"Tune my heart to sing Thy grace"

So, my dear sisters and brothers, it is Friday yet again. As I do from time-to-time, I want to remind everyone that traditionally Christians have observed Fridays as days of penance. We don't do penance to make ourselves more pleasing to God, or remind ourselves how "bad" we've been, but out of gratitude for what God has done for us in and through His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Of course, we recognize those times when we have refused to love God, or to love our neighbor and implore God to change our hearts.

Unlike a growing number of Catholics, I love hymns and congregational singing. While I can't presume to speak for God in this regard, I can only surmise that a congregation singing a hymn is most pleasing to our loving Father. As St. Augustine wrote, the person who sings prays twice. From my own experience, some of the most powerful experiences of the Holy Spirit I have had occurred while singing hymns in the assembly of the faithful.

So, our Friday traditio is Jars of Clay singing "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing":

Teach me some melodious sonnet, Sung by flaming tongues above. Praise His name I’m fixed upon it, Mount of Thy redeeming love.

"Moments of the ultimate"

We're nearing the end of yet another year of grace. The end of each liturgical year is one way of reminding ourselves that the end will come. This end-of-time will happen for each one of us when we die and occur in a definitive way when Christ the King returns in glory.

The season of Advent is perhaps the strangest of all the liturgical seasons, a time we penitentially prepare to commemorate the Incarnation of the Son of God as a babe in Bethlehem, who, "for us men and for our salvation... came down from heaven," to welcome Him anew into our hearts, and to be reminded of the fact that He will return in glory.

In a certain section of his biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen writes about the time Bonhoeffer spent among the Benedictines of Ettal, just outside on Munich, the time during which he wrote his book Ethics, which was assembled and published only posthumously. Schlingensiepen writes with great clarity aboout the chapter of Ethics concerning the "ultimate" and the "penultimate":

Can faith - and that doesn't mean 'the memory of past faith, or of repeating articles of faith,' but rather true faith - be 'realised daily and hourly'? No, during this life there are only 'moments of the ultimate'. God lets human beings live in the penultimate. But they must always be on the lookout, throughout the length and breadth, for the ultimate. The 'penultimate' is life as human beings live it in a 'time of God's permission, waiting and preparation.' Even the person of faith lives in this 'penultimate', and for Bonhoeffer it... meant that, even when one had to live in such a terrible time as the Second World War, it was perfectly all right to enjoy one's life and happy times spent with friends, but knowing that there is an ultimate time that judges and breaks off the penultimate

Typically, in preaching and in catechesis, we refer to this as living the tension between the already and not yet.

"You say you want a revolution, well..."

In light of yesterday's election I have been thinking all day about how to engage politics in a conscientious way. In the midst of all this wondering, I came across the New Statesman's on-line re-publication of V.S. Pritchett's 1960 obituary for my dear Camus, which they posted to mark today's 99th anniversary of the occasion of his birth.

Pritchett, who passed away in 1997, wrote of Camus that he "was (he said) a pessimist about human destiny, but an optimist in regard to man himself. Sisyphus would never succeed in rolling the boulder to the summit, but the continually renewed effort to do so was the secret of his nobility. At heart, Camus was a lonely man."

As much as I admire Camus, I suppose this gets at my fundamental disagreement with his thought as expressed in his writing. I have great hope for human destiny, which I believe lies beyond time. I also believe that the manner of our being in the world plays a crucial role as to whether or not we realize our destiny, which cannot be a given. This view, I think, Camus saw as something of a dangerous distraction. I agree that it certainly can become just that, as various Marxist analyses have sought to demonstrate, beginning with Karl's assertion that religion is the opiate of the masses, simply a means of social control, as history sometimes validates. My belief also makes me hopeful about humanity. I think it is important to distinguish hope from optimism, a distinction that is necessary for me to face reality honestly.

Hearkening back to Camus, being a Christian amounts, in part, to my own metaphysical rebellion against the absurd, the void, the temptation to see existence as meaningless, which results in a betrayal of my own desire. Such a rebellion, I am convinced, is necessary in order to realize my full humanity, something set forth stunningly in Camus' L'Homme révolté.

Pope Benedict XVI, speaking to the youth of Lebanon this past September, spoke of revolution when he said, "In Christ you will find the strength and courage to advance along the paths of life, and to overcome difficulties and suffering. In him you will find the source of joy. Christ says to you: سَلامي أُعطيكُم – My peace I give to you! (Jn 14:27)." The Holy Father went on to say, "The universal brotherhood which [Christ] inaugurated on the cross lights up in a resplendent and challenging way the revolution of love. 'Love one another as I have loved you' (Jn 13:35). This is the legacy of Jesus and the sign of the Christian. This is the true revolution of love!"

Getting beyond [the] disruption

It never ceases to astound me how frequently convergences happen. I appended a personal note at the end of my post yesterday, stating that after 2008 it was no longer to possible to trust businesses. At least in my mind, I was comparing that with a time when people who ran businesses had more character and operated, to some extent, with the common good in mind. One feature of those times was that senior executive compensation was not astronomically out-of-whack with what the company's "floor-level" employees made.

Then, last night before tucking in, I began reading N.T. Wright's book After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters. In the third chapter of the book Bishop Wright offers some insight and commentary concerning events of late 2008, which he described as "a volcano which had been rumbling away in the background [and] suddenly erupted with horrific force." While acknowledging the causes as complex and multi-faceted, he singles out de-regulation as a major factor, that is, the stripping away of laws and legal regulations that sought to restrict the behavior of financial institutions, seeking to make them operate with more than just quarterly profits in mind.

He cites a conversation he had in 2009 with a friend, who is a senior bank executive, who told him,

they can introduce as many new regulations as they like. Yes, we do some guidelines put back in place; we went too far, giving people freedom to gamble with huge sums of money and do crazy deals. But any banker or mortgage broker can easily hire a smart accountant and lawyer to help them tick all the boxes on the government tells them to, and then go around the back of the system and do what they want

A good, recent chronicle of this, apart from articles about start-ups like Uber who see themselves as so high-tech and innovative that the established rules and regulations don't apply to them, is Greg Smith's recent book Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story. This is not to say that laws and regulations don't need to be changed as the result of new technologies, but it is to say that businesses, which should play a role in proposing changes, cannot be allowed to write them and foist them on everyone.

So, what's the remedy? Well, according to Bishop Wright's banker friend, it's character:

Keeping rules is all right as far as it goes, but the real problem in the last generation is that we've lost the sense that character matters; that integrity matters. The system is only really healthy when the people who are running it are people you can trust to do the right thing, not because there are rules, but because that's the sort of people they are

Indeed, following Christ is not, as Pope Benedict indicated towards the beginning of his first encyclical letter, a matter of keeping rules: Deus caritas est, "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" (par. 1).

I am also currently reading Dr. Ferdinand Schlingensiepen's biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. As I was reading yesterday, I re-read this quote from Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship, "Only the believers obey, and only the obedient believe." Bonhoeffer went on to write, "It is really unfaithfulness to the Bible to have the first without the second." It is true that to be a Christian, according to Fr. Timothy Radcliffe, "is to be entrusted with the Word of God." Nonetheless, to receive the Bible, which contains God's word, does mean assenting to the proposition that it is literally accurate in every respect. Such an understanding, as Radcliffe notes, "is a very modern and misleading idea."

To obey does not mean to be thoughtlessly compliant, it means to listen, to give heed. It also requires asking questions. On Christian terms, developing character and integrity simply cannot happen without spending time each day listening. Having integrity requires the integration of your life, which resists the compartmentalization that we are often urged to cultivate. Keeping your faith strictly a private matter is perhaps that height of such compartmentalization, making it the anti-thesis of discipleship. The New Evangelization, which Catholics, judging by the majority of the interventions at the recently concluded Synod, seem to think is something institutional, is a dead letter without this recognition.

More (on) "Disruption"

A week ago I put up a post about the company Uber based on an article by Paul Carr ("Travis Shrugged"), which sought to expound the philosophy not only underlying Uber, but, at least to some extent, the business model known as "Disruption." As I stated in an update I made to my post, prompted by the feedback of a friend and brother deacon who works as an entrepreneur in the high-tech industry, I am not an expert in business theory and certainly can claim no in-depth knowledge of "Disruption," or any other business theory for that matter, though I do have more than a passing grasp of much of Peter Drucker's oeuvre. I am always looking to be better informed, especially on matters about which I write. I certainly invite my readers to assist me in this regard and to correct me when I am in error. So, I was very glad to have brought to my attention (I know, I know, the use of passive voice) an article from the website Tech Crunch concerning Uber and local limo regulations in Chicago: "As Regulators Seek To Revise Limo Rules, Uber’s On-Demand Car Service Faces Shutdown In Chicago."

The situation certainly brings up matters that are worth discussing between the city of Chicago, Uber, and limo companies in that city. I will even go one step further, judging by what the article says, the way limo services currently calculate fares seems in need of a better solution. On the other hand, it appears to me that what Uber really favors is avoiding regulation altogether. I arrive at this judgment based on the fact reported by Tech Crunch that "Uber is urging its riders to email their comments to the BACP, telling the agency to 'Remove the No Measured Rates Provision (PPV Sec. 1.10)' from its proposed regulations."

Ferrari 360 Modena Stretch Limo

The basic problem, it seems to me, is how to objectively determine distance and thus fare, assuming the rate is set, even if by negotiation, or if the limo service is free to set its own rates. What if there is a consistent problem of a variance between what the driver says s/he is owed and what the passenger says s/he owes? This strikes me as a matter that needs to be regulated. Consider if an app were invented that featured an algorithm that its purveyors claimed more accurately measured the amount of gasoline you pumped into your personal vehicle. Then let's say, for the sake of argument, that the app often came up with a different amount than the pump? I have no problem with utilizing new technologies that more accurately calculate distance, but urging people to petition to simply remove applicable regulations strikes me as a very unsatisfactory way to resolve the matter, as well as more than a bit of a verification of Carr's assertions.

On a purely personal note, while I am a supporter of free enterprise, I certainly don't trust businesses or business groups, even high-tech ones that consider themselves enlightened, to regulate themselves, or to operate with a view of the common good. Probably well before, but at least from 2008, those days ended and are over. 

All Souls

Today we remember our beloved dead. Thus, it is appropriate to post as our Friday traditio the Dies Irae from the Requiem Mass, in particular that Dies Irae composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Centerpiece of Hans Memling's triptych The Last Judgment, painted between 1467-1471

Therefore when the Judge shall sit,
whatever lay hidden will appear;
nothing unavenged will remain....
Remember, faithful Jesus,
because I am the cause of your journey:
do not lose me on that day.


You can see the full Latin text, both from Graduale Romano Seraphico, the 1975 Latin Breviary, as well as the English translation here.

All Saints

Today is the great Solemnity of All Saints. It's best not to think of today as a holy day of obligation, making going to Mass just one more thing we must do in our often over-burdened schedules, but a holy day of opportunity when we are allowed to once again participate in the great communion of saints to which we belong by virtue of our baptism.

While All Saints is certainly a celebration of all of the saints, it is particularly a way of commemorating and celebrating those holy women and men whose names are lost to us, those people who followed Jesus Christ, thus making Him present among us, fulfilling their baptismal vocation to be a sacrament, that is, a visible and tangible sign of Christ's presence in and for the world. Along with those we know, like St. Francis, St. Thérèse, St. Gianna Molla, etc., they intercede for us before the throne of God and are numbered among those written about in Revelation:

"After this I had a vision of a great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue. They stood before the throne and before the Lamb, wearing white robes and holding palm branches in their hands.

They cried out in a loud voice: 'Salvation comes from our God, who is seated on the throne, and from the Lamb'" (Rev. 7:9-10).