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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is what Bruckner can do for you.

The American Soul is without Mercy

Utterly without mercy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cure for Futility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faith as the Future Present of the Flesh of God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How indeed are restoration and the Cross compatible?

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

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

Judge Gorsuch and the Supremacy of Pro-Life Principles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saint Josephine Bakhita, pray for us!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Trust in the Doubtful Hour: Between Love and Accusation

[Originally posted on Facebook, 19 January 2017.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Originally posted on Facebook, 18 January 2017.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The therapist gives her two options.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only the Lover Is Free

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

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

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

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

What does this have to do with the Presentation?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patience is just another word for being in love. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recalled to Life: A Hope and a Choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I am wounded by love!” Yes. Amen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life as love. The essence of Christmas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why does the breviary give us Colossians during Christmastide matins?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Merry Christmas!

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

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

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

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

Thus begins the visible growth of a Kingdom of Love.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They know and do not know, that acting is suffering

And suffering is action. Neither does the actor suffer

Nor the patient act. But both are fixed

In an eternal action, an eternal patience

To which all must consent that it may be willed

And which all must suffer that they may will it,

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

And the suffering, that the wheel may turn and still

Be forever still.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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