Eros within the Vastness of the Divine Will: Love versus Libido Dominandi

Why does the breviary give us Colossians during Christmastide matins?

Because the appearance of the Son of God in the flesh means that the glory of the Lord has come to earth for good. Night has been dying since the newborn God opened His eyes from the manger of Bethlehem. Heaven has been spreading, slowly, so very slowly, but most assuredly, across the darkling plains of time.

And Saint Paul writes to the Colossians about the new life we have gained by being made members of this slowly growing Body of Christ.

In the passages for today and yesterday, we find two modes of what Saint Augustine calls the libido dominandi, the lust to dominate: one operative within the Church, one operative in the world. In both cases, what we have is treason against the Kingdom of Love that baby Jesus makes definitively visible for the first time. The libido dominandi is what happens to the eros of the human spirit, the yearning to know everything about everything and to love and be loved without condition, when that eros is trapped within a world that has closed its borders against the incursions of transcendent love.

Within this secularized saeculum, the currents of desire are corrupted into currents of dominative power: the self becomes predatory rather than delivered-over to the other. There are principalities and powers that drive the ideologies that discipline human desire into this curving back on self (the incurvatus in se Saint Augustine so incisively describes), this auto-eroticism of power, which finds a perverse jouissance in the control of others and a kind of control of self.

And so Saint Paul: “If with Christ you died to the elemental principles of the world, why do you live as if you still belonged to the world? Why do you submit to regulations, ‘Do not touch or taste or handle?’ All these regulations refer to things that perish with use; they are simply the commandments and teachings of men. These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-imposed piety, humility, and severe treatment of the body (sōma), but they are of no value against the indulgence of the flesh (sarx)” (2:20-23).

This is the pharisaical form of the libido dominandi, and it is the form that observant Christians need to be vigilant against, as Pope Francis most correctly has been stressing.

That said, there is of course a pagan form of the lust to dominate, in which expressions of sexuality serve for the world the same way repressions of sexuality serve for the pharisee: shifting the body and its pleasures from the realm of self-transcending love into the realm of power and control.

But Saint Paul never fixates on sensual sins. He knows the fundamental dynamic has to do with control: “These are the ways you also once followed, when you were living that life. But now you must get rid of all such things—wrath, anger, malice, blasphemy, abusive language from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old man with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new man, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its Creator” (3:7-10).

Again, Saint Paul points us to baptism as that inflection point at which we are transferred from the secularized realm of powerplays into the love of Christ, a transference that is never secure until the end: we are always in danger of changing even the Garden of the Church into a hell of perverse control—putting on the old man again, old skins within the new ceremony.

What does the new paradise of life in Christ look like then?: “As God’s elect, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, long-suffering. Bear with one another and, if anyone have a complaint against another, forgive each other—just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you must also forgive” (3:12-13).

But the ultimate manifestation of Christmas is something greater than all of these: “Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which is a bond of perfection. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one Body. And be thankful. Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with grace in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God” (3:14-16).

A eucharistic existence of self-transcendent love, always open to the other, reaching for the other, grateful to the good Father, hungry for wisdom: a musical existence of mutual harmony.

Such a life, the new life in Christ, is the life of peace and love. I want to close by quoting from the second matins reading for yesterday’s feast of Saints Basil and Gregory Nazianzen. There we are given a vision of love fully alive, but which seems all-too-strange in this bourgeois world, both in pagan and in churchy precincts, for we are so stymied by an ideology of control that throttles intimacy and that cannot understand how crucial the love of learning and culture and the pursuit of moral perfection are for intimacy.

Saint Gregory writes of his love for Saint Basil: “I was not alone at that time in my regard for my friend, the great Basil. I knew his irreproachable conduct, and the maturity and wisdom of his conversation. …Such was the prelude to our friendship, the kindling of that flame that was to bind us together. In this way we began to feel affection for each other. When, in the course of time, we acknowledged our friendship and recognized that our ambition was a life of true wisdom, we became everything to each other: we shared the same lodging, the same table, the same desires, the same goal. Our love for each other grew daily warmer and deeper.

“The same hope inspired us: the pursuit of learning.  …We seemed to be two bodies with a single spirit. …Our single object and ambition was virtue, and a life of hope in the blessings that are to come….”

This is the life that Christmas makes possible, life on the way towards a knowing and a loving without end.

At Last, to Begin: To Live by Faith and Not by Power

Happy New Year! Entirely befitting the Janus-moment, the final first matins reading of 2016, from Colossians, presents two ways of living in the world: according to power or according to faith—the two ways (the fundamental option in the wisdom tradition), set forth, for example, in Psalm 1. 

By baptism, we have been transferred from the world, with its fever for control and its measures of success, into Christ and the true measure: unending love. Now our journey is literally “in Christ”: we are Christian peripatetics (2:6).

Set against this life of faith is a “philosophy” invented by men and inimical spiritual powers: “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ” (2:8).

Surely Saint Paul is warning about a gnostic (and legalistic) teaching, but we must recognize that his diagnosis applies to any ideology that would legitimate the manipulation and control of others.

We either find our “fullness” in the social status hierarchy or in Christ. In this case, Saint Paul is particularly concerned with a pharisaical gamesmanship (2:16-23), but anytime we see one person wielding power against another, outside the order of love, what’s happening is the kind of worldliness that Christ has come to overcome.

He destroys the inevitability of the powerplays of this world by incarnating divine knowing and loving within time: “For in [Christ] all the fullness (plēroma) of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness in Him, Who is the head of every ruler and authority.”

Love, the total kenotic love of Jesus, has final authority over power. We either stand in the blessed circle of faith in Christ, which is the life of self-sacrificial love, or we stand in the constricted and constricting circle of secular power. We are delivered from the world into deathless love by baptism, the sacrament of faith:

“In [Christ] you were also circumcised with a spiritual circumcision, by putting off the body of the flesh (sarx) in the circumcision of Christ: when you were buried with Him in baptism, you were also raised with Him through faith in the power of God, Who raised Him from the dead” (2:11-12).

“Flesh” does not mean the body as such; it means the disordered desire/willing arising within the contracted horizon of worldly powerplays. Having been “circumcised” by baptism, we enter into Christ in Whom the fullness of God dwells bodily (sōma). In love, our bodies become what they are meant to be: that through which boundless knowing and loving, an infinite intimacy, is communicated.

We either trust the fullness of God as what’s really real, despite the force of law and power wielded so mercilessly in the world, or we try to find our fullness in our merciless selves.

In one of his edifying discourses, on “The Expectancy of Faith,” Kierkegaard (who seems to me to be on par with Saint Augustine in the spiritual profit to be gained from reading him) presents a New Year’s Day reflection that pairs beautifully with what we have just read from Saint Paul. He asks, “How, then, should we face the future?” And then he does what he does so well, and draws us a picture:

“When the sailor out on the ocean, when everything is changing all around him, when the waves are born and die, he does not stare down into the waves, because they are changing. He looks up at the stars. Why? Because they are faithful; they have the same location now that they had for our ancestors and will have for generations to come. By what means does he conquer the changeable? By the eternal. By the eternal, one can conquer the future, because the eternal is the ground of the future, and therefore through it the future can be fathomed.

“What, then, is the eternal power in a human being? It is faith. What is the expectancy of faith? Victory—or, as Scripture so earnestly and so movingly teaches us, that all things must serve for good those who love God. But an expectancy of the future that expects victory—this has indeed conquered the future.”

Are you tossed about, in extreme perplexity? The only thing to do is trust, have faith, in God, Faithful and True. The good Father will honor all His promises, and He intends infinite good for each of us.

Only faith gives access to the future, for the future is simply the fullness of God that is still too great for this world to endure.

Faith does not mean a polyannaish assurance that my desires will be satisfied in time. It means trusting that God the Father is trustworthy at last. Thus we conquer time and worldliness:

“‘My soul is not insensitive to the joy or the pain of the particular, but, God be praised, it is not the case that the particular can substantiate or refute the expectancy of faith.’ God be praised! Time can neither substantiate nor refute it, because faith expects an eternity. And today, on the first day of the year, when the thought of the future presses in upon me, I will not enervate my soul with multifarious expectancy, will not break it up into all sorts of notions; I will integrate it sound and happy and, if possible, face the future. Let it bring what it will and must bring. Many an expectancy will be disappointed, many fulfilled—so it will be; experience has taught me this. But there is one expectancy that will not be disappointed—experience has not taught me this, but neither has it ever had the authority to deny it—this is the expectancy of faith, and this is victory.”

In my own distress in this long passage of my life, this lesson is still being wrought in me, but I do know it to be true. Kierkegaard is a thinker of the highest order and, I think, a saint. He sees far and in and deep, and what he speaks is true.

Where Christ is, there is the faithfulness of the Father, and there is no night that Christ is not enduring with you and there is no future of woe that Jesus and His Father have not already traversed:

“Look, an hour is coming and has already come when you will be scattered, each to his own home, and you will leave Me all alone, yet I am not alone, because the Father is with Me. I have told you these things so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take courage; I have overcome the world!” (John 16:32-33)

“Any Child Might Be Christ!”: Seeing the Invisible God

Merry Christmas!

On this feast of Saint Thomas à Becket, a martyr for religious liberty, we note martyrdom’s liturgical prominence during the Christmas Octave. Of special importance to pro-lifers is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, celebrated yesterday.

The mystery of martyrdom is another name for the mystery of the Incarnation. Martyrdom is giving bodily witness to the reality of truth and love, in a world in which power and success alone seem real. The mystery of the Incarnation is the mystery of the becoming-flesh of infinite truth and infinite love, along with the correlative fact that every time a new human body comes into existence, there begins a new visibility of the invisible God.

But there is more to the identity of martyrdom and Incarnation: God becomes flesh to accomplish the purposes of love, the purposes of a love that is infinitely “passionate” (as the Cross reveals) and that is thoroughly characterized by solidarity: “For by His Incarnation, the Son of God in some way has united Himself with every man” (Gaudium et spes 22). God becomes flesh to identify, in actual fact, with each of us in our godforsaken condition of having chosen power over truth and love, and to liberate us from that condition.

Like water, God seeks the lowest level. Where there is pain, Jesus flows in. Where there is weakness, Jesus flows there.

Thus begins the visible growth of a Kingdom of Love.

Bare human life shows us the invisible God most clearly. Where there is a life that is divested by the powers of this world, unprotected by the advantages of social status, as on this feast of Saint Thomas à Becket, we see “unaccommodated man…a poor, bare, forked animal”: and that’s just to see God hanging between heaven and earth.

But, above all, when we see the weakest human flesh, the flesh that literally cannot survive without love, we see the flesh most intensely iconic. We see God in love.

The great English mystic Caryll Houselander understood this: “Herod ordered the children to be killed because he was afraid that any one of them might be Christ. Any child might be Christ! The fear of Herod is the fear of every tyrant, the hope of every Christian, and the most significant fact in the modern world.”

To see today’s slaughter of the innocents requires having the eyes of passionate and solidary love, eyes unclouded by the fears that inevitably attend the securing and wielding of power. To have such a countercultural vision requires having hearts grown young again, hearts innocent with the boundless wonder and reckless love of Christ, hearts free of the fear that insists we must scrape and scrabble to maintain our sad place in the status hierarchy. Only where there is such fear could we fail to see the star that shines over every little child.

“To overcome the world we must become children. To become children we must fold our consciousness upon the Divine Infant Who is the center of our being; Who is our being itself; and all that we are must be absorbed in Him; whatever remains of self must be the cradle in which He lies. This is the answer to Herod in all times, the answer of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux in our time: ‘the little way of Spiritual Childhood,’ which is the oneing of the soul with God, in the passion of the Infant Christ.”

As we grow young again in how we know and love, the powers of the world are stripped of their power to harm. We begin to see in the material world the play of an infinite knowing and loving. To suffer and to act become inseparable within the divine dimension of grace, for as we surrender calculation, the plan of God the Father takes hold, and all things become well.

As T. S. Eliot has Becket say in Murder in the Cathedral:

They know and do not know, what it is to act or suffer.

They know and do not know, that acting is suffering

And suffering is action. Neither does the actor suffer

Nor the patient act. But both are fixed

In an eternal action, an eternal patience

To which all must consent that it may be willed

And which all must suffer that they may will it,

That the pattern may subsist, for the pattern is the action

And the suffering, that the wheel may turn and still

Be forever still.

Christmas means that an infinite Love has come in this flesh, and all shall we well.

Hostage to the Other: A Pro-Life Meditation on the Advent of Love

How do we serve as catalysts for pro-life conversion? For that gift of sight by which we have come to see and feel the absolute, world-filling agony of the child in the womb having life ripped away from him or her—in a place of warmth and infinite expectation? 

Do we go out and shame abortion advocates? Try to shock people with gruesome photos? Pursue legislative and electoral strategies that seem zealous but which are prudentially nonsensical?

I think of Pope Francis’s rejection of “proselytism.” There’s a right way and a wrong way to communicate the truths that must be communicated.

We feel the urgency of waking people up: how is this madness going on? But can we advance the cause of the most basic human right by overlooking the dignity of our opponents and of the indifferent?

As Advent ends, I want to think about what is required for a new birth of freedom in our nation, and I want to do so by drawing on two stunningly brilliant thinkers: Caryll Houselander, an English Catholic mystic, and Emmanuel Levinas, a Jewish philosopher.

In her astonishing book The Reed of God (an essential work of spirituality), Houselander compares two very different ways of evangelizing, and I take this as analogously related to the question of how we pro-lifers are to relate to those we would convert.

On the one hand, “everyone knows how terrible it is to come into contact with those people who have an undisciplined missionary urge, who, having received some grace, are continually trying to force the same grace on others, to compel them not only to be converted but to be converted in the same way and with precisely the same results as themselves. Such people seem to wish to dictate to the Holy Ghost.” This would be proselytism, the invidious form of trying to stimulate conversion: another form of control, just another brick in the wall.

On the other hand, there is the way of Christ, the way of servant helplessness. This is the way to win hearts. It is the only way: “By His own will Christ was dependent on Mary during Advent: He was absolutely helpless; He could go nowhere but where she chose to take Him; He could not speak; her breathing was His breath; His heart beat in the beating of her heart.”

If this is the way Love enters the world, then how else does the Kingdom of Love progress in this world? “Today Christ is dependent upon men. In the Host He is literally put into a man’s hands. A man must carry Him to the dying, must take Him into the prisons, workhouses, and hospitals, must carry Him in a tiny pyx over the heart on to the field of battle, must give Him to little children, and ‘lay Him by’ in His ‘leaflight’ house of gold.

“The modern world’s feverish struggle for unbridled, often unlicensed, freedom is answered by the bound, enclosed helplessness and dependence of Christ—Christ in the womb, Christ in the Host, Christ in the tomb.”

If love is to come into this dark world, it will not be by the violence of zealotry. It will be through the helplessness of a heart that has given itself up totally to reach the other heart: the cold, the blind, the hard.

“This dependence of Christ lays a great trust upon us. During this tender time of Advent we must carry Him in our hearts to wherever He wants to go, and there are many places to which He may never go unless we take Him to them.

“None of us knows when the loveliest hour of our life is striking. It may be when we take Christ for the first time to that grey office in the city where we work, to the wretched lodging of that poor man who is an outcast, to the nursery of that pampered child, to that battleship, airfield, or camp.”

By way of concluding with an entrée to further reflection on the kind of subjectivity required of us pro-lifers in order to change the world, I turn to Emmanuel Levinas, who teaches us that our “subjectivity,” our personal agency, depends on our being “subject” to the Other. My personality is always already determined by responsibility, a responding-to every person around me. I am called into existence by the need of the other person.

Levinas goes on to draw, from profoundest philosophical insight, radically Christian conclusions: “Constituting itself in the very movement wherein being responsible for the other devolves on it, subjectivity goes to the point of substitution for the Other. It assumes the condition—or the uncondition—of hostage. Subjectivity as such is initially hostage; it answer to the point of expiating others.”

Exactly so. We are hostage to the child in the womb. We are hostage to those who do not pass eugenic muster threatened by euthanasia and assisted suicide. And we are hostage to all those whose hearts we wish to reach with the joy of serving life and love.

On the Identity of Dreadfulness and Bliss: A Soteriological Note on the Fate of Love in Time

[In response to a question posted on Facebook concerning "No Progress Without Darkness," on whether or not it is sadistic for God to "hold us under" in proportion to how much He loves us.]

A preface from Rilke as to the ambiguity at hand: "Whoever does not, sometime or other, give his full consent, his full and joyous consent, to the dreadfulness of life, can never take possession of the unutterable abundance and power of our existence; can only walk on its edge, and one day, when the judgment is given, will have been neither alive nor dead. To show the identity of dreadfulness and bliss, these two faces on the same divine head, indeed this one single face, which just presents itself this way or that, according to our distance from it or the state of mind in which we perceive it--: this is the true significance and purpose of the Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus."

First, I concede that any human being who "holds someone under," even if he or she claims to be doing it out of love ("tough love"?), is in fact being sadistic.

You are, charitably, concerned about "someone very close" to you who rejects Catholicism because this is the way God behaves. Here I distinguish.

The fact is that existence in this world is a slaughterhouse for the vast majority of people: from broken and impoverished bodies to broken and impoverished hearts. Any worldview that does not set this fact in the center is worthless for human existence: inhuman ideology.

Catholicism sets it in the center: the crucifix is the focal point. That is Catholicism's central "selling point"; it does not whitewash the pain of the world. 

So, the question is: what is happening in Jesus' agony on the Cross? The answer is: God the Father so loves each human being that He sends His Son into the outer dark of our sinfulness and despair, and this Son, Jesus, absorbs every night that has ever invaded, or will ever invade, the heart of man. In assuming each instant of our hell, our vicimtizations and victimizings, Jesus is literally, not metaphorically, with each of us in our agonies. Love suffers with. And in His co-suffering our hell (indeed He suffers it more than we do), Jesus opens a way to the light for each of us. Because He "loves us to the end," the Resurrection of Jesus (the vindication of the Son by the Father) is an opening for each of us into a life on the other side of suffering, within the loving immutability of the Trinitarian life. 

This absolute mercy of God the Father, carried out by His Son in Their Spirit of missionary love, contains within itself the ineluctable moment of justice. For every victimization, there must be vindication. This is called "the wrath of God." It is love still, but love in the mode of vindicating the powerless. God the Son has no other will than the divine will received from the Father. That will is to save every single human being, while at the same time vindicating the victims.

The need for vindication comes from the fact that every moral evil is introduced into the world by the perverted personal will of a creature, demonic or human. In no instance does the good God enact moral evil. But the good and just and merciful God must contend with moral evil. If He is to have a creation filled with finite persons at all, He is going to have to deal with the fact that imperfect finite freedom is able to sin. (Perfect freedom, on the other hand, is incapable of sin.)

God the Father contends with the fact of moral evil by meeting it with suffering love, the love of His Son, but also by commissioning others with a mission within the universal mission of the Son, to participate in crucified love. 

To carry out this mission, we must be purified. And that requires spiritual training. Hence one reason for "holding us under." This is analogous to what a teacher or a coach does when they, non-sadistically, run their charges through a regimen. When the training is training for missionary love, it must necessarily be extreme, as the mission is extreme.

The second reason for "holding us under" is to give us the gift of solidarity. If we were given the choice, very few of us would take the offer of misery for the sake of greatness, including greatness in love. But God wants good for us greater than our paltry imaginations can conjure. God the Father, being God, will make good on all that He promises will come if we serve limitless love. And, indeed, the dark night is its own reward, in a way, because it IS union with the abandoned Jesus. The Father is giving those He has elected the infinite honor of intimacy with His Son. 

I conclude by noting that the Father takes no pleasure in our pain. But He does takes infinite pleasure in love. And as He IS infinite love, He knows nothing, nothing compares to the glory of love. But it is hard to see all this, and that is why in his epistle Saint James writes: "Blessed is the man who endures trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life which God has promised to those who love Him." He then goes on to affirm, in one of the greatest verses in the Bible, what he, what we, must affirm in the face of the anguish of existence--the affirmation of simple Christian faith, despite the fact that we are hurting though God be sovereign: "Every good and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with Whom there is no variation or shadow due to change." 

Or, as Saint John has it, even more emphatically: "God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all." Or, again, as Saint John writes later in his first epistle, "God is Love." God is infinite love, love so broad and indefeasible as to contain all the modes and orders of this world's anguish.

The Living and Broken Heart: Prayer as Infinite Desire

If there are depths left in a soul, if a person has not traded himself to win at the superficialities of worldly success, then the castle-keeps within will be invested by deepest suffering.

And when we are squeezed at our core, it is as if we have become all solar plexus and dealt such a blow we can but feel death: "There is a hidden anguish which is inaudible to men."

In the second matins reading for the day, Saint Augustine exegetes Psalm 38, and shows again his profound sensitivity to the pain of the world, thus vindicating God in the only possible theodicy: one that emphasizes the divine empathy.

"[W]hen a man's heart is so taken up with some particular concern that the hurt inside finds vocal expression, one looks for the reason. And one will say to oneself: perhaps this is what causes his anguish, or perhaps such and such has happened to him. But who can be certain of the cause except God, Who hears and sees his anguish? Therefore the psalmist says: 'In the anguish of my heart I groaned aloud.' For if men hear at all, they usually hear only bodily groaning and know nothing of the anguish of the heart from which it issues."

God the Father always hears our sighs and screams. And He answers with His crucified Word.

We need to know this, for otherwise we will be tempted to close our hearts to protect ourselves from the pain of the world. And that means extinguishing the fiery desire of our hearts. This happens in two modes: 1) the parodies of desire in which love is usurped by a desire to dominate, and 2) the common "religious option" of playing everything safe when it comes to intimacy and passionate openness to the world.

Either way, the Father's Word of Love is spurned. If we are to respond to the Father's total love for us, our desire must be infinitized, not deformed or suppressed. 

If the suffering of our hearts is felt by God, it is because Being Itself is Love. And our hearts suffer because they want love above all, and cannot find it.

The correlate of the God on fire with love for us must be a humanity on fire with love for Him and for every neighbor:

"Who then knows the cause of man's groaning? 'All my desire is before You.' No, it is not open before other men, for they cannot understand the heart; 'but before You is all my desire.' If your desire lies open to Him Who is your Father and Who sees in secret, He will answer you."

So begins the conversation, the whispered urgencies of new love, the ladder between heaven and earth, sustaining the world: prayer.

"For the desire of your heart is itself your prayer. And if the desire is constant, so is your prayer. The Apostle Paul had a purpose in saying: 'Pray without ceasing.' ...Whatever else you may be doing, if you but fix your desire on God's Sabbath rest, your prayer will be ceaseless."

Saint Augustine brings this to a point in a magnificent line: "Therefore, if you wish to pray without ceasing, do not cease to desire." 

The only alternative to ever-increasing desire, to the sublimities by which love in its newness continues to be new, is to close one's heart, to grow cold and sink wordlessly from the heaven of desire:

"The constancy of your desire will itself be the ceaseless voice of your prayer. And that voice of your prayer will be silent only when your love ceases. For who are silent? Those of whom it is said: 'Because evil has abounded, the love of many will grow cold.' 

"The chilling of love means that the heart is silent; while burning love is the outcry of the heart. If your love is without ceasing, you are crying out always; if you always cry out, you are always desiring; and if you desire, you are calling to mind your eternal rest in the Lord."

I want to conclude by bringing Saint Augustine into conversation with Rilke on this point, whose first Duino Elegy famously begins:

“Who, if I screamed, would hear me in the angelic/orders? Even should one take me/to his heart suddenly, I would evaporate/in his more powerful existence. For beauty is nothing/but the beginning of terror, which we barely endure,/and we marvel because it calmly disdains/to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying.”

It is hard to be open to beauty. It means being open to the pain of the world. It is terrifying. It destabilizes our personal homeostasis. It costs far more than the world considers "prudent." 

And yet. If we would enter into the conversation that binds heaven and earth, the luminous commerce of prayer, then we must scream out of a heart wounded and bleeding. Thus we will find that an ancient and ever-new Love has always encompassed everything. Then our hearts will bloom in the desert. And desire will make the world light with the lightsomeness of first love. And we will rise.

No Progress Without Darkness: The Cross the Only Way to Wisdom and Love

On this feast of Saint John of the Cross, the great master of the spiritual life, it is well to remember that our passage through mortal existence is eased by clarity on what matters most, the very goal of personality: to know and love each other within the infinite knowing and loving that is the divine life.

Our intellects long to know everything about everything, and our hearts long to love and be loved unconditionally. The true, the good, and the beautiful are the atmosphere of a common life of ever-greater intimacy with each other, within the ever-greater glory and goodness of the God Who Is Love.

But the joy of eternal love is bought at the price of temporal endurance. To get from here to there always requires dying, a daily dying to self culminating in the relinquishing of this form of temporal existence.

The treasure houses of heaven can be gained only through the narrow way, a path narrow enough to abrade all the excrescences of our egos, all the ways the truth of who we are has become distorted by our history and our willfulness.

That narrow way is the Cross of Christ.

And the second matins reading from Saint John of the Cross makes this clear: "The soul cannot enter into [the treasures of the wisdom and knowledge of God hid in Christ] unless it first crosses into and enters the thicket of suffering, enduring interior and exterior labors, and unless it first receives from God very many blessings in the intellect and in the senses, and has undergone long spiritual training."

Of course, only suffering can circumcise our fatty hearts. The agonies that envelop us bring this about. It is also the case that those of us who enjoy the prosperity of an American existence, in particular, should, all things being equal, undertake the voluntary mortification of fasting. Advent is a penitential season, so it is a very acceptable time for us to be prepared for the coming of Jesus in this way. Ascesis is an essential component of "spiritual training," as is of course prayer, including the Liturgy of the Hours, the rosary, the Divine Mercy chaplet and, above all, Mass as often as one can participate.

Now many of us have been through fiery trials, but the sanctity required to affirm completely what Saint John says next has not been wrought in me. Nevertheless, I know it to be certainly true, and not a matter of spiritual masochism. The broken and open heart wills to suffer all for love and wisdom: "Would that men might come at last to see that it is quite impossible to reach the thicket of the riches and wisdom of God except by first entering the thicket of much suffering, in such a way that the soul finds there its consolation and desire. The soul that longs for divine wisdom chooses first, and in truth, to enter the thicket of the cross."

Saint John brings it to a point by citing the perfect passage from Scripture: "Saint Paul therefore urges the Ephesians 'not to grow weary in the midst of tribulations,' but to be 'rooted and grounded in love, so that they may know with all the saints the breadth, the length, the height, and the depth--to know what is beyond knowledge, the love of Christ, so as to be filled with all the fullness of God."

To be filled with all the fullness of God (!), the human spirit must be stretched in every direction on the Cross of unrequited and solidary suffering.

We used to know more about this in a more chivalrous and knowledge-seeking age. The serious pursuit of the liberal arts and the sciences requires, and certainly the pursuit of love requires, lucubration. It is no favor to the transcendent eros of the human spirit to be weighed down by the consoling stuff of a consumerist interpellation and colonization of our desire.

We must endure, if we are to develop. Since this is the human lot, the universal community of Christianity must make it possible. We should support each other in undertaking the voluntary discipline of asceticism. 

But community is even more urgent when it comes to the decisive entry into the mystery of the Cross: the dark night, an involuntary operation by God upon and in the soul. When the dark night swallows someone, as a matter of basic Christian charity, we must accompany that person. 

Saint John writes in The Dark Night: "One ought to have deep compassion for the soul God puts in this tempestuous and frightful night. It may be true that the soul is fortunate because of what is being accomplished within it, for great blessings will proceed from this night; and Job affirms that out of darkness God will raise up in the soul profound blessings and change the shadow of death into light [Jb. 12:22]; and God will do this in such a way that, as David says, 'the light will become what the darkness was' [Ps. 139:12]. Nevertheless, the soul is deserving of great pity because of the immense tribulation and the suffering of extreme uncertainty about a remedy. It believes, as Jeremiah says [Lam. 3:18], that its evil will never end. And it feels as David that God has placed it in darkness like the dead of old, and that its spirit as a result is in anguish within it and its heart troubled [Ps. 143:3-4]."

We must all pass through the crucible. May we not abandon those who feel abandoned. May we do this work of spiritual mercy, which is also essential for our spiritual training.

The one consumed by the dark night cannot finagle some accommodation, or gin up some self-consolation, for the dark night is precisely the time when divine election has seized one out of the world. In the world, we delude ourselves into thinking our initiatives are originary, that boot-strapping makes sense. In the dark night, God the Father undertakes the severe mercy of stripping us of this delusion. If our goal is supernatural, we cannot attain it by our power. If the fulfillment of the human person is infinite knowing and loving, only God can bring us to it.

So the Christian community must be a community indeed, and surround the one marked out by God's hard favor with the loving accompaniment of co-suffering. That is what love does. How stupid it would be to harangue people in the darkness!

Even a well-meaning spiritual director, with words of comfort, is of no avail, for a person in the dark night cannot be exhorted to DO anything, even to buck up: the whole process is one of RECEIVING a supernatural shaping, in one's very depths: "Indeed, [the director's doctrine] is not a remedy, for until the Lord finishes purging them in the way He desires, no remedy is a help to them in their sorrow. Their helplessness is even greater because of the little they can do in this situation. They resemble one who is imprisoned in a dark dungeon, bound hand and foot, and able neither to move nor see nor feel any favor from heaven or earth."

Utter anguish.

The more God the Father loves someone, the longer He holds the person under. But He is no sadist. The one thing He seeks is loving union with us: "They remain in this condition until their spirit is humbled, softened, and purified, until it becomes so delicate, simple, and refined that it can be one with the Spirit of God, according to the degree of union of love that God, in His mercy, desires to grant."

When the night has ended, we will look back and praise the goodness of the Father. I suspect we will say something like: "Amen to all that has happened to me in my life! Amen, good Father! How I love You and Your strange ways! How elegant and intricate they are! How oddly precious that time spent united with Your crucified Son! How happy I am to have had the honor to suffer for a joy so infinitely free! Thank you for these tears now shed for sheer delight, O my good and gracious Father!"

Lucy in the Sky: Romance and Solidarity Batter the Gates of Hell

Dante understands Saint Lucy. For him, she is "the enemy of everything cruel." He presents her as an essential mediator of heaven's help in Canto II of the Inferno.

Beatrice is the one who descends to Limbo to commission Virgil to serve as the wayfaring Dante's guide. Virgil recounts how this all came about because Dante is about to lose his nerve for traveling through the worlds on the other side of death, and Virgil wants him to know that love surrounds him and directs his way out of the dark wood of his life. (The translation I have to hand is Lombardo's.) 

Beatrice does not gush, but she loves Dante, who has always loved her, who has loved her into the bright world on the other side of death. And her love has gained the objectivity of heaven, which is stronger than death and hell: "loved moved me to do this, love makes me speak."

Beatrice's personal love for Dante has been so elevated, it descends from the heart of the Trinity through a series of female mediators beginning with Mary. And descending love is mercy: 

"There is in Heaven a gracious Lady

with such pity for the plight to which I send you

that the strict decree above has been broken.

This Lady summoned Lucy and said to her:

'Your faithful one now stands in need of you,

and I deliver him into your care.'

And Lucy, an enemy of everything cruel,

arose and came to me where I sat

with venerable Rachel, and said to me:

'Beatrice, true glory of God,

why do you not to go that man's aid

who left the common crowd for love of you?

Do you not hear his pitiful lament

or see how he is threatened by death

in the flood that outswells even the sea?'

No one on Earth was ever so quick 

to gain an advantage or escape from harm

as I was then upon hearing these words."

If what Dante says here is thought together with the second matins reading for the feast day (from Saint Ambrose's On Virginity), we see why love must travel through all the worlds. 

The problem is that love must first cling to Jesus, if it is to be love. And Jesus is always on the move: "The Word of God moves swiftly; He is not won by the lukewarm, nor held fast by the negligent. Let your soul be attentive to His word; follow carefully the path God tells you to take, for He is swift in His passing." 

Why is divine love so difficult to lay hold of? Because the only way to attain a beloved who is above you is for your love to be stretched to the measure of the higher. When this proportioning is to the beloved God, it's called sanctification. In any human love, proximity to the beloved is attained through an analogous process of dying to self. Unless we suffer, we cannot love well. 

So, to stretch our hearts, Jesus leads us through the desert, to break our hearts, to break them open: "What does [Christ's] bride say? 'I sought Him, and did not find Him; I called Him, and He did not hear me.' Do not imagine that you are displeasing to Him although you have called Him, asked Him, opened the door to Him, and that this is the reason why He has gone so quickly; no, for He allows us to be constantly tested."

Now, that's one reason the divine Beloved cannot be simply laid hold of: we need to undergo the purgation of a lifelong courtship. So, the first reason for the desert is our own need for purification. 

But this is inseparable from the second reason for the desert: solidary love. Why is Jesus moving swiftly? Because He has a burning love to love every single person: "When the crowds press Him to stay, what does He say in the Gospel? 'I must preach the Word of God to other cities, because I have been sent for that.' But even if it seems to you that He has left you, go out and seek Him once more."

And this is relevant for tomorrow's feast of Saint John of the Cross: the dark night, the dark wood, the wilderness, the desert, the hell of our lives is two things simultaneously: purification and solidarity. It is the stretching, and breaking, and opening of our hearts. AND it is solidarity with all the others in darkness. And it is the former precisely by being the latter. We are only purified if we are following Christ as He goes about descending into the hell of each person's life, in merciful solidarity.

And so Saint Ambrose sums it all up: "If you also, like the bride, wish to hold [Christ] fast, seek Him and be fearless of suffering. It is often easier to find Him in the midst of bodily torments, in the very hands of persecutors."

And so we are back to the charity of Saint Lucy, and of all our friends in heaven, who in their solidary love for us can harness romantic love and send it into hell to rescue cold and closed hearts wandering in fear.

And the very love of heaven begins to set these hearts on fire, one by one. And a light begins to grow on this darkling plain. 

Saint Lucy, pray for us!

What Trump and Francis Might Teach Us: Against the Gnostic Threat in Secular and Church Politics

The root of pharisaism is the gnostic temptation to claim a knowledge that marks inside and outside in invidious ways.

There is too much apriorism in politics on both left and right, that is, clinging to ideas despite on-the-ground facts. Conservatives do it; progressives do it; supercilious centrists do it.

An essential fact from the sociology of knowledge must be recognized, which explains the covert isomorphism uniting political foes: the pundits of right, left, and in-between, overwhelmingly, belong to what Peggy Noonan has called the protected class.

I am materialist enough to think this decisive.

That social positioning threatens to distort everything. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a materially comfortable talking head to transcend ideology.

Did you vote for Trump? There are many, many on the left who feel morally superior in ruling you out of the circle of respect owed a rational agent, though, ironically, such an act of dehumanization is one of the most morally inferior things to do.

But the totalitarianism of the left does not require sussing out. I am much more concerned with the gnostic dynamic at play on my side of the fence, amongst the conservative and religiously orthodox.

I will engage the disastrous response to Pope Francis soon enough. I’ll just say right now, it is one thing for a Catholic to prefer different personal styles in popes. It is quite another for a Catholic to imply (or more than imply) that he has an inside line on the truth in such a way that he may judge the pope.

If truth in faith and morals is so obvious that the charism of the papal office is unnecessary for ascertaining it, then the papacy is jejune, and would in fact be the most retrograde institution on the planet.

But, indeed, the papacy is the one place truth may hope for vindication in a world of profound ambiguity and in the age of consummate ideology. Just like the vast majority of Catholics not belonging to the commentariat, I’ll stand with the pope.

That is the Catholic position. Of course, I understand the modern need for reserving to oneself magisterial authority. But pronouncing for all the Church and world does not belong to any one person, except the pope. The attempt to do so by whomever else is a wildly illegitimate extension of the authentic authority that conscience has for any given person over him or herself. 

This is not meant to impugn any Catholic who is sincerely seeking for answers. Asking questions is always a good thing. Always. And I will try to lend my own moral-theological expertise, such as it is, to that cause.

But that will be in a series of posts yet to come. What I want to address right now is the need for political conservatives to recognize that Trump voters have something to teach us.

I am a proud political conservative, who has subscribed for years to both National Review and The Weekly Standard. I am definitely more in the Standard camp (as I really like immigrants), but Burke and Kirk have always been important to me.

That said, the agenda of movement conservatism, no matter how committed I am to it, must be recognized as having been unable, over two presidential election cycles, to crack the electoral map.

But somehow this vulgarian Trump did gain the following to do so.

And it would be to transform conservatism into ideology to refuse to try to learn from this.

Peggy Noonan continues to provide essential insight into this new moment in American (and global) politics.

She cites a crucial passage from Edmund Burke as to the decisive role circumstances play in political prudence. It’s one thing to have the right principles (and we must). It’s another to apply them correctly. Movement conservatives and orthodox moral theologians need to understand this. Oddly, both Trump, as an occasion, and Francis, as a teacher, provide opportunities to learn on this score.

I end with a searing passage from Noonan, which would be morally callous for anyone, especially pundits, to ignore:

“Life has been famously cruel to some good people the past few decades. The past few years it seemed the progressive left and the Democratic Party, confident in what they called the coalition of the ascendant, were looking at the old American working class, especially the white working class, and saying: ‘Here’s your disability check, now go take your opioids and get lost while we transform our country. By the way, we have friends on Wall Street.’ From the right and Republicans it was: ‘Take your piece of the dole, we are importing an entire new people from other countries to take your place, could you please sort of pass away? We’re replacing you! Why can’t you get the message? By the way, we have friends on Wall Street.’”

"Night Will Be No More": Of Tyrants and Redemption

We are come to the end of the liturgical year. We are obliged to remember.

Another enemy of humanity has died. Fidel Castro, like all totalitarian tyrants, besides killing the body, tried to kill the soul. No ideology in the history of the world approaches the body count heaped up by communist terror. Not even close. But it is a thing to consider that the tortured body is merely the beginning of the red horror. [The only more murderous regime is the biopolitics that brutally disciplines the fertility of women through abortion, but both communism and bourgeois consumerism site the female body in that penal colony, exterminating the smallest and weakest human bodies.]

We must hear from victims on such occasions. Let this serve, from one of the premier testaments to the memory of the victims, The Gulag Archipelago, by the prophet Solzhenitsyn: “The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is the center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you, ‘You are under arrest.’”

Against justice, dark power places in chains, and I tell you it is profoundest violation.

May God have mercy on the soul of Fidel Castro, and show him the mercy he never showed the noble people he tried to crush.

May God grant peace to his victims.

In the lectionary today, we finish a whirlwind traversal of the Book of Revelation. We see the great image of Trinitarian intimacy and healing and physical delight: “An angel showed me the river of life-giving water, sparkling like crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the street. On either side of the river grew the tree of life that produces fruit twelve times a year, once each month; the leaves of the trees serve as medicine for the nations” (Rev 22:1-2).

True to Johannine form, the river here is a symbol of the Holy Spirit, Who proceeds from the Father and the Son.

And through the Holy Spirit, all of our wants are met and wounds healed, both as individuals and as political bodies.

We remember that when the fifth seal binding the book of history is broken by the slaughtered Lamb, we see the victims of history under the altar in heaven (Rev 6:9). I say to you there is no question this includes the victims of communist terror. Christ on the Cross identifies Himself with every single victim of injustice from Abel on. The ecclesia ab Abel is constituted essentially by those who have been ground down by superior power. If the comfortable can also belong to the Church, it is only because the victims would have it so. The world goes on by the sufferance of the suffering, and no way else.

Thursday’s first Mass reading was from Revelation 18, in which we hear of the fall of Babylon. This means the fall of the anti-city, the anti-nation, the anti-church, the anti-body, the anti-human, founded on worldly success and the cruelty of materialist luxury (capitalist or communist) and loveless power:

“A mighty angel picked up a stone like a huge millstone and threw it into the sea and said: ‘With such force will Babylon the great city be thrown down, and will never be found again. No melodies of harpists and musicians, flutists and trumpeters, will ever be heard in you again. No craftsmen in any trade will ever be found in you again. No sound of the millstone will ever be heard in you again. No light from a lamp will ever be seen in you again. No voices of bride and groom will ever be heard in you again. Because your merchants were the great ones of the world, all nations were led astray by your magic potion.’ And there was found in her the blood of prophets and saints, and of all who had been slain on the earth” (Rev 18:21-24).

After this we hear doxologies in honor of the justice of God. And who that has suffered unjustly does not yearn for that justification?

But is it too harsh? “Alleluia! Smoke will rise from her (Babylon) forever and ever” (19:3).

I will only quickly note here the indispensable insights of Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr. Besides the fallen angels, hell at least contains also the effigies of each of us, the impossible possibility that is our sinfulness. Each time we sin, we “form” a parody of ourselves, a distortion of the good Father’s eternal vision of who we are.

Metaphysically, of course, evil is privation. But in the flesh of lived existence, it is not metaphysical nullity we experience when we suffer; rather, we feel the existential weight of darkness. The outrage enacted on the bodies and souls of victims is NOT an existential nullity. If a child is harmed, there is an eternal weight to the “thing.” And if there is any love or justice in reality (that is, if the metaphysics of being is real), then that effigy must burn forever and ever.

In heaven, the correlate is the eternal stigmata in the body of the eternal Son. The vulnerability of love belongs to the thing itself. It never disappears. And that yields the imperative of all Scripture, which we hear at lauds today, the only Way that love can conquer all: “Bless those who persecute you: never curse them, bless them” (Romans 12:14).

With Castro, with any person who hurts and hurts and hurts others without mercy, we are confronted with the mystery of reprobation. Our vocation as Christians, our vocation as suffering victims, is to offer our sufferings up for the salvation of the victimizers, so that it is only the effigies that burn, and not a single human. To suffer is the state of divine election, and that election is for nothing else than to save the lost.

It is night. Pain envelops us. But Love is coming. He has promised. Amen. Marana tha! Come, Lord Jesus!

Money for Nothing: The Either/Or of Divine Election

"What is of human esteem is an abomination in the sight of God" (Luke 16: 15).

There is no proportion between the calculus of the world and the life of divine election. No proportion at all. God or mammon. God or money. God or profit. God or material possessions. God or success. God or comfort. Either. Or.

The Pharisees sneer.

The Gospel readings for the last two days have presented the Parable of the Dishonest Steward. And the thing cannot cut deeply enough. We always find ways to protect ourselves from the radicality of Jesus.

To out live divine election requires faith, a freefall into an expanding abyss.

Faith: the substance of things hoped for. Mammon: the substance of this world. Two kingdoms. No mediation possible.

Even such an honest thinker as D. H. Lawrence, in revolt against bourgeois cruelties, cannot escape the gravity of money. Who doesn't know what he's talking about?:

"Money? Perhaps one couldn't say the same there. Money one always wanted. Money, success, the bitch-goddess...that was a permanent necessity. You couldn't spend your last sou, and say finally: So that's THAT!--No, if you lived even another ten minutes, you wanted a few more sous for something or other. Just to keep the business mechanically going, you needed money. You had to have it. Money you HAVE to have. You needn't really have anything else. So that's THAT!--

"Since, of course, it's not your own fault you are alive. Once you are alive, money is a necessity, and the only absolute necessity. All the rest you can get along without, at a pinch. But not money. Emphatically, that's THAT!--"

What is the substance of our lives? God or mammon.

"And I say to you, make friends for yourselves from the wealth of injustice, that when it fails, they may welcome you into the eternal tents" (Luke 16:9).

Money is dishonest. Marx wasn't wrong about that. He just went the wrong way with his insight.

The Christian must transvalue money by "laundering" it through faith: that is, the Christian makes money honest by making it serve charity and mercy. That's the point of the parable. That's what the dishonest steward gets right. That's how we pharisees become Christians.

Review: Brahms's Second Piano Concerto with Hélène Grimaud

Thanks to the blessing of rush tickets, last week I was able to experience my favorite pianist in person: the lovely and incomparable Hélène Grimaud. Every few years, a concert captivates everything inside of you. I remember attending a Boston Symphony Orchestra performance of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 4 with my sister that was like that.

Well, the BSO's current presentation of Brahms's Second Piano Concerto does it again. This is a piece of music that will go all through you. If you give it a chance, it will accompany you through life.

The inner movements are the most piercing. Brahms innovates by inserting a scherzo into the usual three-movement concerto schema. This Allegro is impassioned indeed. Grimaud makes it utterly riveting. She is all poetry and power. By her modesty and mastery, she electrifies the orchestra's playing. With her grace as the center of attention, the joys of paradise are approached during this movement. But only approached, for this is Brahms and Brahms means the simultaneity of majesty and loss. That old bachelor was no dead man. The scherzo is all tension--sexual, existential, what have you, done up in loping Schumannesque grandeur. And all that tension primes one for the only relief there is, in the following Andante movement: tears. It's the reprise of the cello solo (exquisitely played by Martha Babcock) that got me, but it is Grimaud's gravitational force that makes the visceral response possible.

One hears in this slow movement the quintessential Brahms: the one who sings all the promise of life--and how it never turns out.

Life is hard, but God gave us Brahms--and Grimaud.

A Kingdom on the Other Side of Slaughter, 2: Power, Authority, and Democracy

What would America look like if Christians actually lived according to the unilateral love of Jesus?

Well, to start, we bloggers wouldn't pontificate with such smarminess (that air of "wink, wink, how stupid/vicious is everyone who thinks differently!"), judging everyone else, quite certain we've understood every angle. That is, the pharisees of the right, left, and in-between wouldn't be so toxic for democratic co-existence. We would be committed to being shepherds of thought and of love, humble before the sacrament of our neighbor, humble before experience and suffering and expertise other to our own.

Of course, it's always the other guy or gal who's intolerant. Moi? Bien sûr que non!

Be that as it may. When Pope Pius XI instituted the Feast of Christ the King in his 1925 encyclical "Quas primas," during the sixteenth centenary of the Council of Nicaea, and in the oozing wound of the Great War's aftermath, he wanted to point a way forward for the democracies of the West. It had nothing to do with an anonymous Christianity. It had to do with the difference that Jesus makes.

"When once men recognize, both in private and in public life, that Christ is King, society will at last receive the great blessings of real liberty, well-ordered discipline, peace, and harmony. Our Lord's regal office invests the human authority of princes and rulers with a religious significance; it ennobles the citizen's duty of obedience. It is for this reason that St. Paul, while bidding wives revere Christ in their husbands, and slaves respect Christ in their masters, warns them to give obedience to them not as men, but as the vicegerents of Christ; for it is not meet that men redeemed by Christ should serve their fellow-men. 'You are bought with a price; be not made the bond-slaves of men.'"

What is Pope Pius saying here? That the totalitarian tendency of secularized power (power exercised without the limiting context of religion in general, and of Christianity in particular) destroys the very possibility of AUTHORITY. It is so hard for us to recognize the reality and goodness and inherent necessity of authority (of responsible imperium that serves due order) in communities of whatever scale (as a common good is the final cause of any community (making an aggregate more than an aggregate), and authority must exist to coordinate the personal powers of constituent members towards the securing of that common good).

But there is a reason we don't recognize authority anymore: it has too often been wielded by people who abuse their authority. If, say, a president has advanced personal policy preferences by violating the constitutional order he has sworn to uphold (and upon which his authority proximately rests), then he has deformed authority into tyranny. Authority is power exercised in accord with the rationality of reality; tyranny is power exercised with no higher measure than the person who wields the power.

That is, authentic authority never enslaves: it is command in the service of the integral human development of every member of a community. But power unmeasured by natural law, or rather, by the Lawgiver Who has disposed the natures of all things sweetly to advance the development of each human person, enslaves those subject to that power.

And this calls forth resistance and rebellion.

The only way to stabilize a body politic descending into a spiral of factional power plays is to recognize a higher measure--specifically, the measure of the limitless love of Jesus Christ, Who came to serve, not to be served.

This truly would change how power is exercised. It would save authority: "If princes and magistrates duly elected are filled with the persuasion that they rule, not by their own right, but by the mandate and in the place of the Divine King, they will exercise their authority piously and wisely, and they will make laws and administer them, having in view the common good and also the human dignity of their subjects. The result will be a stable peace and tranquillity, for there will be no longer any cause of discontent. Men will see in their king or in their rulers men like themselves, perhaps unworthy or open to criticism, but they will not on that account refuse obedience if they see reflected in them the authority of Christ God and Man. Peace and harmony, too, will result; for with the spread and the universal extent of the kingdom of Christ men will become more and more conscious of the link that binds them together, and thus many conflicts will be either prevented entirely or at least their bitterness will be diminished."

Piety before reality, before the intelligibilities that constitute the world, before the Divine King Who wins His authority through a limitless suffering for the sake of love: this resurrects authority.

Believe me, I hold no secret brief for theocracy. One would have to be, shall we say, inexperienced to think bishops would make good rulers of the saeculum. It is more than enough if we had bishops actually living out the Christian remit of mercy and reconciliation.

I'm not holding my breath to see courageous, fervent, and consistent pastoral charity sweep through the hierarchy (all the honorable exceptions aside). The point of Vatican II, though, is that the responsibility of laypersons to live out charity and mercy in the world is there regardless of how well or ill the clerical state is lived out. What would this world be like if more of us went about the ministry of reconciliation with zeal?

How many marriages would be saved? How many friendships? How many workplaces transformed?

If we took Pope Francis more seriously when it comes to mercy, and he is only following Saint John Paul II and Pope Benedict in this, the pharisaism of right, left, and in-between would start, finally, to wither. We would look upon our neighbor with the eyes of Jesus anguishing on the Cross.

A completely new politics arises from the posture of tortured love: "men will become more and more conscious of the link that binds them together, and thus many conflicts will be either prevented entirely or at least their bitterness will be diminished."

Piety before the sacrament of the neighbor: thus the veil of death, that obscures all things and chokes all things, is rent.

But to learn this politics is a costly enterprise. It means following the King of all hearts as He gains His authority through an act of absolute self-dispossession for the sake of each poor sinner.

Paul Claudel begins his play "The Satin Slipper" with a dying Spanish Jesuit priest who has been fixed to the main-mast by English pirates. You want democracy? This is the kind of heart we must have:

"Lord, I thank You for having fastened me so! And, sometimes, I have chanced to find Your commandments painful. And my will, at sight of Your rule, perplexed, restive. But, today, it is not possible to be closer bound to You than I am, and, verify each limb as I will, there is not one that can withdraw from You ever so little.

"True, also, I am fastened to the cross, but my cross is no longer fast to anything. 'Tis floating on the sea, the free sea, away to that point where the limit of the known sky melts and is equally distant from this old world, which I have left, and from the other world the new."

Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.--IF we will to love above all things, IF we will to follow the God Who dies for love.

A Kingdom on the Other Side of Slaughter, 1: The Divine Sovereignty of Unrequited Love

Jesus, the King of all hearts, has earned His sovereignty over our hearts by the limitless quality of His love for each human being. He surrenders Himself into our hands, in the divine madness of unrequited love, and we slaughter Him.

And it is thus that He has broken the claim that the powers of this world had on us: the claims of money, comfort, status, control, "self-care."

In that excellent encyclical "Quas primas" that instituted today's Feast of Christ the King, Pope Pius XI highlights the Scriptural claim that Jesus rules by more than natural right. Yes, as God, Jesus has plenary authority over every creature. Yes, even as man, Jesus enjoys universal sovereignty, by virtue of the hypostatic union of His human nature with His divine Sonship.

But what really moves Pope Pius is the theodramatics, not the metaphysics, of Christ's authority: "But a thought that must give us even greater joy and consolation is this; that Christ is our King by acquired, as well as by natural right, for He is our Redeemer."

Redemption.

This is well attested in the Resurrection narratives, and it is crucial to the soteriology of the New Testament.

Pius cites I Peter 1:18-19: "You were not redeemed with corruptible things, but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb unspotted and undefiled."

Redemption means that the divine economy of salvation radically disrupts the economy of this world. Pius goes on to sharpen Saint Paul's observations in I Corinthians 6: "We are no longer our own property, for Christ has purchased us 'with a great price'; our very bodies are the 'members of Christ.'"

We are no longer our own property. Not even our bodies belong to us. Love has displaced all other claims. Love has the final claim on us. We don't get to say, "this much and no more," before love's imperium. That is what the sovereignty of Jesus means.

Love is stronger than death. Love conquers all. By dying.

The authority of Jesus has everything to do with His love-death on our behalf. What He says at the end of Saint Matthew's Gospel, "all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me" (28:18), He explains at the beginning of the Book of Revelation: "Do not be afraid; I am the First and the Last and the Living One. I became dead, and behold, I am living into the ages of the ages and I have the keys of death and of hell" (Rev 1:17-18).

It's because Jesus has pierced the veil of death by being slaughtered that Love has authority even in this world of terminal lovelessness.

And what this slaughtered Priest-King wants is subjects willing, in turn, to fall in the service of love: "To Him Who loves us and freed us from our sins by His blood, and made us a kingdom, priests serving His God and Father, to Him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen" (Rev 1:5-6).

A kingdom of priests is a kingdom of martyrs to unilateral, unrequited Love. With such an army, the King would rule every heart.

The Apocalypse of the Father: There Is But One Who Knows When the Suffering Will End

The end is near!

At the turning of the liturgical year, the eschatological readings come at us. For the next two weeks, the lectionary presents the Book of Revelation.

And we should always be startled by that indispensable handbook for living.

It begins: “The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave Him to show His servants what must happen soon; Christ signified (esēmanen) it by sending it (aposteilas) through His angel to His servant, John, who testified (emartyrēsen) to the Logos of God and to the testimony (martyrian) of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw” (Rev 1:1-2).

Here’s the deepest apostolic succession: from Father to Son to angel to human servant of the mission, who must be a faithful witness of the Faithful Witness, a martyr of the Martyr.

This is communication of the Word. This is revelation.

All of Scripture, indeed the entirety of cosmos and history, is the apocalypse of the Father, the unveiling of the infinite abyss of divine faithfulness and mercy: the Father’s plan of loving goodness.

In chapter 5, the Lamb must receive from the hand of the Father the scroll of world history. The Father is the Source of all there is, in eternity and in time. And everything the Father has to give us, He gives through His Son.

The Father must reveal His plan to His Son (“The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave Him…”), for the Son receives everything from the Father. That’s no derogation from the divine dignity of the Son: this is exactly HOW the Son is God.

So, when Jesus emphatically states, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away. But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mark 13:31-32, and Matthew 24:36), He is not playacting, or splitting theological hairs. He is affirming His divinity AS the Son. (That is, Jesus isn’t a unitarian!)

Again, Jesus is emphatic when asked before His Ascension when the Kingdom will be established: “It is not for you to know the times or seasons that the Father has set by His own authority” (Acts 1:7).

It’s not that Jesus doesn’t enjoy the beatific vision in His human intellect, which He does. It’s that the eternal Son is WHO HE IS: God FROM God, God Who receives everything directly from the Father. He is simply, “Son of the Father,” as the Gloria puts it so straightforwardly.

And the Son shows us how to be who we are each meant to be: integral human development for each of us means becoming a person in an existence that receives itself entirely from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. We are to become “sons” in the Son.

And that means receiving time (and therefore history) in the grueling posture of patience. When will the Kingdom come? When will the victims of history be vindicated? When will justification blossom into glorification? When will our suffering end?

Well, what does Jesus say in the Synoptic Apocalypse from Luke we heard at Mass on Sunday, when He prophesies the destruction of the Temple and the end of the world?

“Teacher, when will this happen? And what sign will there be when all these things are about to happen?”

His answer: there will be messianic pretenders (who will meet our hunger for signs, our anguished need to know where we are on the long arc of suffering); there will be all the calamities of history.

What happens “before” these things? The constraining of the very ones asking for the sign, the suffering of Christians in the Spirit, the martyrdom of Christian existence in a loveless world. “It will lead to your giving testimony (martyrion)” (Luke 21:13).

There will be betrayal by family members; there will be assimilation to Christ’s being hated “by all.” Finally: “By your perseverance/patience (hupomonē) you will gain your souls.”

What is the sign of the coming Kingdom? Witness to the Word, the martyrdom of faithful existence in history. The sign is nothing other than suffering in Jesus, the gutting-out of time in the darkness of faith. This is how the Kingdom of the Father comes to earth. Suffering in and with Christ is the effective sign of the Kingdom: it is the sacrament of the New Jerusalem.

The invisible Father, the Source of all we see, must be trusted to bring the visible into continuity with the invisible. There’s a ladder between heaven and earth, and we end up struggling with God because it takes time, all of time, to get from here to there.

Again, that magnificent passage from Balthasar’s A Theology of History comes to mind:

“What tells us more than anything else that Jesus’ mode of time is indeed real is the fact that He does not anticipate the will of the Father. He does not do that precise thing which we try to do when we sin, which is to break out of time, within which are contained God’s dispositions for us, in order to arrogate to ourselves a sort of eternity, to ‘take the long view’ and ‘make sure of things.’ Both Irenaeus and Clement consider that original sin consisted in anticipation of this kind: and indeed, at the close of Revelation the reward which the Son bestows upon the victor is that fruit of Paradise which the sinner had to his own hurt stolen in anticipation (Rev 2:7). God intended man to have ALL good, but in His, God’s time; and therefore all disobedience, all sin, consists essentially in breaking out of time.”

[By the way, Doctor Strange does a very good job portraying the demonically inflected ressentiment against time: there is no shortcut through the rigors of time. There’s only one way to surmount all the pain: to go through it; indeed, to embrace it in sacrificial love. To die and die and die, over and over and over again.]

When will our suffering end? Only the good Father knows. Ours is only to patiently exist within the Son, as He is ground down by the winds of history.

And as we disappear together, our eyes will open onto invisible light, martyrs of the martyred Light proceeding from the Father of lights, from Whom comes every good and perfect gift.

In the Aftermath

On this Veterans' Day, I think of my father, Jesse Gibson Franks, Army Air Corps, who flew 35 combat missions in B-17s over Central Europe in World War II. He was shot down twice.

He survived to benefit from the G.I. Bill, securing a doctorate in British and American Literature with a dissertation on Melville.

He came from Arkansas, of that invisible swath of the nation that is now being disparaged by the sophisticated and the comfortable. He was a flawed man. But he was a great man.

He fought the most necessary war in the history of the world, but as I would always tell my classes, that most just war tore through America in the decades to follow, to this very day. The inhuman rigors of battle broke the American soul (not to mention the rest of the world, and never forgetting the reason for the necessity of the thing, beginning with the moral imperative to rescue the Jews). In home after home. Our descent into materialism, consumerism, the sexual revolution, a totalitarian hubris that refuses to be disturbed by liberal education, confusion about the relation of the sexes, the collapse of marriages that goes on and on, I trace back, societally, to the unimaginable trauma of that heroic venture. Everything solid melted into air.

Here we are, in the ruins of greatness. The only way back to that heroism is through open hearts and open minds, through liberal education and the recognition that the "other side" is filled with fellow citizens, fellow humans, people WITH REASONS.

My father survived the war, but he couldn't outrun it. We must somehow, together, outrun the inhumanity that lies coiled in the cellars of each of our hearts.

I miss him. My kids miss him, though they don't know it yet.

A fatherless world stings. It's a world of infinite collapse. "It's Father's Day, and everybody's wounded," sang the indispensable Leonard Cohen.

I am re-presenting one of my early sonnets for this occasion. Thank you, veterans, for your sacrifice. May God the Father give you all the grace to outrun in peace the horrors that must be sustained in war that horrors find their end.

Flying Fortress

For my father

How cold it must have been those three dozen sorties;

How loud, within the belly of the dragon;

How quiet, floating down a thousand stories;

And colder, when your friend was strafed and slackened.

It ruined you. You couldn’t drink enough

To exorcise the gelid cacophony. 

You fathered freedom, though, and, in that, us,

Crushed the rage that slaughtered Jews so savagely.

Still, I can’t keep a father. They all go.

Joseph, David’s son, could you foster me?

Of my unquiet bapa, too, take custody?

And ward my children’s own unpatroned woe?

Would that the festal, gliding, glinting ranks

Drop soundless fire upon these orphaned banks.

Composed of Eros and Dust

An elevated sensibility for beauty is necessary if we are to have the kind of renewed republic that can produce leaders deserving of respect.

Venality and libido dominandi don't just afflict the protected class. Our hearts have become consumeristic. Love becomes a mask for the will to power. Nothing but social catastrophe can come of it.

The great Auden writes,"For the error bred in the bone/Of each woman and each man/Craves what it cannot have,/Not universal love/But to be loved alone."

The vectors pointed to the New Jerusalem arise from open hearts and a will for ever-greater love.

So, on the eve of this calamitous election, I present a great and flawed poem (Auden detested it later) that teaches things we need to know at this moment in the life of America. Above all, "We must love one another or die." 

September 1, 1939

by W. H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can

Unearth the whole offence

From Luther until now

That has driven a culture mad,

Find what occurred at Linz,

What huge imago made

A psychopathic god:

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew

All that a speech can say

About Democracy,

And what dictators do,

The elderly rubbish they talk

To an apathetic grave;

Analysed all in his book,

The enlightenment driven away,

The habit-forming pain,

Mismanagement and grief:

We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air

Where blind skyscrapers use

Their full height to proclaim

The strength of Collective Man,

Each language pours its vain

Competitive excuse:

But who can live for long

In an euphoric dream;

Out of the mirror they stare,

Imperialism’s face

And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar

Cling to their average day:

The lights must never go out,

The music must always play,

All the conventions conspire

To make this fort assume

The furniture of home;

Lest we should see where we are,

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash

Important Persons shout

Is not so crude as our wish:

What mad Nijinsky wrote

About Diaghilev

Is true of the normal heart;

For the error bred in the bone

Of each woman and each man

Craves what it cannot have,

Not universal love

But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark

Into the ethical life

The dense commuters come,

Repeating their morning vow;

“I will be true to the wife,

I’ll concentrate more on my work,"

And helpless governors wake

To resume their compulsory game:

Who can release them now,

Who can reach the deaf,

Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky:

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.

Voting for Trump and the Question of a "New Pro-Life Movement"

[My final long intervention with regard to the election, this is a follow-up to my last Massachusetts Citizens for Life blog, "NeverTrumpers and Basic Political Hygiene."]

To start: I am grateful that so many, including those who disagree with me, took the time to read through my last post and thoughtfully weigh my arguments. Such generosity of spirit is how the revival of democratic deliberation comes about.

Let me take this opportunity to clarify a couple of points. First, all those, like me, who vote for Trump must be committed never to defend the indefensible and to resist energetically a President Trump in any and all instances should he violate the basic canons of human dignity or of constitutional order.

A corollary: we must as a people, in a most intentional way, overcome the libertarian consumerism that has lobotomized the common good from the American mind, so that never again will we have two such character-challenged persons before us to choose from to represent the people as a whole. We must cultivate pietas, a humble awe and gratitude before the divine glory hidden in the achievements of the dead (tradition), in nature, in high culture, in every neighbor, especially the suffering neighbor.

Second, I want to leave no ambiguity that my concerns about “bad political hygiene” apply to every person who cannot bring himself to recognize rationality and goodwill behind a contrary political opinion held by someone else, not just to NeverTrumpers. There are partisans of Clinton, Trump, and Neither who indulge the temptation to anathematize. From whomever, it is civic cancer. The pharisee mutilates the body politic.

Third, let me make clear that I recognize that not all NeverTrumpers indulge in this pharisaism. There are many NeverTrumpers whom I love and respect. I simply disagree with them on what must be done in this election for the sake of the most powerless. Clinton’s vision of an America is one in which abortions are funded by tax dollars, in which Catholic hospitals are compelled to perform abortions, in which the law should place no limits at all on this private franchise to dispose of human life, and in which the dignity of women is somehow built upon the rejection of an ethic of care. Clinton’s America would be so inhospitable to the fostering of the basic conditions of civilized coexistence, of liberal democracy, and of a renewed republic of virtue, I am convinced of the necessity of voting for Trump, despite his evil comportment towards women and his atrocious demagoguery vis-à-vis immigrants.

So, I disagree with NeverTrumpers, while respecting them. But there is a certain strain of NeverTrumpism that strikes me as particularly naïve, the one that speaks of a “new pro-life movement.”

A little prolegomenon: there is not a sincere pro-lifer who does not feel in his or her guts the same passion that motivated the abolitionists.

But between visceral urges and properly human action fall intellect and will.

Say the machinery of the culture of death, the biopolitics of the global elite, deserves to be smashed. And it most certainly does. Do we learn politics from the Incredible Hulk?

When one acts out of raw emotion, one cannot build, advance the cause of emancipation, foster the progress of a civilization. Hegelian and Marxist privileging of the magical power of negation is profoundly anti-democratic and anti-humanist.

As I’ve noted before: we all know what was inside Lincoln, disgusted by a slave auction in New Orleans, when he said, “By God, boys, let’s get away from this. If I ever get a chance to hit that thing, I’ll hit it hard.”

But movement pro-lifers follow Lincoln all the way: you “hit that thing,” not by pursuing revolution, but by pursuing the incrementalism of a constitutionally framed politics (the fact that revolution was thrust upon Lincoln belongs to the mystery of divine providence, as he himself so profoundly explicates in the Second Inaugural).

And you “hit that thing,” in a properly human way, by at least always voting according to the most viable strategy that advances the cause of the most powerless human life.

Within the pro-life movement, we have disagreements about the “personhood” strategy, as there have been disagreements before about the efficacy of civil disobedience. I have said before, and will say again, constitutionally framed incrementalism is the only strategy that befits the American citizen and this great republic. And it is the only strategy that can induce America to embrace the ethos of defending the most vulnerable.

So there are those to the “right” of the right-to-life state organizations who overlook the mediations that must necessarily come between the visceral abhorrence we all share for abortion and our actual conduct as rational actors.

Now there are those to our “left” who might also be overlooking necessary mediations. There is talk of a “new pro-life movement,” especially amongst NeverTrumpers who excoriate participants in the actual on-the-ground pro-life movement for daring to come to the prudential conclusion that a vote for Trump (no matter how much he has been a poster boy for the sexual revolution or has insulted deeply pro-life immigrant communities or has degraded women) is necessary given the pro-abortion fervor and radicalism of Hillary Clinton, who is the only other electable candidate. These "new pro-lifers" tend to discount the necessity and the urgency of changing laws and of engaging in the nitty-gritty of political process in general.

The promising thing about hearing people speak of a “new pro-life movement” is hearing from people whom we desperately want to join our ranks. We need and want new ideas and new fervor. The problem with talk of a “new pro-life movement” is that it tends to ignore the concrete opportunities the existing pro-life movement affords. To have an even more energetic pro-life movement is what we all want, but that requires joining forces, not bypassing the old in favor of the new.

And it requires recognizing important facts, such as the actual operation of our constitutional regime and how the development of the federal power has given absolutely inordinate weight to the decisions of the Supreme Court. More deeply, it requires internalizing, bone-deep, the lesson that Martin Luther King, Jr., kept insisting upon: law is a teacher.

And deeper than that--all effects, all consequences aside--the pro-life movement of tomorrow must continue to know this: LAW MUST NEVER SANCTION THE USE OF PRIVATE VIOLENCE AGAINST THE POWERLESS, even should that sanction never be exercised. There is nothing left of civilization in a society whose law refuses to protect the right to life of the innocent.

A pro-life movement energized by the new members we do in fact need and welcome cannot innovate at the cost of ignoring the practical wisdom gained by decades of patient democratic effort. Together we must build on the long, hard struggle to get incrementalist restrictions placed on abortion (parental involvement laws, informed consent laws, etc.), which have been crucial in reducing abortion numbers. One need only look at the important work of the excellent scholar Michael New, for example: http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/04/1250/.

Yes, we must work to reduce abortions, especially by meeting the needs of women and girls in crisis pregnancies, who are under pressure from dereliction of the fathers of their children or from chaotic family patterns or from economic distress or from sexual consumerism or from anti-natalist careerism or, in the case of pregnant girls, from their parents preferring the violence of abortion to derailing the bourgeois lifeplan. Movement pro-lifers have taken on the overwhelming preponderance of that burden. We’re happy to have help on that front.

But it is not either political action or transformation of the culture. It must always be both. 

We get a renewed republic only by building on what’s still whole in our rotting culture. Please get your friends to join their state’s right-to-life group. Please join Mass. Citizens for Life!

There has been a catastrophic breakdown in the generational transmission of an ethos of caring for the common good. As a gen Xer myself, I am eager to see my demographic cohort and the millennials provide energy that the pro-life movement needs. Unless the younger generations flood into civil society, bringing their immense gifts to bear in voluntary associations committed to the common good, we have no future.

An America true to the proposition of the equality of each human life begins with active participation in the concrete, existing, right-to-life movement. From there, we can innovate. We can only do this together.

NeverTrumpers and Basic Political Hygiene

[My October 21st "From the Chairman" blog for masscitizensforlife.org.]

“I can’t believe you would vote that way. I thought you were smarter than that.”

It’s very hard in politics not to assume that those with whom we disagree are acting in bad faith or are stupid. But with regard to this year’s presidential contest, there is one side that has indulged this human failing disproportionately: the NeverTrumpers.

To think that someone disagreeing with one is wrong only makes sense. If you didn’t think so, you presumably wouldn’t hold a contrary opinion.

But to think that someone disagreeing with one has no plausible reasons at all, to presume they are simply acting out of simple selfishness or caveman ignorance: that is something else altogether.

Democracy is a social form that can perdure only given a common recognition that we are all reasonable creatures, owed respect regardless of difference of opinion. Democracy requires an existential commitment to maintaining an indissoluble body politic, rooted in an even deeper commitment to honoring the rationality of each human being.

Within that indissoluble commitment, all kinds of friction must be accommodated.

Disagreement is normal. What is extraordinary is refusing to recognize the fundamental rationality of one’s opponent. Rationality is what makes a human a human after all. “I thought you were smarter than that” is not another opinion: it’s a common-body killing form of pharisaism, the indulgence and empowering of which is called totalitarianism.

This is bad political hygiene for any American. But for the Christian, the situation is even more serious. The failure of charity here is patent and astonishing.

We have been treated to the spectacle of some Catholic “pro-lifers” demonizing other pro-lifers, movement pro-lifers, because we have the temerity to see things differently. If any of these Catholic bloggers wish to question my pro-life authenticity, as they have questioned pro-life heroes who have put real skin in the game and have actual experience of the political and judicial battles that have been slogged through and that have had a profound impact in lowering the abortion rate and in shifting public opinion towards the pro-life side: well, bring it on.

There are devoted Trumpsters who bellow against those who don’t support their man. There are Hillary supporters who arrogantly mock anyone who would dare support Trump, even if in the most qualified terms.

But the tribe that has been most strident is that of the bourgeois Catholic NeverTrumpers. Their self-satisfied pontifications against those who disagree cut against the most basic requirements of Christian decorum because they lack any semblance of charity.

Barring some miracle (please, please, please, dear God), on election day, that sad and ridiculous man, that “sexual barbarian thug” in Maggie Gallagher’s apt description, will receive my very reluctant vote, because nothing matters more than the defense in law of the most powerless human life, and Hillary’s commitment to abortion is radical and zealous: she is a formal cooperator, at the highest level, in the gravest evil infecting this great nation, and in doing so she betrays the true good of women and girls in an even more profound way (!) than the Donald has.

For everyone, restoring the right to life of the innocent in law should be the criterion. Will everyone who sincerely has that as a criterion come to the same conclusion as I have come to? No. Of course not. Politics is not a precise science. And I will not question the good faith of those whom I think to be making a prudential mistake.

For those who do not recognize the unquittable moral lien the unborn place on each of our consciences: I just pray that you will see the truth.

My unhappy vote will mean only one thing: the preferential option for the powerless has an absolute claim on me.

If you disagree, that’s fine. It’s my job to make better arguments. What I won’t do is belittle you.

Roll, Jordan, Roll: Solidarity in This Election Season

[My October 7th "From the Chairman" blog for masscitizensforlife.org.]

Some Netflix discs languish for months because they’re movies I know I should watch, but which I also know will be unpleasant.

Well, I finally got around to viewing 12 Years a Slave. Like, say, Hotel Rwanda, it’s hard to stomach, but also necessary. We pro-lifers need to be submerged again and again in the history of suffering. In fact, no human can afford to skirt that history, but what constitutes the very essence of the pro-life subjectivity is the existential cry, “Never again.” The powerful may successfully continue to assail the innocent with the blessing of the law, but we will never acquiesce to it, though the struggle go 40, 50, 100 years…

12 Years a Slave presents the horrors endured by Solomon Northup, a free man from New York who was kidnapped in 1841 and sold into slavery in Louisiana. The most powerful scene in the movie, I think, shows Solomon finally realizing that though he differs from his fellow slaves in being enslaved “illegally,” the same screaming injustice is being done to all of them. In the scene, he has just helped to bury a man who dropped dead in the cotton fields, and the whole enslaved community gathers to sing a hymn, “Roll, Jordan, Roll.” At first, Solomon does not sing with the others, but eventually he does, and does so viscerally.

Part of what’s implied here is that Solomon’s cultured self has “gotten religion”: here melts away his aloofness from the Christianity that the other slaves have held on to (despite the grotesque parody of the faith presented by the masters). You can’t be in real solidarity with the poor without sharing their simple faith.

Enough faith seizes Solomon for him to glance up to heaven with the agony of the common situation. That’s where faith begins: in the universal cry for justice, in the tortured plea for mercy.

Solomon couldn’t get to that point of anguished faith without acknowledging that the pain of those around him is in fact his pain, and his pain is the pain of those around him.

Like Simon of Cyrene, Solomon has been dragged into hell, and the initial thought of both men had been “I’m innocent, an innocent bystander. I’m not like this man, these others. I don’t belong here.”

Well. There is no “free man among the dead.” When Jesus harrows hell, He does so in His total identification with us sinners. (That is why the facile, triumphalist, and indeed modernist—because non-solidaristic—misunderstanding of Christ’s descent into hell will always strike me as abhorrent, a betrayal of the Gospel, if I may fly my Balthasarian and Ratzingerian flag for a moment.)

The phrase from the hymn that gets repeated is, “My soul arise in heaven, Lord,/for the year when Jordan roll.” There’s ambiguity in the original hymn as well as in the altered version heard here, but I think what’s going on is a plea that the waters of baptism become a new flood to sweep away our inhumanity and lift the victims up to heaven.

Solomon learns that he is not above his suffering brothers and sisters. And that is what we must always remember: looking upon sinners and victims, we’re looking at ourselves—in absolute need of love and mercy.

We are also the unborn. In the womb of this world, there is not one of us who is master of our lives, who is not utterly dependent on the goodness of others and of God. There is not one of us whose present life is not merely prelude to an abundance of life that can be received only in the kingdom of merciful love.