These Dread Latter Days

[My September 6th "From the Chairman" blog for masscitizensforlife.org.]

These are strange and perilous times for the American republic.

Words come to mind from that canny Southern novelist, Walker Percy. He published a great book in 1971 called Love in the Ruins that more or less begins like this:

“Is it that God has at last removed his blessing from the U.S.A. and what we feel now is just the clank of the old historical machinery, the sudden jerking ahead of the roller-coaster cars as the chain catches and carries us back into history with its ordinary catastrophes, carries us out and up toward the brink from that felicitous and privileged siding where even unbelievers admitted that if it was not God who blessed the U.S.A., then at least some great good luck had befallen us, and that now the blessing or the luck is over, the machinery clanks, the chain catches hold, and the cars jerk forward?”

Now, that was right before Roe, so things were in fact to get far, far worse. Has the inexorable historical process of civilizational decline enveloped this beloved land?

Our nation has always needed critique and elevation, as every society on earth perennially stands in need. But we once ordered our common life around the principle “that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

A president of the stature of Lincoln could recall these principles to our nation and excise the cancer of slavery.

But we no longer acknowledge the principles that constitute American exceptionalism. If not perfect in virtue, at least we once acknowledged the claims of virtue. If not always learned, we recognized the value of a high cultural tone and of liberal education.

Now we have come to that crisis that Saint John Paul describes in Evangelium vitae, 18:

“…a long historical process is reaching a turning-point. The process which once led to discovering the idea of ‘human rights’—rights inherent in every person and prior to any constitution or state legislation—is today marked by a surprising contradiction. Precisely in an age when the inviolable rights of the person are solemnly proclaimed and the value of life is publicly affirmed, the very right to life is being denied or trampled upon, especially at the more significant moments of existence: the moment of birth and the moment of death.”

To use fancy philosophical language: this assault on the most vulnerable bare human life is the deployment of biopower. There is no resistance to such power but an existential commitment to follow the truth regardless of what it costs us personally, even if it leaves us in every way homeless in a world gone wrong.

The right and left and center no longer place the principles of the Declaration above the multifarious indefensibilities of partisanship.

This derives from the fact that every stratum of society (the poor, the wealthy, and the middle class) pursues consumer comfort and ego consolation.

Without recovery of the first principle of civilized life, that each “man,” that is, each individual of the human species, has an inalienable right to life, we cannot have anything else. (I will suggest how these principles apply concretely to this election year in the posts to come.)

 

We either make the preferential option for the powerless, or we embrace the principle of power and death. That’s what our grand republic has been tending towards for a long time now. We must become virtuous enough and learned enough to stand athwart this hurtling history.

Who Benefits from Fracturing the Solidarity of the Dispossessed?: A Manifesto

[A further response to Deacon Nicolas De la Cruz.]

It really is a question of what it takes to have one nation. America is the cosmopolitan nation (a kind of secular analogue to the Catholic Church), the leading edge of all that's good about modernity--but afflicted with all that's bad about it too. The American experiment in ordered liberty can only succeed if we believe again in the decentering of self by republican virtue and devotion to the common good, embrace liberal arts education again, and somehow recover piety towards the basic verities--gratitude to God and wonder before the truth, goodness, and beauty of existence and a bleeding heart for the suffering neighbor. 

This is my civic credo, and I don't think I'm alone.

As for your original comment, which I didn't quite close the circle on: you of course provided the answer all along. I deplore Trump's immigration stance--deplore, detest, denounce it. But as you indicate: there is a hierarchy of suffering. It is no part of intellect or heart to ignore the way the passional hierarchy unfolds. To do so, in fact, would betray all the victims, of whatever rank. As I said with regard to my last Trump post (and which I need to return to): the prime mystifying operation of ideology is to set the unprotected, the exploited, the oppressed classes against each other. Try this: who benefits from setting the white working-class poor against immigrants, or vice versa? Or setting either against the victims of abortion and euthanasia? Cui bono? 

The protected class. The global elite. And all their comfortable hangers-on. That's who. That's who.

All the dispossessed must stand in solidarity, or we will be ground to nothing, or rather, reduced to bare desiring-machines suitable no longer even for the extraction of surplus value by labor, but only by consumption. 

The revolution cannot proceed without voting pro-life. Those of us who are dispossessed must never place the self-interest of the specific victim class to which we belong above the interests of another victim class. Emancipation MUST begin by defending the barest human life, the most dispossessed, the most powerless: the victims who are not us. It starts by defending the unborn.

The revolution begins by restoring the right to life of the innocent in law. This is my manifesto.

The Global Elite and the Rest of Us: On Trump and Immigration

[Written in response to a Facebook query from a Latino friend, Deacon Nicolas De la Cruz, who asked how to weigh Trump's anti-immigrant demagoguery versus voting pro-life.]

This is a crucial matter you bring up, and I'm grateful that you've done so. I am very clearly on record supporting a "liberal" immigration policy. I am not shy about the word amnesty. So, I'm firmly with the Reagan/Bush/Rubio wing of the Republican Party, which earns me disapprobation in many sectors of the right. Obviously, enthusiastic Trump supporters and I disagree on this. I will admit I have not had enough patience with the restrictionists in the past. I have had to learn, as we all have to learn, what is behind so many good people's enthusiastic embrace of a horrible man. Well, we learn nothing by impugning the intelligence and goodwill of Trump supporters. We only show our own lack of intelligence and goodwill in doing so. This is my new political mantra: THERE ARE REASONS. There are reasons people will vote for Hillary. There are reasons people will vote for Trump. There are reasons people will vote for neither. Civility requires recognizing the rationality of those who disagree with us, and a willingness to understand what's going on. And that is the great and humble and necessary thing you have done here, Nicolas. It's the only way forward.

Peggy Noonan has done essential work on this. I owe her a lot; we all do. She and I come from different sides of the immigration debate, but she has conducted her analyses this election cycle with such acuity that she has made herself indispensable if one is interested in understanding America right now. This is the breakthrough piece: react-text: 838 http://www.wsj.com/.../how-global-elites-forsake-their... /react-text . 

I admired Chancellor Merkel for the deeply Christian hospitality she extended to the wave of refugees. But then came Cologne. The immigration situation is different for the U.S., but not what Noonan points out about who bears the cost of hospitality: 

'Nothing in their lives [those of the protected class] will get worse. The challenge of integrating different cultures, negotiating daily tensions, dealing with crime and extremism and fearfulness on the street—that was put on those with comparatively little, whom I’ve called the unprotected. They were left to struggle, not gradually and over the years but suddenly and in an air of ongoing crisis that shows no signs of ending—because nobody cares about them enough to stop it.

'The powerful show no particular sign of worrying about any of this. When the working and middle class pushed back in shocked indignation, the people on top called them “xenophobic,” “narrow-minded,” “racist.” The detached, who made the decisions and bore none of the costs, got to be called “humanist,” “compassionate,” and “hero of human rights.”'

And this is true. Again, the immigration situation in America is VERY different. The vast majority of Latino immigrants are Catholic, so the profound issues of large-scale Islamic integration are not in play. We are all Westerners, to begin with. 

However, and I say this as a man who still wants to see a "liberal" immigration policy, there are always costs to integrating a new community. And the protected class of this nation simply does not bear them. I am the oddball, a man belonging to the unprotected class who wants more immigrants. But I will not judge the fellow members of my class as racists simply because they bear costs others who share my immigration opinions don't bear. Here's my proposal on immigration: let's build immigrant and refugee housing in Wellesley and Norwood and Hingham. I'd still be all for the "liberal" policy. How many of the protected would continue to stand with me?

Trump's immigrant-baiting is execrable. There is no defense for it. None. At. All. But I guarantee you the vast majority of his supporters are not racists. They are people barely scraping by in life. They are literally despised by the governing elite, when they aren't simply forgotten. They're not scapegoating immigrants. They're pointing out to the elites: "This is your policy. Assume the real costs of that policy. You run this country: factor us in." And with that position, I am in full agreement.

This all dovetails with what has been revealed in Clinton campaign chair John Podesta's emails: react-text: 862 https://www.theguardian.com/.../the-podesta-emails-show... /react-text . This split between the protected and unprotected means the end of the republic, if it isn't checked. Forcing the elites to shut up and listen to the people for once: that is what Trump represents for people. (I still say he's the strangest standard bearer for that good cause, as he belongs to the protected class just as profoundly as does Clinton. Be that as it may.)

Nicolas, let me reiterate. I'm an amnesty guy. I want the door open as wide as reasonably possible. Other than who bears the cost of that policy, which should be those most capable of bearing that cost, the only question in my mind is how to infuse new populations with the American ethos. The problem there, though, isn't that new immigrants are resistant. The problem is that the American ethos is everywhere in abeyance. THAT is the real limit on immigration. If we do not have the confidence to communicate the grandeur of American ideals and Western civilization and liberal democracy, then we cannot responsibly open our borders. But that problem is not a Latino problem. That problem is an American problem, above all, a problem of American education. This cheap cosmopolitanism of the protected class being peddled in classrooms is at war with the genuine cosmopolitanism of America, which is coincident with patriotism. That is the precise beauty of this country, the substance of American exceptionalism.

My devotion to immigration has everything to do with my Catholicism, yes. But it also has everything to do with what I know and love about America. I still believe we are the shining city on the hill. 

I was born in Taiwan, of a Taiwanese mother. Though born American, I am most certainly an immigrant too. And I will not see the door closed behind me. Everyone who agrees with me that America is enriched and strengthened by immigration, NEEDS to understand what's going on in America, especially among the supporters of Trump.

A Different Kind of Life

On the Feast of Pope Saint John Paul II in this Year of Mercy, we Catholics are in special need of hearing John Paul's words from that early, magnificent encyclical of his, "Dives in misericordia [Rich in Mercy]."

There is so little mercy in the world, and, scandalously, sometimes there's even less within Catholic precincts. Nothing but mercy can save each person, marriage, home, nation. The war in the human heart is destroying each of us, all of us. May the dewfall of divine mercy settle upon us all.

Outside of mercy, there is only death. If there is to be social progress, or a new evangelization, or even basic human community, there must be mercy. The Christian must hang upon the cross of mercy, or the night will destroy everything true, good, and beautiful in this world.

"The Church must consider it one of her principal duties--at every stage of history and especially in our modern age--to proclaim and to introduce into life the mystery of mercy, supremely revealed in Jesus Christ. Not only for the Church herself as the community of believers but also in a certain sense for all humanity, this mystery is the source of a life different from the life which can be built by man, who is exposed to the oppressive forces of the threefold concupiscence active within him. It is precisely in the name of this mystery that Christ teaches us to forgive always. How often we repeat the words of the prayer which He Himself taught us, asking 'forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,' which means those who are guilty of something in our regard! It is indeed difficult to express the profound value of the attitude which these words describe and inculcate. How many things these words say to every individual about others and also about himself! The consciousness of being trespassers against each other goes hand in hand with the call to fraternal solidarity, which St. Paul expressed in his concise exportation to 'forbear one another in love.' What a lesson of humility is to be found here with regard to man, with regard both to one's neighbor and to oneself! What a school of good will for daily living, in the various conditions of our existence! If we were to ignore this lesson, what would remain of any 'humanist' program of life and education?"

Looking Vaguely into the West

[Originally posted on FB, October 19th.]

In honor of the North American Martyrs, here's a passage from Willa Cather's follow-up to "Death Comes for the Archbishop," her other novel on the Catholic genealogy of North America, an elegiac gem, "Shadows on the Rock," about Quebec at the end of the seventeenth century.

Twelve-year-old Cécile, the focus of the book, looks after a sweet, fatherless boy half her age, Jacques. Towards the end of the novel they are sitting at the top of Cap Diamant, watching the sunset:

"They sat down in the blue twilight to eat their bread and await the turbid afterglow which is peculiar to Quebec in autumn; the slow, rich, prolonged flowing-back of crimson across the sky, after the sun has sunk behind the dark ridges of the west. Because of the haze in the air the color seems thick, like a heavy liquid, welling up wave after wave, a substance that throbs, rather than a light.

"That crimson flow, that effulgence at the solemn twilight hour, often made Cécile think about the early times and the martyrs--coming up, as it did, out of those dark forests that had been the scene of their labors and their fate. The rainbow, she knew, was set in the heavens to remind us of a promise that all storms shall have an ending. Perhaps this afterglow, too, was ordained in the heavens for a reminder. 

"'Jacques,' she said presently, 'do you ever think about the martyrs? You ought to, because they were so brave.'

"'I don't like to think about them. It makes me feel bad,' he murmured. He was sitting with his hands on his knees, looking vaguely into the west.

"Cécile squeezed his arm. 'Oh, it doesn't me! It makes me feel happy, as if I could never be afraid of anything again.'"

Unfathered, like Jacques, we look vaguely into the west, into the crimson flow, and don't know what to do about the future, about suffering, about the direction of our ardor. 

The subtitle of Cormac McCarthy's monumental "Blood Meridian" is "The Evening Redness in the West." At the end of the seemingly manifest destiny of our lives, of our civilization, what do we find? What do we see in the blood of history? Something to make us flinch, or something to make us hope? 

The North American Martyrs belong to the DNA of this New World, and it can still be a brave new world for all, in the self-sacrifice of crucified love.

We celebrate another saint today, Paul of the Cross. He speaks of the complication of joys and pangs. This is the very patience of God, the seedbed of all greatness, in this world and in the new world to come: 

"Love is a unifying virtue which takes upon itself the torments of its beloved Lord. It is a fire reaching through to the inmost soul. It transforms the lover into the one loved. More deeply, love intermingles with grief, and grief with love, and a certain blending of love and grief occurs. They become so united that we can no longer distinguish love from grief nor grief from love. Thus the loving heart rejoices in its sorrow and exults in its grieving love. 

"Therefore, be constant in practicing every virtue, and especially in imitating the patience of our dear Jesus, for this is the summit of pure love."

A World Justified and Diaphanous: Eternal Life is Trinitarian, Part 2

[Originally posted on Facebook, Sunday, May 22nd.]

Happy Trinity Sunday! Today we concentrate on the mystery that makes sense of everything.

The question I began exploring yesterday, lies before us still: “What is eternal life?”

Supremely, it is life in the Spirit of the love of the Father and the Son. And such a Trinitarian life even now provides a revolutionary optics by which to see the world and history, for faith is growth towards beatific vision. Love gives vision.

Mystagogical initiation into the Trinitarian life is the point of Jesus’ Farewell Discourse (John 14-17), which I wrote about in my post “Darkness Sharpens the Eye.” I think the First Letter of John provides the fullest elaboration of that initiation: the Trinitarian life, a life of Trinitarian indwelling, is a life of radical love.

First, a brief return to the Farewell Discourse. Today’s Gospel marks a solitary post-Easter return of the Discourse: “All things that the Father has are Mine; on account of this, I said that of Mine, [the Spirit] takes and will announce to you” (John 16:15). That’s an almost infinitely compact expression of the Trinitarian processions, as extended in the saving missions. Only Jesus could have said it.

One more citation we need from the Discourse is Jesus’ own definition of eternal life: “And this is eternal life, that they may know You (Father), the only true God, and He Whom You sent, Jesus Christ” (John 17:3).

That proves the thesis that eternal life is simply Trinitarian life. What Jesus is sent to bring us (“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that all who believe in Him should not perish, but have eternal life”—John 3:16) is precisely inclusion in the Trinitarian relations, for we cannot know the Father but through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. If we do not know Jesus, we cannot know God, for He is God from God (the Prologue leading up to John 1:18), which we could not recognize without the Holy Spirit: “no one is able to say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit” (I Corinthians 12:3).

Which is why John is so severe about the anti-Christ, the one who negates the Trinity, the unitarian who preaches severity not mercy, accusation not justification, that is, the Christian pharisee:

“Who is the liar except the one denying that Jesus is the Christ? This one is the anti-Christ, the one denying the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father; everyone who confesses the Son has the Father also. Let what you heard from the beginning (ap’ archēs) abide (meneto) in you. If what you heard from the beginning abides (meine) in you, you will also abide (meneite) in the Son and in the Father. And this is the promise which He promised us: eternal life” (I John 2:22-25).

The “liar” is the Adversary of each human, the one who makes the case against us. And he doesn’t believe in the Trinity (James 2:19).

The Trinitarian vision is the vision of the justification of man, and of each of our fellow humans. “Abiding” in that vision is life in the Spirit.

If one denies that the fulfillment of the messianic promise comes through the sending of very God, God the Son, then one has misunderstood the whole work of justification, which is inclusion within the Trinitarian life. It is simply by that inclusion that our sin is overcome (Trinitarian indwelling—divine filiation, the indwelling of the Spirit—is the ultimate cause of justification in the act of justification, baptism).

Denying the divinity of the Messiah means making God the Father a metaphorical “father.” But God’s Fatherhood is no mere symbol. God the Father is Father all through. Because He is God AS Father, and in no other way is He so, that is, because He is Who He is in the generating/uttering of His Son/Word in the Holy Spirit, His merciful paternal care can never be minimized. The Father’s plan of loving goodness is the truth of history.

But this can only be so, all the horror of history could only possibly be overcome, if God is Trinity, for then the processions of the Son and of the Spirit from the Father can open to absorb all the toxicity of malice, through the saving economy, culminating in Cross and Resurrection and Church. (The classic and most beautiful systematic explanation of this is given by Saint Thomas Aquinas in the Summa theologiae I, q. 43, on the divine missions.)

Because God is Trinity, divine love can course like blood through all the channels of time and make everything new.

This apocalyptic conquering of evil occurs through the sacramental economy, preeminently in baptism and Eucharist. The Eucharistization of humanity through the Church is growth in both intensity and extent of the divine Spirit’s indwelling of the human spirit, both personal and communal.

When our spirit is thus divinized, the world becomes diaphanous of Trinitarian glory. Life in the Spirit is a life of iconic vision. It is seeing what no one else sees, an irrefutable glory, in our neighbor, in creation, in history.

Everything becomes luminous, and streams with the glory of God, when we believe in the Trinity and live within the Trinity: “[The New Jerusalem] has the glory of God, and the radiance of it is like a precious stone, like jasper, clear as crystal” (Revelation 21:11).

Balthasar taught the following profound truth to me, perhaps the profoundest of all: the infinite “intervals” of the Trinitarian relations (the divine Persons are “really distinct”: the Son is “not” the Father, the Father is “not” the Son, etc.) produce all the beauty of this world, and only the Trinitarian “intervals” can absorb all the abysses of this world, making beauty shine even through the hell of despair and malice and godforsakenness that is our history of carnage.

Aquinas says that magnificent thing about all the wonder of creation being marked by the specific contours of the Trinitarian life: “The processions of the Persons are also in some way the cause and ‘ratio’ of creation…” (ST I, q. 45, a. 7, ad 3).

Balthasar extends this essential insight of Trinitarian metaphysics to history: all wonders speak the Trinity and no hell can escape the Trinity.

An anti-Trinitarian monotheism cannot encompass our hells. The pharisaical unitarianism of a hardened Christian heart is the consummate idolatry. That is why John ends his first letter, “Little children, keep yourselves from idols” (I John 5:21).

To see the persons that the good Father places in our life, convenient or not, as the neighbors I am to justify, whatever the cost to me, to be filled with gratitude for even that cost, is to be a Trinitarian Christian, is to be love in the world, is to be a person who makes love shine in the world. The conducting of this mission, the Christian mission, is the beginning of eternal life.

[The following astonishing passage by Balthasar provides a powerful overview of the Trinitarian life: “The Father strips Himself, without remainder, of His Godhead and hands it over to the Son; He ‘imparts’ to the Son all that is His. ‘All that is Thine is Mine’ (John 17:10). The Father must not be thought to exist ‘prior’ to this self-surrender (in an Arian sense): He IS the movement of self-giving that holds nothing back. This divine act that brings forth the Son, that is, the second way of participating in (and of being) the identical Godhead, involves the positing of an absolute, infinite ‘distance’ that can contain and embrace all the other distances that are possible within the world of finitude, including the distance of sin. Inherent in the Father’s love is an absolute renunciation: He will not be God for Himself alone. He lets go of His divinity and, in this sense, manifests a (divine) God-lessness (of love, of course). The latter must not be confused with the godlessness that is found within the world, although it undergirds it, renders it possible, and goes beyond it. The Son’s answer to the gift of Godhead (of equal substance with the Father) can only be eternal thanksgiving (‘eucharistia’) to the Father, the Source—a thanksgiving as selfless and unreserved as the Father’s original self-surrender. Proceeding from both, as their subsistent ‘We,’ there breathes the ‘Spirit’ Who is common to both: as the essence of love, He maintains the infinite difference between Them, seals it, and, since He is the one Spirit of Them both, bridges it” (Theo-Drama, Vol. IV: The Action).]

Forever Falling in Love: Eternal Life is Trinitarian, Part 1

What is the good life?

This is one of the most basic philosophical questions. But Christianity speaks of something more than even the good life: the promise is eternal life. What does that mean?

The answer the Apostle John gives us, in his Gospel, in the Apocalypse, and in his Epistles always has to do with the Trinity, especially with life in the Holy Spirit of truth and love.

In these days after Pentecost, with Eastertide receding from us, and in preparation for the celebration of Trinity Sunday, I want to conclude my cycle of reflections on the Johannine readings that have dominated the liturgy during the festival days.

The good life is a life of spirit. Philosophically, spirit means knowing and loving, the perfective acts of intellect and will. In terms of the powers of the soul, we cannot love without knowing our beloved, which is also to say that loving is the point of knowing. Of course, it’s an ever-intensifying cyclical rhythm: the more we know our beloved, the more we love that person; the more we love, the more we want to know… But though the recurrent operations of the spirit have no upper limit, the logical order is clear, which accounts for the unique excellence of the Third in God, the Holy Spirit.

Each divine Person is excellent in His own way: the First, the Father, most obviously so, as the Source without source. The Second, the Son, is the center in God (and, therefore, as Saint Bonaventure indefatigably traces out, the center of history), the One Who proceeds and from Whom Another proceeds. But the Third, Who proceeds from Father and Son, and from Whom no other proceeds? What’s the excellence in being Third? [We might lapse into Arianism and think, a la The Simpsons, “beautiful gold, so-so silver, and shameful bronze.” :P] What we must recognize is that the Third is the ultimate in God: the culmination, God AS the transcendence of God.

Everything culminates in loving, which is the union of our personal knowing and loving with another person’s knowing and loving, in a common spirit of love, a mutual subjectivity. Common spirit is inherently expansive; it gives rise to children, and nations. We speak of the “spirit of a people,” correlative to a body politic. (Spirit forms bodies: a man and woman love each other and form one flesh…)

The good life is, in the first place, a life of questioning inquiry stirred by the wonders of sheer existence and of the manifold good things of this world, luminous in their intelligibilities, as well as by a thirst for self-knowledge, for the common good, and for relieving the plight of agonized humanity. Our desire to know draws us out of ourselves, towards the other.

As one advances in understanding and wisdom, one’s heart grows larger. Knowing gives rise to loving. Our spiritual nature drives towards communion with other persons.

This is simply because we are made in the image of a God Who is Trinity. As the council fathers of Vatican II put it: “Indeed, when the Lord Jesus prays to His Father that ‘they may all be one…, even as We are one’ (John 17:21-22), opening prospects impervious to human reason, He indicates a certain similitude between the union of the divine Persons and the union of the sons of God in truth and charity. And this similitude manifests that it is not possible for man, who is the only creature on earth that God willed for its own sake, to come to himself fully except through the sincere gift of self” (Gaudium et spes 24).

Why is man the social/political animal? Because God is Trinity. Why is our deepest need to love and be loved? Because God is Trinity.

There is nothing esoteric about the Trinity. That God is so, is why we are so.

God the Father wishes all humans, through all space and time, to be gathered together as one people, in the one Body of Jesus, joined in the Holy Spirit.

The good life is a life of spirit. Eternal life is life in the very Spirit of God—and What God IS is infinite knowing and loving.

Eternal life means infinite wonder and infinite learning, and getting to know forever, without comprehending, the ever-greater Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, AND every other person, within the Trinitarian processions: billions of created persons being raised forever towards the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit.

Which all means that eternal life is falling in love forever.

Facts Agleam with Wonder: On “The Ethics of Elfland” and the Primacy of Love

A dear and respected friend recently caused me to engage seriously with chapter 4 of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, “The Ethics of Elfland,” and was indispensable in helping me work through an impasse.

Meditating on this chapter fanned a little flame that’s been rising within, a tentative return of the joie de vivre that had been so characteristic of me before collapsing in this nighttime. Chesterton helps me see again the magic that’s everywhere.

But he offers more than personal renewal. Chesterton’s simultaneous defense of democratic liberalism and of tradition clearly sank into my bones at some point. What a glorious vision, with far too small a constituency! And that political sensibility is exactly what we need right now in America.

It’s also the vision necessary for our culture if we’re going to make sense of moral norms: “Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it.” Brilliant. And true. A fairytale sensibility is the way out of moralism without collapsing into relativism.

That has to do with the “Doctrine of Conditional Joy,” his second principle of fairy philosophy. As to his first principle, wonder and gratitude: Chesterton’s recovery of the wonder behind facticity really does restore the aura of divine glory to the world. He compares the things that are all round us to what Robinson Crusoe saves from his wrecked ship. What a powerful spiritual discipline this is: “It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island.”

We thus get the world back again after, as it were, having lost it. I think something like this is what Kierkegaard describes in Fear and Trembling.

In fact, Chesterton does this remarkable thing that gives me access to Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recurrence for the first time: “But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore. Heaven may encore the bird who laid an egg.”

This is the way to look at the world. I am convinced of it. But one thing niggled. The philosopher in me was troubled by something in Chesterton’s first principle.

In order to secure his magical vision, he veers into Humean country: “I observed that learned men in spectacles were talking of the actual things that happened—dawn and death and so on—as if they were rational and inevitable. They talked as if the fact that trees bear fruit were just as necessary as the fact that two and one trees make three. But it is not. There is an enormous difference by the test of fairyland; which is the test of the imagination. You cannot imagine two and one not making three. But you can easily imagine trees not growing fruit; you can imagine them growing golden candlesticks or tigers hanging on by the tail.”

Okay. On the one hand, there’s all the good stuff. Chesterton flirts with occasionalism to give us the full-on Thomistic metaphysics of the primacy of divine causality, which shows deistic clockmaker mechanistics philosophically incoherent, besides robbing the world of wonder. Every single good thing and every single perfective action, from the spinning of quarks to the winging of angels, is first done by God. Yes, yes, yes.

And there certainly is a distinction to be made between intrinsically necessary realities (2+1=3), which God “can’t” change (as He is coincident with them), and facts that follow from His free choice: would there be 10 to the eleventh or 10 the fourteenth galaxies?

But whether apple trees put out candlesticks? The philosopher in me can be scrupulous. Chesterton indicates that dawn isn’t inevitable. That, of course, was exhibit A in Hume’s attack on the necessity of causality under the banner of “constant conjunction.” I can see a romantic and a certain kind of conservative finding it plausible to side with that odd conservative Hume (who wanted to replace rationalism with custom and instinct), in the name of putting modern scientism in its place. Fine.

Well, not really. Hume’s attack lands just as powerfully, except more so, on Aristotelian metaphysics. The etiolated causality still operative in scientism (of the four causes, only efficient is left, and a denuded version of that, at that) is still a thread going back to the Philosopher. Hume severs that. His version of causality is even more metaphysically blind than modern science’s, even more divorced from substance and natures, even more superficial than superficial Baconianism! His is just another nominalist/voluntarist halfway house on the way to transgender bathrooms.

So, I get a little antsy when I hear Humean language from a romantic, being one myself. I want to affirm everything Chesterton provides through his joyous voluntarism. I do think such a thing profoundly true, at a place where Saint Thomas and Saint Francis touch. Without the will of God, there can be no magic. But is the cost of magic, acceptance of divine caprice?

Struggling with this, given the manifest truth of Chesterton’s sensibility, I choose to ignore the Humean garb, to see something shining through, what one might call a higher voluntarism, which allows access to the fact that God is Light because God is Love.

To think this through, Balthasar is required. He has a tag for his Franciscan avowal of the primacy of love that in no way reneges on the Dominican point that knowing must precede loving, as a matter of facultative logic, and that in no way countenances nominalism: “love cannot be anticipated by thought.” He uses it to describe the ultimate mystery, the mystery of the Father, but this mystery has everything to do with the ultimate in God, Who is the Holy Spirit. The Third in God, the One Who proceeds according to the mode of willing, cannot simply be reduced to the, quite true, logic of the processions of spirit. There is something like a “Trinitarian inversion” even in the immanent Trinity, because love is not only to be understood on the analogy of the operation of a faculty; there is love that is the whole existential disposition of the person:

“But the Father’s always already giving Himself away, which thought can neither go behind nor exhaust, is the ultimate ground for God’s being incomprehensibly more than any finite concept can comprehend: love, posited in its absoluteness, is absolutely groundless, and it communicates this groundlessness to everything that, qualifying its plenitude more closely, can be called a ‘property’ of God. Everything inside and outside God proceeds ‘a secreto Patris arcanoque’ [from the secret and mystery of the Father] (DS 491)” (Theo-Logic, II, p. 137).

THIS is what Chesterton captures. Everything we see drips with the wondrous glory of love.

This is not nominalism or voluntarism, as normally meant. Balthasar again: “Now, the first thing that we must say about this groundless, all-grounding love is that it is anything but blind. Rather, it is supremely wise and is thus the ultimate sense of all knowing and all reason; it is supreme rectitude and thus orients all that looks for direction and guidance. Although, in the worldly echo, man seeks to apprehend and to know in order to direct his steps to some end, what sets him on his way is still the good, which he desires to love and, through understanding, can love. And, in attaining the end toward which his love-inspired knowledge is directed, he learns that the gratuity of love reigns beyond every utilitarian calculation. Only in this experience does his knowledge become the sort of wisdom ascribed to God, does the self-confident, finite wisdom of the world fall down before the wisdom of God that reveals itself in the form of His crucified love. ‘For the folly of God is wiser than the wisdom of men’ (I Cor 1:25) precisely because it is the wisdom of gratuitous love” (Theo-Logic, II, pp. 140-141).

This, not Hume, must be the ultimate horizon of Chesterton’s fairytale sensorium: he feels in every thing, in every fact, the gratuitous wisdom of God.

Before we can know, and therefore love, as the operations of our intellect and will, there is a more primal existential stance: wonder, a desire to know. That’s just Aristotle, of course. And Saint Augustine at the conclusion of Book 9 of De Trinitate identifies this appetitus inveniendi (desire to discover) as a kind of love, “amor,” that is not the operation of a faculty, but something prior to that. Balthasar writes of “love-inspired knowledge.” To use Balthasar’s terminology, what Augustine gestures towards at the end of Book 9 is a Trinitarian inversion in God, in which the Holy Spirit of Love has something to do with the procession of the Word.

The world glows because love is the ultimate. Only with the fairytale vision of Chesterton can love’s wildest abandon, on the Cross, be recognized as the deepest wisdom. The Eucharist is the secret center of fairyland.

Darkness Sharpens the Eye: The Mutual Implication of Trinity and Cross in Jesus’ Farewell Discourse

What does it take to hear what God is trying to tell us?

In the Gospel readings for Mass yesterday and today, a profound shift from incomprehension to comprehension on the part of the Apostles is registered. Jesus’ mystagogy in the Farewell Discourse (John 14-17) has seized, at least to some degree, their minds and hearts, bringing them into the mysteries of the Trinity and of the Cross, which are what the Discourse is all about.

Today we hear the beginning of the High Priestly Prayer (John 17), in which Jesus speaks of the consummate historicization of glory through the Cross, that is, the final envelopment of history (and of the whole span of humanity) by the Trinitarian relations: “Father, the Hour has come; glorify Your Son so that the Son may glorify You, because You gave Him authority (exousian) over all flesh, so that He may give eternal life to all which You have given Him” (17:1-2).

This is mysterious indeed. But the Apostles are catching on: “Now they know that all things whatsoever You have given to Me are from You, because the words which You gave Me I have given to them, and they received them and truly know that I came forth from You; they have believed that You sent Me” (17:7-8).

This is so odd. Throughout the Farewell Discourse, the incomprehension of the Apostles has been patent, and especially concerning “going to the Father,” which is inseparable from the Paschal Mystery. How did they catch on?

Indeed, as if to emphasize the radical quality of the shift from incomprehension to comprehension, this is the lead-up to their getting it: “Then some of His disciples said to one another, ‘What does He mean by saying to us, “A little while, and you will no longer see Me, and again a little while, and you will see Me”; and “Because I withdraw (hupago) to the Father”?’ They were saying, ‘What does He mean by this “a little while”? We do not know what He is talking about’” (16:17-18).

Jesus ends up meeting their confusion by saying, “I have said these things to you in cryptic proverbs (paroimiais). The Hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in cryptic proverbs, but I will announce to you concerning the Father in unreserved openness (parrhesia)” (16:25).

But instead of a change in His way of speaking, Jesus sums it all up once again in words and in a style we have heard throughout the Discourse: “I came from the Father, and I have come into the world. Again, I leave the world and go to the Father” (16:28).

It’s at this point, with no change in Jesus’ manner of expressing these mysteries, that the change in the Apostles occurs: “His disciples said, ‘See, now you speak in unreserved openness (parrhesia), and You no longer speak cryptic proverbs (paroimian)’” (16:29).

What?!

Here’s my proposal. The Farewell Discourse is the mystagogy every Christian must undergo. But because it is mystagogy, it is not an abstract teaching. This is simply the pattern of the Christian life. There is no newness of Christian life unless we walk this Way. Why else is the Discourse, which occurs after the Last Supper on Holy Thursday, presented in the lectionary at a little past the midpoint of Eastertide, running almost to Pentecost?

Jesus isn’t in fact speaking cryptically. He knows that we encipher what He reveals. Decryption of divine revelation cannot occur through a mechanical procedure. It requires the transformation of the person receiving the message. Jesus knows this, of course. The Farewell Discourse isn’t finally spoken theoretically, but in the flesh. The “Hour” in which He will speak without reserve is when He, the Father’s Word of Love, will be uttered to the last syllable. The parrhesia of Jesus, the source of Christian parrhesia, derives from the pierced Heart of Jesus, His love-death transposing the Word He Is into a silent flowing, the pouring forth of everything He is (pan-rheo), in complete abandon, for the sake of love. This flow is also the Spirit: “Having bowed His head, He handed over (paredoken) the Spirit” (19:30).

(That is also the moment, the Hour, when the abyss of hell is swallowed up within the historical elaboration of the Trinitarian relations.)

This is the unreserved openness of Jesus. But a pierced heart in our breasts is still the required receiving Enigma machine. And only the Spirit of Love can break our hearts in the way that's necessary.

We might assume that it’s a straightforward thing to hear the words of God. And, certainly, from God’s side, it’s all infinitely luminous, infinitely clear, infinitely understandable.

But it’s too much for us. We are creatures, and we are broken.

As creatures, our finite minds and hearts must be infinitized to receive the ever-greater signal of divine knowing and loving.

As broken creatures, we need healing.

And so, in baptism, the grace of the Holy Spirit, given through faith in Jesus, is infused into us, to begin to heal our brokenness and to begin the process of infinitely expanding our finitude. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit in our hearts (which is at the same time Trinitarian indwelling, for He is the Love of the Father and the Son), this new mode of presence of the Spirit Who is the Advocate justifying us against the Adversary, causes our souls to be transformed. The sole formal cause of our justification, brought by this indwelling of the Spirit, is called sanctifying grace, which begins to heal and begins to elevate us.

But this initial justification requires the traversal of history to become more than formality: it must ramify in flesh and blood. Through time and circumstance, Spirit perfects, or sanctifies, bodies. Sanctifying grace must grow and intensify, so as to permeate everything in us, such as our temperaments, and to straighten all our slumpings from true: in our habits, in our rationalizations and compromises, in our mental schemas, in the ways we’ve been marred by history (from family interactions to the ideologies of our age). And all of this rectification must go on as we inexorably face new circumstances and change physically and psychologically.

The pedagogy of this total process of formation essentially involves suffering. The smallness of our hearts requires the breaking of our hearts. Transcending the self requires dying to self. Personal development does not proceed only by gradualism; it also proceeds by cataclysm (analogous to geological change or punctuated equilibrium in evolution).

I assert what I’ve written about before: the dark nights through which we must pass are needed for two reasons, purification and substitutionary suffering on behalf of others. No person rises for himself; if the stars come closer to our reach, if their music sounds more brightly, it is because we have suffered for others, and in so suffering, have become relieved of some of the gravity of self.

God is Light. If we cannot understand what He is saying, it is because we are too full of darkness. God is Love. If His words do not claim everything in us, it is because we love too little. We must become light, and we must be in love, to hear God. He is not speaking in riddles. It is our spiritual sensorium that scrambles the light.

The purifying and amplification of this sensorium is done by the Holy Spirit. Throughout the Farewell Discourse, when Jesus speaks of “going to the Father,” it means Cross and Resurrection, but that also means the coming of the Spirit.

“Yet many things have I to tell you, but you are not able to bear them now, but when He has come, the Spirit of Truth, He will guide you into all the truth. For He will not speak from himself, but what things He will hear, He will speak, and things to come He will announce to you. He will glorify Me, because He will receive from what is Mine and will announce to you. All things which the Father has are mine; therefore, I said that He receives from Mine and will announce to you” (16:12-15).

The procession of the Son from the Father, and of the Spirit from Them both, is the very texture of Being. And in the Paschal Mystery, Trinitarian Being transfigures history, by swallowing up ambiguity and deception within a Light from Light from Light.

This zone of mutual comprehension, deeper than words we can voice: we call it being in love. It’s the magical world opened by faith, hope, and charity. It’s Trinitarian indwelling. It’s the Kingdom of God breaking into time.

And it is life in the Spirit. 

Like Eastertide, the Farewell Discourse leads to Pentecost. It is Jesus’ initiation of His followers into the Trinitarian life. The Trinitarian mystery is the mystery of infinite self-dispossession. And that is why there is no glory without the Cross, why there is no love without the Cross, why there is no mutual understanding without the Cross.

The process by which cosmos and history are indwelt by the Trinity, by which Light can be seen exploding out of every thing and out of every event, is the cataclysmic process of enduring the dark night of the Cross.

This is how everything becomes luminous. Our patience in the Cross makes us mediators of the massive ricorso of the procession of the Son from the Father into the world, and of the Son’s return to the Father in the Spirit, bearing all of humanity with Him, with its weight of sorrow and lightness of joy, and with the whole cosmos and all of history.

There are times when we will fail in the darkness, even after having understood something of what Jesus is saying: “Now do you believe? Look, an Hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, each one to his own (idia) and you will leave Me alone” (16:31-32).

But the Trinitarian life is so strong; it will overcome all the wastes and voids of forsaken love: “Yet I am not alone because the Father is with Me” (16:32). 

Remember, Jesus knows He will experience utter godforsakenness on the Cross, exceeding every hell. But He knows the Father will be there, somehow. 

The Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit: God just wants us to trust that all shall be well: “I have spoken these things to you, so that in Me you may have peace. In the world, you have misery (thlipsin), but be cheerful, I have conquered the world” (16:33). 

The Trinity is always there. When it is dark for you, please try to remember: it’s because the Light is so strong. It’s because Love has taken hold of you. It’s because Love has come and is coming. Such glories you will see when you are ready, when the world is ready! This Light, which streams everywhere... “Amen, amen, I say unto you, you shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man” (John 1:51).

A Dawn That Streams Backwards

[Originally posted on Facebook, Friday, May 6, 2016.]

What sense do we Christians make of our continuing sinfulness?

The first matins readings have been coming from I John. What a glorious synthesis of Saint John’s Gospel and his Apocalypse!

Jesus instructs us to remain in Him and in His love and so bear much fruit, in the Vine passage of the Farewell Discourse. But this process is not organic and inevitable as viniculture. It is apocalyptic warfare, this remaining in love.

And how we love rewrites history.

That’s what we meditate upon at matins today:

“And you know that [God] was manifested that He might take away sins, and in Him there is no sin. Everyone remaining in Him is not sinning; everyone sinning has not seen Him, neither has known Him. Little children, let no one deceive you; the one practicing justification is just, even as He is just; the one practicing sin is of the Adversary, because the Adversary sins from the beginning (ap’ archēs). The Son of God was manifested for this reason, that He might destroy the works of the devil.”

To become a saint, that is, to become a Christian in earnest, means spiritual warfare against the unimaginably immense forces panoplied against love.

Does the holy flame of love ever waver in us?

The First Letter of John can be confusing, because there are passages that make clear that we Christians struggle with sin (most emphatically in 1:8), and then passages such as this that seem to disown anyone who sins. The key, I think, is that the process of going from sinner to saint (sanctification, increasing justification), from loving ill to loving well, has something of the flavor of quantum mechanics: when God (Who is Light, 1:5) is manifested, AND we can see Him as He is (3:2), then that fixes the value of our whole personal trajectory to light.

“Let what you heard from the beginning (ap’ archēs) remain in you. If what you heard from the beginning (ap’ archēs) remains in you, then you will remain in the Son and in the Father. And this is the promise which He promised to us, the life eternal” (2:24).

Unfortunately, there is a quantum correlative. Again: “Little children, let no one deceive you; the one practicing justification is just, even as He is just; the one practicing sin is of the Adversary, because the Adversary sins from the beginning (ap’ archēs).”

Lucifer was not a sinner from the beginning. But he chose to trade in his identity as child of God (Light-Bearer, Bringer of Dawn) to become the adversary. Instead of ministering to man, to serve the cause of divine justification/vindication, to manifest and communicate the Light Who is God to mankind, he makes the case against us.

This is the office of anti-Christ, and that satanic spirit fills us every time we make the case against our neighbor. All commandments come to this: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God” (4:7).

Lucifer chose to generate the murk of accusation rather than serve the light of justification. He insisted on self-definition. If we follow him in this, we would be fixing the value of our whole trajectory to darkness.

Let me close with a quote from the pivotal chapter of C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, in which Lewis encounters his Virgil, George McDonald, who has this to say:

“‘Son,’ he said, ‘ye cannot in your present state understand eternity.... But ye can get some likeness of it if ye say that both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley [the country on the border of heaven] but all their earthly past will have been heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town [hell], but all their life on Earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been Hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say ‘Let me have but THIS and I’ll take the consequences’: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,’ and the Lost, ‘We were always in Hell.’ And both will speak truly.’”

On Political Responsibility: Initial Reflections after Indiana

In the obscurity of this year’s presidential politics, can the pro-life movement offer the American Republic some clarity?

The result of the Indiana primary leaves the future of the Republican Party very much in doubt.

This matters, though our pro-life loyalty will always transcend party membership. The essential electoral requirement has been and will continue to be to vote in a way that best advances the cause of the most powerless human life.

But it is a fact that in a two-party system, ignoring where the major political parties stand with regard to state sanctioning of the private execution of the most vulnerable would be a simple failure of prudence and therefore of morality. The same goes for ignoring the relation between the Republican Party and conservatism, by which I mean classical liberalism thoroughly inflected by pietas and therefore determined by solidarity.

Will the two-party system break down? Maybe. That’s fine too. We certainly need a realignment. Whatever is best for the weakest.

This must be an ongoing reflection as we approach November. I just want to plot a few coordinates.

1) God the Father is sovereign. Providence, though mysterious, is trustworthy. We must entrust ourselves yet again to its irresistible waves.

Are our hearts broken contemplating the possibility of losing an election that not a year ago was simply there for the taking? We had hoped that wounds inflicted by the most radically pro-abortion president ever could begin to be healed, that a different Supreme Court might emerge. Are we dejected?

Of course. We must pray more, worship more, trust more.

We also do not know how this will end. There is still time before the end of the primary season. And then, who knows? All we know is that the first requirement of solidarity and social justice is to act in a way that favors the most vulnerable given the actual circumstances we must contend with.

2) We cannot blame “the political classes” or “the system” or some subset of our fellow Americans for this predicament. It is our nation. Solidarity doesn’t just kick in with the good stuff. We are solidary in our failures also.

In any case, this is a democracy! We get a government that reflects the character of the people. That’s exactly what we’ve gotten and will continue to get. The only solution is for us to become better as a people. And that starts with me.

We all must embrace personal conversion: more thinking, more study of the facts, more simplicity of lifestyle, more cultivation of mind and heart through the elevation of high culture and contemplation of nature rather than the coarsening of sensibility through consumerism.

3) Excoriating people for supporting any particular candidate is rash and morally repugnant. This disastrous Indiana primary should have the good effect, at least, of spiritual chastisement of our tendencies to run hot in our reactions to those who support candidates we do not prefer. Unless the inner temperature decreases, civility is impossible. Without civility, there can be no common life.

The supporters of Bernie and Hillary have grievously ignored the priority of the claim the unborn make on our responsibility. Yes. But they are fellow citizens and fellow humans, and we only debase ourselves and undercut the cause of life when we let anger determine our response. As for all this name-calling with regard to Trump supporters: it must stop. It betrays a certain social positioning insulated from the shocks to which the working poor are exposed. I have made no secret of my assessment of the threat Trump poses to the future of the conservative movement and therefore to the future of the Republican Party. But berating our neighbors because of a political difference? Is that something any thoughtful person should be doing?

A corollary: calling people, even Hillary and the Donald, “evil” is fatuous and unchristian. I understand frustration, but Jesus is very clear on the impossibility of such existential judgments on fellow humans.

4) It is not intrinsically evil to vote for a pro-abortion candidate. To do so is morally permissible, if there is no other choice and as long as our first criterion continues to be: “what choice best serves the cause of the most powerless.” I might have to expand on this technical moral-theological point about the principle of material cooperation, depending on your feedback.

5) Abstaining from voting seems to me morally impermissible. This is clear under the principle of “participation” in Catholic social doctrine, itself a sub-principle of subsidiarity, but it’s simply an obvious entailment of the fact of personal responsibility set within the context of a democracy.

Abstaining from voting seems to me to aim a deathblow at the whole notion of republican self-government. It feels like secessionitis. Lincoln correctly pointed out that secession means the end of liberal democracy: you can’t take your ball and go home when the game starts going the other team’s way. We agree to play ball according to a certain set of constitutional rules. We have the means to reverse the momentum: more emphatic political engagement.

Part of the problem is too many of us have reduced our sense of political participation to voting. Politics has its vital roots, as Aristotle makes clear, in mutual deliberation on the common good. We must have a habit of making a thoughtful case to people who think differently from us about the matters that are most important in common life. We must be involved in local political races, perhaps running as candidates ourselves. We must personally lobby legislators. The “system” gets away from us only if we let it.

We must vote, and we must always vote with the preferential option for the most powerless human life as the determining factor. I don’t know what that will mean come November. A lot of things can happen between now and then. But the pro-life exigence must carry all before it, as it streams in crimson from every victim slain since Abel.

When making my personal endorsement before the Massachusetts primary months ago, I laid out a full conservative vision based on the preferential option for the poor. Obviously, much has changed since then, but the principles remain the same. They matter more than ever, even if you and I might disagree on how they apply to certain candidates.

From that blog, I offer this:

“Only where prudence, piety, mercy, and graciousness hold sway can there be a rejuvenescence of America. Conservatism is committed to these things in principle. We need to be committed to them in lived existence. Let’s be joyful, open to the wonders of nature and culture and the beauty of our neighbor, relishing that beauty, and relishing conversation, eager for dialectic (an intentional and shared pursuit of the truth), voracious to know and love, zealous for the common good, for the life of republican citizenship, for the cause of the poor, the immigrant, the unborn, all the powerless.” 

[The latest “From the Chairman” post for Massachusetts Citizens for Life: http://www.masscitizensforlife.org/political-responsibility-initial-reflections-indiana/?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=socialnetwork.]

A Moving Icon of Eternity: The New Jerusalem as Trinitarian Indwelling

To begin with, the human heart is inhospitable to love.

So God the lover must become God the warrior, besieging fiefdom after fiefdom in our little hearts to create a dwelling place for Himself.

It is the work of a lifetime, but God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit are very patient. The Trinity carries out, in each human heart, a strategic plan specifically fashioned to overcome our idiosyncratic resistances to love and to cultivate our personal gifts for serving love. 

The Trinity has been at this all your life, all my life. Through tactical reverses caused by ourselves or by others. Through our wild cursing at the supposed cruelty of God. Through addictive spirals of abject self-destruction. 

All the Father wants, all Jesus wants, all the Holy Spirit wants, is to share the whole of life with us, consortium totius vitae. 

We’ve just finished up the Book of Revelation in the breviary, and almost in the lectionary (though we will hear the conclusion next Sunday). At Mass today, we saw the New Jerusalem descending from heaven to earth. The point was never to remove us from the world into some airy realm of cumulus clouds. The point has always been the apocalypse of divine glory as shining through this material world. 

That’s why the New Jerusalem is “like jasper, clear as crystal.” We are children of this Mother, this New City, this Bride; so, what Gerard Manley Hopkins says of Our Lady applies to us, “who/This one work has to do—/Let all God’s glory through…”

Our vocation is to become instruments of the divine iconography. This requires purification, for light in the eye comes from love in the heart. Love gives vision. The Father wants us to see all the beauty. When love comes to our hearts, it must come as conqueror (omnia vincit amor), because what’s resident in us are many refusals to see and to love.

Our mission is to see the divine glory that’s everywhere—first, by being that glory.

When the eye that sees the world is full of light, the world streams with light. And we are to amplify that streaming. To riff off Plato’s Timaeus: the human commission is to make of history “a moving icon of eternity.” That’s what the image of God in the world, male and female, was always meant to do (Genesis 1:27-28).

And here we are at the end of Scripture, the conclusion of that arc from “the beginning,” and there's a final marriage, now between God and all humanity, the offspring of the first marriage. All God wants is to live with us. That's all the Father has ever wanted. It is overwhelming to take seriously. 

“And I saw the holy city, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will tabernacle with them, and they will be His people, and God Himself will be with them'” (Revelation 21:2-3). 

Tabernacle, tent, dwelling. It rings a little bell... There is a beginning older than the beginning that was the original human union of Adam and Eve. An archaic-eternal beginning, an eternal union, drives all of this, drives this future of love: “In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). 

But this eternal Trinitarian dynamism takes a detour: “And the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us, and we gazed on His glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). 

At the end of Scripture, we see the consummation of the whole story, which begins in the eternity of God, advances through the Incarnation and Paschal Mystery, and ends with eternity indwelling time. It’s stranger than any possible fiction.

Today’s Gospel reading tells us how the New City comes: “If anyone loves Me, My word (logon) he will keep, and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and We will make a dwelling place (monen) with him. …the word (ho logos) which you hear is not mine, but is of the Father Who sent Me” (John 14:23).

As I indicate in “Glory Built in the Dark,” when Jesus speaks, just a few verses earlier, of there being many dwelling places (monai) in the Father’s household, and He is going to receive us there, that is not contradicted by what we have here, with the Father and the Son (the Holy Spirit as Their mutual Love is how there's a first-person plural) intending to dwell in us.

To be drawn into the embrace of the Trinity is correlative to the Trinity’s dwelling in our hearts.

That has to do with Trinitarian logic. 

To logic must be added history, and this is what the Book of Revelation provides. Is our home to be in heaven or on earth? The answer: both. Heaven is to come down to earth.

When we love Jesus, when we cherish Him as the Word of Love whispered by the Father just to us, just to each of us; when we respond to that Word by allowing Love to destroy each of our defensive positions in turn; when we surrender in faith to the loving scalpel of the good Father: we become light, and the world becomes light, and those around us begin to hear a whisper and see a glimmer, and the Kingdom comes on.

 

[A note on the use of logos by Jesus in these verses. In my post “Some Trinitarian Reflections on Judgment and Hell,” I give an account that makes sense of what might appear to be Saint John’s not having redacted his Gospel very well. His prologue is emphatic in identifying Jesus as the eternal Logos, and yet he reports words of Jesus that seem to undercut that. In fact, these words emphasize the reality of the Trinitarian relations.

Jesus simply IS the Logos of the Father. He is not in any way “for Himself.” His words, the Word He is: these are not private property. He simply comes from the Father and returns to the Father. That is all there is to His personality.

That is, the Trinitarian distinction of divine Persons is not notional, but real, and the missions of the Son and the Spirit in the economy of salvation simply translate in time what is so in eternity. 

We see this Trinitarian realism reinforced with the following words on the sending of the Holy Spirit: “But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, which the Father will send in My Name, He will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you” (John 14:26). 

Everything depends on the concrete contours of the eternal Trinitarian life. The future depends on that eternal love.]

Glory Built in the Dark

“Let not your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in Me” (John 14:1).

Friday’s Gospel reading is one of the most poignant passages in Scripture. After telling the Apostles at the Last Supper that He is about to leave them, He tries to console them.

Every time you feel abandoned by God, these are verses to cling to. God does not “withdraw” except to create a future of supreme joy and wonder and peace, a home from which you will never be exiled, in which you will never be hurt:

“In My Father’s household there are many dwellings [monai, the fulfillment of the quintessential Christian characteristic of hupomone]. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” (v. 2).

God does not envelop us in the darkness of godforsakenness for any other reason than to make our hearts more receptive to Trinitarian indwelling, which is simultaneously our being enveloped in the heaven of Trinitarian love:

“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to Myself, so that where I AM you also may be” (v. 3).

Indeed, Jesus never actually leaves us. It’s just that His proceeding and returning to the Father must bridge eternity and history. The Son is nothing other than the Eucharistic pulsation between heaven and hell.

So, though the Father may at times seem very far away, Jesus is in Himself the Way that touches the Father:

“‘And where I go, you know the way.’ Thomas said to Him, ‘Lord, we do not know where You are going. How can we know the way?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I AM the Way and the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me’” (vv. 4-7).

When we feel abandoned, and the Father seems more distant than the quasars on the edge of space, Jesus is with us in the abyss of godforsakenness, spanning all the worlds of space and time and agony to tether us to a joy that is long in its coming, but forever in its staying.

As we cling to Jesus on the Cross, the timber of our despair, unobtrusively, becomes first a ladder, then a mansion of the good Father’s prodigality.