From whence comes "meum cum sim pulvis et cinis"?

"respondens Abraham ait quia semel coepi loquar ad Dominum meum cum sim pulvis et cinis" (Gen. Xviii, 27).

Abraham pleading with God not to destroy Sodom.

Cor ad cor loquitur

It has been a really Lent-like week, whatever that means! For me, it means that it has been a difficult week, an exhausting week. If we practice spiritual disciplines to get ourselves, that is, our egos out-of-the-way, then this week works great. I am crushed. When I get down (not in the funky way), I feel alone. I know that I am never alone and this comforts me. What comforts me even more is this being made manifest to me in concrete ways. Sure, Christ is very often present to me in and through other people, but not exclusively in this way. Sometimes, I think we take that too far. By taking that line of reasoning too far, I mean when we start to think that Christ is only present to us in and through other people. While I am grateful that I can acknowledge both, right now I am most grateful that I am aware of His presence apart from people.

Just because this is a spiritual insight does not mean that reason doesn't apply; reason still applies. To wit: other people let me down, disappoint me, and are not always there for me in the ways I need to them to be. Sometimes this is not a problem and is the result of unrealistic expectations and unhealthy attachments on my part. At other times, it is just another person's inability to read my mind, which is surely an impossible expectation! There are times when it is none of those things, when I am being neither unrealistic nor unreasonable. I don't just have needs, as Fr. Carrón said, I am a need! Here is where the judgment of reason comes in- if Jesus is only present to me in and through other people, then sometimes He disappoints me, lets me down and is indifferent to me.

I know the Lord is never indifferent towards me. He is always deeply concerned about me, about how I am doing, and cares for me in the way only He can. I know this through many experiences. I know this through what I am experiencing now and what I have been going through this past week, especially towards the end of the week. This is what I really mean by this week being Lent-like. All the Lenten paces I have been putting myself through are worth it to realize His presence, to get closer to Him. I am not merely being sentimental or wistful.

He accompanies me, which means He doesn't magically make everything better, but that He walks with me through it. He holds me up when I need it. He invites me to His table for nourishment, giving Himself to me body, blood, soul, and divinity, as well as absolving me of my sins. Could I really ask for anymore? Too often, as Rich Mullins sang, I'd rather fight Him for what I don't really want than take what He gives that I need. I am inclined to call this the beggar's exchange, in which I give Christ my heart and Christ gives me His very self, thus satisfying the need I am because if I possess Him, I possess everything! I don't share this to be smug. I am mindful of these words written by Camus: "Beginning to give yourself means condemning yourself to never giving enough even when you give everything. And you never give everything." These words are a fair summary of my struggles this week.

St. Justin Martyr, the first Christian philosopher, wrote: "He who once for all conquered death for us, now continually conquers in us." Moreover, He conquers our hearts with His tenderness.

Meum cum sim pulvis et cinis

"We'd like to help you learn to help yourself"

Jesus loves you more than you will know (Wo, wo, wo)/God bless you please, Mrs. Robinson/Heaven holds a place for those who pray (Hey, hey, hey...hey, hey, hey)

Since I posted a cover for last week's Friday traditio and because I heard this song a few times this week, I decided on the Lemonheads' cover of Simon & Garfunkel's Mrs. Robinson. Yes, there is a bad word in the lyrics.

Meum cum sim pulvis et cinis

Why do I blog?

Does blogging count as a hobby? I sure hope so because after I complete everything I have to do sitting down and writing a few words is about all I can manage these days, though as the weather grows warmer I anticipate heading to the hills and work outside. Authoring Καθολικός διάκονος day-by-day is an adventure, perhaps it is an avocation, or maybe a provocation. I choose the latter. This August will mark four years of serious and pretty much daily blogging. I have to say that it isn't a lot of work. Blogging provides an outlet for many of the things that course through my consciousness everyday. It helps me to synthesize, to clarify, even revealing to me when I am way off base. It is easy to say that writing is therapeutic and/or cathartic, but it is really neither of those for me, though it may work that way for others. Rather, writing for me is a challenge, a provocation. I don't mind provoking others with what I write. I certainly know that I have that effect from time-to-time.

Blogging is especially good for me right now, during this Lent. Given the corrective post I was morally obligated to write because of some anonymous person's being provoked by another post and responding in a manner that utterly lacked integrity, I had intended to forego my annual Lenten introspective on blogging. Obviously, I changed my mind. It is important to me that what appears on these pages origniates from me. I almost never know what I will read, think, hear, or see that I will pull together and write about, which is not to say I am not careful about what I post and what I don't. There are a lot of things about which I would never write publicly.

There is the ever present question, Why do I blog? I think the why questions are the ones that make us human. Hence, it is important to keep them in front of us. One of the things I like about Heidegger's philosophical method was his dogged insistence over many decades of the centrality of the question of Being. He saw his life-long project as a recovery of this quaestio: Why is there something instead of nothing? Like most why questions, the one about blogging has no singular or set answer. Well, actually it does, but the way we arrive at our understanding of the answer is more important than the givenness of the answer. Kind of like when you first started studying algebra and, unlike your previous experience with arithmetic, it was not just about arriving at the correct answer, but showing, step-by-step, how you arrived at it.

Last night at School of Community, we ended by talking about how truly radical the method we follow in CL is. It is radical because experience, the things that happen to me everyday, the circumstances in which I find myself, are how I see that I am a direct relationship with the Mystery, are the means Christ uses to bring to me to my destiny, and are precisely where I encounter Him. "Our whole life is a questioning, quaestio, the quest for an answer. What's the most important condition in searching for an answer? Not having preconceptions" ( Is It Possible to Live This Way? vol. 3, pg. 119). In other words, my beliefs, which are pretty much summed up by what the Church teaches, can all too easily be nothing other than a set of preconceptions into which I try to stuff my experience instead of trusting in the One who is the answer to the questioning that constitutes my (human) being.

In the end, it is a choice between Christ or nothingness. He is the answer to the fundamental question. I understand how stark and even how alienating that assertion may seem to many. Without a doubt, it is a provocation. Nonetheless, I cannot allow even this clear and bold statement to become a preconception, a lifeless banality. I will never grasp that the choice is between Christ and nothingness by someone telling me it is so, even if I robotically and reflexively nod my head in agreement. When it works, this truth boldly proclaimed provokes you and may even have the effect of pissing you off. The truth is that it can only be verified through experience, which means, at least in the first instance, facing reality honestly. It also means not playing it safe. Life in Christ both requires and emboldens us to take risks. In other words, the truth of the provocation, at least for me, is something that needs to be verified over and over because I am forgetful. My blogging greatly aids me in choosing Christ over nothingness, which, in turn, enables me to see that I am either a protagonist or a nobody.

Meum cum sim pulvis et cinis

Living a Christian life, a life of integrity

"While comfort and consolation are legitimate things to experience at and from liturgy there is also - and, I would argue, more compellingly - the challenge that all liturgy offers us; nothing less than communal conversion and communal self-transcendence. This means that the Eucharist challenges us to change our minds, hearts, and - yes - our ways and wills to conform to what God has already revealed and has in store for us. Liturgy is not a refuge from the world so much as it is an intense moment in time that refocuses our lives and reminds us that what we celebrate in liturgy should be borne out in the way live our lives" (Msgr. Kevin W. Irwin Models of the Eucharist pg. 92).

Asserting that what we do in liturgy should be bear fruit in our lives is a call to integrity, that is, integration. As Christians we have integrity only insofar as what we do in liturgy shapes how we live. Along these lines, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver delivered a great speech the other night at Houston Baptist University (the link takes you to His Excellency's complete speech on YouTube). In it he discussed the disastrous nature of the speech John F. Kennedy gave in Houston to a group of Protestant ministers during the 1960 presidential campaign. In his Houston speech, which Mitt Romney's College Station speech was supposed to be some kind of LDS analog, Kennedy basically said that if he were elected his Catholic faith would have no bearing whatsoever on how he governed. In essence Kennedy's message that night in Houston some fifty years ago was "I solemnly swear on a stack of Constitutions that if elected my most deeply held and cherished beliefs will have absolutely no impact on how I govern." This is not living one's faith with integrity. One could multiply examples moving forward. Probably the next most famous example would be Mario Cuomo's 1984 Notre Dame speech when he set forth his "personally opposed but I can't impose my faith on other people" defense of his stance in favor of an unlimited abortion license, as if the defense of innocent human life were a uniquely Catholic concern.

Living with integrity is difficult at times. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed a long time ago, Christian discipleship has a cost. Sometimes it costs us nothing less than it cost the Lord, as with Bonhoeffer, it may cost you your life! For most of us, the cost is not that high, it may mean accepting defeat, disappointment, rejection, being seen as being "a bit off," as the British say. Then again, Jesus asks, "what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul? For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels" (Mark 8:36-38). The Greece/Goldman shenanigans offer us a concrete glimpse of what it means to lack integrity, which almost rises to the level blasphemy, given Blankfein's claim that they are doing God's work.

The Eucharist is what gives us strength "to live this way." As Archbishop Javier Martínez of Granada, Spain stated in a speech he delivered several years ago, Beyond Secular Reason, part of which I include in my blog header: "The Eucharist is the only place of resistance to the annihilation of the human subject. And the Eucharist is also the place where one can learn and experience a universality, which is not the abstract and false universality of modernity, which is not in opposition to local realization, identity and fullness."

This Lent make an effort to go to Mass more in order to let the Lord challenge you, to let Him conform your lowly body with his glorified body, so that you may live a life that accords with your destiny, the reason you exist, a life of integrity, the only path to true happiness.

Meum cum sim pulvis et cinis

Goldman-Sachs and God

Lloyd Blankfein the current chairman of Goldman-Sachs, you know, the firm that specializes in making money by adding no value whatsoever, yeah, the firm implicated over the past week or so for less than above-the-board dealings with the Greek government to keep a lot of deficit spending off their books so that Greece could appear to be adhering to the mutually agreed upon European Union guidelines for countries participating in the common currency, known as the euro, stated last November that he and his firm are doing "God's work." Greece's malfeasance, aided and abetted by our friends at Goldman, has caused the common European currency to drop significantly in value and it has been learned that Goldman is working with other European governments on similar schemes. So, instead of borrowing money to cover their deficits, Greece had an off-the-books arrangement with Goldman, involving derivatives, that had the effect of misleading investors and the EU about Greece's financial health. These dealings are well explained by Beat Balzli, writing for the international edition of the German magazine Der Spiegel, which is published in English. The article is called, How Goldman Sachs Helped Greece to Mask its True Debt.

When queried about their Greek dealings, Goldman says they were only doing what Greece wanted, which caused Harry Shearer on yesterday's installment of his weekly radio program, Le Show, to accurately observe: "Yes. Goldman-Sachs has gone, ladies and gentlemen, since last November when the chairman, Lloyd Blankfein, said 'we're doing God's work,' they've gone from that to the hooker's defense: 'well they wanted it'." I think in the comprehensive reform of our finance laws, which Congress will no doubt get to once they finish with healthcare reform, there should be laws against pandering of the kind routinely engaged in by these international hustlers.

If you check out Le Show and want to listen to his take on Goldman's Greek odyssey, go to 30:52 and listen until 40:00, a section that includes Shearer's witty muscial tribute to Mr. Goldman and Mr. Sachs.

Ah, Hammerin' Hank and the boys! Matt Taibbi took their measure in his Rolling Stone article Inside The Great American Bubble Machine. These guys are the architects of what Naomi Klein, in her insightful book, The Shock Doctrine, called "diaster capitalism." Heads these guys win, tails you lose (and they win). I am not a socialist, but a capitalist. I believe in markets, which is why I am skeptical of the two bills now under consideration in Congress to reform healthcare. I believe that markets require some regulation, however. Regulation of markets, like gun laws, must be smart, that is, not only applicable and burdensome to honest, law abiding people and businesses, enforceable, and minimal.

In addition to helping to create and then benefitting from crises, Goldman Sachs thrives off a kind of crony capitialism, the kind of corruption and opacity, that keeps underdeveloped or barely developed countries, like, say, Greece, which is one of the EU's poorest countries, especially among the countries that participate in the common currency, from ever thriving economically. The only possible silver-lining to this cloud is that some are predicting that this and other situations as they come to light will lead to the break-up of the euro, which was never a really good idea. If it comes to that, Goldman Sachs will undoubtedly find a way to profit from the problem they helped to create.

Just as Bob Dylan observed that it doesn't take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, it doesn't take a moral theologian to know that this ain't God's work, quite the contrary. If you're not convinced, I urge you to read Caritas in veritate and/or Populorum Progresso.

UPDATE: This post was published on Il Sussidiario.

Meum cum sim pulvis et cinis

If March comes in like a lion, it will go out like a lamb

I think March is about lions and lambs not primarily because of the weather, but because most of the month is Lent moving towards our celebration of the Paschal Mystery of Christ's passing over from death to life. It is a time we endeavor to make peace in ourselves through penitential practices, which do not in themselves bring us closer to God, but aid in getting our egos out of the way so that God, through Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit can conform us more to His image, His shape, which is cruciform, the cross being the tree of life!

It is the cross that makes the lion of Judah the Lamb of God, who takes away our sins and makes our peace with God and with each other. As regards Lent, walk on, remembering "that the only baggage you can bring is all that you can't leave behind."

Two things are staying with me through this Lent: the refrain from the responsorial Psalm from the first Sunday of Lent- "Be with my Lord, when I am in trouble;" the words of Don Giussani that tell me of the necessity of "accepting the sacrifice of the circumstances through which [I am] made to pass." God is at work in my life in no other way than through my life, a tautology to be sure, but also a necessary reminder.

Meum cum sim pulvis et cinis