The Olah of Christ: Covenant and Consummation

 

I'm gratefully resting on a foundation of Jewish wisdom; Rabbi Fuhrman of Alephbeta.com, to be precise: he has such a clear way of speaking about what is, for the Jews since Sinai, an ever-complicating series of laws, labyrinthian commentary and daily rules and rituals; as he says, understanding the wisdom of the Torah "is compounded by the complexity of the laws surrounding" every deep idea. When I listen to the Rabbi speak, I imagine the Jews at the feet of Sinai, in their ant-like smallness at the threshold of Law; I imagine not the human attempts, as noble as they were, to escape simple revenge laws, like Orestes resting at the threshold of the civil court as the Furies unfurled into the Eumenides: rather, I see these were humans waiting upon the Creator to reveal the true, natural law, but somehow...more than that: "I place before you life and death; choose life." I see a kind of wedding moment, a moment just before consummation. Martin Buber, the great Jewish phenomenologist, describes in I and Thou those standing before God's mountain, learning the law, learning the rubrics of sacrifice and temple: "Upright servant[s] of former times, who believed that God yearned for the scent of [their] burnt offering." This is more than just a system of justice: it is a relationship. Of what? Creator and created? Master and servants? Father and children? Husband and wife? Suitor and beloved? 

What if this relationship is not just one of these, but all of them? Or perhaps...what if it is, in a sense, a centrifugal progression towards a center, a kind of circling out from a center, through rupture in the Fall, and then back to that center and beyond it, to a marriage feast? God is Creator: He makes foundations ex nihilo and then other things from those elements: Earth from a formless void, Adam from earth, Eve from Adam, their progeny through both. God is also Master: He who governs, He who is Justice, because all order comes from Him. God is also Father, as Creator, but also by desire; He is not a Deist "clockmaker" or Aristotle's Prime Mover, who has no back-and-forth relationship with His creation, especially angels and humans. The Song of Solomon shows us God as a suitor, and God also relates many times in the Torah that He sees His people as a wife; therefore, His desire, analogously human because He is so beyond our true understanding, is ultimately unity in love. Not only does He yearn for us, He gives of Himself, his image, His life, His love, His Son, His Spirit, freely and generously. 

God asks us to choose--life or death--love or disconnection--either we choose to be on a road towards marriage, or we are on a road towards self as center; there are no other options; it is a true disjunct. Why? Simply put, God is the source of all life, all that exists. If we choose ourselves, we choose death. Love, even on a purely human level, asks always for unity, a transcendence of selves into something new. God asks no less. Another way to speak about God's generosity is in the language of covenants: this is more fundamentally a gifting of one party to another, an act of giving, sealing oneself to a bond, a relationship of generosity between two unequal parties; it reminds me a little of the Western medieval "oath" relationships between the different classes of society (peasant to noble/landholder especially). The lord owned the land, and was, ultimately the person to protect and govern those "oathed" to him, those who worked the land and benefited from it. It was a personal commitment between parties, not bureaucratic; it depended on virtue and a certain noblesse oblige that meant the lord had to be, certainly, an exceptional human being: generous, just, willing to lay down his or her life in battle to protect and serve his or her dependents; the relationship was more like a metaphorical shepherd-sheep, more like a parent-child covenant. 

Covenants, in the ancient Jewish world, were represented by a "cutting" which is part of the Hebrew root word for "covenant"; one thinks of Abraham and the mysterious dance with God between the halves of a sacrificed animal. God Himself passes through the cut pieces to indicate His commitment to the promises He made to Abraham. "I shall be your God." God here takes upon Himself the ancient consequences of breaking this covenant: to be cut apart like the animal. Though this was the norm for the greater party to do as an oath to the lower party, it seems almost silly for the Source of Justice to take justice upon Himself; I always imagine this as God's condescension to Abraham's human understanding, a humble "coming down" to Abraham's level, so that Abraham would be able to respond, to be in the relationship. 

God making covenants with human beings is the most clear indication, before Christ, of His desire for deeper relationship, of His love. His picking out of particular people for relationship is mysterious, and His particular calling, after the betrayal of Adam and Eve, of Seth, Noah, Abraham,  Moses and the Prophets, and then Christ and His calling of particular disciples, is mysterious. Why not all people? This is another indication of the desire not just for ruling, but for relationship: it must be two-way, and relationship with God, who is so Other, requires cultivation and faith; it is a generous, delicate thing, something built on many instances of trust and goodwill and love, like any deep relationship for a human being. This calling out may indicate God choosing those who were also trying to choose Him, and simultaneously, examples for others. And, in the event of that relationship being broken, it requires mercy and a way back. But how does a human being adequately requite God for a broken relationship? Thus was the system of sacrifice instituted, first, in a sense, at Passover, and then in full force at Mt. Sinai, the great "giving of the law." In a sense, the whole system of laws was a training and a covenant in one. 

The Jewish sacrifice-laws, therefore, reflect a proper covenant with God, and covenants require sacrifice as a seal...yet they were much more than simple seals. They were acts with deep meaning for the human soul,  fundamentally a visceral expression of "I-Thou" relationship between the human person and God. The "Thou meets me through grace," Buber states, and "it is not found by seeking. But my speaking of the primary word to it is an act of my being, is indeed the act of my being." He goes on: "The Thou  meets me. But I step into direct relation . . . the relation means being chosen and choosing, suffering and action in one; just as any action of the whole being, which means the suspension of all partial actions . . . is bound to resemble suffering . . . concentration and fusion into the whole being can never take place through my agency, nor can it ever take place without me. I become [my emphasis] through my relation to the Thou . . . all real living is meeting." A covenant with God can be described this way: it is the stepping into relationship with all of my being: a covenant is not made partially, and the laying down of my whole self between the pieces is a denial of the self as center-point; it is the dependence on another for the lesser party, and so requires the fundamental suffering of self-denial. Yet, so does the covenant for the greater party: it is also an irrevocable gifting of the self: so precious, so deep. God giving Himself and I meeting him, soul to Maker-of-soul. There is something so right about this, leading I think to Moses' desire "to see Your Face." Moses is acknowledging the "I-Thou," which is a relationship of unity and love, an almost-equality that is astounding when one stops and thinks about it, and his shining face requiring veiling is a visceral reflection of his near I-Thou with God. Buber elsewhere talks about Sinai as "the navel of the world" and that the Israelites were experiencing this mountain of God towering over them, almost capturing the people in its I-Thou gaze, a gaze of love, terrifying, life-giving love, ultimate gift and demand all in one. 

The Israelites first learned this relationship out in this Sinai silence and nothingness, the place of no hiding, no distractions from without, far from Egypt, symbol of the world. They learned in their very journey through this nothingness—a journey that millennia later the Desert Fathers and St. John of the Cross would take in spirit and would learn the same—that the essence of relation is also sacrifice, that the covenant is consummated in sacrifice. The Blessed Mother exemplifies this in the Annunciation and Magnificat, and lived it out in her journey with her Son. Fundamentally, it is sacrifice of self-independence on the part of both parties, and the sacrifices of the Jewish people reflect the different aspects, or levels, of that spiritual relationship: how to repair a broken relationship (Chatat), how to maintain peace (Shlamin), and the reality of myself in I-Thou with God, a kind of consummation or unity (Olah), mysteriously, a kind of holocaust. 

Rabbi Fuhrman more explicitly explains the three basic types of sacrifice in the Torah: "Chatat" is a sin offering, a kind of "tit for tat" or "eye for eye" in another form; it is the re-ordering of the first sin of transgressive consumption, the transgressing of God's domain in the Garden through the eating of the fruit. The sin-offering was, in a sense, a visceral "return"—quite literally of an animal needed for food, a taking of something from our domain and giving it to God in return for what we took from Him. It is a form of returning a tribute due, or what we think of as "retributive justice," the righting of a relationship through payment of some kind. God doesn't need fruit, though, does He? The sin and then retribution of Eden was more about respect of boundaries, actually. It simply was His domain, and we transgressed into it and stole; we violated the trust, the covenant first established in the Garden. Ever after, a return is needed from every one of us. The Chatat for the Israelites, a gift of a precious animal in the shadow of Sinai Law was not wasted; it was given to God's priests, who stood for Him in eating the sacrifice. Rabbi Fuhrman: 

If we transgress those commands, so we failed –if you would have to categorize it – in the area of respect. So respect is one of the great things that make the relationship between human beings and God work. But it's not the only thing. Life isn't just about respecting God, there's another thing we can strive for too, and that's where the Shlamim comes in.

The Shlamin is much more than an agreement to play by the rules. It is a revelation of what it means to be in relationship with God, a tutelage in justice, a justice reaching far back into the creation, a reflection in human life of proper order. To agree to live this order, this justice, is to abide in a relationship of love with God. "Shlamin" then, is a kind of "peace" or "wholeness" sacrifice, and this is reflected by which parties consumed the Shlamin: first, the Kohenim (priests), second, those who gave the sacrifice; the third part of it was consumed on the altar as God's portion; in other words, the animal became a means by which all parties, including God, shared: boundaries became open borders; strangers became siblings; estrangement became eudaemonia. This type of covenant ratified by shared sacrifice still filters through human life: the basic transactions of business contracts (I give you this, you give me that, and we're in business!) to the deeper contracts of marriage. Of course some are more religious; as one ascends the ladder of covenants, they are more and more about the heart and soul. Marriage is more about love, though natural; holy orders are also about love, but of a more purely supernatural essence; finally, the covenant between God and soul results in a spiritual unity of peace, a peace possible once the demands of justice in the Chatat are satisfied. These are all in the realm of the Shlamin, and it is, in a sense, the "bridge-sacrifice" between the Chatat and the Olah; it includes elements of both. But there are higher forms of relating to God, even beyond a shared covenant; this is echoed in the last, highest form of Israelite sacrifice: the Olah. 

The Olah, or burnt offering, was the symbolic, sacramental "I-Thou" with God; it was a kind of face-to-face, or "eye-to-eye" instead of "eye-for-an-eye." It was beyond retributive, and even beyond the peaceful sharing of boundaries. Rabbi Fuhrman explains:

Olah is about giving everything back. The Olah is entirely consumed on the altar. The very first Olah of the Torah is when God said to Abraham, give me your son, your only son, the one that you love. The one special thing that you have. You see how it's the inverse of the tree of knowledge? If the tree of knowledge is us sort of illegally and inappropriately taking God's one special thing from His domain, the Olah is when we voluntarily offer our one special thing, the thing that really by rights ought to be most mine, and I offer that back to God. The Akeidah, the binding of Isaac, becomes the paradigm for Olah.

It doesn't come because we've failed in some sort of respect to God, sort of our baseline obligation to God. It's not even about building a bridge of love with God – that's the Shlamim. It's about something else. It's about awe, really a step higher in a way even than love, at least when it comes to our relationship with God.

The Olah, in a sense, allowed Abraham to see God, to know Him as He is, almost, perhaps, a going beyond human limits; to experience God directly is to know that we, and all we claim to have, are either dust apart from Him or that which is His. It is a moment in the fire of pure love, pure justice, pure mercy, pure power. Rabbi Fuhrman tells a mysterious story about the kinds of sacrifice in practice, and more deeply, how the Chatat and the Olah are actually in a kind of inverse relationship. Aaron, as the first High Priest of the Law, had sons, and they were like assistant-priests, the Kohanim. They, in place of God, who did not eat physical animals, ate God's portion; they received the atonement for God. Two of Aaron's sons, though, during the Chatat ceremony, had brought "foreign fire" before the Lord, asserted themselves as knowing what was good and evil in the realm of Chatat, and they themselves were consumed by fire. The Chatat is about restoring, atoning, giving God back symbolically what is His, restoring justice. Somehow, the "foreign fire" seems to be another infraction in the act of healing an infraction, and they themselves in consequence were consumed. This is a great mystery: is it a visceral reminder of the seriousness around the atonement, that it required the deepest respect for each detail? The animal must be perfect; the ritual must also be perfect, because God Himself is perfect? The most profound part of this story, though, is Aaron's response: He is silent, almost in complete, profound grief and awe at the same moment. And then, instead of re-offering the Chatat, he offers an Olah, an offering completely burnt, completely given to God, as his sons were consumed. It is as if there was a symbolic conversation between God and Aaron after this indescribable loss, a conversation about boundaries, about the reality of covenant. God's deep humility and condescension to even accept a Chatat or Shlamin requires the deepest respect; an assertion of self ("foreign fire") in the face of this humility is deeply inappropriate, deeply disrespectful; in effect, it nullifies the Chatat at the very core and they suddenly faced God as if they had somehow placed themselves as equals. Aaron's response to the immolation of his sons is to offer an Olah instead of trying again to offer the Chatat, and Moses does not understand; there is an argument. Rabbi Fuhrman describes Aaron's heartbreaking response: 

Today the Chatat was brought, he said; Vatikrenah oti ka'eileh – but look what has befallen me, the loss of my children. V'achalti chatat hayom – and on that day would I eat a Chatat on behalf of God? Hayitav b'einei Hashem – do you think God would find that pleasing? How could I take even on behalf of God – how could I assert boundaries even on behalf of God, when I have nothing left to give, when everything has been taken from me? When I feel that there's just no boundaries left, there's no boundary that I can assert.

It is, of course reminiscent of one of the first Olahs recorded in the Torah, the request of God for Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. When Abraham goes silent, refusing even to explain to his son, like Aaron has gone silent, Rabbi Fuhrman phrases it so well: They had "touched the energy of the Olah," the deepest reality of all creatures before the Creator: in reality, there are no boundaries: everything IS God's. Thus, the Chatat and the Olah seem to be in contradiction, unless one takes God's love into account: like His willingness to create others in His own image, to share relationship with them, God condescends to give part of His creation, part of His life to each of us; however, in the deepest reality, our lives were never our own except by His first allowing it to be so. Like a good father sharing His wealth, this is an ineffable gift that should never be forgotten, and all other sacrifices, all covenants are acts of God desiring relationship; they are love, pure love...and though we can disregard them through free will, God asks through these sacrifices, through the covenants they represent, for all of our being; we cannot enter into relationship with Him half-heartedly, or respond like the prideful princess to her suitors; God, in His mercy, chooses to discipline us, to teach us, to allow us to make Chatat, to live within a Shlamin, but all of it depends on that primary inclination and understanding of the reality of the Olah.

This discipline, these boundary-relationships allowed by God, are reflected from the very first, when Adam and Eve are given the Garden and stewardship over creation, except for certain bounded areas that are God's: the right to judge between good and evil. It is His right. Always. They did not respect this; they did not understand the awe of the Olah; they began to assert their own right to judge apart from God, and this meant, in effect, that they were rival kingdoms to God, that they joined a kingdom of rebellion and unreality, Satan's kingdom, cut off from the source of life; God uses the metaphor in Ezekiel of trees as kingdoms, which gives a certain interesting view of "the tree of knowledge of good and evil"--in effect, a political reality, a kingdom of which God is the unalterable ruler, the only true judge of what is right and wrong. In Ezekiel, God uses metaphors, including trees in Eden, to describe the falling of those rulers and kingdoms who raise themselves up beyond what they really are, who try to rival God especially in terms of judgment of good and evil: "You were in Eden, the garden of God . . . Your heart became proud on account of your beauty, and you corrupted your wisdom because of your splendor . . . So I made a fire come out from you, and it consumed you" (28:13--19). Over and over we see the monstrosity of creaturely pride resulting in death, twice here a consumption by fire.

Is God cruel? Why can't He just set aside His justice for creatures who cannot seem to handle themselves properly? I cannot presume to answer for God; this journey through the sacrifices has taught me something of the mystery of God. I can simply wonder, and do so only from a human point of view, based on human experience. It seems to me that love can only be built on truth; we cannot love what or whom we do not truly know; if there is no reality, and all is relative, then we are all in our own "kingdoms" and love is not possible, for no unity is possible without connection to a common reality, to what is, to truth. And the Kingdom of Truth is inherently God's because He is the source of everything. Therefore, to have a love relationship with God one must be in reality, which is His, and living according to reality is also just. God would not be loving if He did not also desire that we know justice and become just. 

Why fire?  Natural light is sourced in burning, immolation, combustion, and by light we can live and see; in the spiritual world, what is burning? In a deep sense, God Himself; He is the source of reason and also all life. How do we approach this burning, this life-giving fire? As Moses did, with our shoes off, with an awareness that this is Holy Ground. If we think of this fire as love, a creative force, we see that it does not consume in a destructive, wanton way. This love gives life when we are in a right relationship with it; it consummates, but does not consume; yet, if we are not worthy, or in a right relationship, it burns us because we are, in a very real sense, "playing with fire." 

In a sense, then, the mystery of the Olah is a mystery of consummation because God loves me, the realization that all I am is God's; in that complete offering of myself, or all that is precious to me, I am acknowledging that all I have is God's to do with as He pleases. This is justice, and in free will, it is also love.

The history of Israel is a history of this relationship, attempts and failures on the part of humans to become "I-Thou" with God; it is the love story of God, who wants a love-relationship. It is the impossible dream, on a human level. And then, God does something even more impossible. He steps into His own creation, which makes no sense to one who is expedient and only focuses on justice; however, it makes total sense when one looks through a lens of love. God becomes the Lover in the Song of Solomon, "emptying Himself."

Suddenly, God is a baby, Jesus Christ, "God with us" and "Savior." It should astound us, because it is not the logic of justice and power alone, of the Judge; it should not astound us, if we read the story of Adam and Eve, as God walked in the Garden and called out to them; if we read the story of Noah, arc, and rainbow; if we read the story of Abraham and see God gushing in generosity and then in ultimate test of Abraham's love for Him; if we read the story of Moses, and the complex language of signs to the oppressed, grieving Hebrews, signs that said, "I have seen your grief and will heal it"; if we read the story of Isaiah and the still, quiet breeze; if we read the story of Jonah and the little tree God made to shade him in his anger and distress. It is a language of love, a love built not on sentimentality but on the reality of God Himself; it is the self-giving of God and His desire for response in kind: the desire common to all true lovers. 

What is Christ, then, in the language of sacrifice? 

Is He most like a Chatat? He is indeed a Chatat; He offers Himself as atonement, for us, a perpetual sin-offering; this was done once on the Cross, and is perpetuated in the Eucharistic consecration; He is also a Shlamin, because we share the Sacrifice in the taking of the Eucharist, both priest and people, a bond of peace between us and God, and God Himself is there, accepting Himself as Peace Offering; He is also an Olah and this is the most fundamental and profound, because without this element, I do not think the others would be possible. The Olah is the foundational sacrifice, the one most given to God, the one that reflects the reality of God's being "I-Thou" to us; it alone allows the other forms of sacrifice to be perpetual, because it is the truth of justice and love; it is the place of the most real relationship with God, the most truthful one, and so it is the consummation, the wedding feast;  the Olah of Christ is the only perfect human response of Olah: "I do all that my Father tells me"; "That they may be one as we are one"; perhaps the apex of immolation, "Father, why have you forsaken me?" and finally, "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit." 

In short, Christ fulfills all types of sacrifice that came before in His own person. St. John says, "God so loved the world that He gave His only Son." This is of course analogous to the Olah of Abraham, the highest demand of love. Christ is, though, God creating an Olah for Himself; He is completing the circle of the highest love for us. He asks us simply to believe Him and to respond, through His grace given in the Shlamin and Chatat of Christ, the Eucharist, by doing the same. "Give your all, because I have." 

I have no words for this, no adequate words. God desires so much to draw each of us back into the center, and beyond, the center of love and unity; He desires you as the most ardent of lovers to be with Him in love, and He made the highest sacrifice to assuage justice, to reveal reality, to make possible a real love, and offers us, in our walk through this life, to, in turn, become an Olah by becoming Christ through the ultimate sacrifice, the one that encompasses all others, the Eucharist.  Only through an Olah can we be consumed in God's love, be truly remade in the fire of love through Christ, the only perfect human Olah-response possible, an Olah of perpetual love through the Resurrection: 

Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing at the center of the throne, encircled by the four living creatures and the elders.

--St. John, Revelations 5:6

Martin Buber, I and Thou: http://www.maximusveritas.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/iandthou.pdf

Salt-Dough Cross

It is a Celtic cross, delicate-dough baked

slightly skewed tiny swirled shapes

with lots of spaces

for the window-light to shine through;

a daughter's gift to me,

an artifact of suffering

made in the throes of anxiety,

made carefully, slowly,

to keep going,

to keep living.

Pondering Submission

I'm fifty-three; I've been married for more than twenty years, and we've done our best to raise three children. I've been a Catholic since 1997; as I've moved in and beyond different Catholic communities, I've experienced different perspectives on men and women, on marriage. The roles of women seem to be a flash-point in many Catholic communities, whether these groups are ultra-traditional and fighting for a return to more traditional roles, or ultra-liberal and still on the revolution train, and every iteration in between, so I suppose it is an important question: why is everyone so very sensitive (including myself, at certain points in my life)? 

I think there are very good reasons for this sensitivity; the roles of men and women in marriage must be a hinge or support point of Christian community. Indeed, marriage and family are highly political: if the Church and the world both start in the family, the organization of that family has tremendous influence. Also, a marriage is meant as a sign for Christ and His Church, for the love of the Trinity; the sexual act is a nexus of the physical and spiritual; phenomenologically, the attacks upon marriage and the family, both from powers and principalities and human forces, indicate that the family, beginning in marriage, is much more than preference; it is the heart of human civilization, and one nexus of God meeting persons. Most of us first know God in the persons of our parents: they show us this love in their marriage as well in their roles as individual parents. In my lifetime of experience, it seems true that a father's leadership in spiritual practices has a tremendous influence on a child's later faith, and this leadership goes so far as to make a facade of faith one of the strongest "lessons" for a child to drop faith. A mother's influence: many, many people will express the beginning of their personal interest in the faith, their heart's movement, to their mother's model and encouragement. This doesn't mean that children without ideal fathers, or fathers at all, or mothers, are doomed—but they will sustain a wound requiring grace and incarnational healing to overcome. Therefore, there is a layered order inherent in marriage: biologically, socially, spiritually, these human orders echoing the relationship of Christ and the Church, the relationships of love in the Trinity.

The more subtle, implicit lesson about God from the family is the marriage itself; this is a sign both for the children and for the outside world: it is a sign, as St. Paul says, of Christ's love for His Church. John Paul II, in Dignitatis Muleris, says:

The author of the Letter to the Ephesians sees no contradiction between an exhortation formulated in this way and the words: "Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife" (5:22-23). The author knows that this way of speaking, so profoundly rooted in the customs and religious tradition of the time, is to be understood and carried out in a new way: as a "mutual subjection out of reverence for Christ" (cf. Eph 5:21). This is especially true because the husband is called the "head" of the wife as Christ is the head of the Church; he is so in order to give "himself up for her" (Eph 5:25), and giving himself up for her means giving up even his own life. However, whereas in the relationship between Christ and the Church the subjection is only on the part of the Church, in the relationship between husband and wife the "subjection" is not one-sided but mutual.

There are two issues that need to be understood before particular judgments about how this should happen on a day-to-day basis in particular families as a sign for those around them, children or community: first, the fundamental anthropology of a woman versus a man, because upon this definition rests any conclusions we can make: only when the essential nature of a being is understood can we make judgments about particular actions and or details. Second, the arrangement of St. Paul's passage here in Ephesians 5: what is he saying within the context of the argument itself? 

First, then: By nature, are men and women equal in dignity before God? I mean not an equality of "sameness" but rather of essence. Are both sexes equally endowed with the image of God? Are each capable of a personal relationship with the Lord? Are each fundamentally responsible for responding to grace? I think the answers are clearly "yes" on all counts. It is worthwhile to note, however, that this fundamental equality in nature is not a Western pagan idea; rather, the early philosophers played with the ideas that women were not capable of the highest practical rationality (that of political prudence), nor does it seem they were thought capable of contemplation either, which is the highest human activity according to Aristotle, due to the erroneous assumption that they had an inferior ability to moderate their emotions. Therefore, they were not thought equal companions to men, leading to the allowance of male homosexuality as a "more fitting, higher form of love between equals." Likewise, Cicero never spoke of friendship between a man and a woman, because it is implicit in his Greek philosophical foundation that women cannot be as comprehensively virtuous as men. Women were thought even to be the completely passive, surrogate element in the foundations of life, conception, which is a fundamental human power: the power to pass on life. This all places women, in the Western collective history, as a secondary essence, without rational or conceptual authority; I believe this was partially driven by the Aristotelian concept that where we see more than one thing, we encounter hierarchy. 

The Christian understanding of the Trinity, an apparent paradox to human reason, will counter this idea of "differences necessarily mean hierarchy" at the very source, and the Judeo-Christian understanding of women versus men, in comparison to the whole of early Western philosophy and faith, is revelatory. Fundamentally, though, the order in a marriage cannot both follow God's order and dehumanize or infantilize anyone; it must reveal and uplift that which God has created, individual souls with equal dignity, the chance for each to have authority in proper measure, because to be an author is to give life, it is life-giving, it is one of the fundamental elements of being imago Dei.

In this reality of imago Dei, Jewish tradition seems, from Genesis, to counter the pagan ideas of "human degrees of essential rationality and equality" from the beginning. God creates both sexes directly, and asks of each obedience to His law; each are punished, held responsible, and the corrective punishment for the woman is the rule of the man over her. This tells us that the original state of perfection was not one of political hierarchy between them, but a relationship of unity and companionship: love and friendship, which can only happen between those who have been given a certain equality. Thus, men and women are complementary iterations of the same essence, and pace Aristotle, they can be equal and yet different. The actions and words of Christ in terms of the women in His life also speak volumes about the essences of men and women: In a culture hostile to feminine involvement in religious or public matters, He often spoke directly to them, related to them much as He did the men he encountered, held them accountable in the same way, and even chose one as His mother and one as the apostle to the apostles. He spoke of no marriage in heaven, indicating individual souls in direct relation to the Trinity, rather than women as relating to Him only through a man. St. Paul also indicates this radical equality in the Body of Christ: "For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:27-28). All of this indicates the way God orders us: each as His children, in unity, in an essential equality. 

Why do I spell out the obvious here? Because this is the context in which St. Paul's statements about submission must be made: the submission of a wife is not an essential submission, one that comes from her personhood, or even from her womanhood. Not all women are submissive to all men. It is a particular submission in a certain relationship, and so it has a special, limited reason. Furthermore, both men and women have parts of their lives, responsibilities, areas of authority not directly part of their role in marriage. Even in traditional medieval Christian communities, as Regine Pernoud shows conclusively in Women in the Days of the Cathedrals, women, including married women, held great authority in political and social life. There are also many saints who held authority in areas beyond their marriages: The mother of St. Therese of Liseux ran a successful lace business; St. Gianna Molla was a doctor; there are queens and artists, musicians, teachers, and the list goes on. As Dorothy Sayers says in "Are Women Human?" a woman, as a fully human person, cannot be limited to one or two roles in life, or treated as a child without full agency, without the opportunity to be "life-giving." God gave women gifts, abilities, calls, similar to men, in various areas, and St. Edith Stein calls for women to bring the feminine genius into all areas of life. 

A Christian marriage, nonetheless, seems to create a special sign, a stage space, so to speak, a certain drama in which something slightly different is played out. It is a dynamic reality, not a static sign. Christ first sets that stage by reminding us of the state of perfection in Genesis: the two are one flesh, in this life. Marriage is a sacrament, a sign, a nexus of nature and super-nature. John Paul II speaks of this beautifully as he relates that the masculine and feminine physiques are also signs of the complementarity of marriage, the perpetual "overcoming of original solitude," and implicit in this unity and complementarity of physical and emotional, mental and spiritual, is the definition of the sexes as fundamentally equal in essence—for that which is essentially unequal cannot be yoked together in unity, in "one flesh." A man cannot marry a sheep. We also recoil at the idea of child marriage. Marriage requires rational consent, an indication of this fundamental dignity and equality between man and wife, the fundamental agency and authority of both over their own persons. The sign, the drama of marriage is where a unity of the flesh is achieved, but it goes farther: eros is meant to be expanded to other forms of love, such as family love and friendship, but also selfless love, agape. John Paul II speaks of this fundamental "gift of the self" as signified on the lower level by the very physiques of men and women, and signified on a higher level by children and family life, and over a lifetime, that selflessness required for a long-lasting marriage. 

Christianity also raises marriage to the sign of sacrament because it deals with eternal souls, and also because it is a sign of supernatural forms of love: to the children of a marriage, the first lessons in love are given within the home, from the marriage itself. They are then tilled soil ready to receive the supernatural analogues of these loves: the eros of God, the family of the Church, the friendship with Our Lord, all made possible by the supernatural agape of Christ on the Cross, a selfless love we are meant to embody for others as part of Christ's Body. 

Therefore, any submission in Christian marriage must be understood within this structure of essential agency, authority within one's own person, equality and dignity, and the call for each soul to a supernatural life of selfless love. The marriage, like the Church, is a sign of the servant economy of Christ, that "right-side up" kingdom as opposed to the "domination" that runs the world. Submission, then, is a dynamic, ever-flowing movement, a perpetual gift of one soul, one authority to another, and back again. One must first have something to submit; one must first have a self, an authority, out of which to love and to sacrifice as Christ did. 

Here, then, we turn to the second important issue to understand before we can make particular judgments about how submission in marriage is lived out: the arrangement of St. Paul's exhortation in Ephesians. St. Paul is speaking, in Chapter 5, of how those within Christ's Body should relate. He then turns, and states, "Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ" (Eph 5:21). Many people could read this as the end of the first section, with the next starting with ""Wives, submit to your husband as to the Lord." However, if one reads the section "Submit to one another" as the generic "submit," then the next passages are species of submission: wives have one kind, and the husband another kind. 

"To submit" or "to regard" or "to respect" all have similar meanings, perhaps getting at the original language: to allow oneself to be under another's authoritative gaze; this seems to explain St. Paul's directly following ideas of the husband nourishing, cherishing the wife. The key definition then, to unpack, is Christian authority. Unlike a worldly understanding of authority as rule-giving, domination, Christ tells us quite clearly that it is about service. True, life-giving authority is exercised in deep humility, in the washing of another's feet. "Do not rule as the Gentiles do, dominating each other; you lower yourselves to the role of servant," Christ tells his astonished disciples, those who wished for the position of greatness, of domination, at Christ's right hand. Christ's question, "Can you drink the cup I will drink?" indicates the definition of the great in the Kingdom of Heaven: it is the epitome of selfless love, a deep pouring out of the self in humility, for the good of the other. 

Thus, the husband's submission is quite literally a lowering of the self into a position of servitude, and the wife is to regard this, to respect it, to accept it and receive it as a means to be cherished and nourished and empowered in the faith. In turn, her regard and respect for his humility and his gift of self is empowering to him, and answers the deep call in his nature to be heroic. She must allow him to serve her, she must respect and respond to any legitimate, moral way he does this. This also answers the call in her nature to be able to feel secure to nurture others. 

Therefore, what does this look like in real life? I believe that this is going to be different in each marriage, because marriages are between individuals, not stereotypes, and there are different stages of life that a marriage must adapt to as well as individual needs, strengths and weaknesses, and various crises. However, there are some general marks of this mutual submission: again, the father is the spiritual leader. He will set the tone with the help of his wife, and though they must make spiritual decisions together, his witness will generally be one that is more a bridge for the children into their own independent lives; he will be the proto-father for the Father, just as the mother can be the prototype for the action of the Holy Spirit, or the tenderness of God, and of course, a link to the role of the Theotokos in the lives of the children. The spousal mutual self-gift, regard, submission (one accepting the service of the other, the other given regard in decisions in appropriate areas) is the most powerful witness to their children and the outside community.

Does this mean that a wife has to leave all money matters in her husband's hands, or that she should never work outside the home, or that there is no discussion or that the woman has no authority over issues at work or in her own work at home with the children or over her own bodily needs and what she should do health-wise? These are questions that the Church wisely does not answer, because they are too particular. Neither should other, lesser voices seek to claim ethical and moral and dogmatic authority over others in these areas. This is best left to the spouses themselves and at times of need, counselors, spiritual directors, and pastors, who should refer to the Magisterium.

It seems to me that better questions (leading to principles of action in particular situations) for husbands and wives are "How can I best act out selfless love in whatever situation we find ourselves?" and "How can I best serve you and regard your gift of self so that you may one day be unified with the Lord?" and "How might I respect your area of authority (servanthood)?" Then, each is loving God through submission to the other, and as St. Augustine says, in the case of a holy, complete mutual submission (different, but equal) that is love of God in action, "Do what you will."

Fanfare for the Common Man

On March 12, 1943, the Cinncinati Symphony Orchestra opened a concert with Aaron Copland's new Fanfare for the Common Man; it was a serendipitous place to celebrate the lives of normal people, those who go from birth to death without gracing the pages of a newspaper or the history books: Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus (c. 500 BC), for whom the city in Ohio is named, was a Roman statesman who stood up for the plebeian, or common man, against those (amongst them his own son) who wanted to keep them in a kind of perpetual servitude. Cincinnatus came into almost absolute power as dictator at the request of his fellow Romans: persuaded to leave his plough, he worked to create a more just republic for the mass of Roman citizens, and then gave up his power as soon as he could, returning to the work of the common man, returning to his plough and fields. He is in the Roman history books, such as Livy's History of Rome, as a man representing the best of civic virtue: solid, humble, brave, a servant of the common good and his fellow common man. 

In the city that bears this great (common) man's name, Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man was a response to the part that millions of men and women were playing in the fight against totalitarianism in the guise of fascism: it was a celebration of that peculiar mix of viewpoints one must have to properly appreciate the identity of what others have derisively called "the masses" or "the silent majority."  Thoreau characterized these as "the mass of men [who] live quiet lives of desperation." In one sense, Thoreau was referring to those, in his day, who blindly accepted the status quo and were not looking transcendentally at life: those who did not look beyond the roof and walls of atmosphere around them, conventions and propaganda, to the expanse of order beyond that is the foundation for the air they breathed, to the principles of justice and beauty. Therefore, in one sense, Thoreau may have been right: there are certainly many people who are "common" in the sense that they are complacent, uneducated, uninterested in anything beyond their own comforts. However, Thoreau, with a certain hue of the Harvardian self-important whiner, likely was looking, ironically, too narrowly from his own status in the intellectual class to see whom Copland, decades later, might be referring to. 

Who was Copland celebrating? I've seen many of them in the history books, like Horatio at the Bridge; like Cloelia, a Roman woman who came out of obscurity to fight when it was needed; fishermen at Galilee who dared to follow a nomadic Rabbi; the unknown artists who helped keep Christian civilization alive by creating bibles like the Book of Kells; those obscure faces under helmets in the mud who lived for weeks and months in the pits of hell on the front lines of Europe; pioneers on the Oregon Trail who left directions for others not to repeat their mistakes as they forged across the West; Native Americans who pursued justice as they were forced onto reservations, a justice that was not revenge...the list goes on and on, countless common men, women, and children who actually made history. Made history. Allowed it to continue.

Copland's Fanfare begins with simple brass notes, one and then two instruments. The melody sounds immense, expansive, like two cherubim calling across eternity: a surprisingly majestic theme for nobodies.  The echoes continue, deepening, as they are joined by more instruments, more complex movements. It is a slow coming together of innumerable voices: What are they saying? And to whom? 

I have seen the common man, that elusive figure that stands for many. I saw him one day when I was looking down 1st Avenue from an apartment window; I saw the garbage trucks, the taxis, the ambulances, the little silver commuter cars all edging their way, as a group and as individuals weaving, making small decisions in traffic, to work. I thought of all of them collectively getting up at 5 am each day to put food on the table, to educate their children, trying to commit to the daily tasks of life. I saw the uncommon common man when I was a young woman in San Francisco at a bus stop. He drove up, opened the doors, and smiled at me in the gathering dusk; he chatted with what would have, could have been anonymous, isolated passengers: he enjoyed us, he enjoyed his bus, he brought joy into being in a roaring white box in a maze of roads and apartments. I see the common woman in the faces caught on camera during the Depression, holding her children, looking beyond to their future even as hers closes down around her. Their voices are the call to life, the call of the heart and the backbone of any culture, a long, consistent courage. Sometimes we don't pay attention to the billions of good acts each day, because they aren't interesting to us; they don't raise our itchy curiosity for the different, the sensational. However, seeing the good isn't about interest: it is about beauty. The true common person continues to Choose the Good, the basic goods of family and community life, the essence of political life, and these acts are beautiful. When millions of people choose the good without any fanfare, they are calling to God and are lovingly watched by Him.

Therefore, leaders, political, religious, or intellectual, make a great mistake when they forget the true identity of the common person. He or she grows our food, delivers it, serves it, tends our sick, teaches our children, puts out our fires, creates beauty, helps bring new life into our world, stewards the earth and the millions of small communities on the globe. They are not the "thousand thousand thousand [wheel-tenders]" referred to contemptuously and fearfully by the Controller, the totalitarian-population eugenicist in Huxley's Brave New World. Rather, like the Romans ignored Cincinnatus on his farm until things went wrong, you don't think of or see the common person until things start to go wrong; the common man is often a little late off the block, hesitating to introduce disorder into the delicate balance of community and life: but off the block he and she will come, especially once the lives of their children and their communal life are in danger.

In our day, an old and tired story is being acted out once more: In a culture more focused on celebrity and self-absorption (the common person is also culpable here), elites have, yet again, gone Caesar or Marc Antony and think too highly of themselves, going from over-stuffed capitalists into totalitarianistas, and for some reason, as it has always been, billions of dollars are not enough: they need to live forever on the backs of others, they need greater and more perverse pleasure to continue being happy: satisfaction and security instead of virtue and the consistent, courageous, choosing of the Good as they best understand it. In our day, politicians have allowed themselves to be owned by corporations (echoes of facism) or have been run out of office. A situation like this only requires a catalyst to send it into oppression: enter the Public Crisis, whether that be a health crisis, economic crisis, or a climate crisis. 

For the power-gluttonous, these crises are opportunities, and sometimes they are also tempted to manufacture them or fan them into a greater flame. Surely everyone knows from history that for those with wealth to invest, any situation that forces mass purchasing, on the backs again of the common person, is a gold mine. Therefore, whatever one's opinion on the origins and soundness of these crises, the evidence of "raking in money" on the part of a few is self-evident. And, worst of all, as CS Lewis said, is the tyranny that claims its actions are "for your health" or "for your good" or "for the good of society." As one heroic common person, an Austrian MP, said, "Tyrants use apparently good ends as alibis."

In our day, though, Copland's Fanfare is still playing: listen for it. The trumpets begin with the few courageous who dare to lose everything in order to speak the truth from their ploughs: from hospitals where patients are being killed by medical malfeasance, from schools where children are being abused because they can't breathe well for hours on end, from small rallies on bridges across the world, to bigger rallies, to thousands of trucks honking their way to capitals in true service of their brothers who refuse to be coerced into an experimental gene therapy, to ethics professors standing on the great ethical tradition they teach even when fired, to students writing poems about the oppression they have faced over the last two years. 

It is playing in the crowds growing around the world, crowds listening to heroes and common people from all perspectives, echoing to each other even across the abyss of sound created by a failed, captured media. 

Play it again, Common Man. 

Hardening Pharoah's Heart

 I have always wondered why God "hardened Pharoah's heart"; I've always been curious about moments in Scripture which seemed to create contradictory views of God's character, loving versus vindictive, just versus unjust; under this curiosity lay a kind of hyper-vigilance around trust issues, around what it means to really be loved by my Creator...and all the love in the world depends on what the love of God means. Our smaller human loves can be re-categorized as various forms of survival needs, memory of infant satisfaction, or simply material, chemical responses to various stimuli, without the love of God. If the Artist, the One beyond who needs nothing from us does not love us, or is not there, all the movements of our wills are reduced, for there is nothing beyond; our loves are no longer signs to a Higher Object, but are ends in themselves--and as St. Catherine of Siena proclaimed with her life the words Jesus spoke to her, "You, human, are what is not; I, your Lord, am what is." Without Him, our loves are nothing; with Him, they can transcend themselves. 

Yet who is this God who loves? Does He really love each of us? God "hardening" a heart that served a vision of polytheistic dominance of the known world seems just on one hand, but when that hardening served to create more suffering for the innocent and only prolonged the time that the Israelites were caught in Egypt, it seems like the unloving creation of unnecessary suffering, at the least, and petulant one-upmanship at the worst. God doesn't need to do one-upmanship, does He? Yet this is what it appears from the very beginning, as Moses and Aaron confront Pharoah's magicians and respond in kind, but better, in contests like making serpents from staffs. God's serpent eats the others. 

As the plagues multiply, the phrase "and God hardened Pharoah's heart" makes its appearance; why? Rabbi David Fohrman offers the following explanation in one of his parishes: There are two Hebrew phrases used: one meaning "made stubborn" (as in one's own will hardening) and the other meaning "made courageous" (as in being given the power to continue to fight). This latter phrase seems less likely, doesn't it? However, this one is used. Why would God "encourage" Pharaoh, and in what way, especially if Pharaoh's vision, and through him, his people, is that of a polytheistic dominance, a view that excluded the sovereignty of a single, transcendent Creator? 

Could it be that God has a larger agenda than just getting the Israelites out of Egypt, though that was the catalyst, the core? What if the whole thing were about justice on a number of levels: justice for His people, the Israelites, a re-ordering justice that set things right for them; justice, in terms of re-ordering the vision of Pharaoh and his people, and through them other peoples throughout geography and time, as the story spread? What if it were about a parental love that did not want to take free will away, ie hardening a heart to make a tool of Pharaoh, but rather to say, "Son, fight me for your warped vision; I will strengthen your heart, your free will to continue this fight until you see this vision fails; as this happens, you will, perhaps look for Me, you will at last see that I am truly in control of all areas of life--and death." 

This view of the "hardening" is a view of a daring, great love, and yet this is not tame, as CS Lewis used to say. This is a severe mercy and it certainly terrifies me, yet I stand back in awe of this Parent who would not settle for children who loved Him simply because they gave up in a one-upmanship competition, but because they really saw Him, finally. It also tells me that this is a God who will chase us down, stop at nothing; it also tells me that suffering and even death are, in the hands of God, educational, attempts to save us with our understanding, the necessary precursor to real consent, real love. 

The plagues are an intensifying lesson about who this "I am who am" is; from the moment that He introduces Himself to Moses as Existence itself, to the moment when He commands thousands of tons of water to fall upon the army of Pharaoh, God is showing who He is; He, in His mercy, creates a ladder of lessons, from almost playful courtroom displays to world-stage events. He allows a proud Pharaoh to face-off with Him, even as He allows a frightened, insecure Moses to take along a stronger voice in Aaron. He taught the Egyptians and the Israelites visceral lessons about His true nature as a Creator, the source of natural forces and their proper order; the One of Justice who will defend His people; the One who will never take free will or consent, simply because He wants to be served and loved, to be seen. 

We too live in a time of plague; we too live in the time of the Horsemen. Does it feel like we, God's people, are increasingly under the eye of Pharaoh, a multiplication of eyes intent of plutocratic dominance, anti-God, a mockery of the Creator who, though He could incinerate us all, nevertheless respects our free will, our ability to choose to live in a vision apart from Him? Are we living in Egypt, where fear of the forces of nature drive us to oscillation between dominance and worship of them? Is God hardening hearts again, squaring off for the fight for the true vision? 

One Jewish scholar stated that not all the Israelites chose to trust God and leave Egypt, that many of them stayed behind, new acolytes to the old pagan vision of placation and control. The remnant of Jacob's great family placed their trust in God and went through the water in defiance of worldly and demonic power: they made their choice to trust in the desert, on a journey that required that choice to trust--or not--over and over. Is there a remnant now? Which of us refuse to trust a system, a conglomeration of industry and government that seems lost in a warped vision, and instead wish to understand the truth, which is itself a movement toward Him who is the source of truth? 

Are we like those Israelites who must watch, and hope, and pray, and stand fast as the plagues come---does God harden hearts around us because He wants to educate not just some of us, but all of us? Is He showing us the natural consequences of a system built on faulty values and perverted practices like abortion?