O Adonai

The memory of Oscar Wilde has been reduced to that of a flamboyant and defiant homosexual, a martyr for the cause. In reality, he was no such person. Like all similar ways of remembering, this is reductive (memory has a tendency to be reductive). It is perhaps one of the worst distortions of the time in which we live to reduce a person, any person, to her/his sexuality.

Wilde's stay in Reading gaol (jail), which was the result of his being convicted in May 1895, along with Alfred Taylor, of "gross indecency," was the occasion of the composition of one of his best-loved poems, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. In an on-line article, "The Long Conversion of Oscar Wilde," Andrew McCracken wrote:

The year 1898 saw the publication of The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Wilde's imprisonment and his alienation from friends and society are clearly at the root of this poem, but while the author's experiences were bitter, the poem is not. Gone are the arch aphorisms and mocking paradoxes of his earlier work; gone is the hopeless sense of sin that finds no redemption. The Ballad tells of the execution that Wilde witnessed at Reading Gaol, and conveys the inhuman isolation that the condemned man felt as he awaited his death. Here Wilde's latent Catholic sentiments reveal themselves unequivocally. The poem condemns the petty censoriousness and miserly justice of this world, but not from the pose of anti-bourgeois snobbery that might be expected of an artist, nor in a fit of vindictiveness over society's harsh treatment of the author. Rather, he returns to a tone that he used to good effect in his fairy tales for children, one of compassion:

"Ah! Happy they whose hearts can break And peace of pardon win! How else may man make straight his plan And cleanse his soul from Sin? How else but through a broken heart May Lord Christ enter in?"

It was also Wilde who pithily observed, "The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future." Advent is that time when we joyfully anticipate that future.

The above seems to me to be a fitting reflection for our O Antiphon for today, the second of seven, O Adonai:

O Adonai and Ruler of the House of Israel, you appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush and on Mount Sinai gave him your law. Come, and with outstretched arm redeem us.

The Scripture passages that form this antiphon are Exodus 3:2 and Exodus 6:6.

O Sapientia

With yesterday's celebration of Gaudete, or "Rejoice," Sunday, we turned a corner in Advent. The season moved from one of penance and judgment, to one of rejoicing and joyful expectation, "as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ." At least for this particular year, the best manifestation of this shift following Gaudete Sunday is our recitation of and immersion in the "O Antiphons," which we begin reciting every year on 17 December and conclude on 23 December.

In the Church's liturgy the O Antiphons are part of Evening Prayer, known in Latin as Vespers. These lovely antiphons address Christ with different biblical titles. In the Church's liturgy the antiphons are used with the Gospel Canticle, reciting them before and after praying the canticle itself, which today is Ephesians 1:3-10, a passage that begins with "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens."

These antiphons can and often are, perhaps even usually, prayed and recited alone, outside of the Liturgy of the Hours. This is most fitting, especially in family situations. In English, today's antiphon, "O Wisdom," is:

O Wisdom, you came forth from the mouth of the Most High and, reaching from beginning to end, you ordered all things mightily and sweetly. Come, and teach us the way of prudence.

All of the O Antiphons are composites, made up of different scriptural passages. Today's antiphon is from Sirach 24:3 and Wisdom 8:1.

"Now the people were filled with expectation"

Today is Gaudete Sunday (the Sunday we light the rose colored candle). The Latin word Gaudete simply means "Rejoice." It is taken from the Introit of the Mass. At The Cathedral of the Madeleine, where I am privileged to serve, the Introit is that music sung by the choir, in Latin, back by the Baptismal font before Mass starts. The Introit for the Third Sunday of Advent is: Gaudete in Domino semper: iterum dico, gaudete. Modestia vestra nota sit omnibus hominibus: Dominus enim prope est. Nihil solliciti sitis: sed in omni oratione petitiones vestræ innotescant apud Deum. Benedixisti Domine terram tuam: avertisti captivitatem Jacob. Say what?

In English, the Church says this- "Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice. Let your forbearance be known to all, for the Lord is near at hand; have no anxiety about anything, but in all things, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God. Lord, you have blessed your land; you have turned away the captivity of Jacob" — (Philippians 4:4–6; Psalm 85 (84):1).

With the Third Sunday, Advent undergoes a not-so-subtle shift, from what I think is best described as a penitential time to a time of joyful expectation, even anticipation. Our readings for today amply demonstrate this shift: the response of the Baptist's hearers in today's Gospel, as well as the opening words of our first reading from the prophet Zephaniah, but also our Psalm response and our reading from St. Paul's Letter to the Philippians (the same passage from which the opening part of the Introit is taken).

There is no way we can enter into worship this Sunday not mindful of the horror that happened in Connecticut on Friday. While this violence is still a raw wound on our national consciousness, it is important, if a bit incomprehensible (at least when we think in a worldly manner), that even this can be an occasion for hope, for just the sort of joyful expectation we're called to today. As I did in my post on Friday evening, I turn once again to Bishop Steven Croft's The Advent Calendar, the entry for 14 December, in which Alice, upon being brought into a vast chamber where, through headphones, she could hear prayers and see angels receiving and conveying these plaintive petitions upward, asks her guide, JB (for the John the Baptist), "Can every prayer be answered?" To which he responds,

Every prayer is heard child... Each prayer which is the cry of the heart makes a difference. Each tear is counted. Many more are answered than you or I can know. But prayers are not like the wishes in your stories. Not all can be answered yet. There is too much that is still bitter and twisted and evil in the world. Too much is still to be set to rights. But the day will come. The day will come when the King returns... Then every sorrow and every sigh will flee the earth forever

As I believe the author intends, this puts us in mind of the beginning of the twenty-first chapter of Revelation:

"Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. The former heaven and the former earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. I also saw the holy city, a new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'Behold, God’s dwelling is with the human race. He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will always be with them [as their God]. He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there shall be no more death or mourning, wailing or pain, [for] the old order has passed away.' The one who sat on the throne said, 'Behold, I make all things new'" (Rev. 21:1-5a). This does not constitute so much the "why" of heeding Paul's exhortation to "have no anxiety about anything," so much as it tells us how to do just that; to be people filled with joyful expectation, even as we make our way through this valley of tears.

Let's make today's collect our prayer, as we pray for the victims, their families, and, yes, even for the perpetrator of this incomprehensible evil:

O God, who see how your people
faithfully await the feast of the Lord's Nativity,

enable us, we pray,
to attain the joys of so great a salvation
and to celebrate them always
with solemn worship and glad rejoicing.

Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Church: sensus fidelium is not public opinion

As with the State, when it comes to the Church, most important news and information goes unreported. Hence, these important events and statements never enter the public discussion, leaving it as the almost exclusive domain of either unknowing and uncaring commentators, or fairly knowledgeable commentators with an ideological ax or two to grind. When it comes to speeches by Pope Benedict XVI this seems to be the case almost all the time. To be fair, this is also a function of the Holy Father’s penchant for addressing important thoughts to appropriate audiences and not speaking off-the-cuff to uncomprehending people, thus avoiding the risk of having his message badly distorted. As we near the end of the year, we approach the time when he will give his annual Christmas address to the Roman Curia, which is something like his annual State of the Church address. One can learn much by reading his previous seven December speeches.

On 6 December the Pontiff addressed the International Theological Commission, gathered for their annual plenary session and for the first time under their new president, Archbishop Gerhard Müller, who is president by virtue of his being Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In his speech, Pope Benedict takes on two major threats to authentic Church teaching: the use of public opinion against the magisterium and the idea that faith, particularly monotheistic faith that claims to possess universal truth, inevitably leads to violence.

He began his speech by referring to two recent documents issued by the Commission: Message of the International Theological Commission on the occasion of the Year of Faith and Theology Today: Perspectives, Principles and Criteria. In his speech, the Holy Father said of the latter document that it takes note of “the vitality and variety of theology subsequent to the Second Vatican Council, this document seeks to present, so to speak, the genetic code of Catholic theology, namely, the principles that define its identity and consequently guarantee its unity in the diversity of its achievements.”

The Holy Father goes on to speak of one criterion set forth in Theology Today, namely the role of the sensus fidelium (the “sense” or “consensus” of the faithful). He went on to note that Vatican II reaffirmed “the specific and irreplaceable role that the Magisterium must play” in addition to emphasizing “that the People of God, in its entirety, participate in the prophetic office of Christ, thereby fulfilling the inspired wish expressed by Moses: ‘would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, that the Lord would put his spirit upon them!’ (Num 11:29).” Pointing to the Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, the Holy Father noted that “the whole body of the faithful who have an anointing that comes from the holy one (cf. 1 Jn 2:20,27), cannot err in matters of belief. This characteristic is shown in the supernatural appreciation of the faith (sensus fidei) of the whole people, when, ‘from the bishops to the last of the faithful’ they manifest a universal consent in matters of faith and morals’” (par. 12). It is with this that we finally arrive at an important correction:

In the believer this gift, the sensus fidei constitutes a sort of supernatural instinct which has a vital co- naturality with the object of faith itself. We note that the simple faithful carry with them this certainty, this firm sense of faith. The sensus fidei is a criterion for discerning whether or not a truth belongs to the living deposit of the Apostolic Tradition. It also has a propositional value for the Holy Spirit never ceases to speak to the Churches and to guide them towards the whole truth. Today, however, it is particularly important to explain the criteria that make it possible to distinguish the authentic sensus fidelium from its counterfeit. It is certainly not a kind of public ecclesial opinion and invoking it in order to contest the teachings of the Magisterium would be unthinkable, since the sensus fidei cannot be authentically developed in believers, except to the extent in which they fully participate in the life of the Church, and this demands responsible adherence to the Magisterium, to the deposit of faith.

What I think is of particular note is his insistence that the development of the sensus fidei in any individual believer is proportional to how fully s/he participates in the faith. To wit: when one looks at public opinion polls among Catholics in the United States it is often the case that there is almost a complete reversal of opinion when one compares the views of self-identified Catholics who do not fully participate in the life of the Church (i.e., don’t go to confession, don’t attend Mass, don’t participate in faith formation, etc.) with those who do. My guess is that this phenomenon is not limited to the U.S. I think another theological note worth citing is that, in the end, only the saints make up the Church.

BXVI in Regensburg with then-Bishop Müller behind him

Following closely on the heels of this important correction, Pope Benedict also used this occasion to respond to one of the persistent criticisms of the so-called “new atheists”:

Today, this same supernatural sense of faith in believers also gives rise to vigorous reactions against the prejudice which holds that religions — and in particular the monotheistic religions — are intrinsically vehicles of violence, especially because they claim the existence of a universal truth. Some consider that the “polytheism of values” alone would guarantee tolerance and civil peace and would be in conformity with the spirit of a pluralistic democratic society

Having set forth the problem, the Holy Father here, too, gives the correction:

it is essential to remember that faith in the one God, Creator of heaven and earth, encounters the rational needs for metaphysical reflection, which is not weakened but reinforced and deepened by the Revelation of the mystery of God-Trinity. On the other hand, it is necessary to emphasize the form that the definitive Revelation of the mystery of the one God assumes in the life and death of Jesus Christ, who goes to the Cross like a “lamb that is led to the slaughter” (Is 53:7). The Lord testifies to a radical rejection of every form of hatred and violence in favour of the absolute primacy of agape. Hence, if in history there have been or are forms of violence perpetrated in God’s name, they must not be attributed to monotheism but rather to historical causes, and, principally, to the errors of men and women. Rather, it is forgetfulness of God itself that immerses human societies in a form of relativism which inevitably gives rise to violence. When the possibility for all to refer to an objective truth is denied, dialogue becomes impossible and violence, declared openly or hidden, becomes the rule of human relationships

Evil is an absence

Since 30 November, a few days before Advent began, early each morning, I have been reading a chapter a day of Bishop Steven Croft's book The Advent Calendar. Even though I was up in plenty of time this morning to read today's chapter, I really didn't feel like it. Internally, I tried talking myself into it, but to no avail, thinking, "I'll read it tonight." Read tonight I did; here's the very first paragraph:

Alice woke early the next morning, her mind full of the image of the great tree, rotten to the core and falling to the ground. What was it, she thought, that caused people to go bad? Where did badness come from? How did it grow so that it took over your whole life?

In the wake of today's evil, many are asking this question tonight. St. Augustine taught that evil is simply the privatio boni (i.e., privation of good). Evil is insubstantial, it is not an (ontological) entity. I think this is why evil almost always seems to throw the world into chaos. In the wake of today's horrific events the most human question is Why?

President Obama summed it up well when he said, "our hearts are broken today." So, at the end of this horrifying day I am happy to be home with all my children, even as I am heartbroken to think about those parents and those children who can't do that tonight. I pray for them and all who are left devastated by today's violence. While this is always controversial, I pray, too, for Adam Lanza, the sad soul who perpetrated today's horror. Kyrie eleison/Christi eleison/Kyrie eleison.

For the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.

I'm more convinced than ever that our greatest need is to be loved. The absence that is evil is overcome by a Presence, "the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it" (John 1:5).

"Now I'm playin' it real straight"

Okay, as of today I am letting go of the hipster meme. It's time to move ahead. In all actuality my embrace of the snide insinuation that I am a hipster (an insult, not a compliment), while it has served as a source of amusement for me, really made me realize, even more deeply, just how unhip I am. Like most terms of this sort, "hip" is an equivocal term. Being a "hipster," at least to my way of reckoning, means being a person who hops on every band wagon slightly before it goes mainstream and then denounces said book, group, song, trend as soon as it becomes popular. Someone who is obsesses with being "hip," or "cool." I suppose there are other similarly negative ways of defining a "hipster," but it just goes to show that it is an insult, not a compliment.

On the other hand, it seems that being "hip" (but not a hipster) is still alright, I think. To my mind this would be something like being a trend-setter, a person who, while "with it," does not necessarily let trends dictate their attitude (i.e., someone who is "cool," or "bad," or whatever the current appellation might be). As the 47 year-old father of three teenagers, I am well aware that I am not hip, but to use a term that also fades in and out of use, I am a "square."

Bass Weejun "top-siders"

I came of age in the early-to-mid-1980s, during the Reagan years. It was a pretty conservative time, a time of Levi's 501 button-up jeans, button-down Oxford shirts, Izods and other brand polo shirts, top-sider shoes and penny loafers- I had black loafers (worn without socks, or with colorful argyle socks), etc. A favorite television show of mine from that time was Square Pegs. The term "preppy" came into vogue back then. One of the most popular bands of that era was Huey Lewis and the News. The films of the late John Hughes captured my high school time brilliantly.

All of the above is just a big wind-up to this Friday's traditio, an oldie and goodie: Huey Lewis and the News' "Hip To Be Square," surely a song beloved of "unhip" Dads of a certain age- a song also featured in American Psycho. I would be forced to concede the horn section is "hip"- that's the positive one, remember?

I like my bands in business suits, I watch them on TV/I'm working out most everyday and watching what I eat

And so, I am who I am, someone in the process of becoming (hopefully) who God created and redeemed me to be. I think that is precisely where all of this has some relevance to Advent.

A dissociative digression on my need to (re-)discover my I

Reading Jacob Needleman’s book Lost Christianity: A Journey of Rediscovery, I encountered the extraordinary figure of Fr. Sylvan, a Christian monk Needleman met while traveling home from an inter-religious conference in the Far East in the early 1970s. Fr. Sylvan’s affiliation is not clear, even to Needleman, not even after he received a package containing a journal the monk wrote for him after their encounter, an attempt to answer the questions posed by Prof. Needleman during their time together, which was sent to him after Fr. Sylvan’s death. My guess is that Fr. Sylvan was probably a Coptic monk, but perhaps Orthodox, or maybe Syriac.

In the extract of the journal published by Needleman I was particularly struck by Fr. Sylvan’s insistence of the necessity of what might be called, to borrow from Don Giussani, the discovery of one’s I. Fr. Sylvan wrote:

We must work to know what God is doing in ourselves and then God will enable us, through power, to love my neighbor. We need power, energy, to love, that is, to not get absorbed by our emotional reactions to the other. This energy... cannot appear without self-struggle of a specific, revealed nature"

I don’t mind relating that the word I eliminated by using an ellipsis is the word “magic,” which would take more effort to put into context than I am willing to make here.

It seems to me that love must factor in here somewhere, not silly, sappy, emotive, sentimental love, but true love, something like what I think Fr. Aldo Trento meant when, describing his personal experience with Don Gius, gazing on myself with the same tenderness with which Christ gazes on me, or God taking pity on my nothingness. Jesus' command to love my neighbor as I live myself, it seems to me, is at the root of this (Matt. 22:39; Mark 12:31; Luke 10:27).

Fr. Sylvan wrote about the need, to borrow something from Walker Percy, whose Love in the Ruins: the Adventures of a Bad Catholic At a Time Near the End of the World I just finished reading, the importance of not to being abstracted from one's self and the need to align one’s perceptions with reality. This is where I detect yet another connection with the teaching of Don Gius. The problem also consists of experiencing what you believe and adequately conveying that experience, which quickly puts you up against the limitations of language, but enables one to grasp something Derrida insisted upon, the ontological priority of writing over speech.

In an attempt to align my observations and the connections they have prompted with reality, I note something that Sean Penn said in a recent interview with Esquire. I do not do so in order to be judgmental in the least, but because of the honesty of Penn’s observation and, frankly, its convenience for making at least part of my point. Referring to his fourteen year marriage to Robyn Wright, he shared, "There is no shame in my saying that we all want to be loved by someone. As I look back over my life in romance, I don't feel I've ever had that. I have been the only one that was unaware of the fraud in a few of these circumstances blindly." He went on to say, "When you get divorced, all the truths that come out, you sit there and you go, What the fuck was I doing? What was I doing believing that this person was invested in this way? Which is a fantastically strong humiliation in the best sense. It can make somebody very bitter and very hard and closed off, but I find it does the opposite to me."

He went on to describe what his reaction to this realization was, both initially and subsequently: "And so I go out and I strike out four nights in a row, drinking at a bar and ending up home, you know, drunk. And on the fourth day I said, 'I could just go sit in the middle of the bed and watch TV at four in the afternoon, too. I don't have anything.' My daughter's eighteen and she's doing her thing, my son's with his mother. So I turned on the TV and there was this earthquake in Haiti.” His response to that is amazing. Whatever you might think of Penn or his outspoken politics, you can’t argue with what he has done in Haiti, for Haitians, or, for that matter, what he says here (well, as my experience on social media has taught me, people can and will argue with anything and everything- I am certainly that argumentative at times). I can’t help but wonder whether he has yet found that love he so deeply desires, that we all desire. I do appreciate his public honesty. No doubt he’ll pay a price for that, which, at least from my perspective, makes it all that much more valuable.

My experience has taught me that no human being can bear the weight of my need to be loved. Nonetheless, it is a lesson I have to re-learn with more frequency than I care to admit. This, in turn, puts me in mind of a favorite hymn: "Lord, whose love in humble service," which begins, "Lord, whose love in humble service bore the weight of human need." We have no greater need than to be loved. "In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins" (1 John 4:10). God sent His Son to expiate our sin by loving us even though we are unlovable, to resolve the contradiction at core of our being: our deep need to be loved and our refusal to love.

Please permit me another insight from Fr. Sylvan and a connection, one that the departed monk made himself, namely with Kierkegaard. The wise monk wrote, "Purity of intention is to seek and struggle for one's own self" Is this much/any different from what Kirkegaard insisted upon when he averred that "Purity of heart is to will one thing"? Lest we overlook it, the subtitle of this work is "spiritual preparation for the office of confession" Writing of Kirkegaard, I think in our present moment, with the New Evangelization in mind, Kierkegaard’s distinction between Christianity and Christendom, a variation on the Augustianian postulation of two kingdoms, but as filtered through Luther and in vehement response to Hegel, is most useful.