THE PASSION OF ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST

From Wednesday 29th, 2012  The Magnificat
The task set before the Baptist as he lay in prison was to become blessed by this unquestioning acceptance of God's obscure will; to reach the point of asking no further for external, visible, unequivocal clarity, but, instead, of discovering God precisely in the darkness of this world and of his own life, and thus becoming profoundly blessed.  John even in his prison cell had to respond once again and anew to his own call for metanoia or a change of mentality, in order that he might recognize his God in the night in which all things earthly exist.  Only when we act in this manner does another - and doubtless the greatest - saying of the Baptist reveal its full significance:  "He must increase, but I must decrease" (John 3:30).  We will know God to the extent that we are set free from ourselves. - Pope Benedict XVI 

The Witness of John the Baptist - Father Alfred Delp, SJ

The figure of John demonstrates two laws about authentic people and shatters two dangers to which man's authenticity generally succumbs. He shatters two situations in which an authentic man so very often suffocates and drowns. The first law and the first danger: the prophet stands before the king. And the first point: do not permit regard for private security or personal existence to make you into an inauthentic person. So very often throughout history, whenever prophet and king have encountered one another, the king is always in the superior position. What is easier, what is simpler, than to muzzle a prophet! Yet, indeed, hasn't it been - not the voices of those who went into the palaces and were welcome there - but rather the voices calling in the wilderness who filled the cosmos, who prepared the way, who directed people toward Advent, and who arranged for the proper meeting with the end and the Ultimate? 

Prophet and king! The prophet must have known that the king's power and force and majesty would fall upon him and crush him if he said, "Non licit: That is wrong because it is inauthentic and is not in accordance with the divine order." And John said it, and he was crushed, and he way brutalized, and - for all time and eternity - he stands as the witness within history, as the witness before the face of the Lord, as authenticity itself. And he was right!

Along with that are the second law and the second danger. Futility or ineffectiveness do not dispense one from speaking the truth, declaring what is wrong, and standing up for what is right and just. How could this prophet think he could interfere in the family history and family scandals of the king, and be successful? Whoever considers success, or makes his decisions of attitudes dependent upon whether something is futile or certain of success, is already corrupt. Then authenticity no longer means his personal encounter with what is real; it is rather his personal dependence upon success, upon being heard, on popularity and applause, and on the roar of the great throngs. He is already corrupt. And woe if the prophets are mute out of fear that their word might not be heeded.

Read more on Father Delp (+1945) who was a German Jesuit priest condemned to death by the Nazis in Berlin, Germany.

Parody on the 'modern self'

I file this parody under, Who am I? You tell me.

... I uploaded that image up on Facebook and within minutes I had friends telling me how much fun I was having... and you know, for one brief moment I almost believed it myself. Click HERE to see the parody. 

Really, truly, substantially present - John 6:51-58 (Fr Barron videos and text)

Gospel reading: John 6:51-58

Jesus said to the crowds:
"I am the living bread that came down from heaven;
whoever eats this bread will live forever;
and the bread that I will give
is my flesh for the life of the world."

The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying,
"How can this man give us his flesh to eat?"
Jesus said to them,
"Amen, amen, I say to you,
unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood,
you do not have life within you.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood
has eternal life,
and I will raise him on the last day.
For my flesh is true food,
and my blood is true drink.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood
remains in me and I in him.
Just as the living Father sent me
and I have life because of the Father,
so also the one who feeds on me
will have life because of me.
This is the bread that came down from heaven.
Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died,
whoever eats this bread will live forever."

The Real Presence of Christ

The text below is much of what the video addresses.

Additional comments regarding the Catholic teaching.

Last week, I gave an address at the annual Atlanta Eucharistic Congress, which is one of the most impressive gatherings in the American Catholic Church.  Roughly 30,000 people came together, on the eve of the feast of Corpus Christ, to celebrate the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.  The Congress opened with a spectacular procession of thousands of Catholics, representing practically every parish and organization in the Atlanta Archdiocese.  As the throngs marched in, a choir, backed by an energetic band, sang spirited gospel songs.  After an hour of singing and marching, Archbishop Wilton Gregory appeared, at the end of the procession, bearing a large consecrated host in a gold monstrance.  As the Archbishop approached the elevated altar, a group of Mexican drummers, dressed in Aztec finery, beat an insistent rhythm.  Then, when the monstrance was placed on the altar, the entire arena fell silent for two minutes, and finally one of the classic Eucharistic hymns of the church was sung.  It was one of the most impressive expressions of the church’s belief in the real presence that I have ever witnessed.
  
 What is the provenance of this distinctively Catholic conviction that Jesus is “really, truly, and substantially present under the Eucharistic signs of bread and wine?  I would suggest that we begin with the still breathtaking discourse of the Lord, found in the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John.  Astounded by the miraculous multiplication of the loaves and fishes, the crowds come to Jesus and he tells them not to search for perishable bread, but rather for the bread that “endures to eternal life.”  He then specifies, “I myself am the living bread come down from heaven…the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.” 

Now it would be hard to imagine anything more theologically problematic, and frankly, more disgusting to a first century Jew than this claim.  Scattered throughout the Old Testament are numerous prohibitions against the eating of an animal’s flesh with the blood, for blood was seen as life and hence as the special prerogative of God.  But Jesus is proposing, not only the eating of an animal’s flesh with blood, but his own human flesh with blood.  When they balk (“The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’”), Jesus does not tone down his rhetoric; he intensifies it:  “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”  It is fascinating to note that the Greek verb that lies behind the word “eat” here is not phagein (the verb normally used to designate the way human beings eat) but rather trogein (a verb that designates the way animals eat, having the overtone of “gnawing” or “munching”).  And in case anyone has missed his point, Jesus adds, “For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.”  Are we surprised that most of the crowd, having taken in this teaching, decided to leave Jesus?  “Therefore, many of his disciples…said, ‘This is a hard saying:  who can understand it?” So indeed has this teaching been hard and divisive in the course of the church’s life.

 How can we begin to understand it?  Let us consider the power of words.  Certainly words can describe reality, standing, if you will, in a passive relationship to what is.  But they can also play a much more active role, not simply describing reality, but affecting it, changing it.  Think of the manner in which a word of praise, spoken by a significant authority figure, can change the direction of a young person’s life.  Or consider the authoritative statement, “you’re under arrest,” spoken by a properly deputized officer of the law:  whether the addressee of those words likes it or not, he is, in fact, under arrest, the words having actively changed his status.  Now if our puny human words can change reality, how much more thoroughly and radically can the divine word bring about an ontological transformation.  On the Biblical telling, God’s word in fact constitutes reality at the deepest level:  “God said, ‘let there by light,’ and there was light.”  The prophet Isaiah, channeling the words of the Lord, says, “So shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; it shall not return to me void, but it shall accomplish what I please…”    

 The central claim of the New Testament is that Jesus is not simply one teacher among many, one more in a long line of prophets, but rather “the word made flesh,” the incarnation of the divine word which made and sustains the world.  Therefore, what Jesus says, is.  To the dead daughter of Jairus, Jesus said, “Little girl, get up,” and the dead girl got up.  At the tomb of Lazarus, Jesus shouted, “Lazarus come out!” and the dead man came out.  The night before he died, Jesus sat down with his disciples for a Passover supper.  He took the ordinary unleavened bread, broke it, gave it to his disciples and said, “take this all of you and eat it; this is my body.”  He then took the blessing cup after supper and, passing it around, he said, “take this all of you and drink from it; this is the cup of my blood.”  Was he trading in symbolic and metaphorical speech?  If he were an ordinary human being, one more prophet or religious poet, that’s all he could have been doing.  But he was, in fact, the Word of God, and therefore, his words had a power to transform at the most fundamental level of reality.   This is why that ordinary bread and wine became Christ’s very body and blood.

 At the consecration at every Mass, the priest takes bread and wine and pronounces over them, not his own words, but Christ’s.  He acts, not in his own person, but in persona Christi and hence he affects the transformation that Catholics call “transubstantiation,” the changing of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.  And this is why, in the presence of those transformed elements, the only proper action is to fall down in worship. 

Father Robert Barron is the founder of the global ministry, Word on Fire, and in July will become the Rector/President of Mundelein Seminary. He is the creator of the documentary series, "Catholicism," airing on PBS stations and EWTN. The documentary has been awarded an esteemed Christopher for excellence. Learn more about the series atwww.CatholicismSeries.com

What could be stronger than marriage, or what shapes any particular life-form more profoundly than does marriage?

The "Meditation of the Day" in the Magnificat today is from Hans Urs von Balthasar's The Glory of the Lord Vol. 1. However before getting to the meditation read today's Gospel selection, Matthew 19:3-12. 

Some Pharisees approached Jesus, and tested him, saying, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause whatever?"

He said in reply, "Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator made them male and female and said, For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, man must not separate."

They said to him, "Then why did Moses command that the man give the woman a bill of divorce and dismiss her?"

He said to them, "Because of the hardness of your hearts Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. I say to you, whoever divorces his wife (unless the marriage is unlawful) and marries another commits adultery."

His disciples said to him, "If that is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry."

He answered, "Not all can accept this word, but only those to whom that is granted. Some are incapable of marriage because they were born so; some, because they were made so by others; some, because they have renounced marriage for the sake of the Kingdom of heaven. Whoever can accept this ought to accept it."

I grant you that the meditation below is dense yet it is full of jewels that we should contemplate on for hours on end. Hans Urs von Balthasar's use of the word "form" may be difficult to grasp yet what it means, just as in the reading from Matthew, Jesus' proclamation, is that one is being called to make a single definitive life choice. Hans von Balthasar understands that marriage serves to integrate the Absolute into the relative - the transcendence or vertical with the worldly - that is an immanent or horizontal form. The key is to see marriage as an indissoluble form. The spouses choose the form not based on a reciprocity between each other but rather on Love in and through the Trinitarian model. This opens up a freedom in persons through marriage that was not available before. And the warning in the last paragraph has a relevance in today's time that perhaps could only have been guessed at the time of the original writing. Please go slowly and pause frequently to allow his words to create a contrite and humbled heart (Ps 51).

What could be stronger than marriage, or what shapes any particular life-form more profoundly than does marriage? And marriage is only true to itself if it is a kind of bracket that both transcends and contains all an individual's cravings to "break out" of its bonds and assert himself. Marriage is that indissoluble reality which confronts with an iron hand all existence's tendencies to disintegrate, and it compels the faltering person to grow, beyond himself, into real love by modelling his life on the form enjoined.

When they make their promises, the spouses are not relying on themselves - the shifting songs of their own freedom - but rather on the form that chooses them because they have chosen it, the form to which they have committed themselves in their act as persons. As persons, the spouses entrust themselves not only to the beloved "thou" and to the biological laws of fertility and family; they entrust themselves foremost to a form with which they can wholly identify themselves even in the deepest aspects of their personality because this form extends through all the levels of life - from its biological roots up to the very heights of grace and of life in the Holy Spirit. And now, suddenly, all fruitfulness, all freedom, is discovered within the form itself, and the life of a married person can henceforth be understood only in terms of this interior mystery ... which mystery is no longer accessible from the profane sphere of the general.

But what are we to say of the person who ignores this form and tramples it underfoot, then to enter into relationships answerable only to his own psychology's principle of "this far and no further?" He is but quick-sand, doomed to certain barrenness. The form of marriage, too, from which derives the beauty of human existence, is today more than ever entrusted to the care of Christians.

Battling to the End - A book review

Nothing from René Girard is ease and so we plow through the material countless times picking up treasures of something we know, or rather, it is more accurate to say that we find ourselves being known by and through the material, and by this sense we know it is very real and very powerful.  What has been helpful in this process of "induction" into something bigger, that of what Girard writes on, is seeking out other Girardians and commentators.

The following review of Girard's latest book, Battling to the End (Studies in Violence, Mimesis and Culture), describes some of the main points in a 'user-friendly' manner.

Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoit Chantre (Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture) by Rene Girard

Reviewed by Cynthia L. Haven
San Francisco Chronicle

In Laurel and Hardy's Big Business, two door-to-door Christmas tree salesmen fight a bad-tempered homeowner. The manic tit-for-tat escalates from head banging to a demolished house and an exploded car. The three become more and more alike as their wiggy violence spirals without aim or purpose.

It's funny because we know that that's the way we are, from the cradle. You hit your brother; he hits back; you hit again, only harder. Aggressor and aggrieved become interchangeable, indistinguishable, and parents know there is little point in trying to figure out "who started it."

As the Stanford scholar Rene Girard observes in the book-length interview Battling to the End, "The aggressor has always already been attacked" and so feels justified. Look at the Middle East.

But what if violence goes unchecked? "This is an apocalyptic book," Girard states at the outset. The more probable such an endgame becomes, "the less we talk about it."

The world-renowned author, a member of the Academie Francaise, should cut a bigger figure on the American intellectual landscape: He has, after all, lived in the Bay Area for decades. This Eurocentric book is unlikely to do the trick: Readers to whom the names Peguy or Adenauer are obscure, and who are unfamiliar with Girard's prior work, will be left in the dust somewhere between the Battle of Jena and Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises.

C'est dommage. Battling to the End is elegant, profound, wide-ranging and frequently punchy. The introduction and epilogue are persuasive, prophetic tours de force.

Battling to the End created an intellectual buzz in 2007 when it was published in France as Achever Clausewitz. The book focuses on Prussian general and military theoretician Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), the Napoleon-obsessed author of On War. According to Girard, "The apocalypse appropriate for our time is perhaps no longer Saint John at Patmos, but a Prussian general riding with his friends along the roads of Russia and Europe."

Clausewitz speculated about total war, but funked it midway through On War, claiming it was only a theoretical possibility. Man's natural tendency to hedge his bets, postponing commitment, causes his opponent to scale back. This process inevitably short-circuits infinite escalation. Or rather, it used to.

"If we had been told 30 years ago that Islamism would replace the Cold War, we would have laughed...or that the apocalypse began at Verdun, people would have taken us for Jehovah's Witnesses," writes the Avignon-born octogenarian.

Fundamentalists, preoccupied with apocalypse, nevertheless grab the wrong end of the stick: "They cannot do without a cruel God. Strangely, they do not see that the violence we ourselves are in the process of amassing and that is looming over our own heads is entirely sufficient to trigger the worst. They have no sense of humor."

Girard insists that our desires are mimetic; envy and admiration fuel imitation and resentment -- and eventually violence. We become our foes. In one of the sweeping, epigrammatic statements that pepper the book, Girard claims, "Individualism is a formidable lie."

Decades ago, Girard formulated his controversial contention that scapegoating is the time-honored way societies control violence and restore peace -- "sacrifice prevents vengeance."

However, Judeo-Christian history, beginning with Cain and Abel and culminating on Calvary two millennia ago, revealed the scapegoat's innocence -- thus irrevocably undermining the mechanism. We no longer have bloody hands and clean consciences: Over 2,000 years, war itself has been breaking down under the burden of the truth. Yet violence is unchecked: "We are thus more at war than ever, at a time when war itself no longer exists."

Now, with the advent of global terrorism, one man can unilaterally wage war -- witness the Fort Hood massacre. Globalization and technology have only accelerated "the worldwide empire of violence."

Girard claims the only answer is to "abstain completely from retaliation, and renounce the escalation to extremes." He advocates "the imitation of Christ in order to avoid the imitation of men."

A Christian accused of bypassing orthodox Christian mysticism (notwithstanding echoes of Thomas A. Kempis), Girard is inspired by the image of the otherworldly Friedrich Holderlin, in the poet's final years of seclusion. Girard asserts that "salvation lies in imitating Christ, in other words, in imitating the 'withdrawal relationship' that links him with his Father....To listen to the Father's silence is to abandon oneself to his withdrawal, to conform to it."

In these passages and elsewhere, Girard seems to be gripping a torch passed from Blaise Pascal, through Simone Weil, detouring the existentialists and their latter-day heirs. (Girard slyly chides our intellectual fashions: "Think about the inadequacy of our recent avant-gardes that preached the non-existence of the real.")

Big Business ends with Laurel and Hardy running away, half a block ahead of a cop. That's the formula for comedy. But we're not cast in comedy. Girard writes hauntingly, "More than ever, I am convinced that history has meaning, and that its meaning is terrifying."

Cynthia L. Haven has written for the Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Times,Washington Post and San Francisco Magazine. Her An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz will be published next year. E-mail her at books@sfchronicle.com.

Faith and hope are the contagion from the other's delight in knowing and discovering us

Heliotrope arborescens marine, a Peruvian native flower

Three times St Paul expresses astonishment at this notion that to know is really to be known by God (Gal 4:8-9; 1 Cor 8:1-3; & 1 Cor 13:11-13).  "In other words, St Paul simply takes it for granted that “being known” is what underlies all our knowing, and that we do not yet know properly because our “being known” is still to some extent veiled from us in a world run by rivalry and death. And this “being known” is in fact the reception of a loving regard towards which we, like so many heliotropes, find ourselves empowered to stretch in faith and hope. No wonder love is the greatest of these three, because it is the coming towards us of what really and inalterably is, the regard which creates, while faith and hope are the given response from within us to what is; the given response which love calls forth, while we are “on the way.” Faith and hope are a relaxing into our being uncovered, discovered, as someone loved. But they are relaxing into love’s discovery of us.                                                                                                                                                          

       "What did the treasure in the field think after the man had found it, and covered it over and while he had gone off to sell everything in order to buy the field?  

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field." Matt. 13:44

"Treasure doesn't think, you may say. Precisely. Hence the importance of faith and hope: faith and hope are what it looks like for unthinking treasure, which has no idea of its worth, to find itself actually being able to share in the delight of the one who has found it while waiting for him to come back and take possession. Faith and hope are the contagion from the other's delight in knowing and discovering us, and of course the treasure depends entirely on that never-to-be-withdrawn delight and discovery emanating from the other rather than anything within itself." - James Alison On Being Liked (p 133-134)

The Mystery of the Eucharist

I am the bread that came down from heaven

The mystery of the Eucharist alone - that Christ left his Body and Blood for us to eat and drink - I could ponder forever and not fully plumb its depths. That it's his actual (real) Body and Blood - not "virtually real," "not a symbol." That he literally becomes part of us and we become part of him. That by leaving us "food" to eat and drink, he acknowledges and appeases our ravenous spiritual hunger. That eating human flesh is the deepest, darkest, most unmentionable of taboos: not cannibalism, though, because he gives it. The very worst thing a human being could do - butcher a man, torture to death a person who's completely innocent, and eat him - Christ says, I'm going to let you do it: I'm going to offer myself up. I'm in solidarity not only with your humanity, your brokenness, your sins; I'm in solidarity with your pathologies. And in offering up my very flesh, I am going to transform the consciousness of all humanity, for all time. I'm going to descend to the depths and ascend to the heights of the human spirit and, to all who want to avail themselves, open up the possibility of becoming truly awake and alive to reality. 

While I could never plumb the depths of the Eucharist - yet a simple fisherman would understand all that needs to and probably can be understood about it: it's a gift, and it's holy. Someone sacrificed himself and left his very Body and Blood to us as a gift, an offering, the answer to our deepest prayer: Oh, please let there be something beyond me and my sadly, pathetically limited powers. Let there still be something holy in the world, let there be something we haven't wrecked with our greed, our fear, our lust. Let the terrible, terrible suffering of me and every other human being on earth have meaning. The Mass is a celebration and reenactment of the sacrifice: the consecration of the Host, the bridging of the gap between life and death, light and dark, heaven and earth, the material and spiritual. The Eucharist is the eternal coming-into-being of the power that on the one hand has the ability to shake the foundations of the universe, and on the other, perpetually, gently assures us that we are known, seen, cherished; that God hungers for us, thirsts for us.

— HEATHER KING, Heather King is a convert to Catholicism and a writer from California.
— Magnificat, Vol 14, No. 6, August 12, 2012 Pp. 153-154.

For the young the trap has already been set.

Interesting article by Roger Scruton - Waving, Not Drowning.

For me, the labels can be misleading and distract many readers from following alone, yet we should follow along as it can lead us to an exploration that's time is right.

Our task is now less political than cultural -- though for the young the trap has already been set.

No longer can we access the attention of the young today: 

Exhortation, example, the stories of saints and heroes, the life of humility, sacrifice, penitence, and prayer -- all such moral influences have little or no significance for them. And although from time to time they encounter obstacles, and perhaps experience real love, real jealousy, real fear, and real grief, these emotions are not available to them in the regular doses and predictable circumstances in which they were available to us...

... Our work, it seems to me, consists in what Plato called 'anamnesis' -- the defeat of forgetting. We cannot ask young people to live as we lived or to value what we valued. But we can encourage them to see the point of how we lived, and to recognize that freedom without responsibility is, in the end, an empty asset. We can tell them stories of the old virtues, and enlarge their sympathies toward a world in which suffering and sacrifice were not the purely negative things that they are represented to be by the consumer culture but an immovable part of any lasting happiness. 

So I would say that our task is in a living out toward Truth - an act of stop forgetting - but what are we forgetting that is so important that it has become the trap we have set for our young?

Gil Bailie sheds some light on these roots when he wrote about the fall into "forgetting" and the resurrection of Truth.

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 mutaremeans 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.

-Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, 33-34