Catholic Elan

2011-11-13T18:20:00.001-08:00

Early Winter

The sky was a dull grey

snowflakes coming down from it, like ash.

A metallic silver pinwheel pinned to a white fence

spinned in an erratic way

trying to free itself from the tape and stick;

in my mind, I took it

and set it free.

ps-

it flew south, for me.

Desire

2010-03-03T10:34:00.000-08:00

"...[may I] come a little nearer to the instant when [I] will really be the slave-faithfully waiting while the master is absent, watching and listening- ready to open the door to him as soon as he knocks. The master will then make his slave sit down and himself serve him with meat."

The great Jewish writer, Simone Weil, wrote these words. She was, in my opinion, a kind of martyr for the idea of desire for God- more explicitly, a martyr for the baptism of desire. Her writings run with the blood of longing, a longing for truth, and prayer, and beauty. And all this in the world in which we live, where hope is often near-extingushed by the weaknesses and vice of those closest to us: ourselves, our families, and those in the Body of Christ.

In The Republic, Socrates is in dialectic with young politicians over the question of the essence, or eidos, of virtues in the soul. Do they exist? Is there a real, existing good from which these virtues spring? Socrates, I believe, was really asking: does God exist? He asks this question not because he does not know the answer, but because he is one who comes out of the light into the darkness in which his students live and explains to them the things of the light. In reading the dialogues of this great man, one begins to see that, despite the fact that he did not have divine revelation in the same way the Israelites had it, he was given a great grace and gift: he was searching out of the darkness of pagan culture, and yet knew, in some mysterious respect, He who is Goodness. Socrates became the man coming out of the bright light back into the darkness of his culture, and he knew that he could not teach or persuade those in darkness by pulling them into the direct light, by his own efforts, but he must lead, using innate reason and the desire of the soul found in human nature. This is Simone Weil's desire, which comes to life in a watchful, humble, attention: a readiness given by God and nurtured and disciplined by ourselves.

The mission of Socrates, and later, Christian saints (who have the knowledge of faith and sometimes, vision-be it intellectual, spiritual or actual vision) is, in varied ways, to live out that desire for, as Weil puts it, "...the pure image of the unique, eternal, and living Truth, the very Truth that once in a human voice declared, "I am the Truth.'" This Truth is always bound up with, in the person of Christ, agape and all virtue. The saint lives this out by living as St. Francis did, living to love rather than to be loved.

This way of life is life, true life.

No "but" can destroy this truth, but experiences which come with living in community and with ourselves can chip away at our hope, and faith, and even desire for this truth, and this life: experiences as profound as weaknesses and failures in ourselves, a hard marriage, or failures regarding our children; and things less intense, but nonetheless for a person of love and truth profound- like friendships and community life and our work. For instance, I see within myself always a mixed, an adulterated desire to love my friends, those far and near: I desire their good, but when I am hurt by them, or disappointed, or feel that my efforts on their behalf seem to come to nothing, I immediately sense that my love and efforts are much more tied up with my own ego. Sometimes the feeling of failure and discouragement becomes almost overwhelming. The temptation is to give up-which means that I stop believing in that true life of love and goodness, and beauty.

As Socrates spoke to his students about the education of those in darkness, he- as one who had lived long in the light-used the analogy of a man in a dust storm, who hides under the cover of a wall. He is in the midst of swirling, biting injustice, the violence of society all around, hitting him who is a stationary object in the restless, wind-blown fragments of confusion. Socrates says that he would like to stay under the wall and hope only not to enter into the fray and perhaps do injustice to another; for, to Socrates, doing injustice to another is the greatest evil into which one can fall, and so the temptation for those who understand and desire the life of Truth is to simply "check out"- because the ideal seems so hopeless.

But Socrates did not fall to this temptation, even to his last day, when his own city killed him because of the ludicrous charges brought against him of "corrupting the youth" and "impiety towards the gods". We see in the murder of Socrates an example of those who, lost in the dust storm, themselves became the storm; in other words, those who lived in darkness hated the light and quenched it, and would not be guided. Those who will not be guided out of darkness become a party to and source of darkness, and a terrible source of pain and discouragement to those who wish most of all to love them.

I am not a Socrates; I live in a different universe of intelligence and virtue (translation: I am a lot dumber than Socrates). However, I am, I hope, in my better moments, a working part of the Body of Christ. And Socrates was a kind of forerunner of Christ, who is the Good and the Source of that Truth Socrates was searching for and believed in. Now, because I am a daughter of God through grace, I too can intuit, and desire, like Socrates, to live in Truth. And like Socrates, like the saints, I desire to see both the order of love in my own soul, and to see order writ large on my community and writ in delicate, loving lines within those I know-and those I don't.

I do not see truth well, but I desire this. In this world, what follows this desire is the suffering(as it was for Socrates and anyone who desires love, and truth, and beauty), the burden, of seeing most often the opposite of these: selfishness, rationalization and banality. It seems that there is little truth and honor within the average community, and this is but mirrored in my own, often tepid and wicked soul. I cannot speak to my friends, my family, in a truly honest way; for most often, they cannot hear it, nor do they have the profound trust for me needed for hearing hard truth in my words, because they see the same hypocrisy in my life, and they will see this as long as my ego and my self are tied up in my efforts towards the true, good, and beautiful. Also, when do I hear the truth about myself? And if I do, what is my reaction? Most often, to rationalize it into oblivion, either to myself or to the unfortunate person who tried to speak the truth.

It often seems hopeless. One friend believes in Christ but lives a life centered around having the most pleasure possible with the least trouble, even to the point of hurting those who have placed their lives near to his; another will not hear that her children are cruel at times to other children because she feels the fear of being imperfect or ridiculous; in the academic community in which I live and work, there are those (me, too?) who think they are Christians but are living and behaving more as if they are in an intellectual and spiritual class above everyone else; and worst of all, are the times when I've let my own identity be squashed in the desire to maintain social ties- ties which, without love, and truth, mean nothing. And finally, the times when I've committed the worst evil: injustice towards the other, the most important Other being God. The worst sins we deal with in this life are our own, and they are the things we are least able to see, and the things we most refuse to acknowledge even if we do see them. We become our own prisons, and the potential for real evil increases, sometimes, in proportion to the intellectual, physical and spiritual gifts we are given.

We are all, it seems, the blind guides which Socrates warned his interlocutors about: the solution, perhaps, is a radical one. It seems to me that a true guide is one who follows St. Francis' prayer: May I seek more to love than to be loved; may I seek to understand rather than to be understood. This simple desire has a great and deep foundation: the death to oneself. Christ said it a different way: If you seek to save your life, you will lose it. The result of the death to self, the uprooting of self-absorbed, fearful 'love', is the beginning of humility. It is like when one must first dig a deep hole in order to then build a solid foundation. The hole must be there, and deep, and complete, before the virtue and grace of humility can be poured within it. Then on the rock of humility(personified in Christ), and no other, can a house of love, and truth, and beauty be built, a house fit for the Master to enter. And when He does enter, He serves his own servant. This is the way of love.

Only then, when the Master lives in our houses, can we become places of light in a dark cave, and strong bulwarks in the sand storm, and true guides for ourselves and others. Only then will we build true Christian communities, because we will provide a locus and source of grace, and light, and beauty around which a real community can be built. Of course there will always be suffering, and often these communities will in the end be destroyed by the trilogy of selfishness, rationalization and banality (the deflated desire for less than the best good). I think of the pain of St. Francis as he watched his order fracture into contentious camps of the more and the less worldly. But hope lives, because there is another world, the world which Socrates caught a glimpse of, and which we see everyday in the Mass; and as St. Francis knew, when he retreated into his mountain cave and received the wounds of Christ, it is in one's own soul that the light must first penetrate. Therein lies hope. In one's own soul, in that quiet place where the Master waits.

A last word from Simone Weil:

" To be sure in the realm of action we have to do all that is demanded of us, no matter what effort, weariness, and suffering it may cost, for he who disobeys does not love; but after that we are only unprofitable servants. Such service is a condition of love, but it is not enough. What forces the master to make himself the slave of his slave and to love him, has nothing to do with all that. Still less is it the result of a search the servant might have been bold enough to undertake on his own initiative. It is only watching, waiting, attention [desire- my sic]."

image: www.newcatholics.com/library/protestent/saints/francis.jpg

A Winter's Lament

2010-02-06T17:44:00.000-08:00

My toes are blue near the ends

Blue, like the lapis shadows thrown by sagebrush in the snow

Water, like my blood, cannot make up its mind

swirling slowly, ineffectually

Will I ever wear open-toed shoes again?

Red and brown toes, like the stones with vines curling round them

Water in my blood, blue and purple

the sunlight holding each molecule tenderly

Love is like that, I think

seasons of sage and snow, white and grey

Water, grace moving slowly, blocked

The soul breaking through, dying on a halcyon day

And then, those days of sandals and blue

and green, and each flower, each wave a lover

and I, I leap like a child again, clothes left in a wake

and I look for You, for you, and you.

Woman with a Hemorrhage

2010-01-22T09:27:00.000-08:00

The day dawned hot; the very sky seemed feverish, swirling in hues of yellow, yellow above the yellow dust of the streets, and brown above the brown of houses and trees covered in a light sheen of that same dust. Miriam rose from her semi-recumbant position and looked briefly, carefully, as she always did, across the rooftops fellow to her own: she had slept up here, for the coolness. One of the good things about her illness was that she was largely left alone. Yet this was a bad thing, too, for Miriam was a bright light shining, a woman of deep prayer. She had been praying, but in that odd position of semi-recumbancy, because this position allowed her the least amount of pain.

She stretched as she stood, and then bent over and winced. She had not yet, in the two years since she started bleeding most days instead of just a few days between new moons, learnt to anticipate and avoid these sharp stabs. She tensed and held her position until the throbbing subsided, and then, seeing the sun more insistent in this curried sky, rolled up her pallet-taking more care to move smoothly-and picked her way down the stairs. Each step darkened a little more as she went down, and this always made her think of death, her death which she assumed was coming soon. Somehow, though, she did not fear death, but she did not want to die. She felt the loving, familiar shapes in relief on the stone and sand wall as she descended into the delightful grind of another day.

Miriam was smiling at this incongruency in her thoughts, when she met the eyes of her father looking up at her from the bottom of the stairs. His eyes were like sparkling onyx stones in a wrinkled and long face. Even though they were hard, and full of disappointment at her unclean state, at her returning in shame from her husband’s home, there was love-around the mouth. How she knew this, she could not tell, because he never spoke about it. But it came out also in his actions, for he would let her go out, go to the market attended by one of the children, let her be useful in public. As she came down into the main room of the house, he nodded his head in a silent greeting and left, disappearing out the door in a flash and glow of yellow light.

The other room of the home, the eating and cooking room, was full of light, for it had a smoke-hole in the roof and two windows to further let out the heat. And today these windows and the hole would be needed. Miriam thought of the huge, reed-woven fans of Egypt: one of the strange folk-memoriabilia to survive, along with the flesh-pots, thought Miriam wryly. Her older sister, a widow, was tending the baking of the cakes in the pitted oven and already she was pink and sweaty, for she had started too late this morning, and would have to suffer more heat than usual. She turned when she heard Miriam’s tentative scraping footsteps on the floor. “Miriam,” she quipped, but not unkindly, “wake that sleeper Ruth and go to the market for some beans-plus the usual things," and she sighed: “I have started too late again.” She turned back to the hot pit, and added, “Hurry- before it gets too crowded.” Miriam moved to apologize for not being able to help with the daily cooking, but stopped when she saw her sister’s methodical, kneading movements.

Ten minutes later, Miriam and Ruth, a ten-year old child of Miriam’s sister, walked, and Miriam held a small basket made by herself for her own use-no one else was allowed to touch it; their head-cloths were in place and their feet shod in simple, leather sandals. Miriam mused, as she moved down the street in companionable silence with the little girl, that although she was largely relegated now to silence and the company of children, this was in reality not a lower state. She was lonely sometimes, and sorrowed over the loss of having children herself; but she had learned silence, and the fullness of the Lord in silence. She, a woman! But the tall, stone fences around her, now that she was perpetually unclean, made her unsure as to whether the Lord would actually visit her at all, really. She wondered sometimes, and it brought the deepest swirl, ugly and dark, with putrid bits of real despair, of loneliness, when she thought that she might be cut away from God because the blood would not stop, and the pain grew worse, slowly, like a bite which gets infected and swollen.

A sound like the roar of an angry wind yanked her out of herself. Ruth, her little face blanched, had stopped in the middle of the quiet, gray street and was looking down towards the noises. They were in a narrow passageway between two houses, which would, if followed, open suddenly out into the glare and noise of the market. Miriam motioned to Ruth to follow, and they moved slowly against one wall, so as to be able to look round the corner before descending the two deep steps into the glare and the place of the crowded stalls. There was more than the roar: they could feel, inexplicably, the excitement, the almost desperation, of a roused crowd. This was always frightening, especially in these days of Roman anxiety; for the soldiers, under the recent instabilities in Rome, and the resulting fear of the Governor of Judea, had become more quick to arrest and even quietly murder those who disturbed the peace in their areas.

But when the two looked around the corner, there were no soldiers in sight. Perhaps they’d been drinking the night before and were sluggish in the already insistent and nagging heat. There was a crowd- but not the usual circling, orbiting, quiet crowd of a normal morning; this was a crowd like a clump of bees crawling on a hive, a hive just disturbed by the hand of a desert wanderer: agitated and buzzing, and calling out: “Rabboni! Rabboni!” There was shoving at the outer edges. The stalls were guarded only by women, normally non-descript figures who sat down behind the stalls, preparing the wares. Now they were standing, and staring at the crowd, which was moving now, following something or someone towards the well in the center.

Miraim and Ruth, deciding that there was no real danger but only some great interest which did not concern them, sped towards the stall of the beans. As Ruth picked out the things they needed, putting them in the household basket which she carried, poor little thing, and putting into Miriam’s basket the things she needed for her own meals, they moved from stall to stall and tried to ignore the noise of the crowd. Miriam, though, felt something strange welling up in her. She finally got the courage to ask one of the women at a stall about the disturbance. “Oh,” the woman said, “there is a Rabbi here, a teacher-“ and she bent a little closer, “and some say he heals. That he makes the blind to see, and the lame to walk…as they say,” she shrugged as she said the last words, as if to take herself back out of caring about this. But Miriam felt a shock go through her heart. She quickly motioned for Ruth to sit by the side of the stall and put her basket beside the girl, who obeyed quickly but who had gone now completely white. “Aunt,” Ruth whispered, “Aunt.”

“Wait here, Ruth. But if you do not see me return, run home. Leave my things. It does not matter.” And Miriam turned towards the crowd, which was moving again. It seemed to Miriam that someone new had entered the hive and there was the sound of a wail in the middle. The crowd surged away from the well, headed towards a main street leading away from the market, and this gave Miriam a chance to slip in amongst the followers. There were some other brave women in the crowd, but it was mostly men, with their carefully woven cloaks in blues and rusts and browns. The dust beat up unmercifully into her eyes and mouth. Miriam pulled her head covering close over her face, so that she would not be recognized, and with her adrenaline drowning out the stabs of pain, and despite the blood which she knew was flowing more freely now, she tried to move her way closer to the head of the heaving and hurried cloaks and sandals and past the rough movements of the men. Some pushed her away, and she thought with some sadness, that they did not know that they were touching an unfortunate: a woman, an unclean and useless woman. But she kept on.

At the head of the crowd, behind which all followed in greedy interest, she saw a man, a leader of the synagogue, in earnest conversation with another, shorter man in a poor, off-white cloak. Miriam knew of the leader of the synagogue, and so surmised that he could not be a healer, or she would have been told- it must be the other man. She got closer and closer, partly because of her size- and the agility she’d once used, as a girl, to climb anything and everything, in joyful expectation of a view above the swirling dirt. Now, she used what was left of this child-energy, which had laid hidden by the sorrow of the last two years, as if those two years had given it time to germinate and build up; or perhaps the sorrow and her outcast state had made her care less about the swirling dust and long for what lay beyond. Perhaps she had stopped caring so much what others thought.

She found herself looking at the cloak of the healer, the edge of it trailing just a few inches beyond her reach; no one had noticed her because they were all listening to the pleading conversation of the the synagogue leader and the soft answers of the healer- those listening in were insatiably eating up both the high man’s misfortune, and the wonder of him sharing it so desperately and publicly- and the ill one just a child, and a female child at that- the wonder of it. But Miriam had only grasped bits, for she began to reach out her hand, to touch the rough, off-white fibers which moved with their owner in a peaceful sway. In a long instant, her hand traveled out-just a touch- just-

…the roughness of the garment surprised her; she thought healing would feel like Eastern silk. She felt a fire go through her body, and instantly, her hand moved to her abdomen. She stopped suddenly, bent over, and was knocked side to side by those who were following- but just as Miriam thought she would surely be knocked to the ground, the crowd stopped. There was a silence. And then, a voice of quiet strength.

“Who touched me?” Heavier silence. Miriam felt the blood coursing deeply through her entire being, blood moved by embarrassment, and also, still, the fire. Again the voice rolled out above the crowd: “Who touched me?" Miriam wished that she could just back away quietly; as she began to go, a rumbling started in the crowd, an uncomfortable reaction to intolerable silence, and another voice, in some confusion and rattled tones cried,“Master- look at the crowd! It is pressing all around-“

Miriam stopped moving, because she realized that everyone was quite still, like the leaves on a tree in the silence before a storm, and that any escape on her part would be impossible. She looked around at the feet of those around her, and then pulled her head covering back a little, and straightened up. She dared a glance at the healer, to whom she was now a few yards away. She could only see the side of his head, a side of thick, common brown hair and a beard. Only an instant or so had passed since the last query, and as Miriam inched her way around the obstructing figure in front of her, so that she could get a better view of his face, his quiet voice, with a slight reluctance to it, broke in on the crowd again, and in answer to the other man’s logic: "I felt power go out of me.” The crowd sucked in a communal breath, and the healer said again, with gentleness, “Who touched me?”

At that instant, Miriam had got herself a place for a full view of his face, and when she looked up, she found herself looking into brown, earth-colored eyes, eyes with sorrow and joy woven , eyes that contained the very fire she felt still in her. She followed the gaze with her body and moved towards him, finally kneeling before him in the dust, the sounds of “I did” somehow escaping her lips. The crowd moved back, with more sucking of air, a sucking sound of petrified disdain. Miriam took this all in, but some thread in her stayed with that gaze and she looked at a face which seemed to reflect, and know, the pain of the unwanted.

Not only did the healer look at her, but breaking through a cold, invisible, stone wall put up over millenia, he kneeled in the dust in front of her, and took her hand in his. Quietly, with the softness only deep courage and profound, divine humility can produce, he said, "Your faith has healed you.”

Image: "Woman with a Hemorrhage" by Louis Glanzman

Exile, The

2009-10-08T16:26:00.000-07:00

What does it mean to be an exile? I suppose you'd have to talk to one to understand; perhaps even an interview with an exile wouldn't give you much real information, either. You'd have to have been exiled. But the question is not, "What does it feel like to be an exile?" but rather, "What does it mean?"

"Meaning", used in this question, has the connotation of 'purpose': What is the end, the directing paradigm, the teleology of being an exile?

I can think of many types of exile in my life. First, a very concrete one at age ten, when I was forced to leave Greece, where my heart lived. I have never gotten over this, this splitting of my soul. Do exiles, the more deeply suffering ones, exiles from their home because of war, ever get over it? Do exiles, the political ones, ever get over it? Do exiles, the third-culture kind, like me, ever get over it?

I have read in many stories, especially of the medieval bent, how a hero or villain is "banished" and he pleads, begs, for some other punishment, even death. I have felt my heart go back to that time, at ten, when I also wished to run away from my parents (a child's version of wishing for death) rather than leave my beloved Anatolia, for some foreign place; I had some presentiment that it would not be a place which welcomed me, that I'd be somehow an outcast. I was right. But are we meant to become so entwined with a place, a physical place? What is the mystical connection between ourselves and a place comprised of dirt and rocks with some culture plastered on it? No, I know it is more than that. We are deeply connected to places because we are composite beings, and we humans, because we are also spiritual, imbue places with spiritual realities: even as children, we sense this and connect with all of it much more easily and deeply than we do even as adults. That is why the places and people of our childhoods always retain a certain luminosity, a magic, which never leaves many of us- perhaps until we visit and see its destruction. Then our hearts are broken.

I have also felt exiled from people I've loved. From childhood friends, from those I've loved on the crest of life and lost due to the changing, sometimes inexplicable currents of lives meeting and sundering. I have never forgotten, not in my heart, those moments of joy, and in those memories do I most chafe against a linear existence, one we cannot escape, in which those times of real love, in deep sweetness or in friendship become hard jewels set in the past. We cannot escape the linear nature of our existence; in fact, it has been ordained for our life on earth. So there must be a meaning in it, similar to the meaning of being an exile. Time itself creates the state of being an exile.

There is an old proverb, which I hate: "Love makes time pass, and time makes love pass." I hate it because I think that then it cannot be love. This is speaking more about pleasure, I think. Love does not pass, not real love. But how does an exile from loved ones go on in a healthy way? How does one re-invest, an important stage of grief, if time does not make love pass? And the most important question: how do we truly continue to love if the real person is not with us, at least from time to time? Does it become the unhealthy love between ourselves and a vaporous memory?

I have also been an exile from myself, in those periods when I have tried, for safety or love, to fit into a mold which others set out for me, and consequently lost my own voice. To lose oneself is part of the pain associated with both the concrete, physical exile from the soil we love and the exile from those we've loved and lost. When we left Greece, I had certain knowledge that I'd left part of myself there, that I could no longer live to the rhythm of joy and sunlight, that the sea and the colours of beauty and light were drained from me, and I went on my journey a shell of the person that I was. In rebuilding, trying to fit into a new culture, into an extended family whom I did not know, into a culture which seemed gritty and twisted, I lost myself for many years. I lost my God because I had no real face or voice left with which to know Him. But as my sister, my partner in this loss, once said in a song, "You danced with me, through a bend in time." And He does.

Sin itself, trespassing the moral law, also creates in us an exile from ourselves, from our real face which is always before God, and destroys the true love which is the bridge between ourselves and reality, and the 'other-ness' of those we are called to love as well as the ultimate Other, our God. And sin can take larger, social forms, such as trying to be in the inner circle, to please others for the sake of advancement or to create a facade, becoming a fake of ourselves. All this is deep, hellish exile beside which the physical exile because of war or simple loss becomes a potential portal of growth and hope.

For me, my physical exile from the land of my blood and heart has made me feel like a wanderer, of sorts, on the face of the earth. I have struggled for an identity, and held understandings with other third-culture kids, understandings like the lighting of one candle to another. I have felt myself a citizen more of the world, and had no phobic patriotism which might blind me to the actions of the country in which I hold citizenship. I have become a culture-explorer and discovered richness everywhere; and in the pain, I have grown to understand how to discern bad culture from good, however amateur and often mistaken I've been at times.

There is still the question of exile originating in a linear existence, of the loss of those we love in this life, and the question of how love lives, real love, based in real people and not just memory. I think that there is an essential, real, eternal person inside each of us, and true love, rather than being blind, has true sight. If we love, we can see more like God. We see, if we truly love, the potential, the person that ought to be, whom God wills, whom God is trying to accomplish despite flaws and sin. If we love, we become co-conspirators with God in helping this person become what he or she should be. This is true, I think, for the love of friendship as well as eros, although the love of eros has an arrow-like strength for the melding of two persons into each other, and in a mysterious way, echoes the love of God for the soul, in that in becoming loved by God, we begin to be melded into Him, to become like Him: although mysteriously, this love, if true, and moral, always retains and enhances our uniqueness. Eros, and the love of God, is a beautiful paradox, and the person we love, whether with us in the day-to-day or not, is truly with us in essential things. Is the only thing that can separate us the marring of sin which destroys, in the end, the person meant by God? I do not know, but the person who loves always sees, and hopes, like God always loves and hopes.

So we see something eternal and real, and non-linear, when we love truly. This does not pass with time. There are those whom I have seen again after ten or twenty years, or more, and knew as I knew them so long ago: it is expressed in, "we picked up where we left off". I believe that part of the fear of loving is the fear of the loss of self, of exile, and of loss in a linear existence. But this fear is a half-truth, because in love, we are multiplied, we can become more ourselves even as we give ourselves away, and love does not die or impoverish, even in loss in this life. It is not easy, and there is pain, there is real exile. But there is hope, not necessarily for the consummation of real love in this world, but hope nonetheless. It is why people who have faith in a good God can continue through great loss, and even in time, grow though it.

I have felt my soul stretched and raw, when I've been through a leaving, an exile made necessary by circumstance, sin, or choice-for in every choice there is a yes and a no; and sometimes I have felt that I was, as Bilbo says in The Hobbit, "like butter spread over too much bread"; and like Frodo, feeling that some wounds do not heal with, or in, time. But still, I will to believe in love, in love that does not pass with time, a love found again in the ultimate eucatastrophe, or sudden turn from bad to good, that is found with God after this life. God willing I will make it there, past this exile. I hope it looks like Greece, too.

Perhaps the real meaning of exile, of a linear existence, is to test us in our hope, our love, and to teach us the real meaning of home- for as it is said, and I like this much better, "the darkness helps us to understand the true value of the light." Or something like that. I could change it, like this: "being an exile shows us the true meaning of home."

Or, perhaps, I just want too much and should just be more easy come, easy go. However, like Gandalf says at the end of The Return of the King, "Not all tears are an evil"; in other words, some things, some necessary exiles and goodbyes deserve the honor of tears. To deny this is to become flippant and shallow, I think, or to become a person who embodies the life equivalent of a womanizer. A lifenizer, in the endless search for the easy life, the perfect situation, quick-releasing anything that requires the risk of pain, or exile.

Maybe I can still believe in endless, eternal love, and be the exile of solemn joy traipsing through a field on a full spring day- like the Mole in The Wind in the Willows, who leaves his home and marvels in the River and the Rat, rejoicing in what is, what will be with God. And yet even the loving, happy Mole, upon scenting his old home in the midst of deep winter, weeps about the loss of it after so many months away. And, in one of the most beautiful metaphors on friendship, the Rat puts his impatience with all this weeping aside and helps the Mole find his home; then as they find that his home has been left in a shambles, the Mole weeps again in his shame over having the well-to-do Rat see his humble abode. But the Rat, with true charity, "-praised everything he saw, and said, 'Why Moley, you've a capital little place here! Capital!' " And they feast, as only love can do, on the remains of a sausage. It is a moment of kairos, a time when the love of God breaks through into existence and exile.

For you, you exile full of angst, and sorrow, do you not know, exile, that I know every hair of your head...that I know when each lark falls to the ground, and you, you are worth many of these...

Greece- Day one, two three, themberazi!

2009-06-10T23:59:00.001-07:00

I arrived in Athens on Tuesday, June 9. As we landed, I just started crying, and the New York Greeks near me politely stared for a second. It was twenty-four years since I'd last landed there, and that time I was fifteen: when you come back suddenly to a place like this, after so long, you can see yourself, like in a video. And that time, as a fifteen-year old, I was in the throes of that teenage time, where the thoughts in your head about actual reality are much less important to you than your thoughts about what other people are thinking about you.

But now, this time, I come just to be- with Greece, with my sister, and my oldest friend, Iris. When I saw the sea, the brown and green hills, the little vineyards and olive groves, I knew why I'd loved Santa Barbara- there was something there of Greece. As I walked through the joi de vivre energy of the airport, and got my tickets for the bus and felt the humidity, I knew why I'd liked New York; there was something of the people there which reminded me of Greece.

But here, I noticed, as we traveled through Athens toward Syntgma (Constitution) Square, there was that energy of New York, but also a real understanding of leisure; of being. I saw men sitting on benches or cafe tables, and my American instinct thought, "what are they doing just sitting there by themselves?" and then my Greek instinct remembered leisure.

As a child, my sight was much more like my sight now- I am too old to care about what other people think of the way I look, and no one's looking anyway- good thing in a Mediterrenean country; and besides, there's way too much for Greek studs to look at these days- and so, like a child, I bound along, suitcase in tow, delighting in the lucid air, the curry smell, the soft dang of a little church bell, the little shops, rowed one after another down the little, narrow winding streets. I hear my mother telling me to stay on the sidewalk at all costs, as she, amused, watched the little old ladies navigating a jay walking journey with inches to spare. On my own steam now, though, I can trundle down some steps in a small, quiet square and enter an ancient Orthodox church. Now, I know, as I didn't as a child, that I can venerate the icons of Christo Pantocrator, or the Annunciation. The religious landscape of the land of my childhood has become more accessible to me now, and the simple joy this gives me can't really be expressed- it is like a soft breeze of love, coming from the past.

I reach the hotel and my sister is there. How long we've been trying to do something together- and God, in His gifts, gave me this one- to be here in Greece with her! And the cornucopia opens further, when Iris, whom I haven't seen for twenty years, comes to the door the next morning. We spend three hours talking in a taverna next to the ancient Agora, and I imagine Socrates sitting in something like this, quite near, 2300 years or so ago, agitating and educating the populace- with a little wine and olives. We have "cappucino freddo" with the thickest, coldest milk I've ever seen.

We go then to Marylynne's gallery, where twenty-two people, mostly young twenties, are putting up art work, creating art work...the gallery is located in an old apartment building, due for condemnation after the show. There are old, beautiful old doors and shutters; the place has an elegance, and the marble floors, that particular Greek pattern of mottled marble, reminds me of my childhood- I would lay on these floors in the heat of summer, and just think.

A girl from Holland is doing cardboard towers, to be installed on the rooftop; a Japanese girl is creating hundreds of fishwire strings with resin dripped down them; a delightful Englishman from Manchester is putting videos on the wall, and the air of nebulinity, the aura created by a lot of artists together, is thick. Margarita, the curator, a Greek woman closer to our ages, is bustling around in a Greek way- last minute (made time for leisure, see) everything. Marylynne gets down to measuring and working through problems with a plinth. Iris and I, with a futile offer of help, break out into the clear air of simple reality again. I think about how Aristotle wrote about poetry, art, as a teacher, an imitative teacher, for the soul- art as a doctor of sorts; and how so much art has become more a vehicle of expression for the radically individual. And I think about how this can be good, too, although we humans always seem to default into imbalance. Marylynne's work is the most tied to reality, to beauty, as a teacher of order.

We walk through this condemned area, and we begin to understand the riots of a few months past. Hordes of young immigrant men, and Greeks, hang out listlessly( nothing to do with leisure) on the corners, many of them skin on wasted frames, with the occasional desperate face. This is a drug area, and the storekeepers, many of them immgrants, look tired and worn, as if the very air were poison. I feel sad, so sad.

We make our way to the Plaka, the oldest neighborhood, just below the towering figure of the Acropolis. The Acropolis still seems like a beacon of beauty and order, rising like a king above the sprawl of white houses, a sprawl which reaches for twenty miles or so all round. The ancient Agora, below the Acropolis, was a marketplace- but also much more. Here Socrates walked, Aristotle came to the "thinkery" - a civic building set aside for thinking- and Pericles probably had an office here.

To be continued.....when I can get on a computer again!

Greece

2009-05-19T12:38:00.000-07:00

Do you know how I feel? Deep down?
Now that I am returning to you,
to your brown breasts, salt and olive-scented
to your pearly teeth on the mouth of the sea
But even deeper down, the clarity of the water
which mirrored the child-clarity in me:

I touched every stone and every bloom creeping
out from among their rough faces, in some wall
at the edge of a garden somewhere in the folds
of your dress; I did not need its history.
I named the dirt, a certain tree;
I knew the abalones and the jellyfish knew me
I breathed your air and drank your wine
I danced a dance of the soul with you.

I an exile of thirty years, will you recognize me?
As I roam always, always lonely, on the shoulder of a road
I did not pick out to travel,
will you know me, a woman covered with the dust of others?
did you know I left unwillingly?

The rose-water light of a summer night
ancient Athenian stone ladies caught forever
reflecting light in their own way
like the inside of a white shell
retsina on the Plaka
my sister there
and me
home.

So why do I weep, now, that I am returning?
It is seeing the fingers of God stirring the water
and not being able to get into it because
I am now lame, the free child I was is lost
my heart has been entangled, twisted so often: but at least,
I am weeping.
I am not hard, I hope, too hard, and I will touch
your walls, your flowers...may I be able to float
once again, in your ambrosia depths, and just be
in a horizontal minute of life
my sister there
and me
home, like
Home.

Where the *&# is Muddy Gap?

2009-03-04T21:06:00.000-08:00

We went camping last weekend: three little kids, two parents (clueless city-idiots) and four college students (camping geeks after their NOLS training).

Of course we were late: why on earth were they leaving at 8:30 am on a Sunday? Were the mountains on a schedule? So the fact that we were late, and oh- yes, we brought our dog, Lucy: "I've never gone camping with a dog" said one student, politely- all this together, meant that we knew that they were slightly regretful for inviting us and Chaos, who seemed to sit on the back of our city Volvo.

We were late, oh yes, so we were too embarrassed to mention that we weren't sure we had enough gas, as we-too late- looked at the gauge on the car. "Hmm," we said, "hmm." We kept going, because I am too shy to pull alongside a van full of skeptical students and yell through the wind while the damn dog is trying to kill herself by jumping out. As it was, she had my head pinned to the headrest in her interest in every smell carried on the wind.

Surely Jeffrey City, on our way out to the Agate Flats, would have a gas station. As we drove past it, we realized that Jeffrey City is in its death rattle. There was a Texaco sign half gone, and the only thing still open was a liquor store. I wondered if they had moonshine strong enough to count as petrol.

So it was that we ended out in the high desert, on a cattle track on the moon, with the gas gauge lit up. The students were surprisingly kind. I think they finally decided we were funny. "I want to go home," said Sophie.
"Let's try Muddy Gap", I said to one student,"it's about ten miles east."
"Can you make it there?"
"I think so."
"Okay, we're behind you." Rocking and rolling, over insistent sage brush and granite, we made it back to Hwy 789 and headed towards Muddy Gap. "Let's pray for a station kids, and hey- maybe God will make one be there for us," said brave Dad. We shot down the highway, coasting when we could and feeling like- well, you don't want to be out in the middle of Wyoming, with no cell service, no gas, at any time of the year. Only idiots from urban areas would get themselves in that situation.

"Where in the hell is Muddy Gap?" queried worried Dad. All we could see was an imposing mountain covered with snow, and the highway leading on, looping up and down over the blank land. The kids were even silent for once. If I could think of music for this moment, it would be some agitated Celtic song that you desperately want to end.

"Where the hell is Muddy Gap?" Repeated a few times.

I looked up to see a flashing light, a stop sign- and not much else. Then I saw the station I remembered, up on the hill, and with a sinking heart, thought, "Why on earth would THAT place be open on a Sunday?" We pulled up anyway, in desperation- we'd decided that we'd just flag someone down to help us get gas from Rawlins, sixty miles away, and let the students go on their way to their wilderness adventure. I'd had enough of adventure already. The only one who seemed to want more was the dog.

Our tires crunched on the uphill driveway into the station, and we passed a white van parked there, which had black letters on the side that said, "Where the *&$ is Muddy Gap?"

The pump was on.

The door said, "Open". We all trudged inside as our car filled up hungrily. We were greeted by a small Arab who said in dulcet tones, " Welcome to Muddy Gap. We having the cleanest restrooms in Carbon County, and please we're happy to have you." The store was clean, the restrooms were clean, and the white walls and ceilings of the entire store were covered in happy graffiti in red, blue, purple, pink, green and yellow: lots of other people who thought this place was something of a miracle, too.

There was a museum of sorts adjacent to the food store, filled with memorabilia of the Mormon Handcart tragedy. I looked at the story: as the Mormons fled West in the late 1800's, they were so poor and persecuted that they had to travel the thousands of miles pulling handcarts; they were too poor to afford a beast of burden. They did not make it to Independence Rock, a marker used by Pioneers on the Oregon Trail, by Independence Day. The common wisdom was that if you didn't make it to Independence Rock by July 4, you wouldn't get over the mountains before the snows came. They died by the hundreds in the frozen desert in which we now stood.

I mentioned this to one of the young people, and she replied, "Who would want to remember Mormons?"

"I would," I said, "they are people, too." I knew that she was young,and kidding, and yet I disliked the comment. I no longer cared that she was a NOLS expert, nor that we'd almost run out of gas, as I looked at the paintings of children in the snow, in that desert outside the doors of that little haven that was the Muddy Gap Station.

We shot back down the highway, the car full of gas and us a little less full of gas, sobered. We went on another crazy jaunt through the cattle tracks, thinking about Ford trucks with super-suspension. We hiked four miles through the sage brush, sand, cactus and grass, the dog bounding joyfully, all of us glad that it was unseasonably warm. We made it to our campsite, and the student experts found 'a source of running water and a sheltered campsite'. They immediately began setting up the 'kitchen', and we set up tents and the kids bounded over the rocks, the mountains reaching suddenly out of the desert in pink hues, rocks lain over rocks in rounded shapes, trees hovering around in the crevices. We looked back over the desert as the sun went down, and the mountains in the distance, down towards Muddy Gap, called back to us in beautiful tones of blue and white.

Pat, one of the students, took the kids on little climbs, and I began to see his kind and loving spirit- he was someone who saw past the intricacies of expert camping to the purpose of being out, way out and away: to just be, just be with beauty. And to go rock climbing, although he put the real stuff aside for our sake. The men slept out in the open, just to be men, I guess, and the dog slept inside with the rest of us. I experienced the whole night.

We had made it past the view from the highway, and got to know the life in the desert, walked past sage brush the size of small trees, and found the beauty of the pink-rock mountains; we weren't at some groomed campsite, but found our way into the heart of the land, and got to know it as it is, at least a little. The view from the highway doesn't look the same after that.

We hiked out of there, all regrets and suspicions ground away by camping together. The young people went on the the next site, to serious rock climbing, bumping away on the cattle track, while we made our way home across the high desert, the white peaks of the Wind River range laughing in the distance, joyful and impervious in the sun. We went down a thousand feet, ever closer to the Winds, down through red canyons and past brave ranch houses surrounded by quiet cattle, down through yellow hills and brown ones with sage brush clinging to life. We came back up slightly, into the foothills of those white mountains, so close to them that you can no longer see the peaks, and into Lander. We went to McDonald's, as if in revenge, and sipped our sodas, and felt very proud of ourselves for completing a winter camping trip on the freaking moon. "That wasn't so bad," said someone.

A few days later, we were told that we were crazy because it can snow five feet suddenly out there. We went back to feeling like idiots.

Something Happened on the Way to the Opera

2009-02-24T16:46:00.000-08:00

There were four of us, ladies in desperate search of metropolitan culture, going to the opening night of Bizet’s “The Pearl Fishers” in Denver. We live in Lander, Wyoming, about 350 miles from the nearest city.

Nancy, the driver, is a Latin language expert, and a culture aficionado; she speaks a few languages and has been to many cultural centers of the world. In the front passenger seat sat Edie, who is a young grandmother and a native of Lander. This was to be her first opera experience: brave lady. Aileen and I were in the back, two escaped mothers.

Ours was a motley crew, but we like each other a lot and we have the faith in common, so in that love, all our differences become fascinating journeys into real education. As we drove south out of Lander, the snow lightly falling, Edie taught us about our environment and the creatures- well, the strange doings of people, actually. That’s most what women are interested in. That and food. So we did stop for chocolate as she regaled us, saying a jaunty “Happy Valentine’s Day” to the Rawlins-mellow store clerk (the wind blows so hard that they just stop trying to be jaunty). True to feminine form-or substance?-we played the game, “You Are What You Eat” with our choice of Valentine treat. I was a colorful, hard shell with sweet, cheap chocolate on the inside; Nancy was a hard, shiny chocolate shell with a tangy, powdery milk substance; Aileen was a soft, chocolate cover with crunchy nuts and chewy nougat; and Edie was, simply, nuts.

Edie told us about Lander as we drove on past cultural black holes like “Grandma’s Café –Open”, the kind of place you’d make a horror film about a family from New Jersey stopping there to use the restroom. Edie knows mysterious things like the restaurant in Lander where they leave the side dishes out all night and serve them the next day (important info for the rookie); the Maverick station (where you get good snack food) which was once a dumpy trailer park with a sandwich shop in front. So that plot of land always had a sandwich charism, and now it is fulfilling it completely- no messing around with trailers. The next-to-best story was of Amoretti’s, a beautiful old building and former swanky Italian restaurant on the corner of Second and Main. After a year of twenty-dollar, lacy salads and such, the owners just- left; locking the door, they left the place ready for dinner that night. For weeks and months afterward, Edie said you could still look in the dusty windows and see the fancy place settings, the wine glasses slowly being covered with dust. Lander’s own Great Expectations…and finally, the best story: a Wyoming Romeo and Juliet: I said, remember, Wyoming style: In Hudson, a town near Lander built around a curve in the two-lane highway entering Shoshone and Arapahoe reservation territory, there is a sign that says: “This is the greatest food in the world”. I was busy laughing about that and the “Happy Hocker Pawn Shop” when Edie chimed in, saying, “It really was great food.” The restaurant in question was El Toro, now defunct like Amoretti’s. “Was it Mexican food?” I asked. Edie looked at me in that Wyoming way, just a straight look. “No, it was steak.”

“Oh”. I remembered that this is Wyoming, not California. Edie went on: “El Toro and Svedtler’s were in competition..”

“Was Svedtler’s Mexican?” (I was trying to needle her.)

“ No, Svedtler’s is a German name.” Another straight look, and she continued, “..anyway, these two places were in competition-“

“Two steak places competing in a town with the population of about 50?!”

“Be QUIET, Tami!!” Chorus now.

Edie tried again: “Well, El Toro’s was by far the best. Then, the owner of El Toro’s married the daughter of the owner of Svedtler’s.”

“A Montague- Capulet story! What happened?” exclaimed gentle Nancy. Edie replied in her no-nonsense Wyoming tones, “El Toro’s owner just lost interest in his restaurant and closed it.” There was silence for a few seconds.

It was Nancy’s turn to educate us. She had a collection of CDs; Turkish medleys, Mexican Baroque-“Mexicans do Baroque?” I asked, displaying my shallow-ness- and the best, an Italian Michael Bolton-type. We put him in and he started crooning, “Senxa una donna” (without a woman). The snow was falling now more seriously, and we were on Interstate 80, climbing over the pass from Laramie to Cheyenne. I looked up from my book, Peace of Soul, by Fulton Sheen, and saw the big patch of slush just before we hit it. We started fishtailing at fifty-five mph, and Nancy tried to correct us so we didn’t go off the edge of the highway, down into the trees and rocks in the gully along the highway. In the next instant, we were spinning. For me, it became slow-motion, like when your spider-sense kicks in. Zanchurra the Italian was still crooning and Nancy was yelling “Jesus”, Aileen was praying “Hail Mary”, Edie was frozen, and I was- what was I thinking about? The median wall charging at us and the strange similarity of feeling to a Tilt-A-Wheel ride.

We slammed into the median wall at about 50, and the Tilt-A-Wheel, true to experience, flung us the other way. Suddenly we were driving forward again, and Nancy got us off the road. We all looked at each other, checked poor Aileen’s head, felt our bruises. The car was smoking from a smashed-to-hell engine, so I told everyone to get out so we could check it. As we surveyed the scene, trucks filled with kind, wide-eyed Wyoming tough guys came to help out. They pulled car parts off the highway and smiled at us. We felt better, and just so thankful for being spared. Nancy said flatly, as a huge semi roared past us, “We could have been hit”. The Tilt-A-Wheel image exploded, except that I mused, based on our last thoughts, that Nancy would have been going to see Our Lord, Aileen would have been in the arms of Our Lady, and me? At the eternal Tilt-A-Wheel? That sounds like hell. In my shock state, I was worried about this for awhile.

The Wyoming HP came, the wrecker came (car was totaled) and I got a ride in the back of the patrol car, in the “perp cage”, furthering my worry about my eternal destiny. But I was jolly enough to take a picture of myself and hope for God’s mercy on a frivolous soul, a soul not always in reality enough at the important moments of life. Like the last one.

We got to Laramie, Wyoming’s second or third largest city (not saying much, since the largest, Cheyenne, has only 53,000). Everything on a Saturday closes at noon in Laramie; so we found ourselves with Chad and Misty and their kids, Edie’s family, riding into Cheyenne over the same pass on which we’d crashed.

Nancy: “Well, shall we go to the opera?”

Aileen: “Let’s find out the weather conditions.”

Tami: “We have to take down Denver, remember?”

Edie: “I am going to stay in Cheyenne.” She hugged her grandson.

A few hours later, three of us got a rental Chevy Cobalt from a metaphysically sleepy Avis agent at the- I must say it- absolutely pathetic excuse of an airport that is “Cheyenne Int’l Airport”. I drove. Before leaving we hugged Edie and her family, our rescuers from the wilderness of Laramie, and began our culture-seeking, Frodo-esque journey once again.There was black ice, there was the 7:30 curtain-up deadline; there was the unknown city maze of Denver- the white sharp-tooth mountains rising in the distance; there was the ominous warning of the Cheyennites of “traffic always in Denver”: but we steeled ourselves, thinking of the pioneer women who “did whatever the men did and had babies”. We pulled up to the Grand Hyatt, and the pioneer woman metaphor could go no further. She stayed at the door, her skirts flowing in the wind, looking at us ruefully.

Rushing into the elevator, we were almost bowled over by a man who was holding his chest and calling out for Our Lord. “Alright”, I thought, “there’s a theme going on here.” We called over the hotel staff and he assured them he was fine. “Just a cramp!” he yelled. We continued on up to our room, got ourselves dressed, down again, and got into a taxi. I was expecting a “New York rush” as soon as I got into the taxi, but instead I got “Denver doldrums”. We could have walked faster.

We swooped into the “Ellie Caulkins Opera House” at 7:30 on the dot, transformed into preened peacocks, a far cry from the forlorn little sparrows next to a smashed car. We drank red wine and had a chocolate cookie at intermission, mingled with ball-dresses and very cool, orange-vested western tuxes, and with frightening mini-skirts on sixty-year-old legs and with well-painted, ordered faces. We watched a large man rolling around in exotic silk dress on the stage singing about lust (and I wondered at the ironies of high-culture); but there were a few moments of true sublimity in sound.

After the opera, we decided it was time for dinner, at 10:30 pm- how European of us- and we also decided that we needed a drink-how Western of us-and so we settled ourselves in a hopping Denver place off 16^th St. I made the mistake of having two glasses of wine, which I later put down to pure shock.

We made it back to the Grand Hyatt, and I consider it a great feat that I made it back balancing on little tiny heels. I must have looked like Barbie when you try to make her stand up. As we entered the lobby, Aileen wisely asked about Mass times for the following morning. I thought the surreality of the day was done, but I was mistaken. The man behind the desk, an otherwise typical Colorado boy, asked jauntily, “Well, do any of you speak Latin?” Unbeknownst to him, with us was Nancy, who is probably the ONLY person in a thousand-mile radius who speaks Latin, and fluently. She said, “Ecce boalpoh f lpofpom” (that is what I heard-two glasses, remember?). The bewildered bell-boy said to Aileen, as if Nancy was a foreign personage, “What did she say?” Aileen quipped, “She said, ‘You are handsome’”. The bell-boy, red, looked at Nancy and said slowly, “Well, you’re sort of beautiful.”

As we were lifted to the sixth floor, Nancy said finally, “I guess after forty you get compliments like that. Sort-of beautiful? What is that?”

The next morning, we got ourselves to the Holy Ghost Church for the Latin Mass. We walked into a stunning creation in mahogany and brown marble, with the redeemed Garden of Eden painted and carved into the walls and trimmings; the candles near St. Therese, St. Joseph and Our Lady burned with a strong and gentle light. Our souls were feasted in glorious musical courses: Faure, complex Kyries, the choral voices perfect with ordered passion. The columns, standing like ladies-in-waiting along the side of the main apse, seemed to sing as Our Lord was raised in sacrifice.

“Here” I thought, “is high culture.” And I thanked God for my life, and asked Him to order my soul.

Later, much later, as we drove through the beautiful, open, endless rolling grasslands and eerie, fortress-like rock formations, I remembered Brandy at the Cheyenne airport, a young girl we’d seen while in our rental car fury, on our high-culture search, a girl traveling on her own. She had a shaved-looking head, a beautiful face, and she talked loudly, with Midwestern pancake-tones in the “Cloud-Nine” bar about her back-yard lake in Michigan. We were busy rolling our eyes at this young pup, when we heard an old Wyomer say to her, “You got such a pretty face, young lady, what’s with the hair?” She gave him a sparkling smile. “I was diagnosed with cancer in September, and I lost my hair. It is growing back though,” and she patted her own head affectionately. “It is finally starting to lay down.” The bar fell silent. We fell silent.

As night slowly fell outside the window of our traveling car, as I remembered Brandy, I looked out to see the stars. Out there, in cattle land, cowboy land, the stars are not poking through like pinholes in an opaque black paper sky. They are in the millions, taking over the expanse, and the sky is not flat, but full-form space, and the stars hang down in the living air, within reach like ornaments on invisible strings: millions of tiny glass ornaments, reflecting a light from another source. I felt simultaneously, after a weekend with the theme of approaching death, very earth-bound and yet still desirous about the door to beyond those stars.

Above all, I did not strike the flint to make the spark that is my life; the spark is given me to help start a fire for God in this world. Someday, I pray, in His hands, my spark will float up into the night, disappear, and light up in His heart again.

Driving close to home, through the sad town of Shoshoni, we played the “You Are What You Eat” game again. I was dried out, cured, heavily peppered flesh, Nancy was a Dinty Moore stew, ‘hot and substantial’, and Aileen was, simply, nuts.

2009-01-21T18:36:00.000-08:00

Ring the bells that still can ring,
forget the perfect offering,
there is a crack in everything
that's how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen-Anthem-Nature

The Forgotten World of Children

2008-11-27T12:28:00.000-08:00

I am a mom, with all the duties of daily life shooting at me like tennis balls from a serving machine; often, I am happily keeping up with each ball: dishes, wham! homeschooling, wham!dog-ate-paper-towel-roll clean-up, wham!

Sometimes, in life, a ball comes flying in from some other court and suddenly I am on my rear with tennis balls flying past me (the machine doesn't stop for surprises).

I found myself more solidly on my rear recently- this last surprise ball flew past, and I watched it like one would a shooting star across the sky; I didn't even notice the pummeling I was taking from the machine balls. I turned back to face the machine with little more than raw will. Kid with pink eye, dirty floors, disinfect bathrooms, dishes times fifty, dog eating furniture, messy yard, tutor, wham-wham-wham-wham-wham-wham. I must have looked like the Road Runner playing tennis. But mysteriously, the machine turned off- or it lost its verve. Because of that last, curving ball, I was left with a sense of silence and retreat, even as I continued parrying with the duties of my life.

From within that retreat, a place of struggle, I somehow was given the grace to begin to be grateful to God: but in simple things, like the swirl of a cloud, the spread of stars, a bird on top of a pine tree sticking out his breast- childlike things. I also noticed from this retreat little details like the repeatedly wet shoes I found on my porch: children's shoes; my childrens' shoes. In a normal time, these presented themselves as only tennis balls to hit and move on: now I stopped to wonder what they were doing. Could I be grateful for these wet shoes?

Thanksgiving Day, my nine-year-old daughter, Ana, started talking to me about Delos, Minith Tirith, and the journey across the river. I was listening more intently than usual, because I was in a retreat. At the mention of the river, seven-year-old Sophie joined in with, "It is so cold, Mom!"- and like a puzzle piece, the wet shoes on the porch fit. Aha, I thought; but I did not start with the usual questions about wet shoes, from my mom-laundry-mold problems perspective. I just listened. "Can you come with us today and see Delos?" asked Ana.

We got on our bikes and coats and gloves and hats- and started out on the commonplace road towards City Park. On the edge of the Popo Agie river, we parked our bikes. I was worried about the bikes getting stolen, but the girls just looked at me and shrugged, and I, because of the retreat in my heart, no longer cared. Instead, I looked down the hill towards the gently dancing water, and asked, "How do we get there?" I followed them down the hill, through bracken, reeds bowed by the last snow, and little mirrors of frozen water. We reached the shining beach of large river rocks, sunning themselves in their break from being the riverbed. The winter-river was not deep, but running and very cold. We were to get across by stepping on stones. I noticed, in my new observant and docile state, that Ana and Sophie were intent on getting across, and the coldness of the water did not bother them in the least. "That's cold", Sophie said, in the same manner as I would have said about a flower, "That's pretty."

We picked our way across, holding onto the grey, spindly branches of a tree which hung submissively over the river. I learned from the children that your feet actually stay warmer if you just get wet in your shoes and socks. I'd forgotten this short-sighted wisdom of a child in the throes of adventure. Climbing up the hill, I noticed bits of man-made cement holding back the dirt, and felt a sadness, like the breaking of a spell. We were yet in a land where the spirit lay fettered in practicalities and trash. But Sophie said, "Here's a good, flat rock to climb on- hey, lookit this wire in it! COOOL!". It was cool.

Ana had run ahead to a blackened-bark, old tree whose branches, never pruned, reached down heavily to the ground. It made a network of little rooms, and in one, the children had placed an old bell or something upside down as a decoration. It looked pathetic on one level, but through their eyes, it was the treasury of Minith Tirith. I was shown Neptune's frozen pond, and we journeyed further towards our goal, Delos. As we neared it, I could feel the childrens' excitement building. Ana, in her odd mixture of practicality and imagination, was our tour guide, showing us all the solid paths, and at the same time, saying things like, "I don't know if Apollo will be there. Maybe Artemis. She's usually around." We approached another un-pruned tree, branches bowed to the ground, but forming a huge space, the size of a small circus tent. A deer bounded out, and I could see that we'd disturbed her nesting space. At the entrance, Sophie and Ana picked their way into the center of Delos. I hung back, looking in. "Come in, Mommy"; "Yeah, Mom, come in! Do you like it? Do you?"

I still hung back, smiling, and remembering my Deloses from childhood. There was a branch with many spindly fingers reaching across the open space in the middle, with a strange, drippy green moss hanging from each digit. The sunlight filtering in made the green sparkle like emeralds; jewels of Artemis. I stared at this unexpected beauty for a moment, and I said, "I love it. But if I come in, I will break the spell of this place. I am admiring it, but I am a Big Person." Their eyes shone, because they knew somehow that I was affirming their world, by respecting it enough not to enter.

As we walked past the frozen pond, I noted that there was another pond completely unfrozen. Instead of thinking of what chemical quality of the different ponds made one freeze and the other stay fluid, I noted quite casually, "Perhaps the Ice Queen froze this pond because it gave her no fish, and the other one did." Four eyes shone brighter.

Deep in the spell now, we maneuvered our way back across the ferocious torrent by the log bridge, using a special balancing stick. No one noticed that I nearly broke the child's bridge, but I was roundly cheered upon my leaping to the other side, as if I'd got across the Amazon by swinging across on a vine. I was then treated to the super-duper hill in McManus Park, and I got the ultimate compliment: "Mrs. F- would never do this- we're lucky to have you as our mom."

On the way home in our wet shoes, toes frozen, we stopped to pet a cat.

Do not,in your sorrow or joy, not see the child's world for the balls, I told myself as I peddled home, looking at the massive mountains in the distance.

Image: near Delos, Greek island of mythology

Sacre Coeur

2008-11-05T10:31:00.000-08:00

I just came back from Santa Barbara to Wyoming- like going from what Eden might have looked like to the mountains of the moon; winter is setting in here, that strange time of year when the skeletons hanging listlessly on doors in the wake of Halloween mirror the bony trees: trees slowly falling asleep in their wait for the gentle fingers of spring.

In a way, I am traveling that path also; now here in Wyoming in normal life from being in Santa Barbara, in Santa Barbara! -cutting pepper tree and bougainvillea in the mountains above the city, sneaking around my old college campus in the estates of Montecito, weeping openly at Butterfly Beach (no one notices the tears because the wind, like the hand of the Lord, wipes them away to join the passion of the wind off the water): in short, plugging in very suddenly to an old life in which I was a passionate young woman- disturbed, at times, but passionate.

Standing along the beach wall on Sunday, saying goodbye before taking to the road north, I remembered that when I was living here in Santa Barbara, I was full of passion- but a passion alternately unfettered and unreasonable and then clamped by terrible fears of consequence and punishment. Now, as I watched the waves pound in, I remembered also that this kind of passion led me to be a slave of Thanatos:

And there the children of dark Night have their dwellings, Sleep and Death, awful gods. The glowing Sun never looks upon them with his beams, neither as he goes up into heaven, nor as he comes down from heaven. And the former of them roams peacefully over the earth and the sea's broad back and is kindly to men; but the other has a heart of iron, and his spirit within him is pitiless as bronze: whomsoever of men he has once seized he holds fast: and he is hateful even to the deathless gods." (Hesiod, Theogony 758 ff, trans. Evelyn-White, Greek epic C8th or C7th B.C.)

Thanatos is the twin god of Sleep, twin children of Night and Darkness; and because I was a slave to my passion, I would, at times of destruction and fear, desire not to live, which is our modern understanding of Thanatos: a seizing, iron desire for final sleep. I loved deeply and passionately (I was not promiscuous, which by its nature cannot be passionate) as the Lord made me to do, but I did not know how to love with balance and without fear; thus, it was not a perfect love, for “perfect love casteth out fear”. I did not love the way the Lord would have us love, freedom within His will, His laws.

I left Santa Barbara once before, twelve years distant, completely dried out from tears; I could not cry anymore, so in the grip of Thanatos I was then: I do not know how I left, only that I was, in a way, slowly guided; a carrot here and there, and I was in graduate school in Annapolis; soon I was, girl-like, twirling on a wide campus lawn leading to the Severn River, alone in the gentle, falling snow at ten pm after a glorious class on Homer; I was in the Adoration Chapel at St. Mary’s at two am, laying on the floor and weeping again in the arms of the Lord, letting go my loss. I was slowly being released from the death-grip of that bronze demon.

I lived, then: drank deeply of Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Shakespeare, and Euclid (who would have thought math could be passionate?), taught, loved my students, married, had three children, came out of my shell because of the deep love and friendship of a few holy people, and began to create. I began to understand deeply Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

I understood this in terms of God loving and not myself, for I had bent with removers, the deepest of failures- bent to have love removed from fear, mostly, a fear of not living up to what I was expected to do and suffering because I did not understand what was written deeply inside me; nor, at the time of my life in Santa Barbara, had I the saving balance, reason and teaching of the Faith- and my love and other's for me had been destroyed. How does one live with that knowledge, with that depth of failure in the deepest parts of life?

In the years that I began living again, I understood how God loves us: He looks upon tempests and is never shaken: and He began to teach me how to love that way, through suffering and discipline, through times of poverty on many levels; through His gift of Himself in the Eucharist and His gifts of children and family. I was in a school of love, and I know enough now after all that the love of Sonnet 116 is impossible for me to attain, to live- to the edge of doom?- and that it cannot come from any power in me.

When I returned to Santa Barbara this time, rather innocently for my aunt’s wedding, I was looking forward only to time alone and a chance to meet old friends and family. I did all that, and it was blessed; but I did not know that I was to meet myself in a mysterious way again, to revisit that passionate young woman that I was, to look back on her decisions with some horror but mostly sympathy and a deep and unexpected sense of terrible loss and regret, and through the eyes of others who knew me inside and out, to love and appreciate who I was then, while yet taking into account my disorders. If I had known better how to love, if I had known better how to be balanced…this time I saw clearly the loss, because I understood better what love was and could have been, and have never felt pain like that before.

So I stood at Butterfly Beach on the day I was to leave, watching the surfers and remembering that time I’d sat on the beach, twenty-one or so, and had asked God why I couldn’t sit and talk with Him, face to face; and the next minute, a man came up to me and said, “Can I sit with you and talk?” Not knowing who this guy was, and being ripped from my reverie, I said, “No”. Even though this may have been some pick-up, there was a lesson in it for me, I knew. This was me in a nutshell- asking God for everything in my deep way, like jumping into the blue and purple ocean not caring that I couldn’t swim, and then shrinking back in fear from any decision I was supposed to make, and then rolling around in regret and uncertainty afterward.

I stood there, now forty, and remembered that because of this agony of uncertainty, there was a deep current of thanatos in me, which is the mark of the truly depressed, and a mark of deep self-absorption. I began to weep for the destruction and disorder this had caused; I wanted to ask forgiveness from everyone I’d hurt and disturbed, especially those whose lives had been most deeply affected by me, and yet felt helpless to ever repair it all. Thanatos came and stood there by my side, but I recognized him and stared him in the face. Then from somewhere inside me (yet from somewhere outside of me as well) I heard, in that deep language which has none of the boulder-heavy quality of the words we speak, but rather the honey-ness of deep realities: “I want to LIVE”.

I got in my car and pulled away from the beach and up 101 towards Santa Cruz, caught in the grip of that thought. I realized that although I had been schooled in the discipline of love, I had perhaps quashed some of that passion I’d had as a young woman- basically, in order to survive: but I wanted now, because of that school, to live- to live now without fear. To live truly is to love perfectly- and passionately.

I do not know how to do this, but I do know that it must come from Christ. That is all. I know now that I want to burn up in a fireball- not in the way of Thanatos, but in the consuming fire of the love of Christ. I love the Sacred Heart, the Sacre Coeur, because He is described as an ocean of love, or a consuming fire, two images which are fundamental to my life. I understood finally the deep desire for martyrdom, the desire for the greatest love: “for no man has greater love than he who lays down his life for his friend”. I realized that the passionate person that I was made to be, better schooled now that I am, can desire no less than a fireball of love. So now I want to die, not in the arms of Thanatos, but in the fire of Christ, without fear. I want to supernaturalize my loves, and may destruction and regret and loss be burned away and love restored.

However, I cannot do this. My nature wants it now, wants not to wait, like a woman in love cannot wait for marriage, admitting no impediment; but this kind of love, I now know, the best kind of love, is dependent on the will of God. I understand St. Therese of Liseux better, perhaps: I think her greatest pain was not to be immediately consumed in this fire- she was, like me, made to be passionate at a deep level. Instead, she was consumed by tuberculosis- on a natural level- but God supernaturalized it, and with Him, St. Therese supernaturalized every action of her life, from picking apples to dying of suffocation slowly. This IS the heroism of the saint, and yet I am, as she describes, a weak bird in a storm who is looking for the sun. I am no longer afraid, except of sin and of my own weakness: or perhaps I should not be afraid of this weakness, for does not God work most through our weaknesses? Perhaps the one thing of which I am afraid is to live a passionless life, buried in the humdrum of bills and cycles. St. Therese, in her Little Way, I pray will teach me.

I ask now to be consumed in His fire, like a meteor across the sky, but I know it must be in His way and not out of a selfish desire. This will, I think,be the next school for me.

Image: www.timboucher.com, "Sacred Heart Fractal".

Howdy, Wyoming

2008-08-30T16:49:00.000-07:00

We drove (the cattle) into town in the beginning of June. At least, I felt both like we should be driving cattle, and that we were cattle, after forty or so hours in the Blue Donkey.

Lander does not rise elegantly into the mountain range; we came in from the southeast, and never have I seen so much lonely and brown-tone space, sad places with desperate names like "Sweetwater"; places along the Oregon Trail where I am sure many silent and unmarked corpses lay- remains of those brave hearts, the innocent and weak who died of exhaustion and thirst after months, not hours, in their wagons. I looked across this high desert on our way to Lander and felt absolutely naked and lonely and empty- and afraid. "Hell's bells, what if this is what Lander looks like?"

Suddenly, as we sped through the hot afternoon, the road slithered like a rattler in between red-rock canyon walls- we were goin' down. As we went down, I saw the Wind Rivers raising their heads off in the distance, snowcapped, green-swathed, looking like huge forms in royal robes but ever turning away, with their robes fanned out on the high desert scrub plains. They are mysterious mountains, with much promise of adventure spilling out of their canyon-gateways.

Lander is snuggled in a valley amidst the folds of the Winds' hems. Coming in from the south, the road widened in a proud way, and the sign which said "Lander" had an iron silhouette of a prairie woman on it. "Good", I thought, "that'll be me in a couple years- maybe less, depending on how hard it is."

In the evening, we were taken to our temporary accommodations, the "Dillon View Apartments", on Dillon Road. I wondered why on earth you'd name an apartment complex after the view of the road it is on: I might be wrong, but this kind of thing says something about Wyoming- so practical that it is funny. Or maybe Dillon is that great, white peak of a mountain with his one eye always on us. Anyway, we settled in, glad for a bed- even if there were only four beds for five of us. I had, after all, learned something in Canada: simple gratitude- and I would not trade that lesson for anything. Au revoir, Canada (until re-seeing).

We spent our first weeks in Lander among the working poor, next to the Family Dollar store, McDonald's and a gas station, which for some reason, played rock music from various speakers night and day. We met our first friends in the apartments: David and Debbie, a son and his mother (she was managing the complex), who were trying to make it without alcoholic Dad and another brother. David is a gem of a kid, who tries to make up for his complex life by telling us stories of his horse. It conveniently got killed when our kids wanted to go and see it. Nonetheless, David and Debbie made our first weeks joyful- water fights, climbing trees, kickball with a pockmarked nerf basketball, the works. It was truly joyful, like the face of God peeking through the scrub brush.

We saw the Indian families who are trying to make a life off the reservation, working long hours and very infrequently out for a leisure walk. One family had the strange habit of opening their car door without looking to see if anyone or anything was in the way. We all learned the Dillon rule #1: Never park beside the white SUV with "Roman" and Indian feathers on the back.

In Lander, I noticed right away that there is still a very strong racial divide- in appearance as well as daily life- between the Indians and the cowboys' descendants. There are many blond and blue-eyed Scandinavian types, with delicate features, and they cut quite a contrast with the wide-cheek-boned, dark and braided Indians. I felt that under the modern veneer of jeans and cars, I was still looking the Old West right in the face: and like my first months in Canada, I sensed people tougher than myself. I remember being at City Park with the kids at the same time that about a hundred Indian children were there, kids in The Shoshone Boys and Girls Club. We were there for about an hour, and as we were leaving, a nearly lone blond kid, about five, dressed to the nines in a cowboy outfit, came ridin' in on his bike. I couldn't help thinking that he was about to get scalped.

The Indians, I am told, are a people heartbroken. Looking at the high desert, the mysterious peaks of the Winds, the canyons and arching sky, I wondered if their heart was broken because they could be nomads no more. This country seems to call for the nomadic spirit; and the Indians seem to carry a certain frustration in their black eyes; a certain shift in the reflection of the light conveys this. I saw a photograph of the Shoshone Powwow Queen, or something like that, and she stood proudly dressed in white leather Indian wear next to a bareback horse, on a rock in one of the canyons- and I saw what they would like to be, instead of the heavy, Cadillac-drivin' misfits they often are. Sound harsh? I'm becoming a Wyomer already. However, there are those Indians who still live, to some extent, the spirit of this country: The highlight of the 4th of July Rodeo was watching the Indian relay races. To see them going full tilt bareback, and jumping off midstream to alight with elegance on the next horse is an eye-opening experience. To see them cheered raucously by every Wyomer there is a great experience.

The cowboys, on the other hand, are tough people full of surprises and practical jokes. I was at McDonald's, sitting rather dog-eared by the infernal PlayPlace, when I noticed two cowboys exit a massive truck with a cistern tank in the back and a horse trailer behind- how much equipment do you need? Anyway, ears suddenly up, I noticed another cowboy sitting near me. I eavesdropped (cultural research, of course). The conversation was between this old, rusty cowboy and another guy and centered around the expected: water levels and fishing spots... the the old guy, tough-looking, mentioned how he was 'a fixin something and was havin trouble. "Yeah, yeah", I thought. The other guy asked him what it was, and he said, "Well, its my damn sewing machine- stitches a couple stitches and then jus gives out- can't seem to get it right." The other guy, sympathetically, "Oh, I'm sure it'll come out alright." I couldn't figure out if they were serious or knew I was listening.

The local gas station is named "The Maverick" and the nice inn in town is "The Pronghorn". Doesn't make you want to stay there, does it? Speaking of pronghorns, there is a mysterious yard absolutely filled with horns of some deer-thing. When I saw that, I wanted to throw up right there. There are the NOLS types: granola, crunchy, tasty (oh, sorry, went too far with that one) types who know all about survival but usually nothing about salvation. There are the country-club types who drive souped-up Cherokees and Land Rovers, and I wonder, "Why are you here and not in Santa Barbara?" I guess in Santa Barbara they'd be living at the "Whatever View" apartments, and they know it, so they stay here.

Don't get me wrong, I like it here: there is a saying which I think has truth in it: "Wyoming is as America was". There is an adventurous, open, friendly, realistic spirit which, I think, fires the ancestral blood in me. My father's white trash family came West in the 1800s, to become something more than that trash label they had in Illinois: they came West through these deserts and mountains, and became ranchers in Eastern Washington. They were the blue-eyed, tall blonde people I see here. Some say I must have Indian blood, too: one day, I wore my almost-black hair braided down the back as I often do, and I was ridin' my iron horse, Diamond Back, through town, imagining the wheel tread sound was the sound of pounding hooves. I was eight again; suddenly pulled from my fantasy world, I happened to see some Indian kids on the other side of the road. Seeing me, one of them slowly and deliberately put his hand up in the "How" sign. I realized that they thought I was one of them. How different-and lovely- that is.

Howdy, Wyoming.

image: www.flickr.com : "Darkness, Darkness 8" by Crick3

The Edge, the Cross, and a Pilgrim

2008-05-08T07:20:00.000-07:00

So now, Barry’s Bay, I am saying goodbye. In the last few weeks and days, I have been reminded both of our pilgrim status, the cross, and the “edge”.

When I first arrived, shocked and exhausted- and reluctant- I remember Fr. Terry, the biker-turned-Byzantine priest, telling me in his bear-like way, “Welcome to the edge”. It frightened me and thrilled me at the same time. The edge turned out to be a place from where I could see past the comforts and joys and temptations of this life. I have a memory in my mind of Fr. Terry pointing out the hill beyond our little dilapidated house, a lone, treed hill overlooking the rat-a-tat of pale little houses surrounded by yards beaten to death by weather, ski-doos, four-wheelers and toys. He pointed to that hill and told me it would be beautiful in the winter; and then he encouraged me that I would see beyond that, even, if I trusted God.

The edge turned out to be a place of well-placed little crosses for me to carry: financial panics, the grind of buying everything and only things on sale and otherwise cheap; battling anonymous arms for things at St. Joe’s thrift shop; a culture and community which seemed inscrutable to me for months; Canadian bureaucracy; losing a couple teeth; burned arms, root canals, sledding accidents and April still buried in the cold; and the ever-flapping housewrap-“Polish siding”. And finally, a very large cross: losing two precious students. This was a cross we all shared, and it seemed to break down barriers and open hearts all round.

Up until the point of the loss of Janine and Paul, the crosses were there to strip me of attachment to the comforts and beauties of this world. I’d imbued so much pressure to be and appear as the world would like without even knowing the extent of my attachments. Our Lady’s Valley, the area surrounding Barry’s Bay and Combermere, was a place where a mother’s hands gently but firmly stripped my soul. The cross of losing Janine and Paul was rather a cross for all of us in this community to carry together-it was too heavy to carry alone-but for me, it was a sort of completion of one part of my journey of attachment to this world, like a lodge halfway up a two-day hike: for both young people seemed to me to exemplify the idea of the Christian pilgrim, which necessarily carries within it the element of detachment. In their flight away from this world, culminated in their deaths, they hammered home the point to me that our home is not here.

With their deaths on the lake, another temptation to attachment was taken from me. When I first came here, all I wanted to do was to settle on Mask Island. It seemed like another world to me, and how I love the water! After the accident, that was taken from me as well. Nothing here seemed beautiful to me anymore, especially shrouded in the death of winter. It was sometime round then that my sight began to change, and I understood what Fr. Terry had been telling me when I first arrived. Sometimes it is those seemingly innocuous temptations that hold our sight on the wrong things.

At first, it was St. Hedwig’s which seemed more and more beautiful; it was as if a light emanated from the place- the darker things got around me elsewhere, the lighter the church became. Then it was the faces of my students, my fellow teachers, the kindness of the lady at Afelskie’s and the flower lady at Value Mart, and my neighbor down the road on his funky new bike. They began to be luminous, just like my memories of my short time with Janine. I began to converse with Janine regularly, asking her for help in how I should see things- and truly she had already helped set the seeds for me for a better sight; for before she died, she had asked me, me already too burdened with tasks and roles and life in Barry’s Bay, if she could help with the Little Flowers group (which I had resisted starting). She broke that barrier, and I began to serve a little more, rather than looking at my own problems. My sight changed as the direction of my looking changed.

I know more now about the disorder of this place, as there are disorders in every place. But with my sight changed, I saw the miracle of God living side-by-side, almost with the filth on Him, as He works to change hearts and break down the barriers of disordered poverty, pride, selfishness and fear. I know, from my life in many different places (six or seven countries now), that this disorder is everywhere; but here it seems more naked in a way: in California, for instance, it seems to be nicely covered with a veneer of good weather, health and wealth (except if you visit the produce-picker’s shacks in Salinas). In general, here there is less to cover it with, unless someone becomes the ultimate block-head and tries to cover it with the veneer of holier-than-thou poverty or Jansenistic spirituality.

After a year, after the Canadian winter and a winter of the soul, I am a pilgrim a little more, in a hurry on the road to God, less interested in delaying for the temptations along the way (as Divine Intimacy puts it). I am definitely less attached to my teeth and more concerned with the words of love which I can get past them and my attempts at the abeyance of selfish ones. I rejoice in the beauty of God’s house and the souls who crawl in on spiritual knees: I saw with real eyes the widow with the mite, and the little children who came close to Christ. I do not weep over the house I live in, but rather the loss of knowing, day-to-day, the beautiful souls I knew here.

However, I believe that all born-or re-born- in love does not die, nor fade. Both my look into the hearts of a few young students, who were making the miraculous effort(borne by grace) to turn to God, and my deepening knowledge of those farther along the way to holiness was a catalyst for greater love- and now, greater loss in a sense. But to lose sight of our brothers and sisters in this life means naught in the economy of the spirit. In fact, I think we can love purely if we simply keep praying for each other. This is the meaning of our life here: that is, to be pilgrims in love with God and those He loves; and the Cross in some way makes us pilgrims- for while we carry our crosses, we can’t carry anything else.

Image: www.pbase.com

The Upside-Down Kingdom*

2008-03-19T12:10:00.000-07:00

I went to a ‘mass’ recently, feeling a little curious as to how the ‘liturgy’ might come off, and what I might learn about the people involved. As soon as I sat down, the small congregation started singing, “…the animals came in, two by two…” I thought it a strange hymn, seeing that this was supposed to be Easter Sunday. I tried to sing along as best I could, although the style was rather informal and thus hard to follow.

The priest came in, processing perfectly and reverently. He seemed rather nervous, and I surmised that it was because the audience was, I guessed, a very critical one and made up entirely of the feminine. I wondered how this congregation made up of little women would treat the young priest who seemed so serious. As I thought about this, the priest reached the ‘altar’ and kissed it. He then turned around and put his hands out, moving them quickly to a prayer position, almost as if he was grabbing something in the air, and said that the mass was offered for “Granddad”. He blushed and stood there.

Then, there was a long silence, and I realized that no one knew what to do. A little lady from the congregation jumped up from her seat, came up to the altar area and faced the congregation. She read, “Dear Brothers and Sisters, be nice to one another.” As you can imagine, my reaction was one of shock, wondering what translation of what book this was. After the reading, she sang alleluia about eight times! and when she was done, the priest did the strangest thing I have ever seen. He went over and pinched her cheeks, shaking her head back and forth. It was a strange mixture of affection and annoyance. It was a natural reaction, I thought, amidst the yelling of the congregation, to the over-done alleluia( even though it was reverently and beautifully sung- eight times) and the obvious attempt by the cantor at a mass coup.

As the cantor retreated to her seat, the priest went over to the lectern area to say the gospel. He did the signs of the cross on the forehead, mouth and heart perfectly and with reverence. He started: “Jesus said to his disciples, I mean, he told them”- he was interrupted by the cantor from the audience, who shouted, “He always says that for the gospel!” At this new insurrection, the priest went into the aisle and stubbornly began his homily, which was: “There will be an Easter Egg hunt after mass.” The cantor still heckled him, and finally he took matters into his hands, shoving her back down into her chair.

Things soon settled down, with my help. The communion hymn was a slight different rendition of the “animals” song- very apropos in a delirium-induced way, to the congregation coming up for ‘communion’. I guessed that this was some sort of Protestant communion, because I didn’t catch a consecration. Or maybe they just forgot. I was beginning to leave, when a new problem came up. It seems that the priest was taking communion over and over, and the congregation, who were themselves taking communion over and over, were protesting. They were a rather hypocritical bunch, I thought.

At this point, we stopped the mass, and had a little discussion about what is actually done with the Host after Mass at the church. The priest, who was only four, nodded his head. The rebellious cantor wasn’t really listening, already off on her six-year-old journey into something else. The eight-year-old looked at me, almost winking in her aged understanding of the realities of Mass.

The experience left me with some interesting thoughts about the nature of male and female, and their relationship to true liturgy. Women are nurturers and helpmates, they have a great desire for procession and order, for beauty and correctness. However, they can tend to take over if authority or proper understanding of hierarchy is lacking. Women are caretakers and they should be caretakers of the simple and central reverence of the priest. Often, they are hungry to be a part of the center of Christian life, the Mass, and are seemingly relegated to observers only. However, this does not have to be, nor does having women exercise their nature as caretaker and helper, of nurturer, have to mean a struggle of authority and proper roles. It is easy to see, at least for me, that men can withstand the rigors of the public eye, with less attention paid to themselves- they are, by their more simple physical form, less of a focus for the eye. They can stand in front and yet still be ‘to the side’, so to speak. We see this quite clearly in the comparison with a disordered male, that of the flamboyant male.

This is not to say that a “chaste and humble woman” like the woman of the Proverbs, is not possible- for she is a woman whose beauty shines from within, from her actions and her prayer life. When you meet a prayerful woman or man, you begin to understand the saying, “In Christ there is no male and female”. This kind of woman can be anywhere and be reverent, and as unobtrusive as the prayerful man: but in this world, where there still is a sharp, almost caricatured difference between male and female, I believe the Church has maintained gender roles within the Mass out of a realistic understanding of the need to communicate and model these roles to the world. This is for the good of all who are in the world, and looking at the Church from the outside, but also for those of us who are “in the world but not of it”. For me, this solves the seeming paradox between “priesthood of believers” and the traditional priestly role of the male within the Church, a paradox which has given rise to so many errors-especially within the Protestant communities- of interpreting Holy Scripture in a way which confuses the role of men and women in their communities. I am glad that the Church is there, through teaching and Tradition, to show us things which are often too deep for us to understand-except at a very simple level.

I believe, and this is my opinion of course, that Jesus modeled this delicate balance of treating women as equals (in a way never before experienced before or since) and the different roles of men and women, in an understanding of the limits of human understanding and nature; and showing in practice “a bruised reed I will not break” by knowing how much those in the militant Church and the world could understand, both being wounded by sin and the disorder of original sin.

However, women can and should exercise their nature in the community of the Church, in the Body of Christ. How? By doing things which are conducive to their feminine nature. The best sacristans are often women, and this job of caretaking for the Lord’s House is a foundational one for the community. If the House of the Lord is barren of the little touches of care that a woman can best bestow, the message to anyone who enters this place is that this is not a home but an institution; that no one could live here, day in and day out, as the Lord does.

In many churches, I have seen beautifully embroidered altar clothes, prie deus, and vestments. Flowers and plants with liturgical significance are arranged with care and delicacy around statues and the tabernacle; and the church is clean and cared for by unseen hands. Is this less important to the Lord than the men who stand in the public eye? Is the priest more important than the woman who cleans or replenishes votive candles?

The Church does not, in terms of holiness and spirituality, make a distinction between men and women. Both men and women are saints, both men and women Doctors of the Church- there are great woman theologians and, most importantly, the most precious saint in the Church is the Blessed Mother. Her role and her humility alongside the crown of glory given her by God, is the best example of a woman in the Church.

A description of the Christian life which I have long mused upon is the title of a book: The Upside-Down Kingdom. For me, this is the answer to the feeling of many women who would like to be more a part of the public liturgical life of the Church. “The first shall be last, and the last shall be first”; and “ who wishes to be greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven should make himself the least”. Some of the greatest mystics in the Church have been women: when one looks at the community of saints, those whose stories we know, the glory of God in both men and women-not in a hierarchy of male and female, but rather in a hierarchy of humility- one understands a little more.

* Title of a book about which I can remember nothing else.

The Courage Of A Pure Heart

2008-02-09T15:50:00.000-08:00

A pure heart is one who seeks God totally and fully; one who loves deeply and feels the pull of many things, yet still seeks, as in St. Louis de Montfort’s term, “God Alone”.

How many of us have seen or lived with a pure heart or have one ourselves? How can we ever really judge the purity of our own or another’s heart? Yes, impossible. God alone judges this; but we see and know glimpses of this purity in our lives, whether it is through the intimate experience of another or in our own moments of truly loving God. Through a very special experience of one of my students, I have learned that purity is a state of being won through habitual and courageous practice of virtue; and a death to oneself in order to live for Christ.

I met Janine when she came to my class the first day: well, actually, I didn’t notice her because there were so many students, and many more compelling or colorful, with great laughs and well-thought-out comments: she was rather a quiet presence just to my left, her long and thin fingers still on the paper, or quickly writing a note here or there. I began first to notice her smile, a little like a child’s (with a wrinkling of the nose). Her smile was genuine, from the eyes, and she would laugh or smile and give a look of some amazement, her small, black eyes widening (I never figured out what the amazement was, unless she was simply amazed at the things I got myself into in the way of joking).

Then she came to my office one night, to talk about a paper. I could tell she was very focused, with a cultivated sixth-sense for discipline. I was a little uncomfortable because notwithstanding the discipline, she seemed so very fragile and unsure of herself, and I wondered if she would make it through the rigor of the academics. She surprised me first with the quality of her work: her purpose was clear and her thoughts were succinct and genuine.

I asked her and another student to house-sit for us because I implicitly trusted her, and when we returned they surprised me with the tiniest, sweetest notes for my children, little encouraging statements for each of them; and further, she had ‘done a poustinia’ in our house: a time of fasting and prayer. I began to realize that she had a depth I’d not guessed at, and also that there was a goal in mind: not a mercenary goal, but a goal of love, and like St. Therese of Liseux, she did deeds of deep love in very small ways- so small that one might easily miss them altogether.

My next surprise came when she asked if my daughter would like to visit the elderly home with her and some other students. Every Sunday, the little group visiting the elderly grew, and Janine, I surmised, was not quite comfortable with either taking little children or speaking to older people who may or not be feeling well enough to be greeted. But she went anyway- and not in her soft-spoken, often unsure words, but rather in her actions, did I begin to ascertain a certain something which inspired me. What was it that lived in her, which belied the easily-ruffled waters on the surface of her being?

One night after class, we had a passionate discussion of the journey of the soul, as we studied it in the character of Odysseus, and how the Greeks were able to see certain truths even though they did not have Christ. To my shame, I can better remember my own words than hers; but I felt a sense of illumination and a joy in our meeting of the souls: for great literature can provide these meetings, when the souls are open to truth. Janine, my deep interlocutor during that short conversation, was passionate about the pure beauty of a human search for truth and discoveries of the heart.

A few nights later, I was trying to staple numerous pages together for a class, and I had all twenty-five or so page-piles laid out on the library tables- except for the front couple tables, where a dark coat and bag lay. Janine came in, and I apologized for the interruption of her studies. She tried to read for awhile with the noise of shuffling papers and my suppressed moans when the stapler began to malfunction. She noiselessly got up and asked if she could help me. I resisted for a second, and then something in her demeanor, something beyond sight or words made me understand that this was a gift to me and that I would do well to enjoy it. So we shuffled papers together and chatted peacefully. I always felt completely safe with Janine; she was a person with whom I was totally myself: ages, stations, backgrounds, none of these mattered: what mattered, it seemed to me, was the desire to love and be loved. I must admit that there are very, very few people with whom I feel completely myself.

The last time I saw Janine, she was a quiet observer within our small group chat after First Friday Mass and the louder ones of us were bantering about the cultural impact of the Rolling Stones and “Badger, Badger” You Tube videos. I didn’t even realize that Janine was there- it was dark and she was so quiet, and I am at times absorbed in my own wit- until the group broke up, and I saw her curled-lip smile. I smiled back in peace- and we waved goodbye. I was hoping that nothing we’d said had ruffled her delicacy, but I was glad to see her just hanging out; and I remember thinking that she was going past another boundary of what was perhaps not comfortable to her: bantering. As her face receded, still smiling, I turned away to make sure the kids were getting into the car. It was the last time I saw her.

The next day, Janine got a ride to spiritual direction, and there was a decision to go via the frozen lake. She and another student drowned when the van went through the ice.

In my grieving, the image of a delicate, pink rose keeps coming to my mind, wafting up from my soul, and from my memories of her. It is the kind of rose that waves a little in the breeze, at the end of a gentle and flexible stem, a rose of surpassing softness and transparency, a rose with a scent which requires all other scents to be purged before one can really experience it.

Janine, God’s pink rose, may have had imperfections I did not know about, but she gave me a powerful example of purity, and the very real struggle for it. She was focused on God, it seemed to me: all her actions, all her service and her joys seemed bent by an indomitable will towards Him. This clarity of purpose and desire required her to be courageous: she had to go past what was comfortable, and she wanted to because of Love. She had to say no to attachments and desires, fears and natural dislikes, in order to say “yes” to God. She did it, with some trembling sometimes, but she did it nonetheless. I learned from her that purity for God requires courage.

She was such a paradox of rose and iron: but this paradox melts away when seen in the light of pursuing Love Himself- for “love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” You see, I think that this Love is so gentle, but to do all these things, to be truly gentle in the winds of this world requires a purity of heart, a heart for God alone; and this, in turn, requires a strong will to say, over and over, “I want to do what You want. I want to believe in You. I want to hear only Your voice.” In those choices of the will, there must be God-given courage; and what results is Christ in the world again: even if He is taken again in some way, as He was, I think, when Janine died in the days just before Lent.

I will LIVE, I will LOVE, I will ask for courage to have a pure heart- and I will hope to continue to know Janine through the bridge of prayer.

image: www.penick.net

Philia

2008-01-16T13:01:00.000-08:00

The snow lays light on the ground, and I walk in the sunlight, feeling the prick of the cold on my ears: but I don’t care. It is the sun shining which keeps me hatless, regardless of the stripped trees, dying grass, the houses with their windows and doors wrapped up against the chill.

I am thinking of you, my friend: there is no one to replace you, no one who spoke into my life in quite the same way; and the sunlight on my light-starved skin reminds me of you in wordlessness. For what was I but a parka-encased soul, holding out against all the possible elements, when you softly and lovingly entered my life?

I look over the lake, subdued and white like a bride, and to the shores of the island, the tiny, far houses and trees bending towards each other in their winter dress. They seem like my memories of you, far and almost indiscernible. I cannot remember your smile, and I cannot remember even the exact color of your hair or your eyes: but I can remember the clothes we used to trade back and forth, and the flow of your handwriting, or your strong hug at the airport the last time I saw you. Strange, that what remains clear are those things which functioned as connections between you and me, like the causeway across the lake to the distant island. What remains living?

I feel my skin responding again to the precious, ephemeral wafts of light; and I feel like Iulus, with the divine fire crowning me: you convinced me to start un-wrapping my soul, and I remember being able to do so because you loved me. But yours was the kind of love, I remember, that showered itself freely wherever you went. Perhaps you never knew what you did for me, as you passed through my life, dancing through my winter landscape and scattering sunlight everywhere.

There is a kind of remembrance, like a footstep in snow, which gets encased in the ice: still living water, but frozen. Like ice on the surface of the water, these rememberings are lighter than seems possible, and they wait in one’s heart for those moments when they are needed. They are little pieces of you, which in the thaw, water my soul for the spring; they have become an integral part of the new growth there.

Also there is the remembrance of God: in His ever-spring, our philia – our friendship made pure by baptism in the fire of Him- lives on. So it is that you live on in my life, my friend, who loved me even when I was ugly, even when it seemed you were the only person to see some value in me, even as I was busily burying myself in snowdrifts. You are part of the green shoots in me, rising towards God. No matter what has happened to you- whether you are still on this earth or not- something of you lives on in me, and will, I pray, bend forward to meet you again in eternity.

Barry’s Bay Chronicle: Poverty

2007-10-22T07:53:00.000-07:00

image: shiftingpixel.com

I think that the “Cross of Combermere” has something to do with detachment. It seems that this area was picked from the ice age as a place for the cross and thus a chance, a chance for detachment; for as soon as the glaciers scratched their way south, taking almost all the good topsoil with them, and leaving rocky hillsides and blue-eyed lakes, it became a potential place for poverty.

And so it was; when the white men came, these lands were the leavings. Polish and Irish suffered here and became tough in their strange lives of the beautiful and the miserable: and then Catherine and Eddie Doherty came, two people accustomed to wealth, who were now establishing a spiritual center for the ministry to the poor. Then their vision seemed to develop into a deep understanding of Christ and His choice to be poor with the poor. Catherine’s old Russian memories of the poustinikki, men and women who gave all they had to retreat into silence and poverty, began to develop in her soul and she understood that her early visions of helping the poor were just the beginnings. As she established her dreams of silence and union with God, she understood that it must be in the context of poverty: the poustinia of Madonna House, in my mind, are little gateways, chances for the individual to have a taste of the spiritual road to God: a road, where, “The Son of Man has no place to lay His Head”. Walking with the Man of Sorrows is must be on a lowly dirt road, a road empty in the night where one must look for a place to lay for the night, stomach rumbling, feet sore: but heart full.

And so I, with my half-heart: half materialist, half spiritual longing; I, with my torn heart, have played on the outskirts of the true life. I am driving on that dirt road, wondering if I can indeed park my comforts, get out, and walk with Christ. I have not felt strong enough, or worthy. And how I love nice things, love beauty; my eyes have not been blinded enough to the world to see the beauty of God. Here, under the Combermere Cross, I have been mostly afraid and angry. I don’t want to have to be afraid of every bill; I don’t want to have to go to shop at the thrift store. I remember shopping in San Francisco and New York and feel sick. I’ve had to work at not looking at our forlorn house and imagining what I would do with it if it were mine and I had some money.

However, something inside wants union with God: this has never really changed; and I understand now that it is because He wants this- of all of us. Love desires union. So I have, all my life, done things with half of myself, dragging the other half (which is screaming and threatening dire consequences) in search of the beauty which is beyond sight, of the love which is beyond the capacity of my heart. I believe, too, that this is the condition and desire of every human heart, and remains so. I don’t believe this desire can ever be fully expelled or ignored, but living a torn life causes disorder and unhappiness. A choice must be made.

I look now more closely at what the half which longs for God is doing; and it is easier to look at it here, under the Combermere Cross. No matter where I go, whether we are called to stay here in Barry’s Bay or not, God called us here to be under this cross, and to understand poverty by living in the beginnings of it. Relative to what I have seen around the world, we are rich. But relative to what we are used to, and God knows this, we are poor. We are wimps and God knows it and is merciful to our pathetic crying: but merciful enough, also, to keep moving us closer to the ideal.

I see St. Francis in my mind; the missionaries and saints, and Mother Teresa: and I see a depth of freedom in their lives and actions that is beyond what any king or dictator enjoys. Yet it seems that I am still watching them work out their salvation in Christ- from the car. When Father Terry told me in the beginning of my pilgrimage here, “Welcome to the Edge”- I felt that I was finally getting out of the car- but then I get back in; ride, back out; walk a few steps and get scared.

I finally understood one night, after tears of deep frustration, that it was about detachment. So I went to the church to pray- it was locked, Our Lord inside. I sat in the car, literally, but my heart was outside waiting for the Lord on the road. As I looked at the lonely cross outside the church, I asked Him to begin to teach me about true detachment; and I begin to understand that a person can be as owner-minded and thus prideful about being poor for the sake of the kingdom as he is about having human power and riches. “What a minefield along this road to God”, I thought; “-if I am going to be prideful, I might as well be rich and at least provide well for my children (and myself)!”

Pride is the deep enemy within ourselves against union with God. “He resists the proud”- and how often I have felt this resistance. Poverty, then, is essentially a thing in the soul- and it cannot be an end in itself, or it simply becomes another petty idol, a place of pride, worse than that of the rich because it is under the veneer of spiritual advancement. Poverty is about detachment, of treating nothing as if I own it- because if I own it, I begin to love it; it is a physical extension of myself (Divine Intimacy). I must be detached from things, and this journey along the dirt road of poverty must be essentially a journey where one puts more and more down along the side and continues with less and less (but with more and more room for Christ).

Detachment itself cannot be the end, because then we would be Buddists only, and God wishes more than nothing-ness for us, He wishes to give us Himself. Detachment is the condition under which God can come to us, when we are becoming places where the proportion of our self to His Self matches reality, matches heaven. When we are full of Him, we are most ourselves because we give glory to Him who needs none, but is Glory Itself: and thus, as St. Paul says, “We go from glory to glory.” Giving glory to God who needs none from us is really about changing ourselves into someone more like Him, who is Perfection.

The crosses of life, whether they are Combermere Crosses, Santa Cruz Crosses, New York Crosses, or African Crosses, are gateways. They are chances by which we may begin to detach from the beauties and comforts of this life, in order to see God and thus to bring real beauty into the world, a beauty which glories in God and shows others His love: from simple flower gardens to solid family life, to a love of philosophy and literature; like the songs of St. Francis or a beautiful painting done by a happy child, or the halo of light that the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge saw when he visited Mother Teresa’s House of the Dying (Something Beautiful for God).

Barry's Bay Chronicle- One

2007-10-03T17:19:00.000-07:00

Image from the Madonna House website

I have been here in Ontario two months, arriving timidly in the humid and stark days of August and now facing the sultry and mecurial weather of October. I am waiting for the cold, like a soldier in the trench looking for the first sign of movement out across no-man’s land.

Life goes slow here, with small “Combermere Crosses” laid on from time to time (Combermere is an adjoining town wherein lies the Madonna House). It is a place I want to run from one day and to embrace the next: just like the Cross. The town of Barry’s Bay is roughly in the shape of a cross: St. Hedwig’s at the top, near the lake; our neighborhood one arm, the lake area houses another arm, and the business district the bottom. All of this placement seems appropriate, too.

This area, about twenty or so miles square, seems like a spiritual powerhouse: it would look like New York City if the spiritual elements of life were truly visible. Sixty or more years ago, Catherine Doherty came here to start Madonna House, and her vision of people from all walks, including artists and scholars coming to this area is fulfilled. Families and single people are drawn here, some rather mysteriously, from everywhere to pursue a life of simplicity and spiritual poverty.

Catherine Doherty came here because it was most like her native Russia; but it is a strange little place with its own history of great beauty and great hardship. This was the area of Ontario least wanted by the first settlers- so the poor Polish were given it: the only place in the world where the bedrock is so close to the surface that it is visible almost everywhere. Good for enthusiastic geologists, bad for farmers. Some or other ministry of the Canadian government considers this place uninhabitable, even to this day. So the Poles built their lives one heartbreak at a time, and built out of that suffering very beautiful and majestic houses of God. Their lives were simple, and poor, and religious. Families were strong, and are strong. Perhaps their poverty of spirit drew the notice of Our Lord and He built the present apostolates upon it. Here it is as if the world is Catholic and the secular culture is trying to sneak in: exactly opposite of everywhere else I’ve been.

For me, I feel like a soft-bellied rookie here- these people are tough. They roll their eyes at me when I tell them where I am from(where am I from?). The Catholic immigrants, of the last sixty years, drawn like bees to the Madonna House spirit, are not tough Poles for the most part. But they are serious counter-culture and fighters- from a young mother in her bohemian-blue, solid cabin-farmhouse to a man-pillar in his ever-present joy. For me, this place with its wind-blown, misted lakes and deep forests is a visible reminder of the spiritual life on this earth, this place of exile- it is as if the spiritual realities of beauty and simplicity, suffering and exile are here more visible than anywhere else I have ever been.

I came here afraid of the winter, and the Lord is making me face a deeper fear: that of being a saint. Part of me does not want to get tougher on myself; yet I sense the real and lasting joys, also visible to me in the chance to teach and help something worthy grow- namely, the Academy. I am like a flimsy and flapping tent in the wind, comparing myself to the large, bulky stone houses that stare back at the lake and the wind and defy it in the Lord’s strength. When I begin to see the reality of the saints, their inner strength and deep love of God, mirrored in the landscape and the lives of simpler people here, I realize what a city ninny I really am, what a spiritual weakling, what a fearful soul.

Perhaps if I make it through the winter, the spiritual one, I will be a saint. One can always hope, but not in my strength- I’ve California blood for a Canadian winter, and a sinner’s heart for reaching heaven. It will have to be God. I always knew this, but it seems very real to me now: my anti-strength for the journey. There is so much to be purified in His fire.

I remember about ten years ago, when I lived in Virginia, I read about the Madonna House and a description of Catherine Doherty. It may have been described in the article, I am not sure, but a real inner picture of a large and large-hearted woman, a huge mother-figure, stayed with me, and I imagined myself walking up through some tall and dark pine trees, up a path, to a small cabin wherein I would meet her; and something about my death and my desire towards sanctity crept in at the corners; and sometimes it seemed I was her. It was like a dream one has over and over, except in my imagination during waking moments. A few days ago I walked into that picture, but in reality- I walked on a path through tall and dark trees to a small cabin where she had lived for many years. I felt at home there, as if I’d really seen it before. So I hope she can, with her large and strong soul, pray for me, with my small and weak soul. It is essentially a choice to let go and let God, as they say; because I’ll end up in a hell of my own making if I try to do it myself (which I have been).

D-Ascent

2007-08-07T10:50:00.000-07:00

Descent, Ascent: D-Ascent, or the Ascent.

Ok. This is more like a moving, upheaval, life-change journal, I guess, which I think of in terms of going up a mountain: or going down into a deep, dark valley ( like the Valley of the Shadow of Death) and wondering where God is- and are we going in the right direction? And will the cat make the trip? And will the children be forever warped by the whole experience? I am now imagining a teenager yelling at me, blaming me for her bad attitude because I moved her around- oh, that was me when I was a teenager.

Ok. Gone off the beaten track, there. It can't be a beaten track, though, because if it was, I'd feel much more secure and cocky about the whole thing. Our lives are a foray into a wilderness, a track we must make ourselves. Sounds grand until you realize that you are on it, because then you realize just how small you are.

Let me backtrack and explain. We're on our way to Canada- to a little town west of Ottawa, where we are going to teach at a small Catholic college. We were in Santa Cruz, California. Now that right there should create a mental pause. "Wow, that's a change". I know you thought that because I've heard it more than I've heard "Hi" in the last few months. The other thing I've heard more than the 'Wow' comment is, "Oh the winter", or "Oh the bugs".

To be balanced ( which I am not right now), I have also heard, " Oh it is a beautiful place- it just grows on you". I can't really comment on this, because I haven't been there. I am also trying not to imagine it too much, because I want it just to be itself.

Right now, we're sort of stopped halfway between California and Canada, physically and culturally speaking. We're in Washington, on one of the San Juan Islands. Physically, it is much more wooded and it is more stark-looking than California (I am not allowing myself to think of the pinks, yellows, reds, purples and oranges). Washington has a more blue-grey-white-green-brown beauty to it. California is a flamenco dancer and Washington is a cowboy just off the fields. Culturally, the same metaphor applies. Thus, I've been weaned slowly off the exotic and getting ready for something more subtle- and tougher, I imagine.

Who are Canadians, though? What are they really like? I've been trying to get snatches from the CBC and conversations with the natives. It seems that they are much more reserved, I think; not like the candy-coated chatter of a Californian, or the in-your-face of the New Yorker. Perhaps they are more like the Washingtonians, but with a little European flair (a little less of the covered wagon simplicity, more subtlety). You can see here that I am shooting in the dark. I enjoy this immensely, partly because of my moves from culture to culture throughout my life, and partly because these thoughts distract me from the normal nervousness inherent in times of transit.

I should, though, push these thoughts aside and rather try to get through the travel days ahead in some semblance of sanity. One of my favorite places to be in is on the tarmac of life, the airports and new places- handing over your passport for inspection just makes me feel right at home. But not with three little children and a cat. A friend said innocently, "Is that the cat you had to chase down Soquel Ave on your way out of Santa Cruz?"

Poor children, though, I have to say. Well, I don't know who will be the poorer at the end of this coming flight. Perhaps I will be the poorer in the sanity department; perhaps they will be richer for the suffering I am imposing on them. Or, just maybe, maybe, it will be an adventure in the true sense of the word: an experience that draws the best and worst parts out of us all and makes us choose which part we'll be. It is, after all quite commonplace to see a woman with a large red bag, computer bag and a cat in a bag, towing three children with their own cute little Spiderman or princess bags.

I'll be back.

Moses/ Transfiguration

2007-07-13T14:02:00.000-07:00

I was that prophet-mute; that prince stripped of power and honor

Who first beheld You in that wilderness of my shame:

Being hid within flame

Like all who suddenly behold God, I fell in fear, I decried

My own sins and was given a way to approach: in the softness, the vulnerability

Of my shepherd’s feet.

You asked me to speak for enslaved Israel; humbled desert-man

Like a feral, wounded animal hobbled by healing bands

Approached by the Healer

You caressed me with reproach, stroking my fear down

To a steadied flatness and with a promise: new understanding

Of Your Person.

I was that sunburnt piece of humanity on the side of the Mountain

Who climbed beyond knowledge as You led me:

Inward and outward ascent

An ember twirling in fire-wind, begging to see Your face, to know

you as a man knows his friend and silence fell: softness of thought:

“You will die-”

I was in the cleft; I was the Eagle’s chick with Your wing over me

Nearly burnt to death in the wake of your back

Shekinah gave way to form

In my heart, the longing to see Your Face remained, to be

drawn in to unity and made a new being: I to Thou

Ever afterwards.

I was left, to become part of the mountain, a being of longing

You gave me that office, to speak to Israel ever:

Longing for You.

Becoming rock at the top, remaining to wait upon the Savior

and in that thought, to remain in my solitude a sign upon the wilderness

The Law of Hope.

My mountain-head awoke in a bright,clear day in the Fall

I to greet He who comes up the smooth slopes, blessing the air

By His passage.

He called me, as a man to his friend, to converse:

As an I to a Thou, I was drawn like a babe: a new being

Ever afterwards.

I was the giver of the Law, the longing that You fulfilled

You gave me that office, pleading with Israel ever:

God-made-man!

That new Rock, Peter, falling at the top, wishing to remain in Tabernacles

In the knowledge of Your glory; I had seen it once in my longing

And nearly died.

I was the Law fulfilled, brought to incomprehensible fullness

By a Person; You were Whom I’d loved, longed for, and with my brother Elijah

Wept with joy-

And looked with some pity on the apostles, men nearly dying

And filled with longing as I was still, sweet longing

Of God’s joy.

I was then, with Elijah, Your I to Thou, I was a Face Fulfilled

By the Suffering God, I’d never have guessed Your design, especially

After Egypt

As I took my eternal fill of Your human Countenance and of God’s light unabashed

Made bold with love and immanent freedom, I spoke as a man to his friend,

Of the glorious Cross.

Waking the Past

2007-06-21T13:27:00.000-07:00

There is a deep understanding of life and the human psyche in the practice of a wake, assisting the soul on its way beyond natural life; the practice of which, I imagine goes back into the shadows of human communal memory. The Irish Catholic practice of waking the dead retains something of this pagan custom: but true to the Church, there is taken from the practice the slivers of truth and it is baptized into the life of the body of Christ.

I guess I’m not talking about getting drunk and making wobbly speeches on chairs: or am I? I am trying to get at the spirit of waking underneath there. Perhaps a muse will help…

A few days ago I sat on a log bench in the park near the lake, feeling the rough skin of the old pine tree seat as it echoed its younger brothers still standing tall- elegant, sweet-smelling skyscrapers of the green. I was having a nice respite beside the play structure at the edge of Cascade Lake, a few minutes wherein the kids are occupied with spinning, the gyrations somehow drawing them into a different plane of being.

The line of the trees drew me upwards, and the wind off the lake supported this movement; as I was drawn away from the present, into contemplation of the quiet tree-speech: slow-motion syllables of old-timers, living things who had, perhaps, been there when my ancestors came to this state: I saw my great-great-great grandfather planting flowers in La Conner, dreaming of his own store in the new country; and my grandfather swimming in a lake like this, a water-spraying lithe figure, before life and illness bowed his body into the underground.

As I looked to the top of one old tree long since hit by lightning or fire, it’s point now shaved to a venerable but disfigured flat-top, a terrible feeling of heartbreak and sadness took hold of me, like the slow chill one feels after being out in the rain too long. It was an old feeling, one of mine; but it seemed to emanate from that old tree, as if it had held this sadness for me all these years. Was it the tree holding it, or was the sight of it waking something from the past?

I thought back on all the summers I’d been here to this park, like snapshots of myself within the flow of time. I found one, an old one from ten or fifteen years ago, when I was a young woman; a girl, really, in a woman’s body. I was an awkward thing, arms crossed over my heart too often, from more than any chill or wind in the natural world. There was no peace in my brown eyes, just a look of someone who is ruminating on something, or someone who is out-of-reach. I must have spent my time there, so many years ago, looking at this tree.

And so I looked at it now, through two pairs of eyes, a double soul. I saw more clearly who the child of me was at that time, a brown girl drawn a bit out of a self-absorption towards this old tree. The tree seemed then, as now, to speak slowly of a longer view, a view of living simply in expectation of rain and sun, of not minding so much the price of life; the price being for it the cuts of fire and the indignity done to its grandeur by children skipping on its roots.

It seemed to have, indeed, pulled some of the pain from that young woman who I was and held it in expectation that I would see it again: or perhaps, this is how our human psyche works. Maybe we are, in conjunction with places made immanent and precious to us by either great pain or joy, meant to wake the past. But why? The clues must hide in that other soul, that younger tree and younger person that I was so many summers past.

It was a summer when I was about twenty-four. I had come to visit my parents, who were planning to build a home here. I was breaking out temporarily of a life I had made for myself outside of grace; a place wherein I could not relate to my family, or real friends, because of something within myself which was disordered. I was trying to love, I wanted to, but something in me could not do it right. I was riddled with confusion and guilt, and this shadowed, heated place is where I truly lived, where the outside world of well-meaning people could not penetrate. I had many strange and tortured ideas about how I was supposed to find solace in this place of fire; and I thought that the right person could rescue me- but in my disordered state, I did not know how to see right from wrong and so I placed on certain people in my life no meaning at all, and on others all meaning. God was not an option because He seemed to ask total trust, and I was too afraid of trusting.

My world was tilted, and I was constantly trying to grip hold of something I could control in order to stop the feeling of sliding into darkness. I remember now, that the tree I looked at so long that summer somehow seemed to have the right answers, because it was so straight and tall, so rooted, so patient, so trusting in some providence; it kept on growing its green leaves amidst the scars of fire. The tree remained in my memory as a symbol of grace, but lodged there initially as only an image, a small root amidst my soul’s blackened and rotting ground.

Now sitting in the same place, a woman of thirty-eight, I was waking the past with the tree of now and the tree of my memory; the sameness of that evergreen providing a bridge to a more immediate experience of who I was fourteen years ago. I faced myself and all the years between. Although my hips now hurt from childbearing and my eyelids are more wrinkled; although my hair has some grey in it and my face does not have that smooth and chiseled look it did then, this matters nothing next to the other change.

The person I met again through the tree was someone who wanted to love; but without grace, love cannot grow or bear fruit. I saw now who I was loving, and felt sorrow in the understanding now that without God, what tries to live as love becomes a destructive force. I saw clearly that the creation does indeed groan, for with the introduction of sin and disorder (sin is disorder) our relationships to each other and to the outside world become places of burning and rotting.

I mourn the loss of friends and loved ones to these disorders, and wonder now as still a young soul in an older, ever older body if these loves (albeit disordered still bearing some semblance to real love) are ever redeemed from the twisted junkyard in which they now reside. I am waking the past, perilously close to becoming again absorbed in the vale of ghosts.

No. For now, I am depending, like the tree, on providence and grace; I am growing in the soil which God has planted me, and although scarred and a little deformed, the leaves are yet growing and the world within me is straight. So I face the past, I wake it: and I rejoice in that God let me, at twenty-four, see myself as He would allow me to look at thirty-eight: a evergreen standing straight and tall, not minding the indignity of children tripping over my roots, with a certain lived-in look, interesting knarled bark, and a peace which only comes from Him.

I remember now the love He snuck in from around me through those of His flock; the love which granted me, finally, the grace to let go of my own conception of the good and to be open to His. I remember the long road back to theology and sanity; and the evergreen hope in heaven, that all good things will be bought back from the darkness and the past.

So I wake the past, and rejoice in its going to God, that it and I were always kept in His sight; I rejoice and freely sorrow for the loss of loved ones, in the hope that in heaven, they will be made as they should have ever been- relationships of eternal joy and vessels of glory to God: but most of all, I wake the past and rejoice that God rescued me from myself.

My Beloved Winks

2007-06-10T16:55:00.000-07:00

One sort of slams into island life.

At least, it feels that way: perhaps it is the other way round, that island life sort of slams into one; not maliciously, of course, but rather in the way it would be if you started running down the beach, into the surf and suddenly the water drags on your limbs with its thousand and one fingers.

We left Santa Cruz two weeks ago, in a frenzy of wrapping up things and placing that sear on changing relationships so carefully opened; that sauter of a goodbye which can totally scar over the love, or simply change it’s bleeding to a much slower version: for love of friends are like wounds we open to share ourselves.

The trip away was so frantic that I didn’t even look back to the familiar sea-lines and silhouettes of tree and cliff which I came to love: perhaps it was easier that way. We left in shock (at our lack of organization and my irrational fears of the car wheels blowing up as a result of the weight) and we reached the San Juan ferry in shock (at four days in the car with three kids and a cat and each other).

Then island life hit.

The house we are living in right now is a home, in a real sense, in that it was built in the sweat of fathers and uncles, a loving expression of extended family and a dream of my Dad’s. A work of art in rustic cabin style, with large picture windows looking out across Puget Sound to Sucia Island downstage and Vancouver, BC lights peeking out from upstage. The lighting is run by a master, every sunset and sunrise different, and with all the moodiness of the ocean. How I love the ocean, since I was little- perhaps it is that it matches my mercurial creative nature. I am sure I could be called treacherous too, sometimes, in my moods. But no one paints my moods. The ocean’s are much more interesting and informed by the light of the sun. I suppose that is what I hope will happen more and more with mine; that they become informed by the true light.

We’ve been trying to get our family home back from some squatter spiders, bees and birds. Paco the cat is helping with the birds and I am not sure who will help us with the other, more devious things. It is fun to watch the birds dive-bombing Paco as his little black head peeks out of the beach grass. They just don’t know what they are dealing with: this isn’t some bumbly sea otter, but a sleek, black hitcat.

One daughter is grieving the loss of the social life she loves so much, the other (like me) is just absorbing the new atmosphere in her own mysterious ways, and our son is peeking in the garage at Grandpa’s ‘driving boat’ and making bows and arrows out of driftwood (he might kill someone…).

People maddeningly drive the exact speed limits, limits unheard of like 15 and 20- and 40 on the only thing that resembles a highway. We’re dependent on the ferry system to get off and on the island; over to Friday Harbor for Mass and the cheaper groceries; or Shaw to the monastery; or to the Mainland to get Thaddeus off to his various real-time conferences and other things. And dealing with these green and white monster-boats is where the Strange Island Day for Rookies grabbed us while saying it its crusty voice, “ Haha! You’re on an island now, me hearties!”

We left Orcas in a hurry (40), and drove onto the inter-island ferry, the Kakima or Tacoma or something like that; and we made our languid way threading through the islands, leaving us time to look at each other, the water, other passengers, or just read (Thaddeus, who never leaves home without a good supply of books). Then, a little scuffle and then back in the car, and OUT! Wow. Excitement. A new island! A bigger town! We went grocery shopping in a big way (cheaper), hoping the cold day would keep the food ‘til we got home to Orcas.

Friday Harbor still has the saltly feel of an old, Western sea town, with the richly decorated buildings sticking out of the street like old teeth, and the saloon on the corner; although nowadays, besides the one tattooed guy, the patronage is mostly anorak-coated, biking short spindly Northwest types. We got ourselves to Mass in the little 1894 St. Francis Church, where we heard a homily from a Maryknoll missionary on ‘being sent’ and educated by his stories of poverty and hospitality in the Philippines. One story stuck out, about a dining room table doubling as a bed for him to sleep on, complete with the hosts still sitting around the table as he slept.

We left thinking about poverty and being sent by Christ, as we made our way down to the ferry for the ride back to Orcas Island and home. That is where the day got weird. The ferry-man, looking a bit like Charon, told us that there was no other ferry, except for the 8 in the morning.

Silence. Then test-awareness happens. God threw a curve-ball, using our stupidity as an arm. We drove back into town, found the cheapest place, which, ironically, was the “Orcas Inn”, it’s motto: “Spend a night, not a fortune.”. I have never seen a smaller room in my life. I had been worried about all the food we’d bought going bad, so was wondering if these closet-rooms would have a fridge at all, or one big enough for our stuff. Lo, there was a whole row of new little fridges in the dim hallway, fridges which the kind lady in the office said we could use- “all six of ‘em, if ya need it”. I could almost hear the silent, deep laughter from Above. We had passed the test thus far, keeping alive humor and forgiveness for the person who’d assumed there’d be a ferry back on a Saturday night (non-island thinking cropping up).

We then got everyone back in the car to go out, avoiding the one queen bed in the closet as long as possible. We wandered to Paradise Bowl, but had no socks with us. The thought of fungus and the doubtful looks of the small, red-haired island man behind the counter nixed that idea. Leaving with crying kids, we went back down to the harbor. There, like a stupid giant thumbing his nose at us, was a ferry. We looked at each other and then Thaddeus sprinted down to say, “Um?” He came back as fast and said, “ Charon said he’s so glad we came back, he made a mistake. We’ve ten minutes.”

Back to Orcas Inn. Fridges back were they were. Food out of fridges. Crying children in car, who WANTED to stay in a closet. Money back from kind Orcas Inn lady. Back down to ferry, lane 11 for Orcas. On ferry. “We’ll try to get you to Lopez for the 9.10 Orcas ferry.” While waiting for ferry to get to Lopez, eating chips, cheese, grapes and juice for dinner. Laughing together.

Suddenly everything slowed down with a child’s comment, “ God wanted to teach us trust today”. Thinking about this as the sun turns back for one glorious look, peeking through a hole in the thick cloud cover, turning the grey masses of water and sky to sparkling orange and red. It seemed to me, that the eye of my Beloved winked at me.

The Right Wood for Building Faith

2007-05-31T12:14:00.000-07:00

There is an amazing staircase in Arizona. It is called "St. Joseph's Staircase". It is the result of a desperate nun's prayer and a mysterious wanderer who built it. It serves a rather mundane purpose, the staircase up to the choirloft in a small chapel built in the late 1800's, but to the nuns who built the chapel, it came to mean everything: but mostly, in the end, as a metaphor for faith and how God works with each of us.

In the movie about the staircase, the story goes that the mysterious carpenter, "Joad", knows that the available wood in the area will not be flexible enough for the curvature required, but that he needs a special wood which is deemed to hard to get hold of. He then tells the Mother Superior, who is very emotionally involved in the completion of the chapel, that he will try to build it with the oak wood that is available.

He works for weeks and weeks, soaking, shaping, bending and dowling the wood (no nails are used in the staircase). As the staircase goes up slowly, Joad realizes that the wood is not flexible enough and is pulling apart the form of the staircase. He speaks to the Mother Superior, and she falls apart in frustration. She wants to build this chapel for God, and "what use is a chapel without music"?

Quietly, Joad says in reply: "No. The wood is not right for building this staircase. But it is right for building faith."

Once the Mother Superior is forced to simply let her work go, Joad is able to go and get the long-leaf pine he needs, and as the Mother is dying, he completes the staircase: and it is truly a work of art, mirroring most the interior structure of a conical shell.

I have long loved that line: "not perfect for building staircases, but perfect for building faith".

How often in the last months have I grown more and more aware that the wood with which I am made, the materials native to me with which I am trying to build sanctity is not right in the sense in which I expect. How often have I come to a pass in which I cry, "I am not able to handle this". I feel myself pulling apart, wretched knotty and stiff oakwood, knarled and stubborn in my desires and habits.

I have begun to ask the Lord to remake me in long-leaf pine, which one can only get by traveling up to the mountains, His mountains. I can't get the wood myself, and I can't be shaped into a woman of real faith until I am made of something other than what is in me now.

I do think I understand, though, that the experience of being oak and trying to build and finally pulling apart at the seams is within His plan; in that He can only change our structure and substance with the aquiescence of our will; and that only truly comes when we have humililty. Humility, in turn, comes when we can see ourselves for the oak we truly are without Him.

Magnificat

2007-05-13T21:14:00.000-07:00

Icon: Mary of the Magnificat, Mother of the Poor by Fr. W. McNichols

Today is May 13, Mother's Day; and also the 90th anniversary of the first appearance of Our Lady of Fatima in 1917. I was thinking today that I am so glad to be able to put that Mother's Day emotion somewhere beyond me.

Mother's Day still reminds me of my grandma's rose water perfume: I suddenly feel like a child again, find myself thinking about my mother. It is still slightly surreal to be the Mom. I loved the little cards, especially my older daughter's which read: "Dear Momy, do'nt be depressed.". It is telling that she knew how to spell 'depressed'. I realized then the mixture of love and pain I was for her and I felt ashamed, I have to admit.

I was glad to get to Mass where the focus was not just on us rabidly imperfect moms, but was also on a Mother who was given the grace to be what we all imagine a mother to be: a soul who magnified the Lord. I think of her, a mother so young, who with the ardor and freshness of that youth-and also a soul full of grace- laid down her soul and her life before God as she said her "Fiat". I think of her sitting outside Bethlehem under a tree waiting for Joseph to return with news, any news, of a place to stay, her anxiety quelled by the closeness of God inside her. I think of her standing at the entrance to the temple, listening to Simon and imagining swords piercing her heart, knowing the untameable nature of Him who chose her. And I cannot imagine her at the cross, I cannot fathom what she would have looked like at that moment; perhaps Michelangelo's Pieta comes closest, with the carved face exuding a mysterious mixture of love and regal suffering, empty of revenge or anger.

In all of these vignettes, she remains for me a soul who magnifies the Lord. We are defined by what we chose to magnify, or to give praise. If it is ourselves, we are selfish, thin tornados darkening the skyline in our search for the gratification of the self. If we praise and give glory to Mother Nature above all else, we become mere cogs in a system and devalue the soul of ourselves and others. If we praise a nice house and a comfortable life, we become either eaten slowly by fruitless envy or the powerful silver-sleek lord of the freeway and byway. Whoopie- that's a low bar to shoot for in the real scheme of things (but it is sure tempting).

Whether or not we praise or give glory to something or someone does not change the real value of that thing or person. A classic car remains that whether or not we praise it. It might sell for more, but the metal and wheels are the same (whalah- the secret of the advertising industry revealed for the banal thing it is). The praise and glory we give changes us, not the object or the person. The higher or more noble the value of what or who we praise, the more noble we are. Therefore, those who praise material wealth are, in a sense, making themselves less noble than the person who praises world peace or charity work.

However, only One is really worth our praise, our highest praise: only One takes our praise of Him and makes us a child of the Divine. All else, even the work for the poor done without His glory in mind, falls far short of Him. God does not need our praise to be glorious. He is, and was, and ever shall be, perfect and full of every good thing. He is Love, He is Glory. He does not need us. But love, by nature, is creative and empties itself out for the good of the lesser. He is due our praise because of His very Being and because all things were and are made because of Him: and we can only be truly human and truly ourselves when we praise Him and give Him glory. When our souls do nothing less than magnify the Lord, we are full of His grace.

This, in every aspect of her life, was Mary's privilege- not because of her own intrinsic worth, but because of the role God called her to and His love for her. She was the new Ark of the Covenant, carrying God within her; and just as the Ark of the Israelites was carefully constructed by God's instructions, just as it was to be kept sacred, so was Mary. In that fullness of grace, her soul magnified God- like the light in a room increases as it is reflected, so did the light of God in the world increase by Mary's choices and by the beauty of a human soul as it was meant to be.

So on Mother's Day, I was glad to look away from my own imperfections as a mother and a person, and see once again what I am trying to become. It gives me hope that a simple girl from the backwater of Judea was given the grace to magnify God, becoming by this a glorious soul in the garden of God. I know that God loves us and being Love, wishes us all to become Magnifiers of His Glory. Our Lord Himself deigns to be placed upon our altars to mingle as a lover does, with our very physical and spiritual nature. He desires nothing more that our greatest good, which is contained in this simple phrase: "My soul magnifies the Lord".

Our destiny is certainly lofty, and I almost feel that perhaps a tiny corner of my heart is beginning to reflect although I am slowed in my ardor and hope by the amount of grime I still see He must scrub off the rest. I think of all the spiritual Brillo pads coming and cringe. But it is that tiny corner that responds in hope and love as we sing the Ave Maria around the garden outside the Shrine of St. Joseph on a sunny May day.

Not Livin'By Default Two

2007-04-27T17:52:00.000-07:00

So, we were on hippies gone south, and the poster phrase, "Live by Choice, Not by Default".

I think in order to understand 'choice' in the phrase, we have to understand 'default'. Viewed from the secular self-actualization, these are the two exclusive options: it is either default into a Stepford Wife (and at Curves, they mean a fat one, at that), or (wind blowing hair fan starts along with Braveheart theme music) start making choices about your life, determine where you are headed.

In the Ellulian society (cities escaping from God), default is allowing yourself to become what your environment, your place of origin and your genetics determine. It is the easy route, the way of the cow crossing. It is acting like a cow because that is what you know. It is holding onto certain values because they are simply what you know. It is getting married because your parents did, or not going to college because no one in your family has ever gone. It is the unthinking man, Marx's common man on religious opium. Default is, to the City of Man in our day, hell. It is the worst thing you can do in the eyes of the cultural elite.

The other secular option: Choice. Instead of a cow, you can be a god. You can take each day and choose to be in it, you can send out positive energy to those around you and change the world, one ripple at a time! You can begin to be the self that you are truly inside- or better yet, since the days of EST seminars and encounter groups when people found out that they couldn't get to anything but an empty hole after stripping everything away- you can create the self you would like to be (and by the way, there's lots of great products like hair colors and psychoanalysts out there which can help you do it). You can follow the ones who are self-creative, like the woman named after the Mother of God who seems exactly the opposite of her name saint. Or you can go along with "The Secret" and THINK about what you want in order to get anything (on the downside, anything bad that happens to you is totally your own stupidity and result of negative thinking: and what kind of negative thinking does that engender towards Christ's crucifixion? I can hear it now: "Oh, of course Jesus was a great teacher, he just needed to work on His positive thinking skills"). If you wind it out far enough, it gets scary.

Enough. We know we aren't gods. A bunch of us with divinity with no redemption would make up exactly the image that Lewis paints of Hell in The Great Divorce: a bunch of selfish, oppressive ninnies building more and more palatial homes but farther and farther away from each other. That is what is the end of this "Live by Choice" mentality: if you are making up your own existence, then in effect you are alone, because all real relationships come from God.

Then let's turn from this cacophony of choice-making and towards the Catholic thing: the real thing.

We are endowed with free will, and this is never taken from us. We have a will to choose: find God or to lose Him forever. That is the choice upon which all other choices rest, the foundational choice. However, after Adam and Eve fell, we did inherit a terrible default: original sin. Our bent will is skewed towards the self, towards the three-fold sin of the Man of Lust: lust of the eyes, of the flesh, and the pride of life. The real default of a bent will is exactly what the secular culture defines as "Choice": choose what to wear, let that be self-expression; choose how to live out your sexual nature; to be self-actualized and a positive part of the culture, choose your lifestyle.

In the true sense, choice is freedom: but it is the choice to find God at all costs which gives us true freedom, for He knows how we are made to live as only the Creator can know. It is beyond us, as the EST people found out. We have to make that choice, but because of the default of a bent nature, we need help to continue to choose God and freedom. That is the very purpose of right religion, of orthodoxy and orthopraxy: to assist us to make the choice for freedom, to become truly ourselves by paradoxically losing ourselves in God.

The ten commandments, the inspired writings of the New Testament, the saints, the doctrines and traditions of the Church: all these are assists in each person's choosing God every day. This kind of life is the true wind-blowin' hair fan Braveheart hippie life: it is what the hippies were almost on to in their hippie way at the very beginning and then lost. This kind of life takes the William Wallaces and the St. Joan of Arcs. It is the only choice worth dying for. The default is unthinkable, as Hell is unthinkable.

The poster should read : "Live by God, Not by Sin". Then it would truly express the nobility it aspires to, even in the fat-farm outlet.

Not Livin'By Default

2007-04-17T17:25:00.000-07:00

There's a poster that says, " Live by Choice, Not by Default". That is the kind of poster that should be charged with Spiritual Assault. Maybe it will be on Judgement Day. I can't wait to see the exquisitely shorn, bottom-wisp coiffed woman named Jewel Iksen-Radcliffe standing on the dock that Day, answering for those words (and then I'll be right after her for judging her- but wait a minute, she doesn't exist. ha.)

Now, let's dissect that phrase. "Live by Choice" first: what does that mean? Is this a subtle sexually liberated, pro-abortion phrase? For as we all know, a woman just can't be free unless she has the right to kill someone. Wait. Oh, yeah, the truth is exactly the opposite. A woman can't be free unless she has the right or the ability do do what is right; that certainly doesn't include killing someone. So perhaps that isn't what they mean. I suppose we'll have to look at the context then, in which we find the words. I have to admit, I suppose, that I was in an outlet akin to a fat farm. It is called "Curves" (Why don't they call it "Sleek" or something like that? I thought I was trying to get rid of those five or six extra curves). Well, anyway, I was at "Curves", finishing my workout, and there was the poster. So the context is that we are all, most of us, out of control, eg. Food Chooses Us. So, we're all a bunch of poor oppressed women, oppressed mainly by the weight: literally oppressed to the point of not being able to breathe well when sitting in the car sucking that sixth soda.

Maybe, just maybe, there is a good intention there in that phrase: Take Control, Baby. Choose your food to the proper end. Well, they should have said that. "Live by Choosing Your Food to Live". No, that doesn't work well. This phrase on the poster seems to suffer from the same problem that many advertisements do: they make a universal, philisophical statement about something that doesn't warrant it: "Have It Your Way" or "Do What Tastes Right" or something like that. It is depressing, really: when noble values are used to sell burgers, it somehow demeans the noble value. Not in its objective value, doing what is right will still be noble, but it will lose its attraction and nobility in a subjective sense, to the teeming masses, of which I am one.

So, "Live by Choice", if it is about dieting, seems to devalue the grand romance of free will. But perhaps the statement in it's entirety, IS at a higher level than fat farm or burgers- which may make it all the more subtle and possibly dangerous.

The statement, "Live by Choice and Not by Default" reminds me of a return to the sixties slogans, but for the common man, not the blowin' in the wind' hippie. It carries the same value that the hippie ended up with. It is truly a statement about self-actualization, of stripping all the values put into one by the traditions and culture, the media and the consumer-driven interests, and THINKING about what you want.

Sounds good.

Not.

The hippies in the sixties had, I think, a brief golden moment where they were on to something, but then it went south. Way south. To hell. In the golden moment of partial clarity, they were realizing that their values were being driven, in the larger culture, by the interests of big business and advertisers, and those in power who wished to control them by arousing and satiating their desires for goods and self-images. They started fighting back, eschewing materialism and wishing to build a 'love-culture'. If they had turned to Love Incarnate, ah, there would have been a golden moment shining out for generations- the Kingdom of God ever-nearer.

Instead, they went the direction of self-actualization, of stripping the self of all indoctrinated values, good or bad, to a point where there was nothing left. And then, instead of recognizing the hole in us where God belongs, the Source of all real value and identity, they started creating themselves. They began to Live by Choice and Not by Default. This was, though, a Satanic chimera: individualism, self-image, self-esteem: the true and freeing realities are ever out of their grasp. They succeeded in making dolls of themselves, ever more able to be manipulated by the culture at large and big business.

Part Two will, well, finish it.

The Eros of God

2007-03-18T20:07:00.000-07:00

Simone Martini
"Annunciation", 1333, panel, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

The Annunciation, one of the most profound feasts in the liturgical year is almost upon us. . In many paintings of the Annunciation, there is a certain posture which seems to be repeated ove and over. It is that of the angel on one knee, holding out a lily to a retiring maiden- Our Blessed Mother. What I think of as the real meaning of this posture was hidden to me, I believe, because there was a part of my spiritual life which was not yet developed or awakened.

It was when I read the Holy Father's meditation on the Love(s) of God for Lent when this part of me was tapped upon the shoulder and began to look sleepily around. Let me go back a bit to explain:

For many years, before my conversion, I knew I did not understand love. It seemed so vague, and varied- what was the difference between the love my mother had for me and that other love she had for my father? How should I love my friends? Was I supposed to? Was that betraying my family in some way? It wasn't that I shut myself away because I didn't know the word storge but rather a feeling of bumbling around in a pitch-black, glass store.

When I converted to the Faith, something in my intellect began working properly: that is the only way I can describe the reality that I was a different mind, a different heart and soul. I was Home and the moral universe began to fit into a pattern I could understand. In study, I began to understand that "LOVE" - our big and clumsy English word - is a much more varied, and fruitful reality; and in beginning the philosophy of love I was becoming more who God wants me to be.

I understood now the difference between philia and storge, and began to grasp that agape, the selfless love, as Christ grows it in us, is the transfer love. It is like the beam in Star Trek which penetrates the person and lifts them and all the rest of the loves into the supernatural sphere. But I did not understand the relationship of eros- the passionate, the lover's love- to the other loves, especially agape. In fact, I simply did not understand eros, but I thought I did (ignorance being made nearly invincible by dependence on one's own understanding).

...until I read the Holy Father's Lenten reflection and Theology of the Body at the same time, a providential juncture of study. The piece I needed for my understanding of eros on the natural sphere, as God intended it, was the movement from original solitude (in which Adam understands himself as essentially different from all other creatures) to the gift of self to the other, "the flesh of my flesh". The body is the sacramental sign of this reality, this pure and unadulterated passion for a joining with the beloved.

From this, I began to wonder about the eros of God: how can He make that same movement, or have that need for His creatures, when He is not in solitude nor does He need us? Yet if God is love, then He must encompass all the loves. I thought for awhile that agape superseds all the others, and these are absorbed into it on the supernatural level. But I was making the Buddhist mistake- that whole "we're absorbed into the tapestry of the universe" nonsense. No. God does not destroy what is good-somehow we are meant to be absorbed, in Divine Union, yet in this becoming more ourselves. And so the same with the different kinds of love, and eros specifically. As the Holy Father elucidated for me, the eros of God is seen quite clearly in His death for us on the cross. And it is indeed a sacramental sign in the body. No detail of true eros left unanswered: an act of selfless love and passionate love at the same time. Not out of need, but eros out of agape.

So it is that God wishes, like a lover, to unite with His creatures in intimacy. It is a profound and absolutely astounding thought! And so, the paintings of the Annunciation are profound in their portrayal of the love of God, the eros of God, personified in His angel, wooing The Blessed Mother. I wonder: does she provide us with an archetype of how God wishes to incarnate Himself in each of us? Not as another savior in the same historical way as the Savior of the World, but that He wants us to be one with Him, to be filled totally with Himself so that we become incarnations and bear the fruit of His love.

St. Francis and the Wolf

2007-02-04T15:40:00.000-08:00

"Oh, St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio- what a cute story. The wolf who eats people and then becomes nice because St. Francis spoke to him. That's neat."

Wait a minute.

A people-eating wolf who becomes their pet because of a saint? That isn't a cute story. Either that is total fiction, or it needs some thought. Legends about saints, especially those who drew out their lives- like pure water from the well of God- hundreds of years ago, are rife. How do we sift through that which is pure fiction from those stories which hold truth?

Legend, especially in the area of hagiography, is a more complex area of study, because there is usually some grain of truth, some part of the saint's spirituality which so struck those around him or her, making stories grow and spread over miles and generations. The importance of the legend, it seems to me, is not the details which vary just about every time you hear it, but rather the truths about the God-infused person who is the center of the legend.

Here is the story of the Wolf of Gubbio, in short: St. Francis, after he had been espoused to Lady Poverty for some time, heard about a town called Gubbio, whose inhabitants were menaced by a ferocious, giant wolf. The wolf had figured out that Gubbio was a place where there was an endless supply of food- unfortunately, he had taken a taste for people. So frightened that they would not come out of their houses, the people now survived in a state of near anarchy.

St. Francis, hearing of their situation, traveled to Gubbio and learned the whereabouts of the wolf's lair. He walked right up to the entrance, and the wolf rushed out with teeth bared, ready to feast on St. Francis then and there. The saint held up his hand and ordered the wolf to lay down. He then spoke to the wolf and rebuked it, ultimately making a bargain with the wolf: if the townspeople agreed to feed the wolf, the wolf would leave the townsfolk in peace. The animal agreed, nodding its great, shaggy head, and placing its huge paw in the hand of St. Francis. For two years, the people fed the wolf, and when it died, the people mourned it.

The image that draws me into this legend is that of St. Francis traveling towards the entrance to the wolf's lair. What would he have been thinking, or praying? Would he have been sure that God would exercise His power to tame the wolf? Was he placing his own life in the hands of Our Lord, caring not whether he lived or died, in hopes that the suffering people of Gubbio would find relief? Was he thinking of the parents who had lost children in those evil times, and hoping that with the change of the wolf, the parents would find hope in the power of God to heal suffering? What kind of man would face a wild animal without weapons?

There are some clues in the rest of the life of St. Francis which can help us flesh out this part of his character- and spirituality. There is something almost wanton, but a wantoness with a sure love and deep passion for God, in the well-documented instance of St. Francis coming out from behind the Bishop's tapestry with nothing on, in order to give everything back to his earthly father. It is a courage beyond earthly prudence, but not beyond supernatural prudence. Francis understood worldly prudence: he had lived it, and lived with an incarnation of it in the person of his successful merchant-father. However, he eschewed this prudence for the supernatural, like the merchant who finds the pearl of great price. Francis knew that the price of this Pearl is the espousal of Lady Poverty.

Another instance is the rule which St. Francis wrote for his new order, radically stark- and pure Gospel. In his reply to Pope Innocent III's concern for the 'impossibility of following such a rule', St. Francis' reply elucidates the man who could face a wolf with supernatural prudence: "Holy Father, these are the words of the Gospel. Our Lord lived them: who are we to water them down?" (paraphrased).

It was this courage based in absolute love of God that drew followers to St. Francis like bees to honey. It was that this man became so thin, thin of bodily frame as to have light shine through him, the light of the ineffable love of Christ, that made him a torch by which the love-starved thirteenth century man could find real love.

Inspired by God, the saint stripped himself of every comfort, of every modicum of status and power, all that was easily in his grasp based upon his family background. This sounds so familiar to us now, that the radicality of it is largely lost on us, so that we reduce it in our lives to a 'willingness to be detached' but no actual action; when in its reality, St. Francis' actions were and are unthinkable to us in our natural state. To leave all normal society and follow in the invisible footsteps of Christ, to become a second Christ on His cross of ignomy and absolute poverty is not something we can even think about doing on our own.

St. Francis jumped into the call of the Gospel with all that he had, and reaped from his great loss of worldly comfort an amazing harvest of courage, love and joy. It was with this absolute-ness that he tamed the wolf. God was so present with him that the wolf responded to St. Francis as a creature to Adam before the Fall. It is the incredible dignity to which God calls us all: but the road is through poverty for the sake of God. This means something different in every life; we only have to understand the myriad of ways the saints traveled this road of absolute surrender: but the call to radicality is the same, for real love is radical.

It is not easy, I think, to be in radical love with God- but I think it is a beauty beyond compare, making the things of this world fade. The paradoxical mystery is that as we are impoverished in the terms of the world, the more we are enriched in God. We begin to live on another plane, and this carries with it what John Paul II called original solitude: the sense which a'dam had of his own body and the difference that the image of God placed upon him meant in relation to the world of all other creatures. Adam sensed a solitude: but it is through this solitude that we understand the need to search for and the meaning of communion- with God and with our neighbor.

The sense of solitude and emptiness of chosen poverty works, I think, in the same way as the solitude of Adam in creation (before Eve)- in that the awareness of oneself as completely naked(like Adam before the Fall, in acceptance of poverty, unashamed) and dependent on God enlightens us as to our absolute need of Him: thus are we truly prepared for His loving reply, I am always with you. Poverty, Lady Poverty as St. Francis so called her, on the levels of the body and the soul becomes the necessary incarnation for us of our absolute dependence on God ( a reality that comfort simply hides but does not eradicate). The dependence on God is the condition for our loving Him and Him loving us in truth: for without Him we are indeed impoverished. He cannot bring us to the true heights of love until we understand our real position; our real depth of poverty when we depend upon ourselves or creation for love instead of Him Who is True Love. Poverty, like the Cross, is a sign of contradiction to the world, but a sign of grace and love for those who seek Christ.

The wolf is tamed by a spirit steeped in the heights of love. St. Francis knew that if you try to steep a tea bag in more than one pot, the tea is weakened in its power and becomes insipid. Thus, he impoverished himself from the tea pot of the world in order to be totally God's, and he was made strong with the strength of Christ.

The Community Builders

2007-01-28T16:06:00.001-08:00

I think (maybe I'm wrong) that the mom in a family is the community builder. I remember listening to a Mars Hill tape on hospitality, and how this is a dying concept in our fragmented (or spatialized, in Catherine Pickstock's view) societies. The mother, that ideal of hospitality, comfort and the warmth of community, is now often replaced by a slick office version, who is an expert at microwave meals and would be interested in an ad such as the one I found in a California paper: "Do you need a housewife? Well, we've got 'em".

The reality is, it seems to me, that among working mothers there are two types: the educated, wealthy types, who manage things with smooth hair because they have a lot of help, and the frazzled one, who must work to help maintain a mortgage or just survival. This second type is often covering over a train wreck with saran wrap and hoping that the kids will make it somehow- thanks to the schools. The wealthy type enjoys dinner parties and guests from time to time, but really has no time for true community building and hospitality.

There is another, growing group of women: the neo-community builders, who are the true heirs to that generation (two or three ago) who knew the art and importance of hospitality and community. These are the homeschoolers, the stay-at-home moms, or the 'very part-time working' moms who somehow understand that their place is at home- but not staring out the kitchen window like some fifties manikin. They have sensed that no one, not even the TV, can replace them in the lives of their children. They understand that they have to build a culture for their children, because the culture outside is failing children, and corrupting them. They know that they have to provide safe and healthy spaces of play and work, places where their children can retain their innocence and yet learn to deal with 'the world' from a place of strength.

In this endeavor, hospitality is primary, because in order to build a healthy culture-within-a-culture, community is essential. People have to open themselves, their gifts and their homes in a more radical way, so that a community can begin to grow. However, as important as hospitality is, there is something else much more important which I have discovered in my community-building attempts (some successful, some abject failures).

I have realized a couple of things, actually: one is that women, it seems, are ill-suited in one sense to community building, and well-suited in another way. The other thing is that community building is an apostolate- and watered by prayer.

First, the suitability of women: they are highly sensitive and prone to talking. These are good and bad things, both. In being sensitive and talkative, they are showing their propensity to be experts at hospitality. Being sensitive to others' needs is the foundation of hospitality, and the beginning of community. In talking, 'word gets around' and families begin to get to know each other. The moms can help the dads and the children to understand one another, and encourage friendships between families and not just between individuals. Family friendships are the building blocks of the community, and hospitality is the mortar. The woman in a family is the primary producer of both: and if her vocation is primarily her family and home, she will pour into it not just effort and thought, but her very being.

The underside of a woman's propensity to be sensitive and to talk might be pretty obvious to anyone with any sense. The cure of it is not. I think that often the sensitive and talking issues as weaknesses are objects of fun and sterotyping, but they can actually wreck community. Gossip and grudge-holding, the bad fruits of sensitivity and talking, can destroy every tiny effort to build family friendships, choking these efforts in a tangle of weed-roots.

The Gospel commands to forgive- seventy times seven- and not to gossip, and following these commands is the practical way by which women can retain their natural propensities for good. Additionally, prayer and the understanding that community-building is an apostolate are the essential and supernatural ways by which we forgive and not give in to gossip.

An apostolate is a work which God has given a person. It is like a house built, and it must be built on Christ. It will be tested by fire, it is a work upon which we will be judged. It is also primarily Christ's, and it cannot be something that we hang on to for ourselves, no matter how big or how small it is. An apostolate must be given back to God and within it God must be given the glory, or it is built on sand.

An apostolate like community-building in all its forms, from little schools to bible groups to girl's or boy's groups, must be supported by and watered with prayer. "Pray without ceasing" the Apostle said, and we must pray while we are doing anything, any apostolate. We must pray with our willingness to forgive, to love beyond death even those whom we dislike, and with our determination to think the best of those around us and to protect their person and their reputation with our lives.

We must pray with our blessings and our goods shared, to the point of sharing what we ourselves need. We must pray with our desire to serve the other, and to see Christ in those around us. Only then will true community be built, a Christian community.

We must all of us, pray for the Christian communities in the world, those little cells of renewal, the new monasteries perched on the edge of the sea.

Savior Delusion

2007-01-17T15:46:00.000-08:00

As St. Thomas Aquinas taught, no man consciously does anything purely evil. In any action, however evil it might be, there is some motivation for good- either the good of the self, or others. The perceived good may not be good in reality, but the point is that it is perceived by the doer as a good on some level.

One can see this easily with small children. Two-year-old Robin believes that the rabbits need some fresh air, and decides to do something about it without checking with the gatekeepers of reality (his parents). He is perceiving two goods: one, his own decision-making ability, and second the good of the rabbits (as he understands it). The rabbits are let loose in the yard, they crawl under the fence, and finally they are lost. Little Robin has created a wake of destruction while believing he is doing good.

It is much more difficult to see this same disorder in adults- mainly because they cover it up with onion skins of rationalization, slowly blocking out the truth to others and to themselves. Let me try to elucidate it with a fictitious example: Andrew is a very intelligent adult in his thirties. As he has grown in his faith, he begins to feel that he has much to give those around him, in terms of counseling and faith-based solutions to people's everyday problems. He sees two goods here, just like little Robin: the good that helping others will do for his own spiritual journey, and the good that he will do for others in helping them with their problems. There is one issue, though, that Andrew does not grapple with: just because he can help, should he? What does God wish him to do? What has God called him to?

Andrew, you see, has learnt a way of looking at his faith such that he is the center of it- but he doesn't know this, awash in the very self-oriented culture of both the modern culture and many churches of the day. Andrew believes in God, but believes in Him as Andrew perceives Him. Andrew does not know that he does not have a faith based on God's presentation of reality but rather a faith built on self-perception, the wishes of oneself.

Andrew begins his mission, his savior-like work. Because he is self-oriented, he lives somewhat in an enclosed world, a bit like an observer sitting in the dark under the canopy of 'stars' in a star-gazing room (the ones where the constellations are actually little lights placed in a ceiling). It is a safe and predictable environment, and this safety in a synthetic creation is where Andrew actually derives his incredibly alluring optimism and self-esteem. As he tries to help others with their problems, he is actually helping them to create their own synthetic realities, wherein they can claim to know that God understands them and that they feel certain about the decisions they have made. Andrew, the savior, begins to make disciples of Hell.

The most common problem of evil is not that there are these frightening people who decide they are going to cause havoc. Evil is a much more subtle problem of those who have made their own world, their own understanding of existence. They are people who are, fundamentally, lying to themselves. Thus they can actually believe they are telling others the truth, when in fact, they are creating versions of themselves. A sociopath is the extreme version of this, but a culture bent upon sowing the seeds of radical individualism and self-determination (even in questions of existence and the right thereto: think "abortion") will produce the same evil fruits, albeit on a spectrum of mild insanity to extreme sociopathology.

One only needs to read the history of the City Council of Santa Cruz to understand this kind of middling insanity. They're just now trying to declare Santa Cruz a 'Pro-Choice City', establishing a diabolical city-state religion of sorts, all the while believing they are establishing freedom.

Evil is the absence of good. In terms of a self-oriented person, reality becomes subsumed into their own encased bubble of 'reality'. Three important examples from literature come straight to mind: one is the scene in C.S. Lewis' The Last Battle. All had come through the door of judgement at the end of the world, and the little group of dwarves who had been 'sacrificed to Tash' were sitting huddled together in the midst of a bright meadow (heaven). They could not see anything beyond the darkness of the world of their own making, the cynical 'reality' of the dark stable. Aslan, to please one of the queens, attempts to break into their reality but is rebuffed at every turn. As He tries to help, He turns and says, "I will show you both what I can and cannot do." Even Our Lord cannot break in to a person's selfish construction of reality: Reality Himself is rebuffed, for the deluded person has made himself god and will not trade for the True God.

Another example is the unforgettable character in Flannery O'Conner's A Good Man is Hard to Find, an older woman who is waylaid by robbers along with her family. As they relate to the criminals, it becomes apparent that the older woman has been a tyrant and a destructive influence all her life, all the while believing that she was acting for everyone's good. As reality thrusts itself upon her in the form of a gun, she begins to dismantle her own reality for the truth. The great line in the story is from the mouth of the man who shoots her: "She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." In this, O'Conner brutally illustrates the terrifying nature of evil and the near-impossibility of a self-deluded person opening himself to reality.

In The Brothers Karamazov, the famous character of the Elder Zossima exhorts the people, "Beware of the lie to yourself". In this great passage, he begs those who come for his advice to search for truth, and above all, to avoid the lie to oneself, for this is the unbreakable prison.

Pride, or fear of hurt is the source of this kind of evil, and it is by learning to view ourselves as humble creatures and not the creators of our own existence, or the creators of whatever information or tradition we inherit, that we begin to live in true reality: thus we live in the good. Humble people, those who stand on the ground, or humus, are those who see themselves in the true light- they seek to see themselves as God sees them, and measure themselves against the standards of Christ and the teachings of the Church. They do not dance around a self-made golden calf, but rather follow God's laws which reflect reality and teach us how to live in it with peace and true love.

Inasmuch as we are humbly searching for the truth, for the True Savior, in reality, we are good. We may not be completely healed, or sane, but the will to strip ourselves of anything or anyone which would keep us from God, or from seeing ourselves how God sees us, is what means we are heading towards being good.

The Philosophy of the Broken Boat

2007-01-08T19:53:00.000-08:00

We stand, you and I, on the edge of the languid pond; we are looking together at the small boats bobbing and bending along with the wind-sighs of a balmy, New York afternoon sometime in the Spring. Compounds of young and old move past us in differing versions of the same stroll around the sculpted edges of the pond, edges which seem to have an agreement with the water : to stay in concert with one another and to provide an orderly experience of boating.

One boat, a perfect red dash crowned with white triangulated splashes splayed outward to catch (to it, a gale) the soft-blowing wind, breaks from its compatriots who toddle safely at the far corner and dares the high seas at the center. It sails true and straight for a glorious thirty seconds and seems never to mind the end of the world ( it's world is rather squarish wherein one does not fall off, but rather splinters on an unforgiving and orderly wall). The wall, now, as we watch in fascination and some horror (imagining tiny people asleep at the helm), does not forgive. There is a splintering sound and a 'whosh-flap' as the sails crumple into the shallow water.

We do not speak, we wait- for what? Perhaps we are waiting in morbid curiosity to see what the owner will do with the remains of the red dash. A boy comes, plodding rather than running. To my surprise, he does not waste too much time in mourning his art-work toy: straight to the great green garbage receptacle he plods and without cermony, lets it fall to the bottom with a humiliating myriad of thuds.

You do not turn towards me, for we live in different universes now. I only hear you say, as if from very far away, "That reminds me of a relationship- you know, maybe that boy loved his boat. But he was not afraid to admit that it was broken beyond repair, and realized that he would just have to get rid of it-hard. That's why I like that 'thud' in the trash."

I do not answer, for you will probably not hear me; your philosophy comes from so deep inside that it is not something I can counsel you about; and also it places us far apart. I cannot be with you in this, the philosophy of the broken boat. I will not. But I live outside it, and pray; and discuss to myself, to make clear to my own heart what bothers me so about it.

I suppose I understand this philosophy from a natural standpoint: I guess I've had experience both as the broken boat and also the trash-man. However, my soul and all I know of God's love makes me reject this philosophy absolutely. I must here differentiate between a relationship which is disordered from one in which each person has struggles and deep flaws, causing hurt to the other. In the former case, the cause of the disorder must be remedied in charity, according to the laws and will of God-in charity. Sometimes the remedy is indeed an ending of the relationship- but it is done in prayer and charity. In the latter case, with the flaws and such, it is different: and I think of this now, as you begin to turn and walk away slowly...

When one person holds the philosophy of the broken boat, whether in a courtship, marriage or friendship, the other person becomes aware of the guillotine hanging unobtrusively over the relationship, and the whole thing becomes a dance of fear. It is a dance of control, of waiting for a flaw to appear and be judged: hurt does not become a chance for spiritual growth, but rather a tally mark on some ledger-sheet in the heart. A wall is built, and the one willing to love and work on the relationship will often feel a temptation to escape (and perhaps escape is just what is needed). The one who understands true love must call the other out and be willing to lose this relationship on the altar of reality, of real love: for love will be tested, either by the lovers or friends or by the providence of God and the trials of life.

For love is not meant to be a perfect sail on a balmy night. It is meant to help us grow towards Our Lord, who gave Himself up to death for love. Love is meant to make us heros and saints: it demands nothing less. That is why the disillusionment in any longstanding relationship is actually a good thing; for in the moment of disillusionment we have the profound and divine choice to really LOVE: not for gain, nor pleasure, but rather for the other. Our self-life begins to die as our life in Christ grows in exact inverse-proportion. Love is not fundamentally fun. It is fundamentally real, worth great risk and pain. The fixing and re-fixing of the boat is true love.

The other kind of relationship, the disordered kind, needs remedy before it can even approach the fixing and re-fixing of love. You and I, my friend, and all friends, how can we love if we are starving spiritually, or in sin, far from the Source of Love and Life? How can we navigate the storms on the pond without formation or the Sacraments, or the sanity of the True Theology? How can we discern anything through disorder? As you disappear into the trees beyond the pond, this is what I grieve the most: that I was not capable or willing, perhaps, to love the way God would have wanted me to, and to let you be His first and not mine.

In this fundamental disorder, God is ready to rescue at the slightest humility and willingness to let go: for even in disorder, to let go (not to throw in the trash, but more akin to the boy allowing Someone else to take the boat who could perhaps fix it and sail it better for him), yes, to let go is the beginning of real love and the beginning of hope of order.

In any real love, to begin to lose oneself truly in the love of God is to begin to be able to truly love anyone else. It is only after really loving this way, perhaps often in the dark, that one begins to understand the depth of love. It is the true meaning of the prophet who married the harlot as a sign of how God loves His own though they stray.

You know, my friend, as I watch your shadowed form slowly climbing the hill across the way, I sense that you know that real love is much more demanding than the toughest mountain-climb- and you say you don't have the courage for it. None of us do, I whisper, hoping the wind will carry my message of hope. That is why you need the Sacraments, the 'body and soul' love expressed in the life of the Church. It is Her purpose: to cause us to be able to love, like the wind in the sails. The strength of the Eucharist, the healing of confession...

How can I express it? I feel that I am failing to convey it! I remember that love of God you first felt, even as a pagan of sorts, when you were suspended in the deep blue; that infusion of the knowledge that He would never leave you, that He would reach you wherever you were and walk through death for you. It was a mark of deep understanding that was imprinted on your soul, it shone through your eyes: a kind of never-ending explosion. You thought that somehow a relationship was tied up with that- and in some sense you were right; but yet you carried the pagan broken-boat philosophy with you, like an extra change of clothes, a just-in-case.

And I failed you, miserably. The mysterious thing, is that perhaps He allowed us to fail-to give us a chance to learn to love as He does: or to know beyond doubt that He is the Alpha and Omega of everything, but especially of love. Love in courtship, or marriage, or friendship, must begin in Him and His law and will, it must continue thus, and end thus. When any relationship fails in His law, or tries to live outside it or in selfishness, it becomes demonic. The only remedy for this is not to trash it because it hurts, but to repent and to seek after His will once more: whether His will is to seek Him together or apart.

But when you are seeking His will, and His will for you is to have a broken boat, or to be one, do not despair. Rejoice. Again, I say, rejoice...for He gives you the power, His power, to love beyond measuring, beyond and in failure, and this makes you Christ in this sphere. You become a true witness to the other and to those who observe: and you give witness to the truth that the final end of any love-whether it be agape, philia, eros, or storge-is to draw everything to heaven through the love of Christ. No love can remain love and be an end in itself. You are only left with childish anger and despair at a broken, expensive toy.

I know, my friend, that God will ask from you a love no less than His love, for your good. If you ask for the courage, He will give you His own, the courage of the One who stumbled to Golgotha for love. Love those whom God has placed in your life with that love, a love that never forsakes, that always wishes for the other's good: that good of the other being to dwell in the House of the Lord forever. Heaven is constructed on this selfless love, and I pray that He will fill you with the grace to love this way, for it is all His doing. It is begun in our willingness to have God transform us as we surrender our own precious philosophies which do not conform to His Truth. It is the seeking after His Truth as the 'doe longs for flowing streams'.

For me, I know I am nothing, nothing, next to the love of God in the relationships I have now- I just want to be in that love, immersed in that ocean. My peace, in my clingings to selfishness, is that God knows He must change me, and that I want it. This wanting is also a grace given by Him. I know I always retain my free will: and I hope to use it to be willing to love without thought of measuring the cost, to love even when someone is imperfect or seriously flawed, or when I have been seriously hurt.

Perfect love casts out fear. Fear, begone. Sweet Courage of Love, enter in!

To Be A Man of Peace

2007-01-02T11:34:00.000-08:00

"Keep thyself first in peace, and then shalt thou be able to pacify others."

This is harder than it sounds. I'm failing at it pretty miserably right now, so I feel the hardness of the good way, like the characters in C.S. Lewis' book The Great Divorce, who come from Hell on a busride to Heaven. They are like soft silver fishes flopping on diamonds: the very goodness of Heaven rubs like sharp points on their thin, selfish skin. But help is sent to them: the inhabitants of Heaven come with charity to lift them and strengthen them; but in the end, to be a good man and a man of peace requires great humility and the choice of the will.

" He that is well in peace, is not suspicious of any".

This is not so easy, especially in our closest familial relationships, when hurt has been passed around like a sour drink, me buying one round, and you another until we're dizzy with hurt and anger, it becomes very difficult to be at peace. I think of the Lord saying, "Forgive seventy times seven", completely blasting open the apparently more prudent Old Testament law to forgive seven times seven: that is a prudence which dictates one must have a limit on one's forgiveness.

A limit on forgiveness is a limit on love, the selfless love which lays down its life for the other: and with the grace of Christ, we became able to have charity, and thus to forgive endlessly. Thus, the suspicion ends, and you are well in peace. Easy? No. It requires the death of the selfish seeking in us. As in the New Testament, "Let me die with Christ, so that I may live with Him."

"Behold, how far off thou art yet from true charity and humility, which knoweth not how to be angry with any, or to be moved with indignation, but only against its own self."

I think this means that if you really understood the enormity of any sin you would realize your focus on rehabilitation must be foremost on the self, and that we have all sinned, and that I have sinned: I have sinned!! This brings either a despair from the proud, or a humility from the humble. The enormity of placing the self above God is the root of sin, it is pride: and this is enough to make us realize that we cannot treat others as if they are doing something 'that we would never do'. It is that feeling of 'how dare you' which falls against charity and humility. We, a fellow creature, a fellow sinner, have no business saying 'how dare you' with self-righteous indignation. This kind of pride is the sneakiest kind I know- that is, you are doing it before you realize it, and the more 'moral' a person, the easier it is to have this kind of pride.

Anger, however, is not an evil: it is, as Aquinas says, a motivating feeling; an emotional reaction to a real or apparent injustice. Anger is meant to motivate us to act decisively and courageously in the face of danger or evil. However, it is the anger and subsequent reaction of a perceived injury to one's self-image, one's ego, which is the bad kind. This is the hypocritical kind, because in the case of damaged pride, we are most at fault who have not first considered our own injustice to God and to others.

"But to be able to live peaceably with hard, and perverse, or undisciplined persons, is a great grace, and an exceedingly commendable and manly deed."

I would say this applies also to living with oneself in this regard: for often it is our own hardness and perverseness which brings us the most suffering, and lack of peace. But all of us, in whatever state of life we have been called, must suffer another's lack of discipline and hardness. Suffering another's burdens is a purgatory and when done with loving, manly resignation, can sanctify and purify us.

" And there are that keep themselves in peace and study to bring others unto peace. Nevertheless, our whole peace in this miserable life consisteth rather in humble sufferance, that in not feeling adversities. Who knowest best how to suffer, will keep the greatest peace. That man is conqueror of himself, and lord of the world, the friend of Christ, and heir of heaven."

Friend of Christ! What greater and sweeter title is there?

*Quotes from The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas 'A Kempis

Make Ready the Crib

2006-12-23T10:38:00.000-08:00

We are now almost at the crib: and in this season, of the year 2006, the crib resides truly in each heart. Our cribs are places of preparation now, in contrite and happy expectation of the travel-weary little procession of St. Joseph, Our Lady, and the Babe she carries within her. Our hearts, humble and stable-like as they are, are true echoes of the first stable in Bethlehem. Did not the Lord wish to show us, by His arrival in a humble stable, the very image of His desire to enter into all hearts, hearts open to Him in true contrition, purity and humility? And does He not offer us the means by which to prepare our hearts, namely His own grace won on the Cross; these graces to which we must respond with a humble giving over of our wills to His? Are we not constantly re-soiling the stable, and in need of His help which He gave to His Bride, the Church, won through His suffering, suffering which began at Christmas? How are we to clean the stables which are our hearts without help, without following the words He left with the Church? I find the words of Thomas `A Kempis profoundly apt in these days of Advent, just before the arrival of the True King:

"The Kingdom of God is within you, saith the Lord. Turn thee with thy whole heart unto the Lord, and forsake this wretched world and thy soul shall find rest. Learn to despise outward things, and to give thyself to things inward, and thou shalt perceive the Kingdom of God to come in thee. For the Kingdom of God is peace and joy in the Holy Ghost, which is not given to the unholy. Christ will come unto thee, and show thee His consolation, if thou prepare for Him a worthy abode within thee. All His glory and beauty is from within, and there He delighteth Himself. The inward man He often visiteth; and hath with Him sweet discourse, pleasant solace, much peace, familiarity exeedingly wonderful. O faithful soul! make ready they heart for this Bridegroom, that He may vouchsafe to come unto thee and dwell within thee. For thus saith He, If any love Me, he will keep My words, and We will come unto Him, and will make our abode with Him.

Give therefore a place unto Christ, and deny entrance to all others. When thou hast Christ, thou art rich, and hast enough. He Himself will by thy provider and faithful steward in all things..." (from The Imitation of Christ)

Conforming to Christ

2006-12-16T10:28:00.000-08:00

I have often struggled with the idea of conforming to Christ: I think, "How can I conform, I am so weak? I can barely will the idea, much less handle thinking on an emotional or practical level about the reality of it."

I then say a prayer for help and enlightenment. Why the fear? I think fear comes because Our Lord was prophesied to be, and was beyond measure, a Man of Sorrows. Crowned in His crucifixion, Jesus' life on earth was, to the outside observer, a life fraught with much that would break the heart of a lesser man. He was a man born far from home; a man who lived in relatively poor conditions. He chose, as God, to live in what was considered the 'low-class, working-class' area of Israel: He chose to identify with the despised and the low of the world and to suffer the ignomy that accompanies such a choice. As a Rabbi, a Teacher, he confronted the rot and evil which had grown up among those in religious and political positions- and this kind of confrontation inevitably brings stress and persecution in its wake. He did not turn from sorrow, or 'live above it' - a nice way to say you are ignoring it- instead, He wept with those who sorrowed, and brought rejoicing forth from the sorrow when He found faith in the grieving.

All of these choices of God, and the events in His life, are viewed by us as through the wrong end of the telescope: as if they are enacted on a stage, far away from our lives. This is natural, I suppose, for the obvious connection between my life and the life of Christ does seem like a long thread, covering long distances: the distance between a Creator and creature. It is truly a distance we cannot cross ourselves, that distance between how Christ lived His life and we live ours.

God Himself comes to us, the purpose being because He loves us with such a passion as to wish us to be conformed to Him, to become small, but true visions of His heart. He wants to be with us, and to bring us home with Him. To do this, He made Himself a bridge between earth and heaven- I am thinking of St. Catherine of Siena's vision of Christ as a bridge which is found in her Dialogues, or talks with God. Reading the understanding given her in ecstasy of this Divine Bridge is worth the effort. I cannot reproduce the beauty of it here in this short essay.

Nevertheless, He is a bridge: and He comes to us, and wishes to remain close. He is gentle, and gently calls us to conform our lives to His: a baby in Our Lady's lap, a lover of the poor, a simple and hardworking person, a person who understands deeply the sorrows of this life, in our own as well as others; a person who does not turn from nor fear those sorrows, but looks to them as opportunities to become more like Him in charity. He calls us to lay down our lives, our desires, in His service- as He did in the Father's service- and he beckons us to follow in His footsteps on the dusty, messy and dirty road through a landscape so far from perfection, but in need of His light and joy. Finally, He asks us to accept crucifixion: and this comes differently for each person, for God knows each person more intimately than he knows himself.

The essence, though, of crucifixion is the giving over of the self- of the will- to the service of God and for the love of one's neighbor. This does cause pain, and in times of the persecution of Christians, it causes death like unto Christ's. There are other kinds of crucifixions, though, and one only has to learn the lives of the saints in all the ages to understand how many types there are.

All this frightens me.

The answer comes to me, like wisp of frankincense smoke: to conform to Christ cannot be done through one's natural will and abilities: the foundation and beginning must be deep love of God, as Christ has for the Father and the Holy Spirit. This love cannot be earned, but must be earnestly begged of Him who gives gifts lovingly, mercifully, and in greatest abundance. We must start with this love, we must desire it, and then our foundation for conformation in Christ is begun. We cannot hope to get anywhere besides either failure or massive pride (like the Jansenist heresy) without this gift of Love.

After we have asked for, been given, and responded to the graces of God, namely His Love, then we begin to understand that for those who love God, this life on earth, this exile in a valley of tears, is itself a conforming to Christ. You see, if you love God with your heart, soul and mind, you will suffer tremendously because this love cannot be fully consummated in union until you "know as you are known". Perhaps, I don't know, some of the great contemplative saints reached this union while still living on earth: but I think that they still suffered a sense of exile, and suffered the uncertainty of those who lived around them. In heaven, 'your shores are safe and secure' (A'Kempis).

So our daily lives, each moment, becomes a chance for conforming to Christ, in that each moment suffused with the love of God while in exile on this earth is a moment that is imbued with the life of Christ.

Have I given a picture of melancholy and morose -looking Little Christs? If I have, I have failed in explaining, so I will add this last: The love of God is Joy itself. The great mark of the Christian, or one-of-Christ's, is great joy and love in both times of sorrow and joy. Not the superficial ignoring of sorrow, or escapism, but a deep and solemn joy and a deep love and hope that exists ever under tears or the weight of life. Our shoulders may be scarred or bowed, but our eyes still sparkle like a child's in his Father's embrace. And there is peace, a peace in knowing that all happens in our lives for our ultimate good. This peace is only possible as a gift from God, a gift won by our sincere asking.

For those of the world, the Cross is foolishness, for they see it as a purposeful impoverishing of oneself for naught. For those who love God, the Cross is everything. The Cross is part of a personal and love relationship, it cannot be understood otherwise. It strips us of the dross of sin, it allows us to know our Saviour as only those who have loved and suffered together can know one another. It is not a stumbling block but a purgatory on earth, a place of fire, that purifies us and mysteriously builds in us the love of God in proportion to how much we allow it to turn our hearts from created things in this world. Everything we think or do, through the Cross, becomes the love of others through first loving God, like a man who tells another the hard truth, in love, in the face of persecution from the very person he is trying to help; or he who stands for the Faith and for true morality, at great loss of worldly opportunity for hismself.

If you lose your life for God, you will save it. If you look to garnish and coddle yourself, you will come to naught.

I'm a little less frightened now and more focused on love than fear. Oh, yes! "Perfect love casts out fear". May God perfect His love in me, and in all who, knowingly or not, search earnestly for Him.

May I Meet You by The Crib

2006-12-11T23:29:00.000-08:00

A Reprint

When our first parents fell, they fell, in a cosmic sense, off the earth, away from the centre, pulling creation with them, the bloody weight spiraling down, down and around until they found themselves monarchs of the Upside Down Kingdom.

Their heads were down, reason and will existing now under the emotions, under the passions, a body inverted; and their children made civilization upon civilization upon civilization: these grew like an upside down tower, a Tower of Babel reaching across eons of time; entrenched, a foundation of sin.

Dante captures this topsy-turvy nature of rebellion very well in his depiction of the Devil: a grotesque animalistic creature with three heads, his body towering through the centre of hell like a perverted axis: but his head is, of course, at the lowest level of hell, at the bottom.

Photo: Bethlehem:The Door of Humility, leading to the Altar of the Nativity

The only way back, God-given, is to reach not above the head, in this Upside Down Kingdom of Sin, but rather to reach for the ground: to go to the ground is to actually go up: up in the real sense, in the sense of the Right-side Up Kingdom, the Real Kingdom. To reach for the feet, for the ground, to lower one's head to the dust of the earth, and to look there for up. God gives us this grace: to desire the humus, the dirt from which we came, to place that dirt on our heads in repentance: to look for salvation among the lowly and despised of the earth.

So we come, by God's grace, to a small cave at the edge of town, away from the clinking of coins and the open mouths of laughter by the fires, to the animal-warmth of the primitive stable where the shepherds, wiry like juniper branches, lean on their crooks, faces inscrutable in the shadows. We come to the new Eve and to the Foster-Father, and to the Way, to the Doorway, the Word made flesh; to that Holy Couple covered in the humus of the road and in the humility that comes from keeping close to the humus in the Upside Down Kingdom. And we come to worship the Child Who is the only Flesh entirely of the Real Kingdom:Who is the Real Kingdom.

The Child's appearance is a scandal to the Upside Down Kingdom, for He is a living picture of the Right-side Up Kingdom, and shows the other for what it is, by His very existence. Only those who are looking to the ground, looking in humility or in desperation, will see Him in hope. The rest will only see Him as a stumbling stone.

May I meet Him at the Crib, may I see you there, too. I kneel, looking into a tiny Face of loveliness, mirroring the Mother's in the flesh: and something else there, too, of the Father, that I cannot grasp; I feel the pain of my soul's smallness, its limits, as I look at His face. I look away in shame, and I see the glow of Him reflected on your face. In common shame, we somehow smile and by unspoken agreement, look again into the face of God: in hope.

Photo: Bethlehem, "Kissing the Star" : The Birthplace of Our Lord

Hope of this Holy Doorway, into a Kingdom of Charity and Light, and Him. So, it is thus for these two thousand years since His coming in the flesh. And we, part of His Church, we are meant to carry the Child, the King of the Right-side Up Kingdom, across the terrain of the world, to transform it, to turn it Right-side Up: for all things will be made new, in Christ. And we carry Him, and follow Him: for the good suffer for the evil: this mysterious economy of love and suffering is the turning to the Right-side Up. He is our only hope, the Child, He is our salvation, for of ourselves, we are nothing.

May I meet you by that Crib this Christmas.

Death in Advent

2006-12-03T19:35:00.000-08:00

Death is suddenly there: a sickness, some hoping, a little rally, and then- nothingness. Frozen eyes, stiffened limbs, the heaviness of entropy. When Death is in front of you, naked, in your home, there is neither sparkling ornaments of glory nor dramatic clothes of nobility and grief. You are stricken with a whip in the face, your feet of clay are crumbled and you are forced to look at the terror and the grotesqueness, the humilation and the deep sorrow. You know death then as punishment, as a ripping, a breaking, something utterly foreign to the momentum of life: and this, even at the death of an animal, a small bird you have loved. You see a hollowed, twisted shell and you remember the inevitability of your death.

Then you cry, for the existential experience of the poor being who has been taken by force from it's earthly home, who has by some mystery, been pulled through a merciless turnstyle, experiencing a pain unknowable, a psychic pain which cannot be a survivor's pain: a supernatural pain.

You cry, when you know in the flesh the permanence of it, and that there is no use to "We should have"- or "next time". The destiny of that being is out of reach for this lifetime, the paths are cut asunder and run now on different planes of existence. You weep, then, with the helplessness of the created: you know both the existence of death and the power of God in the same moment-He who holds life and death in careful hands: but they seem so universal, these hands, like the ten-foot, over-sized, steel-like hands of a Soviet sculpture. You feel that He who understands death is the clock-maker of the Deists, who is simply responding out of eons to some alarm in His workings, and you are not even seen. Your beloved is simply picked up, and is gone; and you are left with the remains, the visceral horror around which you must gather the clothes of ritual.

And later, when you are tired of weeping, you are in God's house, and you ask Him: "Help me to understand this, this death." And He does not speak of the why, or the whereabouts of the dead one, but He looks at you, soul to soul, and He sends you a verse first: "I know when a sparrow falls to the ground"- and He infuses to you a new understanding of the word "know" in that verse; He makes you realize that it is meant as the Genesis-meaning of "to know"- that is, a word more like "to live within" or "to be with in the deepest sense possible to the objective known": that somehow, He knows each death in creation intimately. And your heart contracts in a sudden rush of understanding, when your soul-eyes look into His soul-eyes, and you see Him once again on the cross, turning death backwards with His own death. You see, also, His man's eyes, once also a child's eyes, once also a helpless baby's eyes in the crib at midnight: and in those eyes you see empathy: a simple being with you in your pathos, your grief. You connect with a Person who has known this grief, this death, in the same visceral sense that you have just experienced it. A look steeped in knowing togetherness.

You think, suddenly that God has deemed to be your brother in the flesh at all times, and now especially in your grief. And you know that Love can do no less: and He is no Deist's dream, but Lover in intimacy with all. And the word "How" raises itself to your consciousness, unbidden, and unanswered. You leave that question there, I suppose until you can ask it without sin or vain curiosity.

And you rejoice in this Little Coming in love, like a tryst of lovers in the corner of the church, but your heart expands in the joy of a guilt-less and passionate love, a love born partly of the thrill in the condescention of the Holy Trinity, to visit such a small stable of a soul, a soul wounded by the facing of death.

And you remember it is the beginning of Advent, a coming, and you remember the baby in the crib, hidden at midnight, a baby come to grow and die a shocking and early death. You remember the face of uncorrupted St. Bernadette, and St. Catherine Laboure with her eyes still open in a look of fierce joy. And you allow the experience of death to be a drawing, a drawing like a current in the sea, towards Him.

Combing Her Hair in the Sanctuary

2006-11-25T21:05:00.000-08:00

The silence rests on us, like dust: but it is a dust playing in harmony with the gentle air and the colored light from stained glass. We wait, all of us, in the confession line, and I study the bowed heads and rounded backs of those few who have come early for Mass. Only a few children break with the strongly held quiet: they make jerky movements and strange little squeaks as they clack their Playmobil figures along the pew backs, the walls, the floor, in a practiced desperation of retaining normal noise in this stretched time before Mass.

We wait, and I should be focusing on my inward self, asking for guidance in understanding the state of my soul: there are little things, and all together they conspire against me and weigh me down. I ask for help, a usual prayer; and then my attention is sucked over to the heavy doors as they open, scattering the lit dust in a frenzied dance of surprise. Both doors are opened, as if a procession will enter, and I squint against the light to see what royal person might appear.

Here she comes, resplendent in her wheelchair, a face full of years, children, and suffering with cancer. She, who bore twelve children, is now little bigger than the ten-year-old girls who come to the sanctuary in a rush of ribbons: but she is absolutely still, a mask of white and wrinkle, except for the intense pools of peat which are her very alive eyes.

As she enters, she is attended by her husband, a scarecrow of a man: but a clean, groomed and dapper one, complete with polyester plaid pants that match a plaid tie. He is lanky but strong, and he almost looks like a devotee carrying his queen before him, with such care does he maneuver her over the threshold and gracefully close the doors. The procession of man and wife, patriarch and matriarch, stops at the beginning of the pew rows at the end of the vestibule.

He reaches into the polyester plaid pants, lifting the brown jacket tails up slightly, and pulls out a small comb. Carefully, gently, and with more love than I've seen (it is as if he were twining roses into her hair and planting a golden crown on her head), he combs her hair. It wasn't as if her grey bob cut wasn't neat. It is a work of ritual, of making her feel groomed and ready for the Mass. It is a small work of love and honor: if you saw him, and her, you would know what I mean.

In Honor of St. Cecilia on Her Feast Day

2006-11-22T21:17:00.000-08:00

Martyr

Face dried still in paint
Costume’d robes and diadem,
Offered arms caressing
Palm, and instrument of thy death
Thy form encased by an unknown painter,
In rounded, antiquated strokes.

Mouth created in straight lines
No smile to soften legacy;
A linear beauty
Like to blade which pierce'd thee:
Wast thou ever swallow,
Child keeping time with wind?

Black pupils wreathed in flames
Eyes(even in paint) are bright
With the pierce'd Love of Christ:
Thus, the bridge 'twixt me and thee,
Martyr, far above, is Charity.

Melina Novena

2006-11-11T19:12:00.000-08:00

Melina and I are about the same age- a couple months apart. Dark-haired and blue-eyed, she is really tall, and I am pretty short(at least I feel like that when she's looking down at me). We both have two girls and one boy. We both have one husband, good ones: But there is something special about Melina- I saw it, or rather with the eyes of the soul did I see it. For some reason, she reminds me of the woman in C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce, whom we meet when the bus from Hell arrives with the woman's husband who has come to find her. She meets him, she who was a normal woman in life with a house-apron and raw hands from the lye in wash-soap, a joyful woman who fed those who came to her door with food and love. She meets him, garlanded as a queen and followed by her court: all those whom she helped- men, women, children, cats and birds and dogs (the latter yelping and bounding eagerly around her flowing skirts).

I met Melina that day we came to St. Mary's, a little lost and lonely because we'd just moved to Melina's town- she pulled us right into a community of people; and when I hung around the tutorial she was helping run, we just fell into easy chatter. But Melina is no easy come, easy go friend. She kept me and my family at a distance, a distance respectful of the fact that she did not know us. As she experienced us, she prudently became more open: I understood this as the really loving thing to do, in that there was no falsity in her- this was a Woman of Prudence.

Then we graduated to talking on the phone about this or that(we were working together on a girls' group) and I noticed that she would always, consistently, draw the problems to prayer: "Let's go and pray about that and then get together and decide"; or, with something really important or hard, "Let me go to confession and Mass and then I can make a good decision".

I also noticed that she has a very counter-cultural attitude about her husband. She talked to me matter-of-factly and in a strong, femine way about submission: "I need to make sure that I am home for my husband, especially when he's been traveling"; or, " I have to check with my husband and see if he'll allow this". Now, often, I wonder about my slightly different take on the whole marriage relationship - because I respect her greatly; but nevertheless, I deeply respect Melina's desire to be submissive, as Christ is submissive, showing in this attitude a love of humility and servanthood. The actual, practical way this is carried out in any marriage is a complicated and private matter, dealing with the spouses strengths and weaknesses, intermingled essentially with the spiritual growth of each person. It is no easy matter to make principles in this area- so I don't, beyond an imitation of Melina's strategy: Take each thing to God in prayer.

In her habitual recourse to prayer in even the humblest matters, Melina reminds me of a child in the lap of God. This doesn't mean she is a spiritual simpleton, but rather someone who has the strength and balance of heart to know that she cannot rely on herself, but would choose, rather, to rely on God: because she knows her strength is not equal to sainthood. I've no doubt that she would be able to be a very successful and prudent person on the purely natural level, and so it is all the more amazing to see a gifted, balanced person like herself choose to take even the smallest things to God. There is a key to understanding this in her life, and it is a person: her son, James.

Melina has suffered because James has autism, and as hard as that is (hard beyond measure), somehow I think that God knew that this would help make her the tower of faith that she is; and she has no fear of others who may think (I have never heard this said, or anything negative about Melina) that she is 'all about God'- I think she would laugh her strong and deep laugh and say, "absolutely".

We have a group of homeschooling moms here, and someone coined the phrase, "Melina Novena", expressing both a little humor, but primarily a little awe and respect for this joyful and normal person, who is inside a passionate and unusual lover of Christ. She does not talk about herself in an inordinate way, and she takes criticism more humbly and better than anyone I have ever met. So it isn't that she doesn't have faults, but I somehow see that because her life is centered in Christ- He seems to be the measure by which she sees everything in her life- that she will, in the end, be perfect. This is my hope for my friend- and myself- and all of us.

Musing Between the Solstices

2006-11-01T12:45:00.000-08:00

Sometimes we are asked to look outside our little track, our rationalized, sleek zones of understanding- of those things which we cannot comprehend this side of death. Sometimes it is the suffering we see in others or the suffering we go through ourselves- and sometimes it is simply loving and knowing another person who does not agree with us.

How do you love a person whose very sight upon life and death is diametrically opposed to yours? How do you suppress the desire, the apparent NEED to change them so that they fit inside your track? How do you do this without psychologically punching them into submission? How do you maintain your own sanity, the features of your own face in the face of another?

This kind of meeting, the crashing of different minds, is frightening to us all. Our beliefs are questioned, and beaten up; our dogmas must bear the brunt of relentless waves, and like a wave-break wall, will either stand the test or crumble into the sea, taking our security with it. We are frightened when we are not sure of God, and of how we understand Him. We are frightened most especially the more we have constructed our own belief system, independent of a communal tradition. We are all, all of us, religious. People believe in something, inevitably: themselves, the sun, the fact that they can think, anthropomorphic gods, or the true God. So it is not the fact of ‘religious’ or not, but rather the kind of religion that makes the difference.

There are people who are not frightened, though. These live on opposite ends of the metaphysical spectrum: either they are ensconced in a religious and cultural tradition which is more like Plato’s Sparta: an entity of individuals melded together by the welded iron of laws and eyes, a nightmare of certainty- or they are Saints.

Saints. They live an exaggerated life inside, they are idealists and ideologues: but of Love, not politics. They are embedded in society like jewels in a cotton tapestry, they are those who dream big of loving a God who loves them, with everything the four loves (agape, eros, storge, philia) can offer. They are extremists, and they have no fear, except for the original sin of pride. So they work to become the nada of St. John of the Cross- to become the humblest and the most forgotten: and thus are they drawn to those considered nothing in the eyes of the rest of society, those in the gutters. They see the Lord of Heaven and Earth suffering in the trash heap. In the quest to forget self in the great ocean of God, they look to their Ideal, Christ who “humbled Himself, leaving all glory behind, taking the form of a servant”. In this, the beautiful synchronicity of the Lord becomes apparent: as they humble themselves, and lose their only fear, they become more like Christ, like God. But they do not know this. They only know Love: and bear with joy the suffering and the meeting of those who hate them because their very existence of Love makes anything else held dear look empty( those who are clinging to other things cannot bear the bright light shone on their emptiness).

A saint turns an open, loving and fearless face on the other who does not see the way they do: they are totally free, because they are the power of God, the power of love. They are already lost to self, they have nothing else to lose, and yet their souls are carried quietly and safely in the arms of God and they are more themselves than they would be if they clung to their atomized existence in this life. A saint faces the other and looks at them: really sees them. Most people only see each other through their own need-filters, their own selfish clingings, their own scars and fears: they do not truly see the other, and so they are blind. A saint sees because Christ has cured them of blindness by enabling them to die to themselves. They have no filter save that of the love of God.

We are in the time of the year of the saints. The Church placed the feast of All Saints’ today, November first: why? We are in the waning of the physical earth, the low point on the swing between Summer and Winter Solstices. Here, the Chinese say, the veil between the natural world and the supernatural thins to a point of transparency and openness. Perhaps this is true, as in many cultures of the world, one can see attempts to deal with the uncomfortable feeling of closeness to the unseen in the different religions: Halloween was, before the Church stepped in, a veritable festival of the attempt to appease the entities in the darkness in many cultures.

Beginning with saint-missionaries like Bishop Patrick, the Church stepped in to bring Christ’s power and the reality of redemption from the darkness, right at the high point of fear: All Saint’s Day. Halloween actually is ‘Hallow’s Eve’- the vigil Mass for the feast of All Saints. Yet, it is still an uncomfortable time for many people, where death and fear is celebrated and made a joke, where modern-day occultists try to bring back the glory days of evil. But the Saints march in this dark night, in their fearless love, reminding us that death is but a reminder and a visible proof of the supernatural realities: for who has not seen a corpse and known, known in the center of one’s being, that something is gone: this is a visceral and spiritual experience of the reality of the soul as part of yet separable from the body.

And “the death of His holy ones is precious in the sight of the Lord”. Strange, but not when one thinks about it: at the death of a saint, the veil between that soul, who has lived exaggerated love for the love of God, and the Beloved, is finally torn and complete unity becomes possible. Many saints, like St. Therese of Liseux were seen to pass through the veil, to yet be in the body but seeing and experiencing already the reality on the other side. One only has to look at the ethereal, uncorrupted face of St. Bernadette in her glass coffin to understand. It is a look beyond human beauty.

So as we live through these days of the thinning veil, and many of us feel the disturbance, the darkness, we can turn in joy to the saints; we can then begin, on November 2, (All Souls’) to become the saints we are all called to be: we can pray for all souls without fear- and ask to love with the exaggeration of God, because it is His gift and His gift alone. We can do nothing but use our free wills to be willing: and look at this life from the immense perspective of eternity, rather than looking in fear or in ignorance at eternity from the narrow perspective of this life.

A Measure of Charity

2006-10-23T13:06:00.000-07:00

I'm part of a small, plain, little family. I'm the Mom. There's a Dad, and three young children. If we were filmed in downtown Smalltown, we'd be pretty inconspicuous- just five ordinary people bobbing down the sidewalk with all the other bobbing people, tied together in a very normal way. We don't wear anything particularily special, except perhaps the brown scapulars or a crucifix for which we get curious looks and remarks- usually if we're right up close in an elevator or at a shop counter. Sometimes we seem odd on a Sunday downtown, because we're dressed up- a day when everyone else seems to be dressed way down. In fact, I guess we're a little odd because me (the mom) and the kids only dress up on Sundays- the rest of the week we are doing homeschooling or going to the tutorial on Wednesdays, or an occasional field trip or outing. We are on exactly the opposite schedule for dressing up or down than the rest of society.

I suppose when the UPS man comes to our door, he might notice some more oddities- the children are home with me- well, I'm at home, too- and they are either sitting at the table working on math or Latin, or they are running around like horses let out to pasture. I get a smile and a surprised look from him sometimes. The carpet cleaner named Jay looks around at the paintings of saints and the statues, and the schedules for school and just puts on his Ipod. Sometimes people are warm and ask us questions about our life, and sometimes they avoid getting to know us, because we don't fit into regular categories of culture. We are counter-culture: and that should be just fine in Santa Cruz. It actually is, for the most part; I find the society in Santa Cruz to be much more in the vein of: "Really? Wow, that's cool, whatever." This is somewhat of a relief compared to uptight Westchester County in New York, where quarterly reports to the school district are required; and you bear daily the more intense scrutiny of neighbors and secular friends.

But still, no matter- whether it be floaty Santa Cruz or lead-weight New York, we are a Catholic homeschooling family: and this is a project which takes the 110% of the whole family, Dad included. Both parents are the curriculum director, the cleaner, the person with interests, the friend, the piano teacher, the Latin teacher, the preschool teacher, the religion teacher and guide, the police PERSON and the cook- and occasionally a firefighter. We all have to look hard and carefully for friends and opportunities for social growth. This is where the really hard part begins.

Catholic families, whether in New York, California or Kansas, are like non-blips on the society's radar: we do this on purpose, because we want to pass Faith and Morals down to our children; and we have made the decision, based on what is going on in our area, to educate our children ourselves. We are entrepreneurs in the soul market, and as anyone knows who has started an entrepreneurial enterprise, it is often a hard and lonely process for the one with the responsibility. There are a lot of obstacles to success: fear of failure, finances, the sheer amount of driving, exhaustion, loneliness and not having the support from other families.

The support from other families is what I have begun to see as absolutely essential. We can't live in a Catholic vacuum- it ceases to be truly Catholic when it becomes a vacuum, for God created us in society and for society, and we have to be in the world- but not of it. In modern culture, with it's values increasingly anti-Christian, fulfilling our mission in this sense is more and more difficult. Our children, like young plants, need outside influences, but they have to be positive ones, chances for growth and learning, but not chances for corruption or confusion. So we need other families who understand our mission, with whom to share it: a society within a society.

Whenever we have moved into an area, there has usually been one or two families who are especially good at being hospitable to others: they host dinners, or St. Nicholas Day parties, or All Saint's Day celebrations; they start groups like the tutorial (a one-day supplemental school) or organize to provide food after Mass on Sundays so that families can stay around and get to know each other(if there's no food, families usually have to leave to find food for hungry children). They do this with very open hearts and hands to those whom they are just meeting! I have become more and more grateful to those people who have seen the needs of families, especially homeschooling ones, and have stepped up to an often difficult and thankless task. But to be hospitable, to support other families in their quest to bring up children who retain their innocence and who love God, is working directly for Heaven, Inc. - no unimportant job.

On the other hand, hard as I know it is to be hospitable, I have often found that this heavenly attitude is usually limited to a few families- and they are doing far more than their share of the work. I am beginning to believe that we are dealing with what is more of a moral issue than I realized. Let me explain.

If we homeschoolers are right, and the best thing for our children in the area we live in (some areas can provide great Catholic schooling and thus social outlets) is to educate them independently of the regular means, then we need support from other families: not want, but NEED support. Families in a feasible geographical area who are Catholics are each other's support systems. Sometimes we need to start a girls' or boys' group; sometimes we need to get together and clean someone's house who is sick so that they can homeschool; or be a counselor, a friend, when someone is down- but the principle, the attitude which must exist under all these activities is moral and biblical: "to clothe the naked, and feed the hungry, to give comfort to widows and orphans in their distress"- and from the Acts: "they shared everything, for the good of the community".

The most important thing a homeschooling family can do for the other homeschooling families in the area is to have a heart full of ready charity- not handouts (unless that is needed) necessarily, but a heart like God's: full of caritas, the love of God, the love of selflessness and open-ness to the needs of others. The heart that does not worry as much about personal likes and dislikes as what God thinks, the heart that learns to love with everything one has (always with prudence and the understanding of proper priorities). The beauty is, however, that the family which loves this way is often the richest spiritually- well, after all, we're dealing with the economy of God, not man.

Also, families have seasons: seasons of plenty in terms of finances and emotional well-being, and seasons of want on many levels. Other families must be flexible and ready to be back-ups- for the clubs or the tutorials, or the potlucks. Sometimes a family who has a sick mom is actually providing a center-point, a reason for the community to wake up and get together to help out. In God's economy, even sickness can be a good.

However, too often we let the three or so families who usually do everything to continue to do it until they simply can't do it anymore, and then suddenly the activities and support we took for granted are gone; or we base our willingness to do something on whether it is with someone we like or who treats us how we want to be treated. We cannot base real charity on fickle feeling, or natural 'simpatico', but rather on reasoned, willed faith and "works, without which, faith is dead." P.S.- this often brings a depth of supernatural 'simpatico', which makes the natural variety look like corn meal next to corn bread.

Some families have seasons of loneliness, especially just after moving into a new area. They are especially vulnerable as homeschoolers because there is no ready-made school group to plug into. Making friends can sometimes take a lot longer when there are few hospitable families in the area.

One family told me a story about how they had just moved and their children were lonely. The parents called a few other homeschooling families to ask for playdates, so that their children could get to know others- but amazingly, they receieved rather cold and vague responses. When I heard this, I wanted to personally punch the parents (of the vague, cold families of course). However, I was on my meds for poison oak so I knew this was a steroidal reaction. So I lectured them in my mind instead.

Really, though, this gets my dander up. It is too easy to get into a comfort zone, but we are PILGRIMS in this life, and we should always be ready to be charitable: all the more so because homeschooling families are especially vulnerable and needy: and for good reason. I believe there are some people (hopefully not me) who will have to answer to God for " ...if you have all wisdom, all virtue, but have not charity, you have NOTHING." This of course applies to many areas, to doctors and intellectuals and train drivers- but I believe that the family, whose foundations are being eroded daily in the larger culture, are especially the forum for charity: especially charity from those who should understand their obligations clearly.

Here's some tips: have a tea party for the little girls in the homeschooling group- how about once a month? Or start a late-night catechism for the dads every third Friday- provide salt-encrusted bread products and beer, too. Find out who is sick, and see if there's any way you can help- make this your silent, humble apostolate- your children will learn an invaluable lesson about charity from this. Start an email group like Barbara from New York did, where women from all over the place can email in questions and concerns, and get instant help from a huge source. Find the TORCH group in your area and become a servant. Be willing to be a substitute for the tutorial, or figure out how to start one. If you are part of someone else's group, DON'T BE FLAKY: remember that someone is putting out a lot of effort and hospitality to do it- either be a growth part, a consistent and helpful part, or don't sign up- do something else that you can be consistent with. Learn to do things that you don't really feel like doing, like trying to befriend the ones to whom you do not have a natural affinity, or the shy and hard to get to know. This is often the measure of charity.

Take care of your family: your own, and the larger family that God has placed in your area with you. Your life will be richer and God will be pleased. What greater good is there than pleasing such a good God?

God's Fool: A Reprint

2006-10-15T19:11:00.000-07:00

Almost early October, a cold wind ripping through the tops of the trees, flowers and leaves still hanging on, holding on to life. In a small, eye-of-the-storm corner of the garden, a tuft of lavender September flowers are peeking through a hole in the tough shrub. On the tiny stalks, nestled in the flowers, are large bumblebees, dying. Death returns in the midst of flowers, and it is just a few days before the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi.

Mother Church knew what She was doing when She placed St. Francis’ feast here, in this season of nature’s death. For St. Francis was a man who knew that all of nature teaches man about God, about the joy of spring, but the joy of a spring out of a fall and winter. St. Francis was not a jovial, idiotic, eternal optimist. He was optimistic about eternity, but only because of the greatest wounding and death and resurrection ever achieved: Christ’s.

As G.K. Chesterton points out, St. Francis’ entry into the world came in the fall of the world’s purgation of its paganism and nature-worship. Christendom had eschewed the spiritual lessons of nature in its attempt to escape nature-worship. Francis burst into life, to call the world back, now baptized and purged, to learn of God through His creation; and he knew that the little in life must be protected, and loved, and celebrated, because that requires humility- whether in washing a leper’s diseased body, or in providing a blessing for the animals of children. Humility is the foundation of the spiritual life, along with love, and these the little man of Assisi embodied.

How did Francis first learn humility? Again, I refer to G. K. Chesterton’s poetic analysis. Francis was attracted, with all the force of his powerful nature, to the chivalric and romantic ideals of his day. These were the days of dynastic Italian feuds and the Crusades, and Francis fell to the charms of this pageant. His stalwart and stable Assisi was his oyster, out of which he would spring in pearly brightness to troubadour the world. Suddenly, his world was turned upside down- as Chesterton says, his world was literally turned upside down. His soul, in meeting the Lord through locutions in the Portincula and on the battle march, was unfettered and set asail on the wild waters of the love of God. He saw that everything he knew: Assisi, chivalry, his family, his body, his soul, were all hanging upside down and totally dependent on God and His love. Everything. He then saw himself for what he was, a fool and a puffed-up fool. He knew also that everyone else, in heaven and in Assisi, could see him for what he was, as Chesterton puts it, “ like a fly on a windowpane’.

What might strip other souls of courage to go on, Francis responded to with total abandon, abandon almost unparalleled in the history of the Church, abandon to the will of God in imitation of Christ and Our Blessed Lady. Francis used the language of chivalry still, but in the service of God and in acknowledgement of his new understanding of his true relation to the God Whom he loved with ardent fire: he called himself God’s fool. In the language of chivalry, a ‘fool’ was what we would understand as an entertainer, but a comedian-sort, more like the Three Stooges or John Belushi. It is sadly indicative of our day that fools are held up as “comedic geniuses” and celebrities, but Francis knew what a fool was. He knew that he was a fool, and that his only dignity was that he was the fool attendant upon God: and paradoxically, then, what a dignity he had! For God’s fool has a greater dignity than any worldly dignitary. Francis also used the title of ‘fool’ in the sense that he was bent upon serving his Lord and his Love in whatever capacity, in whatever cost to himself and his own thoughts of self-dignity. Almost seven hundred years later, St. Therese of the Child Jesus would live out the same self-abenegation and humility in search of her Love, her Lord, by using the imagery of being a toy, like a ball, waiting in deep longing for the Child Jesus to want to play.

Thus did Francis learn humility: and his humility and his great love of God were born almost simultaneously. All of his actions and words can only be seen correctly by the twin lamps of humility and love of God. His care of the poor and sick, his journeys to the Holy Land to preach love of Christ to Muslim and hardened Crusader alike, his warrior-like defense of the dignity and sanctity of the Eucharist, and his stigmata, all come from these two lights. He was a joyful, but probably more serious man than he is often portrayed. He was battle-hardened and a man who understood the darknesses and illicit attractions embedded in the world of the flesh, and the death to the soul they caused. Yet he was a man full of love, an ardent and chivalrous love for Christ and because of this, for all creatures, regardless of size or importance. He was joyful in and because of his poverty, because this state helped him to remain humble and detached, set free on the wild sea of God’s love.

St. Francis would grieve for the death of bees in the early days of October, but yet would rejoice in that they played their greatest role in reminding and helping to prepare souls for death; and that they demand humility of souls, because we share the same death, and our days are “ short, like the flowers of the field.” It is good for us to remember about death, and so to turn to faith and hope in Christ and His resurrection. The glory of the autumn leaves shout and sing a last song, as if to remind us of that hope in the resurrection, the spring.

St. Francis, God’s Fool, pray for us.

Did You Pay For That F-16? Are We Responsible For A Little Boy's Death?

2006-10-08T22:37:00.000-07:00

Wierd title, I know. I'm trying to be part of the wake up call for Americans: did you pay for that F-16 that blew up a house with a family in it, in a territory that was not owned by the nation that sent the F-16? Are we responsible, as a people, for what "is being done in our name" in the Middle East?

As Christians, we need to be "gentle as doves, but wise as serpents"- in other words, we have to work for peace, but we really can't unless we know what the serpents are actually doing. The video link I've posted below is a really good, serious look at what has been happening between the state of Israel and the illegally occupied territories of the Palestinians- from the viewpoint of Israelis for Peace, Palestinians and various journalists.

Right now, we live in America, whose democracy is being eroded in large part by a media that has given in to large government and corporate interests: as Thomas Jefferson said, "I would rather live in a country with a free press and no government, than a country with a government and no free press". He understood rightly that without journalism commited to the truth with courage, democracy or true freedom can easily be morphed into a pseudo-democracy, an Orwellian oligarchy disguised as 'free'.

We need to start to look more closely, find other news sources, and TURN OFF the mainstream coverage. Check out foreign news services, or look up the organizations listed at the end of the film. This is about our responsibility to know what our government has done in the last twenty or thirty years, in terms of the Middle East and Israel in particular- and where our own tax dollars have gone in the paradigm of this fight over territory. I believe it will be something we each will have to answer for: as individuals, because a nation is made up of individuals.

We aren't getting the real story: and perhaps this film is only part of the story, but it rings a lot more true than Bill O'Reilly, Dan Rather or Ted Turner's CNN (Who in their right mind would trust anything he puts out, anyway?) At the least, try BBC America on cable.

Here's the link:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7828123714384920696&q=peace+propaganda&hl=en

King Solomon's Doe

2006-09-30T18:09:00.000-07:00

St. Catherine of Siena, as a young child, would sit around the family hearth at night and listen to the tales of the saints: she was inspired, with the generous heart God gave her, to seek after Him totally from this very young age.

She went so far as to retreat to the edge of Siena, where there was a cave, to be a hermit at about six years of age. She was persuaded to return home to live again with her family; but the Lord did not leave her longings unanswered. She was graced with heavenly visions from the time of her sixth year, the crowning moment of her life being her espousals with the Lord, from which she wore a ring that no one else could see. At the moment of her death, the tan line from the many years' wear of a supernatural ring became visible on her wedding finger.

She lived with and was tried by her family for the first years of youth, and then she was finally allowed her 'cave'; and lived the life of a hermit for a few years. She understood, by total gift, the balanced life that is a saint's: suffering balanced with the joy of contemplation; poverty balanced with the inexpressible riches of the Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist, where the Lord of Heaven and Earth comes bodily to us; and complete self-denial balanced with a fervent service and fruitfulness in the Lord's vineyard.

There are many facets of this great saint's life, this Doctor of the Church (let no one say the Holy Church is misogynist), this woman who persuaded the Pope himself to return to Rome: but I wanted to capture the essence, in a sense, of her childhood, in which the spiritual one coincided with the bodily.

She has been saying the rosary, and is out away from society, symbolic of the doe that frolics in the verdant pasture of King Solomon; and she is caught in the moment of contemplating the Lord- whether with the eyes of her body or her soul, or both, it is the same. It is the look of absolute, passionate and tender love. It is a reflection of His gaze upon the soul He loves. It is the way He looks at you.

If you notice the rosary, it has upon it a memento mori. This was a common practice, the inclusion of a human skull in art (many have seen the Magdalen Contemplating the Skull) and in sacramentals. This was a reminder, in the deep sense of St. Alphonsus Ligouri, that inextricably tied with loving the Lord and gaining one's own life, is to understand and to accept one's own death: death to self, death of the body, death of one's own desires.

"If you lose your life, you will gain it"- and the Lord lived this first for us: not only in the ultimate sense on the Cross, but also in His very 'emptying of His glory, to become like a slave'. He was showing us, in accepting death, the many kinds, that Love knows no bounds, no limits, no height nor depth: but will go to death and beyond.

Death is also a reminder that we are sinners and must continually ask mercy of the Lord, to sustain us, especially at the hour of death. We have free will until the moment when we appear before Him, and so we must keep watch, and a sober one. A memento mori is meant to help the praying one keep all of these thoughts close to the heart: and remembering death is tied to moving toward the only life that counts: that of seeing the Lord face to face.

A European Crossroads

2006-09-24T21:04:00.000-07:00

Below I have pasted two articles from the excellent website, Chiesa. com. One is by Sandro Magister, an experienced journalist and Rome-observer, and a woman who seems to understand the real meaning of being feminist. Both articles underline the enormity of both what the Pope said in his speech at Regensburg, and the terrible predictability of the reaction to it.

I think that many Americans do not grasp the full stage background of Europe today and the Pope's main program. Unlike John Paul II, Pope Benedict is not globe-trotting; rather, his trips have been, like his focus, Europe-centered. The very choosing of the name Benedict brings up the monk who, in the wake of a barbarian-run Europe, was used by the Lord to create a massive movement to renew Christendom and to form a rule that would make saints of many who followed the religious life. The Pope is laboring for the resuscitation of Europe, the cultural as well as the spiritual. In fact, it is the spiritual life, centered on Christ, which will renew Europe- and it is the lack of Christ, the denial of Christ, which is killing
her, like a lack of nourishment kills.

So a Pope named Benedict makes a speech in Europe, quoting a Byzantine Emperor who was the sovereign of a region which would be overrun by Islam within fifty years from the time he said the controversial words to the Persian. This was no mistake by an absent-minded theolgian to a bunch of specialists at Regensburg. His purpose was not to inflame the Muslim, but to make the point that the Muslim could overrun Europe, because Europe has no true moorings, no faith: and will soon, in part by her over-emphasis on pure human reason, be swamped into oblivion by those who hold a faith, even if an irrational one.

Pope Benedict, like Pope John Paul II, promotes discussion toward understanding. However, he is making it very clear that it must be on true grounds; that is, that only a discussion that puts on the table the true differences and foundations of each faith will have any real results. He is saying that like the Emperor and the Persian, we must speak truly and openly about the facts of disagreement: but that it is very difficult to speak rationally with a faith that does not see its God as comportive of reason.

The articles below describe the situation much better than I can:

Why Benedict XVI did not want to fall silent or backpedal

by Sandro Magister

The masterful lecture that the pope-theologian delivered at the University of Regensburg really did send shivers throughout the world. Because what Benedict XVI said there is just what happened afterward. The pope explained the distance that runs between the Christian God, who is love, immolated in Jesus on the cross, but also “Logos,” reason; and the God worshipped by Islam, so transcendent and sublime that he is not bound by anything, not even by that rational assertion according to which there must not be “any coercion in matters of faith.” The Qur’an says this in the second sura, to which the pope conscientiously made reference, but it then makes other and opposite statements. And the violent eruption in the Muslim world against the pope and Christians confirms that this other tendency has the upper hand, giving form and substance to the way in which myriads of the faithful of Allah view the world of the infidels. The other side of pope Joseph Ratzinger’s lecture in Regensburg is the blood poured out in Muslim Mogadishu by sister Leonella Sgorbati, a woman veiled and yet free, a martyr whose last words were addressed to her killers: “I forgive you.”

In reality, almost the entirety of Benedict XVI’s lecture in Regensburg was addressed to the Christian world, to the West and to Europe, which in his view are so sure of their naked reason – too sure – that they have lost the “fear of God.” But here as well the pope’s words found their confirmation in the facts. Hand in hand with the swell of verbal and physical violence on the part of Muslims, on the other side, in theory his own side, the pope was the target of incessant volleys of friendly fire. Just as the sagacious companions of Job attributed the blame for his misfortunes to him, so also Benedict XVI was surrounded by a veritable whirlwind of advice and rebuke of the same sort.

It was the same way in the Vatican. Benedict XVI had the good fortune of installing a new secretary of state and a new foreign minister, both of them firmly in his trust, on the very day that the Muslim attack against him began, on Friday, September 15, right after he came back from his trip to Bavaria. But the grumbling of the curia members hostile toward him did not calm down at all – on the contrary. He got away with the appointment of the new foreign minister, archbishop Dominique Mamberti, from Corsica, who has worked as a nuncio in Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea, and before that in Algeria, Lebanon, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, and thus has direct familiarity with the Arab and Muslim world, and is skilled in the art of diplomacy. But as for the nomination of cardinal Tarcisio Bertone as the new secretary of state – for this, no, they did not forgive him. The fact that Bertone is not a career diplomat, but a man of doctrine and a pastor of souls, is now being held even more against the pope as proof of his ineptitude on the world political scene. In Bavaria, with the assignment changes not yet having taken place, Benedict XVI was accompanied by the outgoing secretary of state, cardinal Angelo Sodano, who has spent his entire life in diplomacy. But the pope was careful to avoid having cardinal Sodano read in advance the lecture he was preparing to deliver in Regensburg. Whole sections of the text would have been censored, if its supreme criterion had been the Realpolitik upon which the Vatican diplomacy of Sodano and his colleagues is nourished.

For Benedict XVI, too, realism in relations between the Church and states is a value. It was so with the totalitarian systems of the twentieth century: with German Nazism as with Soviet Communism. The controversial silences of Pius XII with Nazism, and later, with Communism, of John XXIII, of Vatican Council II, and of the Ostpolitik of Paul VI, had compelling reasons, and in the first place the defense of the victims of those systems themselves. But now, it is being demanded of Benedict XVI that he maintain a similar silence in regard to the new adversary of Islam: it is a silence that is often given the name of “dialogue.” Has pope Ratzinger not respected this? Then this is the comeuppance he deserves from “offended” Islam: threats, demonstrations, burning in effigy, governments demanding retractions, the recall of ambassadors, churches burned, a religious sister killed. The pope is seen as bearing his part of the blame in all this. On the other hand, it’s “post mortem” beatification for his predecessor John Paul II, who prayed humbly in Assisi together Muslim mullahs, and when visiting the Umayyad mosque in Damascus listened in silence to the invectives his hosts hurled against the perfidious Jews. No fatwa was issued for the demolition of the Vatican walls, or for the slitting of Karol Wojtyla’s throat. It was a mere coincidence that Ali Agca, who shot him, was a Muslim – the assassination had been planned in Christian territory...

Benedict XVI does not deny the proper value of political realism. The secretariat of state has mobilized its network of nunciatures to provide for governments the complete text of the lecture in Regensburg, the official note of explanation released on September 16 by cardinal Bertone, and the explanations presented by the pope in person at the Angelus on Sunday the 17th. By the end of September, the ambassadors to Muslim-majority countries will be called to the Vatican for another effort to defuse the tensions. And the pontifical council for culture, headed by cardinal Paul Poupard, is preparing a meeting with Muslim religious representatives.

But realism isn’t everything for Benedict XVI. The dialogue with Islam that he wants to create is not made of fearful silences and ceremonial embraces. It is not made of mortifications which, in the Muslim camp, are interpreted as acts of submission. The citation he made in Regensburg, from the “Dialogues with a Mohammedan” written at the end of the fourteenth century by the Christian participant in the dialogue, the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologos, was deliberate choice. A war was on. Constantinople was under siege, and in a half century, in 1453, it would fall under the dominion of the Ottoman Empire. But the learned Christian emperor brought his Persian counterpart to the terrain of truth, reason, law, and violence, to what marks the real difference between the Christian faith and Islam, to the key questions upon which war or peace between the two civilizations depends.

Pope Ratzinger sees modern times, too, as being fraught with war, and with holy war. But he asks Islam to place a limit of its own on “jihad.” He proposes to the Muslims that they separate violence from faith, as prescribed by the Qur’an itself, and that they again connect faith with reason, because “acting against reason is in contradiction with the nature of God.”

In Regensburg, the pope exalted the greatness of the Greek philosophy of Aristotle and Plato. He demonstrated that this is an integral part of biblical and Christian faith in the God who is “Logos.” And he also did this deliberately. When Paleologos held his dialogue with his Persian counterpart, Islamic culture had just emerged from its happiest period, when Greek philosophy had been grafted onto the trunk of Qur’anic faith. In asking Islam today to rekindle the light of Aristotelian reason, Benedict XVI is not asking for the impossible. Islam has had its Averroes, the great Arab commentator on Aristotle who was treasured by such a giant of Catholic theology as was Thomas Aquinas. A return, today, to the synthesis between faith and reason is the only way for Islamic interpretation of the Qur’an to free itself from its fundamentalist paralysis and from obsession with “jihad.” And it is the only ground for authentic dialogue between the Muslim world and the Christianity of the West.

At the Angelus on Sunday, September 17, which was broadcast live even by the Arab television network Al-Jazeera, Benedict XVI expressed his “regret” at how his lecture had been misunderstood. He said that he did not agree with the passage he cited from Manuel II Paleologos, according to whom in the “new things” brought by Mohammed “you will find only evil and inhuman things, like the order to spread the faith by means of the sword.” But he did not apologize at all; he didn’t retract a single line. The lecture in Regensburg was not an academic exercise for him. He did not put aside his papal vestments there in order to speak only the sophisticated language of the theologian, to an audience made up only of specialists. The pope and the theologian in him are all of a piece, and for everyone. Cardinal Camillo Ruini, who has grasped the essence of this pontificate better than other Church leaders have done, said on Monday, September 18 to the directive body of the Italian bishops that “the fundamental coordinates” of the message Benedict XVI is proposing to the Church and the world are found in these three texts: the encyclical “Deus Caritas Est”; the address to the Roman curia on December 22, 2005, on the interpretation of Vatican Council II; and, last but not least, the “splendid” lecture in Regensburg.

Benedict XVI is hopeful. He would not have been so daring if he did not believe in the real possibility that an interpretation of the Qur’an that marries faith with reason and freedom can be reopened within Islamic thought. But the voices in the Muslim world that are accepting his offer of dialogue are too weak and too few, and almost not to be found. And the pope is too much alone in a wayward Europe that really does resemble somewhat the Eurabia described by Oriana Fallaci, a “Christian atheist” whom he has read, met with, and admired. And then there is the violence that hangs over Christians in Islamic countries, and also outside of them – when, to silence the pope, members of his flock are killed, and all the better if they are innocent, like a religious sister, a woman.

__________

The twofold symbolic weight of the killing of sister Leonella

by Lucetta Scaraffia

The dramatic killing of sister Leonella Sgorbati in Somalia on Sunday, September 16, is, unfortunately, a symbolic action of great significance. This is so for two fundamental reasons. Because, in fact, even in the absence of precise assertions, this is a matter of blackmail. And because the one assassinated was a woman, and a religious woman.

As seen in the history of the Christian persecutions, this time as well the method was chosen of striking others in the place of the one who was indicated by so many voices in the Muslim world as the main target, namely Benedict XVI, and not only because the Italian religious sister was an easier victim The explanation is found in the memorable pages of the Japanese writer Shusaku Endo, which narrate the persecution of the Christians in Japan in the seventeenth century: some Jesuits, although they were ready to die to bear witness to their faith, were forced to commit apostasy by having the Christian country people subjected to torture before their eyes. A Christian can dispose of his own life, even to the point of martyrdom – and the countless Christian martyrs of the past century demonstrate this – but not of the lives of others: the killing and torture of other Christians paralyzes the real target of the aggressive action, it gags him, it prevents him from saying and doing what would be right for himself, until it impedes him from martyrdom. The Japanese case is the most sensational, but there have been other, similar cases, if one only reads attentively the lives of the missionaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: it’s enough to recall the Combonian missionary sisters who were held prisoner by the Mahdi in the Sudan at the end of the nineteenth century.

In threatening the lives of Christians who live in Islamic countries, the intention is to make the pope retract words that he did not say, and what he did not even think. The intention is to make him lose dignity and authority, forcing him to say what is dictated by a certain type of Islamic extremism. And this blackmail is much more weighty than diplomatic protests, demonstrations, threats on fundamentalist websites: it is not possible to ask all Christians who live in Islamic countries to accept the possibility of martyrdom in order to permit the pope freedom of thought and speech, the freedom not to be maliciously misunderstood. It is the most serious thing to have happened yet in the confrontation between the West and Islamic fundamentalism, with the violation of all the rights of respect and reciprocity that the United Nations constantly invokes.

But there is another factor that increases the symbolic weight of this action: the one killed was a woman, a woman who had none of the characteristics of visibly flaunted sexual freedom that the more traditional Islam condemns in the West. A woman was killed who went with her head covered and dressed modestly, but who had chosen the veil freely, and had chosen just as freely to offer her life to God and in service of others. It is this freedom that was struck, this freedom that is the sign of a culture that attributes to women the same dignity as men have.

The simple presence of women of this type, modest and respectful, but free and responsible for their lives and their choices, brings up a problem: it is what for Benedict XVI is the encounter between cultures. Before this is a theological dialogue between religions, it is an encounter between two cultural universes that originated from two different religions, which, in this case, reserve very different places for women. If, in fact, we speak of the freedom and dignity of woman as equal to those of man, we are not placing in doubt an entire religious tradition, but we are proposing a non-negotiable cultural value: and it is precisely on the encounter among cultures and on their founding principles that dialogue must be centered, a dialogue like the one Benedict XVI has proposed, “frank and sincere, with great reciprocal respect.”

To Be Salt and Light

2006-09-17T22:01:00.000-07:00

Recently, Pope Benedict made some remarks about faith and reason at the podium of his old university- remarks that most of us would find pretty tough chewing, intellectually speaking. Within this discussion of the balance of faith and reason, he quoted an Byzantine Emperor, Manuel II, from many centuries past. By using this quote, the Pope was trying to illustrate the point that a faith cannot be true in essence if it proclaims as a tenet, something that is contrary to reason: in other words, he was trying to show that God and true faith will comport with reason, not be irrational. This doesn't mean that reason can encompass faith, or mystery, or the nature of God: it just means that a faith inspired by God would not counteract reason, or demand something that we normally hold to be evil, such as 'conversion by the sword'.

What the Pope said, even about Mohammed, was TRUE. It isn't comfortable, it is hurtful when one is mistaken and follows Islam as the true religion, but, nonetheless, it is true: and reasonable. The Pope has since stated that he was not aiming to be offensive, or to deny that there is any good in Muslims or in any passages in the Q'uran, but he was articulating a truth: that Mohammed did not bring any new revelation that was good, but rather the novelties he brought were anti-reason, such as the command to kill those who do not believe in Islam. What Mohammed reiterated from Judaic and Christian sources (upon which he relied heavily) might be good in itself.

The Pope was being 'salt' in that salt is necessary to preserve and to provide an essential nutrient, and also to give 'taste'. To those who are wounded, though, salt is painful.

The Pope was also bringing light on an essential question of our day: the necessary, God-given relationship between faith and reason: and to those who have long been in the dark, light is painful.

Please pray for the Pope, that he might be able to articulate truth in a way that those who are well-meaning and yet mistaken might "turn, and be healed".

I have reprinted the Holy Father's speech below.

Lecture of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI at the Meeting with the Representatives of Science (Tuesday, 12 September 2006, Regensburg, University)

Faith, Reason and the University
Memories and Reflections

Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a moving experience for me to stand and give a lecture at this university podium once again. I think back to those years when, after a pleasant period at the Freisinger Hochschule, I began teaching at the University of Bonn. This was in 1959, in the days of the old university made up of ordinary professors. The various chairs had neither assistants nor secretaries, but in recompense there was much direct contact with students and in particular among the professors themselves. We would meet before and after lessons in the rooms of the teaching staff. There was a lively exchange with historians, philosophers, philologists and, naturally, between the two theological faculties. Once a semester there was a dies academicus, when professors from every faculty appeared before the students of the entire university, making possible a genuine experience of universitas: the reality that despite our specializations which at times make it difficult to communicate with each other, we made up a whole, working in everything on the basis of a single rationality with its various aspects and sharing responsibility for the right use of reason - this reality became a lived experience. The university was also very proud of its two theological faculties. It was clear that, by inquiring about the reasonableness of faith, they too carried out a work which is necessarily part of the whole of the universitas scientiarum, even if not everyone could share the faith which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole. This profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about our university: it had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God. That even in the face of such radical scepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: this, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.

I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on - perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara - by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both. It was probably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than the responses of the learned Persian. The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur'an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship of the three Laws: the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Qur'an. In this lecture I would like to discuss only one point - itself rather marginal to the dialogue itself - which, in the context of the issue of faith and reason, I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.

In the seventh conversation (διάλεξις - controversy) edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the jihad (holy war). The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: There is no compulsion in religion. It is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threaten. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war. Without decending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the “Book” and the “infidels”, he turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the central question on the relationship between religion and violence in general, in these words: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably (σὺν λόγω) is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death....

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practise idolatry.

As far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we find ourselves faced with a dilemma which nowadays challenges us directly. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: In the beginning was the λόγoς. This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts with logos. Logos means both reason and word - a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance. The vision of Saint Paul, who saw the roads to Asia barred and in a dream saw a Macedonian man plead with him: Come over to Macedonia and help us! (cf. Acts 16:6-10) - this vision can be interpreted as a distillation of the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry.

In point of fact, this rapprochement had been going on for some time. The mysterious name of God, revealed from the burning bush, a name which separates this God from all other divinities with their many names and declares simply that he is, is already presents a challenge to the notion of myth, to which Socrates's attempt to vanquish and transcend myth stands in close analogy. Within the Old Testament, the process which started at the burning bush came to new maturity at the time of the Exile, when the God of Israel, an Israel now deprived of its land and worship, was proclaimed as the God of heaven and earth and described in a simple formula which echoes the words uttered at the burning bush: I am. This new understanding of God is accompanied by a kind of enlightenment, which finds stark expression in the mockery of gods who are merely the work of human hands (cf. Ps 115). Thus, despite the bitter conflict with those Hellenistic rulers who sought to accommodate it forcibly to the customs and idolatrous cult of the Greeks, biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident especially in the later wisdom literature. Today we know that the Greek translation of the Old Testament produced at Alexandria - the Septuagint - is more than a simple (and in that sense perhaps less than satisfactory) translation of the Hebrew text: it is an independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of revelation, one which brought about this encounter in a way that was decisive for the birth and spread of Christianity. A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion. From the very heart of Christian faith and, at the same time, the heart of Greek thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: Not to act “with logos” is contrary to God's nature.

In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which ultimately led to the claim that we can only know God's voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazn and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions. As opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language (cf. Lateran IV). God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love transcends knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is logos. Consequently, Christian worship is λογικὴ λατρεία - worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).

This inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history – it is an event which concerns us even today. Given this convergence, it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe. We can also express this the other way around: this convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe.

The thesis that the critically purified Greek heritage forms an integral part of Christian faith has been countered by the call for a dehellenization of Christianity – a call which has more and more dominated theological discussions since the beginning of the modern age. Viewed more closely, three stages can be observed in the programme of dehellenization: although interconnected, they are clearly distinct from one another in their motivations and objectives.

Dehellenization first emerges in connection with the fundamental postulates of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Looking at the tradition of scholastic theology, the Reformers thought they were confronted with a faith system totally conditioned by philosophy, that is to say an articulation of the faith based on an alien system of thought. As a result, faith no longer appeared as a living historical Word but as one element of an overarching philosophical system. The principle of sola scriptura, on the other hand, sought faith in its pure, primordial form, as originally found in the biblical Word. Metaphysics appeared as a premise derived from another source, from which faith had to be liberated in order to become once more fully itself. When Kant stated that he needed to set thinking aside in order to make room for faith, he carried this programme forward with a radicalism that the Reformers could never have foreseen. He thus anchored faith exclusively in practical reason, denying it access to reality as a whole.

The liberal theology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ushered in a second stage in the process of dehellenization, with Adolf von Harnack as its outstanding representative. When I was a student, and in the early years of my teaching, this programme was highly influential in Catholic theology too. It took as its point of departure Pascal’s distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In my inaugural lecture at Bonn in 1959, I tried to address the issue. I will not repeat here what I said on that occasion, but I would like to describe at least briefly what was new about this second stage of dehellenization. Harnack’s central idea was to return simply to the man Jesus and to his simple message, underneath the accretions of theology and indeed of hellenization: this simple message was seen as the culmination of the religious development of humanity. Jesus was said to have put an end to worship in favour of morality. In the end he was presented as the father of a humanitarian moral message. The fundamental goal was to bring Christianity back into harmony with modern reason, liberating it, that is to say, from seemingly philosophical and theological elements, such as faith in Christ’s divinity and the triune God. In this sense, historical-critical exegesis of the New Testament restored to theology its place within the university: theology, for Harnack, is something essentially historical and therefore strictly scientific. What it is able to say critically about Jesus is, so to speak, an expression of practical reason and consequently it can take its rightful place within the university. Behind this thinking lies the modern self-limitation of reason, classically expressed in Kant’s “Critiques”, but in the meantime further radicalized by the impact of the natural sciences. This modern concept of reason is based, to put it briefly, on a synthesis between Platonism (Cartesianism) and empiricism, a synthesis confirmed by the success of technology. On the one hand it presupposes the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, which makes it possible to understand how matter works and use it efficiently: this basic premise is, so to speak, the Platonic element in the modern understanding of nature. On the other hand, there is nature’s capacity to be exploited for our purposes, and here only the possibility of verification or falsification through experimentation can yield ultimate certainty. The weight between the two poles can, depending on the circumstances, shift from one side to the other. As strongly positivistic a thinker as J. Monod has declared himself a convinced Platonist/Cartesian.

This gives rise to two principles which are crucial for the issue we have raised. First, only the kind of certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered scientific. Anything that would claim to be science must be measured against this criterion. Hence the human sciences, such as history, psychology, sociology and philosophy, attempt to conform themselves to this canon of scientificity. A second point, which is important for our reflections, is that by its very nature this method excludes the question of God, making it appear an unscientific or pre-scientific question. Consequently, we are faced with a reduction of the radius of science and reason, one which needs to be questioned.

We shall return to this problem later. In the meantime, it must be observed that from this standpoint any attempt to maintain theology’s claim to be “scientific” would end up reducing Christianity to a mere fragment of its former self. But we must say more: it is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by “science” and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective. The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective “conscience” becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.

Before I draw the conclusions to which all this has been leading, I must briefly refer to the third stage of dehellenization, which is now in progress. In the light of our experience with cultural pluralism, it is often said nowadays that the synthesis with Hellenism achieved in the early Church was a preliminary inculturation which ought not to be binding on other cultures. The latter are said to have the right to return to the simple message of the New Testament prior to that inculturation, in order to inculturate it anew in their own particular milieux. This thesis is not only false; it is coarse and lacking in precision. The New Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the Greek spirit, which had already come to maturity as the Old Testament developed. True, there are elements in the evolution of the early Church which do not have to be integrated into all cultures. Nonetheless, the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.

And so I come to my conclusion. This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific ethos, moreover, is the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which reflects one of the basic tenets of Christianity. The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.

Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world’s profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures. At the same time, as I have attempted to show, modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought – to philosophy and theology. For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding. Here I am reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many false philosophical opinions had been raised, and so Socrates says: “It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being - but in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss”. The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur – this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. “Not to act reasonably (with logos) is contrary to the nature of God”, said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.

9/11 Anniversary

2006-09-10T23:47:00.000-07:00

Today or tonite, watch the documentary Press for Truth. Go to Google, type in the title, and click on video above the search box. You can watch it right online. It is the best thing you can do to remember this day.

TRWK

Faith in the Last Times

2006-09-03T19:58:00.000-07:00

Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson died a painful death in his early forties, in the year 1914, two months after Pope St. Pius X- for whom Msgr. Benson had great love and admiration. He was born into an accomplished Anglican family from England, and was the first son of the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury. He made a splash by converting to the Catholic Faith and becoming a priest. Upon becoming Catholic, he seemed to endure a martyrdom of prolific writing, hearing confessions and speaking, for it seems he was a very sensitive and reserved man- but a man who loved Our Lord with all that he was. Anyone who has read Come Rack! Come Rope! or The Lord of the World will feel the torrent of deep Catholic piety and absolute surrender to God; yet, in his books, he clearly outlines the essence of faith as being a thing of the will; and that our faith is a work, in the Jamesian sense, a work of love- but not primarily of emotion or intellect.

It is said that his eleven short years as a Catholic priest, until his death, were “each years of eleven years”, so great was his output of novels, poems, lectures, sermons, and non-fiction works. In my estimation he was a literary giant, whose powerful and profound descriptions; depth of themes and human experiences; and even his prophetic moments, rank him with the greatest of the world’s ‘bards’. I’ve always said there is something in the water in England, which produces such writers! However, my thought is that the water of Msgr. Benson’s soul was the Blood of Christ.

This brings me to arguably his most influential novel, The Lord of the World, which outlines the Last Times, the Anti-Christ and the Coming of Our Lord. Benson sets the novel one hundred years ahead- and as he was writing in 1907, we are living on the threshold of the time he imagined. Benson denied that his book was ‘prophetic’ in the literal sense- and it is very interesting to see what he could imagine in terms of technology, and what was beyond him. For instance, he could not imagine either the television, the computer, and certainly not the internet, so he thinks of the characters using a private and very fast telegraph; yet his ‘airplanes’ are really quite sophisticated.

The one area that strikes me as interesting in terms of prophecy, is that he characterizes the Church in the last times as a fortress- a very Pre-Vatican II characterization. Little could Msgr. Benson imagine that the smoke of Satan would literally enter into the very enclaves, through the little cracks of ambiguity left in the proscriptions of the Council, and primarily through the bad will or weakness of those who are meant to protect Her! Little could he understand how the Church could remain and yet be shrouded so that it would be hard even to find Her; or that some of her very shepherds would be leading so many astray. No, he could not imagine it. All of us who love the Church have a hard time grasping the snaking confusion, even though we are witnessing it daily. It is as if The Lord of the World is prophecy drawn in thick marker, a too-clearly unfolding of the decisive battle Sr. Lucy talks about, or a condensed version of real events. It seems that reality is really stranger than fiction, and that the development of the Last Times has taken centuries rather than a hundred years.

Where Msgr. Benson becomes prophetic is at the existential and faith level of the Last Times. How the Anti-Christ gains his power is not so important in the book - rather it is the experience at the levels of reason, emotion and will of the Catholic in the novel that becomes important for us, and those who come in later years. The protagonist, Fr. Percy Franklin, begins the book by a three-man discussion of the last hundred years’ history, in the subterranean apartment of an old, dying Catholic, along with with a young, doubting fellow priest, who later apostasizes. From the rather abstract understanding of the historical processes toward a ‘unified world’, Father Percy goes out into the reality of a world cowering under the prospect of a Great War. There is an unbearable juxtaposition between fear and ultra-modern convenience ( as we are living in today): and yet he spends his most important time in contemplative prayer- he has practiced for years this silencing of thought and emotion, to stand simple in the Presence of the Lord, in the inner recesses of the will. This practice, this understanding, this place of simple will, will be all he has left when the tide of the Anti-Christ comes.

Fr. Franklin’s faith survives the incredible temptation and power present in the ‘peace’-bearing Anti-Christ, because he simply hangs on to Our Lord, the Suffering Lord, with his will. He later hangs on, through the destruction of Rome and the last days of the world, as he leads the remnant of the Church from Nazareth as the last Vicar of Christ. Msgr. Benson’s message to us here is a prophetic message: If your faith in Christ and His Bride is based primarily on reason, or on emotion, it will not withstand the Last Times. It must be a faith forged within the Cloud of Unknowing, within the terrible and silent darkness of simple will. It must be a practiced faith, a faith bolstered by prayer-neither the whining prayer of the emotional nor the abstract faith of the academic- it must be the prayer of the will: the will to love God and to receive His grace. It must be a receptive prayer, for none of us will survive another minute without God’s grace; and we need to be aware of our total dependence upon Him even when we don’t feel Him or see Him in the normal channels or places.

Our faith must be a faith imbued with courage from God, for we will have to hang on in a terrible, sick-peace storm: and hang on to the death, if need be. There was nothing more terrible in Msgr. Benson’s book than the spectacle of former priests leading a liturgy for the Anti-Christ; a close second is the attractiveness of euthanasia for the characters without faith; and third, the superhuman pull of the forces of false peace with the Devil.

It was very interesting to me that Msgr. Benson included the destruction of Rome and the Pope leading the remnant of the hierarchical Church with the Monstrance toward the forces of the Anti-Christ- eerily similar to the visions of Fatima- although in Msgr. Benson’s book, the destruction and the procession take place apart in location and time-one in Rome, one at the edge of the plain of Mageddo (Armaggedon).

Are we living in the Last Times? My reason says, “yes”. The fruit seems to be ripening on the tree; but again, none but the Father knows the hour. However, it is still important to be watchful, to be prepared; for at no time is it easy to be a Christian in the world; and The Lord of the World is a powerful teacher about what it means to be in the world but not of it.

The Unlovable(There's a World Full of Us)

2006-08-19T06:52:00.000-07:00

I've had some important people in my life who have had something in common- and perhaps it is more common than I first thought. It is a person, most often a son and father relationship, where the father has been more or less sadistic-usually emotionally, not physically. I've seen it in my women friends, also, but in my experience, more often with men.

The sadistic comes out in making the son feel, over and over, from infancy, that somehow he is just not making it as a man, or that there is something flawed or even evil in the son, something that has to be rooted out quickly and forcefully, so that his son can 'make it in the world'. This isn't tough love. This is fear on the part of the father, a fear that was perhaps handed down to him from his parents in some form: fear of failure, fear of oneself not being a good enough father. It is a warped love, and so ceases being love to the son.

What happens to the son? He is either berated, abandoned or critcized from his earliest years. Usually, I've thought, it isn't always all the sons in a family, but the sadistic 'discipline' (emotional abuse) may often focus on one son especially- and it seems to be the son who actually has the most masculine tendencies- perhaps the father thinks, "Ah. If I can just work on this one, he may have a chance to do something with himself: he's got potential". What actually may be happening is that the father, in his fear, feels most threatened by the stronger son. He feels that this son may get out of control and he may not be able to 'save him'.

The son then may take a couple courses: either he runs away physically; or mentally, by establishing a false self to please the father and placate him. Unfortunately, this sets off a cycle that may well end up in narcissism (the narcissist begins to put the maintenance of this false self at the center of his universe). Then the son grows into a man who cannot come out of himself to really love anyone, or to really recieve love. He has locked himself, his true self, away to protect himself from, primarily, the father-but as his father's influence recedes in reality, the son replaces 'father' with 'real world', 'commitments', or 'God'. He then relates to everything through this false self, which is actually not relating to anyone at all. He becomes essentially alone- and to be alone like that within oneself is a precursor to being in hell; we are not meant to exist like that.

The other course is that the son simply rebels. This is probably the most healthy, because it is in touch with reality. However, rebellion to any legitimate authority is a dangerous course, and can produce guilt and self-hatred, or again, narcissism. The best course would be that the son is strong enough to find other father-figures, healthy ones, who will discipline him in love and selflessness, not in fear. He can then develop in tune with the real world, the world that God made and will meet him within.

Only through right, sane, true faith in God can the son, wounded by a wounded father, begin to be himself, and to love himself as God loves him. This is the only cure: and it comes often through a very tough road of blind faith in God. Most often, as Aquinas says, the Lord uses normal means of healing- He doesn't usually zap us and we're set. Therefore, I like the term used by a great counselor I know: "Incarnational healing". This means, basically, that God uses people and relationships, incarnate realities (not abstractions or words) to heal wounds in people and relationships. The wounded person needs the grace to be able to trust God when he's been so wounded by the first father in his life, and the grace to accept love from whoever God sends to heal him. But as we know, the Lord gives everyone the grace he needs- and each person always, until death, maintains his free will to choose or to reject the love God continually sets before him. The free will part is good news because it allows even the most messed-up of us to make choices to get better and learn to love.

We are composite beings, beings whose souls are interspersed throughout a physical body-somehow! This means that, in order to receive full healing, we need to work at all these levels. When a person like the son I have been mentioning is wounded, in such a primordial way (by a sadistic father), he needs to be healed by being loved.

They say the saint is one who loves the unlovable. A narcissist, an angry (or worse, not angry) person whose spirit has been beaten up for many years, IS unlovable. This is their torment and it drives their existence. They can never find anyone perfect enough, or safe enough; they can never be satisfied because they are asking something impossible of another person. They do not truly see other people, often, until it is 'too late'. But then this is a grace: to be humble, to learn that you missed something so important- and then to be more open to the possibility that what you see as reality may be mistaken. Then there is a chink in the iron wall: and infinite hope! For the Lord always remains, waiting to insert love, usually through who He puts in our lives: friend, co-workers, religious, counselors, family members, a legitimate marriage-partner(or if that is not possible, Himself as Spouse of the soul).

So how does the saint love the unlovable? The pattern is how Christ loved. He laid down his life. In practical, daily terms, this means that the saint must have an over-abundance of God's love flowing through him, so that his heart can become a stepping stone for another, especially the unlovable. As Our Lord said to Blessed Angela: "Make yourself a capacity, and I will be a torrent of love through you." Through saints and potential saints making themselves capacities, wounded people continue to have a chance to experience true love, over and over.

True love can come in a friendship, a marriage, a family relationship. But the saint has to remain primarily in love with God. All his source of strength is the Holy Spirit. And he must be a person of prayer and commitment to the Sacraments, the Sacraments which nourish both body and soul.

Most situations are people in a relationship or family who are mixtures of potential sanctity and woundedness in different areas. With God, and right religion (how we relate to God), these mixtures of love and problems can slowly improve.

My early years of romantic thought about marriage and relationships have been blown out of the water. And good thing, too. For I'm starting to see that real, deep love has romance, but of a different color than the tinny stuff we're brought up to expect. It is the romance of Christ with a soul, the King with the scullery maid. Romance between two people is lovely and real, but it needs to be in a situation that always has potential to grow into the love of God: in the tough places of commitment, of sacrifice, in the places where we must wait on God to help us. Asking God to fill us with His love, and thus to help with problems, especially amongst the unlovable parts of us, is how it can happen.

Union With God in the Tempest

2006-08-15T10:00:00.000-07:00

A Reprint

In the movie Therese, there is a very simple but profound scene: a climax, a turning point. It is where St. Therese herself says in A Story of a Soul, “my life was changed, in the time it took to go round the turning of a stair"; it is her passing from one with the will of a child to one with the will of a maturing Christian. It the movie, this change is shown visually as Therese kneels before the crucifix in her room and stretches out her hands in imitation of the small ivory figure nailed to the polished wood.

In the following days and months, Therese begins to conform her will to the Lord’s. She starts with very small things, she starts with the denial of self: not complaining when something unpleasant is asked of her; not weeping when something is said which hurts her pride. Then she moves to actively conforming her will to the Lord’s, by taking that habitual denial and filling the residual emptiness of self with acts of love and kindness towards others. Her eyes begin to be opened, and she begins to see all that there is to do for others, in very small and unseen ways; and then, she begins to see that in the strange economy of God, even her small acts, although done “with great cost to myself” can accomplish big things- even to the point of saving a soul. She once said, “A soul can be saved in the picking up of a pin”-that is, in conformity to God’s will.

In her conformity to God’s will, she begins to realize, as the years go by, that her vocation is to be in the center of the Church, in the heart: “My vocation is love”. And sheis the saint who knows in a special way that all of us, especially in the beginning of our journeys, have the wills of children, to whom each small sacrifice is insurmountably hard- because she herself was "a small soul." The journey, the success, the contemplation, the union, the love: all are God’s, all are His gifts! Also in the movie, Therese, the Mother Superior says to Therese, “The closer you come to God, the simpler you will become”. This is also the essence of contemplation.

Therese in all of this, is following in the august footsteps of the other great Carmelites, like St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila. These two were people who had their feet firmly planted on the earth- they were of humus, of the soil, or humble- but they were also two of the great contemplatives of the Church, and the mountain of Carmel was their haunt: they seem to be very high above us, on the sun-kissed peaks of that misty mountain. St. Therese of Liseux comes to us three hundred years afterwards as another great contemplative, but a contemplative flower in the meadow below the great mountain. Her road to contemplation is simpler, smaller, quieter. It is as if the Lord grew the Little Flower to show us that contemplation is a call for all of us- for contemplation is, simply, living in the presence of God. It is the daily, hourly, minute by minute practice of being aware of, and living immersed in, a Presence which is all around us and has always been all around us.

The mission of St. Therese, I believe, was to show with her life, her little life, that all can accomplish this with the help of God. But perhaps some are wondering still, what is contemplation and why is it so important? How do I practice and accomplish this?

Dom Zeller says, “Contemplation expresses itself in actively receiving.” There is a passive receptivity, which is more like fatalism. Then there is the more fully feminine idea of active receptivity, which can best be visualized in the conjugal relationship described in the Song of Solomon. The soul, whether it be that of a man or woman, is always the spouse of the Lord- to His activity, we are actively receptive. He sees the image of Himself in us, and as we actively conform to His will, we are receiving Him. As we love Him, He pours Himself into our being.

Contemplation is, really, at its highest level, total union with God. But all of us who are searching for God, longing for Him, trying to love Him and obey Him on somewhere on the journey towards union with God. As C. S. Lewis said, there is no such thing as ‘static’ in the spiritual life. We all, every person, are either moving away from God or towards Him; and now, in these times, I think the movement towards or away is much more clearly life or death. The battle lines are being drawn now, like blood in the snow. The writer David Hart, in his profound article “Christ and Nothing” argues that now the choice for Westerners is between union with Christ or union with the self- and the self is, set by itself with no reference to anything higher, a nothingness. Our modern culture in the West is now largely built upon this principle- that there is no greater moral law than that which each person makes for himself. This is the abyss incarnated: it is the Body of Satan. And as we see now, the West is globalizing itself and its values through the channels of economics, cultural outlets like the mass media, and pure force.

Therefore, as Mr. Hart argues, the choices for Christians becomes clearer and clearer. One cannot be of the world and be of Christ. It has always been thus, but it seems now that the murky options are clearing away: each rival cultus, from paganism to Islam are being corrupted into the worship of self, or the nothing. This is the meaning of the process of secularization.

How is this all related to contemplation? Because Christians who must live in the now largely pervasive culture of the nothing must learn to be aware in deeper ways of the presence of God. The traditional, visual and accessible societal means of being encultured into Christ are disappearing. One thinks of the typical religious service and how they are largely centered around the ‘congregation’ rather than the ‘bringing of the congregation to God”. There are too many examples to enumerate.

This does not mean that we must eschew all communal religious activity. To the contrary- we must search out and cultivate those small communities of authentic worship within the Catholic Church, which enculturate us to the union with God. And we must make, as our goal, to be in union with Christ. Contemplation is the daily, hourly, minute-by-minute expression of this. It is the longing look at the One we love. It is waiting upon the Lord. It is being like Our Lady, in her fiat. And contemplation can only flourish in prepared soil: a soil fertilized with the prayers, Rosaries, small denials of self, ascetical practices appropriate to one’s state in life, consecration to the Lord through Our Lady. The highest means of preparation for the life of contemplation is the reception of the Holy Eucharist. In a paradox, this is also a union with God in an incarnate way. It is the capstone of the life of the Church- for the Eucharist is Christ. Our Holy Church carries within Her all the means to union with God: but now they must be searched for under the crustations of modernism which have grown on Her.

There are some general practices which help: and the books A Story of A Soul by St. Therese of Liseux and The Choice of God by Dom Van Zeller are my recommendations. The expert is probably St. John of the Cross.

I think St. Therese, St. Teresa, and St. John of the Cross, all under Our Lady’s brown mantle of Carmel (the same material as the Brown Scapular), are calling every soul who wants Christ and eschews the nothing, to aim for contemplation as a means of the soul’s survival in the tempest.

Miralee, Kensa, and the Crippled Lebanese Man

2006-08-06T16:20:00.000-07:00

These three people are not related at all, in any way, except in my heart. They are especially colourful stones in the mosaic of people in my life, the many people who have some tie to the navel of the world, that is, the Middle East. They are in a special grouping: those pieces whom I cannot quite categorize, except to place them carefully together in the place on my mosaic in which the grout is prayer for the special grace of God.

Miralee was my nanny, my grandfather who cared for me when we lived in Afghanistan. I have dim memories of his wizened and gentle hands patting me on the arm, “Imjabeeb, Tamee, imjabeeb”; his quiet and sun-bleached eyes smiling, always smiling, until the day we left and they were wet and sparkling, with the words, “When you are big, Tamee, come back to visit me.”

I have never gone back-except in spirit, many, many times- for I am sure Miralee is dead, he was a grandfather in truth when he was traveling the dirt roads of Kabul, back and forth from our house to his. He was a Muslim, a simple man too, and like the poor can, he loved me with a care and purity. He warned my naïve young parents about the bad gardener and the packs of dogs outside, the scorpions the size of a man’s hand. I remember Miralee as the most pure gift of Fatherhood, a spark of older, wiser gentleness. When we left Afganistan in 1973, I had a recurring dream of the land engulfed in flames, totally destroyed. The dreams receded and were replaced by reality only a few years later. And as my own life entered into the metaphysical flames of confusion and uncertainty, the fate of Miralee and how he’d loved me were always in the back of my heart, because he’d given me his heart, many times over- and my soul has hope for his in the mercy of God.

Kensa is my neighbor here in California. She comes from Morocco but of an American mother and an English/Iranian/Moroccan father. She is a mosaic within a mosaic piece- responds easily and naturally to pulls of compassion and virtue, but skeptical to any organized religion. She sees selfishness clearly and has no pretensions to the upper class being somehow better, yet also seems strangely, loosely luxuriant. She fits both in the Quaker Meeting House and belly dancing in someone’s sitting room in Morocco. We go on long walks and I talk sometimes about Christ and she questions me on hypocrisy and real love and politics; she is extremely reasonable but suddenly hurt and sensitive, putting the Hand of Fatima around her child’s neck. She understands the situation in Lebanon from a Western and an Eastern point of view.

Somehow, the Kensa I see inside does not fit with the secular, environmentally ferverous, international, third-culture kid. Her soul seems to be a religious one: in that when her children and her husband fail her, when she is faced with something raging like a fire in her life (as we all face, both failure and fire, in ourselves and in others) she will raise a metaphysical cry- and I hope that she will remember the little glimpses of Christ (I hope were see-able) she may have encountered. When she asks me what made me change into a religious person, and I say that I finally understood that God loves me- that simple truth- she does not say anything, there is a flat and closed silence. I do not understand this silence, and it grieves me. It as if she cannot grasp the paradox of intimacy and omnipotence I am presenting to her. But I love her, nonetheless, because I see something in her, like love set to the music that floats along the harbor-water in Tangiers. I have never heard it, I have never been to Tangiers, but I hear it in her. In some ways, she, like those of her father’s culture, has from the beginning of my knowing her, given her heart to our family and to me- the heart-giving of an open tent, a sharing of food, time and care. She treats my children like she does her own and catches them when they jump to her in the pool; she saw that Ana was ready to swim before I did. Yet, I know that also in this giving, there is great responsibility to walk therefore carefully, because once betrayed, even inadvertently, and the tent will never be the same. So I pray but know that I am not her answer- only Christ will be, as He is for the whole world.

The Crippled Lebanese Man is the only name I have for him- just a chance meeting outside a Catholic Church somewhere you wouldn’t expect to meet him. He told me something that brings Miralee and Kensa together, and places them in the context of the suffering in Lebanon, Iraq and Israel. “A Muslim,” he said, leaning on his walker, “will give you his heart if you approach him with open hands in peace. He will give you everything he has. But if you approach him with war he will fight you until he dies.”

Is this right philosophy? No. It lacks prudence, forgiveness and holy balance. It lacks the Wisdom of Christ: “Do not throw your pearls before swine”- that is, know with whom you are dealing- and “ be gentle as doves, wise as serpents”- that is, be gentle but with the firm constitution that survives to forgive- “ if a man asks you for your shirt, give him your cloak as well”- that is, in the context of detachment and love for your fellow man, but with no conditions of return- “ if a man slaps you on your left cheek, give him the other also”- that is, forgive all the way to the Cross.

So now the Semites are in a civil war- for the Lebanese, the Iraqis and the Israelis are all Semitic, all descendants of Abraham. Their lines of division are religious and political- but it is essential to remember, essential, that neither side explicitly has Christ informing it- except among small communities and individuals like Miralee and Kensa who are trying to follow the lights of love as they understand it, who are singing songs of love with their lives. We Christians are the salt granules who must answer those songs with the Word that will fulfill the nascent melodies.

The difficult thing is that the communication cannot come through UN Resolutions, armies, or frontal assaults. It comes when one lays his life down for the other in the Spirit of Christ. It is like a live-wire connecting one wire to another, passing the electricity along until all is connected: and there will be the Kingdom of God. And this is not a Western project- how presumptuous! No, it is a project the Lord started in the Great Command, "Go ye unto all the world, making all men my disciples". Nothing less will do.

My Beloved Father Edmund

2006-07-31T23:12:00.000-07:00

I met St. Edmund on Ender’s Island, Connecticut. To be more accurate, I came across his arm. I was attracted by the gentleness and beauty, the long, slightly curved fingers and the delicate bone structure of the hand. I marveled at the thought that a hand can tell so much about a person, because I was immediately aware of St. Edmund’s presence. I was struck by the sense of peace and loving interest in my hurts and fears. His island, possibly like his other resting place, the Abbey of Pontigny in France, is a place of beauty, peace and refuge for the burdened spirit. After observing many emotional healings in the families and people who visited the island, I became aware that there was a great saint interceding, humbly and quietly, without recognition- a great lover of Our Lord and Lady.

In preparing for this icon, I researched the life of St. Edmund. I felt the hairs stand on my neck as I met the same man in words as I met in spirit on Ender’s Island. His titles: Peacemaker, Father of Poor and Afflicted Children. Thus the icon shows St. Edmund interceding for one of his poor and afflicted children, encouraging another to reach out in charity.

St. Edmund was born in England in 1174, a contemporary of St. Francis of Assisi. He was primarily a man of prayer, and then a scholar. He became a priest, then was pulled up through the ranks of the Church until he occupied the Archbishopric of Canterbury, at that time, the second highest place in Christendom. Like his saintly predecessor, St. Thomas a Becket, he was forced into exile by problems of politics. On his landing in France, he blessed a young prince who would become the future King and Saint Louis. He was not a politician, but a saint, who loved his neighbor. He was not a worldly man, but made his decisions based on the justice and love of God and thus he failed in politics. His life was like a perfect mold of the beatitudes. I take many quotes from the beautiful biography of St. Edmund, Edmund Rich : Archbishop and Saint, by M.R. Newbolt (first published in 1928). I give here examples of a few of the beatitudes:

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“One might subtract everything else from him — all his gifts of learning and the powers of leadership which carried him from the position of a poor scholar to the Primacy of England — and still, by virtue of those long hours spent night after night in solitude before our Lady's altar, he would remain a saint, retaining what is essential in his character.”

Blessed are the meek: for they shall posses the land.

“Rather he knew that it becomes the servant of the Lord to suffer. "Eadmundum doceat mors mea ne timeat" ran the legend on his seal. It was Becket's martyrdom which pointed to him the true way to victory. He would strive till he could strive no more, yield till he could yield no further without sin, endure to be browbeaten, humiliated, flouted, and disillusioned, and then, since Henry was no tyrant to give him the glory of martyrdom, he chose the humbler self-immolation of retirement.”

Blessed are they who mourn: for they shall be comforted.

“For saints are unaccommodating people, excessively inconvenient to live with in an evil world where Christian principles have to be elastic if they are to square with politics and economic laws...(my sic). We get the impression of a gradually growing sickness of heart, a progressive agony of resistance to forces which he could neither make alliance with nor overrule.

Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have their fill.

“As a bishop he stood for the very highest ideals of the churchman ; he is in the true succession of saints of apostolic life who ruled the flock of Christ, not from ambition nor for filthy lucre, but as a true shepherd, ready if need be to lay down his life for the sheep.”

Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

“When according to the law he received a "heriot"—that is, the best animal from the estate of a deceased tenant — he always listened to the natural complaints of the widow. " My good woman," he would say, speaking to her in English, "this is the law of the land, and custom demands that thy lord should receive the best animal which thy husband had when alive." Then turning to his retinue he would say in French or Latin, "Truly this law was invented by the devil, not by God. After the poor woman has lost her husband, the best thing her dying husband had to leave her is taken away." He would then say to the widow in his mother tongue, "If I lend you the animal, will you take good care of it for me?" Thus the requirements of the laws of man and God were satisfied, at the expense of the archiepiscopal estate.”

Blessed are the clean of heart: for they shall see God.

“He was seen to wash with wine and water the marks of the five wounds on his crucifix, then, making the sign of the cross over these ablutions, he drank them with great devotion saying the words of Isaiah, " Ye shall draw water with joy out of the wells of salvation." His love for the image of the Crucified was notable throughout his life, and in the history of Christian devotions this practice of his was famous in the development of the cultus of the Five Wounds, which finally crystallised into devotion to the Sacred Heart, in which the spear made the chiefest of the wounds of Christ.”

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

“We too need scholarship allied to sanctity, and our generation, like his, is overwhelmed with an access of fresh knowledge which requires to be assimilated by religious thought, and is assailed by an epidemic of unbelief which only doctors of the faith can conquer.”

Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice's sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“The world being what it was, and he possessing the character he did, no other result of his life was possible, for, as has been said, he is one of those whom our Lord sends as lambs into the midst of wolves, and the wolves of his day were hungry and formidable. He may not have combined in equal proportion the protective wisdom of the serpent with the harmlessness of the dove, but no tact or subtlety could have evaded the issues he was called to face.”

St. Edmund of Canterbury, to me, is a saint akin to St. Joseph: a true father, gentle and loving, but never losing sight of the truth. His life gave a perserverant and humble glory to God.

Enclaves of Heaven

2006-07-23T18:44:00.002-07:00

Shaw Island, part of the San Juan Island chain in Puget Sound, is truly an island from regular suburban or city life; even more so than the other islands in the chain. Shaw makes Orcas Island look like a hopping metropolis.

We traveled over on the ferry from Orcas to Shaw this morning because we were looking for a reverent Mass, and hoping that the Mass at the Benedictine Monastery on Shaw would be just that. Part of the charm of these islands is that they are like small countries unto themselves, complete with mountains and farmlands tucked in between the boundaries of the blue, cold water. The monastery is in one of these farming areas; a quiet, gravel-crunching turn under a wooden archway, with a large rust-coloured Benedictine cross melding into the red and brown trees. Along the road cows, llamas, peacocks, chickens and wheat are growing and living silently under the resplendent sunlight of a Sunday morning.

The first good sign is that a nun barrels by us in an ancient red Subaru, in full work-habit with a blue and white bandana tied like a pirate’s over her headpiece. Coming in from haying, she is hurrying to change for Mass. The chapel is the second good sign, for it is lovingly built- how can one see that? The straight lines of the roof, the carefully allowed moss on the Japanese-style gate, the trimmed bamboo reeds, the small touches here and there of both beauty and sturdiness. It is a strange combination, this San Juan-style-sturdy(pine logs and cedar siding) and the beautiful Oriental décor and garden: but somehow, it fits together: the whispering of the wind in the pines and the green, sleepy sound of the water flowing down a rock into a carefully placed pool; the island rocks placed in the cracks of the slate path, but island rocks polished to a beautiful sheen, little tiny works of art; the off-center apex of the building held aloft by a rugged pine log, left in it’s natural but shaven state- off-center in a stance of demure, subtle reverence to the altar which becomes the focus of the space rather than the building itself.

The Benedictine sisters come quietly into the cloister area of the chapel, behind a transparent grille of bamboo, and begin to sing: we look at eachother in gratitude, because it is a beautiful, simple, “Asperges me…” and the Mass begins. The quiet reverence of a Novus Ordo Missae said the way it was promulgated, complete with the priest facing the East- ad orientum-the worshipful rythym of a people looking towards the Lord with one another.

I was thinking about this, this quiet enclave, the beautiful farm with its centerpiece this little piece of heaven, and wondering how we all present got to this beauty, this intersection of ourselves and Our Lord, on this small island in the more or less pedestrian State of Washington. How can I describe these moments, whether you are in a little town in New York, or Mexico, or a makeshift altar on pilgrimage? They are moments where you look around gratefully to the serious, reverent neighbor, the wise, sacrificial and quiet-spoken priest, the plaintive air of the Gregorian chant, and the air becomes heavy with the supernatural, as if the Lord sees the feeble human attempts to worship Him and gently turns His gaze our way, filling us all in ways unspeakable.

For myself, I was thinking about this miracle, and then the Old Testament was read: “ I Myself will gather a remnant, I will shelter them in a good land, I will be their Shepherd.” I thought of how the Lord Himself grants the enclaves, the tiny pockets of real worship, real life, in the midst of the Ellulian flight from Him that is the world.

I was thinking about the small number of nuns and their age, I was thinking in a worldly way about the survival of this place with the lack of vocations; for most people cannot even see this place, they hear its name, perhaps, and look no further- for they are not looking further than convenience or of ‘uplifting service’. I myself fall into this convenience thinking very often.

I was wondering about the mystery of these small enclaves of heaven, compared with the busy, alternating current of suffering and entertainment of the world. But I was, again, thinking in a worldly sense.

But these enclaves are the Lord’s, it is His will that allows them, grows them and leaves them in the hands of His creatures: they remain His. When we ignore them, or do not look for them, we are poorer and we are culpable.

As we left, the little valley spreading below the road, I saw a peacock sitting majestically on the balcony of the nun’s house, across from the barn. As he spread his wings and moved in his silvery, slow way, I was forcefully reminded of the loss of Eden- and the Deep Beauty that must have been there. It was the combination of the light, the reverent Mass, and the Presence of God that made me see an ordinary day as a slice of Paradise. It was a grace.

If you seek, you will find.

The Cure of Narcissism

2006-07-17T23:59:00.000-07:00

She waited there, by the sandy window ledge, as the clouds beyond the desert mountains caught the last light like white cloth hung behind the oil lamps. The darkness of her unbound hair covered the side of her face as she leaned down on one arm, still attending the glorious colours of evening; she mused that it seemed the world was underwater, and that somehow this glorious sky was the real land, that the heavens that caught light were somehow like the glowing shore surrounding the blackness that was the fallen world.

As she focused on a certain cloud sculpture, her peripheral vision seemed to catch a movement in another part of the sky, like a sudden whirlpool in water. The next instant she felt a presence at her back, and she peeped out from under the strands of hair as slowly as she could. She felt a sudden rush of fear, and love, and glory, as if indeed all the beauty of that sky had pulled itself together into a person, who was now addressing her: “Hail, O Full of Grace, the Lord is with thee”.

Immediately she got herself turned around, still in a half-sitting position. Her face became white, even in that soft pink light of sunset; and any admiration or fascination she might have entertained on this creature’s behalf was immediately stifled by both her awe and outright fear, and also by her habitual practice of looking for the unknowableness of the Lord. She was not distracted by earthly beauty- and even this unearthly beauty could not entice her to want it for herself. She was afraid because she did not know who this was or what this meant for her soul.

Gabriel, or Power of God, knew all this about the young woman humbly looking at the floor, and so he said gently, “Be not afraid, for the Lord has found favor with thee.” She did not speak, but waited. The angel continued, and each word seemed very heavy to the young woman, a heaviness of massive, bright diamonds. She had to take in each syllable, and they almost hurt because of their immensity, as if they were actual physical things. He said, “Behold thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and shalt bring forth a son; and thou shalt call His name Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Most High and the Lord God shall give unto Him the throne of David His father; and He shall reign in the House of Jacob forever. And of His kingdom there shall be no end.”

The corners of the room were darkened, but between Mary and the Gabriel there was a strong focus of all the light in the heavens. She looked up with a mixture of timidness and holy, solemn joy, her faith in the power of God already evident in her features: “How shall this be done, because I know not man?" The question had come from a heart lost in the mystery of God, a heart lost in the highest love, a love of passionate, loss-of–self humility and sacrifice. A heart like unto God, because He had filled her with His grace and prepared her for this moment and all others after. A helpless creature’s heart, but one He had transformed into a vessel of supernatural beauty, a heart inflamed with all loves coming out of the fiery furnace of charity, like the rays of the sun.

The angel inclined his glowing features a little, and lifted his hands: "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee. And therefore also the Holy which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.”

Mary tried to take in all these words. But she only understood them in the realm of her soul which is beyond words, the part of all of us that simply trusts God. In that realm, she was pondering a real question of love, but from One Whom she could not see or know in the way a maiden expects to know before acceptance. In the place beyond words, however, she’d lived in prayer for most of her young life; she had waited, a servant of the Living God, she had practiced virtue and forgot her self in contemplation of the beauty of the Lord as she understood Him in a myriad of ways. Here was no selfishness, no errant sensuality, no thought of a place in the world at all: only room for a clear, pure stream of servanthood that was fashioned by the Lord Himself, unbeknownst to the object of His grandest plan. In that silence-full place, Mary’s answer had been formed over all the hundreds of days that comprised her life to this point: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done to me according to thy word."

Each day thereafter, her life was that answer, over and over, from the long journey to Bethlehem and the cave, to the Holy City and the Cross, to the Empty Tomb and the Upper Room of Pentecost. She was, and is, a true Echo of True Beauty: and she calls in full tones the rest of us to the cure of narcissism.

Narcissus’ true sin was to miss True Beauty and put something, a reflection of himself, in the place of God. The genius imbedded in the naming of the nymph, “Echo” is multi-layered: Echo not only provides Narcissus with more of his own reflection in a symbiotic relationship, she also, like the echoes, or ripples from a splash of water, spreads the narcissism into a society. Narcissus can be renamed Nemesis, or inverted image, for he is symbolic of the fallen part in all of us that wishes to invert the image of God in ourselves into a self-image. This is idolatry, plain and simple, and wreaks havoc upon the world, because it destroys and absorbs others into itself like Echo. It is like a virus, numberless absorbent selves trying to remake creation in their own creature image.

True Beauty once walked in Palestine, and His Echo was Mary. He is the only one with the right to love His own image in others, for He created them all, and Him loving Himself is, by its essence of Charity, loving the other and transforming them into true beauty. He is the Source of Love. Real love begets love and builds up on a strong foundation; and selfishness begets selfishness and destruction.

The cure for narcissism, both on a personal and cultural level, is not a thing like a pill or a method or a social program- it is a Person, the Person of Christ. This sounds like an unattainable answer until we understand the true role of religion (Latin, to tie). Like the weaving of a net which pulls men to safety, religion slowly and surely ties us to the Person of Christ: and if it is true religion, it does not bind into selfishness, but into the freedom of a disciple and a slave of Love. This slavery is joy, this discipline is gratitude and celebration, and ultimately freedom from the pit of living for self.

The daily practices, the examples of those who have gone before heroically (the saints), the architecture, the liturgy, the prayer books, the hierarchical nature of the Church, the different members of the body both clerical and lay, the chant, the spiritual direction, the holy education: all these little pieces work together to form a religion that ties one to the Person of Christ- or, if it is a man-made religion and thus false, again to self. These pieces must all work together, they must be informed by the Person of Christ in order to lead back to Him. That is why these seemingly small things, like prayer books and liturgical norms, are so very important. They become like the individual ropes of the net; if one of them is weak, many fish will fall back to the sea of destruction.

It is, of course, not left to chance that Our Lord used the parables pertaining to the fishing barques, the nets, and the fish. In His choice of First Apostle, He chose a master fisherman. It is also no accident that in mystical writing, the Church is called 'Peter's Barque'. The sea is murky and a dangerous place for fish, but they cannot see this at all, being unable to survive anywhere else: they are helpless as prey. The fisherman lowers his net, and is careful to lower a mended one, lest his work be in vain; and he pulls in a catch ordained by forces greater than himself. In pulling the fish out of the water, he is putting them in a position to die- they will no longer be fish, but in order to be born to a new life, they must come into the fisherman’s boat and die to self. The more resistant may jump out, but those that die will be changed in the confines of the boat, they will begin to become new creatures in Christ, creatures meant for heaven.

Narcissism, which is really just a precursor to hell, is cured by a death to self and an infusion of supernatural charity. This is brought about not usually by a single act of extraordinary grace from God, although this does and can happen. The most usual way, nonetheless miraculous, is through accepting the net of true religion, in order to be brought into Peter’s Barque, in which the Lord is waiting to transform us into fires of charity(Religion is like a slow-motion miracle). When we finally become Echoes of Truth, rather than of self, we can begin to transform the narcissistic culture we live in.