Some thoughts on the Assumption the day after

What does it all mean? We celebrate the Assumption of Mary by going to Mass mid-week, we sing lovely songs, etc. Well, as he is wont to do, our Holy Father summed up what it means very nicely at the end of his Angelus remarks yesterday when exhorted us "to give our life rather than take any, setting off on the path of love, which means losing ourselves, a path which alone can let us truly find ourselves as well as find true life." Lest we despair that such efforts do not work, the Pope urged us to “look upon Mary, the Assunta, and be encouraged in our faith and in the feast of joy: God wins. Faith, which appeared weak, is the real power of the world. Love is stronger than hatred." (emboldened emphasis mine)

The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

At last a holy day of obligation that we observe as a holy day of obligation! Our faith is so beautiful. It is a joy to celebrate what God has done in the world for us and for our salvation. What an incredible mystery of love that God became incarnate through a humble young woman from Nazareth. If we stop and think about these things, we begin to grasp how God works in the world. Why would God choose to become human at that time, in that place, with Miriam as his mother?

Anyway, may we today and always invoke the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In her sinless beauty she never ceases interceding for us to her Son, seeking to draw us nearer to him. As we ponder the assumption as the penultimate of the Glorious Mysteries of the rosary, we are mindful that the fruit of this mystery is the joy of a happy death. Yes, dear friends, dying in the friendship of Christ is a joy indeed, as his mother shows us.

This daughter of Jerusalem is lovely and beautiful as she ascends to heaven like the rising sun at daybreak.

(Antiphon for Canticle of Zechariah Morning Prayer for The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary)

It also bears noting that today marks the ninety-eight anniversary of the initial dedication of The Cathedral of the Madeleine, the community I am privileged to serve.

Yet another hierarchy update

Today the Holy Father named Bishop Robert Baker of Charleston, South Carolina as bishop of the Diocese of Birmingham, Alabama. This ends the longest vacancy in U.S. Catholic history (by that, of course, I mean since the Church has been well-established in this country, there have actually been longer vacancies). So, Mother Angelica and company will shortly have a new ordinary. However, while filling a vacancy it creates another one.

Now, including the Diocese of Charleston, the number of vacant dioceses remains at ten. The other diocese that are sede vacante are: Knoxville, Green Bay, the Military Archdiocese, Des Moines, IA; St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands; Shreveport, LA; Great Falls/Billings, MT; Little Rock, AR; New Ulm, MN. Also, the number of ordinaries serving beyond the mandatory retirement age of 75 remains at ten.

The Good News

Back on the twenty-sixth of March, on our parish blog, The People of St. Mary Magdalene, we marked the fortieth anniversary of Papa Montini's landmark encyclical with a post entitled Populorum Progresso turns 40. Pope Paul VI was easily the most prophetic pope of the last century and, as is the case with prophets, he paid a dear price. His two most prophetic proclamations were Populorum Progresso and Humane Vitae.

It was noted in the post back in March that Pope Benedict XVI made mention of Populorum Progresso in his homily for the Feast of Epiphany, acknowledging its upcoming anniversary. I learned this afternoon from my dear friend Rocco over at Whispers, via the (London) Times online, that the Holy Father's next encyclical, which he worked on during his vacation in in Northern Italy in July, "will be a modern reflection on one of Papa Montini's landmark texts: his 1967 treatise on 'the development of peoples' Populorum Progressio."

While I am overjoyed that globalizing capitalism will be morally scrutinized in light of the Gospel, Populorum Progressio remains a very "modern" document in its own right, that is why we can revere it as prophetic. Today as much as ever "The hungry nations of the world cry out to the peoples blessed with abundance. And the Church, cut to the quick by this cry, asks each and every man to hear his brother's plea and answer it lovingly" (PP par. 3). According to the Times' Richard Owen, the Holy Father's second encyclical "will focus on humanity’s social and economic problems in an era of globalisation. Pope Benedict intends to argue for a world trade and economic system 'regulated in such a way as to avoid further injustice and discrimination', Ignazio Ingrao, a Vatican watcher, said yesterday." This just a week after the twenty-eighth anniversary of Pope Paul VI's death!

Anamnesis: Merton on Proust

Thomas Merton wrote in 1939, prior to his entering Gethsemani, about Marcel Proust in his journal.

"Marcel Proust and memory: to Proust experience seems to be valuable only after it has been transformed by memory . . . What kept attracting him was the 'present time of things past'" (The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals, pg.7).

Especially in light of God's eternity, time is such an interesting reality. God is outside of time because time is a function of change. God is the same today, yesterday, tomorrow, and forever. In a word, God is atemporal. As regards this, it seems physics is finally catching up to theology. Therefore, all time (i.e., past, present, future) is before God simultaneously. I think what Merton writes here about Proust is true of any thoughtful or spiritual person; namely that experience becomes (more?) valuable after it has been transformed by memory. This is one of those relatively simple, but incredibly dense ideas to ponder. Using idea here brings me back, as one who studied Philosophy, to εἶδος, or, transliterated, eidos, which, like memory, means so much more than what we tend to mean by idea, especially after Plato.

Of faith, pragmatism, and the unfolding of the event

Living as if God exists and having faith, which is an event born of an encounter, are different. It is the difference between faith and pragmatism. I would certainly agree that it is better to live as if God exists than to live as if God does not exist. However, living as if God exists is certainly a case of starting from propositions (i.e., you choose to accept the proposition God exists), whereas faith is of an entirely different order. Pope Benedict addressed this very issue in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est. This love letter is not only sent to Christians, but also, as Sandro Magister observed, "to those far from the faith, to the 'secularists,' to those without faith". To these people, Magister continues, "Benedict XVI says: This is the true heart of the Christian faith. Understand this. With a God such as this, you may have the strength to live 'as if God exists,' even if you do not have the strength to believe" (A Clear and Coherent Direction in the Beginning of Pope Benedict’s Pontificate, says Vatican Expert). Certainly accepting this proposition can be the beginning of faith, but it is not yet faith, it is pragmatism. It is often a response to Dostoevsky's observation that if God does not exist everything is permissible.

The relationship of propositions to faith, to truth, is always interesting to explore because it goes to cognition and language. However, given the philosophical difficulty of that interrelation, it is best to just write that we never begin from nowhere or from nothing. The encounter always occurs where we're at and if where we're at is pragmatism, having accepted or assumed God's existence for whatever reason(s), this is the starting point. So, perhaps I was too dismissive in my previous post about starting with propositions.

As I also mentioned in yesterday's post, we automatically, if not immediately, seek make sense of our encounter, to deepen it, to appropriate it. Pope Benedict gives a beautiful description of such an encounter and the event, which is on-going, to which it gives birth: "We have come to believe in God's love: in these words the Christian can express the fundamental decision of his life. Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction" (DCE par. 1). Another danger not mentioned previously is that, too often, people just want to endlessly repeat their initial encounter instead of growing, instead of allowing the event to unfold, to be revealed in them and through them, because growth is unavoidably fraught with paradox and tension. It is difficult and requires persistence, or a persistent abiding. Again, as mentioned, in seeking to make sense of our encounter we soon discover others who have had like encounters. Just like snowflakes, these encounters may bear a remarkable degree of resemblance, but no two are the same. This seeking, which leads to community, constitutes the unfolding of the event to which our encounter gives birth. Hence, this event, while deeply personal and unique, leads us out of ourselves. Put simply, it draws us into relation and not just with God, but with others, too.

In a post over on Whispers entitled The Great "Et Et, my friend Rocco has posted a lovely exchange between the Holy Father and a young priest during Benedict's meeting with priests in Cadore during his vacation last month. In his response to the very insightful question posed by the priest, the Pontiff (which means bridge-builder) addresses some of these concerns when he said: "Catholicism, somewhat simplistically, has always been considered the religion of the great 'et et' ['both-and']: not of great forms of exclusivism but of synthesis. The exact meaning of 'Catholic' is 'synthesis'. I would therefore be against having to choose between either playing football or studying Sacred Scripture or Canon Law. Let us do both these things. It is great to do sports. I am not a great sportsman, yet I used to like going to the mountains when I was younger; now I only go on some very easy excursions, but I always find it very beautiful to walk here in this wonderful earth that the Lord has given to us. Therefore, we cannot always live in exalted meditation; perhaps a Saint on the last step of his earthly pilgrimage could reach this point, but we normally live with our feet on the ground and our eyes turned to Heaven."

Therefore, if you find yourself stuck in propositions, you might consider taking a walk in the mountains, or playing soccer with friends, instead of reading books, articles, and blog posts full of propositions, or instead of writing them! After all where did Elijah find God? So my friends, have a blessed Sunday! I intend to.

Faith+Reason+Humility=Wisdom, or, "fides quaerens intellectum"

"Faith," we read in The Letter to the Hebrews, "is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen" (Heb, 11,1). Humility is a virtue that is very misunderstood. Therefore, it is misapplied. Christian faith requires humility both because, as disciples, we seek to imitate our Master and because faith falls far from certainty. Put more coherently and to paraphrase myself from a response to a discussion on another blog, anybody who begins with propositions and not faith is off on the wrong foot and headed down the wrong path. No doubt some Christians approach the faith this way for many and varied reasons.

Faith is an encounter. The best definition of theology remains St. Anselm of Canterbury's "faith seeking understanding". Faith, by its very nature, is a bit slippery, which makes it difficult to get a firm grasp on. It is slippery because it is a deeply personal "event born of an encounter". Nonetheless, it remains the correct starting point. Every effort we make to better understand our faith must remain true to our encounter with God, who "transcends all creatures" (CCC 42). Hence, we acknowledge that we have to "continually purify our language of everything in it that is limited, imagebound or imperfect, if we are not to confuse our image of God --'the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable' [Anaphora of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom]-- with our human representations. Our human words always fall short of the mystery of God" (CCC 42).

In seeking to make sense of our encounter, to deepen the experience, to enter into relationship, we run the risk of trying to frame our experience exclusively in terms of pre-existing explanations that may not be true to our encounter. To actually quote from what I previously wrote in another venue: "Sooner or later this false faith will collapse. While devastating, such a collapse is the best thing that can happen. In fact, as people of faith, we all need a shift from time-to-time, a correction. This comes through examination and ultimately out of love and desire for what is true, [for] what is really real.

"Faith seeking understanding makes [us] humble due to [lingering] uncertainty and incompleteness. The very last thing that faith is is smug certainty; true faith takes account of human limitation, frailty, proneness to pretense, etc."

The definition of theology as "faith seeking understanding", which is the most widely accepted definition of theology, is but a way of saying faith and reason must work together as we seek that which is ultimate. Upon having an encounter we automatically seek to make sense of it, to verify it in some way. In doing so we soon discover that other people have had like encounters. This is the beginning of community, the beginning of our pilgrim journey together. It was Chesterton who wrote that tradition is democracy across time.

As a Catholic with a very robust ecclesiology, I am well aware that we're often too willing to let the event born of our encounter be mediated through others, through priests, deacons, religious, etc. To allow this is to attenuate the encounter and threaten to terminate the unfolding event to which it gave birth. This is one of those tensions about which I am beginning to sound like a broken record. On the one hand, God wants an immediate, personal relationship with us and, at the same time, we must acknowledge the necessarily communal nature of faith, or the fact that the unfolding event is precisely relationships with others.

As Christians we believe there is "one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all", but there are different theologies, different ways of explaining and understanding this one faith, many of which are complementary, not contradictory, though there are many of those, too (Eph. 4,5-6).

Dom Helder Camera

In all this it is important to note that anybody who studies the history of dogma and the development of doctrine will see objectively that it is the story of faith seeking understanding, not one of obscene power grabs and imperial or ecclesial machinations, that it is a history of the unfolding event of God's encounter with humanity in Jesus Christ, or of applying reason to faith because faith has to make sense in order to be meaningful.

Writing about faith as an event born of an encounter, I just found a beautiful ending to this most recent in a long line of ponderous posts. It is the Prayer of Dom Helder Camara posted by Sr. Edith over on Monastic Musings, which I linked to from Deep Furrows. Dom Helder Camara is the late archbishop of Recife, Brazil, who died in 1999 at the age of 90.

"Come Lord!
Do not smile and say
you are already with us.

Millions do not know you
and to us who do,
what is the difference?
What is the point of your presence
if our lives do not alter?

Change our lives, shatter
our complacency.
Make your word
flesh of our flesh,
blood of our blood
and our life's purpose.

Take away the quietness
of a clear conscience.
Press us uncomfortably.
For only thus
that other peace is made,
your peace."

If all this is still too abstract, check out Scott Simon's Kaddish for a Cardinal on today's Weekend Edition about "the inconceivable expressed, the impossible existent," (Aaron) Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, the Jewish Cardinal who once said, echoing the Jewish Apostle, (Saul) Paul of Tarsus (Rom. 12,21): “The strength of evil can only be answered with an even greater strength of love.”