Samaritans All

How odd that this weekend's Gospel was the parable of the Good Samaritan. As it turned out, on Friday I went over to Redner's Supermarket for a few things, and seated on the ground outside was a woman I know to be homeless. If I was In Washington or Nw York, I'm pretty sure she would have been asking from money, but I have never seen this woman do that.

Nevertheless, my first instinct was to check and see if I had any cash -- which I didn't. So, I passed on by. She wasn't asking for anything, but I felt that I was somehow failing in Christian Compassion by not offering anything. My thoughts went towards all the little luxuries I have concerned my self with lately -- a new phone, planning to buy a new car, some additional books on my wishlist. And then, naturally, I compared those concerns to what this woman's concerns were, and what constituted a little luxury for her. She and I didn't peak in the few seconds we passed, and I thought that perhaps few people speak to her at all. She probably brings up a series of reactions in people -- disgust at her dirt and smell, fear, shame that she will ask for something and I don't want to give it (or can't). And as a result most people probably avoid eye contact and walk on past.

Even though she didn't ask me for anything, perhaps the one luxury I could have given her was simply spekaing with her briefly. A little human contact to acknowledge that she too, is valued. But I didn't. I only thought of it after the fact, and even then I thought, "But what would I say?" I have a good friend who spends a lot of time on the downtown streets. He has come to know most of the local homeless and strikes up conversations with them regularly. I could learn a lot from a guy like this for whom such encounters involve no personal courage at all. Just simple charity. From my time in Africa there was a saying that 'A person becomes a person through other people.' And here, this poor homeless woman gives me a lesson on this week's gospel that no amount of reading books could have driven home any deeper.

Kyrie eleison.

9 Things God won't ask on that Day...

Got this in the email, the tenth was pretty dumb so I cut it out.



TEN THINGS GOD WON'T ASK ON THAT DAY..

1.... God won't ask what kind of car you drove. He'll ask how many people you drove who didn't have transportation..



2.. God won't ask the square footage of your house, He'll ask how many people you welcomed into your home.



3... God won't ask about the clothes you had in your closet, He'll ask how many you helped to clothe.



4... God won't ask what your highest salary was. He'll ask if you compromised your character to obtain it.



5... God won't ask what your job title was. He'll ask if you performed your job to the best of your ability.



6.. God won't ask how many friends you had. He'll ask how many people to whom you were a friend.



7..... God won't ask in what neighborhood you lived, He'll ask how you treated your neighbors.



8.... God won't ask about the color of your skin, He'll ask about the content of your character.



9... God won't ask why it took you so long to seek Salvation. He'll lovingly take you to your mansion in heaven, and not to the gates of Hell

A Christian Country

The Christian Church has been powerfully damaged by letting itself be confused with love of country and the making of great wars. Countries are about the acquisition, distribution, and sharing of power. Or the opposites of those verbs. By deliberately setting itself up as a state with no officially sanctioned church, America is the one nation under which the Christian values of its early intelligentsia, and undeniably Christian faith of the early masses were able to flourish unfettered by the intersection of secular power and religious belief. The founding fathers learned much from the aftermath of the 30 years war in Europe where battles for national and local power were carried out under the ostensible guise of 'Protestant' versus 'Catholic' and the uses of state sponsored religion to consolidate the secular power gains. However, it is a brutal mistake to mix the love of country with the love of God. Among many other things it allows the citizens to confuse their Christian morals into sometimes believing the the 'end justifies the means'. For example we condemn the Nazi death camps, Saddaam's gassing of the Kurds, the horrible inequities of Socialist states but we have a tendency to overlook the mass bombings of cities, firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo, invasion of Iraq etc., as being necessities. Perhaps worse than the deliberate, scientific killing of civilians in the wars of the 20th century, was the sad, desperate attempt to pretend to ourselves later that it was right and justified. In this way the pain and damage were passed on to new generations who had no hand in the killing. War does terrible harm to civilizations, to morals, to families, and to innocence. How strange that we should make it the heart of a national cult.

"C'mon, is there such a thing as Hell?'

The best response to the complaint that an all loving God wouldn't allow for something like the Doctrine of Hell is provided (as always it seems) by C.S. Lewis. When talking about simply unrepentatntly bad people he responds:

'What are you asking God to do? To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But he has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does."

Injecting a soul into hominids

I have never had much difficulty accepting the idea that the universe is not 6000 years old as some too-literal readers of the book of Genesis infer. Maybe some of this comes from my training as an archaeologist. As a Christian I take some small pleasure from the fact that the Big Bang hypothesis was first put forward by a Catholic priest, Georges LeMaitre. Likewise the theory of evolution never bothered me tremendously, since I reasoned quite early on that if there can be physical laws governing the attraction of matter and forces in the universe, surely there could be merit in some of the various forms of the theory of evolution explaining how biological life developed. Much of the hubbub about creationism versus Darwinism is really rooted in the fact that many creationists ignore the facts that science has revealed about the way in which the universe works; and many Darwinists try to use the scientific data to talk about metaphysical things.
As Pope Benedict pointed out in his book Christianity and the crisis of cultures, the proper attitude to take toward Scripture is the Catholic view which isn't always advertised well even by Catholics. Galileo wrote a letter in 1615 illustrating the perspective quite well:

And if the same Holy Spirit has intentionally refrained from teaching us
propositions of this kind, that is, of astronomy, since these have nothing to do
with his own true intention-which is our salvation-how can one then assert that
it is absolutely necessary to hold this position rather than that, so that one
is de fide, the other erroneous?... Here, I would repeat something I once
heard from an ecclesiastical personage of the most eminent rank, namely, that it
is the intention of the Holy Spirit to teach us how to go to heaven, not how
heaven goes.

So while I was living my career as a paleoanthropologist, I really had no trouble with the science of the origins of life and the universe in history, and believing in Scripture. But when someone would ask about when those hominids received a soul, I would just give a short stock answer that was only partly satisfying: "at some point God injected a soul into the hominid."I have just finished reading a book by CS Lewis called The Problem of Pain. And in the fleshes out a little bit the whole concept of God injecting a soul:

For long centuries God perfected the animal form which was to become the vehicle
of humanity in the image of himself. He gave it hands whose thumb could be
applied to each of the fingers, and joggers and teeth and throat capable of
articulation, and a brain sufficiently complex to execute all the material
motions whereby rational thought is incarnated. The creature may have
existed for ages in this state before it became man: it may even have been
clever enough to make things which a modern archaeologist would accept as proof
of its humanity. But it was only an animal because all its physical and
psychical processes were directed to purely material and natural ends.
Then, in the fullness of time, God caused it to descend upon this organism, both
on its psychology and physiology, a new kind of consciousness which could say I
and me, which could look upon itself as an object, which new God, which could
make judgments of truth, beauty, and goodness, and which was so far above time
that it could perceive time flowing past... Judged by his artifacts, or
perhaps even by his language, this blessed creature was, no doubt, a
savage. All that experience and practice can teach he had still to learn:
if he chipped flints, he doubtless chipped them clumsily enough. He may
have been utterly incapable of expressing in conceptual form his Paradisal
experience. All that is quite irrelevant. From our own childhood we
remember that before our elders fought us capable of understanding anything, we
already had spiritual experience as fewer and as momentous as any we have
undergone since, though not, of course, as rich in factual context. From
Christianity itself we learn that there is a level-in the long run the only
level of importance-on which the learned and the adult have no advantage at all
over the simple and the child. I do not doubt that if the Paradisal man
could now appear among us, we should regard him as an utter savage, a creature
to be exploited or, at best, patronized. Only one or two, and those the
holiest among us, would glance the second time at the naked, shaggy-bearded,
slow-spoken creature; but day, after a few minutes, would fall at his feet.

Provides some pretty stimulating ideas doesn't it?

First Communion in the Hand

Did you realize that St. Joseph was the first person to receive communion in the hand?

This is precisely how screwed up my prayer life is...

Of late I thought I had been doing pretty good with a prayer life. I try and give one of the first half hours or so to God in dedicated prayer, whether it is Liturgy of the Hours, Magnificat Mag, Rosary, Meditation, Lectio Divnia -- what have you. Oftentimes in the morning it is a challenge to keep out impending thoughts of what I need to do during the balance of the day. Then, later on around noon I like to say a standard prayers, and read a bit out of the NT.
I have been fairly convicted by recent experience, including a talk by Fr. Larry Richards and C.S Lewis 'The problem of Pain.' I thought I was doing pretty good until I heard these two guys.

Fr. Larry:

You gotta have daily committed prayer. You don't TRY to fit God into your
day; you build your day around God...do you TRY to eat every day? Do
you TRY to read the paper every day? How about if your relationship with
your wife was like that? Every day in the morning after you wake up and do
your stuff, you go to see your wife with your book of poems. And you read
her a beautiful poem. And then you say "Shhhh!" And then you go
about the rest of your day, and you're one of these real good husbands because
you pick up the phone, call her and say, "Thank you for everything you've ever
done for me: SHhhhhh." and then you hang up. You go home from work
and your wife has made you a beautiful dinner, and every day you say the same
words, "Thank you for this wonderful dinner." And then you shove it down
your throat and never talk to her during your dinner time. After that, you
show that you're in that 1% of great husbands by saying "Thanks for that dinner,
it was really great." Next its off to read the paper or watch TV, and
right before you go to bed, you walk in to see your spouse with your book of
poems, and you read her the same poem every night... or the same 5 poems... or
'let's try something different tonite' and you try a different poem. And
after you do this for 50 years, what kind of relationship would that be
gentlemen? It would STINK. And that's our relationship with
God. We say our prayers, but we don't enter into a relationship

.

C.S. Lewis:
"We try, when we wake, to lay the new day at God's feet; but
before we have finished shaving, it becomes our day and God's share in it is
felt as a tribute which we must pay out of 'our own' pocket, a deduction
from the time which ought, we feel, to be 'our own'.

OUCH!