Whassup?

Well, I have been on a long blogging hiatus.  Partly was because I was having a really difficult time discerning the diaconate and then likewise thinking that I should perhaps blog under a different banner.  I never could figure out what that alternative banner was to be named though.  While I dallied, life continued and I neither journaled nor blogged my 'progress'.

So rather than go into a summary of the intervening few years,  I think I'll just pick up where we are at.  By way of summary,  I had some rather technical issues regarding my first application to the diaconate a couple years ago, and they couldn't be resolved in time to join an aspirant class.  By complete surprise I learned in March of this year that a new class was forming, but I only had a few days to get in the application, and through frustration I hadn't resolved this issue from a few years ago.  So, here I sit, perhaps to follow through with this program again in two years.  In the meantime it has been recommended that I get a Spiritual Advisor, and I intend to make a few phone calls about that after Pentecost when Confirmations are over and prospective priests will have a moment to catch a breath.

On Church-Shopping

In his rule, St. Benedict describes one of the decrees of monastic life. The monk "is to promise, before God and his saints to be stable" -- that is, to settle in a place, one place, for life. It is not an assumption we share. The notion of a grown man still living in the house where he was born conjures images of instability, mental and emotional. We imagine Boo Radley, afraid of the world beyond his porch.

Our culture is formed and defined, not by stability of place, but by mobility and choice.  The modern American family is often spread over the country.  My own relatives live in PA, VA, IL, IN, IO.

Although more powerful in protestant churches, I think the phenomenon of church shopping is a growing experience locally in the Catholic Church.  There is a tremendous sense of place and rooted identity in most of our parishes, as well as the idea that 'Priests come, priests go, the community stays put.  But I think that younger churchgoers no longer prize stability of place in worship any more than we prize stability of place in the rest of our lives.  There is a lot written about leaving one church and finding another, but comparatively little on choosing to stay put, as sticking with an uncomfortable fit is never valued in a consumer culture.

When some parishioners get upset with a certain turn of events in their parish there is a sense of taking our business elsewhere in voting with their feet and checkbooks.  But what if, there is no 'perfect fit' in finding a parish?

We learn in our marriages that neither spouse is perfect, and so perfection ceases to be a factor.  We set about building households in which people can grow and learn and forgive and be forgiven -- a place where we are known to one another.  The only way we can do that in our families is to stay together through the tough times - in one place, in and out of season, weathering the flowering and falling and flowering again of affection.  Stability makes community possible.

Likewise, our parishes are communities made of the ecclesiae - the little churches - that are our homes.  Stability in the parish is as necessary as stability in the home.  Like the home, the parish needs to be a place where brothers and sisters can be formed together, under one roof, sitting at one table, hearing family stories told again and again.  But like in the married life, stability in the parish means giving up the hope of perfection. 

We all have some grim tales to tell about our parish experiences.  Some of them involve over or under or self involved clergy.    Some are stories of parishioners who have transformed the act of leaving in a snit into an art form.  But there are lot happier tales to tell too.  Pastors come and go, the parishioners remain.  Sunday after Sunday, when it is only the visible sign of others; faithfulness keeping me holding fast.

Stability allows parish memory.  And that is antidote to nostalgia.  There was never a golden age when we prayed without ceasing, cared for the poor without complaining and shunned gossip.  There was never a time when our priests were all attentive and wise in the confessional, eloquent yet brief at the ambo and saints on the streets.  Lay and clergy, they were like us, humans who try -- and fail -- to love God and their neighbors.  Parish memory is the antidote to the 'mall syndrome'.  The idea that just around the food court and past J.C. Penney's lays the secret of our happiness.  Parishioners who leave one failing church to join a parish that appears to be ascending will discover the lead beneath the gold soon enough.

Though I'm sure they're out there, I've never met a long married couple who wished they had divorced.  Maybe when John lost his job they say, or during the years when Mary was drinking, because those were bad days.  But they knew on some level perhaps too deep for words, that neither they nor their marriage were consumer items to be returned for imperfections.  Having come through the fire together -- in part because they came through the fire and the did it together -- they found it wasn't they who made the marriage; it was faithfulness to the marriage that made them; a couple, a household, a family.  And in the hard work of fidelity, they too have found something better than customer satisfaction.  They have found joy.

The Feast of Stephen

Yesterday Dec 26th my little group of friends was scheduled to bring the Eucharist to those Catholics with the misfortune of being in the hospital on Christmas.  As we rode the elevators, I thought about some comments of a few mentors who introduced me to this ministry.  While much focus was given to bringing the physical presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, my Deacon and Priest friend also focused on the importance of bringing Jesus in companionship and brotherly love. In other words we are all called to be His hands and His feet.  The deacon said that often times, no one comes to visit these people and they are starved for some simple conversation and attention.   As I rode the elevator up I wondered where it was that he got the impression that so many were looking for that.  It was a rare experience for me.  I kid you not, the following then happened...

For it being the day after Christmas, a surprising number of people did not want to receive, but this was tempered by the genuine enthusiasm and gratitude of those who did receive.  At my very last stop though, I experienced something new.  I had one last woman to visit in room 448.  It was a two bed room, but there was no one in the first bed.  The lights were off, though there was that grey illumination that comes from the overcast sky.  Behind the divider curtain slouched an elderly woman who watched me approach.  I asked her name, and it turned out that she was not the person I was looking for.  On a whim, I asked if she was Catholic and explained why I was there.  She was not Catholic.  She then engaged me in a conversation that  was filled with the fear of a person confused as to where they were and what was happening.  In the beginning, I was seeking a break in the conversation, or an opportunity to extricate myself (I had to serve at Mass within the hour).  But  when she denied me every opportunity I thought "so what if I am late, they'll get along fine without me."  And so I started to speak with her and tell her a few stories about my Christmas, and the cruise I just returned from.  She lit right up, had long moments of lucidity and laughed at my stories.  She complained of being hungry but couldn't sit up to eat or peel the banana that was on her breakfast tray.  So, I helped her rearrange her pillows and sit up, peeled her bananas and told her another story while I helped her to eat.  In the end as I left she thanked me for 'being the only Human contact' she has had.

On the elevator down I realized that today was the feast of St. Stephen -- the first Deacon and martyr in the Church.  The Diaconate was created to serve because of inequities and human failings  in the early church; 'the Hellenists murmured against the Hebrews because their widows were neglected in the daily distribution'.  And now, on the cusp of my 40th birthday I ask for clarification on this aspect of the diaconate, and the Holy Spirit provides.  How remarkably easy it would have been for me to turn around and leave this woman the second I learned she wasn't who I was looking for.  And yet... she was who I was looking for after all.

Ephesians 5 set to music -- Sanctus Real, 'Lead Me'

Food. Incorporated

I think every adult should watch this movie.



"A Culture that views this pig as a pile of protoplasmic inanimate structure to be manipulated by whatever creative design the human mind can foist on that critter will probably view individuals within its community and other cultures in the community of nations with the same type of disdain and disrespect and controlling type mentality."  -- An organic farmer interviewed in the movie.

Amen brother. Aldous Huxley, how prescient you were.

Nero's Torches

From the Annals of Tacitus (56-125 A.D.)

Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.

(click for super large version)
Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or stood aloft on a car. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man’s cruelty, that they were being destroyed.

On the Debt of Science to Christianity

I came across this thought provoking article originally at the Augustine Club of Columbia University.  The original publisher is closed and knowing how ephemeral such College Clubs can sometimes be, I am reposting the article in it's entirety here, as I think the facts and arguments presented here are critical for some individuals in my audience who might take umbrage at the title of the article and this post.

From THE POPE’S PHYSICIST by Fr. Paul Haffner

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The Origin of Science
How is it that science became a self-sustaining enterprise only in the Christian West?

…as Whitehead pointed out, it is no coincidence that science sprang, not from Ionian metaphysics, not from the Brahmin-Buddhist-Taoist East, not from the Egyptian-Mayan astrological South, but from the heart of the Christian West, that although Galileo fell out with the Church, he would hardly have taken so much trouble studying Jupiter and dropping objects from towers if the reality and value and order of things had not first been conferred by belief in the Incarnation. (Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos)

To the popular mind, science is completely inimical to religion: science embraces facts and evidence while religion professes blind faith. Like many simplistic popular notions, this view is mistaken. Modern science is not only compatible with Christianity, it in fact finds its origins in Christianity. This is not to say that the Bible is a science textbook that contains raw scientific truths, as some evangelical Christians would have us believe. The Christian faith contains deeper truths– truths with philosophical consequences that make conceivable the mind’s exploration of nature: man’s place in God’s creation, who God is and how he freely created a cosmos.

In large part, the modern mind thinks little of these notions in much the same way that the last thing on a fish’s mind is the water it breathes. It is difficult for those raised in a scientific world to appreciate the plight of the ancient mind trapped within an eternal and arbitrary world. It is difficult for those raised in a post-Christian world to appreciate the radical novelty and liberation Christian ideas presented to the ancient mind.

The following selection summarizes the most notable work of Stanley Jaki, renowned historian of science and Templeton Prize laureate.

How did Christian belief provide a cultural matrix (womb) for the growth of science?

In Christ and Science (p. 23), Jaki gives four reasons for modern science’s unique birth in Christian Western Europe:

1. “Once more the Christian belief in the Creator allowed a break-through in thinking about nature. Only a truly transcendental Creator could be thought of as being powerful enough to create a nature with autonomous laws without his power over nature being thereby diminished. Once the basic among those laws were formulated science could develop on its own terms.”
2. “The Christian idea of creation made still another crucially important contribution to the future of science. It consisted in putting all material beings on the same level as being mere creatures. Unlike in the pagan Greek cosmos, there could be no divine bodies in the Christian cosmos. All bodies, heavenly and terrestrial, were now on the same footing, on the same level. this made it eventually possible to assume that the motion of the moon and the fall of a body on earth could be governed by the same law of gravitation. The assumption would have been a sacrilege in the eyes of anyone in the Greek pantheistic tradition, or in any similar tradition in any of the ancient cultures.”
3. “Finally, man figured in the Christian dogma of creation as a being specially created in the image of God. This image consisted both in man’s rationality as somehow sharing in God’s own rationality and in man’s condition as an ethical being with eternal responsibility for his actions. Man’s reflection on his own rationality had therefore to give him confidence that his created mind could fathom the rationality of the created realm.”
4. “At the same time, the very createdness could caution man to guard agains the ever-present temptation to dictate to nature what it ought to be. The eventual rise of the experimental method owes much to that Christian matrix.”

But what about the other monotheistic religions?

Jaki notes that before Christ the Jews never formed a very large community (priv. comm.). In later times, the Jews lacked the Christian notion that Jesus was the monogenes or unigenitus, the only-begotten of God. Pantheists like the Greeks tended to identify the monogenes or unigenitus with the universe itself, or with the heavens. Jaki writes:

Herein lies the tremendous difference between Christian monotheism on the one hand and Jewish and Muslim monotheism on the other. This explains also the fact that it is almost natural for a Jewish or Muslim intellectual to become a patheist. About the former Spinoza and Einstein are well-known examples. As to the Muslims, it should be enough to think of the Averroists. With this in mind one can also hope to understand why the Muslims, who for five hundred years had studied Aristotle’s works and produced many commentaries on them failed to make a breakthrough. The latter came in medieval Christian context and just about within a hundred years from the availability of Aristotle’s works in Latin

As we will see below, the break-through that began science was a Christian commentary on Aristotle’s De Caelo (On the Heavens).

So how did it all happen? Or fail to happen?

Fr. Paul Haffner writes:

Modern experimental science was rendered possible, Jaki has shown, as a result of the Christian philosophical atmosphere of the Middle Ages. Although a talent for science was certainly present in the ancient world (for example in the design and construction of the Egyptian pyramids), nevertheless the philosophical and psychological climate was hostile to a self-sustaining scientific process. Thus science suffered still-births in the cultures of ancient China, India, Egypt and Babylonia. It also failed to come to fruition among the Maya, Incas and Aztecs of the Americas. Even though ancient Greece came closer to achieving a continuous scientific enterprise than any other ancient culture, science was not born there either. Science did not come to birth among the medieval Muslim heirs to Aristotle.

….The psychological climate of such ancient cultures, with their belief that the universe was infinite and time an endless repetition of historical cycles, was often either hopelessness or complacency (hardly what is needed to spur and sustain scientific progress); and in either case there was a failure to arrive at a belief in the existence of God the Creator and of creation itself as therefore rational and intelligible. Thus their inability to produce a self-sustaining scientific enterprise.

If science suffered only stillbirths in ancient cultures, how did it come to its unique viable birth? The beginning of science as a fully fledged enterprise took place in relation to two important definitions of the Magisterium of the Church. The first was the definition at the Fourth Lateran Council in the year 1215, that the universe was created out of nothing at the beginning of time. The second magisterial statement was at the local level, enunciated by Bishop Stephen Tempier of Paris who, on March 7, 1277, condemned 219 Aristotelian propositions, so outlawing the deterministic and necessitarian views of creation.

These statements of the teaching authority of the Church expressed an atmosphere in which faith in God had penetrated the medieval culture and given rise to philosophical consequences. The cosmos was seen as contingent in its existence and thus dependent on a divine choice which called it into being; the universe is also contingent in itsnature and so God was free to create this particular form of world among an infinity of other possibilities. Thus the cosmos cannot be a necessary form of existence; and so it has to be approached by a posteriori investigation. The universe is also rational and so a coherent discourse can be made about it. Indeed the contingency and rationality of the cosmos are like two pillars supporting the Christian vision of the cosmos.

The rise of science needed the broad and persistent sharing by the whole population, that is, the entire culture, of a very specific body of doctrines relating the universe to a universal and absolute intelligibility embodied in the tenet about a personal God, the Creator of all. Therefore it was not chance that the first physicist was John Buridan, professor at the Sorbonne around the year 1330, just after the time of the two above-mentioned statements of the Church’s teaching office.

Buridan’s vision of the universe was steeped in the Christian doctrine of the creation; in particular, he rejected the Aristotelian idea [in De Caelo] of a cosmos existing from all eternity. He developed the idea of impetus in which God was seen as responsible for the initial setting in motion of the heavenly bodies, which then remained in motion without the necessity of a direct action on the part of God. This was different from Aristotle’s approach, in which the motion of heavenly bodies had no beginning and would also have no end. Buridan’s work was continued by his disciple, Nicholas Oresme, around the year 1370; impetus theory anticipated Newton’s first law of motion.

The doctrine that God created the universe out of nothing and that the universe had a beginning was later to be reiterated at the First Vatican Council, against the errors of materialism and pantheism which enjoyed a new vogue at that time. In addition, Vatican I stated the absolute freedom of God to create, and made clear (against fideism) the possibility of arriving at God’s existence through a rational reflection upon creation. As Jaki states: “The Council, in line with a tradition almost two millenia old, could but insist on the very foundation of that relation which is man’s ability to see the reasonability of revelation, which in turn is inconceivable if man is not able to infer from the world surrounding him the existence of its Creator.

It is precisely the inability of many scientists to trace the grandeur of the Creator in His works that Jaki opposes with great skill. He challenges the atheistic positions of R. Dawkins in the biological sphere and of Stephen Hawking in physics. He shows that the best way to unmask the thought of non-believing scientists is to show how the basis for their reasoning cannot be proven scientifically. In an unjustified way they leave the realm of their own scientific disciplines and make a priori philosophical deductions against Christian belief. Again, one example of this is the pervasive “chance” or “chaos” ideology used to “explain” the coming into being of the material universe, of life and of the human person. Stanley Jaki has also refuted such approaches to the cosmos and creation in his masterly work,The Purpose of It All, published in 1990.

The originality of Jaki’s thought also lies in the link which he describes between the dogmas of the Creation and the Incarnation. He shows how the development of the doctrine of creation out of nothing was “connected with the conceptual refinements of the doctrine of the Incarnation around which raged the great inner debates of the early Church.” Jaki then discusses how the Jewish position on creation underwent a change during the first few centuries of Christianity. Philo, a contemporary of Jesus, tried to interpret the first chapter of Genesis, but his view “showed him closer to Greek eternalism than to Biblical creationism.” The earliest midrashim “showed that Jewish theologians were no longer willing to uphold the doctrine of the complete submission of matter to the Maker of all.” In the Mutazalite tradition of Islam there was also a tendency to slide towards emanationism and pantheism, as a result of endorsing the pantheistic necessitarianism of Aristotle.

Jaki clearly affirms that in Christianity, a slide into pantheism was prevented because the doctrine of the creation was bolstered up by faith in the Incarnation. Pantheism is invariably present when the eternal and cyclic view of the cosmos prevails. The uniqueness of the Incarnation and Redemption dashed to pieces any possibility of the eternal and cyclic view; for if the world were cyclic, the once-and-for-all coming of Christ would be undermined. The uniqueness of Christ secures a linear view of history and makes Christianity more than just one among many historical factors influencing the world. The dogmas of the Creation and Incarnation mean “an absolute and most revolutionary break with a past steeped in paganism,” and the enunciation of these dogmas and their historical impact is “an uphill fight never to be completed.”

…

But the cosmos and all the specific laws which govern it do not form a self-explanatory system; they point beyond science and call for a metaphysical foundation in the Christian doctrine of creation. It is precisely this Christian doctrine of creation which, according to Jaki, was the stimulus for the unique viable birth of science. The Christian doctrine of creation finds its expression within the Church.