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Marriage in Heaven

Anthropology, Bible, Heaven, Last Things, marriage, Mary, Sacraments, The Life of Jesus, ,

Matthew the Evangelist relays a conversation that Jesus once had with the Sadducees in which they tried to trap Jesus into admitting that the resurrection of the dead was absurd.  They present Him with a case study of a woman who was married seven times, each ending in the death of her husband.  They ask Our Lord, “Now at the resurrection, of the seven, whose wife will she be? For they all had been married to her.”  If Our Lord said all of them, then He would be admitting there was polyandry, thus rendering the resurrection of the body a sinful state.  Instead Our Lord utters words that have shocked many Christians throughout history: “because you do not know the scriptures or the power of God.  At the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like the angels in heaven” (c.f. Mt 22:28-33).  For some of those who are married, newlyweds and those happily married especially, these words cause much angst.  For the rest, relief.  But for all of us they are relevant because they give us a momentary glance at our promised destiny.

This ought to go without saying, but it has been uttered enough that it bears mention.  When Our Lord says that they “are like the angels” He does not mean that they become angels.  “For angels have not bodies” as St. Thomas says.  Therefore, it makes no sense to speak of resurrection, that is the re-unification of body and soul, if there is no body.  Instead Our Lord is describing the qualities of the resurrected life.  They will have the powers of the angels in thought, movement and glorification, but they will still be embodied spirits.  They will also, like the angels, not marry.

Seeing Marriage for What It Is..and Isn’t

Part of the struggle to grasp what Our Lord is saying stems from the fact that we live in an age in which the definition of marriage remains elusive.  That is, we are unclear what marriage is and what it is for and so endeavor to see how, if at all, it could fit into the scheme of eternity.  Marriage is the one flesh union of spouses tending towards the communion of their persons.  This union is of the whole person, physically, emotionally and spiritually, and not just an emotional bond as is commonly thought today.  This unbreakable personal union also is the foundation of the family which is the natural domicile for the procreating and raising of children.

As the instrument for the procreating and raising of children, obviously marriage is unnecessary in the next world.  While it served this purpose here below as the place where man lived out the command to “be fruitful and multiply,” once the harvest comes there will be no need for more fruit.

As a Sacrament marriage too will pass away in the eschaton.  In fact, all the Sacraments will pass away.  As signs, the Thing signified will be unveiled and made fully present.  Gone will be the need to see Our Lord veiled behind the appearances of bread and wine and it will pave the way to see Him face to face.  Likewise Marriage as a sign will no longer be necessary because the reality will be fully present.

Marriage as a Sign

The nature of marriage as a sign that points to a very specific reality is vitally important.  Specifically, marriage, as an earthly reality tending towards the communion of the spouses points to a parallel heavenly reality.  First, in its bond of love and fruitfulness it points to the Communion of Persons which is the Trinity.  But that is not all.

As a complete gift of self, it signifies the mutual gift of self between God and each man and woman.  As proof that this union is real, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  The Incarnation is the definitive marriage of mankind with God.  The Son is forever united to a human nature.  As if further proof were needed, Christ also raised Marriage to a Sacrament by which He bestows sanctifying grace.  This sanctifying grace not only cements the bonds of the spouses, but more importantly it truly unites each of the spouses to God.  In this way it becomes not just a sign, but the thing signified, “the great mystery in reference to [the bond of] Christ and the Church” (Eph 5:32).

There is also a third reality that is signified in marriage and it is this one that ought to bring relief to those who despair no longer being united to their spouse.  It is this reality, says St. John Paul II, that is the reason why we are not simply “laundry listing” what we believe in the Creed but implying an intimate connection between the truths and reality.  More to the point, the Saintly Pontiff says that we link the Resurrection of the Body and the Communion of Saints in the Creed.

We are embodied creatures and our bodies too are a sign.  They are a sign that we are made for communion, not just with God, but with one another.  But these signs do not pass away because they bring about the thing signified, that is our bodies are who we are.  In this life we are limited in our capacity of self-giving to the point that we can only give of ourselves fully to one other person.  When time ceases, this limitation will be lifted so that we will be able to give of ourselves fully in all our relationships.  Put more succinctly we will participate fully in the Communion of Saints, a communion of self-giving and receiving of the entire redeemed community.  This is why, by way of anticipation, Our Lady, although only a creature, can have a personal relationship with each of the members of the Church Militant.  It is this redeemed community that is wedded to God, a communion with a communion as John Paul II said.

This is the Good News for spouses.  All in their relationship they have built upon and centered on Christ will endure.  The true intimacy, in Christ, they experienced will not be forgotten but instead will be the foundation of their relationship with each other in the Communion of Saints.  They will experience a level of intimacy beyond anything they could imagine.

And this is ultimately why Our Lord refused the Sadducees trap of treating marriage and the resurrection as some theological theory.  It is also why we shouldn’t treat this as some “pie in the sky” musings.  It ought to inform our relationships here and now.  If only those aspects of our relationship that were built on Christ will last, then we know which ones we should focus on.  If everyone did this in living out the consequence of Marriage as a Sacrament, then there would be peace in many homes.  And that, truly is the Good News.

In Defense of Fanaticism

Bible, Virtue, , , ,

It is perfectly OK to be a fan, but not a fanatic—especially a religious fanatic.  Better to be moderate than to be zealous.  At least that is what the spirit of the world tells us.  But if we trace the contours of salvation history, especially in the low spots marked by corruption, it was always the zealots that brought about health and reform.  The Old Testament gives us numerous examples.  Moses, Phinehas, Samuel, David, Elijah, Jael, and Judas Maccabeus are but a few.  Though times changed, these men and woman’s jealousy for God drove them to heroic perseverance in restoring God’s glory among the peoples of the world.  So deep was their hatred of all things opposed to God’s glory being made manifest that they were even willing to take up the sword (or even a tent spike).  They were fanatics in the truest sense of the word.

“Killing in the name of God”—that is exactly the reason why fanaticism is a bad thing.   But that misses the point completely.  These stories were “written for our admonition and our learning” (Romans 15:4) so that we would stir up the same zeal, even if it is to be made manifest differently.  When Peter zealously picked up the sword to defend Our Lord he was rebuked not for the zeal, but for the use of the sword.  Armed with the “sword of the Spirit” it is no longer necessary to wield an actual sword.  The thickness of the Blood of Christ makes the enemies of God nothing more than potential friends. It may be true that “those who live by the sword die by the sword” but this does not absolve us from the duty to become fanatics.

What is Zeal?

St. Thomas defines zeal as an effect of intense love (ST I-II q.28, a.4).  An intense love seeks to remove everything that opposes it.  The more vigorously we love, the more vigorously we oppose resistance to that thing.

We can imagine then that zeal is a most necessary virtue in times of corruption.  When there is much that opposes a good, it takes an intense love of that good to fight against the obstacles to that good being made manifest.  In fact, we could say that it is only men and women of zeal who can lead to true reform.  Church history is marked with fanatics, moved by intense zeal, for God’s glory to shine through His Church.  Our time is no different.  We can look back in time and see figures like St. Athanasius, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catherine of Siena, and St. Alphonsus Liguori who were consumed with zeal for God.  But for every one of these saints, there were many more who were consumed with a false zeal.  The temptation is ever-present, St. Paul even cautioned the Romans about synthetic zeal, that is, “zeal for God but without discretion” (Romans 10:2).   In order that we not succumb to this counterfeit, it behooves us to make the distinction between true and false zeal.

Drawing on a distinction made by St. Thomas can help us clarify the distinction.  The Angelic Doctor says that zeal comes about according to the type of love we bear.  First there is the love of concupiscence or self-love.  He does not necessarily mean “self-love” as in selfishness but in the sense that we desire our own good.  Zeal manifests itself in two ways: jealousy and envy.  Jealousy is the zeal we experience when something hinders us gaining the object of our love.  We tend to think of jealousy as an exclusively bad thing, but it is not necessarily so.  A husband may jealously protect his wife from other suitors (assuming they are actually trying to take her from him otherwise his jealousy is a bad thing).  Likewise, God is said to be a “jealous God” because there are enemies that are trying to take His beloveds from Him.  The zeal of envy is always bad in that we are moved to envy those who seem to excel and by doing so seem to hinder us from excelling.

Love of friendship on the other hand seeks the friend’s good and zeal in this regard seeks to remove anything that opposes that friend’s good. Aquinas says that, “a man is said to be zealous on God’s behalf, when he endeavors, to the best of his means, to repel whatever is contrary to the honor or will of God.”

True and False Zeal

It is the zeal motivated by the love of God that marks true zeal.  God’s will, put simply, is that His glory be made known.  Anything that acts as an obstacle to this, especially evil and sin, is zealously opposed.  The zealot hates sin first and foremost because it is an offense against God.  Aquinas again: “a man is eaten up with a good zeal, who strives to remedy whatever evil he perceives; and if he cannot, bears with it and laments it.”

Notice that when Aquinas’ man is unable to remedy an evil, he tolerates it, but he also laments  it.  The man of good zeal, in imitation of Christ, takes the sin as if it was his own, grieves over it, and, united with the Passion of Christ, offers the Father penance for it.  He does not attack the other person, but instead wields the sword of the Spirit which penetrates into the evildoer’s heart.  This is a sure test as to whether you have true zeal or false zeal—are you willing to do penance for the person simply because you do not want God to be offended?  False zeal would rather “flame” the person because it is always tainted with self-love.

The true fanatic also knows zeal for the glory of God and the salvation of souls are two sides of the same coin.  God is never more glorified than in the conversion of sinners.  We usually utter trite sayings like “hate the sin, love the sinner” to remind us of this, but sinners are nearly impossible to love.  Instead it should be “hate the sin, but love God who wants to redeem the sinner.”  This is the discretion that the Israelites lacked and St. Paul warns about.  We must love our neighbor for God’s sake first knowing that even the most unrepentant of sinners is powerless against the flood of the Precious Blood.  It is fanatics that open the floodgates.

Believing in Purgatory

Divine Mercy, Grace, Heaven, Last Things, Purgatory, Suffering, , ,

There was time, especially during the Late Middle Ages, when Purgatory was an intrinsic element within popular Christian piety.  The popularity of Indulgences and their subsequent abuse went hand in hand.  Not so any longer.  Purgatory seems to belong to a superstitious past, part and parcel of a piety of fear.  A doctrine more than a belief, it is more like a Catholic punchline to a joke tinged with false humility.  Why it became this is a long and complicated story, but why it shouldn’t have, or more to the point, why we should make this doctrine one of our core beliefs in the here and now, is worth reflecting upon.

God always anticipates various attacks upon belief by raising up saints to counter them.  Very often these saints appear before the attack.  In this regard, Purgatory is no different for God inspired St. Catherine of Genoa, who died just before the start of the Protestant Revolution, to be the Prophetess of Purgatory.  The saint was given a vision of Purgatory and the tremendous suffering of its inhabitants.  But rather than focus on their pains, St. Catherine instead was struck by the joy of the suffering souls.  Rather than feeding the piety of fear, she places Purgatory in its proper context.

The Mindset of the Holy Souls

The fires of Purgatory are the flames of Divine love.  All that is not pure is being burned away in the fire of Christ’s love.  This of course is very painful, but everyone there knows that it is necessary.  In fact, the members of the Church Suffering “can remember nothing of themselves or others, whether good or evil, which might increase the pain they ordinarily endure; they are so completely satisfied with what God has ordained for them, that He should be doing all that pleases Him, and in the way it pleases Him, that they are incapable of thinking of themselves even in the midst of their greatest sufferings.”

While their pain is great, they find it nearly impossible to focus on it.  That is because all the ways in which they loved themselves more than they loved God is being purified.  They can only focus on what God is doing in them and they are “completely satisfied” with it.  They trust that moment by moment, no matter how acute their suffering is, they are approaching the fulfillment of all their desires.  So they choose to focus only on that and not the pain.  They have learned the lesson that would have served them well during their earthly sojourns, the same lesson the saint wants us to learn now as well: that each and every suffering we experience is a gift of Divine love meant to purify us.  We simply need to trust that is what God is doing and will to focus on that.  All too often we see suffering as an end, where God sees it as a means to our purification.  If we can take our eyes off ourselves long enough, then this becomes easy to grasp and it actually makes suffering easier.  This is the power of the Cross and we should never empty it of its power.

But it is not just a matter of trust.  The Holy Souls also see the sufferings as necessary.  They realize that even if it wasn’t purifying them, they still deserve it.  This is a lesson for us as well.  All too often we cannot see how a particular suffering is sanctifying us until later.  Our perseverance wavers.  This is because we don’t grasp that we deserve the punishment.  And this doesn’t mean just the big things like sickness, the loss of a loved one, or the loss of a job, but the little contradictions that we wrestle with every day.  The annoying habits of coworkers, our children and our spouses, the ones that we grumble against regularly, were sent to us by God to sanctify us.  But we must will them as such and therefore bear with them, knowing that they are necessary.  We must be convinced that not only do we need them, but we also deserve them.  The souls in Purgatory are satisfied because they are paying their debt to Divine justice.

The Joy of the Holy Souls

Many people think the belief in Purgatory in merely fear based.  But St. Catherine wants us to know it is the exact opposite.  “I do not believe it would be possible to find any joy comparable to that of a soul in purgatory, except the joy of the blessed in paradise—

a joy which goes on increasing day by day, as God more and more flows in upon the soul, which He does abundantly in proportion as every hindrance to His entrance is

consumed away.”  Rather than Purgatory being backed up to the Gates of Hell, it is the Mudroom of Heaven.  The souls there, even though they suffer, they still experience an unimaginable joy because they know that suffering is the gravitational force of Paradise.  Each moment they are approaching God’s orbit and they are increasingly joyful.  They are so joyful, in fact, that their joys, according to St. Catherine, are second only to the blessed saints in heaven.

The saint is revealing to us the secret of being joyful amid suffering—to see each suffering, big or small, as producing in us “an eternal weight of glory” drawing us ever closer to our deepest desire.  She wants us to be aware of the plight of the suffering souls so that we will in charity do all we can to alleviate their suffering, but she mainly speaks so that we will have the courage to embrace our Purgatory now.  This is the difference between a doctrine and a belief.  Purgatory is more than an idea, because ideas have consequences.  The consequence is that we learn from the actions of the suffering souls to joyfully accept all our sufferings now, knowing that they are necessary, not in any generic sense, but as coming from the purifying fire of Divine love.

 

The Roots of Feminism

Anthropology, Bible, Fatherhood, marriage, Mary, Scripture, Theology of the Body, , ,

Whenever we want to understand the cause of human behavior, it is usually instructive to return to the “beginning.”  The divinely inspired words of Genesis 2 gives us a valuable glimpse of human psychology.  In this regard, the roots of modern day feminism are no different.  The reverberations from the Fall were felt not only in relation to God, but man and woman also experienced a rupture in their relationship with one another.  Rather than living in domestic bliss, man and woman are destined for conflict.  With the entrance of fig leaves, complementarity is threatened by competition as man rejects his role of protector and instead is met with the temptation to rule over woman (c.f. Gn 3:16).

Competition and Complementarity

It is important to add that while the Fall left man and woman with relational myopia, it did not doom their relationship.  It is strained, but not irreparably so.  The path to reconciliation, at least according to Our Lord, passes through “the beginning” (c.f. Mt 19:4).  Man and woman were made to live in harmony.  But this harmony was (and still is) contingent upon harmony with God.  In fact, it was meant to be a sign of it.    This helps us to grasp why we say they were cursed.  It was not because hell hath no fury like a God that has been scorned, but because God refuses to give up on mankind.  His cursing of man and woman and their relationship is meant to awaken within them an innate sense that reality is not quite what it seems.

The lie hidden within the serpent’s temptation was that God was withholding something from Adam and Eve.  Up to this point, man’s fundamental stance was one of receptivity.  They saw everything as a gift from the God Who desired nothing more than to father them.  But with satanic sophistry, the woman is tempted to change her stance to one of appropriation rather than receptivity.  Rather than receiving a gift, she is tempted to seize it.

This tension between receptivity and appropriation helps us to understand why it was woman who was tempted by the serpent.  Femininity, properly understand, was meant to be a sign of mankind’s receptivity of the gift.  In fact this receptivity is stamped into her body.  Eve, in seizing the apple, rejects not only God but her femininity.  By attacking the woman Satan is able to distort both man and woman’s signpost for their relationship to God.  Woman is now cursed to experience the consequences of the new paradigm.  She will become an object of appropriation as man no longer views her as a gift but instead as something to be seized and controlled.

With the threat of appropriation always looming over woman, she is keenly aware that something is fundamentally wrong.  She experiences desire for man, yet that desire is often met by a lust for domination.  This experience then also carries with it a temptation for her. The desire and the lust are precisely because of her femininity.  The temptation then is to reject her femininity.  Thus we find the genesis of modern feminism in Genesis.

Grasping Masculinity

This helps to explain why ersatz feminists, rather than embracing all those things associated with authentic femininity, attempt to grasp masculinity.  And because they are grasping they grasp a counterfeit version of it.  They set fake masculinity on a pedestal and then try to imitate it by taking a pill that enables them to indulge all their desire for man (even though the Pill actually robs them of that desire) and lord it over everyone they meet.  They come to loathe their own and other’s femininity and hate any man who portrays authentic masculinity, mostly because they cannot seize it on their own.

The curse may haunt the woman, but it does not have the final say.  The path out is by embracing her femininity.  Eve may have set the tone, but the New Eve gives the escape route.  Mary is the archetype of femininity.  She is totally receptive—“be it done to me according to Thy word” (Lk 1:38).  She is the archetype not just because she is the perfect wife and mother, but because she is the perfect disciple of her Son.   She is the model of receptivity, praising “the Almighty Who has done great things for me.”

The tug of the curse cannot be overcome by trying harder—that too is the appropriated masculinity revealing itself.  Instead the solution is to submit to Christ Who offers the grace to embrace her true femininity.  The true feminist is one who demands of men around them that they be authentically men.  She knows that masculinity is not something she can grasp but must come as a gift from a man who is able to give it.

Adam fell in not guarding Eve’s femininity.  The New Adam, because He “handed himself over for her to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word, that he might present to himself the church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish empowers men to guard the femininity of woman” (Eph 5:25-27), restores man’s masculinity and empowers him to guard the femininity of woman.  Rather than seeing her as a threat to his own masculinity, he gifts himself to her.

Many of today’s feminists trace their ideological roots back to the 1960s.  If they were to dig further then they would find they extend back much further.  Failing to see this, they apply false solutions only exacerbating the problem.  Instead they should submit themselves and their femininity to Christ, the only One Who can fulfill their deepest desire.

Light in the Darkness

Church, Church Authority, Prayer, Spiritual Life, Spiritual Warfare, , , ,

At the close of the Great Jubilee Year of 2000, Pope St. John Paul II drafted a blueprint for the Church in the next millennium in his Apostolic Exhortation Novo Millennio Ineunte.  Through his Petrine office, the Pope played the prophet by emphasizing that the Church must  “shine ever more brightly” in the third millennium.  Not prone to echo merely pious sentiments, the Holy Father’s words are a clarion call to us Catholics living in dark ecclesial times especially by reminding us that Church’s luminosity is nothing more than a reflection of the light of the face of Christ in every historical period.  Darkness sets in then when we have “not first contemplated His face.”  Confronted with scandalous silence piled upon scandalous actions, many Catholics feel abandoned by the Church.  But once we allow the prophetic character of JPII’s program for restoring the Church’s luminosity to invigorate our lives we realize that it is not the Church that has abandoned us, but we the Church.  By failing to contemplate the face of Christ we are incapable of “letting our light shine before men”(c.f. Mt 5:16).  But if we listen to what the Successor of Peter told us almost 20 years ago, we can find a path back to the light.

Before outlining his program, we would be remiss if we ignored an important point that the Holy Father makes: “We are certainly not seduced by the naive expectation that, faced with the great challenges of our time, we shall find some magic formula. No, we shall not be saved by a formula but by a Person, and the assurance which he gives us: I am with you!” (NMI, 29).  Notwithstanding, the program is not something new but a revitalization of those practices that are at the heart of the Christian life.   These things are pathways to the face of Christ.

The Plan…

The first is a commitment to a holiness that is devoid of any mark of “minimalist ethic and a shallow religiosity” (NMI, 30).  We must each strive to attain a “high standard of ordinary Christian living” by which we judge everything on a scale of sanctity.  What I mean by this is that we live in a detached manner asking whether each and everything we do is contributing to our holiness.  God is, by His loving Providence, is providing at each and every moment means to grow in holiness.  We need only say yes and fully embrace what He has planned to give us from all eternity.

The “scale of sanctity” is related to the second pillar of the saint’s program: grace.  Fidelity to grace is the key to growing in holiness.  The pursuit of holiness is not enough because it is not something we can ever obtain on our own.  It depends solely upon how much sanctifying grace we are given.  As the word grace (gratis) suggests it is pure gift.  What that means is not that we must sit back and wait for it, but that we must be active in receiving the gift.  Receptivity and passivity are not the same thing.  We must have the docility to receive it in the manner in which God intends to give it to us, but also seeking out those encounters in which God bestows those gifts.

The remaining three pillars are related to those encounters.  The first is the rediscovery of the face of Christ in the Sacrament of Penance (c.f. NMI, 37).  Mercy is for the contrite and it is through the Sacrament of Penance in which our contrition and Christ’s mercy meet.  In an age in which sin remains bound by self-appointed victimhood, freedom is found by approaching the mercy seat of the One Who became a willing victim for us.  These true encounters with Christ, mediated by a Priest, should be frequent enabling us to see them as necessary even when our sin is not grave.

Likewise, the Sacrament of the Eucharist must be restored to a primacy of place.  The Pope “insist[ed] that sharing in the Eucharist should really be the heart of Sunday for every baptized person” (36) but we should be willing to go further and make the sharing of the Eucharist the heart of every day.  By contemplating the face of the suffering and resurrected Christ in the Eucharist, we are being conformed to Him Mass by Mass.  If we really believe that Christ is present and the source of all life, “where else would we go” but to Mass?  Our Lord will not be outdone in generosity so that when we generously make ourselves available for Daily Mass, we find it harder and harder to stay away.

Marked by the communal prayer of the Eucharist, we must also contemplate the face of Christ in prayer.  Prayer, especially mental prayer, is the ordinary means God uses to gift us with His grace.  Reading the signs of the times, especially the “widespread demand for spirituality,” the Pope called upon the Faithful not only to pray, but to be educated in the art of prayer.  This meant going the great spiritual masters of the Church like St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila and St. Thérèse of Lisieux.  More explicitly the Holy Father is saying that rather than looking elsewhere, especially in New Age spirituality, for “methods” of spirituality, that we should all re-connect with the mystical tradition of the Church.  All too often Catholics are told to pray, but in truth do not know how to.  Therefore parishes should become not just places of prayer, but schools of prayer where prayer is taught.

…And the Difference it Makes

While this plan will help individual Christians, it isn’t immediately apparent how it will help the Church.  Holier lay people aren’t going to fix corrupt prelates, especially when those prelates sit in the high places of the Church.  To see things this way however is to make a very worldly mistake, namely, seeing the Church as an institution and not as an organism.  The Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, is the extension of the Incarnation throughout time (c.f Mt 28:20 and this previous post).  The Church is holy because Christ is the Head.  The Mystical Body is holy because it has the Holy Spirit as its soul.  All those who share the indwelling of that same Spirit are members of that body.  But it also has members that have become diseased and are no longer capable of acting as parts of that same body. And just as a body has varied means to heal diseased parts of the body, so too the Church has the same power because it is always the Person of Christ who acts, even if He uses other members of the body as instruments.

Holy Members of the Church, both Militant and Triumphant, are healthy members of the Body that act to heal the diseased members of the Body.  They represent the true hierarchy of the Church.  The hierarchy of the Institutional Church, a hierarchy that will disappear, is meant only to be a sign of the true hierarchy.  Sometimes it fails as a sign and that’s when it is incumbent upon the true hierarchy to step up—not to lead the Institutional Church per se, but to be translucent members allowing the light reflected from the face of Christ to shine through them.   And if we put St. John Paul II’s plan into action and seek his intercession, that will be enough to heal the Church and be a light to a desperately dark world.

The NFP Lifestyle

Bioethics, Conscience, Contraception, Culture of Life, , ,

In recent years there have been a number of sociological studies linking marital happiness/success with methods of birth regulation.   Most of them show positive differences between those couples who practice NFP and those who use other methods of birth control, although not always to the degree that NFP Catholics like to advertise.  This is mostly due to the fact that couples practicing NFP fall into two categories—those who do so with a contraceptive mentality and those who live an NFP lifestyle.  It is the latter group which would likely show a significantly higher marital satisfaction.

I called it a “lifestyle” because it is about so much more than just family planning.  NFP reinforces the one flesh union of marriage even when the couple is not engaged in the marital embrace.  At the risk of pointing out the obvious, I will mention that, unlike woman, man’s fertility is non-cyclical.  He is fertile all the time.  This means that the burden of self-mastery often falls upon him.  In fact one could say self-mastery is at the heart of being a man.  The man, as he finds stamped into his body, is made to make a gift of himself.  But to give oneself away, you must first own yourself, that is, have total self-mastery.  Your yes only means something when you are free to say no.  Without this requisite self-mastery comes the constant temptation to “lord it over the woman” (c.f. Gen 3:16).  When you do not have control over yourself, you will attempt to control other people, especially those that are close to you.

The Burden of Fertility

While man does not experience his fertility as a burden per se, the woman does.  This doesn’t mean that it is a bad thing, only that it carries with it “labor” even if that labor is joyfully and willfully endured.  She is the one who, ultimately, must bear the consequences of fertility.  Family planning and birth control often fall upon her.  As proof of this, despite all the nasty side effects, a woman is willing to take a birth control pill.  This is also the arena in which NFP can facilitate a true one flesh union by enabling the man to help carry the load of her fertility with her.

The most obvious time of her cycle is during menstruation.  The man experiences his constant fertility as a burden so as to be united bodily with his wife during a particularly painful period of time.  The burden of fertility that she is feeling can also be felt, albeit in a different way, in his body too.  He literally is practicing compassion, that is suffering with.  When borne with love and patience he is making a bodily gift of himself to his wife.

Most men already do this, although perhaps in not such a deliberate way.  But for those men who practice NFP and have experienced the “disappointment” of the arrival of an early period, this can enable them to see how the one flesh giving might continue.  Likewise, when for “just reasons” the couple is using NFP to avoid pregnancy the man puts aside the drive of his constant fertility so as to share in and through his body her fertility.  This is where real manhood, that is manhood founded upon self-mastery, is particularly felt because he feels an increase in the burden of his fertility because of the inviting presence of her pheromones signaling her fertility.  Even in abstaining from the marital embrace the couple is experiencing a type of one-flesh union when they join their wills together in postponing pregnancy.

NFP’s Effect on Family Life

An NFP lifestyle also makes for a happier home life in general in the relationship between the parents and children.  Schooled in self-mastery by NFP the parents are better able to love their children in a disinterested fashion.  As John Paul II, in a defense of Humanae Vitae once said:

“[parents that are contracepting] cannot sacrifice their egoism to the good of their spouse, will likewise lack generosity, patience, serenity and calm assurance in their relations with their children.  They will love their children to the degree to which their children bring them joy—that is selfishly and not for their own sakes; they will cajole them and teach them self-indulgence and self-love.  Instead of the peace given by self-mastery, unrest will reign in the family, because the state of tension created by a truncated sexual act surrounded by precautions, an act that is to be an unreserved gift of self, must in the long term be communicated to the children.  It seems that the increasing prevalence of anxiety and even certain neuroses results in large part from contraceptive practices.”

For the better part of the last half-century, the teaching Church has been (at best) silent promoting her teachings on birth control.  It is time that the rest of the Church step out into the void and preach the freedom that comes from ditching contraception.  The one flesh union within marriage is a daily lived experience.

 

The Currency of Eternity

End Times, Faith and Reason, God's Love, Grace, Heaven, Last Things, Mercy, Spiritual Life, , , ,

“This thing all things devours: Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; Gnaws iron, bites steel; Grinds hard stones to meal; Slays king, ruins town and beats high mountain down.”  What is it?  Fans of The Hobbit will recognize this riddle as the last riddle that Gollum asked Bilbo during their inquisitorial skirmish in the dark.  The riddle is met with panic on Bilbo’s part because he has no clue as to the answer and his opponent is growing increasingly impatient and hungry.  In an effort to delay the inevitable, Bilbo blurts out “time!” Gollum is furious because time is the right answer.  Bilbo eventually escapes from his ravenous captor but the readers are left with the inescapable fact that time is not just the answer to the riddle, but a riddle in itself.  St. Augustine once waxed philosophic when he asked, “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know” (Confessions, XI).  But the fact that he included the question within his great spiritual biography shows that this question is more than just a philosophical question.  It has practical applications.

Like Augustine then we must grapple with what time is before we look at how we should best spend it.  Aristotle had what is probably the most succinct definition when he said that time is “the numbering of motion according to before and after.”  His definition captures three important elements.  First, time is a measure of change or motion.  Where there is no change, there is no time.  Second, because it is a “numbering” it must be measured relative to some standard.  We use the movement of the sun as the standard.  But it is the third element, “according to before and after” that merits the most attention.

Before and After

“Before and after” do not exist in external reality.  All that exists is the present moment.  But time refers not just to the present moment, but also past and future.  Past and future, or before and after to use Aristotle’s classification only exist within some measuring consciousness.  In fact, it is only this measuring consciousness that is able to hold time together in a unified whole.  Time then is founded in reality, but only exists formally in the mind.

This helps us to grasp why two people can experience the passage of an hour very differently.  It is a relative measure to their consciousness of time that enables it to slow down or speed up.  Our psychological attention span is made up of the immediate past that is held in memory, the present moment passing before us and our psychic projection of the anticipated next moment.  This explanation of time also clarifies why time speeds up as we get older.  As our vivid memory of past events “thickens” our experience of time is more past-centric causing us to focus more on time past rather than the present and future.  Time then seems to be moving faster because the perspective is of looking back.  For children the experience is the exact opposite as their perspective is more future oriented and time appears to move more slowly.

All that being said, and admittedly only skimming the philosophical surface, we can begin to examine how this definition of time helps us to better spend our time.  “Spend our time” is more than a mere colloquialism—it reveals an important truth.  Time is the currency in which we buy our eternal destiny.  It is the talent that the demanding landowner bestows upon us and then asks for an account of our return of investment (c.f Mt 25:14-30).  Unless we stir up this sense of urgency no amount of philosophical musing is going to help us.  The great mystery confronting our modern culture is that no one seems to have any time anymore.  It is as if time is disappearing.  The truth however is that we are living in a culture that is particularly adept at wasting time and so it is easy to get caught up in it.  We surround ourselves with diversions that steal from us our eternal currency.

Spending Time

Time—past, present and future—is meant to prepare us for eternity when all three elements blend into one.  The past and the future will give way to the eternal present.  The past will be a blur of mercy.  Mercy in the sins forgiven and sins avoided.  Mercy in the unmerited gifts given and for the Divine friendship that elevated us.  The past simply becomes a measure of mercies received.  By way of anticipation then our past “now” should be measured through the lens of mercy. This is time well spent—in contrition and in gratitude.

Likewise the future which should be spent in hope.  Hope is the virtue that enables us to steadfastly cling to the promises of God.  We should spend our time setting our eyes on the prize and stirring up our desire for it.  A strong hope resists the time thieves and keeps account of time spent.  If you think time is moving too fast, fix your eyes on Heaven.  That is almost certainly going to slow time down to a crawl.

Mercy and hope both pass with the passage of time (but not their memory and effects).  But the one thing that will remain—charity.  And that is what we must do in the present moment.  Charity, that is the love of God and the love of neighbor for God’s sake, is the only way in which we may profit by the time.  At each moment we can gather eternal treasures by giving that moment to God.  Never put off an act of charity for later—do it now.  If what you are doing can’t be offered to God—stop.  Started something without offering it to God?  Offer it now.  Waiting in line?  Offer acts of love and praise to God.

Time may devour all things, but only when it is not well spent.  Let us learn from St. Alphonsus Liguori, the great moral Doctor of the Church, who once asked for the grace to never waste a moment’s time and then pledged never to do so. “Son, observe the time” (Eccl 4:23).

Scaring the Hell Out of Us

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“Wide is the path to heaven and narrow is the path to hell.”  Count this among the things that Jesus never said, but many of us Christians act as if he did.   The primrose path to heaven is paved with, at best dismissal, at worst open mockery of “fire and brimstone” preachers.  Give us the Good News they say and let’s not focus on childish fears like hell.  In our satirical heave-ho however we might easily overlook the fact that we would also see the most famous Preacher Who ever walked the face of the earth as a fire and brimstone guy.  For all of our avoiding of the topic, Jesus spoke an awful (in the truest sense of the word) lot about hell.  Perhaps then it is time to examine just how much we should focus on hell.  This post is not about going around threatening everyone with hell.  Most people carry enough hell around with them currently that they really do need to hear the Good News—at first.  But at a certain point we must all maturely face the eternal Bad News in order to grow in our spiritual lives.

“Mature” Christians and Hell

Herein lies part of the problem—we think that mature Christians need not think much of hell.  Even if that we true, which it is not, we conclude that since mature Christians need not think of hell, then we can skip that step.  But an examination of the spiritual lives of many of the saints reveals that a number of them received visions of hell.  St. Faustina, St. John Bosco, St. Catherine of Siena, and even the great mystical Doctor of the Church, St. Theresa of Avila all were given mystical experiences of hell.  The latter described her visitation in stark terms:

I felt a fire in my soul…My bodily sufferings were unendurable. I have undergone most painful sufferings in this life… yet all these were as nothing in comparison with what I felt then, especially when I saw that there would be no intermission, nor any end to them…I did not see who it was that tormented me, but I felt myself on fire, and torn to pieces, as it seemed to me; and, I repeat it, this inward fire and despair are the greatest torments of all…I was so terrified by that vision – and that terror is on me even now while I am writing – that though it took place nearly six years ago, the natural warmth of my body is chilled by fear even now when I think of it.

Since the saints are the healthiest of all Christians we must then admit that turning our gaze towards hell is a healthy thing to do.  We must admit that it is only our immersion in modern psychology which insists that guilt is the greatest evil that keeps us from doing so.  Guilt is natural and thus a tool God has given man for his perfection.  It is meant to stimulate sorrow for sin, the principle of all of our growth in holiness.

The journey of the spiritual life can be summed up as a journey of love; a journey from a love of self to the love of God.  We may love God, but until we are honest enough to admit that we still love ourselves more, we will never progress.  We must grow to the point where we love God more than self.  For most of us, this journey will take a lifetime.

The standard Act of Contrition reflects this as well—we tell God that we are sorry because we fear His just punishments (love of self, leading to a fear of hell) and most of all because we have offended Him Who is All Good and worthy of all our love (love of God, leading to filial fear, that is the fear of offending His goodness).  Until we are free of inordinate self-love, that is, love of self more than love of God, we “need” the fear of hell to keep us moving.

Meditating on Hell Regularly

This healthy fear of hell comes about, in imitation of the saints, by meditating on hell itself.  In an age where most sin is “normal” it becomes especially important so that we can grasp the horror of sin.  This is why Our Lord uses such descriptive language.   It is not just that it “scares the hell out of us” but that, in catching a glimpse of the horror of what we deserve, we can fall more deeply in love with the Giver of eternal life.  Fear of hell then is a necessary foundation for the filial fear that follows.

Obviously not all of us will be given visions of hell like the one from St. Theresa described above.  Those descriptions, especially St. John Bosco’s, are helpful for us.  Dante’s Inferno can also be very helpful.

Before closing it is worth examining one of the intellectual obstacles to meditating on hell—its eternity. If we are not careful, we can allow this intellectual obstacle to lead us to conclude hell is not really that bad.  The occupants of hell suffer most because they have lost their true good—God Himself—and they hate Him for it.  They know the truth that it was their choice that put them there, but because their will is fixed they can never repent.  They simply go on hating.  They also suffer other torments as well.  The point however is that all of these torments are eternal.   Quite obviously we have nothing in our experience that maps back to eternity.  But we can begin to grasp its eternal horrors when we think about our pains and sufferings in this life.  No matter how much pain and suffering we are experiencing, we always have in the back of our minds that they will be over eventually.  This awareness brings with it a certain hope and its accompanying comfort, perhaps the only comfort we have at a given time.  Now, imagine that hope being removed and you become aware of the fact that never, ever, will the pain end.  This would lead to perpetual despair without any hope of relief.  Even the most minor of irritations would be unbearable if it never ended.  This is why Dante affixes a sign at the entrance of his Inferno that reads “Abandon all hope ye who enters here.”  Please God that living in this time of hope, we will be spurred to love Him and desire to see Him face to face.

 

How Do You Talk to an Angel?

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When the Son of God came down from heaven and became the Son of Mary, He did not come alone.  He brought many of His friends, the angels, with Him.  Throughout His earthly sojourn we find the angels playing a pivotal role.  Whether it be in glorifying God at His birth, ministering to Him in the desert, strengthening Him in the Garden or joyfully announcing His resurrection, the angels were His constant companions.  He did this not because He “needed” their help, but because we do.  He wanted to reveal to us just how vital angels are to our eternal well-being.  It seems fitting then that we take an opportunity to reflect on our relationship with them.

In a very real sense we were made for friendship with the angels.  Any time that Our Lord mentions the eternal reward He is promising, He always mentions the angels in the same breath (c.f. Luke 12:8-9, Mt 25:31-46).  But this friendship begins now; the angels are “all ministering spirits sent to serve, for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation” (Hebrews 1:14).  But this community with the angels can remain entirely abstract unless we have a means to communicate with them.

Talking with the Angels

Our side of the communication is rather straightforward.  We can invoke the angels and speak to them directly, knowing that they hear us.  How we invoke them however is also important.  We should never invoke an angel by name.  The Church has cautioned the Faithful about this and in recent times the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has spoken against the habit of asking your Guardian Angel his name:

“The practice of assigning names to the Holy Angels should be discouraged, except in the cases of Gabriel, Raphael and Michael whose names are contained in Holy Scripture.” Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy, 216

This can be a dangerous spiritual practice as you have no assurance that the name you have discerned is not, rather than your Guardian Angel, a demon.  Once you repeat the demon’s name, you are inviting him and giving him a certain power over you.  In fact, because the Church, whose authority binds even those in heaven, has spoken definitively you can be sure that the name you “hear” is either the result of an over-active imagination (hopefully) or the name of a demon.  It is most assuredly not the name of your obedient Guardian Angel.  Better simply to address him as “Guardian Angel.”  The only exception to this rule are the names of the angels revealed in Scripture—Michael, Gabriel and Raphael.

Of equal greater interest to us is how the angels communicate with us.  To answer this question we must first look at how it is that man receives any communication.  When words are spoken to us or read by us, the words themselves are merely symbols that are meant to invoke concepts.  We hear or see the words and then we form images (or phantasms as St. Thomas calls them) in our imagination, supplement those images with other images from our memory, and abstract the concepts from the images with our intellect.

A similar thing would obviously happen if an angel was to audibly speak to us (either by gathering matter together to make a body) or by simply moving air to make sound waves that form the spoken words or even writing us a message.  But this would not be the normal way in which they would communicate with us.  The angels’ normal mode of communication, that is when one angel communicates with another, is to simply place the idea they want to convey in the mind of the other angel.  They do this because of the manner in which angels naturally come to know things—the infusion of ideas directly into their minds.

There is a principle of with Scholastic philosophy that “whatever is received, is received according to the mode of the receiver.”  What this means is that when angels communicate with us, they use not their mode of receiving communication, but ours.  They do not infuse ideas directly into our minds, but instead they move our imagination and memory with certain images that will set off a chain of thought.  The angels, especially our own personal guardian angel, know us well enough to know what images it will take to move our intellects in a certain direction.

A Hidden Corollary

This is, by the way, is why we have difficulty knowing that the angels have communicated with us.  We would tend, because it is so “natural” for our imaginations to actively provide images that come out of nowhere, to think it was just the result of our own thinking.  But there is an important corollary to this as well.  The fallen angels retained this power to move the material faculties of the imagination and memory and thus they too can set us off on a train of thought of their design.  Again, this is why we do not always know whether a particular temptation comes from us or from a demon.

In the information age, we spend a lot of time and resources making sure our personal data is secure.  We would not want hackers to get access to highly sensitive material.  The demons are like hackers.  They can easily hack into our memory and imagination and pull up particular memories or images to tempt us with.  This means we must constantly guard against putting any images there ourselves that could be used against us.  Many men report being able to remember a single pornographic image from 20 years ago and this is part of the reason why.

But we are not left unprotected.  Our Guardian Angel, whose main role is to protect us from the demonic invaders can guard our imagination and memory.  We should regularly seek their help so that the moment one of these images arises, we turn it over to them.  As this habit grows, we will reflexively turn them over and the demonic will seek another means of attacking us.

In a sermon he wrote for the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, Blessed John Henry Newman articulated one of the dangers of an “educated age” such as our is that we take little account of the angels.  When all thoughts are explained as simply the result of the firing of various synapses we can ignore that our friends the angels are still there and desiring to communicate with us.  Let us not fall into this sin of the educated age and rely ever greater on our heavenly ministers.

Marriage as the Ultimate Act of Human Freedom

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Modern sensibilities find arranged marriages to be utterly repulsive.  They represent a great affront to human freedom and harken to a time of patriarchal repression of women.  Nevertheless, for much of human history men and women came together in marriage, not through courtship, but through some prior arrangement.  I am not suggesting that we return to those days, but instead to admit that given the glass house of marriage that we are living in, we should not be so quick to throw stones of subjection and patriarchy without first grasping the wisdom in the practice.  In particular, we can look to see how both love and freedom were actually protected and promoted by this practice so that we can apply these principles to the decrepit institution of marriage today.

In order to begin, we must put aside our gut reactions in order to see why, at least in principle, arranged marriages could work.  A father, when he truly loves his daughter, sees her as a gift and wants her to be fulfilled in the truest sense of the word.  That fulfillment includes the time when she must join herself to a husband.  Because of his great love, he wants to make sure that she will be yoked to a man who has a sense of responsibility of the great gift that has been bestowed upon him.  And so, in arranging the marriage, he was vetting his future son-in-law to make sure that he was worthy of such a priceless gift.  Did it always happen like this?  Of course not.  But the principle which animated it is wholly lacking in today’s culture and so bears some further examination.

Attraction in Marriage

What if the woman was not attracted to the man or vice versa?  Attraction, both sensual and emotional, is very important, but only in the sense that they contain the seeds of love.  But love is not the same thing as attraction.  Attraction is about the pleasure your presence brings to me.  In other words, it is a love of the feelings that you stir in me.  It draws me towards you, but I must decide whether you have more value than the mere trigger of pleasant feelings.  It is ironic that we recoil at the idea of our parents arranging our marriages while we have no problem submitting to the genetics of our passions, the same genetics we have received from our parents.

Attraction should serve to spur me towards love to see if the good that I detected is a real good for me.  When it does, love emerges in which my consciousness of the fact that you are gift (“a good for me”) stirs me to make a gift of myself (“to be a good for you”).  This is a solid foundation of love in which the couple sees each other as a gift and takes responsibility for the well-being of the other.  Once love emerges then genuine attraction roams free because it is directed towards the full value of the person and not just some attributes that I happen to like.  When a relationship never grows past attraction, then true love never develops—infatuation, lust, cupidity, yes—but not true love.  This seems to be one of major obstacles facing marriage today; an inability to move past attraction.  Marriages end because “I just don’t love you anymore,” which really means “I never really loved you, only the feelings you stirred in me.”  They put too much stock in the laws of attraction and when the market crashed they were left with nothing.  Arranged marriages may not have been the solution to this problem, but at least they recognized that attraction was only a seed of love and not a foundation; a lesson we would do well to learn.

Freedom and Marriage

The modern distaste for arranged marriages also sees them as a great affront against freedom.  We are right to think we should be free to marry whomever we choose, but we fail to see that true freedom comes not in choosing who to marry, but in being married.  What this means is that marriage truly is the ultimate sign of human freedom.  When a couple says “I do” it constitutes the greatest act of human freedom.  Why is that so?  Because they are saying that no matter what happens, nothing will change their will to be yoked to the other person.  They are free from any feelings that come or go—their freedom is stronger.  They are free from any person who might come or go in their life—their freedom is stronger.  They are free from any external circumstances that might happen—their freedom is stronger.  In fact, far from diminishing their freedom, holding onto the “I do” and making it an “I am” they are actually increasing it.  To give in to any of the thousands of temptations to call it quits is not freedom, but slavery.

Unlike the marriages of today, arranged marriages emphasized the freedom through the permanence of their consent.   We on the other hand emphasize the “I’d like to” even going so far as to cohabitate on a trial basis.  With no real emphasis on the “I do” we find it just as easy to say “I no longer like to.” To say “I do is to say “I will” and it shows that the human will is stronger than any other compulsion or external circumstance.  Marriage is the great sign of human freedom.

The Glory of God

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Within the Christian vocabulary there are a number of terms that are regularly bandied about, but cry out for definition.  Grace immediately comes to mind as one of the most common.  A close second however is the term glory.  We know it is something that we are supposed to give to God in everything we do (1Cor 10:31).  Short of that however we are hard pressed to describe what this actually entails.  For something so important then it behooves us to reflect on exactly what we mean when we speak of the glory of God and how it is possible that we could actually “give” it to Him.

Because we cannot know God as He is in this life, we spend time contemplating His attributes—His goodness, His power, His wisdom, His omniscience, His Immutability, and so on.  But God Himself “spends His time” contemplating only one—His beauty.  That is, His beauty captures all of His attributes in their wholeness, proportionality, and radiance.  Sacred Scripture has a word for this undiminishing beauty, glory.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Glory

In theological terms God’s beauty, that is, what He is eternally contemplating, is referred to as His intrinsic glory.  From a human perspective this might seem the very height of narcissism, until we call to mind that all goodness and truth are found in God.  The Father, in gazing upon (or knowing) His perfection generates the Son.  From the mutual love of the Father and the Son for the Divine Perfection proceeds the Holy Spirit. Basking in the light of His infinite perfection, God has no need for anything other than Himself and yet, still He created.  Without any need, the only reason for creation must be found in Himself, that is, it must be because of Who He is.  Out of love of His own goodness, He desired to communicate that goodness to creatures.

No finite creature could ever “hold” the infinite goodness and so He makes a multitude of creatures, each with the purpose of reflecting His goodness, even if to a lesser or greater degree.  Or, as St. Thomas says, “the entire universe, with all its parts, is ordained towards God as its end, inasmuch as it imitates, as it were, and shows forth the Divine goodness, to the glory of God” (ST I, q.65, a.2).

From this notion, theologians develop the term extrinsic glory.  This is the reflection of the intrinsic glory that is found in creatures.  The Psalmist proclaims “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps 19:1) and St. Paul reminds the Romans that “Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made” (Romans 1:20).  Simply in existing, all things reflect God’s glory.  But He also willed to make creatures who not only reflected His glory, but could bask in it with Him.

The proof of this is within the story of creation, as elucidated through the scholastic dictum, “first in the order of intention is last in the order of execution” sheds further light on this.  The last act of creation, that is, the first act of the Seventh Day, is God’s “command” for man to bask in it by joining in God’s rest seeing all things as “good, very good” in reflecting the glory of God.  Man is invited to set aside this time specifically for basking in the “after burn” of God’s glory as a perpetual reminder of his purpose.

Man, then, among all visible creation is the only creature with the capacity to “give” God glory.  Like the rest of visible creation he reflects it, but with his unique powers of knowing and loving he can also give it back by acknowledging it and willing his participation in it.  This is what we mean when we say that man gives glory to God—not that God doesn’t already have it, but that through adoration and praise he may willingly return it to God.

Glory as a Temptation

Man is constantly confronted with two temptations.  The first is to see only the glory and to forget the One Whom it points to.  God has put just enough traces of His glory in creation so that man will seek out the true source.  But even these mirrors are so beautiful that there is always the temptation that they eclipse the One whom they were meant to image.  We can fall in love with the creatures and forget the Creator.

While this temptation is ever-present in our fallen world, it is the second temptation that is the more serious of the two.  With the capacity to give God glory comes the (seeming) ability to keep it for ourselves.   This is the sin of Lucifer and his minions and forms the seeds of pride within us.

Now we see that St. Paul’s admonition to the Corinthians to do all for the glory of God is no pious sentiment, but a program of life.  Every thing that we think, do, and say should find its reference point in magnifying God’s glory.  Our Lord too wanted this to be our program of life.  He told His disciples that their light, that is their reflection of God’s glory, should so shine that when other men see what they are doing they know immediately that it is not their own work, but a manifestation of God’s glory (Mt 5:17).  This constant referral of all things to God’s glory increases our share in it both now and in eternal life—“ whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God.”

Our Lady, Queen of Martyrs

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Today, the Church celebrates the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows.  Although this liturgical celebration goes all the way back to the late 15th Century, there are still many people who do not know about the powerful intercession of Our Lady under this title.  To foster a devotion to Our Lady of Sorrows, we need to begin by asking why a devotion to Mary is not enough.  Why must there be all these different titles for her and why do we have different feast days attached to the various titles?  Certainly it serves the practical purpose of introducing us to her.  But there is more to it than that.  Once the Church promotes a particular title for Our Lady, it gives the Faithful a right to call upon her under the specific title and to expect her to act.  This is why the four Marian dogmas, namely her Divine Motherhood (Mother of God), Immaculate Conception (Immaculata), perpetual virginity (Virgin of Virgins Our Mother), and Assumption (Queen of Heaven and Earth), each carry a title with them.  By invoking Our Lady under those particular titles we can expect her to act on our behalf in very specific ways.  In this regard Our Lady of Sorrows (Queen of Martyrs) is no different.  What makes her specific intercession under this title so important is the fact that living in this “valley of tears”, we are in need of her constant compassion.

There are some very important implications that flow from the Immaculate Conception and help us to know Mary as Our Lady of Sorrows more fully.  Recall that Mary in the Immaculate Conception was preserved from the stain of Original Sin.  Put another way, because of the grace Our Lord merited on the Cross, he redeemed His Mother before her birth.  One could then assume that the Immaculate Conception made Mary immune from pain and death since they are consequences of Original Sin.  Now this is partially true in that the pain and death that Our Lord and Our Lady suffered were not a result of Original Sin but stem from human nature itself.  It was only by grace that Adam was exempt from pain and death in the state of Original Innocence.  Both Jesus and Mary voluntarily accepted suffering and death—He in his vocation as Redeemer, she in order to unite herself with Him in her role as the New Eve.

The fact that suffering and death were in a sense voluntary for Our Lady is something we should not overlook.  By reflecting deeply upon this truth, we will fall more deeply in love with the Lord’s most precious gift to us.  It actually made her more sensitive to suffering than we could possibly imagine.  As fallen creatures we suffer from a darkening of our intellects, a weakening of our wills and our passions have the capacity to run wild.  By not inheriting a fallen human nature, Mary had perfect integrity of soul.  Her soul was perfectly ordered so that she had no ignorance, her will was always ordered to love of God, and her passions were always under the control of reason and will.  This means her emotions were more intense than ours, not less.  She was never ignorant of the evil of sin.  As the “handmaid of the Lord” her heart was always consumed by a love of God.  Our imperfection often makes us insensible to evil and our hearts are consumed by love of self.

Hidden in this is a great law in the spiritual life.  Suffering is always proportionate to one’s sanctity.  Being holy one naturally feels all things more acutely, including the evil of sin.  Mary, as the holiest of God’s creatures then carried a great weight of sorrow.  With such a perfect love of God as the One offended by sin and love of her Son Whom sin crucifies she suffered immensely. So too because she had no ignorance her sorrows were also proportionate to her intellectual enlightenment.  When we suffer we hardly know half our misfortune and in a sense become numb, whereas she was flooded with a light that was painful.

It is not without purpose that the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows follows liturgically upon the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.  Because of all we have said about Mary’s immaculate condition we can say that no one, with the exception of Our Lord could have grasped darkness of the Passion or its horrors more completely than her.  While the immensity of her suffering is virtually unimaginable, it is clear that without being given a singular grace, Mary would have died from them.  All that is required for martyrdom is the willful acceptance of suffering sufficient to cause death even if God preserves the martyr through a singular grace.  As an aside this is why the Church has revered St. John the Evangelist as a martyr even though he did not die in the caldron of boiling oil.  So too the Church considers Mary a martyr as St. Bernard says “Mary was a martyr not by the sword of the executioner, but by bitter sorrow of heart.”

This is no mere “white” martyrdom but as Queen of Martyrs her martyrdom was greater than all the “red” martyrs.  In the first place, the martyrs all had to endure sufferings of body.  Mary’s sufferings were primarily of the soul, a perfect soul whose sufferings would have spilled over into her body.  While all the martyrs suffered the torments inflicted upon them, the love of Christ made their sufferings somehow sweet.  We read in story after story of the martyrs how they were martyred in a sense of bliss.  There was none of this in Mary’s martyrdom.  She had to watch her only Son suffer—the same Son she knew to be most innocent and lovable and God incarnate.  Because of His role as Redeemer she also knew that she could do nothing to alleviate His suffering, but instead she was to suffer with Him.  We often will hide our sufferings from those we love because we do not want them to suffer watching us suffer.  This means that Mary was keenly aware that her presence on Calvary only made Jesus’ suffering worse, which in turn increased her sadness all the more.

Our Lady of Sorrows

In commenting on the anguish endured by the mother of the Maccabees who witnessed the martyrdom of her sons, St. Alphonsus Liguori says that anyone can understand that the sufferings of children are also borne by their mothers who witness it.   So Our Lady suffered all the scourges, thorns, nails and cross in her heart.  He says that “the heart of Mary became as it were a mirror of the Passion of the Son.”

Her martyrdom was also greater because it lasted the longest.  He begins not in the Passion, but in the prophecy of Simeon when he promised that a sword would pierce her soul (Lk 2:35).  From that moment on, she knew that Our Lord would be contradicted in all things.  So while Abraham suffered great anxiety for three days knowing his son was to die (Gn 22) and David for seven days (2Sam 12:14-31), Our Lady suffered in silence for 33 years knowing that her Son what to die and ignominious death.  She submitted herself to the will of God and bore all these things in the silence of her heart (Lk 2:51).  In fact when Our Lady revealed herself to St. Bridget she said there was not a moment after that point in which this knowledge did not pierce her soul—“As often as I looked at my Son, as often as I wrapped Him in His swaddling-clothes, as often as I saw His hands and feet, so often was my soul absorbed, so to say, in fresh grief; for I thought how He would be crucified. My eyes filled with tears, and my heart was tortured with grief.”

Her martyrdom did not end at the Resurrection either, but continued after as well.  Given the horrors that she witnessed she would not have wanted to see any of His Passion go to waste.  Each time she encountered someone who rejected her Son and His Church she would relive the ugliness of His Passion because the suffering for those souls would have been in vain.  This is why she is also the Mother of Mercy wanting to see the fruits of the Passion applied to as many people as possible.

Given all this, the Church gives us this day devoted to Our Lady of Sorrows so that we might show our gratitude to Our Lady by meditating upon her dolors and showing pity for her in her sorrow.  There are two principal fruits that come from this.  The first is that those who call upon Our Lady of Sorrows shall grow in true self-knowledge.  This flows directly from Simeon’s prophecy that through her sufferings “the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed” (Lk 2:35).  Secondly, by meditating upon her sorrows we will grow in sorrow for our own sins.  Finally through our growth in the knowledge of Our Lady’s share in the sufferings of Our Lord keeps her from being seen a mere instrument but a true Mother and co-Redemptrix.

Our Lady of Sorrows, cause of our joy, pray for us!

 

On Hurricanes and Divine Judgment

God's Will, Mercy, Purgatory, Redemption, Suffering, , ,

Preparations are under way throughout much of the East Coast of the United States for the arrival of Hurricane Florence.  Houses are being boarded up, supplies are being purchased and evacuation plans are being executed.  Meanwhile “fire and brimstone” preachers throughout the country are preparing their sermons about Florence bringing with her the strong winds of Divine Wrath.  These foreboding missives usually greatly miss their mark and bring with them not fear, but mirth, as both the world and Christians alike laugh at them.  Hilarity, that is, until they realize that these prophets of gloom might actually have a point, even if they have failed typesetting their message in its proper context.

We cannot be too quick to dismiss these preachers of peril.  Be it earthquakes (c.f. Ps 17:8, Is 13:13), droughts (c.f. Jer 3:2), floods or calamities in general (c.f. Is 24:5), Scripture is unambiguous in its account of God using natural calamities in order to punish sinners.  Plus, we find a similar echo among the preaching of the saints.  St. Basil said, that “No one troubles himself about inquiring why drought, lightning, hail, are sent down upon us; they are sent us on account of our sins and because we preserve an impenitent heart.”  St. Anselm meanwhile suggested that “By offending God we not only excite His anger but the anger of all creation.”  We could multiply the examples, but the point is that there is an important truth that needs to be heard.

Setting the Proper Context

The problem then is not that what they are saying is untrue, it is that it lacks the proper context.  At the heart of the Christian message is a point that is so foundational that we can easily overlook it.  Death, although considered an evil in itself, is not the worst thing that can happen to you.  The worst thing that can happen to you is that you end up in hell.   But there is, of course, the flip side of that coin.  The best thing that could possibly happen to you is to enter into Eternal Life with God.  What this means for the question at hand is that there really can be no meaningful discussion about “innocent children” who are killed.  They will get their reward.  A reward that, when they look back on their suffering and untimely death, will make those things seem so disproportionately small compared to the bliss they are enjoying.  They will even be grateful it happened because it was the doorway into their present state.  No sane person would ever complain that their liberator was too rough in granting them free from captivity.

Likewise those who die in unrepentance also receive what they deserve.  But even their death is a mercy.  God knows that they will continue to go on sinning only increasing their sufferings in hell.  So, in His abundant mercy, He puts an end to it so that they do no further harm to themselves.  He also puts an end to not only their offense against Him, but their offense against their neighbors whom they invite into sin with them.  Both justice and mercy at all times.  But we must also look to the survivors, both “innocent” and guilty alike.  How can we reconcile this aspect of punishment with the tremendous sufferings that they will have to endure?

Just as our imaginary interlocutor makes the distinction between the dead and the survivors, so too must we mark the difference between the living and the dead.  For those that die, their punishment or lack thereof is eternal.  But temporal punishments are wholly different.  God issues those for the express purpose of leading to the individual to conversion.  As the Doctor of the Church St. Alphonsus Liguori put it,  “my brethren, let us convince ourselves of what I have undertaken to show you today, namely, that God does not afflict us in this life for our injury but for our good, in order that we may cease from sin, and by recovering His grace escape eternal punishment.”   As the tolerant and loving Messiah once told us: the path to destruction is wide so that He must at times give a foretaste of this destruction in order that people will rebuild on the narrow path (c.f Mt 7:13).  Comfort in this fallen world rarely leads to comfort in the next.

The Good News and the Bad News

Denial of what has been said so far amounts to a denial of another foundational element of the Christian message—the Good News is really that includes the bad news.  Sufferings are inevitable in this world, but Christ liberated us from, not suffering, but useless suffering.  But it is only useful when it is accepted in a spirit of penance.  Otherwise it does have an air of cruelty about it, but only in our steady refusal of reality.  United with Christ however it carries with it the fragrance of freedom.

This is why the objection that these natural disasters seem rather indiscriminant won’t do.  They are part and parcel to God’s Providence.  Contained within the chaos of the calamity, are personal invitations to penance.  Penance that comes from the hands of God not only pays a debt to Divine justice, but heals the effects of the sin within each individual person.  The sufferings are only to the degree that they are needed for this purpose and no more.  There is both justice and mercy, neither of which can exist without the other.

For those outside the path of the hurricane, I close with a quote from gentle Jesus.  When His disciples asked him about the fate of a group of calamitous Galileans, He warned them “unless you do penance, you will likewise perish” (Lk 13:3).  The circumstances are different, but the invitation remains the same—do penance so that you can enter into eternal life.  The Hound of Heaven will not cease to hunt you until you are safely within the room of His Father’s house.

Power Play

Abortion, Bioethics, Contraception, Human Dignity, Magisterium, Theology of the Body, , ,

As the Church marks the 50th anniversary of Humanae Vitae, much has been said regarding the prophetic character of Blessed Paul VI’s controversial encyclical.  In particular, the Pope predicted that four things would happen as contraceptive use spread throughout a society.  There would be an increase in marital infidelity, a general lowering of moral standards, a loss of reverence for woman as she is reduced to an instrument for the satisfaction of a man’s desires and governments would use coercive power to implement “family planning” policies.  In reading the signs of the times, the Pope saw the consequences clearly, but why he was so easily able to see this is just important.  For these consequences were just symptoms of a deeper mindset that the Holy Father feared would ultimately conquer the hearts and minds of men, a mindset that was just as soul-killing as the contraceptive mentality to which it was linked.  After uttering his prophecy of consequences, the Holy Father tells us the root cause is man’s unwillingness to “accept that there are certain limits, beyond which it is wrong to go” (HV , 17).

On the one hand this is nothing new.  One can even say that Original Sin itself is the mark of man’s unwillingness to accept his creaturely limits.  Man in his Edenic bliss can eat from every tree in the Garden, save one, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (GN 2:16-17).  Made in the likeness of God, he is confronted with the choice to be “like gods who know good and evil” (Gn 3:5).  That is, he has a choice between conforming himself to the limits of reality, or shaping reality to his liking.  He quickly finds out that his decision was never a real option.  He passes his confusion on to his progeny along with a proclivity for choosing likewise.

Confusing Limits

Because man is now in a state of confusion, he must set out to discover reality as it really is.  To enter into a relationship with reality he must also (re-)discover himself as he really is (including his limits) as well.  At first, because of his confusion reality appears rock solid and he discovers many limitations in himself.  But as the field of discovery expands, he finds that he has the power to manipulate reality more and more.  His limitations become blurred except when he asks a simple question: does this new power over reality include power over myself?  If so, then it is actually a power within reality, which is the only true power.  Otherwise it is a grasping and remaking of reality.

In many ways chemical contraception represents a paramount example of this principle in play.  In the past contraception usually involved changing the act, but with the Pill and the like came the power to alter the reality of a woman’s reproductive system.  But this is no mere biological alteration, but an alteration to a person’s biology.  Therefore it has to be viewed through a personalistic lens.  Does the power the Pill gives over a woman’s cycle carry with it the power of the woman to master herself?  And, because a woman’s reproductive system is a relational system, does the Pill give the man in whom she enters into a reproductive relationship with a power to master himself?

Power

The wisdom of Blessed Paul VI’s condemnation of contraception begins to emerge, especially when we add a second principle.  With the emergence of new technology comes new power over reality.  This power is given at the service of controlling men.  The question is which men will be controlled.  Will the new power be used to control man himself?  Or will the power be used to control other men?  Or as CS Lewis put it in The Abolition of Man “For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means…the power of some men to make other men what they please.”

Blessed Paul VI was so accurate in his predictions because he knew that the Pill wasn’t really a medicine to control births, but a poison to control other people.  His forecasts are really about the power of one person over another.  More to the point, the Pill is about men exercising their power over women.  It tells women in order to gain her rightful share in society she must act like one of the big boys.  But because woman is a “misbegotten male” she must take a pill to do this.  But in truth it is a ploy in which man, who is fertile all the time, can find partners who are infertile all the time.  It absolves him of all responsibility and creates an injustice in which women are treated as inferiors.  What is so puzzling is that many of them, in the name of equality, swallow the pill anyway.  Shouldn’t society have to change and adapt to the feminine genius and not woman herself?  As then Cardinal Karol Wojtyla (the future St. John Paul II) said ,

“Contraception makes no contribution to the woman’s personal rights.  Since it is a process that makes it possible to satisfy the ‘needs of the sexual instinct’ without taking on any of the responsibility for the consequences of sexual activity, it primarily benefits the man.  This is why, once accepted contraception leads to sanctioning his erotic hedonist behavior.  In this situation, inevitably, the man benefits at the expense of the woman.  He ceases to regard the woman in the context of transmitting life.  She becomes for him simply the occasion for enjoying pleasure.  If one adds to this the fact that it is inscribed in the very structure of man to take initiative in the sexual realm and that the danger of being violated is a threat primarily to the woman, then one must admit that the more constitution of the woman appears grim indeed.  Therefore, when contraception is used, the woman faces not only inequality but also sexual slavery.”

In his opening paragraph of Humanae Vitae, Blessed Paul VI recognized that technology, especially reproductive technologies, were a force that the Church was going to need to confront.  Unfortunately she has not been up to the task and many women have suffered because of it.  As the Church continues to celebrate this Golden Anniversary of Humane Vitae, let’s work towards a rediscovery of the golden wisdom contained within this prophetic document.

A Boring Holiday?

Leisure, Virtue, Work, , ,

Each year, from sea to shining sea, our nation sets aside the first Monday of September as a day of great festival.  People gather together by the tens and celebrate Labor Day, a day that “constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country” (Department of Labor History of Labor Day).  Labor Day is remarkable indeed, but not for the reasons for the Central Labor Union first envisioned when they celebrated the first Labor Day back in 1882.  Instead, Labor Day is significant because it serves as a sign of a different achievement of modern man—the erasure of what Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper once called the “Festive Principle.”

This festive principle is written into the nature of mankind.  One might even say that it is festival that man is made for.  At the end of the first creation account, the seventh day, God invites man to celebrate a festival with Him, a time to not just to reflect and rest but to revel in the fact that all that is, is good.  Therefore, each man and woman finds buried in his and her heart a desire to celebrate the eternal festival; a desire that is fanned into flame by the great feasts of this life.

This desire cannot be wholly stamped out, but it most certainly can be squashed.  We can and, in fact, have become most un-festive, a truth marked by the “celebration” of Labor Day.  An experiment that began with the founders of the French Revolution has failed because, as Pieper says, “while man can make the celebration, he cannot make what is to be celebrated, cannot make the festive occasion and the cause for celebrating.  The happiness of being created, the existential goodness of things, the participation in the life of God, the overcoming of death-all these occasions of the great traditional festivals are pure gift. But because no one can confer a gift on himself, something that is entirely a human institution cannot be a real festival” (In Tune with the World, p. 46).

Labor Day, like the other National Holidays including Thanksgiving where no one will name Whom it is we are thanking, are about celebrating gifts we have bestowed upon ourselves.  As the Department of Labor reminds us, “It is appropriate, therefore, that the nation pays tribute on Labor Day to the creator of so much of the nation’s strength, freedom, and leadership — the American worker.” Dramatic pause aside, the fact that there is a most of suspense as we mention not the real Creator of those things, but man, is most telling.  Once God is removed from our festal vocabulary our festivals naturally fall flat.  Labor Day is a completely flat holiday.

Labor Day in a particular way ends up in the orbit of the absurd because it is a celebration based upon something wholly material.  It no longer has the eternal festival in view.  It loses its sacramental meaning and therefore is boring.  Because of its materiality (along with Thanksgiving and secular Christmas especially) its “celebration” also has an interior spirit of competition.  Men and women cannot unite around a common material good.  The limited nature of material things leads away from unity and always end in competition.

If we peel back the layers of secularization, then we can see why Labor was chosen as worthy of festivity.  Along with procreation, it is the way in which we most image God.  In both cases we image God the Creator.  So it should not surprise us that the Fall, in bruising the image of God in mankind, turned these two things into labor.  The work of Christ the Laborer was to dial back these effects so that work now becomes a source of grace.  Now that is something that is worthy of festival.  That the One Who simply speaks things into existence should allow mere creatures to use their strength and freedom to co-create with Him.  Worker bees have no dignity, man the worker has dignity because and only insofar as he works as the image of God.  To flatten Labor Day out also flattens each one of us making us mere cogs in an economic machine.  Celebrate Labor Day in a spirit of awe and thanksgiving to God the Creator and each man is elevated to his rightful place in the cosmos.

Nietzsche, who was no friend of transcendent values, once said that “the trick is not to arrange a festival but to find people who can enjoy it.”  For all of the reasons above, Christians should enjoy Labor Day and truly celebrate it for everything that it should be.  “This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice in it.”

God’s Choice?

Church, Church Authority, Divine Mercy, End of Life, Fasting, God's Will, History, Magisterium, Pope Francis, Prayer, Sin, Spiritual Warfare, , ,

As criticism continues to mount against Pope Francis amidst this time of ecclesiastical turmoil, a growing number of peacemakers have emerged, who, in an attempt to diffuse the situation, are quick to offer the reminder that “he was chosen by the Holy Spirit.”  One can certainly appreciate the attempt to maintain unity.  Especially because the Pope is the most visible sign of Catholic unity.  But this path to peace is a theological dead end.  The Pope is not “chosen by the Holy Spirit”, at least in the sense that the peacemaker means it.  Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI was once asked whether the Holy Spirit is responsible for the election of a pope to which he replied:

I would not say so, in the sense that the Holy Spirit picks out the Pope. . . . I would say that the Spirit does not exactly take control of the affair, but rather like a good educator, as it were, leaves us much space, much freedom, without entirely abandoning us. Thus the Spirit’s role should be understood in a much more elastic sense, not that he dictates the candidate for whom one must vote. Probably the only assurance he offers is that the thing cannot be totally ruined…There are too many contrary instances of popes the Holy Spirit obviously would not have picked!

In his usual pedagogical succinctness, the Pope Emeritus gives us several important reminders, not only on the election of the Pope, but also on the nature of the Church, especially in times of crises such as we are currently facing.

The Holy Spirit and the Conclave

As Benedict is quick to point out, one need only study history to see that this hypothesis is highly questionable.  History is rife with scoundrels who came to occupy the Chair of Peter.  It is always a good idea to study Church history and remind ourselves of this, especially because most of us have lived under the reign of popes who became saints.  It is only with great intellectual dexterity that we could admit that the Holy Spirit “picked” both these saints and someone like, say, Pope Alexander VI.

One might object that, even if it is a highly informed one, Cardinal Ratzinger was just offering an opinion (“I would say so…”).  The tradition of the Church would suggest otherwise.  Lex orandi, lex credenda—as we worship, so we believe.  The Church, among her various liturgies, has a Mass for the Election of the Pope.   The Church Universal prays that the Conclave will be docile to the promptings of the Holy Spirit.  This implies that they can also operate under the promptings of mixture of other spirits as well.

Free will of the Cardinal electorate then is operative and “anyone” can be chosen.   Yet we are also treading on the horizon of free will and Divine Providence.   The man chosen to be Pope will be God’s choice, but only in the sense that the papal election, like all things, falls under God’s Providence.  We may be certain that the Holy Spirit directly wills the election of a given man as Supreme Pontiff, but through the mystery of Providence will allow another to take his place.

Our Lord told St. Peter that the gates of hell would not prevail against the Church.  What He meant by this was that no matter what, the Church would not fail.  The Barque of Peter may take on water, but it will never sink.  The Holy Spirit will allow the Church to take on water, but will always keep her afloat.  That is the extent of His protection.

This however is not the end of the story because of God’s Providence.  Regardless of whether it is a good Pope or bad, the Church will always get the Pope it needs.  Providence dictates that God will always provide the People of God with what they need.

Reading the Times

There may be a mutiny on the Barque of Peter and the Holy Spirit will pick a strong captain to lead a counter-mutiny, stopping the flow of the water.  Or, He may allow another man who joins the mutiny and ignores the water that continues to flow onto the boat.  Eventually all the compartments are flooded, washing the mutineers overboard.  The end result is the same, the corruption has been washed away and the Church was given exactly what she needed.

In a very real sense then the Pope is always God’s choice but only as an instrument.  As a type of the Church, Israel shows us this.  History continually moved in the direction towards the coming of the Messiah, the only question was whether the king and the people would cooperate.  Israel would flourish, grow fat, play the harlot, be chastised, and continue through the remnant.  This pattern is revealed so that we will come to recognize and expect it in the Church.  Either way history will continue to move towards the Second Coming.

In turbulent times this ought to serve as a great comfort.  The infestation of corruption in the Church is finally coming to a head and God is going to root it out.  He will use Pope Francis as his instrument.  The only question seems to be which type of captain Pope Francis will be.  Either way these scandals should not push us towards despair, but should instill hope into us.  God will not be mocked for sure, but neither will He ever abandon His people. He is always on the lookout for co-redeemers—those people who will pick up the Cross with Jesus and lay down their lives for the Church.  Only acts of reparation will repair the Church and each of us has an obligation to do this.  Every man must come on deck, stem the mutiny and start bailing water or risk being carried overboard.  “Penance, penance, penance!” the Angel of Portugal told us through the children of Fatima.  The time is at hand.  Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!

Standing Firm in History

Church and State, Culture, History, , , , , ,

The attendant clatter of a silent statue falling on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was loud enough to be heard throughout the country.  Loud, not just because of the coverage it received in the main stream media, but also because it was joined in chorus by the death knell of one historical vision and the triumphal melody of its replacement.  Although Confederate statues have been toppling over with great regularity, this one is different.  Different because it occurred on the campus of an institution of higher learning, an institution that prides itself on its department of history whose “primary goal is to foster the creation and communication of historical knowledge.” History as it has been understood up until now is, well, history.

We must first admit that there is no such thing as merely communicating historical knowledge.  The essence of history is not found in facts, but in interpretation of specific historical events.  Good historians always allow the data of facts to drive them, but in the end how they view reality itself is always going to color their communication.  Events never occur within a vacuum so that the context itself also matters.  As the great Catholic historian Christopher Dawson once quipped, an alien may witness the Battle of Hastings and have more facts than we do, but this knowledge would not be historical because it lacked both an understanding of reality and a context.

The Two Views of History

What are these two views of history that have been grappling for the Western Mind?  What we might call modern history has won out strictly because it is modern.  It is modern because it feeds off of the two great modern ideologies—communism and liberalism.  In the communist view, all of history is marked by a conflict between oppressor and oppressed.  History for liberalism is only subtly different in that it documents the struggle at various stages pitting those who fought against for freedom against the enemies of freedom.  Either way, a reduction occurs in which history is driven by conflict with the bad things always left in the past.  This inevitability of progress assumes everything in the past was backwards and that those who do not see this are evil, ignorant or both.

In this way history parallels the theory of evolution in that there is always progress towards a time of enlightened peace.  Progress will save us.  And like its intellectual counterpart, the evolutionary view of history also suffers under the weight of materialism (even if there is some lingering Deism).  With conflict as the only thread, there is a sit-com-like disconnect of events from each other.  History is simply one episode after another, with very little reference to the previous episode.  Retaining a historical memory really has no value, because, as the great historical student Henry Ford once said, “all history is bunk.  The only history I care about is the history I am making.”

The toppling of Silent Sam gives us a prime example of this viewpoint of history.  The Civil War was a battle between the white oppressors in the South and the Union proxies of the oppressed slaves.  Even the great Karl Marx saw it that way.  Sure there are other things that happened, but it all really comes down to this one thing.  Freedom, of course, won the day and the United States marched on in its messianic mission as the instrument of liberal progress.  Because the statues harken back to those days of un-freedom, they must be literally dumped in the dust bin of history.  Anyone who sets his hand to the handle of the bulldozer and looks back can have no part in progress.  History, like our favorite sit-com, has nothing to do with here and now so why would we need reminders of it?  If you do not understand that then you are, at best, an ignorant fool, or just as likely, a racist xenophobe who wants to put other people in chains.

This view of history has finally eclipsed its previous contender; what one might call the Christian view of history.  Christianity is by definition of historical religion because its Divine Founder “in the fullness of time pitched His tent and dwelt among us.”  Whether you use BC/AD or BCE/CE, the fact still remains that the Incarnation is the center of history.  It is the center of history because it proves once and for all that history does not merely have a direction, but a Director Who regularly makes cameos in His story. History now becomes the field in which the redemption of Creation plays out.

Knowing this, history must always leave room for the supernatural.  There are no accidents.  Where would the world be if St. Joan of Arc was blown off because she merely “heard voices”?  What if St. Pius V hadn’t pleaded with the Queen of Victory at Lepanto?  Or what if Pius VI when imprisoned by Napoleon in France had not prayed while the Emperor mocked him (Napoleon is purported to have said “does he think the weapons will fall form the hands of my soldiers?” which is exactly what happened in Waterloo)?  What if the steady handed, trained assassin had not encountered the hand of God in the chest of John Paul II?

The exemplar of all Christian historians is the great St. Augustine.  His City of God is a synthesis of human history read through the lens of Christian principles.  History for Augustine, and for us as Christians, is not a record of events but the revelation of a divine plan that embraces all ages and peoples.  He also shows that history, in order to be truly history, must be continuous.  There are no episodes or seasons, but a continuing story.  Memory is a key component of identity.  Both liberal democracy and Communism create regimes for forgetting the past.  Fans of the Jason Bourne series know the dangers of forgetting the past—not that you are doomed to repeat it, but that an amnesic people is defenseless and malleable.

What About the Statues?

Through the lens of the Christian notion of history, what place do Confederate Statues have as tokens of history?  In an age in which the conflict theory of history prevails they are very important.  When we think we have moved on, it is easy to think we should sanitize all versions of the past.  When we see history as the revelation of God’s plan of redemption for mankind however we need statues.  Statues, as the name suggests, are not symbols of honor but signs of someone who stood firm.  They may have stood firm for bad things like slavery.  Or they may have stood firm for good things like the courage to defend your homeland.  Or, as in the case of many of the Confederate statues, it was both.  But as tokens of history they teach us to choose carefully those things we are going to stand firm in.  They also teach us through real life examples that our actions, good and evil, endure.  They will not be erased.  Finally, they remind us that even the greatest of men is still flawed.  We wonder how courageous young men like those depicted in the Silent Sam statue could have such a blind spot and hopefully wonder where our own blind spots are.  Finally, it keeps our hubris in check in thinking we can build some messianic kingdom.

Let the statues stand—if for no other reason that they keep history from falling into the dustbin.

On Being a Jerk

Sin, Spiritual Life, Spiritual Warfare, Virtue, , , ,

One of the funniest scenes in one of the funniest all-time movies is from The Jerk.  The protagonist , Navin R. Johnson, played by Steve Martin, gets into an argument with his wife (played by Bernadette Peters) and tells her “Well I’m going to go then.  I don’t need any of this, this stuff and I don’t need you.”  As he leaves the room he eyes an ashtray and says “except this ashtray.”  As he plots his course out of the room he picks up several more exceptions (including a chair) until his hands are completely full.  What makes this scene particularly funny is not that Johnson is acting like a jerk, but that it makes all of us look like jerks.  Creating our own list of exceptions to what we truly need is at the root of most of our unhappiness.  That is why it takes a truly wise man like St. Thomas to tell us that there are really only two things we need to make us happy, neither of which is a chair or an ashtray.  In the midst of describing the perfect political regime in his treatise On Kingship, the Angelic Doctor reminds the reader that only  virtuous action and “a sufficiency of material goods, the use of which is necessary for virtuous action” are needed for a good life.

The reason for the first one, virtuous action, is rather easy to grasp.  Only the man who is capable of truly governing himself has the power to use his freedom to pursue goodness, truth and beauty.  The virtuous man is a free man.  The vicious man is a slave—to his pride, his vanity and his passions.  Enslaved to the egotistical trinity, he is easily drudged to other men.  Profound unhappiness ensues.

Becoming a Jerk?

But even if we get the first one right, there is always a risk that we will get the second one wrong.  It is the second one that keeps us from becoming jerks.  Given that the good life consists in virtue, then everything else is evaluated by its capacity to foster the life of virtue.  To be fair, St. Thomas does not say this exactly.  Absent the rare man who has the capacity to practice heroic virtue, most men truly need material support to become virtuous.  These things include food, water, clothing, and shelter for the man and those in his care.  In St. Thomas’ day and age the scant material condition of many men made it extremely difficult to become virtuous.  He thought that it was the King’s job to foster an environment in which men were able to obtain these things with relative ease.  That is his point.

But there is an important corollary to what the Dumb Ox is saying.  What St. Thomas did not envision however was a time when material conditions had changed so drastically that a “regular” man’s virtue would be threatened because of an excess of material goods.  We live in such an age where the material comforts of even the poorest are beyond the wealthiest aristocrats of earlier ages.  Virtue now is threatened not so much by a lack of needs, but because of an excess power to obtain our wants.

We might be tempted to a knee-jerk reaction and think that the response is to only focus on those things we absolutely need.  To be clear, there is nothing wrong with wanting things we do not absolutely need.  It is not a matter of either/or.  A rich life includes wants as well as needs.  The problem is that the jerk wanders about grabbing what he can.  He wants things for the wrong reason.  What are the wrong reasons?  All of them, save one, that the thing helps him in some way to live a life of virtue.  Virtue causes in us the habit of wanting the right things.

True Wisdom of the Saints

The wisdom of St. Thomas is perennial.  He has given us a rule to live by in both lack and plenty.  In this age of plenty there are many Christians struggling not to get caught up in the economic materialism of the age.  This rule guides us in deciding what we will buy and what we won’t.  It keeps us from falling prey to the trappings of the world that are meant to lull us to sleep.  And, most importantly, it gives us a rule to pass along to our children.  Life is about wanting the right things for the right reasons and avoiding becoming a jerk.

St. Ignatius of Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises introduces the concept of indifference which serves as a perfect complement to St. Thomas’ principle.  We should, according to the saint, be indifferent to the means that God uses to make us holy.  All that we care about is that a thing is making us holy.  Everything else in this world is just a means—instruments used for our growth.  When they cease to serve that purpose, we let them go.  Lacking something?  Thank divine Providence because your need for virtue is being filled in that lack.  It is this holy indifference that also keeps us from becoming attached to things we already have.   St. Paul likewise tells the Philippians that this indifference is a key to unlocking joy: “Now I rejoice in the Lord exceedingly, that now at length your thought for me hath flourished again, as you did also think; but you were busied. I speak not as it were for want. For I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, to be content therewith. I know both how to be brought low, and I know how to abound: (everywhere, and in all things I am instructed) both to be full, and to be hungry; both to abound, and to suffer need” (Phil 4:10-13)

The Gatekeeper said that only those who live out the evangelical command of poverty can enter the Kingdom of Heaven.  And herein lies the great value in the teachings of the three saints—it gives us a means to live a life contrary to the anti-poverty of the age.  Might it take heroic virtue to turn away from the excess material pleasures our world offers?  Perhaps. One of the conditions of sainthood is heroic virtue.  And in the end, that leaves us with a true either/or; either we will be saints or we will be jerks.  Don’t be a jerk.

On Eucharistic Miracles

Eucharist, Faith and Reason, Sacraments, Sacred Heart of Jesus, The Life of Jesus, , , ,

One of the earliest documented Eucharistic miracles occurred in the 8th Century in Lanciano, Italy.  A priest who was said to be experiencing doubts about the Real Presence was witness to the consecrated species turning into human flesh and blood. The flesh and blood were gathered and the Church declared that a miracle had occurred.  After more than a millennium, pilgrims still journey to the Church of St. Francis in Lanciano, Italy to offer adoration to the miraculously transformed Eucharistic species, which have been scientifically verified to be human cardiac flesh and fresh blood.  Lanciano was probably not the first, nor was it the last.  The Church continues to witness (and verify) Eucharistic miracles in our own day.  They are among the most “common” miracles; so common, in fact, that St. Thomas even developed a theology around them in order to help the faithful draw fruit from these miraculous gifts of the New Tree of Life.

Miracles

To approach the tree of Eucharistic faith, we must begin with a few important explanations.  The word miracle is often misused making it necessary to offer some clarifying remarks.  We often hear someone speak of the “miracle of life” when what they really mean is how wonder-full it is.  Within the divine plan, life is the natural end of procreation.  It is amazing and awesome, but not a miracle.  There may be miracles that occur that leads to individual conceptions or individual births, but those are the exceptions that prove the rule.  Instead, a miracle occurs when the laws of nature are somehow suspended or altered.  There must be a natural ordering that is understood in order for us to even begin to recognize that a miracle has happened.  The supernatural assumes the natural.

Related to the topic at hand, the Eucharist itself is not a miracle.  Within the Sacramental realm it is exactly what is supposed to happen.  It may be a mystery of unbelievable depths, but it is still governed by a set of laws.  When those laws, which we call form and matter, are obeyed the Eucharist is the “natural” result.  The Bread of Life is an act of God’s omnipotence and omnipresence that has no parallel in the natural order, but still it is the norm within the sacramental order.  Through the proper matter and form, the Son is really and truly present under the appearance of bread and wine.

Eucharistic miracles are no different in this regard.  It is only when the appearance deviates from bread and wine that we can recognize a miracle has happened.  Many saints (St. Catherine of Siena and St. Faustina come to mind) received a personal apparition of Christ’s true body (at various stages of His life) which were miraculous but eventually vanished.  These are personal and the Church does not examine these.  The Church is more interested in the more “permanent” apparitions when the species are transformed into actual flesh and blood such as was seen in Lanciano.  These are miracles properly speaking because the Eucharistic presence of Christ “normally” appears as bread and wine, but through Divine intervention the sacramental law is suspended.

St. Thomas says that the change in the outward appearance has a distinct purpose—to show that Christ’s body and blood are truly in this Sacrament.  It is on faith that we know that, what looks like to all appearances bread and wine, is really the body and blood of Christ.  In order to bolster that faith, God miraculously intervenes and changes the appearance.

Our Lord’s Natural Body

At this point it is important to mention a key aspect of Christ’s Eucharistic presence.  Our Lord’s natural body in its glorified condition has only one natural, spatial presence; heaven.  But through God’s omnipotence His body also has a sacramental dimension that gives it a supernatural non-spatial power of presence enabling it to transcend any physical limits and be present wherever His Eucharistic presence is made manifest.  This power also enables Christ in His humanity and His divinity to be truly present even under the smallest particle of the Eucharistic species.

What this means is that the cardiac muscle in Lanciano is no more an actual piece of Christ’s heart than the Eucharist itself is the natural body of Christ.  The cardiac tissue and drops of blood miraculously preserved in Lanciano only “appear” to be flesh and blood just as the Eucharistic species only appear to be bread and wine.  The miracle is in the change of the accidents and nothing more.  There may be ways to scientifically tie them to the humanity of the God-Man such as blood types and DNA connecting it to the ancestry of Our Lord, but they are not actually parts of His natural body.

Some might balk at this thinking that God is deceiving us.  This is why having an understanding of the Eucharistic theology is important.  But St. Thomas also makes an important point (ST III q.76 art. 8) that “this is not deception, because it is done to represent the truth, namely, to show by this miraculous apparition that Christ’s body and blood are truly in this sacrament”.

In essence the flesh and blood become sacraments verifying the Sacrament.  Like the many miracles that Our Lord performed during His earthly ministry there will always be those who flock to simply see the miraculous.  For the faithful however they should flock because they desire to see the signs themselves.  Because no change in the substance occurs with these miracles, the flesh and blood truly contain the Real Presence of Christ.  That makes them worthy of our adoration so that many pilgrims, confirmed in their faith, adore Our Lord in this miraculous Blessed Sacrament.

The Fatima Example

Grace, Heaven, Mary, Mercy, Sin, , , ,

On the morning of August 13, 1917, an enormous crowd, numbering in the thousands, gathered in the valley of Cova da Iria in Fatima, Portugal expecting to encounter something supernatural. The crowds had continued to grow since Our Lady had appeared to three shepherd children on the 13th day of the previous three months. This time was different however. The children never appeared and the people began to grow restless, wondering what had happened to them. They soon learned that the little visionaries had been kidnapped by the local administrator, an avowed Mason and enemy of the Church, named Arturo de Oliveira Santos. As the crowd grew angry, lightning flashed and a small white cloud floating down from the sky and settled over the same oak tree that the previous apparitions had occurred. Everything began to shimmer with the colors of the rainbow and the cloud then returned from whence it came. Despite the abbreviated supernatural visit and the children being absent, this event was more than just a mere detour on the path to the great Miracle of the Sun during the final apparition on October 13, 1917. It turns out, that once we understand the overall message of Fatima, this event is an essential part of Our Lady’s mission to the small Portuguese village.

One of the constant temptations to those who encountered Jesus was that they were more interested in being amazed by His mighty deeds than anything else. Just as those who witnessed Our Lord’s miracle of the loaves and fishes were mostly interested in simply witnessing His mighty deeds (c.f John 6:26), there is always a danger that we can get caught up in the Secret of Fatima or the Miracle of the Sun and miss the purpose of Our Lady’s visit. That is, we can forget that miracles are not just supernatural events, but signs. The miraculous events at Fatima are each meant to be signs reinforcing the overall message.

The Message

What is the overall message of Fatima?  Our Lady came to call the children (and us) to do penance and pray the Rosary for the salvation of souls. This is at the heart of each of the messages she spoke to the children and the so-called Three Secrets that had been revealed during the July 13th visit.

By all appearances the August 13th “apparition” was a false start of sorts. But viewing the events through the overall message, we can see how they helped advance Our Lady’s mission. It was the aforementioned Three Secrets that generated the interest of the anti-Catholic authorities and caused the children to be kidnapped.

When Santos kidnapped the visionaries by promising them a ride to the Cova da Iria on that August 13th, he first brought them to his house where he attempted to play “good cop” to coax the secret message from the children. While this served to relieve some of the children’s initial fear, they would not break their promise to Mary to keep the contents of the secret to themselves. Once he was convinced this approach would not work, he took the children to local prison and put them in a cell with some other prisoners. He began to interrogate them separately, threatening to boil them in oil if they did not reveal the secret. The children remained steadfast, prepared to become martyrs rather than cave in the face of the administrator’s threats. Eventually the children were released and taken home on the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on August 15.

When we apply the lens of Mary’s overall message of Fatima—penance and the Rosary—to the events of those 3 days, we can see how they fit into Mary’s plan. The harrowing events of those three days serve as a model of what it actually looks like in practice to live the message of Fatima. Our Lady wanted to make the children a model for all of us.

When Santos locked the children up in the jail with a group of prisoners, they were obviously quite afraid. According to Lucia’s memoir, it was her cousin Jacinta who was the most afraid. Her brother, Francisco, reminding her of their mission, told her “Don’t cry, we can offer this to Jesus for sinners.”  In the face of great fear and suffering, the children were faithful to the message of Fatima, looking at their suffering as a means to save souls. They were most certainly afraid, but also willing to cooperate with Our Lord and Our Lady to “lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of mercy.”

The Message Lived Out

This call for penance should resonate in our ears. God wants to bestow upon His children adopted through Baptism the graces won by His natural Son to be co-redeemers with Him (c.f. Col 1:24). While many of us will not face an ordeal as momentous as the little shepherds did, our daily trials can be a source of sanctification for ourselves, but also when borne with patience and love for souls, can be united to Christ’s. When confronted with two choices, we can always choose the one with more of the Cross in it and, like the Little Flower, strive to never miss an opportunity to offer a sacrifice for the salvation of souls.

Our Lady also wants us to use the events of those three days to remove the main obstacle we often face when doing penance for others—fear. These were mere children and there is no natural explanation as to why all three of them were able to remain steadfast when faced with the prospect of being boiled in a cauldron of oil. But they did not conquer their fear, it was grace that worked in them. The willingness to be martyred is always a grace and Our Lady wants us to know that we should not let our fear stop us. By selecting little children, Our Lady wanted to make it abundantly clear that we should not despair of the help of grace in the midst of our trials.

The children also modeled the power of prayer, specifically the Rosary in the conversion of sinners. The children began praying the Rosary in their prison cell and the other prisoners soon joined them. This changed the entire atmosphere of the prison and even one of the thieves began to pray his concertina while the others began to sing and dance with the children. Trusting in the power of the Rosary, Lucia said, “We only hope that Our Lady has had pity on his soul and converted him!”

Our Lady rescheduled her appearance to the children to the 19th of August. At about 4 0’clock on the afternoon, Lucia sensed Mary was about to appear while they were out grazing their flocks at a place called Valinhos. When Lucia asked her usual question as to what Mary wanted from her, she replied “I want you to continue going to the Cova da Iria on the 13th and continue praying the Rosary every day. In the last month I will perform a miracle so that all may believe.”  The location may have changed, but the message rang familiar. As this centenary year marking the apparition of Our Lady in Fatima nears its conclusion, the message of Fatima remains relevant. As Pope Benedict XVI when commenting on the contents of the Third Part of the Secret once said, “the exhortation to prayer as the path of ‘salvation for souls’ and, likewise, the summons to penance and conversion” remains ever new. May we take this to heart and live the message of Fatima every day.