an early manifestation of the psychological distress, the later stages of which we call hysteria – which is the destabilization of the human subject.

There is a parallel of what Girard has laid out – going from character to symptom and that is the concern for victims aroused by the biblical tradition became the source of Western cultures’ moral energy and it is on the basis on that moral energy, even though we have re-defined it in non-biblical terms, it is on the basis of that moral energy that all the important accomplishments of Western culture have been achieved. However it becomes confused the further we get away from the biblical revelation that aroused our concern for victims in the first place. Likewise, this thing we call character, in the positive sense of the term, is based on a fidelity to something transcendent and it was the key to the psychological pose and reliability that we call character and it is lost or obscured when we renounce that source. So as soon as we become interested in “character” as character then we are interested in the surface and not the essence of the reality.

If I look at Jeremiah and I say, WOW, he had character and I try to emulate that character without any relationship to how he got it then what I will create is a caricature of him and that caricature will become more and more implausible the further it recedes from the truth or fidelity that Jeremiah embodied or lived out in his life. Character comes from fidelity and not some kind of array of moral or psychological qualities.

So we have to locate the ‘individual’ somewhere in that process of moving from character to symptom. If Jesus represents the supreme example of ontological density when He said, I and the Father are One, we moderns have tended to shirk the challenge to approximate that ontological density and instead have bartered it away for a shabby facsimile of it, namely desire. And that is why we cling so tenaciously to desire – why we think it is the key to everything – why we would be so reluctantly to voice any criticisms of it. Desire passes for theological orthodoxy in our world. Among believers and non-believers, everybody in the modern world, (the modern world is the Western world in crisis) desire is how we define ourselves. (Remember: desire = compulsive preoccupation with the other.)

The ontological density that Jesus incarnated is the true source of subjectivity. What the modern world has is a shabby facsimile based on desire. That is to say that desire is a powerful force, it can generate a lot of energy, and that energy can give the appearance of something psychologically formidable but finally it dissolves real subjectivity, because it does not imitate the God in whose image and likeness it was made. It imitates all others, any others, this or that other, and it does it for the most part surreptitiously.

The modern world has made a gamble, you could say that it has gambled on the proposition that its possible to generate a substantive psychological reality based on desire – one that is capable of taking the place of the kind of ontological density represented by Jeremiah, Jesus and Paul (as examples). Desire is so psychologically animating that it gives rise to what appears to be a new and exciting personality and the cultural circumstances surrounding the emergence of this new personality are such that the person defines this new feeling of social independence as individuality.

In fact, however, desire diminishes ontological density. And it does so the more it generates all the hoopla of modern personality. Real ontological density is being destroyed in the background of all the pyrotechnics of modern personality.

In cultural history generally, one always has to look at those who are on the edge, sort of speak, in order to see where the rest of us are heading. A lot of these examples we just have to notice; in the 20th century hundreds of millions of people have died violently it should give us pause and say something is going on here. Likewise if we say, humanity, more or less, got along without psychology for a long time, but then in the 19th century they had to invent it. Why? The question is, did what we invented deal with the real crisis or, like so much else in the modern world, was it an attempt to toy with the revelation without facing its religious significance?

So what we have to do is see, take another look at this invention of ours, which is modern social sciences.

Henri de Lubac: We do not know what man is, or rather, we forget. The farther we go in studying him, the greater our loss of knowledge of him. We study him like an animal or like a machine. We see in him merely an object, odder than all the others. We are bewitched by physiology, psychology, sociology, and all their appendages. Are we wrong, then, to pursue these branches of learning? Certainly not. Are the results bogus, then, or negligible? No. The fault lies not with them, but with ourselves, who know neither how to assign them their place nor how to judge them. We believe, without thinking, that the ‘scientific’ study of man can, at least by right, be universal and exhaustive. So it [the knowledge we acquire] has the same deceptive – and deadly – result as the mania for introspection or the search for a static sincerity. The farther it goes, the more fearful it becomes. It eats into man, disintegrates and destroys him.” – Paradoxes of Faith

This is the search for the “real me” – the entitative self. Where is the real me? That is what the disciples who come to Jesus at the beginning of John’s Gospel were talking about, they said to him, “where do you abide?” And he said, “Come and see.” And later in the Gospel he says, “I abide in the Father.” And then when he prayed just before his death in John’s Gospel he prayed that these friends of mine will abide in me as I abide in you. The question is where do you abide? That is a radically different from the question, where is the real me? And the search for the real me – the entitative self – the individual self – with no reference to a constitutive other is what modern psychology is all about. It is tying itself in knots trying to come up with some final answer to the question.

“…the mania for introspection and the search for a static sincerity.” It is the modern day struggle… if I could discover real sincerity then the ‘real me’ must be there – and it is the same thing for the introspection we all are told to strive for. This is a symptom of what? Using another de Lubac phrase – it is a lack of ‘ontological density’ and the search for it. This is what is happening in our world today. There is less and less of it and a more and more frenzied search for it.

de Lubac says that neither the mania for introspection (nor our) search for a static sincerity can achieve their true goal – the true goal is to arrest the process of psychological disintegration and to reach bedrock. He continues, “It is not sincerity, it is truth which frees us. Now it only frees us because it transforms us. It tears us away from our inmost slavery – to seek sincerity above all things is perhaps, at bottom, not to want to be transformed. It is to cling to yourself – to have a morbid love of yourself – just as you are, that is to say, false. It is to refuse release.”

In other words, the search for sincerity is evasion. It is an attempt to find something in the entity ‘me’ which will substantiate me. It can’t happen. That is the problem – the flaw of the modern psychological process. That is to say that it does not recognize the other-ness of the self. It does not recognize that the self is always constituted by the other. Now there are those practicing modern psychology that are using this, but we still are operating under many of the premises that Freud, Jung and others laid down early in this century in terms of how to approach the psychological crisis.

Oughourlian says that the psychological and cultural crisis cannot be separated. He says that you have to understand the psychological crisis against the backdrop of the cultural and historical one which he describes as, “…the gradual withdraw of the victimage mechanism and the protection that they offer.” In other words, the victimage mechanism makes it possible for us to terminate this crisis and rejuvenate culture and without that the crisis just continues as a slow burn. And this breakdown continues to have its effect on human relationships – causing rancor and division.

Oughourlian says, “The development of the psychopathological symptom and the place it holds in psychiatry has kept place closely with the stages of desacralization that governs our culture as a whole. Desacralization is the destruction of all the sacrificial structures of the primitive sacred that have made it possible to resolve all cultural crises. So Oughourlian is saying that the psychopathological symptom and the psychiatry that treats it need to be seen as something related to the desacralization of the world. We had to invent psychiatry because the desacralization had reached a certain stage where the psychological affects of it where too pronounced for us to ignore it any longer.

Primary psychological distress that early psychiatrist and psychologist addressed was clinical hysteria. What they found, as well as Freud and Brewer did a study on, was that the symptoms of hysteria could be cured or alleviated by hypnosis. So at the very beginning of modern psychiatry you have hysteria and hypnosis as the disease and the cure.

Girard says, “Hypnotic phenomenons were at the center of all pre-psychoanalytic and psychoanalytic controversies at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.”

Oughourlian summaries the literature and adds, “I would suggest that the most important point is that the concept of the unconscious in Freud, as well as in Jena, originates with hypnosis and therefore with the inter-dividual relations (the mimetic realization).”

When one is dealing with psychological stress one is dealing with emotions – every emotion involves another. The question is does one give sufficient weight to the presence of the other in that emotion? When these emotions arose we had to locate them coming from somewhere: either we could locate them in the inter-dividual relation – in other words you could say that this subject exists vis-à-vis the other whereas to try to regard this subject as not involved in that relation as an entity that could be studied without reference to that relation would be implausible; or one could say that these emotions are arising from somewhere…where is this somewhere? The somewhere is between the self and the other. The pathology is the problem of the self and the other. But what Freud did is that he invented this place he called the unconscious, which is inside of us, and he put all the problems there. And that completely wipes out the mimetic facts, however the mimetic facts are perfectly clear because the hysteric is one who is being influenced by another who is resents and rebels against the influence. And the hysteric has two archways of warding off this influence: one is to become autistic in a sense – an emotional disassociation – so the hysteric goes blank as a way to ward off the influence; and the other is histrionics – to act out in an effort to exorcise the other and to demonstrate that the hysteric is in fact the real subject.

Hysteria clearly is the self psycho-pathologically entangled with another. And what is hypnosis? It is the self submitting passively and willingly to another. In other words, the cure and the disease are very similar. The question is – Is there another in whom I can live, move and have my being which will ground in the truth as opposed to the others that I might be entangled with which rob me of my identity?

Hysteria is the disease par excellent of the mimetic crisis. And hypnosis is a glimpse of the cure. Think of hypnosis and think of Paul saying, “I live now not I but Christ lives in me.” Think of Jesus saying, “I only do what the Father bids me to do.” “I and the Father are One.” In other words, these two things roughly approximate the crisis and the cure. Now the problem with hypnosis is the hypnotist is not transcendent. The reason the subject is not rebelling against the hypnotist is because the hypnosis last a short while and the suggestions that the hypnotists makes are banal ones, nothing big… so that there is no reason to reject, but already you have the idea. In primitive cultures there are two forms of possession; a bad one and a good one. And the good one is the cure for the bad one. So if somebody is possessed they have a dispossession ritual, which is essentially designed to re-identify the person with the tutelary spirit who will bring him back to sanity. It is never a question of dispossessing in some radical sense. Like the story in the Gospel of Matthew 12:43-45 "Now when the unclean spirit goes out of a man, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, and does not find it. "Then it says, 'I will return to my house from which I came'; and when it comes, it finds it unoccupied, swept, and put in order. "Then it goes and takes along with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first. That is the way it will also be with this evil generation."

This is a tremendous metaphor for the modern crisis. That is it, now the subject is haunted by the others because there is no transcendent other. If there is a transcendent other than all the relationships with the others can be entered into in great intimacy with no destabilizing effect on the subject. But as soon as there is no transcendent then we turn each other into gods and demons and create all the pathologies and become hysteric. So I say that this thing we call personality in the modern popular sense of the word is the early stage of hysteria. What happens if we say, somebody has a very lively personality and we think that is very nice. And it is also very nice that because we are manipulating mimetic desire we are generating a great GNP. Those are very nice things. The economy is booming and we have lots of nice personalities, but what if we look up one fine day and realize, oh, my gosh, the fuel we are using to drive these two miracles is a poison. And it will destroy social and psychological stability.

Henri de Lubac: “If man could enter inside of himself and have a vision of himself both penetrating and sincere, simple and straightforward, he would no longer dare to take refuge in all the alibis of psychological and sociological analysis. He would no longer dare to imagine that anything, which is not the changing of his heart by a Stronger than he, can ever free him.” Pg 136-137 Paradoxes of Faith

Concludes with the word, abide. Where do you abide? For the most part we do not know how to abide. We give it all the best names, we call it mobility, we call it energy, we call it dynamism, and it creates some great things, we cannot complain, but the question is, where do we abide?

IHS carving in the Roman catacombs

2007-07-21T14:04:00.000-05:00

The three nails pictured on some examples represent the nails of the crucifix.

The IHS is a symbolic monogram of Christ used by the Roman Catholic Church. This monogram consists of the Greek letters iota, eta, and sigma, the first three letters of the name Iesous (Greek for Jesus), the letters of which are also used to spell out the phrase "Iesous Hominum Salvator," "Jesus, savior of man." It relates to the story of Constantine, whose vision of the Chi-Rho was recorded by Church Father Eusebius. In the vision, Constantine was reported to have heard a voice proclaim, "In this symbol, thouse shalt conquer." Therefore, the IHS has also stood for "In Hoc Signo," in this sign.

The symbol as it appears at right originated in Rome with the early Christians, and was popularized in the fifteenth century by Franciscan disciple Bernardine of Sienna, who promoted it as a symbol of peace.

The Gift of Self - Gil Bailie -- Tape 3

2007-07-14T15:28:00.000-05:00

First half of Tape 3

(Gil reviews material covered so far in this series.) The culture is destabilizing and coming apart because of the revelation of the Cross has made the scapegoating and sacrificial apparatus of conventional culture and religion morally problematic in those cultures that have been influenced by it and therefore their cultural confidence and the certainty and the moral righteousness with which other cultures at other times might have set in motion some kind of sacrificial or scapegoating scenario that would have reconvened culture and redefined its mores and taboos and its hierarchies and so on that we can’t do anymore – so we are operating with a wounded system for keeping culture together. And that is having not only social but psychological effects.

Looking at the psychological crisis – Psychological matters tend to be thought of, in more or less, medical terms. It’s a medical model that we use for understanding psychological issues… we moderns have tried to come to grips with this problem using these psychological approaches which have been tinged largely by a medical model and to some lesser extent by philosophical and literary things… We would be more apt to shed light on all our psychological issues if we see it historical, anthropologically and religiously. The other draw back to seeing it through a medical model is that until recently they focused on the individual and individual psycho-dynamics.

Approaching the problem from a historical, anthropologically and religiously is what Girard has done…

So what I tried to say is that the Cross, because it exposes something that cannot function while exposed (it can only function if it is misrecognized and occluded) the sacrificial mechanism and it evokes an empathy for its victim and a suspicion about crowd activity. The Cross removes the lynchpin of conventional culture – where (this is only a slight over-statement) the ‘business’ of conventional culture and religion is to erect enough barriers against ‘desire’ to keep the social system civil and sane. ‘Desire’ here is Girardian and not Freudian – meaning compulsive preoccupation with the other. When the lynchpin is pulled out by the Cross the culture can no longer, with great confidence, form the procedures that caused these constraints on desire to stay in place.

Therefore these constraints begin to fall apart and like what is happening in the modern world, so we have an epidemic of ‘desire’ (compulsive preoccupation with the other). Important part of this is that in the sacrificial act has the effect of transcendentalizing desire – turning it into a false transcendence – it creates a religious awe – it turns social unanimity into religious awe – and that religious awe into religious reverence and therefore deflects the compulsive pre-occupation with the other from the social arena to the realm of the gods, and so ultimate concern now is with the gods and not with each other. How do we placate the gods? Etc. So a society which is pre-occupied with that is a society that will be considerably less pre-occupied with how they are going to check-mate their neighbor in terms of some kind of social competition. So the transcendentalizing of desire is what conventional culture and religion does and in the process it erects these taboos and structures, commandments, prohibitions, mores that keep desire from running amok – to keep conventional culture from becoming a modern culture.

Girard says,

“Desire is what happens to human relationships when there is no longer any
resolution through the victim.” ... "There can be no ritualistic or victimary
resolution to the modern crisis. The crisis can be stabilized at different
levels according to the individual’s concern, but it always lacks the resources
of catharsis and expulsion.”

In other words, we can’t have old fashion religious culturally re-generative resolution of the modern crisis, because that would require over-riding the revelation of the Cross in a way that is now impossible to do. Amazingly, the authors of the New Testament already knew that the Cross will have its effect in ways that will render that culture incapable of living, what St Paul called, the old anthropos – the old humanity. The move from the old humanity to the new humanity is the cultural, spiritual, and psychological transition that we are in the mist of.

Notice that Girard says that we can stabilize the situation; we can’t resolve it, according to each individual concern. Each individual can, to one degree or another muster the self-discipline, the insight, the wisdom, the groundedness, etc., etc., to keep from being swept up into this contagion of desire (compulsive preoccupation with the other). But that now is going to be an individual undertaking, as there is no longer a collective solution to this problem... not that cultural processes cannot be mustered that would help the situation, we can’t just abandon the social order because if culture really goes to seed then the chances of an individual being able to hold his or her ground is very, very small. So we have to be about the business of fashioning a culture environment that will be in the service of the individual who is trying to maintain some poise in the mist of this scandal that is going on all around him or her.

Jean-Michel Oughourlian says that,

“desire now flourishes within the society whose cathartic resources are
vanishing, a society where the only mechanism that could renew these resources
functions less and less effective.”

So at the cultural level, Gil has said, that the collapse of the sacrificial apparatus of conventional culture throws culture into crisis. But at the same time, if we analysis it and see the particulars of what is going on, it underscores the absolute relevance of the social and ethical message of the Christian Gospel – which is the Sermon of the Mount. So if you say, isn’t it terrible that the Christian Gospel is destroying all culture? Well the culture it is destroying is sacrificial – the culture defined by Caiphus: 'It is better for one man to die than for the whole nation to be destroyed.” It is a culture built on that premise, over and over again. So you say, is Christianity a pernicious thing? Is it destroying everything like Nietzsche said it is? It is destroying something, no doubt. But it is doing it gradually – mercifully. It destroys the culture as we develop the capacity to live without it. But the capacity to live without it is defined by the Sermon on the Mount. So as the Christian Gospel under-minds conventional culture it provides the guidelines and inspiration for living without such thing. And psychologically and spiritually the instability that results from; a) the collapse of those social reinforcements that contribute to our stability, and b) the spread of the mimetic contagion that scandalizes everybody – destroys the poise of all but the heartiest: that process destabilizes us psychologically, making us as Jung said, “a shuttlecock for every wind that blows.”

As that happens, then just as we look from the cultural crisis to the Sermon on the Mount; we look to that psychological destabilization that is already described somewhat in the Gospel with conversion, it is being reborn. It is the dissolution of the existing personality and a metanoia to bring into being a new mind – anew personality on different premises. The psychological instability that is resulting from the biblical revelation has its corollaries in Christian conversion.

Faith is a gift and a mystery – Christian conversion is the beginning of a life in faith. No acts of analytical insights can cause faith to come about. Knowledge never leads to faith. Faith leads to knowledge. Not by understanding the process are we going to have a great renascence or explosion of faith and conversion. Nevertheless it is not useless to try to understand the process. Christian conversion can be made intelligible. This is not to say that people who find it intelligible will therefore have faith of become converter. But at least we can make it intelligible the same way we can make the mimetic crisis or the crisis of modernity intelligible, we can make conversion intelligible.

One of the things that conversion provides is a form of stability that is not the static-stability of the stasis of culture and selfhood, but a form of stability that is much more supple, enduring, much more able to move in and out of various structures of reality without being disoriented by them. So a new form of psychological stability that it not just ridged stability but a kind of supple stability; a new poise; a new grounding – not a grounding in ethnicity or gender or nationality or tribal or religion in the conventional sense, but a grounding in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – a grounding in Christ, whose death reveals the true face of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – a grounding in such a reality that then is not in a fixed reality, but is a ‘way’.

Another comment of Girard’s:

“Desire (compulsive, preoccupation of the other) leads to madness and death if there is no victimage mechanism to guide it back to 'reason' and to engender this 'reason'. The mysterious link between madness and reason takes on a concrete form.”

The mysterious link between madness and reason is that “reason” is gemmed up out of the sacrificial (scapegoat) scenario. Reason always needs differences and the sacrificial crisis or the crisis of the contagion of desire destroys all differences and therefore makes reason impossible. There can be no reasoning going on in a world where there are no differences. Reason always needs distinction and the dissolution of all those distinctions is what occurs in crisis of undifferentiation – the crisis of desire – or what is brought about by an avalanche of mimetic desire.

And when Girard says, madness and death will be the result if the victimage mechanism does not lead it back to “reason” he clearly has a mind of Heraclitus logos: strife or violence is the father of all things. It gives rise both to chaos and to order – to destruction and to peace. The way it gives rise to that is that it produces this madness which goes supremely mad for one glistening moment; and in that moment it creates social unanimity at the expense of the victim. And that supreme madness then becomes sanity because the victim dies and the cultural esprit de corps is generated and the victimization is then rationalized in a sense of what happened before and what happened afterwards – the whole structure of rationality is then generated by this victimage scenario. A rationality that did not exists two minutes before, but builds up afterwards and religion and culture is the elaboration of that fundamental difference between the mob and its victim – between the living and the corpse. Reason is restored. Reason has something to work with – differences. It has two primary distinctions that sort of overlap like cross-hairs on a scope; 1) is the distinction between the victim and the mob; and 2) the distinction between time before the victimization and the time after. Something new has happened.

The “rationality” that this system is able to generate begins at that moment and from that primary distinction all cultural distinction are born. This “rationality” could all be fiction, of the mob’s imagination, or they may have some grounding in fact… So that this desire (compulsive, preoccupation of the other) leads to madness and death if there is no victimage mechanism to restore reason; and now there is no victimage mechanism to restore reason; so the old logos – the old forms of knowledge (epistemology) is dying – it cannot function because the apparatus for generating its necessary distinctions out of the undifferentiated chaos of an avalanche of desire – it doesn’t work anymore. So less and less are we able to put-to-work the old epistemological strategies.

Eliot says that we know too much and are convinced of too little. Knowledge, itself doesn’t do any good because it is knowledge of a kind that can’t respond to the crisis and it is becoming spiritually impotent.

So we have to have another logos – there has to be another principle of knowledge. The logos that leaps out at us from the Prologue to the Gospel of John is a logos of the lamb slain since the foundation of the world – logos of the One Who comes into His Own and they do not accept Him – the logos of the One Who is raised up on The Cross and thereby draws all man to Himself.

The new logos, in not just about thinking in a strict sense of the word, but it has its own epistemological base – it does not just come along and share the epistemological base of the old logos because the old logos of Heraclitus is finished. In a way, another thing that is happening in our world is that we are moving from one logo to another which brings us back to the passage:

"There is no unique subject: no personality without otherness; no consciousness
turned in upon itself; no real being without intersubjectivity; no real
knowledge nor ontological density without mystery. And no man without God." -
Henri de Lubac

For us studying these thoughts as we are: No real knowledge without mystery or better yet: no real knowledge without genuine transcendence. The old logos, the old religions which gemmed up their gods out of the sacrificial scenario, and created a false transcendence (like I said before suddenly instead of being preoccupied with each other and then there is this crisis and then they are preoccupied with the gods), the pagan realm gems up this false transcendence. This is not what de Lubac is talking about. When he talks about mystery, he is talking about Real Transcendence. Just because the world is filled with false ones does not mean there isn’t a real one. It just means we are hungry for it and we will fall for anything that simulates it.

Again: no real knowledge without Real Transcendence. The opposite can be said of the Heraclitus logos: no real knowledge (behind which stands violence) without some kind of false transcendence.

Secondly: No ontological density without Real Transcendence. What does the word transcendence mean? Doesn’t it mean god? One could also say transcendence is the same as prayer. Or another way you could say, abiding. Can we abide in the God revealed by Christ on the Cross? If we can abide in God reveal by Christ on the Cross we are free – there is nothing that can happen to us that won’t become an opportunity for more love; for more meaning; for more truth.

Real knowledge requires transcendence now, because the other kind of knowledge was based on a false transcendence or else it has no transcendence at all and then it becomes mechanical. Enlightenment knowledge is basically mechanical knowledge, it appeals to no transcendence and therefore can work in a mundane order of things, but it cannot deal with the fundamental problem, which is our fallenness. We can take Enlightenment knowledge and crank it up as much as we can and it will create all kinds of breakthroughs, many advances in medicine and technologies, etc., etc., but it won’t do a thing about the fall because it has renounced any aspiration in that regard. But the knowledge that has something to do with the fall is going to be transcendence and it is going to require that we abide.

Then we come into the modern world where we increasingly say, ‘I cannot abide’ him or her, leaving more and more of us scandalized by the compulsive preoccupation with the other.

We want to track the epistemological (how we know things) and ontological (the nature of our being) implication of the Christian revelation.

We live in a world that we generate all kinds of knowledge, but it doesn’t do us any good, at one level – the important spiritual level it doesn’t seem to be doing us any good. Whatever knowledge or technological breakthroughs based on that knowledge that we generate from an Enlightenment perspective will generate exactly the same proportion of good and evil in every case and in every generation. In other words there is nothing historically progressive about that kind of knowledge. All it does is raise the ante in a game where the ante is already pretty high because now we can destroy the whole planet.

Girard says,

“Desire is always using for its own ends the knowledge it has acquired from
itself. It places the truth in the service of its own untruth.”

So at the level of desire, which is at the level of original sin, we need knowledge that will help us. If desire (compulsive preoccupation with the other) is still running the show it has a way of taking advantage of all knowledge and turning it into a further scheme for keeping desire in the drivers’ seat. Even though the knowledge may be knowledge that reveals the perversity of desire it won’t do anything without transcendence – without conversion.

Girard is saying that desire uses the knowledge of itself to further sconce itself in the life of the person or the society. So that is why people can and have studied this thing and they can’t come up with a solution.

Girard goes on he says that the idea of the demon who bears light is more far reaching than any notion of psychoanalysis. Desire bears light, but puts that light in the service of its own darkness. The role played by desire (compulsive preoccupation with the other) in all the great cultural creations of the modern world – art & literature – is explained by this feature which it shares with Lucifer. Lucifer is the bringer of light who uses the light to continue to generate darkness.

Dante – “they lost the good of intellect.” How do we loss the good of intellect? We have there terms: compulsion and obsession. What do these words, compulsion and obsession mean? It means that you do something even though you know that it is wrong or stupid. You have lost the good of intellect. What is at the root of all of our compulsions and obsessions? Desire – Girardian desire (compulsive preoccupation with the other) and not Freudian desire.

We have an epistemological base from which to work – it’s a structure that we always operate on. If you are running a computer, your computer has an operating system, and you may be running some program, but the operating system is in the background and if it goes haywire it will have serious consequences on the program you are using. We are operating in an epistemological base that goes back to the dawn of human culture and it is beginning to malfunction and it has important consequences for us – it can still gem out an enormous amount of information, but it is just turned into the service of the same system (the system of desire and victimage) that gemmed it out in the first place. And once that system begins to come apart then we have serious problems.

This is amazing – the epistemological mechanism for knowing things is changing and that is why faith is never able to explain itself (to the old epistemological system); and also it is why the old epistemological system cannot destroy faith – they are based on 2 epistemological foundations. One of them is solid and the other one is conditional – it is dependent on certain conditions (conditions which produced myth, religion and primitive culture no longer exist.

Just as the cultural and historical crisis cannot be distinguished from the psychological and spiritual crisis: taking de Lubac’s aphorism about no real knowledge without transcendence (mystery) and its companion observation, no ontological density without transcendence, you can say those are related realities. So our epistemological confusion is part and parcel of a psychological instability.

Ontological density is a synonym of what we call the self except that when you say ‘the self’ you always think of an entity, we rarely think of an interdividual self. We must always remind ourselves that the self is constituted by the other in one way or another. It may be a human other or it may be a transcendent other, but the self is always constituted by another or others and if it is fundamentally constituted by others plural, then the self is going to necessarily be unstable (a James Hillman term psychological polytheism).

Ontological density (or more probably the lack of ontological density) helps out talking about the real problem instead of using terms like the self or psychological problems, emotionality, and even the social drama.

Lack of ontological density means a self that is insubstantial and it is seeking in self-defeating ways some way of substantiating itself. There are 2 ways of substantiating the self: 1) that way that perfectly parallels the cultural system that generates false transcendence; and 2) the experience of true transcendence. The false transcendence is generated out of the sacrificial scenario and true transcendence corresponds with prayer and the God revealed by Christ on the Cross – which can never be the false transcendence because it is the God of the victim and not the victimizers. The god of the victimizer is the false transcendence.

There is a psychological parallel to this: real ontological density is what the prophets experienced; it is what Jesus extremely experiences when he said, I do nothing but what the Father bids me to do and the Father and I are One. This is supreme ontological density. Prophets, mystics, saints, the humble faithful, etc, etc have partaken of that ontological density, to one degree or another, at the heart of it is real transcendence. The simulated form of ontological density is the desire of others – if I can get enough others to desire me or to admire me – even to hate me – I can feel that I exist. A simulation of ontological density is generated socially by somebody putting herself or himself in the eyes of others.

False ontological density is created socially and mimetically like that and when we see attempts to generate this kind of false ontological density we should recognize and not point an arresting finger at them – we should say they are suffering from the same disease we are suffering from – they just may be more prone to its effects.

-- transcript from The Gift of Self by Gil Bailie

Aramis Here and We Are Off and Running

2007-07-13T16:44:00.000-05:00

My patron saint:
St. Bernardine of Siena

Everywhere Bernardine persuaded the cities to take down the arms of their warring factions from the church and palace walls and to inscribe there, instead, the initials I. H. S. He thus gave a new impulse and a tangible form to the devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus which was ever a favourite topic with him and which he came to regard as a potent means of rekindling popular fervour. He used to hold a board in front of him while preaching, with the sacred monogram painted on it in the midst of rays and afterwards expose it for veneration. - from New Advent

My sole purpose for posting to this site will be to support the Three Mass'keteer blog. When I have longer posts that can't be linked to elsewhere I will post them here and link from the post. If there are matters that I want to share but are more personal and/or odd to post to the Three Mass'keteer blog I will post them here. In other words this blog will be my scrapbook.