Happiness = Completeness in the Gift of Self - Monsignor Luigi Giussani

If man as a being (person) is something greater than the world, then as one who exists (living dynamism), he is part of the cosmos. Therefore, while in the final analysis the aim of his actions is his own completeness or happiness, in the immediate terms it is to serve the whole of which he is a part. Even though the objective of the entire universe is to help man attain happiness more fully, man, as part of the world must also serve it.

Human existence unfolds in the service of the world. Man completes himself by giving of himself, sacrificing himself. The finest comment on this Christian principle are the words of Anne Vercors before the dead body of his daughter, Violaine, in Paul Claudel’s The Tidings Brought to Mary:

"Perhaps the end of life is living? And perhaps the children of God remain sure-footed on this wretched earth? Not living, but dying—and giving in gladness all that we have. This is joy, liberty, grace, eternal youth! ... What value does the world have compared with life? And what value does life have if not to be given?"

Human existence is a consuming of oneself ‘for’ something. What is the nature of this consuming? In the mystery of the Trinity, the substance of being is revealed to us as relationship. Now let us add that it is proposed to us as a gift. This is man's greatness. His life, like the Being who created him, is to be a gift: he is similar to God. Thus, man consuming himself must become gift: his is the only creature who has the capacity to be conscious of this structural element of reality.

- Luigi Giussani, The law of life, the gift of self:
At the origin of the Christian Claim

Faith means resisting the brute force

Excerpts from: Year of Faith: We Cannot Do Without Faith – The Magificat, November 2012

Father Peter John Cameron, O.P. 

Pope Benedict XVI says that “faith means resisting the brute force that would otherwise pull us under.”

Very often the reason why we get lukewarm regarding faith is because we do not take the real needs of our life seriously. Instead, we fill our life with distractions and any number of useless things. The lack of urgency in life makes us listless, so much so that we begin to doubt if there are any real answers to the pressing questions of life. 

The wind that seems to be against us is in fact a grace that moves us to face what really matters. The wind symbolizes life, reality. In his mercy, Jesus draws us to the knowledge of him through what he allows to happen in life from moment to moment… even/especially the tumultuous things.

Pope Benedict writes that “the essence of faith is that I do not meet with something that has been thought up, but that… something meets me which is greater than anything we can think of for ourselves.” Walking across the sea to meet the disciples comes Something Greater.

The Presence challenges us to go beyond what “we can think of for ourselves.” Faith begins in the face of an event that provokes our reason unlike other things in life. The emergency prompts (us) to recognize what (we) are really looking for in life. Who can prevent the storms in life? No one. But to be able to walk with Jesus over the very things that would sink us? That is what our hearts are waiting for. Faith is not something optional; our hearts are made to await the Mystery who comes to meet us in the overwhelming circumstances of life.

Faith does not start from within but from without – from an exceptional happening, a fact that moves us on every level. This happening is something that seems both desirable and impossible at the same time… like Jesus walking on water.

Even when we fail by losing focus, the seriousness of our needs kicks in anew. This brings us back to the awareness of how indispensible faith is. For the only thing adequate to answer our boundless need is the One who unfailingly stretches out his hand and catches us. As Pope Benedict puts it, “Faith means fellowship with him who has the… power… that draws us up, that holds us fast, that carries us safely over the elements of death.”

We pray for the grace to resist the brute force that would pull us under by keeping our eyes on the One who gave us our needs. We can rely on the wisdom of Father Jean-Pierre de Caussade, S.J.:

“Our faith is never more alive than when what we experience through our senses contradicts and tries to destroy it. The life of faith is the untiring pursuit of God through all that disguises and disfigures him… You are seeking for secret ways of belonging to God but there is only one: making use of whatever he offers you.”

Inter-dividual - a colony of others

"Inter-dividual" rather than individual best describes us as beings and it points to a term that we may relate to better and that is interconnectedness. Maybe using the aspen tree as an example we can get a glimpse into our own make-up of a person. The leaves of an aspen have an unusual ability to twist and bend to protect the trees from severe winds. Their twisting motion helps the tree to dissipate the energy more uniformly throughout the canopy - to reduce the stress on the tree. Additionally, the quaking movement is thought to aid in the tree’s growth, because the constant movement increases the intake of air by the leaves. Lastly, moving the leaves increases the ability for sunlight to shine on the lower leaves, thereby improving the rate of photosynthesis for the trees.

Or perhaps we should say TREE.

Aspens are unique in that a forest of trees can be actually one tree. Aspens grow in large colonies derived from a single seedling and spread the roots to create new trees. The new saplings may appear as far as 30-40 meters from the parent tree, yet they are a part of the same system. The individual trees may live 40-150 years above the ground but the roots can live for thousands of years. There is one colony in Utah that is believed to be over 80,000 years old! Aspen colonies can even survive forest fires because their roots are so well protected.

And because the colony is actually one system, they are quite generous to what could appear to be” another tree”. If a tree on one side of the forest is thirsty, the trees will work in unison to pass water through the root system to the ailing tree from one that is in an area where water is more abundant. If another needs nutrients or minerals, again it will be passed through the root system from one tree to the one in need. 

One of the most famous of quaking aspens' vast underground root systems is a network called Pando (Latin for "I spread", and also known as the Trembling Giant). It is estimated to cover about 107 acres, weighs about 6,600 tons and dates back 80,000 years - making it a contender to be one of the Earth's oldest and heaviest organisms. Trees within the root system grow and die, but these are replaced with fresh growth. The entire colonial organism, which is said to be derived from a single male plant, contains about 47,000 stems.

Inter-dividual is a term coined by René Girard and it means, in general that we desire according to the desire of the other and which is often referred to as “mimetic”. There has always been some other who precedes us and which surrounds us, and which moves us to desire, to want and to act. We may acknowledge this when we see it illustrated in the way the entertainment industry creates celebrities, or the advertising profession manages to make particular objects or brands desirable. Just spend a few hours observing yourself with others in the mob of consumers on Black Friday. 

What becomes challenging for us is the claim that in fact it is not some of our desires that are highly mimetic, but the whole way in which we humans are structured by desire.

Girard has pointed out, much like the interconnectedness of the Aspen tree, that humans are those animals in which even basic biological instincts (which of course exist, and are not the same thing as desire) are ever-bond to the other. In fact, our capacity to receive and deal with our instincts is derived from a hugely developed capacity for imitation which sets our species apart from our nearest primate relatives.

As a result, gesture, language and memory are not only things which “we” learn, as though there were an “I” that was doing the learning. Rather it is the case that, through this body being imitatively drawn into the life of all those before us, gesture, language and memory form an “I” that is in fact one of the indications of the "social" other. Thus being highly malleable, it is not the “I” that has desires, it is desire that forms and sustains the “I”. The “I” is something like a snapshot, in time, of all the many relationships which preexist it and which it is a mirror image.

The image laid out here, of the person mimetic, is always reaching outward and inevitably getting caught in entanglements - physically, psychologically and every which way. As we twist and turn in our attempts to free ourselves from another, these very movements become highly contagious for others who often enjoin the swirling of estrangement until escalating into violence. The issue for restoring community is how do we break the spiraling cycle of violent contagion - bringing calm after the chaos?

Not wanting to leave a post dangling, check out this link to an audio presentation The Scapegoat: René Girard's Anthropology of Violence and Religion.  And here is one last intriguing thought-image from Girard: "Humanity is the child of religion. In a way religion is like the placenta which protects the newborn." 

Lincoln explains the need for reason even when you have a compass

Mr. Lincoln Goes to Hollywood

By Roy Blount Jr. Smithsonian magazine, November 2012,

Read more of the article here.

In Lincoln, the Steven Spielberg movie opening this month, President Abraham Lincoln has a talk with U.S. Representative Thaddeus Stevens that should be studied in civics classes today. The scene goes down easy, thanks to the moviemakers’ art, but the point Lincoln makes is tough.

Stevens, as Tommy Lee Jones plays him, is the meanest man in Congress, but also that body’s fiercest opponent of slavery. Because Lincoln’s primary purpose has been to hold the Union together, and he has been approaching abolition in a roundabout, politic way, Stevens by 1865 has come to regard him as “the capitulating compromiser, the dawdler.”

...

Stevens’ wit, however, was biting. ...

Lincoln’s wit was indirect, friendly— ... (b)ut it was also purposeful. Stevens was a man of unmitigated principle. Lincoln got some great things done. What Lincoln, played most convincingly by Daniel Day-Lewis, says to Stevens in the movie, in effect, is this: 

A compass will point you true north. But it won’t show you the swamps between you and there. If you don’t avoid the swamps, what’s the use of knowing true north?

That’s a key moment in the movie. It is also something that I wish more people would take to heart—people I talk with about politics, especially people I agree with. Today, as in 1865, people tend to be sure they are right, and maybe they are—Stevens was, courageously. What people don’t always want to take on board is that people who disagree with them may be just as resolutely sure they are right. That’s one reason the road to progress, or regression, in a democracy is seldom straight, entirely open or, strictly speaking, democratic. If Lincoln’s truth is marching on, it should inspire people to acknowledge that doing right is a tricky proposition. “I did not want to make a movie about a monument,” Spielberg told me. “I wanted the audience to get into the working process of the president.”

Lincoln came out against slavery in a speech in 1854, but in that same speech he declared that denouncing slaveholders wouldn’t convert them. He compared them to drunkards, writes Goodwin:

Though the cause be “naked truth itself, transformed to the heaviest lance, harder than steel” [Lincoln said], the sanctimonious reformer could no more pierce the heart of the drinker or the slaveowner than “penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw. Such is man, and so must he be understood by those who would lead him.” In order to “win a man to your cause,” Lincoln explained, you must first reach his heart, “the great high road to his reason.”

As it happened, the fight for and against slave-owning would take the lowest of roads: four years of insanely wasteful war, which killed (by the most recent reliable estimate) some 750,000 people, almost 2.5 percent of the U.S. population at the time, or the equivalent of 7.5 million people today. But winning the war wasn’t enough to end slavery. Lincoln, the movie, shows how Lincoln went about avoiding swamps and reaching people’s hearts, or anyway their interests, so all the bloodshed would not be in vain.

***

There is more to this Creativity Crisis then merely sociology or psychology...

Creativity Crisis

Britannica: Based on your study results, how significantly has creativity decreased in U.S. children?

Kim: Creativity decreased over the last 20 years. The results indicate that all of the scores of the Lateral/Innovative thinking factor, Vertical/Adaptive thinking factor, and Creative personality factor have significantly decreased or have significantly started decreasing. The decrease has been more in recent years than earlier years. 

The U.S. has served as a beacon for creative hearts and adventurous spirits from before its inception to the present, calling out to those in search of freedom of expression and freedom of thought, like Albert Einstein, Igor Stravinsky, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Ieoh Ming Pei, and Alexander Graham Bell. If the United States is no longer an environment that encourages creativity, will it still continue to attract those seeking creative expression? At the same time, while U.S. creativity is suffering, there are mounting and substantial dangers looming: global warming, overpopulation, and terrorism and militancy, for example. Americans may be prepared to lead the world, but are they able? Other countries and other cultures are jealous of what the U.S. has, and some of them have been cultivating creativity by mimicking the way the U.S. used to be, providing environments for creativity to flourish, to their own ends.

Wonder where creativity dies? At most universities in the US

For over a generation, shocking cases of censorship at America's colleges and universities have taught students the wrong lessons about living in a free society. Drawing on a decade of experience battling for freedom of speech on campus, First Amendment lawyer Greg Lukianoff reveals how higher education fails to teach students to become critical thinkers: by stifling open debate, our campuses are supercharging ideological divisions, promoting group-think, and encouraging an un-scholarly certainty about complex issues.

Heather King ...and while following the rules isn't in...

REDEEMED

A Spiritual Misfit Stumbles Toward God, Marginal Sanity, and the Peace That Passes All Understanding

The Christian religion is only for one who needs infinite help. That is, only for one who feels infinite anguish. The whole earth can suffer no greater torment that a single soul. The Christian faith—as I see it—is one’s refuge in this ultimate torment. Anyone to whom it is given in this anguish to open his heart, instead of contracting it, accepts the means of salvation in his heart.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein

I don’t know about you, but this is the kind of quote that makes me feel right at home. This gives me hope. Anguish, torment—this Wittgenstein is a man who understands. So do Maria Callas, Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald, and the people in charge of adorning Mexican churches. I love a good statue of Jesus with a hole ripped in his chest and his sacred heart hemorrhaging blood.  Nobody knew better than Christ that people to whom everyday things like holding a job or interacting with another human being are never-ending sources of torture and anxiety are exactly the ones most in need of healing. A guy who hung out with lepers, paralytics, the possessed: this is someone I can trust. We don’t have to go up to him, he comes down to us. We want a doctor, a hospital, meds; he gives us himself. We want to stop the suffering; he says, I’ll suffer with you.

Like many children of the ’60s, I grew up not believing in much of anything. This was through no fault of my decent hardworking, self-sacrificing (if ever so slightly overburdened) parents. My father was a bricklayer who worked his fingers to the bone to support seven brothers and sisters and me. My mother was a housewife who sent us all to Sunday school at the Congregational Church across the street, played hymns on the piano, and (no doubt desperately trying to stave off the inchoate sense that half of us would grow up to be alcoholics and/or addicts) was given to sayings like “Pride goeth before a fall” and “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” In white Anglo-Saxon, pre-Vatican II, Protestant New Hampshire (I was going to add “rural,” but that would have been redundant), Catholicism was for Italians. Catholicism was for people from May-ass (“May,” short for Massachusetts) who smoked cigarettes and had plastic Marys on their dashboards. Catholicism was for rollicking Irish families, not shut-down, inward looking, abstemious, frugal, non-risk-taking folks such as us.

As a kid, and for a long time afterward, my basic idea toward God was: if I follow the rules—if I’m good—he won’t hurt me. Now I see that’s the whole problem. In fact, trying to be good in a way makes me bad, makes me dishonest. Whereas if I just face that I’m a sinner from the ground up—I’d sell my mother’s soul for a drink, some sugar, fifteen minutes of sex—I might actually start to get somewhere. Alcoholics and addicts know this kind of thing about themselves, which is why, in spite of their other myriad shortcomings, they tend to be the funniest, and often oddly spiritual people on earth. Of course I would think that being one myself. In fact, I have a theory that’ll all addiction is, at bottom, a search for God.

Think about it: the blackout—a crude form of mystical union; the willingness to sacrifice reputation, family, money, health, one’s very life—a twisted martyrdom. Sometimes I think anyone as drawn as I am to suffering would have had to become a Catholic. But truly, it’s a gift to have seen the depths to which I’ll fall, the extent to which I’ll compromise myself, the lengths to which I’m willing to go to avoid God. The problem with avoiding God is that next thing I know, I’ve latched onto something outside myself, established a substitute God; and he, she, or it is holding me in complete bondage. To me, the fall doesn’t mean I’m bad (though in one way I actually am pretty bad) and that God hates me. It means I’m broken and I need help.

Alcoholism is an interesting phenomenon.  It’s the universal perverse tendency toward self-sabotage, except taken to the nth degree. Normal people look at an alcoholic and think, She drinks like me—just more. But it’s a difference in kind, not degree: for the person predisposed to alcoholism, the very first drink begins setting up a mental obsession and physical craving—in essence, a for of insanity—that is entirely beyond the normal drinker’s ken. Alcoholic drinking is only a symptom—of a soul divided deeply against itself; of mental, emotional, and, above all, spiritual conflict. The conflict is of a soul in which the universal human thirst for connection, meaning, love has gone terribly awry—a soul in the grip of a compulsion that has seized upon a substitute for love and made it into a god.

Everybody’s spiritually sick to one degree or another, of course, but what’s interesting about alcoholism is that if I don’t tend to my spiritual sickness, I’ll die.  I’ll pick up a drink, or a crack pipe, or a Xanax or three million, and die. Or I’ll kill myself. Or I’ll get so crazy someone else will kill me. It’s a condition that, over the years, has tended to grab my attention. As one of my sober friends says, “I’m not on a spiritual path because I’m so spiritual, I’m on a spiritual path because I’m so not spiritual.”

And while following the rules isn’t in and of itself the answer, once on the spiritual path, I do follow certain principles, certain rules. I follow the rules not out of gratitude: for having gotten sober, for the ability to walk, see, breathe; for life. The irony is that I find when I’m on fire with gratitude, I’ll not only refrain from cheating, lying, and stealing: I’ll do way more than that. “Do not think I have come to abolish but to fulfill,” Christ said (Matthew 5:17), and I think what he meant was that I’ll live in a whole different way. I’ll “waste” time, commit crazy acts of generosity, interact with all manner of extremely unpromising people. I’ll quit the job I hate and, though scared senseless, start doing the work I’ve wanted to do my whole life. I’ll get out of the relationship that is killing me, over and over again, and finally, finally, finally discover it wasn’t the relationship, it was me, and it’s not his fault, and my mother did the best she could, and it’s nobody’s job to make me happy, I have to do it myself, and lo and behold, it turns out, want to do it myself; that’s all I want. I’ll be like Zacchaeus, the puny publican who climbed the sycamore to get a glimpse of Jesus (Luke 19:1-10): willing to make a fool of myself, to be enthusiastic.

But when I’m enthusiastic, when I extend a hand to the next person, I can’t do it from the level of “I’m up here and you’re down there.” I do it because I realize I need it just as much as he or she does. I “boast of my weakness,” as St Paul did (2 Corinthians 12:9), because I can hardly believe—clueless and fallen as I basically still am—that I’m in even marginally good enough shape so I can help someone else, to be kind to someone else. That’s the only point of the spiritual path: to get in good enough shape so I can help someone else. But not like the Pharisee who stood at the front of the church, regarded the lowlifes in the back, and said, “Thank you, God, for making me so perfect, and man, I am glad I’m not as screwed up as they are” (Luke 18:9-14). I have to be like the tax collector who stood at the back of the church, hanging his head, and said, “Oh my God, I can’t believe you even let me in, I can’t believe there’s a place for me. Thank you so much and please forgive me and help me to be better.”

It hurts to participate, to keep our hearts open when we’re in anguish, but as Wittgenstein observed, this is the means of our salvation. This is Christ nailed, arms open, to the cross, simultaneously utterly vulnerable and utterly powerful: the most radical, subversive, never-ending surprising Savior I can imagine. Turning his own agony, to the thief beside him to say, “This day you shall be with me in Paradise,” he’s the Great Physician, the Great Priest, the Great Friend. When I picture Christ, though, he’s not only, or even mostly, on the cross. He’s coming down off the cross, walking among us. He’s saying, I know, it hurts unbelievably most of the time, but look, here’s how to make it better. He’s saying, Don’t worry, you won’t see how for a while, but it’s all gonna come together in the end. He’s saying, It’s all right already: right here, right now. He’s here to help, he’s here to help. Not a pious image, but a pulsing heart.  A warm body. Blood.

Link HERE to the article at Godspy.

Words That Will Not Pass Away

The text of the Gospel is nothing less than a poetic event analogous to and inseparable from the fleshly Incarnation of the Lord. Here as elsewhere, but here in particular, words, these revealed words, do not simply have an abstract sense that can, with impunity, be disengaged from their "body" in order to be homogenized and transposed into some other neutral medium of expression, such as philosophical or moralistic or political discourse. Words have, besides a "ghostly meaning," a sound, a texture, a color, a flavor: in short, a body that, in the Bible, reveals to us the Face and the Heart of God. 

Is there any other reason why, after the solemn proclamation of the Gospel during the liturgy, the celebrant kisses the book? As Hans Urs von Balthasar has expressed it: we may feel through clothing for the true contours of the body within; but only that body itself is the person we seek, and that body is nothing other than the living, though material, aspect of the revelation, the incarnate Word. Clothing may be shed without violating the integrity of the person; but if we try to go through the body to reach the allegedly "purer" and more transcendental sanctuary of the soul, we will lose both and commit a crime in the process.
— ERASMO LEIVA-MERIKAKIS, Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, now known as Brother Simeon, is a Cistercian monk of Saint Joseph's Abbey, Spencer, MA. He is the author of fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, a three-volume commentary on Matthew's Gospel.
— Magnificat, Vol 14, No. 9, November, Pp. 265-266.

Pray continually through the liturgy - that which is working out a people - a new creation

“Then he told them a parable about the need to pray continually and never lose heart”.Luke 18:1 (NJB)

“PRAY CONTINUALLY” THROUGH THE LITURGY

The Church’s liturgy is, first of all, that: a way of life, the atmosphere created by the life of Christ, by the Epiphany of God, in order that this life might be born and grow within man …

Just as I do not invent my life, I do not invent my faith but instead receive it as it is.  Likewise I do not have to invent my prayer, but I receive Christ’s prayer, born of the Spirit of God and already existing in the community of his sons …

An environment is needed for the flourishing of every kind of life …  Much more is required: a living environment, circumstances that will allow the person who wishes to live to breathe, grow, and nourish himself.  If the environment disappears, so does the life …

The meaning of the liturgy, the “reason for” common prayer, can be summarised in this way: the Church is able to offer me the prayer of Christ and to welcome me into a living environment, a community, where this prayer can originate and grow …

A man is Christian only if he is a member of Christ, and he is a member of Christ only if he receives within himself the life that comes through communion in faith and the prayer of his brothers …

Christian prayer, therefore, will be misunderstood unless it is seen as being related to a community, a liturgy – that is, in a proper sense, the working-out of a people – but as it is completed and lived by Jesus.  It is no longer a matter of choice; Christ has decided for us the kind of prayer he wants.  Do we ever reflect on our doubts about prayer conducted in common?  Beyond laziness or our own meagre well-being, are there not more fundamental obstacles?  A false kind of angelism or illusion: the belief that we do not need to learn and to receive from others the nourishment of prayer, the manna?  Or else ignorance, or worse, a mere external, abstract knowledge that is contemptuous of things and liturgical signs, which, however, are simple, real, and close to us and are justified not as a kind of theatre, even a pious one, but as the living, active presence of a saving God? 

Father Bernard Bro, O.P. – a dominican priest

Taken from the Magnificat November 2012, Vol 3, No 1

Madeleine Delbrêl & the women of Cursillo 1024

My friend Gerry Straub writes that Madeleine Delbrél was a young French poet who at the age of 20 underwent a radical conversion to Catholicism. She and a community of lay women who formed around her were the very work of hope. See Gerry's post here. Today on this feast day of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica she is featured in the Magnificat's Meditation of the Day. 

The Church is the greatest sign of the mystery of God.  For she contains the famous dimensions of love described by Saint Paul, dimensions he hopes we can attain with all the Saints.  She alone is the sign of the massive breaking open that our entire being has to undergo in order to be capable of God and God’s tasks.

We will be incapable of incarnating God’s love in the world we will be incapable of bringing the Gospel, which is but the manifestation of love, to the world, if we do not first accept the incarnation of this love in the Church in the mystical Body of Jesus Christ… 

Everything in the Church shows the movement of Christ’s blood, the gestures that offer it, the places where we can place our lips to drink it and to cause it to pour forth. 

This is what liturgy is…  Are we aware that liturgy is the salvation of the world?  If, through the long course of history, it was necessary to adapt the liturgy, to explain it, to translate it, and if it is once again necessary to do so in our time, it never has been and is not today a question of making the liturgy more human.  It already is human, and tragically so: it is the Passion of the Son of God made man, made continually present among us. 

This is, above all, what a parish is, in the midst of a world that comprehends nothing about such things.  What else are bishops with their offices other than the faith preserved and the responsibility for the salvation that is meant to spread to the ends of the earth?  Rome, through everything else, is the love of God that has been promised to the Church for eternity.  This body wants to propagate itself.  The Church will forever aspire to the world.  She doesn’t need the world in order to accomplish her mission, but without the world, she would have no mission.  The world is the stubble and the Church is the flame.   (Servant of God Madeleine Delbrel +1964)Taken from the Magnificat November 2012, Vol 3, No 1

At a prayer service for the team and candidates of Cursillo 1024 last night I sensed this powerful movement that I believe Delbrél refers to in her reflection. When I finished the reading from Philippians I looked out at all who were gathered, and there sitting among us were innumerable spirits, many were those who have gone before.  We all had come together in celebration, worship and thanksgiving in this love in the Church, in this Body of Christ.

Renew My Mind - Kim Hill