A Nation for the Nations: On Soteriological Cosmopolitanism

[This was written in response to a salutary provocation by a Facebook friend in the course of a discussion on the use of the word “nationalism” in political discourse. My friend argued that the word accurately describes the political theology of the Old Covenant, especially given that a “quasi-isolationism,” my friend claimed, was required of Israel by God. I think nationalism an irredeemable word for political discourse. I think it inherently dangerous, inextricable from a catastrophic history of ideological terror. Inextricable from National Socialism. Inextricable from the pretensions of the modern nation-state to fill the horizon of human possibility. Inextricable from secularism and militarism and statism. Inextricable from the contraction and degradation of the human spirit into the savageries of tribalism.]

“Isolationism” was the pharisaical misinterpretation of God’s purposes and promises for Israel. Every action of God in history has aimed at one thing: the salvation of the entire human race.

This goes, above all, for the mystery of election.

Abraham, the Hebrews, the Jews: Israel was chosen out of the world so as to draw the entire world towards the true God.

There was to be no fortress. There was to be the purity of depending on God alone, of living by radical faith, and living that out visibly and temporally in a polity unique among the nations. Certainly that meant no commerce with the false gods of the nations. But that was for the universalization of the true religion.

Instead, as Israel is the epitome of humanity, the chosen people kept falling from the radical demands of faith. We keep doing that as humans, and certainly Christians do.

The prophets had to decry over and over again presumption based on election, as well as relapse into depending on worldly calculation, including the exploitation of the powerless internally and great-powers calculations externally—the idolatry of our will to power.

The Kingdom of Israel, the whole Davidic covenant, was to have served the Christic mystery as an instrument to bring about the convergence of spiritual and temporal order in a universal city. That service had to retreat into the spiritual register alone because humanity just cannot get this right without the sacramental grace of Christ.

And even with that grace, we seem incapable as a Christian community of living up to the demands of standing by faith and serving as pure instruments of saving universality. We fail over and over again to live out love radically enough to attract the world. Those who still take the true religion seriously tend to make the pharisaical mistake of thinking that our election is for our benefit, when it is, in fact, for everyone else's.

Catholicism is just what Israel has always been about: a soteriological cosmopolitanism. Any backing away from this dynamism entails not only a profound, sub-Abrahamic retrogression into the secularism of worldly calculation--it is profoundly anti-catholic.

A Note on Marriage and Pharisaism

Jesus addresses Christians when we hear His words at Mass today: "They [the scribes and the pharisees] tie up heavy burdens hard to carry and lay them on people's shoulders, but they will not lift a finger to move them."

I think of those of us who take the defense of marriage in dead earnest, who do so above all because the welfare of children is at stake in it, which the preferential option for the powerless sets as the first concern for social justice.

IF we are serious about marriage as followers of Jesus (merciful hammer of pharisees), we would never dare to impose rules on others self-righteously (as if looking down on poor sinners that we somehow aren't!) The defense of love cannot be done from the meanness or pusillanimity of the censorious heart. It must be done from a burning, personal, descending, incarnational love for that single individual we address.

It is not optional for the Christian to empathize with those who do not enjoy the comfortable home lives we might have. If we have been so blessed, then all the more should our hearts be filled with mercy--real mercy, active mercy--for those who bear most painful crosses.

Most crucially, before we would think of obscenely spouting rules at wounded people, WE would accompany them through their dark valley. WE would lovingly provide a marriage-supporting culture in particular cases.

Pharisaism is a profound spiritual disorder, what Voegelin would call a pneumopathology. A pharisaical "defense" of marriage is the smoke of Satan. May the good Father break to pieces the hardness of our hearts.

A Definition of Culture: The Spirit of a Social Body Reproducing Itself

So, I love my Facebook friends. Yesterday I shared an article from The Weekly Standard on being cultured, and received in return a wonderful conversation.

One friend asked for a definition of culture. Questions drive all expansion of the mind. That particular question is so crucial, and yet so often unasked. In Catholic circles, for instance, there is much talk about the new evangelization, yet little clear analysis of what culture is (though culture is one of the central arenas for evangelization). Or, on the right, we have a tendency to talk about baleful influences in "the culture." But unanalyzed concepts are Trojan horses for ideology.

Another Facebook friend asked that I re-post the answer that I proposed as a starting-point. Now I'm hoping for further discussion. So much depends on understanding this word. For myself, I'm going to turn to Terry Eagleton (a brilliant critic, of the left) and his book The Idea of Culture as a next step in grappling with this question.

This is my initial proposal for a definition of culture, slightly modified:

I like what Saint John Paul says at the beginning of Fides et ratio: "Moreover, a cursory glance at ancient history shows clearly how in different parts of the world, with their different cultures, there arise at the same time the fundamental questions which pervade human life: Who am I? Where have I come from and where am I going? Why is there evil? What is there after this life? These are the questions which we find in the sacred writings of Israel, as also in the Veda and the Avesta; we find them in the writings of Confucius and Lao-Tze, and in the preaching of Tirthankara and Buddha; they appear in the poetry of Homer and in the tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles, as they do in the philosophical writings of Plato and Aristotle. They are questions which have their common source in the quest for meaning which has always compelled the human heart. In fact, the answer given to these questions decides the direction which people seek to give to their lives."

Culture is a society's response to the basic existential questions as embedded in a set of practices and institutions and narratives meant to raise (cultivate) the next generation (and to orient every member of the society) according to that common worldview: the means of reproduction of a worldview and of a way of being-in-the-world.

Each person has a "spirit," which is our knowing and our loving (and, unfortunately, our hating). A society is a group of persons with a shared "spirit": a shared way of knowing and loving and (too often) hating. Culture, then, is the operation of the spirit of a people, of a society, upon itself as a social body extending through time, an operation to develop minds and hearts and to regulate bodies.

When THE Spirit, the Holy Spirit, moves an individual or a social spirit, then we have progress in and towards the true, the good, and the beautiful.

Each individual spirit, and communal spirit, grows by asking questions and by loving. To evangelize a culture is to allow one's own spirit to serve as an instrument by which the Holy Spirit moves a culture towards the true, the good, and the beautiful.

That said, "to be cultured" is to be taken up into the authentic elements of a culture (the elements containing the dynamic motion of the Holy Spirit upwards into the true, the good, and the beautiful) constituting the heights of a culture..."high culture," culture at its most self-transcendent.

Of course, this means the worship of God above all, but worship must follow God into all of His effects in nature and in culture. The latter includes those miracles of divine and human spirit that are the masterpieces of high art.

Do Good, for God is God: Our Exceptionless Duty to Care for Our Neighbor

“Do good, for God is God”: this is how the great Spanish playwright, Calderón de la Barca, sums up the drama of human existence in his important play of 1648, “The Great Theater of the World.”

Whether one goes to heaven or hell has everything to do with how one treats the beggar in the play. And in this, Calderón distills much of the lesson from yesterday’s Mass readings.

As we meditate further on these readings, I would particularly like us to think about what they entail in terms of the principles that must guide our common deliberation, as American Christians, about immigrants and refugees. I have staked out a particular position on these matters in other places. Here I want to focus on the principles, in the hope of fostering consensus.

In the first Mass reading from Leviticus, we have Moses presenting the Law under the overarching command and purpose: “Be holy, for I, the LORD, your God, am holy” (Lv 19:2).

Amongst the nations, the chosen nation of Israel is to live differently, so as to draw all people to the worship of the one true God. For example: “The wages of a hired servant shall not remain with you all night until the morning. You shall not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind, but you shall fear your God: I am the LORD” (19:13).

Later in the chapter we are told: “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God” (19:33-34).

These are still our laws as Christians. And the premise is nothing less than the metaphysical fact that God is God. From that fact alone, we must do good.

The coming of the Son of God in the flesh only intensifies the imperative to do good (and this doing good is, above all, a question of social morality; sexual ethics, say, must itself be understood in terms of social morality, and should never be the special object of a neurotic fixation). In the great Last Judgment scene of Matthew 25, it is not only that we must do good because God is God and God is good. We must do good because we love Jesus and owe Him everything. In Jesus, the goodness of God has gone all the way into total identification with each human being, especially the poorest and most powerless.

It is a fearsome thing to fail to see Jesus in our neighbor, that is, anyone whom God brings near by placing him or her in our path in some way (including a stranger from a far country who has come here). Our obligations to our neighbor must not be explained away by a perverse use of natural law, as if nature could ever trump grace. Jesus is very clear, and it should make all of us tremble: “‘Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food; I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, a stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison, and you did not care for me.’ Then they will answer and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison, and not minister to your needs?’ He will answer them, ‘Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me’” (25:41-45).

There is such a thing as an “order of charity,” but how we understand that must be measured by the words of Jesus. We must not measure the words of Jesus by our rationalizations. HE is the Judge; we are the judged. Not the other way around.

We do owe special obligations to those entrusted to our care, but “the neighbor,” the one who has been brought close (and that can include enemies), is also entrusted to our care. Jesus is very clear.

I am renewing my Marian consecration right now, and one of the difficult points about such consecration is surrendering the ability to direct one’s spiritual offerings any way one wants, say, for the sake of one’s loved ones—even for the sake of one’s own children! One is supposed to surrender all merits into Mary’s hands, so that she may see that they are applied where they are most needed. The assumption here is that there is an objective order of need, which of course we are not able to survey. There really is a providential plan in which our sufferings and offerings are important, which we are not able to survey.

Fetishizing the “order of charity” in a way that makes our obligations in the drama of salvation surveyable by us is a mistake. It is crypto-secularism.

Yes, we must provide for our children first. And, yes, the poor and the powerless in our country have a special claim on our charity. And, yes, how many immigrants and refugees we can take care of is a reasonable question. But for the wealthiest nation on earth, the answer is going to be a whole lot more than zero. And the immigrants who have already built lives here… Well, the Leviticus passage above is very clear.

We can’t wait until we’ve stockpiled enough to care for our children for the rest of their lives, or until we’ve eradicated poverty in this country, before we care for others, “strangers,” God has, in His providence, made our neighbors. We must take care of all the needy who are ours to take care of: family, fellow-citizen, and stranger. God the Father is sovereign over history; our convenient understandings of natural law are not.

At the beginning of the second part of his first encyclical, Deus Caritas est, Pope Benedict makes clear that charity in action necessarily flows from charity in the soul: “The Spirit is also the energy which transforms the heart of the ecclesial community, so that it becomes a witness before the world to the love of the Father, Who wishes to make humanity a single family in His Son. The entire activity of the Church is an expression of a love that seeks the integral good of man: it seeks his evangelization through Word and Sacrament, an undertaking that is often heroic in the way it is acted out in history; and it seeks to promote man in the various arenas of life and human activity. Love is therefore the service that the Church carries out in order to attend constantly to man’s sufferings and his needs, including material needs.”

That is the authentic Christian social vision: Trinitarian, integral (spiritual and material), and universalizing.  

This mission is the whole point of being Christian, which is why Jesus presents the Last Judgment as a test of our earnestness in honoring the consubstantial solidarity of our shared humanity, especially as found in the powerless—as radicalized by the Incarnation: what we do to the least of our neighbors, we do to Him. We must always do good, for God is holy, that is, good without limit, good even to uniting Himself in love to every single needy one of us. 

Our Peace in His Will: On T. S. Eliot's “Ash-Wednesday”

The image is by William Blake, who spent the last years of his life preparing illustrations for Dante's "Divine Comedy." This is plate 91, depicting Beatrice atop the merkabah chariot representing the Church, which is pulled by the gryphon symbolizing Christ (from "Purgatorio," Canto 30, lines 60-146).

One of Eliot’s greatest poems provides an appropriate way to savor the strange beauty of this day. His “Ash-Wednesday” (1930) is about the purgation of exile that, we hope against hope, precedes a new life (vita nuova).

It describes, in six sections, the journey from the desert of suicidal despair into a tentative, and simultaneous, embrace of the world, on the one hand, and of faith in God, on the other. A fragile turning again to life.

That’s what the Lenten discipline is supposed to work in us: a detachment from the wonderful things of this world to find those things again in God. For these wonders are obscured by our grasping and our pretense. Only when the veil of self is ripped away can the divine glory in the world finally shine out.

I.

The poem opens:

“Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn

Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope

I no longer strive to strive towards such things

(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)

Why should I mourn

The vanished power of the usual reign?”

Who had sailed high, has been broken. This has a double value: on the one hand, it is good to be humbled, to be withdrawn from the cutting games of the world, to be forced to be quiet before God (“Teach us to care and not to care/Teach us to sit still”); on the other hand, the risk is losing all taste for life, losing all hope of a turning of the self into something better and a turning of the world into something worth operating in.

II.

The second section of the poem addresses the poet’s Beatrice, without whom the fallen man cannot rise again.

For a man, the glorious unveiling of the world must always somehow involve a woman. The masculine death and desert is most intense when marked by the privation of the feminine. Following Dante, Eliot shows that the way into new life, for a man, is through the inamorata, who mediates Our Lady’s presence, who brings heaven to earth.

The central polarity of the world, that of man and woman, is the source of every newness.

The second section opens:

“Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree

In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety

On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained

In the hollow round of my skull. And God said

Shall these bones live? Shall these

Bones live? And that which had been contained

In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:

Because of the goodness of this Lady

And because of her loveliness, and because

She honours the Virgin in meditation,

We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled

Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love

To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.”

If there is an apparition of woman in the slaughter, there is hope, even in resignation. 

III.

The third section emphatically brings Dante’s Purgatorio into play, as the poetic persona climbs out of the terrors of a life lived in the night. The dark night is this rising out of the world’s night.

“At the first turning of the third stair

Was a slotted window bellied like the fig’s fruit

And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene

The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green

Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.

Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,

Lilac and brown hair…”

This is the “summit of the staircase” (which was at one point, in Dante’s Italian, the title of this section), a brilliant and daring synthesis of Marian purity and full-on sensuality, under the genius of the beloved. This is where heaven touches earth, and getting this synthesis right is essential to authentic being-in-the-world, certainly for followers of the Word made flesh.

IV.

The fourth section shows us something like the top of the Mount of Purgatory withthe earthly paradise and the revelation of Beatrice in the divine pageant, who calls Dante to account for his faithlessness in love.

“Who walked between the violet and the violet

Who walked between

The various ranks of varied green

Going in white and blue, in Mary’s colour,

Talking of trivial things

In ignorance and in knowledge of eternal dolour

Who moved among the others as they walked,

Who then made strong the fountains and made fresh the springs”

Violet is the penitential color, of course, and that is being combined here with the green of hope and the colors of Mary. The Beatrice-figure, the beloved, contains the new age, but the night does not end for the poet-pilgrim of “Ash-Wednesday.” All the lady’s glory is right there, the glory of a promised world of love lived out in time and in eternity, but the poet must return to the night alone, though trailing some wisps of hope:

“The silent sister veiled in white and blue

Between the yews, behind the garden god,

Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke no word

But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down

Redeem the time, redeem the dream

The token of the word unheard, unspoken

Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew

And after this our exile”

The revelation of the beloved does not end the purgation, but perhaps the consummation comes. That last line is a quotation from the Salve Regina, so it’s both a plea and a hope.

V.

The poet-pilgrim is thrust back into the darkness of the world, but something is different this time: now he is the commissioned agent of a love he does not fully understand, a love present but out of his reach, that changes everything. An obscure light works in him. And he is no longer simply suffering his own purgation; his darkness now is solidary union with the eternal dolour of the world. He seeks that the Word become flesh. His heart obliquely yearns for the salvation of the world. He is being united to the One Who cries the Good Friday lamentation, Who bears the Atlas-burden of every sin, out of burning love.

The poet is being united to Jesus, through the beloved mediatrix of Mary:

“Where shall the word be found, where will the word

Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence

Not on the sea or on the islands, not

On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,

For those who walk in darkness

Both in the day time and in the night time

The right time and the right place are not here

No place of grace for those who avoid the face

No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice

Will the veiled sister pray for

Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,

Those who are torn on the horn between season and season, time and time, between

Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait

In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray

For children at the gate

Who will not go away and cannot pray:

Pray for those who chose and oppose

                        O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Will the veiled sister between the slender

Yew trees pray for those who offend her

And are terrified and cannot surrender

And affirm before the world and deny between the rocks

In the last desert between the last blue rocks

The desert in the garden the garden in the desert

Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed.

                        O my people.”

The poet begins to love. He fears that his beloved will not continue to love him (and the world with him) because of his faithlessness, our faithlessness. His desire is simultaneously for the intensity of personal love and for the universalization of love: for romance and solidarity. The poet knows how we fail to love, and he pleads for himself and for the world to be loved anyway.

The withered apple-seed, of course, refers to the bitterness of our entire race’s primal choice to reject the disciplines of love.

[A side observation: might Leonard Cohen have gotten one of his most affecting lines, in “Bird on a Wire,” from Eliot’s “torn on the horn”?]

VI.

The final section begins with an important modulation:

“Although I do not hope to turn again

Although I do not hope

Although I do not hope to turn”

The journey from “because” to “although” is the journey through the desert. The exile isn’t over, but that day is coming. “Although” is a definitive pivot towards hope, an adversative to rein in the negative.

“Wavering between the profit and the loss

In this brief transit where the dreams cross

The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying

(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things

From the wide window towards the granite shore

The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying

Unbroken wings”

I think those last few lines some of the most beautiful in all of poetry. For those of you who know and love Cape Ann, it would be edifying to learn that Eliot is drawing on childhood memories of the family vacation house in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

The lines recall the window scene from the third section and combined with “bellied like the fig’s fruit” recalls Titania from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “When we have laughed to see the sails conceive/And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind…”

Less directly sensual than in third section, the words themselves are so exquisite, we feel the sensuality, the joy of embodied life, even more forcefully.

The poem closes by invoking both the beloved Beatrice-figure, as well as Mary, that they mediate the Spirit of God and His good will:

“Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,

Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still

Even among these rocks,

Our peace in His will

And even among these rocks

Sister, mother

And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,

Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.”

Before ending with lines from the Psalms and from the Anima Christi, Eliot quotes Dante: “our peace in His will” is a translation of a line from the Paradiso, “la sua è volontate nostra pace.”

And that is the point of Ash Wednesday and of Lent, of our communal journey through the desert: to find our peace in the Father’s plan of loving goodness. To love in the dark.

The Sensuality of the World to Come: On Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony

Anton Bruckner is the greatest composer completely unknown to most people. He is my favorite symphonist, and I am sure that he would enrich any person’s life.

The great Benjamin Zander and his Boston Philharmonic performed Bruckner’s “unfinished” Ninth Symphony last night at Jordan Hall. 

Late nineteenth-century Austrian, sui generis, very Catholic, pious and mystical in the decadent and delightful world of fin-de-siècle Vienna, that wondrous ferment of Ringstrasse and Jugendstil, of Mahler and Klimt and Freud: Bruckner stood outside these exciting currents because of his Catholic piety, but he was at least as advanced in his art as any of the other great ones operating in Vienna at this time. Indeed, maybe it is only now that we are beginning to catch up with him…

Bruckner is not commonly programmed, but Zander said that his sense of things is that we are on the cusp of a Bruckner era, that his time has come. Please God that this be so. Our culture needs this music. As Zander puts it: 

“This music has an extraordinary effect on the mind. [Everyone came out of that rehearsal] radiant, calm, and full of love. There are very few things you can do to create that nowadays. …It makes you feel very healthy. It gives you access to a state of mind quite outside that of normal life that is especially needed in these anxious times.”

The maestro gives lectures on the music he is about to conduct, and those are must-attend events. (They will be performing Mahler’s Second in April. I will be there, and so should you!)

The Philharmonic’s performance of the Ninth was excellent. Zander understands the articulations of this complex and very long-arced music, and his orchestra vigorously and precisely persevered to conjure up the glory.

The final movement was left unfinished by Bruckner at his death in 1896. His last musical testament is the Adagio, which provides a fitting conclusion for his Ninth and a fitting valedictory to his life. 

The whole symphony bears the dedication: “An den lieben Gott” (To the beloved God). All of his music, even this piece so full of breathtaking dissonance, is focused on God.

I am providing a link to the Scherzo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10v39v9q0x8. My goal is to entice you to actually listen, and then to get hooked. Indeed, it was the Scherzo of the Ninth that first caused me to fall under Bruckner’s spell. The scherzos of his symphonies are absolutely unique in the symphonic literature, an epitome of his style. They are the most easily approached of the movements. They are the shortest, so their compositional logic isn’t stretched over, say, twenty-plus minutes, requiring repeated listenings to begin to assimilate. 

I have no idea whether this hunch of mine is musicologically supportable, but let me offer what I think to be a hermeneutic key for the scherzos. When I first heard Bruckner’s Mass No. 3 in F minor, I was roused by what seemed to me to be the Bruckner-scherzo effect at the point in the Creed where the Resurrection of Jesus is confessed (“et resurrexit”), as well as at the closing when we profess faith in the general resurrection (“et expecto resurrectionem”). So, I take the driving brass of the scherzos to be a resurrection-motif. That’s my theory, anyway. 

Now, the Scherzo of the Ninth is the most anguished he wrote, an alternation of heavy menace and light dance. Musically, again typically, it is well in advance of his time. A reviewer has noted how the rhythmic sensibility blossoms in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. I hear, though more complex in Bruckner, Holst’s “Mars” from The Planets, a work twenty years in the future and written during the Great War.

Despite its minatory aura, I still think this Scherzo is about the resurrection and the coming Kingdom, which is what Bruckner’s music is always about. Piety, but without sentimentality or shortcuts or measuring to our measure. Objective piety. Being measured. And that is exactly what we need. 

This is God-focused music, expressionism from above. Here is an inimitable musical personality ecstatically offering his subjectivity as an instrument of objectivity. And objectivity, God, Love, means the inhabiting of all the immense tensions and contradictions (the dissonances) of time so that the resurrected life may break through. The menace of this Scherzo is that of the pain of the world, but it is even more the menace that the coming-on of God’s love in the flesh poses to the powers of the world. This is the apocalypse of love. This is profound affirmation of the triumph of love without any evasion of the soul-breaking dissonances of finitude and fallenness, a chromatic traversal through every single difficult moment of history by a love that keeps pressing down from on high in order to raise up.

We hear, indeed we see, the mountains of heaven rising in great steps from the subterranean shriek. It is visceral music. You feel your whole heavy body and your whole heavy spirit beginning to expand in a force inexorable in its love and its perseverance, finding and filling every dark space in us, energizing us with the light massiveness of heaven’s highlands.

That is what Bruckner can do for you.

The American Soul is without Mercy

Utterly without mercy.

On the right, on the left, in between. Whichever wrongdoing a particular faction gets most worked up about, the wrongdoer, and anyone supposedly in some way allied with the wrongdoer, will be savaged. Without balance. Without reasonableness. Without mercy.

Everyone one of us, without exception, must examine our consciences on this.

Whatever this American disease is, it isn’t Christianity. It is regression to a world untouched by the core Christian message of reconciliation.

Everybody wants to explain away what was proclaimed at Mass last Sunday: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil. When someone strikes you on your right cheek, turn the other one as well. If anyone wants to go to law with you over your tunic, hand over your cloak as well. Should anyone press you into service for one mile, go for two miles” (Matthew 5:38-41).

(I know it’s hard for me live this. I have tried, but I haven’t always succeeded. I need the grace of the slaughtered Lamb to grow in me.)

This passage should sting. It is not about geopolitical pacifism, but it is explicitly and unambiguously about interpersonal pacifism. THIS IS CHRISTIANITY, the very heart of the matter: love thy enemy.

I literally saw a column recently, from the right, claiming that Jesus Himself didn’t turn the other cheek! This betrays a profound misunderstanding of the Passion, which is the embodied gloss, as it were, on these verses—the demonstration of Christ’s total earnestness about these words. The whole of the Sermon on the Mount is staked on what Jesus knows He will do, out of love for the Father and for us, in not offering resistance to the Evil One and to all of us evil ones who crucify Him.

Why did this commentator stray into such radical confusion? To defend the paltry right to thunder in the culture wars and to smugly judge our neighbor. Pharisaizing the anti-pharisaical Sermon on the Mount—an astonishing act of ideological co-optation!

But this is not a disease confined to the right. Not by a long shot. We see the unedifying spectacle of defamatory denunciations against anyone whose thoughts or words might stray too much towards an opposing political stance. No empathy, no imaginative effort to see things from the other side, no reserve gained from epistemic humility. Just smug judgment. Christian rises up against Christian, feeling righteous about raising the rhetorical rock and bringing it down with a lust for destruction. It is a nauseating spectacle. See how they love one another.

It is all anti-Christ and the smoke of Satan.

Of course, Jesus is NOT saying that the abused should not resist the abuser. And He is certainly not telling us to stand by while SOMEONE ELSE gets abused or treated unjustly. It is the responsibility of the Christian community to defend the victim, every single time, with utmost urgency. The victim of sexual abuse or domestic abuse. The refugee. The immiserated. And, of course, the most defenseless victim of all: the baby in the womb. The preferential option must always be for the victim first. Every single time. Indeed, it is no mercy to victimizers to allow them to continue perpetrating evil upon another.

But there is such a thing as ius in bello [what is right in the conduct of a war]: we must fight the battles we must fight, the battles to defend the powerless, in such a way that we remember that the ultimate goal, beyond the supreme urgency of saving the victims, is to save the victimizers if we can.

Which is all to say, Christ’s injunction is no shield for abuse and violence. No, what Jesus is telling each of US, His disciples who are freely following Him around, at the very least, is to eat the slights to our dignity without pursuing self-justification and to care for the salvation of my enemy more than the preservation of MY property or MY well-being. The cycle of social retribution can only be broken when a Christian, in the strength of the suffering Christ, absorbs the malice.

This command of our Lord must also be seen to entail an infinite patience and gentleness in dialogue and in our every single interaction with our fellow suffering human being, as well as an infinite care not to strike back in anger. Most obviously, the Christian certainly cannot tear down someone else’s reputation and legacy.

The spirit behind our partisan mercilessness is the spirit of faction, of division, of contention. That is what last Sunday’s second reading is all about:

“Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy that person; for the temple of God, which you are, is holy” (I Corinthians 3:16-17).

The “you” here is second person plural. This whole chapter of First Corinthians is focused on the problem of partisanship in the life of the Church. When Saint Paul speaks of destroying God’s temple, he is talking about backbiting and dissension and factionalism: he is talking about destroying the measureless treasure of Christian communion out of party loyalty.

The jouissance, the strange visceral satisfaction, of playing gotcha is real, I’ll grant. But it is also pathetic and sad.

Instead of this mean and contracted being-in-the-world, the good Father offers us, well, everything, in history and in eternity, up to the superabundance of a knowing and a loving without limit and without end:

“So let no one boast in men, for all things are yours: Paul or Apollos or Cephas, or the world or life or death, or the present or the future—all things are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s” (I Cor 3:21-23).

Christianity means preemptive, unilateral, and asymmetrical love. Therefore, the Christian is utterly exposed, with an open heart that will be struck, again and again. We can continue to survive having our hearts broken, because we belong to Jesus and Jesus belongs to His Father. And our good Father has marked every single thing with the sign of love, the Cross of His Son. We open our arms and our hearts, and that sign of love is simply our cruciform passion for the sake of the world. And all things will be drawn to a mercy and a love that absorbs without counting the cost. 

The Cure for Futility

A Platonically inclined thinker like Saint Gregory of Nyssa is going to find a lot to nod at in the Book of Ecclesiastes, which we are now praying through during matins. 

But as one of the great Christian thinkers, Gregory will also know what to do with the fact of the historical diremption between the fullness of divine life and the vanity of worldly existence. For him, the dramatic resolution of the tragic dualism comes from our participation in Jesus Christ's self-sacrificial love, as we see in today's second matins reading.

This participation involves looking with love upon the face of Jesus through the eyes of faith. Faith means living by a different rationality than that of fallen man (this is something of a coda to my post of yesterday). Faith makes the faithful servant look like a fool to the sophisticated:

"People are often considered blind and useless when they make the supreme Good their aim and give themselves up to the contemplation of God, but Paul made a boast of this and proclaimed himself a fool for Christ's sake."

But the point is not some pernicious otherworldliness, some flight from the world. No, the point of looking up is to gain the strength to bear up below, as we carry out the mission of universal love:

"And so, without board or lodging, he traveled from place to place, destitute, naked, exhausted by hunger and thirst. When men saw him in captivity, flogged, shipwrecked, led about in chains, they could scarcely help thinking him a pitiable sight."

True greatness comes from the invisible, lives off of the invisible, and will always substantially remain within the invisibility of infinite wisdom and love. But invisibility wants only one thing: to be visible. As Balthasar says, "The end of all the ways of God is the flesh." So the dramatic dualism between Spirit and history must be bridged in flesh animated by a wisdom and love always transcending the self.

The crossing of the visible and the invisible happens in the tortured flesh of the servant of God. In Christ, the saint has shot his or her very person like a grappling hook into heaven and by an ever-increasing upward fervor strains to lift the whole world to God:

"Nevertheless, even while he suffered all this at the hands of men, he always looked toward the One Who is his head and he asked: 'What can separate us from the love of Christ, which is in Jesus? Can affliction or distress? Can persecution, hunger, nakedness, danger, or death?' In other words, 'What can force me to take my eyes from Him Who is my head and to turn them toward things that are contemptible?'"

By loving Jesus above all things, all things are saved and filled with the very fullness of God.

Faith as the Future Present of the Flesh of God

“By faith we understand that the worlds were created by the uttering of God, so that what is seen has not come into existence from the visible” (Hebrews 11:3).

Faith gives us eyes to see the phenomena of this world as welling up from invisible, and personal, depths—from depths of infinite love and wisdom. If we have these eyes of faith, our souls can expand into the greatness of loving without counting the cost, of living without meanly clinging to possessions or meanly reducing relationships to possessions. 

If we have the eyes of faith, we can see that matter matters because of wisdom and love. We can see time and flesh as iconic of endless glory.

The lectionary did something interesting yesterday. After Christmastide, the first daily Mass readings (Year I) came from the Letter to the Hebrews, except for the last couple of weeks, which have been drawn from Genesis 1-11. But yesterday, that material from Genesis is bookended with a final return of Hebrews (11:1-7), which places the archetypal history, from creation and Adam to Noah, under the sign of faith.

This is significant. Hebrews is about Jesus as the fulfillment of all the promises and types of every previous covenant between God and man, as well as about the proper response to God the Father’s providing in Christ all “the good things that have come.” That response is faith, faith in the goodness of God. What the lectionary shows us is that the archetypal history leading up to Abraham in Genesis 12 was always already about faith.

Faith is always faith in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, the total synthesis of the visible and the invisible, the integration of creation within the Creator, the divine personality of the analogy of being.

Which is to say, not only is God the Son present at the beginning of all things, but in some mysterious way, God the Son as Jesus is present. Indeed, that is what we profess in the Creed: “I believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, …born of the Father before all ages, …through Him all things were made.”

Faith telescopes past, present, and future within the intensity of eternity. The first reading for yesterday’s Mass includes again the opening of Hebrews 11, one of the greatest statements in Scripture: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Pope Benedict meditates on this verse in Spe salvi:

“Faith is not merely a personal reaching out towards things to come that are still totally absent: it gives us something. It gives us even now something of the reality we are waiting for, and this present reality constitutes for us a ‘proof’ of the things that are still unseen. Faith draws the future into the present, so that it is no longer simply a ‘not yet.’ The fact that this future exists changes the present; the present is touched by the future reality, and thus the things of the future spill over into those of the present and those of the present into those of the future.”

Faith is faith in Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, forever.

Faith and hope, when authentic, are Christological. There are distinctions to be made, to be sure, between natural faith and hope and supernatural faith and hope (having to do with the presence or not of sanctifying grace in a soul), but as an existential (as opposed to habitual) matter (the former being the Augustinian, and the latter the Thomistic, approach to understanding the multifaceted reality of faith), Christological faith and hope are present whenever one lives in the world according to the fact of there being a good God, Who is faithful: “Without faith it is impossible to please God, for it is necessary for whoever would approach God to believe that He exists and that He rewards the ones seeking Him” (11:6). This is said of Enoch, and the reading also speaks of Abel and Noah as acting beyond the worldly calculus because of faith.

Having faith and hope in the goodness of God the Father, Whose every promise of good is realized in Jesus Christ, means that the visible and the invisible cannot be separated. Faith and hope depend on recognizing that the invisible keeps coming on into the visible. But this pressing into flesh, this ongoing incarnation of divine love, happens only through the crossing of heaven and earth in the torture that is the sacrifice of self. Only in the Cross are all things restored.

This is, I think, what Jesus is speaking about in yesterday’s strange Gospel saying: “Elijah having come first indeed restores (apokathistanei) everything” (Mark 9:12).

Restores everything? Surely it does not look as if John the Baptist managed that!

Jesus points out the paradox of what He has just said: “How then is it written concerning the Son of Man, that He must suffer many things and be rejected?”

How indeed are restoration and the Cross compatible?

“But I say to you that indeed Elijah has come, and they did to him whatever they desired, just as it has been written concerning him” (v. 13).

The Kingdom of love, the repatriation of all things into the limitless goodness of God, comes through the suffering of the faithful servants of the Lord, and it comes no other way. And to stand in the great trial and high ordeal, which love continues to impose on us, we must see something the world does not see: we must see the glory of God’s love enveloping all things in the Eucharistic cloud of Christ’s endless solidarity with the pain of the world.

Judge Gorsuch and the Supremacy of Pro-Life Principles

[My February 16th "From the Chairman" blog for masscitizensforlife.org.]

We could not ask for a better nominee for the Supreme Court than Neil Gorsuch. His commitment to pro-life principles is profound and thorough, and his moral clarity benefits from the trenchant analytical power of an excellent jurist and philosopher.

I am basing this judgment on Gorsuch’s book, The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia. I plan on devoting future posts to this exceptional book, especially as the fight against assisted suicide is still a pressing matter for Massachusetts.

At root, the arguments for or against euthanasia and abortion are isomorphic. That is why both issues belong to the “single issue” that provides the focal point of the pro-life political coalition, for though we may disagree on all kinds of policies (tax, immigration, health care, etc.), we agree that NO social progress can be purchased at the cost of relegating the cause of the legal protection of the most powerless human life to a secondary position. That would be the most direct violation of the preferential for the poor, which is the fundamental principle of social justice.

Therefore, the pro-life movement, as a political movement, is committed to one thing above all: the restoration of the right to life of the innocent in law.

The isomorphism between abortion and euthanasia is what allows Gorsuch to place before the whole world his pro-life commitment without disqualifying himself for a seat on the Supreme Court despite the Democratic Party’s litmus test against any anti-abortion jurist.

No litmus test has yet been formulated by that Party with regard to assisted suicide, so Gorsuch need not make a secret of his intensive reflections on the issue. But in sharing with us those reflections, he has told us everything we need to know about his existential and philosophical commitment to precisely the principles the pro-life movement is built around.

Gorsuch lays out these basic commitments in chapter 9, “An Argument against Legalization [of assisted suicide/euthanasia]”: “In this chapter, I seek to lay the groundwork for…an argument for retaining existing law on the basis that human life is fundamentally and inherently valuable, and that the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong. My argument, based on secular moral theory, is consistent with common law and long-standing medical ethics.”

He goes on to note that he will not be making an argument about the morality of capital punishment or war. Indeed, in a footnote, he says the same about abortion: “Nor do I seek here to engage the abortion debate. Abortion would be ruled out by the inviolability-of-life principle I intend to set forth if, but only if, a fetus is considered a human life. The Supreme Court in Roe, however, unequivocally held that a fetus is not a ‘person’ for purposes of constitutional law.”

That may dismay you, but of course, whether or not a fetus is a human life is not a function of positive law. It is a matter of basic science. And, again, what is this “inviolability-of-life principle” but the principle the pro-life movement is built upon?

He restates it right away: “I seek only to explain and defend an exceptionless moral norm against the intentional taking of human life by private persons. I begin by seeking to suggest that there are certain irreducible and non-instrumental human goods (and evils); I then proceed to argue that there is a moral imperative not to do intentional harm to such goods, and that such a rule would prohibit assisted suicide and euthanasia.”

What follows is a lovely (and properly philosophical) rendition of the brilliant legal and moral philosopher John Finnis’s ethical theory of basic human goods. To give you a sense of where we are on the intellectual map, our foremost public-intellectual promoter of the culture of life, Robert George, advances from the same principles.

Pro-lifers should not merely be pleased with this particular action of President Trump, his nomination of Neil Gorsuch to serve on the Supreme Court. We should be ecstatic.

The Freedom of the Spirit versus Enslavement to the Will to Power, II: On Seeing Beyond the Event Horizon of Egoism

“You were called for freedom” (Gal 5:13).

A few days ago I posted a reflection on the corruption of the true religion into pharisaical superstition. As we leave the epistle to the Galatians behind as matins readings, here is my conclusion to those thoughts.

Our election, our being called into the Church, is “for freedom.” To transpose into a Johannine register: we are born from below, but are meant to be reborn from above—in the Spirit we are to find our life as proceeding, at every instant, from the Father in Jesus, the Son. We are meant to live our nature freely, and to live everything that inflects our nature (history, biography, tradition) freely, which means simply living in the Spirit of God, Who in the infinity of wisdom and love is sovereign over all things.

Again, this appears to those still looking from below, from the measure of earth, as simple madness. We just KNOW how things work: this goes for the worldly wise who are without religion as well as for the worldly wise with religion. We are quite sure what constitutes success in life, what constitutes sensible behavior. We have no doubt that our judgments do not need modification by, say, a pope (and this, again, joins together the worldly wise whether inside or outside the visible precincts of the Church).

We all have habitual ways of propping up our social position and indeed our own self-estimation, ways that often involve running some Other down. We all do. We tend to make everything serve our ego. Saint Paul calls this tendency “the flesh (sarx).” The flesh is the will to power.

Egoism is terribly tenacious in us all. Not one of us, not a single one of us, can look beyond the event horizon of our selfishness unless an outside force invade our darkness. That invasion is called the dark night: the only balm for our self-flattering blindness is the dark ray of love. This is a love too infinite to comprehend, with an infinity free to abase itself below the surveillance of our prideful gaze.

“Only do not use freedom as a pretext for the flesh, but through love, serve one another as slaves” (v. 13).

The only antidote to the self-bondage that is the will to power is the slavery of love, which is simply life in the Spirit of Jesus.

The truth of nature, the truth of law, the truth of history is to be found from above—in the infinity of love: “For the entire law has been fulfilled in one word (logos): ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ But if you bite and devour one another, see that you are not consumed by one another” (vv. 14-15).

The truth of freedom is love; the truth of egoism is civil war and a kind of cannibalism.

So, there we have it, the great apocalyptic confrontation within each human heart: the Spirit against “the flesh,” love against egoism, freedom against the will to power.

This confrontation certainly occurs in the Christian heart. We must choose whether we will finally leave the world behind completely, all that is old in us, all that we are comfortable with, all our habitual ways of soothing ourselves against the shocks our egos undergo. The old man in us only brings forth the works of death.

We must choose whether we will let the Holy Spirit destroy by the dark night everything that keeps us from rising into the infinity of love. Only in such abandonment to divine providence can we gain the freedom of heart necessary for the only action that matters: that which brings forth the fruits of love.

“But I say, walk by the Spirit, so that you cannot bring to fulfillment the desire of the flesh. For the flesh desires against the Spirit, and the Spirit [desires] against the flesh, for these things oppose each other, so that whatever you want to make, you cannot” (vv. 15-17).

The only personal agency that matters, the only true freedom, is performing the works of the Spirit of love. But so long as we keep turning back to the world, hankering for the Egypt in our hearts, we are unable to be free. We are split, tergiversating, playing both sides.

This certainly happens when we use sensuality as a tool for our egoistic will to power rather than as a channel of love. But it is even more powerfully the case when we backbite and run anybody else down (as, say, in a pharisaical judgmentalism). Saint Paul is very clear on the anti-hierarchy of sins:

“Now the works of the flesh are manifest: prostitution, impurity, wantonness, idolatry, sorcery, hostilities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, divisions, factions, envyings, drunkenness, debauched partying, and things like these…” (vv. 19-20).

Notice the progression from sensual sins into the sins of wrath and partisanship, merging into the sins that destroy community. These are all incompatible with the Kingdom of love.

Our personal freedom was never meant for any of that: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faith, meekness, self-control. Against such things there is no law” (vv. 22-23). No worldly calculation, no egoistic claim, can hinder the fruits of infinite love.

By our fruits will we be known. Jesus in us bears only these fruits of the Spirit. Jesus pursues us in the night, so He may free us to love. As the darkness of the will to power loses its grip on our souls, we wake to a world lit by heavenly light, and we see faces that excite in us a limitless love.

The Freedom of the Spirit versus Enslavement to the Will to Power, I: Against the Consolations of Religion Falsely So Called

“For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Gal 5:1).

Saint Paul devotes his epistle to the Galatians to a blistering attack on pharisaism dressed up as Christianity. If it is essential for all of us Christians to become ever more Christian every single day, we must hear Saint Paul’s strong words as directed to us.

Even the true religion can become a mere shell for superstition. It can be co-opted into yet another worldly attempt to gain control of existence, to wield power to stabilize what is impossible to stabilize. Even the holy liturgy can be perverted into gestures of reification.

In today’s first matins reading, Saint Paul forcefully argues, again, that we must surrender every worldly claim to justification in order to receive our justification completely from the merciful grace of God enacted in, and communicated wholly through, Jesus Christ.

The pharisaizing wing of the early Church wanted to require that male Gentile converts to Christianity be circumcised. We might think this an arcane matter of history, but this is the drama every Christian faces. That’s why it’s recorded in the Bible.

What are the habits of thinking and feeling by which WE try to gain a handle on the disorienting demands of life in the Spirit of Jesus? In particular, what religious habits—ways of making moral judgments, say—that have always been comfortable for us do we insist on as being the measure of a divine life which, by definition, must always explode our measures?

“Behold! I, Paul, say to you that if you are circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing. And I testify again to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obliged to obey the entire law” (5:2-3).

Saint Paul could not be clearer: there are two ways in life. One either lives absolutely by the grace of Jesus Christ, or one lives by calculations with which we are comfortable—calculations that make us the judge of others, rather than the judged always in need of mercy; calculations that make us the planner, not the planned.

Mystery or magic. Faith or calculation. Freedom or control. The Spirit or the will to power.

As he writes earlier in the letter: “Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law, for ‘the one who is just will live by faith.’ But the law does not rest on faith. On the contrary, ‘Whoever does the works of the law will live by them’” (3:11-12).

I am convinced that Saint Paul is saying we can indeed choose one of two paths. We can go all in for grace, and then the Spirit will direct our lives in a way that is beyond our control, beyond our planning, beyond our comfort.

OR. We can, even as Christians, remain bound to the “law” of worldly estimations of what counts as “reasonable” behavior, what is de rigueur. If I play that latter game, I may or may not have success in it. But I will have made Jesus a dead letter. I will be seeking the justification for my existence in something alien to Jesus. I will have cast my lot in with some ideology or other, something that I can grasp through and through, something at my disposal, something that can tickle my self-satisfaction. And something utterly useless when it comes to actually living life.

“You who want to be justified by the law are estranged from Christ; you have fallen away from grace” (5:4).

We must die to everything, everything we thought we knew about life. Then we may rise in the Spirit. We must rebuke every false image of “prudence” or of “natural law,” or any orthodox-seeming disguise for our own will to power.

We are born into a whole set of coordinates: natural instincts, traditions bearing truth, ideologies that deform desire… What dying with Christ means is losing the world that we knew. What rising with Christ means is gaining the world from above, from the hand of the good Father alone, liberated from our selfish gravities, ecstatically bestowed in the Spirit.

“For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any force: only faith working through love” (v. 6).

We must always have the humility to recognize that the one true faith infused in us at baptism is not ever perfectly appropriated by us. How could it be? The infinite truth of Jesus Christ can only inhabit us thoroughly in the limitless dimensions of eternity.

Here below, every single day we must ask the good Father to open our eyes a little more to the truth we have been given. We must ask every single day that that truth be worked in us a little more, so that we may love a little more than we did the day before.

The answer to this prayer will often come from encounters with those who are not Christians, for the true, the good, the beautiful is refracted through every single human being without exception. We have no monopoly on Jesus Christ as Christians: everything that comes to be comes to be through Him.

Do we want to know Jesus better? We must let our hearts be moved by our neighbors, even the ones who are enemies.

This is a daily dying to self. Everything we consider unassailable is assailable. And if the Father loves you very much, He will assail you. And what will be wrought is detachment from the natural drives and the traditions and the complexities of our desires, so that the good Father can give us the whole world back again, now irradiated with perfect love, thrumming with it, alive with it.

He will detach us even from the immutable commandments—not in the sense of relativizing the fact that certain acts are intrinsically evil, but in the sense that the maturing Christian must not follow the law out of a craven sense of serving a tyrannical god who plays gotcha. The Christian who lives by the Spirit does everything, everything, out of love, which explodes every worldly calculus.

Remove law from its embeddedness in love, and you secularize it. Such law is simply the will to power.

When He loves us, the good Father hacks away all of our illusions, which seem so indubitable and solid to us (our “laws”), until there’s one, golden, cord left, the one joining heaven to earth: the Spirit of Jesus. And everything depends on this Love alone.

144 Scars and a Heart Full of Hope: Pope Benedict on Saint Josephine Bakhita

Reading Pope Benedict's second encyclical, Spe salvi (Saved in Hope), is the best short entree to his thought. He begins by reflecting on the life of a modern saint, whose feast day it is. Josephine Bakhita was born circa 1869 in Darfur in Sudan. She was kidnapped into slavery and was savagely treated. Eventually, she was brought to Italy (no travel ban!), where she learned of the Christian God.

"Up to that time, she had known only masters who despised and maltreated her, or at best considered her a useful slave. Now, however, she heard that there is a 'paron' [Venetian word for 'master'] above all masters, the Lord of all lords, and that this Lord is good, goodness in person. She came to know that this Lord even knew her, that He had created her--that He actually loved her. She too was loved, and by none other than the supreme 'Paron,' before Whom all other masters are themselves no more than lowly servants."

Pope Benedict adduces Saint Bakhita to get Western Christians to feel something of the revolution that belief in the Christian God, the God of Jesus Christ, really is: "We who have always lived with the Christian concept of God, and have grown accustomed to it, have almost ceased to notice that we possess the hope that ensues from a real encounter with this God."

This is of course the whole problem of the necessary conversion of Christians. The automation of our Christianity is why Kierkegaard had to wage a war against "Christendom" to serve the urgent project of our becoming Christian. That the truth of reality has been infused in us at baptism does not mean we're all set. It means we have just begun to live. And if we take for granted the limitless gift that has been granted, if we do not grow in faith, hope, and love, then Christianity has been bundled up and exposed in the howling wastes of our hearts.

What sense would it make to speak of evangelization, when the good news has died inside of us and bears not the novel fruits of love? When our religion has become a bourgeois habit of rules or of the breaking of rules? Of accommodations with worldliness, whether dressed up in conservative or progressive garb?

If we hunger for the Eucharist and for prayer and for Scripture, if we don't let mundane (especially monetary) calculations rob us of serenity, if we are peaceful and gentle (even in traffic! even at home!), if we are eager to forgive and be forgiven, if we yearn for more intimacy with others (no matter what differences of opinion, no matter the hurts of the past), if our hearts are open and vulnerable: then we are finally becoming Christians.

But to have an open heart in an indifferent and often brutal world requires the hope that comes from intimacy with Jesus: "Paul reminds the Ephesians that before their encounter with Christ they were 'without hope and without God in the world' (Eph 2:12)."

Comfortable Christianity is almost worse than paganism: there are no questions in the fat or hardened heart, no pangs, no crying need, no eros. We have taken Jesus and have bound Him harmless before the idols of our hearts--pagans without the angst.

To be a straight-up pagan means at times recognizing the precariousness of existence: "Of course Paul knew they had had gods, he knew they had had a religion, but their gods had proved questionable, and no hope emerged from their contradictory myths. Notwithstanding their gods, they were 'without God' and consequently found themselves in a dark world, facing a dark future. In nihil ab nihilo quam cito recedimus (how quickly we fall back from nothing into nothing): so says an epitaph of that period."

Would WE could see the abyss that gapes beneath us and against which Jesus embraces us!

Would we could feel the sheer joy and wonder and gratitude of Saint Josephine Bakhita at being saved by the good Father in His good Son: "What is more, this Master had Himself accepted the destiny of being flogged, and now He was waiting for her 'at the Father's right hand.' Now she had 'hope'--no longer simply the modest hope of finding masters who would be less cruel, but the great hope: 'I am definitively loved and whatever happens to me--I am awaited by this Love. And so my life is good.' Through the knowledge of this hope, she was 'redeemed,' no longer a slave, but a free child of God. She understood what Paul meant when he reminded the Ephesians that previously they were without hope and without God in the world--without hope because without God."

The great hope: everything becomes possible because of Jesus. Every dream of good, the great love...everything becomes possible. The good Father has given us everything in Jesus. May our hearts expand in the atmosphere of a love so limitless its fullness is invisible for now--until the future of love is one with the flesh of the present. 

Saint Josephine Bakhita, pray for us!

Review of Scorsese's "Silence": God's Strangled Word of Love

Having just celebrated the feast of Saint Paul Miki and Companions, it seems an opportune time for me to finally get around to reviewing Martin Scorsese's film Silence. 

It is a very good movie--one of his best. Surprisingly, given how violent Scorsese's movies can be, the Shusaku Endo novel on which this movie is based is a much harder experience: in the book, one feels the silence of God much more agonizingly and the torture is lingered over. 

Scorsese does a masterful job. The movie is a credit to Christianity (a powerful testament to sacramental Catholicism in particular), especially because it does not sugarcoat the ambiguity and brutality of the world that must actually be evangelized. It is an antidote for bourgeois Christianity, and that is medicine we all need.

The movie is a ringing endorsement of the reality of the Christian mystery, despite the seeming silence of God and the inhumanity of man. Endo in his novel makes a much more harrowing case for the absence or sadism of God, though I think the same fundamental affirmation of the faith is painfully attained through the novel. 

There have been criticisms of the movie (and a fortiori of the book) that it whitewashes apostasy. Though knowing there are earnest Christians who have this concern, I am worried about the pharisaism often bound up in this criticism, especially that particular flavor of pharisaism called Donatism, a heresy that Saint Augustine had to battle, a rigorism that would not allow the reintegration of clerics who had apostasized under Roman persecution. Donatist mercilessness in fact is profoundly Pelagian, another heresy which Saint Augustine had to contend with, for it made sacramental grace dependent on the "worthiness" of the celebrant rather than recognizing the priority of God's love. A Church of the pure is the Donatist/pharisaical vision. It is an absurdity and a blasphemy. "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleans us from all injustice" (I John 1:8-9).

And it is always a temptation. It is grotesque to sit in judgment on those who have been tortured, and say, "Tsk, tsk, you are so evil for having apostasized." First, we make the assumption that we would not fail under the same circumstances. How in the world could we know that? Martyrdom is a grace. It is not a work of ours. (Again, Pelagianism and pharisaism are inextricable.)

Second, it is simply a failure of Christian charity. We cannot look at the tortured and have anything as our first and fundamental reaction except, "My dear brother, my dear sister, let me surround your broken body and soul with my burning heart." Even bracketing charity, any other reaction would be inhuman.

This is not to gloss over the fact that apostasy is an intrinsically evil act. It is. Of course. But it's moral theology 101 to recognize that renunciation of the faith under torture is not done freely. The act is morally impossible, objectively; subjectively, how could we possibly judge culpability? To do so would be essentially pharisaical. 

We should never water down the high and supernatural demands of Christianity. We should live a life of mortification precisely so that when the bell rings, we will not hesitate to part with status or money or comfort or life for the sake of the truth, for the sake of witnessing to the reality of Jesus Christ. There is no mitigating this requirement. A life lived in preparation for martyrdom is the only way to live the Christian life. So, yes, apostasy is just about the worst disaster that a Christian could succumb to. There can be no faith in the world if Christians do not live and die according to the rhythms of the invisible Kingdom of love. That is how the Kingdom breaks into materiality, how the divine life is incarnated: in the flesh of our temporal existence.

Let's make this even clearer: what should we teach our children in this regard? We should teach, and we should make clear by the conduct of our lives, that under no circumstances should one compromise one's commitment to the truth, one's commitment to witnessing to the reality of Jesus Christ. 

So, it is not that I disagree with those who have reservations about downplaying the gravity of apostasy. I just think many critics (leaving the pharisaical ones aside) misunderstand what Silence is presenting in the full subtlety of high art, which comprehends far more than systematic theology. I love the latter, but I love the former more--precisely because of my commitment to the amplitude and reality of truth.

We see in both the book and the movie that Endo makes clear the degrading effect of apostasy (even when sacramentally absolved) in the figure of Kichijiro. If one overlooks this character, one misses "the moral" of the story. Endo gets it completely correct: any sin can be forgiven--even repeated apostasy. God's mercy is very real. BUT. The temporal effects of sin are also real. Kichijiro becomes more and more craven with each failure. In that mirror, we are to recognize the cost to Fathers Ferreira and Rodrigues of their failures. Their subsequent lives of comfort are far more craven than Kichijiro's; they become comfortable anti-Christian tools of the state. Kichijiro at least always comes back for absolution. The sacramental reality has seized him at a fundamental level.

[A side note: Endo seems quite clearly to model his book off of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, which everyone should read. It is a technically flawless novel, and a profoundly true one. The isomorphisms between the two books include the characterizations: Kichijiro replays the half-caste, Inoue is the lieutenant, the apostate priests are repetitions of Padre José.]

The silence of God in the suffering of others begins to break Father Rodrigues. Those who would moralize about this would seem to have had no intimate experience of the dark night and of the pain of the world. From the novel: "They were martyred. But what a martyrdom! I had long read about martyrdom in the lives of the saints--how the souls of the martyrs had gone home to Heaven, how they had been filled with glory in Paradise, how the angels had blown trumpets. This was the splendid martyrdom I had often seen in my dreams. But the martyrdom of the Japanese Christians I now describe to you was no such glorious thing. What a miserable and painful business it was! The rain falls unceasingly on the sea. And the sea which killed them surges on uncannily--in silence."

At the climactic moment of the novel, Father Rodrigues is compelled to step on an iconic face of Jesus to save the lives of his sheep being tortured by being hung upside down in a pit above excrement with small cuts in their heads so that they bleed to death over several days. It is not morally insignificant (subjectively, though not objectively) that he apostasizes to save others and not himself. Again, who can judge him? We must judge the action as wrong, but who can judge this man at that moment? 

But then there is concern that in the book and the movie, Father Rodrigues hears what seems to be Christ's voice as he agonizes over the final moment of betrayal: "You may trample. You may trample. I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot. You may trample. It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross." It seems to be a choice for solidarity with one's fellow-man ("social justice") over against the silence and indifference of God before our suffering. 

Now, this cannot simply be Christ's voice. The cock literally crows after Father Rodrigues steps on the fumie. I think the last two sentences truly are the voice of Jesus (they are simply true), and Satan is twisting that truth by framing those sentences with his own "you may trample." Again, who would judge Father Rodrigues for being moved by the screams of those entrusted to his care? And yet there is the objective fact: he does not go on to live a life in solidarity with his poor hunted flock. Rather, he serves state power and actively works against Christianity. He had been so full of real faith and the desire for martyrdom when he begged to be allowed to journey east. This is very grim tragedy.

For us, there can be no question of judging the tortured. There can only be the reality that the truest love for our neighbor will always be a total commitment to Jesus, that is, to infinite wisdom and love. Our lives are lived from Him and in Him. All good comes to us through Him, Who is broken for us, with us, in us. I want nothing else, nothing else than to make His presence tangible to my neighbor. Failing to live by faith in Jesus alone, despite the stratagems of the world, means depriving an often brutalized world of the only hope there is: in dark or day, Jesus the only way.

To Trust in the Doubtful Hour: Between Love and Accusation

[Originally posted on Facebook, 19 January 2017.]

God is good. The enemies of love tear down. And life is ambiguous. Light and darkness grapple, and in the twilight it’s hard to make out who the good guys are.

The Pharisees were quite sure they were the good guys, and that Jesus was the bad guy. In our time, the enthusiasts of rules for rules’ sake are quite sure of their moral superiority, and that the merciful are harming humanity.

The gospel reading for Mass yesterday clearly demonstrates the core anti-pharisaical commitment of Christianity, and as Pope Francis’s detractors amongst the pundit class become more incautious, we must hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches. 

Jesus enters a synagogue, and sees a man with a withered hand. The Pharisees “were watching Him to see if He would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse Him” (Mark 3:2). Feel the intensity of this “watching,” this sort of hunger to catch someone out, the visceral pleasure of playing gotcha. It is not as if we haven’t all indulged in this strange voyeurism. The one who surveils has preemptively changed the subject to the other guy: it’s HIS sins that matter. Mine? Negligible, by hypothesis. 

There is a kind of enjoyment here. It is a perversion, to be sure, almost in the sexological sense, but it is a pleasure nevertheless. To miss that fact is to miss an essential motive of our pharisaism. We may not party like the world, but we have the jouissance of surveillance!

Of course, the world might be forgiven for thinking that their party is more fun and more humane, even if we acknowledge how wretched and inhuman paganism can itself be.

For Jesus, there is no ambiguity. He is the Son of the Father, Who is Light, Who is simply good. Of course He knows what is at stake: “Is it permitted to do good or to do evil on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill?” (3:4). 

Before a suffering human being, there is no neutral stance: we either do good or do evil to that person. There is indeed a clearcut moral imperative here, but not in the sense of a legalist interpretation of one of the Ten Commandments. Exactly not that. Rather, it is the moral necessity of doing right by a suffering human being. To fail to do that is to do evil, to kill. There is no grey area here.

We make the preferential option for the poor and suffering, or we are siding with the kingdom of darkness.

Jesus is not soft on Pharisees: “And having looked at them with anger, deeply grieved at their hardness of heart…” (3:5). 

And Pharisaism reveals itself to be literally anti-Christ (3:6).

Until we Christians reject pharisaism with the same uncompromising vigor with which Jesus rejects it, we have nothing to commend to the world. We have been given all the graces of the Christian life for only one reason: to communicate the joy of being forgiven by an infinitely loving God. 

Life IS ambiguous. That’s why we all need the absolute clarity of knowing by faith that God is good and only good. Or, in the words of Saint James: “Every good and every perfect gift is from above and comes down from the Father of lights, with Whom there is no change or shadow of variation” (James 1:17). 

We need this faith especially when we pass through the dark night. Like the man with the withered hand, we await the healing of God, but it never seems to come. And the accuser’s voice keeps tempting us to doubt the goodness of God: He doesn’t love me; I am suffering, so that means I’ve done wrong (the comfortable have told me so!) 

In exegeting that verse from James, Kierkegaard describes a soul receiving the reality of the good God through a dark night. As dawn approaches for a person, something changes: “When the busy thoughts had worked themselves weary, when your fruitless wishes had exhausted your soul, perhaps then your being grew more calm, perhaps then your mind, secretly and imperceptibly, developed in itself the meekness that is receptive to the word that was implanted within you and that was capable of blessing your soul, the word that all good and all perfect gifts come from above. Then no doubt you confessed in all humility that God…did not treat you unfairly when He denied you a wish but in compensation created this faith in your heart, when instead of a wish, which, even if it would bring everything, at most was able to give you the whole world, He gave you a faith by which you won God and overcame the whole world.”

Faith means trusting in the goodness of God. For that to happen requires our surrendering all our notions of how the world and our lives should be ordered: “Then you acknowledged with humble joy that God was still the almighty Creator of heaven and earth, Who not only created the world from nothing but did something even more marvelous—from your impatient and inconstant heart He created the imperishable substance of a quiet spirit.”

A spirit quiet before God: the great pearl of suffering. 

Such a spirit does not accuse others. It seeks to carry out the one mission: reconciliation. It seeks to be good, as the heavenly Father is good. It seeks to do good, as the heavenly Father does every good. 

A pharisaical Christianity proposes a pharisaical god, who plays gotcha with humanity. In reality, all God wants to do is deliver us from evil: to justify us in His Son Jesus. If we trust in the Father’s love, we will love those in darkness. We would no more accuse them than have ourselves accused (the golden rule). A strong faith also relieves us of the temptation to accuse God. 

Our quiet spirit becomes the docile instrument of the Holy Spirit Who advocates for each human. 

A quiet spirit is a spirit that has been transferred, by the dark night, from the dimension of merely self-serving desire into the dimension of the Father’s graciousness. 

A quiet spirit is a spirit that loves: that hopes all things, believes all things, bears all things. As dawn approaches, our eyes blink upon a world filled with the Father’s goodness, but a world that also needs us to communicate the Father’s unambiguous love.

Christian Radicalism and Worldly Existence: The Desert, Modern Family Life, and T. S. Eliot's "The Cocktail Party"

[Originally posted on Facebook, 18 January 2017.]

Sex, power, and property submerge one in the fundamental rhythms of the world, which reverberate from past to future, requiring planning and compromise. For the majority, marriage and family and the domestic economy are the epicenter of these lines of force.

We just celebrated the feast of Saint Anthony of the Desert, the father of monasticism. His life, especially through the biography Saint Athanasius wrote (which was decisive in Saint Augustine's conversion), challenges us modern Western Christians to make an examination of conscience with regard to our religious earnestness.

The perennial impulse for renewal in the Church comes from new infusions by the Holy Spirit of a desire for the vita apostolica (the apostolic life) recorded at the end of chapter 4 of Acts, which has given rise to the various religious orders. Essential to this apostolic life was the voluntary selling of private property and the distribution of the proceeds to the needy. This and other such thoughts were placed in Saint Anthony's mind when he entered a church and heard the following verse from Jesus' address to the rich young man: "If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come and follow me" (Matthew 19:21). 

That is what he did. Then he left the city to go to the desert, but, as Saint Athanasius writes, a city grew up around him in the desert. Sanctity is the nucleus of a different common life than we have known before. 

But sanctity always requires passing through the desert. Herein lies the difficulty for us comfortable Western Christians, especially those who live out worldly domesticity. The flight path for the bourgeois life is fairly automatic. Education, career, marriage, kids, home ownership, assumption of ready-made social roles, etc. 

The problem: if we go smoothly through life, we will lose our souls. The greatest curse is actually avoiding all adversity, for the greatest woe is to be a hardhearted person, precisely the condition that puts us in danger of hell. Our hardness can only be broken by suffering.

Not everyone can literally go to the desert like Saint Anthony, taking up some form of religious life: the world needs babies and the production of wealth. You can't have saints without babies! Supernatural existence presupposes natural existence. 

However, every heart must traverse the desert. Every Christian needs to be a radical Christian. 

And here T. S. Eliot's play, The Cocktail Party, provides great illumination. A very dear friend recommended that I read it, and I am very grateful. I recommend it in turn.

The play involves a sad marriage and love affairs, but the point is that a crisis comes and choices must be made. The heroine of the story, Celia, thought she had found a great and mutual love, but then the illusion was destroyed. Her heart has been broken. And she goes to a strange therapist for help. 

She has found that it was not the great love: "Oh, I thought that I was giving him so much!/And he to me--and the giving and the taking/Seemed so right: not in terms of calculation/Of what was good for the persons we had been/But for the new person, US. If I could feel/As I did then, even now it would seem right./And then I found we were only strangers..."

The therapist gives her two options.

The first is a return to ordinary life more or less unreconstructed: "If that is what you wish,/I can reconcile you to the human condition,/The condition to which some who have gone as far as you/Have succeeded in returning. They may remember/The vision they have had, but they cease to regret it,/Maintain themselves by the common routine,/Learn to avoid excessive expectation,/Become tolerant of themselves and others,/Giving and taking, in the usual actions/What there is to give and take. They do not repine;/Are contented with the morning that separates/And with the evening that brings together/For casual talk before the fire/Two people who know they do not understand each other,/Breeding children whom they do not understand/And who will never understand them."

Celia responds, "I feel it would be a kind of surrender--/No, not a surrender--more like a betrayal./You see, I think I really had a vision of something/Though I don't know what it is. I don't want to forget it./I want to live with it. I could do without everything,/Put up with anything, if I might cherish it."

So, the therapist presents the second option: "There IS another way, if you have the courage./The first I could describe in familiar terms/Because you have seen it, as we all have seen it,/Illustrated, more or less, in lives of those about us./The second is unknown, and so requires faith--/The kind of faith that issues from despair./The destination cannot be described;/You will know very little until you get there;/You will journey blind. But the way leads towards possession/Of what you have sought for in the wrong place."

Now, this turns out to be religious life for Celia. But what I would like to propose is that there must be a way to combine the two options. There must be, for the reasons I intimate above: the supernatural intimacy of the New Jerusalem requires worldly existence as its prerequisite, and for it to thus serve as a prerequisite, worldly existence must be lived in a radically supernatural way.

The desert must come home. The desert must chasten the luxury of the city. The desert must take us all, so that a new paradise may bloom. 

If something interrupts our smooth trajectory, we should consider whether there is not a severe mercy in it. It is an infinitely sad thing, our zombie lives and our zombie hearts. 

I have lost my name, vocation, wealth, home--every worldly prop. I was not holy enough to surrender it voluntarily as Saint Anthony did. But I am in his desert nevertheless. And it is a mercy. I hope, with all my heart, some day, sooner than later, to share life with a partner who wants to see life through together with me. If the good Father is so gracious as to provide that great love, I must bring the sentiment of desert existence (an attitude of utter dependence on the grace and providence of God, a spirit of spiritual poverty and simplicity of life, a will for the cession of control) into my new home. 

We must be radicals in the good secular earth, so that from this root of faith, hope, and love, the wheat of time may rise towards its fulfillment as the bread of heaven. 

I will close with the blessing that is intoned over Celia's harrowing quest for the great love: 

"The words for those who go upon a journey./Protector of travelers/Bless the road./Watch over her in the desert./Watch over her in the mountain./Watch over her in the labyrinth./Watch over her by the quicksand./Protect her from the Voices/Protect her from the Visions/Protect her in the tumult/Protect her in the silence."

May the good Father see each of you to the homeland of a love that never leaves, and may Saint Anthony who has gone before us pray for each of us along the way.

Only the Lover Is Free

On the Feast of the Presentation, we are met with a great mystery: the harmony of destiny and freedom. Jesus is the Lord of history, yet He is helplessly brought to the Temple as if one of the slaves of sin needing redemption. Isn't Jesus the very Word of the Father? Why is He subjected to the words of the Law? Isn't this the epitome of mindless ritualism? Hasn't the Father simply nodded? To understand something of this paradox, we need to see beginnings and middles in terms of endings, or rather, in terms of the intention that dreams up the whole narrative arc of beginning, middle, and end. That creative intention is called form, and only with the mystery of form in mind can a start be made in understanding how destiny and freedom harmonize in history.

To contemplate deeply the riches of a great book or poem, or a masterful movie, or a painting or ballet or symphony of genius, we have to wait until we can come back to the work after already having read it once, seen it once, heard it once. 

When venturing into a masterwork, there is a welter of detail and information, a vanishing architecture of precisely drawn contours, that we simply cannot survey. So much of the fullness just washes over us, as we begin the process of patiently, painstakingly letting the main narrative line, the melody as it were, illuminate facets here and there along the way. This receptivity is both passive and active (think Simeon and Anna): we have to strain our ears; we have to struggle to let what's there come at us. It's exhausting and disorienting to enter into a work of genius. That's why pop culture sells, and high culture doesn't. 

Having made our first acquaintance with the work as a whole, we will have seen something of the FORM of the work. And it's the form that determines the content. 

What does this have to do with the Presentation?

Let's turn explicitly to the theologian I've been drawing on: Hans Urs von Balthasar. In his A Theology of History, Balthasar notes that in His life on earth, Jesus experiences time simply as the medium through which He constantly receives the will of His Father (by the action of the Spirit and by the situations the Father sets up). But time has a crossbar: the horizontal and massive current of history itself. Jesus encounters His Father's will there too. Indeed, historicity provides the form for (existential) temporality.

"Knowing the Law and the Prophets, the Son knows that they bear testimony to Him (John 5:39)... In them, He encounters the Word of God already in the world, which has already taken human form before His Incarnation [in events and in human words]. ...the Old Testament is not past for Him. ...It contains a definite pattern, as it were, for His earthly life, which lays down certain points from which He cannot depart, and in relation to which He is not 'free' to choose one way or the other. What are involved are not so much certain hard-and-fast particulars (such as those to which the evangelists refer rather by way of examples, so as to point to a broader and more complex pattern) as certain spiritual situations. It is these which create a unified course in His life; the whole of His life is to be the totality of the fulfillment of the whole Law and all the Prophets. Every step He takes is a step from promise to fulfillment. He is not only the New Covenant realized; He has to realize it step by step. On the one hand, it will almost be as though His whole existence were the filling in of a figure already drawn in dotted lines, as though the Son made man received the Law and the Prophets like a man being given his own biography to read as he sets out in life. On the other hand, He is not limited in His freedom, nor even are His actions laid down in advance. For as the fulfillment, He is also the foundation of the Promise, the archetype by which and toward which all the types are drawn. That biography of Himself which He learns from sacred history is an account OF HIM, not preceding Him. Even if one could show a man photographs of himself taken twenty years later, they would not determine his course of life; they follow him, not he them."

So, how does this harmonize freedom and destiny? Destiny is always founded on divine freedom. And that freedom is the exertion of one thing: limitless love. Whatever inanition God allows Himself to suffer, He does so, and does so in blood earnest, because He has already, before the foundation of the world, freely chosen to love. The form of history, of ugly, brutal history, is love.

If we act out of this mystery of love, I think we will find in our own lives, even when most deeply constrained, an unimagined eruption of freedom. Only the ordeal proves the lover. And only the lover is free.

Philosophico-Theo-Political Musings on Inauguration Day: The Romance of Time and Integral Human Development

The life of a people is as mortal as the life of any person. The greater the level of personal self-transcendence, though, the more durable the communal spirit.

The vitality of the American Republic depends on the thoughtfulness and the goodness and the piety of her citizens. Now is always the acceptable hour to wake up to the earnestness of existence.

I am re-reading with a kindred spirit the astonishing work of Balthasar’s, Heart of the World. In the first chapter, Balthasar meditates on time and love in a way that puts me in mind of integral human development, the term with which Pope Benedict preferred to sum up Catholic social doctrine. I have long contended that the holy grail of conceptualizations of love is one that synthesizes romance with solidarity.

Human development requires the expropriations that time inflicts on us: “What strange beings we are! We grow only by being thrust into transiency. We cannot ripen, we cannot become rich in any way other than by an uninterrupted renunciation that occurs hour by hour. We must endure duration and outlast it.”

But these expropriations become precious if we recognize them for what they are: modes of love’s presence and absence. We should experience the extent of time, its agony and joy and monotony, as the very growth of love: “Every moment in our life teaches us with gentleness what the last moment must finally enforce with violence: that we ought to discover in the mystery of time’s duration the sweet core of our life—the offer made by a tireless love.”

Patience is just another word for being in love. 

To attempt to fix our position securely, to mummify our current status, to control the future: such attempts are symptoms of arrested development, of hardhearted lovelessness. (Reification would be a fancy word to describe this unfortunate condition—a reification of spirit, which an Augustinian could term self-incurvature.)

“If, after many a death, we die for one last time: in this act of highest life, existence has ceased dying. Only one thing can ever be deadly: to be alive and not to want to die.”

This explains the second death: to exist while refusing to be decentered. 

Integral human development—the unfolding of the dignity of the human person, the realization of a person’s bodily and spiritual potencies—comes with relinquishing the futile attempt at self-making. Love is the sine qua non of development. I am not myself unless I entrust my heart and my dreams to God’s providence and to those nearest and dearest to me.

If there can be no development without love, there can be no justice without love. In his marvelous 2010 Lenten Message, Pope Benedict makes this explicit. In providing the classic answer to the question, “what is justice?”, “dare cuique suum/to give each his due,” Pope Benedict makes clear that nothing less than divine love is what is “due” each human: “In order to live life to the full, something more intimate is necessary that can be granted only as a gift: we could say that man lives by that love which only God can communicate.”

But love can never be seized. It must be received. We must always wait for it, from the very hand of God. And so we are back to time as the dimension through which we undergo the wise and loving will of God, completely beyond our control: “Indeed, man is weakened by an intense influence, which wounds his capacity to enter into communion with the other. By nature, he is open to sharing freely, but he finds in his being a strange force of gravity that makes him turn in and affirm himself above and against others: this is egoism, the result of original sin. Adam and Eve, seduced by Satan’s lie, snatching the mysterious fruit against the divine command, replaced the logic of trusting in Love with that of suspicion and competition; the logic of receiving and trustfully expecting from the Other with anxiously seizing and doing on one’s own (cf. Gn 3, 1-6), experiencing, as a consequence, a sense of disquiet and uncertainty.”

We either consent to the depredations of time because we trust the goodness of God, or we doubt His goodness and see life as a zero-sum game legitimating our hardhearted powerplays. 

In the end, with Balthasar, we sense that the pulsations of time are all of them the systole and diastole of the Sacred Heart of Jesus:

“What then is the justice of Christ? Above all, it is the justice that comes from grace, where it is not man who makes amends, heals himself and others. The fact that ‘expiation’ flows from the ‘blood’ of Christ signifies that it is not man’s sacrifices that free him from the weight of his faults, but the loving act of God who opens Himself in the extreme, even to the point of bearing in Himself the ‘curse’ due to man so as to give in return the ‘blessing’ due to God (cf. Gal 3, 13-14).”

Focusing on the strange reality that justice is a mode of love allows Pope Benedict to draw romance and solidarity inextricably together:

“But this raises an immediate objection: what kind of justice is this where the just man dies for the guilty and the guilty receives in return the blessing due to the just one? Would this not mean that each one receives the contrary of his ‘due’? ...Before the justice of the Cross, man may rebel for this reveals how man is not a self-sufficient being, but in need of Another in order to realize himself fully. Conversion to Christ, believing in the Gospel, ultimately means this: to exit the illusion of self-sufficiency in order to discover and accept one’s own need – the need of others and God, the need of His forgiveness and His friendship. So we understand how faith is altogether different from a natural, good-feeling, obvious fact: humility is required to accept that I need Another to free me from ‘what is mine,’ to give me gratuitously ‘what is His.’ This happens especially in the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist. Thanks to Christ’s action, we may enter into the ‘greatest’ justice, which is that of love (cf. Rm 13, 8-10), the justice that recognizes itself in every case more a debtor than a creditor, because it has received more than could ever have been expected. Strengthened by this very experience, the Christian is moved to contribute to creating just societies, where all receive what is necessary to live according to the dignity proper to the human person and where justice is enlivened by love.”

America begins a new chapter today. May each of us citizens discover time as love, and so also discover justice as love. May we sway together in the rhythms of a great Heart more relentless in its love than we are in our lovelessness. And finding ourselves in the bleeding Heart and returning the unrequited passion of Jesus, may we find our way to each other.

Recalled to Life: A Hope and a Choice

Where is the glory of the Lord? Is it visible or invisible? Does it really dwell here on earth, other than in the Eucharist?

That is, is there any lasting good within the world of time?

You’ll forgive me for having come to doubt this, from having gone from being an enthusiast for life, brimming with joie-de-vivre, to being a captive of the death instinct. When you are hunted, you just want rest. (That’s what my poem “Benjamin in the Pyrenees” tries to express.)

When you are in the dark night, the infinite chasm between God and creation, between the eternal and the temporal, seems to be unbridgeable. “There’s nothing good, because nothing lasts. And all that comes here, it comes here to pass,” as the Avett Brothers put it.

Without succumbing to Palamism, I would like to speak of my personal rediscovery of a simple truth: there is only one way for the glory of the Lord to reach us, and that is through bodies and through time. This is of course the Christmas mystery (and I plan to celebrate through Candlemas myself), but it is also the truth of modernity, in trying to mediate between this world and the other world.

At the end of the second matins reading for the day, Saint Basil writes: “What, I ask, is more wonderful than the beauty of God? What thought is more pleasing and wonderful than God’s majesty? What desire is as urgent and overpowering as the desire implanted by God in a soul that is completely purified of sin and cries out in its love: I am wounded by love?”

With the sunlight setting the white fire of snow and ice, listening to Shostakovich, and moved by the love of those who love me, these words of Saint Basil clicked, and I remembered something I knew before night came upon me: the glory of the Lord radiates mightily through this world—in friends, in children, in nature, in art, in noble self-sacrifice. If our eyes are open, how can we do anything but fall in love? How can we do anything but sing praise and gratitude to the good Father?

This does not mean unfeeling the pain of the world. Indeed, some of us never seem to get clear of it personally. The power of lovelessness is so strong and insidious—the adversary of reputations and of friendships and of creative life.

In the face of the losses we do not cease to undergo, we must choose, by the grace of God, to be cheerful, to walk the garden without forgetting the desert. And for my children, I so choose.

I want to close with words from that master Shostakovich, who endured the darkness of totalitarian lovelessness his whole life, and yet who managed heroically to resist in his sublime music: “Life is beautiful. All that is dark and ignominious will disappear. All that is beautiful will triumph.”

If he who suffered so much can say this, then you and I can too.

“I am wounded by love!” Yes. Amen.

Making the Two, One: Christmas as Love in the Flesh

The Christmas mystery is all about Epiphany—the revelation in the flesh of the Father’s plan of loving goodness, a plan to bring all things under the headship of Christ in one body, a cosmic-organic symphony of shared life.

The second reading for the Mass on this Solemnity is from Ephesians, the place in Scripture where this plan is most fully laid out. The particular passage culminates what is unfolded in chapter 2, a message to Gentile converts: in Christ, the elect nation of the Jews and the ones for whom they were elected, the rest of the nations, have been joined in covenant unity. This is the Good News: we who were lost in the self-justifying ideologies and willfulness of worldly existence are being invited into the circle of divine favor. Indeed, this was the plan all along:

“Remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of the promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus, you who were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For He is our peace; in His flesh (sarx) He has made the two into one and has broken down the middle wall of partition, that is, the hostility between us” (Eph 2:11-14).

In His flesh, the two have become one. It is a marital mystery, this universal solidarity.

The Magi come, the nations begin their long pilgrimage into Israel, and on this feast we see that God the Father has been working one thing and one thing only through all the labors of evolution and all the terrors of history: the reconciliation of hostile forces in a Eucharistic consummation. The Father’s plan is simply the realization of love in the flesh. 

Life as love. The essence of Christmas.

This is why the liturgy features the First Epistle of Saint John so prominently as first Mass readings during Christmastide, for emphasizing the mystery of living love in the flesh is precisely the Johannine remit.

I just want to note a few passages from the First John readings of the last three days as guidelines for living a Christmas existence.

First, wrath and envy destroy love. They are the essential spirit of the anti-Christ: “This is the message you have heard from the beginning (ap’ archēs), that we love one another. We must not be like Cain, who was from the Evil One and slaughtered his brother. Why did he slaughter him? Because his own works were evil, and those of his brother, just. Do not marvel, brothers, if the world hates you. We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another” (3:11-14).

We must be clear: these are the darkest sins of the flesh, the very darkest. If we indulge in wrath towards anyone (as opposed to righteous anger on behalf of the powerless), we thereby show ourselves outside the Christian communion. If one is a husband who emotionally brutalizes (or, my God, physically hurts) his wife, one belongs to the Evil One. If one holds grudges and refuses forgiveness, one is anti-Christ. If one is a pharisee, mercilessly judging others, convinced of one’s own righteousness, one does the work of the Adversary, who seeks to undo the universal justification Christ works on the Cross. For Jesus comes to do one thing and one thing only: to break down the middle wall of partition, to realize the ministry of reconciliation in the flesh. To make the two, one.

Second, to be a Christian requires having a bleeding heart: “Who indeed is the victor over the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?” And this is how Saint John chooses to identify the Son of God: “This is the One Who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ” (5:5-6).

I have argued elsewhere that Saint John is drawing from his eyewitness experience of the piercing of Jesus’ Sacred Heart, from which flows forth the blood and water of new life. If we are to be victors (a consistent Johannine theme) over the world, that is, if we are to live by faith and by divine love, we must recognize the pierced Heart of Jesus as the pierced Heart of God Himself. The only real life is the unworldly life of the bleeding heart. 

Third, true religion means recognizing that there is an apocalyptic either/or between a life of love and trust in the Father, on the one hand, and self-justification and retaining control over one’s life, on the other. “We know that we are of God, and the whole world lies under the power of the Evil One. And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding so that we may know the True One, and we are in the True One, in His Son, Jesus Christ. This One is the True God and Eternal Life” (5:19-20). 

Everything outside of love of our neighbor and trust in the True Father is darkness. So, Saint John concludes his letter: “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.” 

On this great feast of the Epiphany, we see the glory of the Father’s love on the face of His Son. Jesus looks with infinite tenderness on each of us. If we allow Him to draw our gaze up to His, we will see that all the images of a life in which we are in control are lifeless idols. 

There is one truth thing: love. Fall in love, and see what glory, what glory streams all around!