A European Crossroads

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Culture of Narcissism

Part Two of three

Most of us, without knowing it, swim like tadpoles in a sea of narcissism. We grow up, absorbing the public school culture, the TV, the movies, the news, the street culture in modern Western life. We are formed, in large part, by the seemingly random and existential accidentals around us: and they form us more deeply the less we are aware of their presence.

We are the child who sits watching a Disney movie of a young woman who strives to break the bonds of natural authority in order to plant her image on the world around her; we are the middle school student who suddenly realizes that in order to matter to our peers, we must conform by asserting ourselves with the clothing we wear (which, by the way, ends up looking as a facsimile of the clothes that everyone else is wearing). We are the teenager who knows nothing of the word vocation and ‘lives for the weekend’- a weekend of trying, via some substance or another, to reach intimacy but never to build true friendship. We are the young adult on a gap year, feeling that the loss of identity in the midst of a European twilight is somehow our right; and we are the twenty and thirtysomethings, feeling the weight of new responsibility as if it were meant for someone else, and not really seeing the importance of it beyond what it means for us, as an ‘autonomous individual’. We are the middle-aged sixties washouts who cannot commit to anything, because it threatens our boundaries of surface happiness: and it directly threatens our false view of ourselves as loving individuals. We are the citizen who cannot see that our own secular government, founded on deep pluralism, can and does commit evil (although even a numbskull free of narcissism could put that together). We are the adults who cannot think for ourselves, or think abstractly, because the culture we live in does not produce freedom, but rather narcissists and their symbiotic Echoes.

In the fifties, a Muslim cleric named Kutu came to the United States to study our school system and lived in a small American town. He came to a devastating revelation: even in the American heyday of law and order, the philosophies of radical individualism would produce a people who could not see beyond themselves; they would become selfish, to the point of seeing reality in the image of themselves- and that this was the great danger of the future to his fellow Muslims.

In time, Kutu himself became unattached to reality, in that he was the founder of a radical group of Muslims who came to the (ironically) rather narcissistic conclusion that they were allowed to kill anyone who didn’t practice the faith the way they did. However, amongst the false religious views producing fanaticism were some valid observations. At the time of his American sojourn, Kutu was an educated, moderate Muslim: he was a religious man, who understood something correct and fundamental: that the truly religious person could not be selfish, and that selfishness (narcissism) can be cultural and not just an individual problem. He saw the devastating effects that narcissism, or radical individualism, would produce on a culture at large: it would destroy the ability for people to have faith.

The Latin root of religion is religare, which means “ to tie”. In religion, which is the way in which we practice our faith, we are tied to God: we are obedient to Him, we are the feminine soul in relation to the Creator, the I to the Thou, face to Face. A truly religious person is in the process of forgetting self, or "losing one's life to gain it (in Christ)". But a radical individual, one who “has the right to create the universe as he or she sees fit” (paraphrase from Planned Parenthood vs. Casey) becomes fundamentally a narcissist. And when our own Supreme Court makes statements anywhere close to the one paraphrased above, we have a narcissistic culture. We begin to lose the very ability to see beyond our own image to the other, most importantly to the most Other, God. We cannot think in terms of abstraction, or principles, or faith, because everything is immanentized, everything is reduced to Descartes’ “I think therefore I am”- or the modern version- “As I think, therefore everything is”.

M. Scott Peck wrote a great book titled The People of the Lie in the late seventies or early eighties. In it, he documents that people who are evil are essentially narcissists, those who cannot see beyond the image that they have of themselves. This way of life is not only diametrically opposed to a truly religious life; it is necessarily propped up by bundles of lies. Dr. Peck also describes how a group or nation can become narcissistic, and thus begin to see that making the rest of the world in their own image is somehow righteous and necessary. It makes a person, and a nation, unable to see beyond themselves to reality, and unable to see those whom they are remaking in their own image. Others simply become echoes outside the veil of self.

The Myth of Narcissus Retold

Part One in a Series of Three

Narcissus was a beautiful young man, it is said; and he was given such physical beauty that he was a living picture of the Platonic form of Manly Beauty. He walked alone in the woods on a summer evening and was attracted to the smoothness of the darkening water. As the last rays of creamy sunlight caught his face, he looked into the water and fell in love. He sat curled on the side of the lake, staring at the elusive image on the surface until the light deserted him; he slept, then awoke in the morning sparkle to look at his reflection in this new aspect, the tentative light of dawn.

All day, he watched his beautiful countenance changing in the water: Here, this was the answer to his need for love, for the ideal, for the hunger after perfection, so often thwarted in the ugliness of daily life in the town and farm. Here, here was simplicity of form, crafted like a seamless garment, with no blemish, perfect in its predictability: his reflection was not only perfect beauty, it was something he could love and control at the same time. For Narcissus, the world was a terrifying place of chaotic particularities and blind duty; there had been no soil of love in his growth as a young sapling: only exposed and raw roots clinging to rock and drops of water. His physical beauty combined with his deep and abiding hunger for love had made a deadly potential mix: and the paint-base was the lake, the reflection. Narcissus had found a psuedo-love, a love which both answered his hunger and a controllable image which assuged his deep fears.

From the purple recesses below the surface of the water, a nymph saw the angelic face staring, as if at her through a window. She loved him immediately, and thought rashly but understandably that the look was meant somehow for her. Was her look for him born of true love or a desire to share beauty?- for she, Echo, was very beautiful, and had never found her equal until, she surmised, now. Here he was, his rich curls tapered gently around a golden, strong jawline, the eyes like the mystical waters in which she lived. In her nymphlike way, she came very close to the surface, and blew soft bubbles upward, globes resplendent in color and reflective power: painting a complex and symphonic picture for him of the foliage, the water, the sky. She was fecundating his mind, she was beginning to show him the divine fingerprints in nature all around. This, for her, was a primordial offering to budding love.

Narcissus only saw his reflection garbled by the disturbance in the water. His face grew harsh. He pulled away from the lake and threw in a stone contemptuously, hitting Echo on the cheek. Frozen in the unexpected nature of this abuse, Echo retreated and the water again was glasslike. Narcissus smoothed his own features and again poured his soul into conversation with the reflection.

Echo, from behind a submerged tree, saw him speaking and with timid strokes, came to answer. Surely, she thought, he must be teasing me and now is trying to talk with me. She came out of the water and began to sing, in small, childlike tones, the story of her soul, of her hopes in his regard, her new discovery of love, a love that would fill the world around them. It was like the song of many leaves, but if one listened closely, the words were clear and delicate, small pictures of the glory of life. It was the best gift she had to offer: it was herself.

Narcissus heard her, he heard the beauty and he smiled; but strangely, he did not look at her. He was taking her song and applying it dextrously to the reflection. He was assimilating her song into the image he'd chosen; and when he sang in reply, a song with all the beauty of his Imago Dei, it was to the reflection. Echo was only the instrument to fulfill Narcissus' deep desire: that his reflection would indeed love him in return. He was already feeling the loneliness of his choice, and so he began to use the sounds and smells of reality to fuel his tyrannical dream. Echo was a perfect source for fuel and he used her easily, greedily: and without guilt: because he never really knew she was there, in his focused blindness.

After many minutes, each an epoch of delight and pain, Echo began to understand: but the truth was too horrible to accept. Surely someone as beautiful could not be a cold serpent inside. This was a paradox of nature, one that she did not want to understand, nor could she shoulder it along with her own loneliness.

Perhaps if she could put herself in the place of the reflection, perhaps he would see her in time and begin to love her. Perhaps she could be a bridge to reality, perhaps her heart could be used as a means by which the reflection would lose its power. So, steathily, she placed her face under the water at the very point of the reflection: eye to eye, nose to nose, mouth to mouth. Like a warm breeze off the tropical sea, she felt his glance connecting with hers. It was like manna, it was like succulent fruit, it was pure feelings of joy.

She, too, was caught. She and he stayed there in a time-limbo. As the time slipped away, so did her understanding of herself. She began to thin, like fine reed-paper left on the water. She was dying, giving all of herself to try and reach him through the reflection in the water. Finally, she had no strength to keep herself afloat, and she let a gasp of air escape her mouth. The water once again bubbled, moving with the last strength of the nymph. Narcissus grew desperate, the loss of the reflection threw him into a panic- because unbeknownst to him, Echo had become the very lifeblood of the reflection's power. He reached downward to pull her up and held her there for another long minute. Her heartrate was slowing into the erratic rythym of the near-dead.

Finally, he fell on the bank, asleep. Echo floated up to the surface, and began to take in the cool night air. She saw once again, the trees and the voluminous sky, the ripples on the water she'd loved so much as a child. She saw the night bird cut across the ink expanse, the homely sounds of the racoon along the tree roots. She began to breathe again, to live again. She was hungry.

She did not look back at the still form on the bank as she began to tear joyfully away through the undergrowth, for she knew that Narcissus would not, perhaps, ever miss her. He would have his reflection. She grieved finally, for the loss of her own ideal, her own dreams of love with Narcissus: but later, wiser, she grieved for the real loss of his soul; she felt pity, finally, for the soul trapped in it's own reflection: in fine, she appealed to Divinity for his rescue. The mystery, cloaked in the girds of providence, is whether or not even the Most High was able to reach Narcissus.