The Eucharist: Nexus of the Christian Mysteries

All the great mysteries of the Christian faith (Trinity, Incarnation-Redemption, resurrection of the flesh--which is the mystery of the Church, incorporation of the world into a living body that rises at the consummation of history) are summed up and linked together in the Gospel words we heard for the Feast of Corpus Christi yesterday. The key to it all--the Eucharist mediates the Trinitarian life to humanity:

"Jesus said to the Jewish crowds: 'I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is My flesh for the life of the world.'

"The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, 'How can this man give us his flesh to eat?' Jesus said to them, 'Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. For My flesh is true food, and My blood is true drink. Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood remains in Me and I in him. Just as the living Father sent Me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on Me will have life because of Me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever.'" (John 6:51-58)

Trinity: "Just as the living Father sent Me and I have life because of the Father..."

Ecclesial incorporation into the Trinitarian life through the Eucharist: "...so also the one who feeds on Me will have life because of Me."

Incarnation for the sake of Redemption through the Eucharistic sacrifice of the Cross, by which Jesus becomes available to each human being, initiating the resurrected life of an integrated humanity: "I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is My flesh for the life of the world."

The Easter Joy of the Apocalypse

For most of Eastertide, the first matins readings come from the Apocalypse and the letters of the Apostle John. Indeed, the Book of Revelation fills most of this space. Why?

Why does the Church spend so much time with such a strange book in the great season of joy?

Because Revelation is about the course of each human life, and of history as a whole, as radically qualified by the victory of the slain and resurrected Jesus.

This victory is operative throughout even the most nightmarish passages of time (making it authentic good news), and the vision John receives therefore is filled with nightmare images. That fact, I think, is what makes the Book of Revelation so forbidding.

It is certainly the case that “Left Behind” eschatology has reinforced a tendency long contaminating Christian spirituality (which Ratzinger powerfully analyzes at the beginning of his brilliant book Eschatology)--a tendency to fear the Second Coming of Jesus and the Last Judgment. This is a sad perversity, for the primitive Christian hope is indeed the deep cry, “Come, Lord Jesus.” If a certain spirituality leads to apprehensiveness, or even reticence, about the decisive consummation of history, you can be sure it is false.

Three great nested cycles of seven take up the bulk of Revelation: the seven seals, the seven trumpets, and the seven bowls of wrath.

The seventh of one series includes the first of the next. It all begins with the scroll of history, sealed with seven seals, that no one but the slaughtered Lamb can open. He has earned the right to open the book of history because He has “conquered.” But He has conquered in the strangest way, by giving Himself up out of love to be sacrificed:

“Worthy art Thou to take the scroll and to open its seals, for Thou wast slain and by Thy blood didst ransom men for God from every tribe and tongue and people and nation…” (Rev 5:9).

The self-sacrificial love-offering of the God-man opens the interiority of history to be radically qualified by the Father’s plan of loving goodness.

War, terror, famine, even death and hell, though in no way becoming good in themselves, do not escape the sovereignty of the God Who loves to the end, for divine love absorbs the deepest hellishness and renders heaven in return.

You know something of this dynamism if you have loved someone through an ordeal that shakes the soul. What remains of love after tribulation is pure and divine and deathless.

What Revelation describes is not our future alone, but our past and our present also: terror, yes, but terror in the process of being swallowed up by love. The eastering of history is the slow dawn that keeps infiltrating and permeating the marrow of time. The joy of Easter wells up from the reality that love is, in very fact, conquering all.

Morning Love: Partnership and the World Become Eucharist

Does the Resurrection of Jesus change anything? By the time of Christ, Jews tended to believe in a general resurrection at the restoration of all things. The idea that one man would be delivered definitively from death before the consummation of history just didn’t fit into the Jewish worldview. Is it the case that the present postmortem bodily existence of Jesus (and Mary) is simply a premature exception to regular resurrection timing? Is Easter just a quirky sneak peak of coming eschatological attractions?

In fact, the Resurrection of Jesus is the means by which the general resurrection of the dead, and the transformation of the world, can come about at all. The hinge of the ages is the Paschal Mystery, as the culmination of the Incarnation: Passion, Cross, Descent, Resurrection—all concentrated in the Eucharist. The mysteries of the Triduum are how the Trinitarian life becomes the most intimate rhythm of the consubstantial mass of humanity, and therefore of history and the cosmos—of which man, male and female, is microcosm and mediator.

On this Divine Mercy Sunday, we see the blood and water of the Sacred Heart of Jesus as the extremity of the Father’s plan of loving goodness. By the white and red rays of love, we are drawn into the Son, and therefore into the Trinitarian processions.

The Church flows from the pierced Heart of Jesus, the dead God, the silenced Word of the Father, for He loves to the end with an endless Love. By limitless love, He goes from topless top, the Father, even unto thwarting the bottomlessness of hell. His Love is the End of all things, source and goal, height and depth. Thus Jesus contains every limit within Himself, intensively and definitively, on Easter, while opening Himself to gather, extensively and progressively, the entire weight of human existence into His Body throughout the rest of time.

The Eucharist is the Triduum encompassed in vulnerable form, and it is as Eucharist that Jesus patiently encompasses cosmos and history within the eternal Trinitarian processions. Beyond the intensive recapitulation of all things that occurs in the Paschal Mystery, Jesus carries out an extensive recapitulation through the Church, because He wants to include us as cooperators in His mission of Love. Love always wants a partner. Co-redemption is essential to the Father’s plan of loving goodness; it’s not some optional add-on. (This is why Marian piety is intrinsically necessary for maintaining a balanced Christian faith: the mystery of Mary is first of all the mystery of the Partner, the mystery of co-redemption.)

The Gospel reading for Easter Friday presents one of the most poignant of the Resurrection passages: John 21:1-14. It is redolent of all the morning newness, so new as to be almost strange, but strange because so real, of lovers seeing each other after an absence of months. Peter, James, John, Bartholomew (Nathanael), Thomas (and two other nameless ones) are fishing on the Sea of Galilee. Jesus, unrecognizable, is cooking a breakfast of fish on the beach.

They haven’t caught anything (we can do nothing without Christ), and Jesus calls out to tell them to cast their nets on the other side. Suddenly the bounty of the sea comes to them.

There is here obedience, benevolence, miracle, sharing the rhythms of life: what happens when love is electric, in dawn, true.

After Jesus brings about the extravagant haul of fish, they join Him for breakfast. They add some of the fish they have caught, precisely what Jesus has provided for their catching, a perfect image of co-redemption: “When they had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread. Jesus said to them, ‘Bring some of the fish that you have just caught’” (v. 9-10).

And Jesus takes what He has enabled them to give, and gives it back eucharistically: “Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and the fish likewise” (v. 13).

Jesus proceeds from the Father in the Spirit of Love and wonder and gratitude. Jesus is Eucharist eternally. But the Son is now Eucharist as the slain and risen Lamb. He is food by which we grow into the Trinitarian wonderland.

At this breaking of the long fast of history, there’s bread, but instead of wine, there’s fish. I think one meaning of this is that the whole world has now become the means by which Jesus communicates Trinitarian love.

His Heart has been pierced. All things have been drawn into the wounded God. The Father has justified each of us, and thus transfigured the world, in raising His lost and so-prodigal Son from the dead. The whole world is becoming eucharistic because Jesus has passed from death to life. Everything has changed. Everything is changing.

No Faith without Solidarity: On "Hebrews" and Living the Tension of the Cross

Worldliness, pharisaism, or grace: these are the three options before each of us. Generally, God lets us choose, at least for a time.

If we want to play by the world’s standards of success, God will often let us rise and fall beneath those standards.

And if legalistic religiosity and pharisaical rigor mortis are closest to our hearts, He will often let us spin out that attitude. Yet watch out: the measure with which we measure will be the measure with which we’re measured.

But if we want to live by the new and everlasting covenant, we must give up all control, and float along according to the movements and the dispositions of the Spirit and grace.

The point of the passage from Hebrews from yesterday’s matins (10:19-39) is typically Pauline: we must not revert to pharisaical religion. (I have a pet theory that the letter was written by Saint Barnabas, who would, of course, bring Saint Paul’s emphases to bear.)

The suffering of the God-man in total solidarity with the rest of humanity establishes a covenant that perfects the entire world order. But that covenant must be lived out in time, beyond human calculation, by faith. The divine, solidary suffering of Jesus is the definitive thing in cosmos and history, opening up for us the Kingdom of grace within time, but not definitively: that requires believers willing to be stretched with Jesus, in Jesus, as He slowly, person by person, day by day, strains for a more intensive as well as extensive entry of invisible love into the visibility of flesh.

That is the theme of the letter as a whole: faith mediates in time the once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus. The future of love is invisible; the only way it becomes visible, becomes present, is through faithful agents who are used to proceeding according to the love of God and neighbor despite obscurities, agents willing to be faithful in the desert, where the city of God is built.

Earlier in the letter, the author quotes Psalm 95, which is about the continuing failure of the Israelites to trust that the Father will take care of them, though they have seen so many wonders performed by Him for their sake. Do we not do exactly that? When adversity comes, how easily we forget prosperity; how easily we forget the wonders the Father has worked in our lives:

“Beware, brothers, lest there will be in anyone of you an evil heart of unbelief that turns away from the living God” (Heb 3:12).

Unbelief means needing to see results that are easily comprehensible to me. Unbelief means taking the focus from the Father’s plan of loving goodness, and attending only to my plans. Unbelief means doubting the goodness of God enough to seek the security-blanket of moralism.

Conversely, love gives rise to faith: “Brothers, since the blood of Jesus assures our entrance into the sanctuary by the new and living path He has opened up for us through the veil (the ‘veil’ meaning His flesh), ...Let us draw near with a true heart with the full confidence of faith, our hearts sprinkled clean from the evil which lay on our conscience and our bodies washed in pure water. Let us hold unswervingly to our profession which gives us hope, for He who made the promise deserves our trust” (Heb 10:19-23).

We are called to exist within the immense tension of Jesus’ being the new and living path between earth and heaven, the tension of tribulation. Only persevering faith (sacramentally immersed in the blood and water from the Cross--“hearts sprinkled clear” and “washed in pure water”) can survive the ordeal of time. Living by grace and the Spirit means being taken up into the Trinity’s massive labor of absorbing the sins of the world: “For if the blood of goats and bulls, with the sprinkling of the ashes of a heifer, sanctifies those who have been defiled so that their flesh is purified, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to worship the living God!” (Heb 9:13-14)

If we fail to persevere in trusting in the goodness of God, we will face the vengeful god of law for law’s sake, a god of our own making, a god who is the mere projection of our fears: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb 10:31) has to do with failing to live out the immense strain of living by faith, falling from the world of absolute Trinitarian graciousness back into the realm of scarcity and justice untempered by mercy.

Suffering is where the Trinitarian labor of absorbing sin takes place, but the strain cannot be borne without community. Indeed, unless solidarity sinks into our bones, we cannot have faith. Without love, we cannot see.

“Recall the days gone by when, after you had been enlightened [baptized], you endured a great contest of suffering. At times you were publicly exposed to insult and trial; at other times you associated yourselves with those were being so dealt with. You even joined in the sufferings of those who were in prison and joyfully assented to the confiscation of your goods, knowing that you had better and more permanent possessions. Do not, then, surrender your confidence; it will have great reward. You need patience to do God’s will and receive what he has promised. ‘For just a brief moment, and He who is to come will come; He will not delay. My just man will live by faith, and if he draws back, I take no pleasure in him.’ We are not among those who draw back and perish, but among those who have faith and live” (Heb 10:32-39).

Trust the good God. The substance of this life is really love, though only faith and hope can see it.

Fulfilling the Scriptures: The Fatality of Love

During earlier phases of the dark night, one may be overwhelmed by the urge to do something, to break out of the box in which one is being constrained.

That’s what Saint Peter does during the great Night of the Passion, in Gethsemane, when Jesus is being seized: he defends the Lord with force, cutting off an ear of the high priest’s slave.

But Jesus reproves Peter:

“‘Put your sword back into its place, for all who take the sword will die by the sword. Do you think that I cannot appeal to My Father, and He will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the scriptures be fulfilled, which say it must happen in this way?’” (Matthew 26:52-54)

When we are being squeezed without relief, by great powers of darkness, we may think that either the Father cannot help us, for whatever reason, or that He does not mean to help us—the classic theodicy dilemma: either God is good, or He is powerful, but it seems He can’t be both.

Well, Jesus makes clear that His Father does not lack power. IF the Father had wanted it to be so, He could have destroyed the world with a massive angelic army to extract His Son. The Father really could miraculously extract you from your darkness.

But then the Father’s goodness is attested: the “fulfillment of Scripture” means the carrying-out of the Father’s plan of loving goodness—innocent enduring for the sake of the salvation of the world. That is what’s encoded in the Old Testament: election means suffering on behalf of the world. The more patiently, the better.

(Peter acts out here what he verbally performed in Matthew 16:21-23, when he tries to talk Jesus out of suffering and dying: “From that time on, Jesus began to show His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him, saying, ‘God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.’ But He turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to Me, for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”)

I think we do always have the option of dropping out of the great trials of the dark night, but the cost is abstracting oneself from the particular interventions of grace: you may swing the sword, but then you’re stuck playing the power-games of the world. In that case, you’re on your own.

The alternative is to submit your will to the wise and loving will of the Father: “it must happen in this way.” It’s very painful, and you will sweat blood. But you will come to see that it was all for the best—for you, for everyone. The chalice of bitterest alienation becomes a wedding cup.

Divine Priority and Humanistic Optimism: On the Future of Eros and of the Republic

[This was written in response to a Facebook comment about how we must assume that the vast majority of people, because of the Fall, are not capable of spiritual grandeur when it comes to relations between the sexes, based on an article that more or less asserted that since men bond with men only over coarse things, if a man is "friends" with a woman, he must only be aiming at one thing, etc.] 

I detest elitism, in my very bones. I am a small-d democrat in politics, while also expecting that every human being is meant for high culture (believing completely in the "educability" of all, a la Mortimer Adler). I am viscerally committed to the deeper basis for the universal call to holiness (which as an ecclesiological doctrine obviously means that the members of all three states of life are called to sanctity) in the fact that God's universal salvific will is a will that every single human being become holy. This is the great synthesis of democracy and aristocracy in the spiritual order.

Therefore, I refuse to believe that this unfortunate essay has an audience--that there are troglodyte men for whom it is appropriate to aim so low.

I think to believe so guts the burning missionary core of Christianity.

In politics, the analogue has to do with rejecting any anthropology that assumes we are not all capable of virtue. Here, of course, we have the great debate in political liberalism about what government should assume about the intractability of human selfishness. Famously, Kant in Towards Perpetual Peace writes, "But now nature comes to the aid of the general will grounded in reason, revered but impotent in practice, and does so precisely through those self-seeking inclinations, so that it is a matter only of a good organization of a state (which is certainly within the capacity of human beings), of arranging those forces of nature in opposition to one another in such a way that one checks the destructive effect of the other or cancels it, so that the result for reason turns out as if neither of them existed at all and the human being is constrained to become a good citizen even if not a morally good human being. The problem of establishing a state, no matter how hard it may sound, is soluble even for a nation of devils..." Again we see how good a Lutheran Kant remained.

Then we hear it argued that in Federalist 10, Madison is arguing the same thing. But, not exactly. That the constitutional machinery is meant to neutralize the problem of faction, which is indeed treated as a political factum, is not the same as to make faction and selfishness the motor of the machine, a la Adam Smith, or to believe that one can be a good citizen while being a bad human, a la Kant. The Founding Fathers, though "realist" in knowing they had to deal with faction as a matter of political art, still knew that political liberalism does not work without the pursuit of virtue. So, we are back to what I will never cease to hold: we must assume each one of us capable of sanctity, and act with that real Trinitarian vocation of each human being at least as much in mind as our fallen tendency to individual and group bias. This would, at the very least, humble the superbia of the biopolitical elite.

That said, I have come to know that indeed there seem to be some persons who show no signs of being able to change, including my father lost to alcohol. But that bitter fact, and mystery, is not something we start with when approaching any given human being. It's something we suffer through until no other conclusion is possible.

There is a theological grammar governing citation of the Fall, from Scripture and tradition. Two rules come to mind: 1) any time the Fall is mentioned, one must pair it with the asymmetrically, and infinitely, greater event of the Redemption (Romans 5 being paradigmatic; v. 15, for example: "But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abound to the many!"); 2) no quarter must be given to a Calvinist notion of total depravity. That latter notion violates the former rule, which in turn is there to preserve clarity about what history/the history of salvation is all about: the primacy of the divine initiative (the Father's plan of loving goodness), which intends one thing only--the sanctification of each human being.

In the apocalyptic contest that has gone on from the beginning, and goes on in each human heart, providential grace always has the upper hand over the forces of sin and lovelessness. That is not a thing we see. It is a thing we must know, by faith: "And by this we will know that we belong to the truth, and will assure our hearts in His presence. If our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts, and He knows all things" (I John 3:19-20).

Sexual Politics and the Eros of God: An Application of Pope Benedict's Radical Affirmation

[In "The Benedict Option: A Critical Review," http://www.patheos.com/blogs/samrocha/2017/04/benedict-option-critical-review/?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=socialnetwork, Sam Rocha points out Pope Benedict's revolutionary affirmation that there is eros in God. I take the opportunity to make a topical application of that insight.]

With all his theoretical acuity, Pope Benedict lays waste the false dichotomization of eros and agape. This is the key point of his first encyclical, and it is the basis for his particular rehearsal of social doctrine in part 2 of Deus caritas est, and thereafter. The relegation of eros to the earth, as absolutely non-divine, poisons every thing (as Nietzsche knew)--this common ideological assumption that God is agape and the creature erotic, and never the twain shall meet; and, boy, won't it be grand when we aren't erotic anymore!

It is revolting.

And you see this attitude everywhere. For our souls have died, and our hearts are stone cold. There is no eros in us anymore.

Witness the "controversy" over Mike Pence's not-meeting-with-women-alone protocol, wherein the anti-erotic quality of left and right reveals itself.

It is unedifying, this high leftist dudgeon being vented against a couple's prudential judgment concerning what is best for their marriage, as if the only considerations are political, as if conscience does not matter, as if each marriage isn't radically unique, as if love is uncomplicated.

The explicit moral requirements being met (without burdens being tied up which are mere figments of the busybody), each marriage should be allowed (!) to unfold in its unique way, as long as it is a matter of true mutuality (which obviously means at least that there must be no abuse--actually that first falls under "the explicit moral requirements being met" proviso).

There are things far more important than politics and power games. What use is it to gain the whole world, and not understand the first thing about love? Or to be a pharisaical enforcer of "gender equality" (and yet at the same time, somehow, of transgender fluidity)?

This leftist policing is totalitarian, fatuous, and asinine.

That said, recommending the "Billy Graham Rule" as a general rule presupposes a deeply skewed anthropology. And here we see the lack of eros on the "right." Eros is supposed to aim at the universal intimacy of the New Jerusalem. C. S. Lewis says it so well in The Four Loves: "As nature, for the nature-lover, gives a content to the word glory, so [Eros] gives a content to the word Charity. It is as if Christ said to us through Eros, 'Thus--just like this--with this prodigality--not counting the cost--you are to love Me and the least of My brethren.'"

Segregation of the sexes, as a general rule, is a perversion. And treating love on the model of possessive individualism is a modernist and consumerist fantasy. The privatization of love not only allows many homes to descend into the madness of abusiveness, or even "just" the casual quotidian brutalities of taking-for-granted: it causes us to forget why we are to love at all--bonum est diffusivum sui/the good is diffusive of itself. It causes us to forget what a household is meant to be in and for the world. And this incurvation is why society and politics have been stripped of love. Which brings us back to Deus caritas est.

I find it so strange that many rigorist conservatives avow excitement over Pope Benedict's teaching. In terms of orthodox radicality, he is of the same mind as Balthasar, and in almost every significant respect, he is even more radical than Balthasar--in, say, gestures towards universalism, or the social/political cashing-out of solidarity. On the question of the eros of God, the Balthasarian affirmation would be that there must be a supereminent basis for eros in God. What does Benedict say? Straight up, he affirms that there is eros in God.

Now, eros is more than a matter of relations between the sexes. It is the whole openness of heart and mind to reality, towards all that is other. It is our passion to know more and to love more. Would that we kept asking questions, kept being vulnerable to what is not me, kept having open and bleeding hearts. Would that we were alive to the wonder of it all. Would that we were as erotic as God.

What Impels My Heart?: The Trinitarian Logic of Contrition

When we act in the world, from what hidden center in us does the action flow? What is our effective origin, the principal of our life? Where are we coming from?

The visible manifests the invisible. If we are always outraged and offended (even if there is something of justice mixed in with that), we reveal our hearts to be without peace and therefore not existing from God. (For the Christian, our readiness to be offended by others is a sign that something has derailed our conformity to the Son’s procession from the Father in Their eternal Spirit of love. The fruits of the Spirit do not include irritability or unkindness or smugness or unquestioning self-assurance.)

If I can’t let it go when someone drives badly. If my child or my spouse or my friend or my enemy offends my amour-propre, my sense of entitlement, and I burn and I need an outlet for that. If there is some wrong in the world, and I just have to rain fire on the insolent and the ignorant.

Then my heart is like that of the tyrant and the abuser.

It does not matter how right we may truly be in any given case. If there’s the itch to retaliate, to shame, to signal our moral superiority, there is the Adversary who seeks to tear people down.

The only place for righteous anger is in the defense of the powerless. And even then, if we lack peace, we must withdraw from the fight until we are given peace. For the bully soul is in existential contradiction to the just cause that calls forth truly appropriate anger.

Yesterday’s psalm response from Mass was, Iuxta est Dominus iis qui contrito sunt corde. The given translation is pretty good: “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted.” A more literal translation might be: “The Lord is close to the ones who are of pulverized heart.”

“Contrite” is a word, I think, that has lost its hard contours in a soft moralistic haze. It is the perfect passive participle of a verb meaning to grind, rub, bruise, crumble, wear down, wear out, wear away.

So, to be contrite is to be bruised and battered, ground down, crushed to pieces.

I am no Latinist, but I also find significance in the ablative singular (contrito corde) being matched with the plural “iis qui” (those who). It’s as if the Lord is saying He is close to all those who share this common origin: that of the pulverized heart. And that, of course, is the Heart of Jesus, the Heart of the world.

The Gospel readings from John over the last several days have focused on the confrontation with the Jerusalem elites over authority. After the Sabbath healing of the man ill for 38 years who could not reach the waters of Bethesda, Jesus is pressed as to His authority to be merciful. The self-appointed guardians, and miserly hoarders, of the religion bristle at Jesus’ too-free certainty that mercy norms the law.

In response, Jesus opens up the Trinitarian life, in a merciful attempt to get the merciless to understand the truth of religion: the Trinitarian reality that there is no true self that is not received in gratitude and expended in love.

“Amen, amen I say to you, the Son cannot do anything on His own, but only what He sees the Father doing; for what He does, the Son will do also. For the Father loves the Son and shows Him everything that He Himself does, and He will show Him greater works than these, so that you may be amazed. For just as the Father raises the dead and gives life, so also does the Son give life to whomever He wishes” (John 5:19-21). [The raising of Lazarus, therefore, a few chapters later in John is a most solid sign of the Father’s intention for every person: second chances, new beginnings, and, ultimately, a life so full of love it can never succumb to death again.]

In Thursday’s Gospel, we hear that Jesus does not testify to Himself, but rather the Father testifies to Him. The point is that the reality of the Trinitarian processions means that self-justification is radically pointless. The fabric of being itself is other-justification. This is the Kingdom of God because it is the Trinitarian life:

“If I testify on My own behalf, My testimony is not true. But there is Another Who testifies on My behalf, and I know that the testimony He gives on My behalf is true” (John 5:31-32).

The kingdom of darkness, on the other hand, is other-accusation in the service of self-justification. That is why the pharisee, the tyrant, the abuser must be opposed, and never enabled. That is why fraternal correction is so necessary. We see what hell the refusal to place other above self unleashes. It is no mercy not to tell the truth about this.

In the Gospel reading yesterday, which skips a Galilee return to keep our focus on this Jerusalem controversy over authority, we hear some of the inhabitants of the city say: “Is he not the one they are trying to kill? And look, he is speaking openly and they say nothing to him. Could the authorities have realized that he is the Christ? But we know where he is from. When the Christ comes, no one will know where he is from” (John 7:25-27).

Jesus responds: “You know me and also know where I am from. Yet I did not come on My own, but the One Who sent Me, Whom you do not know, is true. I know Him, because I am from Him, and He sent Me” (John 7:28-29).

Where do we come from? Jesus proceeds from the heart of Another, a heart of truth all bent on mercy. Jesus proceeds from the heights of divinity to be worn away, pulverized, in the dark night of this world, the desert of our lovelessness. Those who would proceed from Him, indeed proceed with Him, into the agonized heart of the world, must share in this contrition of Jesus.

The battered heart remains. The rest is dross. The Kingdom of God flows from the solidarity of the contrite heart. Let us love one another, and be about the works of love, in the confidence that God is close to the brokenhearted. 

Unless We Bleed, We Have Said Nothing

[Originally posted on Facebook 28 March 2017.]

Our exchange of words should tend towards prayer: exuberant prayer of laughing gratitude, anguished prayer of need and co-suffering, peaceful prayer of being-with. Communication is a holy thing, a joyous, poignant, resting thing; it is Trinitarian life.

Therefore, communication between humans needs to be a way of giving our very selves over to each other. Human communication must have the weight of our embodiment, for therein is the earnestness of the human person, and so must not be airily abstract or uncommitted or ventriloquized or distracted or dissembled.

So when the Father speaks His Word into flesh through the overshadowing of Mary by the Holy Spirit, He shows us what our words must be: Eucharistic, prayer as flesh and blood.

We communicate in the Eucharist, for by the Body and the Blood, we come to have a common life in divine solidarity.

Yesterday’s matins readings centered on the great liturgical action of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The increasing proximity of God and man and of humans to each other is what the Sinai theophany injects into history, prolonged in the Ark of the Covenant and the formation of a people around the tent of meeting.

We read in Leviticus how Aaron can only enter into the Presence above the Ark with the blood of sacrificial animals. Now, when we get blood on our clothes, we work hard to get the stain out. But in a liturgical context, blood purifies.

Why? Because blood flows from the heart, and it is interiority that must be staked if we are to communicate, that is, if earth is to have a life common enough to rise to heaven. But this only becomes clear when the sacrifice is that of the God-man.

In the second matins reading, Origen explains Leviticus in terms of its fulfillment in Jesus: “God’s word tells us: ‘…The high priest shall take some of the blood of the bull-calf and sprinkle it with his finger over the mercy-seat towards the east.’

“God taught the people of the Old Covenant how to celebrate the ritual offered to Him in atonement for the sins of men. But you have come to Christ, the true high priest. Through His blood, He has made God turn to you in mercy and has reconciled you with the Father.” [I pause here to note that Jesus’ “turning” God cannot be understood as a matter of changing His Father’s mind. It is the Father’s plan, after all, to send His Son as a sacrifice to save humanity. It’s the Father’s mercy that drives the whole story. No, the blood of Jesus “turns” God to us in mercy in the sense that God contains within Himself the whole objective order of right and wrong and, more importantly, is zealous for the vindication of the victims of sin.]

“You must not think simply of ordinary blood, but you must learn to recognize instead the blood of the Word.”

The blood of the Word.

Unless our words come from our hearts’ blood, there can be no at-one-ment: atonement is simply reconciliation, the fullness of communication, the living out of romance and solidarity—vertically, as the body of humanity is drawn into the Trinitarian life; horizontally, as from the intensity of our truest intimacies we include more and more fellow humans within our open hearts.

The problem is that, too often, our words mean too little. We don’t want to bleed in them. But without blood, there can be no at-one-ment, no communication of heart to heart.

In the chapter of Heart of the World appropriately given the title “The Putting-Off Game,” Balthasar describes how little we stake in life and how little we want to be called on by Jesus to participate in the central mystery of salvation: vicarious suffering, which is the truth of solidarity.

The bourgeoisification of Christianity is the evisceration of solidarity from the core of the Gospel. Without that core, there is no chance we will say Yes when Jesus rings the bell for us to follow Him into the night, into the dark inferno of the Cross.

We would rather be left alone in “…the habit of an innocuous life, the drudgery of ordered existence which requires as its spice a drop of resignation, or the sing-song of a quieted conscience which requires a residue of bad conscience in order to weigh down its keel in the passage through the deep.”

So we tell ourselves, twisting the truth: “God is truly forbearance, God is truly grace. God will not expect from me any more than He expects from others. I am a person who thinks ethically. I have murdered no one, broken into no bank, set no houses on fire, never been convicted before. I am a man like other men, perhaps even a little better than many. …I’ve exerted myself in providing for and rearing my family, as is only right. Day and night I’ve taken care that those I’m responsible for should lack nothing. I’ve washed, cooked, done the shopping, sewn, ironed, made savings, stored supplies, thought of the future. ...I’ve also been a person who’s fulfilled his religious obligations. I am a practicing Christian. …I’ve paid my tithes. I’ve given alms. I’ve always said my morning and evening prayers. I have often been to confession, and they’ve always been valid. I have made the nine First Fridays (which, after all, give me a kind of insurance before God, sanctioned by the Church). I’ve gone to communion every Sunday. I’ve communicated daily.”

Of course, these are all good things. But we often hide behind them because the ever-greater God is going to take any one who will let him or herself be taken and throw that person into the furnace of vicarious suffering.

“‘I have, I have.’ What I’ve done with my religion is raise up walls against God. By my practices I have stopped up my ears to God’s call. Quietly, imperceptibly, everything which could have been life has become a mechanism behind which my soul has laid itself to rest.”

To bleed is repugnant to us, of course. But if we do not bleed, nothing we say, indeed nothing we do, has the savor of prayer, all iron and light. The Word must become flesh in us so we might bleed enough to become a prayer for the healing of the world.

Are We the Walking Dead?

The notion that much of what we think of as everyday "life" is in fact a death-in-life has occurred to many. T. S. Eliot puts it memorably towards the beginning of The Waste Land:

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

But during Mass yesterday, we heard this same notion presented by Saint Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians: "Awake, O sleeper, and rise up from the dead, and the Messiah will shine on you" (Eph 5:14). He seems to be quoting from Isaiah, but he isn't exactly.

Ephesians is all about being called into the new life of the universal Body growing under, and into, the headship of Jesus. But this way of life shares no common ground with secularized desire:

"Now this I say and testify in the Lord, you must no longer walk as the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their minds, being darkened in their understanding, having been alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance existing in them, because of the hardness of their hearts" (Eph 4:18). Saint Paul goes on to extensively describe this futile existence. And his culminating point is that walking the ways of the world is actually to be among the dead.

In Heart of the World, Balthasar describes this condition of having dead hearts from the point of view of Jesus' descent into our world:

"He was the Light, and all were blind. He was the Word, and all were deaf. He was Love, but no one even suspected Love existed. ...This everyday state of affairs, here, in this street full of people who go about, each pursuing his own business: whether cobbler or baker, milkman or mailman, each function can be recognized by the clothes they wear, and all the tasks are divided up among them. They have established authorities and agencies for the public order. ...Many know and greet each other, and all know that together they are fashioning what is called 'mankind.' A shiver of pride and a sublime sensation thrill them at the thought: we are this round circle which bears within itself its meaning and its law. We have an agreement that none of us will go beyond the posted limits of this enclosed park. We make ample allowances for the imperfections of our establishment, but we are also very wary of whoever would call our reality as a whole into question. For even though many a particular could be improved upon, yet, as a whole, everything is as it must be."

Here we are, living in "sensible" ways, self-satisfied, self-soothing, self-affirming, self-assertive, unheroic, relentlessly mediocre, casually cruel, judgmental of others in ego-propping ways, intolerant of opinions that are not ours. Here, even "intimacy" is managed according to the canons of possessive individualism, and solidarity costs us nothing. A universe of death.

Jesus sees our zombie routines. "What they characterized as imperfections was for Him a horrible leprosy on the face and throughout the body--a scab and a pus-filled abscess that devoured their soul and turned them into cripples. What they called their ties were heavy, unbreakable chains which they dragged with great toil, driven on by demons. And what they praised as the cheerful moderation of their limitations, this, seen from within, was a boundless despair. An emptiness like dull hunger gaped in their souls: no expansive emptiness this, but rather a narrow, restricting hollowness that deprived them of head and senses. They walked along in an ugly nakedness, but they thought they were covered in each other's sight and had even lost the ability to feel the cold. What plagued them was so insidious that imperceptibly all of their sensations died away. They were dead, so thoroughly dead that they thought they were alive. ...So rejected that they took themselves to be among the elect."

That's just most of us. Contracted hearts within contracting horizons. Philistine (insensible to the transcendental in nature, art, friendship), mechanically following a script for success and diversion and self-presentation, consuming, consuming, consuming.

What Saint Paul urges is very different: "Therefore, be imitators of God as beloved children, and walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God" (Eph 5:1-2).

Imitate God! Love as Christ loves! Find life by expending it without reserve! Transcend all the way to self-sacrifice...

To live is to love as God loves: God IS; God IS Love. Either we are instruments by which the Father gathers every human being into His Son by the power of the Holy Spirit, into the ever-greater circle of love. Or we molder within ourselves.

So Prayer Might Become Blood: The Annunciation as God's Assumption of Vulnerability

Happy Solemnity of the Annunciation to all of you! What Christmas makes manifest, begins in hiddenness on this very day. It begins with the central Fact of all time and space: et Verbum caro factum est—and the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.

The Son of God becomes zygote Jesus today for one reason: to save each human person and to save us together as His extended Body. The Annunciation and the Triduum are strictly correlative. The Son of God comes to die. His self-emptying goes all the way to the Cross so that billions of humans might be filled with the fullness of God, in a Kingdom of perpetual joy and love and wisdom, a Kingdom of infinite delight.

The Creator assumes a creature (His sacred humanity) into His divine identity, so that never again will the Son of God, the eternal Word of the Father, be other than Jesus of Nazareth, the Crucified!

The Word becomes flesh today, so that prayer might become the meaning of history. The transvaluation of all worldly values happens through our unilateral, preemptive, and asymmetrical love for our enemies.

In yesterday’s second matins reading, from Pope Saint Gregory the Great’s Moral Reflections on “Job,” we read: “His prayer to God was pure, His alone out of all mankind, for in the midst of His suffering He prayed for His persecutors: ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.’

“Is it possible to offer, or even to imagine, a purer kind of prayer than that which shows mercy to one’s torturers by making intercession for them? It was thanks to this kind of prayer that the frenzied persecutors who shed the blood of our Redeemer drank it afterward in faith and proclaimed Him to be the Son of God.”

When we are being tormented, our first thought might understandably be to pray that our suffering end. (This is something I have struggled with greatly.) But if we follow the crucified Lord, our first impulse must rather become a burning desire for the good of our tormentors. This would include for us, yes, a desire that they stop tormenting us, as it is far more damaging to inflict pain unjustly than to suffer pain unjustly (as Plato insists in the Gorgias), but whether they stop or not, our prayer must be, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Tough stuff. But it’s pure Christianity. A Christian can make no excuse for failing to live this way, because, of course, Jesus is pleading for each of us to His Father. WE strike Him; He pleads for us. If we have received the mercy of becoming Christian before others have, it is for one reason only: to serve as instruments of the crucified Lord in extending that mercy to the others.

The Word becomes flesh today, so that He can bleed for us, so that prayer might become blood:

“The text [in Job] goes on fittingly to speak of Christ’s blood: ‘Earth, do not cover over my blood; do not let my cry find a hiding place in you.’ …The blood that is drunk, the blood of redemption, is itself the cry of our Redeemer. Paul speaks of ‘the sprinkled blood that calls out more eloquently than Abel’s.’ Of Abel’s blood, Scripture had written: ‘The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me from the earth.’ The blood of Jesus calls out more eloquently than Abel’s, for the blood of Abel asked for the death of Cain the fratricide, while the blood of the Lord has asked for, and obtained, life for His persecutors.”

The blood of the Victim, Who suffers in every victim from the beginning of human history to its end, conquers malice, conquers the victimizers, by loving more. I wrote yesterday that Jesus is prayer in Himself. Well, prayer as the analogy of being is not just the Word. It is the Word made flesh so as to bleed through all the interstices of creation and history. I think of the end of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus: “See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament.”

(A note: this is no counsel for remaining in abusive relationships. It is counsel that we must always forgive our abusers. There is no limit to Christian mercy. None. At. All.)

This is all summed up in the communion antiphon from yesterday’s Mass: Diligere Deum ex toto corde, et proximum tamquam seipsum, maius est omnibus sacrificiis (To love God with all your heart, and your neighbor as yourself, is greater than any sacrifice).

The point of the Christian religion is the point of the Annunciation: to bestow unmerited mercy (unilateral, preemptive, and asymmetrical love) upon every human, so that we may all join in one Body of praise to the good Father, Who wants only endless good for each one of us and for all of us together. 

Prayer: Living the Discipleship of Losing

A dear friend and I were discussing the state of American religion recently. I had suggested that deism was deep in the American DNA, the concept of a god who started things off but then let go so that the mechanism of the world runs on by itself. My friend corrected me: American Christianity very much believes in an involved “god,” but one that keeps score: “Santa Claus Jesus” “sees you when you’re sleeping; he knows when you’re awake; he knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.”

She’s right. That’s the peculiar form of American religion today. And everything about it is wrong.

Yesterday’s second matins reading comes from Tertullian’s work “On Prayer,” and he demystifies bourgeois idolatry:

“The old prayer, no doubt, brought deliverance from fire, wild beasts, and hunger, and yet it had not received its form from Christ: how much more fully efficacious then is Christian prayer!

“It does not station the angel of the dew in the midst of the fire, nor block the mouths of lions, nor transfer to the hungry, food from the fields. It has no special grace to avert the experience of suffering, but it arms with endurance those who do suffer, who grieve, who are pained. It makes grace multiply in power, so that faith may know what it obtains from the Lord, while it understands what for God’s name’s sake it is suffering.”

This might seem perverse to many of us present-day Christians: “more fully efficacious”! Isn’t that exactly backwards? Isn’t this just loser prayer?

Well, yes. The Christian, the one who follows Jesus, follows Jesus into losing. To be a winner in the world is the opposite of being a Christian. Prayer in Jesus immerses us in mercy and communicates mercy to the world:

“In the past prayer induced plagues, put to flight the hosts of the enemy, brought on drought. Now, however, the prayer of righteousness turns aside the whole wrath of God, is concerned for enemies, makes supplication for persecutors. Is it surprising that it knows how to squeeze out the waters of heaven, seeing it did have power even to ask for fire and obtain it? Prayer alone it is that conquers God. But it was Christ’s wish for it to work no evil: He has conferred upon it all power concerning good.”

Christian prayer is for blessing, not for cursing.

“And so its only art is how to call back the souls of the dead from the very highway of death, to straighten the feeble, to heal the sick, to cleanse the devil-possessed, to open the bars of the prison, to loose the bands of the innocent. It also absolves sins, drives back temptations, quenches persecutions, strengthens the weak-hearted, delights the high-minded, brings home wayfarers, stills the waves, confounds robbers, feeds the poor, rules the rich, lifts up the fallen, supports the unstable, upholds them that stand.”

Notice, the universal benignity of Christian prayer does not mean surrendering the victims to their victimizers. But it does mean that mercy pervades even our resistance to the powerful.

Prayer is the life of the Trinity, and must be the life of all that goes out from the Trinity. Prayer, therefore, is the analogy of being. Which is to say: Jesus, the very embodiment of the analogy of being, is prayer in Himself, for He is the Word Incarnate. And everything that belongs to Jesus, and that’s everything insofar as a thing IS, prays:

“The angels too pray, all of them. The whole creation prays. Cattle and wild beasts pray, and bend their knees, and in coming forth from their stalls and lairs look up to heaven, their mouths not idle, lifting up their spirits in their own fashion. Moreover, the birds taking flight lift themselves up to heaven and, instead of hands, spread out the cross of their wings, while saying something which may be supposed to be a prayer.”

The human person prays by following the eternal Word of God into the ordeal of the Cross, where occurs the full incarnation of merciful love.

I would like to conclude with an observation about the inclusion of Tertullian in the Liturgy of the Hours: it proves how profoundly catholic Catholicism is. Yes, it might be difficult to avoid including the “father of Western theology,” except he ended up as a schmismatic follower of the Montanist sect.

But, the fact is, he wrote many true and profound things. To be catholic and to be Catholic is to recognize that whatever is true, good, and beautiful partakes of the Spirit of the Lord Jesus. When we pray, we surrender “success” and lording it over others, and gain the Kingdom of transcendental love and joy, a Kingdom of servants eager for one thing above all: the turning of each heart to the crucified Jesus and the formation of one Body of prayer.

To Dance Upon the Abyss: On Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony

Tonight is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s final performance of their current run of Beethoven’s Seventh, under the baton of the precise and passionate Bernard Haitink. If you can, you should go.

Though not his greatest symphony, I think Beethoven’s Seventh his best. What comes to mind is something like Shakespeare’s Coriolanus in comparison to Hamlet. The Ninth Symphony is unsurpassed in its range, but the dramatic coherence and unrelenting drive of the Seventh is equally unsurpassed.

Beethoven’s is the name presiding over Symphony Hall, and this performance reminds us why.

As with, say, his Ninth or Mahler’s First, we hear a cosmogony in the Seventh, but here everything is telescoped into the propulsion of a relentless providence. All that love and life must overcome is presented indirectly through the tension of the dance. It is the revelation of the providential rhythm playing in cosmogony and historiogenesis. And in that revelation is the joy.

My father did not have an extensive LP collection, but he did own a vinyl record of the Seventh. Years after his death, I opened up the turntable, in junior high or high school, and started listening to classical music intentionally for the first time. This symphony has been with me from the beginning. Listening to it decades later, after having listened to it through so many different circumstances of life but not having done so in a long time, and in this magnificent interpretation by Haitink and the BSO, it was indeed ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. The tears just kept coming throughout the first movement.

If you can hear your life and the strains of the world together in this music, joie de vivre will be rekindled in you. You will hear the call of the dove over the waters of chaos. You will feel the surging movement the Spirit inspires so that life may ascend despite titanic undertows.

The massive four-minute introduction to the symphony and to the first movement starts with an immense chord that contains everything that follows (again, much different from the Ninth, which has us wait for providence to unfold itself). It is joy, joy, joy that keeps climbing and singing mightily, and in that power and rhythm of life, you feel all the darkness that has ever had to be endured. But you feel it in the mode of its being overcome.

When the vivace takes over from the introduction with the eruption of an impossibly exuberant tutti infused with a fiddling Scottish jig, you are raptured into one of the most heart-filling passages in all of music. The whole first movement is the tension of real joy, the rhythm and lift of a grace more invincible than any drag of hell.

And the symphony never really lets up from there. The familiar second movement, for instance, begins (in a way that obviously inspired Mahler deeply) with a funereal rhythm that builds towards ecstatic triumph.

Be happy without being escapist: listen to this music. Remember, in your dancing bones and in your thumping heart, that the arc of the world beats time to the wings of the dove, and that every abyss is encompassed by the ever-greater depths and heights of divine love.

[Here's a link to a wonderful performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4788Tmz9Zo.]

Servants of an Angry God: Pharisaical Idolatry

After prepping my son Benedict for his first confession by citing the parable of the prodigal son, emphasizing the tireless mercy of the Father (which I hope he has glimpsed in me), and after watching his first confession from afar, one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen, the kids and I went to Saturday Mass at Saint Francis Chapel in the Prudential Center.

Of course, the Gospel reading was the parable of the prodigal son. And we received one of the finest homilies I have ever heard—so good, the fact that the priest was a former student couldn’t add to the excitement of the thing. Father Michael Warren, of the Oblates of the Virgin Mary (one of the treasures of Boston), started from a fact I had never noticed before. The prodigal son says “father” over and over again: in the mode of rebellion, from within his memory, in the dialogue of his anguished interiority. The subjectivity of the prodigal son is paternally saturated.

In radical contrast, the older brother does not once say “father”: “Look, all these years I served you and not once did I disobey your orders; yet you never gave me even a young goat to feast on with my friends” (Luke 15:29).

He has been dutiful, but he been so only out of a do ut des mentality, the religiosity of superstition in which we do certain mechanical things and expect reward (prosperity, success, comfort) in return. The older brother does not serve his father because he loves his father, which would make the very fact of serving its own reward, privilege, and honor; rather, he serves out of secret fear of a parsimonious power who keeps score and plays gotcha, out of a calculation to make good on his investment of being uptight and punctilious, out of spiritual anal retentiveness.

This all fosters a sense of entitlement radically incompatible with the economy of grace. The older brother is a pharisee. (And he is a unitarian—a topic for another time, but as Father Mike pointed out, how often do we address God as Father?)

“Tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to listen to Jesus, but the Pharisees and scribes began to complain, saying, ‘This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.’ So to them Jesus addressed this parable…” (Luke 15:1-3). What follows are the parables of the lost sheep and of the prodigal son.

It looks like obedience, but the older brother’s service camouflages raw self-assertion, so that when the father enacts gratuitous mercy, the older brother says, No. As did the Pharisees, when the Father revealed His plans to universalize Israel through a suffering Messiah and through the suffering faith of the elect in that Messiah. As do we Catholics, when the Father, or His vicar, persists in privileging the lost sheep by exposing the faithful to danger and discomfort and distress so that every prodigal may be recovered.

If we are authentic sons and daughters of the Father, true disciples of Jesus, it’s not about us and any supposed prerogatives we are supposed to have racked up because we haven’t had as much fun as the rest of the world. It’s about our gratitude for the crucified Son and the merciful Father and the Spirit of Their incomprehensible passion for us. Intimacy with the Father, through the suffering Son, in the Holy Spirit of love, is the only true happiness and is its own reward.

There is no greater joy than to be a sinner who has fallen into the hands of the gracious God, the Father of lights, the Father of mercy, the Father of every good thing, the Father Who wastes His substance so that no person need remain lost and confused in a far country, the Father of every missionary and ambassador of reconciling love.

Living from the Invisible

The saeculum is the world in its temporal span. As such, it is simply God's good creation in its providential unfolding. However, "secularization" is the ideological operation by which we refuse to acknowledge that the saeculum utterly depends on the goodness and wisdom of God. Secularism, therefore, is the bending of the world and history back on itself; it is the macrocosmic and world-historical parallel to the curving back on self (incurvatus in se) that Saint Augustine identifies as the essence of sinful subjectivity.

In either case, what happens is that we fail to be grateful for the world, for the mystery of being. And without gratitude, we waste away: wonder dries up; our heart shrivels; the natural bases for faith, hope, love collapse.

And that's what we hear about in the first Mass reading yesterday: "Thus says the LORD: cursed is the man who trusts in human beings, who seeks his strength in flesh, whose heart turns away from the LORD. He is like a barren bush in the desert that enjoys no change of season, but stands in a lava waste, a salt and empty earth" (Jeremiah 17:5-6).

A closed world order means contracting the horizon of human possibility, reducing it to the exercise of power. It results in the barbaric zero-sum game we call "looking after myself."

Only if we recognize the reality of providence can we live differently, in a non-grasping way. By faith in invisible goodness.

The great political philosopher Eric Voegelin speaks of any true progress in history as the flux of "being" in luminous movement towards the divine Beyond.

Or, more simply, our pious gratitude for existence allows the world to light up for us as iconic of the invisible--of infinite truth, goodness, and beauty. Without the reality of transcendence, we cannot transcend the self. And it is only in the process of self-transcendence (which also happens, indeed happens most profoundly, in suffering), that a human is alive in the relevant sense, living by the infinite knowing and loving that is the Spirit of God:

"Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, whose hope is the LORD. He is like a tree planted beside the waters that stretches out its roots to the stream: it fears not the heat when it comes, its leaves stay green; in the year of drought it shows no distress, but still bears fruit" (Jeremiah 17:7-8).

Of course, this sends us back to the first psalm, and its description of the two ways: the way of life, a seeking after God's wise and loving disposition of the world and history, versus the way of death, a denial that our estimation of what's worthwhile must yield to a higher judgment.

Which leads to the Gospel reading, in which Jesus speaks to the Pharisees about Lazarus and the rich man... Beyond brutal insouciance concerning our suffering neighbor and our sense of being entitled to an undisturbed zone of comfort, there are encompassing claims of mercy that expose and repay the mercilessness of our hardheartedness (our secularism). The divine Beyond disrupts and upends our secularized arrangements.

Jesus is the visibility of transcendence. He is the Word of Life. His Resurrection is the vindication of love--the vindication of radical solidarity and of every victim of the world system who got staked on there being something more than the will to power and the private judgment of man.

The way of life is the way of the open heart: the way of humility, solidarity, gratitude; the way of joy and hope; the way of faith and love.

A Nation for the Nations: On Soteriological Cosmopolitanism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Note on Marriage and Pharisaism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I.

The poem opens:

“Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn

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

I no longer strive to strive towards such things

(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)

Why should I mourn

The vanished power of the usual reign?”

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

II.

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

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

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

The second section opens:

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

In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety

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

In the hollow round of my skull. And God said

Shall these bones live? Shall these

Bones live? And that which had been contained

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

Because of the goodness of this Lady

And because of her loveliness, and because

She honours the Virgin in meditation,

We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled

Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love

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

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

III.

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

“At the first turning of the third stair

Was a slotted window bellied like the fig’s fruit

And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene

The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green

Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.

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

Lilac and brown hair…”

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

IV.

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

“Who walked between the violet and the violet

Who walked between

The various ranks of varied green

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

Talking of trivial things

In ignorance and in knowledge of eternal dolour

Who moved among the others as they walked,

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

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

“The silent sister veiled in white and blue

Between the yews, behind the garden god,

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

But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down

Redeem the time, redeem the dream

The token of the word unheard, unspoken

Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew

And after this our exile”

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

V.

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

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

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

Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence

Not on the sea or on the islands, not

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

For those who walk in darkness

Both in the day time and in the night time

The right time and the right place are not here

No place of grace for those who avoid the face

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

Will the veiled sister pray for

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

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

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

In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray

For children at the gate

Who will not go away and cannot pray:

Pray for those who chose and oppose

                        O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Will the veiled sister between the slender

Yew trees pray for those who offend her

And are terrified and cannot surrender

And affirm before the world and deny between the rocks

In the last desert between the last blue rocks

The desert in the garden the garden in the desert

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

                        O my people.”

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

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

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

VI.

The final section begins with an important modulation:

“Although I do not hope to turn again

Although I do not hope

Although I do not hope to turn”

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

“Wavering between the profit and the loss

In this brief transit where the dreams cross

The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying

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

From the wide window towards the granite shore

The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying

Unbroken wings”

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

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

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

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

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

Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still

Even among these rocks,

Our peace in His will

And even among these rocks

Sister, mother

And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,

Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.”

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

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