Welcome to the Desert of the Real

What price are we willing to pay to live in reality?

It is a basic tenet of Christian spirituality that the ease of this world is a diabolical illusion. The subjectivity correlative to that illusion is what Sartre calls mauvaise foi, bad faith.

Because the good Father loves us, and wishes us to live in the reality and superabundance of limitless love (rather than in the tarted-up indigence of secular comfort), we must each be dragged into the desert, into the dark night. There we endure a desolation to subdue the truly abominable desolation of selfish existence.

That is, the real is attained only by a pilgrimage in the wilderness. A new city of love shimmers from the desert of wooing.

The loss of financial security, friends, profession, home, love, children... In His mercy, the good Father will take everything, and give us Bread for the stone of hardhearted comfort. Blessed be the Name of the LORD.

And so today's first Mass reading:

"Pharaoh was already near when the children of Israel looked up and saw that the Egyptians were on the march in pursuit of them. In great fright they cried out to the LORD. And they complained to Moses, 'Were there no burial places in Egypt that you had to bring us out here to die in the desert? Why did you do this to us? Why did you bring us out of Egypt? Did we not tell you this in Egypt, when we said, "Leave us alone. Let us serve the Egyptians"? Far better for us to be the slaves of the Egyptians than to die in the desert.'" (Exodus 14:10-13)

The Egypt of the soul is the Matrix of a social system predicated on radical appropriation, the strong using up the weak--indeed, everyone, weak and strong, meanly consuming each other.

In the first movie of the Matrix trilogy, the traitor deliberately chooses existence under the conditions of delusive fantasy rather than face the demands of the real, the demands of mission and responsibility.

And the Israelites want to return to a slavery determined by the dreams dreamed by power.

But Moses gives the prophetic word, the exhortation to faith. Though all the powers of the world threaten you with destruction, trust in God:

"'Fear not! Stand your ground, and you will see the victory the LORD will win for you today. These Egyptians whom you see today you will never see again. The LORD himself will fight for you; you have only to keep still.'" (Exodus 14:14)

An authentically consoling word.

However, it is a word that can easily be coopted by the world-system, the Egypt still in our hearts. For example, if we take it to mean that the LORD promises us temporal comfort, we have thereby given up the promontory of faith for the imperial flatlands and their fleshpots.

In my dark night, this word was given to me, and I wanted it to mean that everything I had lost would be restored. But that is not how it works. What the good LORD promises is that if we fall into His hands, if we are still, and let His purgation work its way in us, then we will not be overtaken by the infernal fantasy that was our world, inside and out. As we are purged, we are ever more totally incorporated into the consubstantial solidarity of the one suffering body of humanity thrumming with the wounded Heart of an infinite love.

He does keep this promise. If we are still, if we don't try to meet powerplay with powerplay, we will grow in intimacy with the crucified Jesus, and by this Bread of total love, this hidden manna, we will surely overcome the world--and manifest truest love.

A Common Dutifulness: On Christopher Nolan’s "Dunkirk"

There are several worthwhile films out right now, but you should make a point of seeing Christopher Nolan’s latest film, "Dunkirk," (and in 70mm, if you can). It is splendid filmmaking, in the grand style.

Nolan gives us something as visually sumptuous as a Malick film, while being more perspicuous. But this isn’t prosaic storytelling. In fact, the structure of the film is bracingly ingenious. There are three narrative sequences, each on a different timescale, which are brought more or less to coincide towards the end. Nolan, by this ever-interesting expedient, renders the complex, nigh chaotic, kinesis of the Dunkirk evacuation surveyable.

There is a relentless score cutting across all three sequences, like the speed of light in different special-relativity inertial frames, except these photons tick like a cosmic bomb. There is almost no lapse in the dramatic tension, and yet it is in no way overwrought or exhausting. This is an astonishing achievement.

Nolan had the good sense to keep this movie under two hours, though his subject matter (the near-catastrophe of losing the entire British Expeditionary Force to the German military at the beginning of World War II) could easily have justified a far longer film, a modesty I wish would catch on—the action sequences in too many films are prolonged in an undisciplined manner. This is a very lean movie.

Because it is so astringent with regard to warm emotions (only Kenneth Branagh and the scenes on the civilian yacht Moonstone moderate that astringency during the course of the movie), the catharsis, when it comes, is truly cathartic.

Above all, we are moved to tears by Branagh’s and Tom Hardy’s simple warrior courage and the Moonstone sailors’ citizen resolve and immense decency. We are pressed to consider: can our nation ever muster up such common heroism and simple humanity, as the Brits did, as we once did?

At the end, we hear Churchill’s “We shall fight on the beaches” speech read from a newspaper by one of the soldier-survivors. We hear Churchill call to America:

“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”

In her finest hour, America heard the call, and we rose to the challenge that, by itself, sufficiently justified our existence as a nation. In this very different hour of grievance-tribalisms across the political spectrum: could we do such a great thing again? One people, united, exercising civic and other human virtues?

It made me weep to see it in so living an image. Please God, we will see this nation some day produce such an honorable citizenry again.

Towards the conclusion of the film, we see that the soldiers feel shame for having been beaten. Many of these men who in a fair fight on the battlefield would have been courageous, became desperate and craven in the attempt simply to survive. There’s always the question: Would I have done better? Would I have been like the Branagh character in placing others before myself, or Hardy’s Spitfire pilot, or the civilians on the Moonstone? How earnest is my pursuit of virtue? How much flesh will I commit to the good of my neighbor, and to the common good?

Notes on Botticelli's "Saint Augustine in His Study"

Augustine's spirit has probably never been re-presented more faithfully than in Botticelli's "Saint Augustine in His Study," one of the greatest of the paintings included in the Museum of Fine Arts exhibition, "Botticelli and the Search for the Divine." One glimpses the vigor and elegance of Augustine's thought and writing, a force always looking up to the divine measure: intellectual and spiritual power humbly available to God.

The saint's study is that of a Renaissance humanist, including an armillary sphere and geometrical drawings in the open book above Augustine's head.

We are told in the object label that the scene depicted refers to a legend: at the moment (the hour of Compline) when Saint Jerome dies (which would mean the depicted scene takes place on my birthday, a thing I find kind of cool), he becomes present hundreds of miles away to tell Augustine: "He might as soon enclose the ocean in a small vessel, as soon clasp the whole earth in his fist, as soon halt the movement of the heavens as describe the beatitude of the saints without having experienced it." 

This voice startles Augustine. Note that he is on the verge of spilling his inkwell. The voice draws his eyes above the whole created cosmos, represented by the armillary sphere. But what Jerome says is not a thing unknown to Augustine. His whole posture is that of a man given to both study and supplication of the divine wisdom and love. 

For any servant-theologian, this painting should be an emblem. Botticelli has bodied-forth our deepest aspiration.

The Political Theology of John the Baptist

[Posted on Facebook yesterday.]

Happy feast of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist! It's not the most common happening to celebrate back-to-back solemnities, but with the Sacred Heart yesterday, these are great days of grace.

It seems to me that the Church wishes to emphasize the political theology, as it were, of John the Baptist's mission. In the entrance antiphon and collect for Mass today, as well as in one of the antiphons of lauds, is repeated the fact that John is sent from God "to prepare a people/nation fit for the Lord."

We have the call of Jeremiah in the first reading from matins, in which the Lord says,

"See, I place My words in your mouth! This day I set you over nations and over kingdoms, to root up and to tear down, to destroy and to demolish, to build and to plant. But do you gird up your loins; stand up and tell them all that I command you. Be not crushed on their account, as though I would leave you crushed before them; for it is I this day Who have made you a fortified city, a pillar of iron, a wall of brass, against the whole land: against Judah's kings and princes, against its priests and people. They will fight against you, but not prevail over you, for I am with you to deliver you, says the LORD."

The prophet, filled with the Spirit, constitutes the true polity, over against the injustice of human power, the spirit of self-serving ("a fortified city...against Judah's kings and princes"). This spirit is also to be found in any one of us who would prop up self by scapegoating others, whether that be demonization of the "other" by the right, the left, or the middle.

There is also the fact that the second reading emphasizes the Davidic context of John, which isn't the most obvious thing. It is an excerpt from the address given by Saint Paul in the synagogue at Pisidian Antioch (his first recorded oration), itself presenting a political theology, one of comprehensive power:

"God raised up David as King; of him God testified, 'I have found David, son of Jesse, a man after my own heart; he will carry out My every wish.' From this man's descendants God, according to His promise, has brought to Israel a savior, Jesus. John heralded His coming by proclaiming a baptism of repentance to all the people of Israel; and as John was completing his course, he would say: 'What do you suppose that I am? I am not he. Behold, One is coming after me; I am not worthy to unfasten the sandals of His feet.'" (Acts 13:22-25)

Paired with the corresponding speech in the first half of the Petrine/Pauline diptych that is the Acts of the Apostles, Saint Peter's Pentecostal address, in which David is also featured, we have a dual vision of the Kingdom of the resurrected Christ. On the one hand, this Kingdom is a mighty work of the Spirit bringing history and nature, with all of the promises of God encoded therein, to inner, and supernatural, fulfillment. In this light, it is not reducible to political configurations. On the other hand, this Kingdom does in fact have a political history, and therefore places all politics under its measure.

The human person and the societies made up of human persons are not reducible to the state and its arrogant power, whether wielded by technocratic elites of right or left. The state ought to serve the natural end of man, which is intrinsically open to the ultimate end of man in the New Jerusalem. That natural end is gentle virtue, contemplative and responsible, open to supernatural direction by the Holy Spirit, lived out in a body politic of reconciling love.

The gentleness is essential. This is the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart after all.

The preparation of the Kingdom was John's whole life. He was a pure blade of flame in the service of divine love. His baptism of repentance was not performed for the sake of a further self-enclosure of "the elect," of "Israel." His repentance was true repentance, which burns for a universal Kingdom. It says, "LORD, take from me all self-will. Leave me with only the desire to serve Your mission, to form a people who can actually begin to love. But first, I must begin to love. I must decrease; You must increase."

Let's end with the first reading from Mass today, a memory of Isaiah's commission as a prophet, from chapter 49:

"Though I thought I had toiled in vain, and for nothing, uselessly, spent my strength, yet my reward is with the LORD, my recompense is with my God. For now the LORD has spoken, Who formed me as His servant from the womb, that Jacob may be brought back to Him and Israel gathered to Him; and I am made glorious in the sight of the LORD, and my God is now my strength! It is too little, He says, for you to be My servant, to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and restore the survivors of Israel; I will make you a light to the nations, that My salvation may reach to the ends of the earth."

The World Means Intensely, and Means Good: On "Botticelli and the Search for the Divine"

One of the most exquisite aesthetic creations in the world is at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston until July 9th, Botticelli’s “Madonna of the Book.” If you can go, you must.

It is part of an excellent exhibition of Quattrocento Florentine art, “Botticelli and the Search for the Divine,” which includes work from other, contextualizing, artists, notably a few pieces by Fra Filippo Lippi.

In this exhibit, certain awkwardnesses are apparent in some of Botticelli’s work (like hands that are not quite right), but besides the transcendent perfection of the “Madonna of the Book,” there are at least two other overwhelming pieces: “Saint Augustine in His Study” and “Virgin and Child with the Young Saint John the Baptist” (in which the deposition from the Cross is emphatically foreshadowed, à la the earlier “Descent from the Cross” by Rogier van der Weyden).

Also of great interest is Botticelli’s surging and chaotic 1500 “Adoration of the Magi,” in which the Last Judgment has been telescoped onto the Nativity, the mass of humanity positioning itself with regard to the provocation of the God made visible, the God humbled out of love.

The exhibition notes the direct teaching lineage from Masaccio to Lippo to Botticelli to Filippino Lippi (the Carmelite friar’s son). The first paintings one comes across are from Fra Lippo, the most glorious of which is a “Madonna and Child” from the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi (with an astonishing sketch on the back of the panel).

Botticelli somehow renders the tenderness of the interaction between Mary and Jesus even more delicately in the “Madonna of the Book,” a painting of perfect balance. The profound and sumptuous lapis lazuli blue of Mary’s robe fills the canvas, with a Pentecostal sunburst on the shoulder. Heaven doubly mantles and would engulf the fathomless care and docile suffering circulating through Mary, Jesus, the book of prayer: in that robe, and in the open sky of morning taking so much space in the upper quadrant of the painting—the very future of inexorable love.

The exhibition points out the revolution in style worked by these Renaissance painters. Robert Browning, in his fantastic dramatic monologue “Fra Lippo Lippi,” muses on this revolution. 

Lippi address the captain of the watch, which has detained him in the street from his revels:

However, you’re my man, you’ve seen the world —
The beauty and the wonder and the power, 
The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades, 
Changes, surprises, — and God made it all! 
— For what? Do you feel thankful, ay or no, 
For this fair town’s face, yonder river’s line, 
The mountain round it and the sky above, 
Much more the figures of man, woman, child, 
These are the frame to? What’s it all about? 
To be passed over, despised? or dwelt upon, 
Wondered at? Oh, this last of course! — you say. 
But why not do as well as say, — paint these
Just as they are, careless what comes of it? 
God’s works — paint anyone, and count it crime
To let a truth slip. Don’t object, “His works
Are here already; nature is complete: 
Suppose you reproduce her — which you can’t —
There’s no advantage! you must beat her, then.” 
For, don’t you mark? we’re made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see; 
And so they are better, painted — better to us, 
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that; 
God uses us to help each other so, 
Lending our minds out. Have you noticed, now, 
Your cullion’s hanging face? A bit of chalk, 
And trust me but you should, though! How much more, 
If I drew higher things with the same truth! 
That were to take the Prior’s pulpit-place, 
Interpret God to all of you! Oh, oh, 
It makes me mad to see what men shall do
And we in our graves! This world’s no blot for us, 
Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good: 
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.

The poem isn’t fair to Giotto: it is not a question of either iconic flatness or the fullness of sculptural figuration. (Indeed, Giotto has already made icons move.) Icons show us heaven one way; Renaissance three-dimensionality, in another. The former does so through the phenomenal; latter does so in this world of solid flesh.

Browning’s Lippi emphasizes that realistic art can cause us to pay attention to the divine plenitude in creation: pay attention, and fall in love. We are “in our graves” until the great artist wakes us up to what is right there, right here. Indeed, the great artist makes this world burn gold like an icon.

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.