Is your intent suicide? A moral engagement

Finding myself on my own last Saturday evening, I did one of the things I like doing best. I watched a movie. Since I have been unable to engage in any serious reading over the past few weeks, I wanted to watch something substantial, perhaps even a bit provocative. After about an hour of pondering and searching, I decided to watch director Steve McQueen's first film, released in 2008, about the 1981 hunger strikes in Northern Ireland's Maze Prison, Hunger.

Bobby Sands' coffin

The film premiered at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival and earned McQueen the festival's Camera d' Or prize for first time filmmakers. The film went on to garner many prizes.

I am not going to attempt the tell the whole story because it is readily available for anyone who is interested. I remember all of this from the news when it happened. From the time I was 11 I read the newspaper cover-to-cover everyday and watched as many news programs as I could. I certainly remember Bobby Sands, who was the first of the 10 IRA prisoners to die in Maze from starvation trying to gain political prisoner status in the 1981 hunger strike.

His story eventually becomes the focal point of the film. I was particularly struck by the scene in which Sands requests a meeting with a sympathetic priest. The reason Sands wanted to have such a meeting was to tell the priest of his decision to go on a hunger strike and to die if necessary. Of course, the priest tries to dissuade him from taking this drastic course of action on a number of grounds, but ultimately comes to see that he cannot talk Sands out of doing it. So, I share the scene below. It's a bit long I suppose for a blog post, but well worth watching. Even though the dialogue is in English, there are subtitles, which help:

The scene in McQueen's film is a dramatization. However, it does bear noting that Pope John Paul II sent his private secretary to visit Sands on both 28 and 29 April 1981. Between meetings, he met with Great Britain's Secretary for Northern Ireland, Humphrey Atkins. His object was to get Sands to end his hunger strike and open negotiations. He failed on both accounts. My point in posting this is not to garner sympathy for violence and terrorism, which are not acceptable means of achieving political, or any, ends, but because I think the scene does a good job of bringing home how difficult are morals and ethics, especially in a fallen world, especially for a person who has lost hope.

Pioneer Day: looking back

It's been a backward looking week for me. On Sunday night, in response to my post on Sts. Martha and Mary, Norm, commenting on his visit to the beautiful Cathedral of the Madeleine, mentioned the Servant of God Cora Louise Evans, who, like me and many Roman Catholics throughout my diocese and elsewhere, was a convert to the Catholic faith from Mormonism. One of the best ways to facilitate her canonization is to invoke her intercession for various needs. The post I linked to above will tell you how.

Then yesterday I finally took the opportunity to read a New York piece, "Some Mormons Search the Web and Find Doubt." As I pointed out to one LDS friend, who insinuated that what one might find on the worldwide web cannot be relied on, the title does not really do the content of the article justice. While he is correct in a general sense, access to information leads to questions and questions lead a person to seek answers, to either disprove or verify things they have encountered.

This prompted me, as is my wont every few years, to go back and start looking at some LDS issues, like the website that provides information on Mormon founder Joseph Smith, Jr.'s 34 wives, Remembering the Wives of Joseph Smith. Of the 33 women Smith married after marrying his first wife, Emma Hale, 11 were married to other men at the time Joseph "married" them and ten were teenagers, the youngest two, Nancy Winchester and Helen Mar Kimball, were 14 at the time of their supposed marriage. But it was Lucinda Morgan Harris whose story caught my attention perusing the website this time around. This is one of those websites that provides information that is at variance with the official LDS Church line on both the origins of Mormon polygamy and their founder's personal practice of it.

Lucinda was 37 and married to George Harris when she spiritually married the self-proclaimed Mormon prophet in 1838. She and her husband had joined the LDS Church in 1834 in Terre Haute, Indiana. Apparently she married Smith in Missouri, but, like many other women who became his spiritual wives, she continued to live with her husband, making her a polyanderer, that is a wife with more than one husband. After Smith's death, according to Todd Compton in his book In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith, Lucinda divorced her husband and "joined the (Catholic) Sisters of Charity, and at the breaking out of the civil war, was acting in that capacity in the hospitals at Memphis Tennessee..."

There is some convergence in all of this. Cora Evans was born and raised LDS here in Utah. When the time came for her to marry, she married her husband in the Salt Lake LDS Temple. After this experience, she wrote, "I was a true loyal Mormon at the hour of entering the temple, but nearly a confirmed atheist when I left the temple building after the marriage ceremony." Her biography, which can found on The Mystical Humanity of Christ website, also records how Cora summed up her feelings after that event: "I was without a God and religion, but had gained a very wonderful husband. As I looked at him and learned to love him more and more I resolved to help find a God for him." Indeed, years later Cora's husband followed her into the Catholic Church.

Today in Utah we celebrate Pioneer Day, our state holiday to commemorate the arrival of the Mormon pioneers in Salt Lake Valley.

Martha and Mary- a short Sunday reflection

We live in a world that seeks to push us all towards polar extremes. Sadly this as true in the Church as in the world. Such a force is truly diabolic, meaning that it is the devil's work to divide us. Our English word "devil" is derived from the Latin word diabolus, which, in turn, is a transliteration of the Greek word διάβολος. This Greek noun comes from the Greek verb diaballo that literally means something like "to put at cross purposes" (dia= "across," or "through" and ballo= "to throw"). It seems to me that the point of today's Gospel, especially in light of our first reading from Genesis, wherein Abraham and Sarah go to great lengths to provide a feast for their three guests, in whom the Church sees an image, or at least some kind of vague intimation, of the Most Holy Trinity, is not to privilege contemplation over Christian service. To give one example, Does the Church not need both deacons and contemplative religious orders?

Given the above I find it interesting that the place where the Holy Father has taken up residence in the Vatican is the Domus Sanctae Marthae, or, in English, "St. Martha's House." An old Benedictine, that is, monastic, motto is "receive everyone as you would Christ," meaning offer anyone who turns up as much hospitality as you are capable of giving her/him. In the final chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews, the sacred writer reminds his listeners, "Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect hospitality, for through it some have unknowingly entertained angels" (13:1-2). Our first reading from Genesis may well be what the author of Hebrews had in mind when he wrote those words.

Christ with Martha and Mary, by Johannes Vermeer, 1654-55

As a deacon, I firmly believe that the shape, or form, of my discipleship is supposed to be more like Martha's than Mary's. My role in the liturgy is to effectively do what Martha was doing in our Gospel today. It seems to me that what earned Martha what I can only personally imagine to be a gentle correction from our Lord was her either/or thinking, her demand that the Lord "Tell [Mary] to help me" (Luke 10:40). Let's not fail to see the very unique circumstance in which Martha and Mary found themselves- being visited in their home by the incarnate Lord! Jesus' gentle rebuke to Martha reminds me of when He said, in response to the criticism that His disciples were not fasting, that wedding guests do not fast while the bridegroom is present, before indicating they would resume fasting after He left (Luke 5:33-39).

I would never argue that we should not all take the time to sit at Jesus' feet and simply be in His presence, as it were. Quite the contrary! It is of the essence that we do this and, in all honesty, probably more frequently than most of us do. But it is also vital for us to avoid reading Scriptural passages in isolation, apart of the rest of the witness of Scripture and disregarding the experience of the Church over time, especially the experience of the saints, who show us what it means to follow and serve Jesus Christ in every age. After all, we venerate both Martha and Mary as saints!

I think the key is not to act like Martha when we should be acting like Mary and vice-versa. It is also important to recognize that Christ's Church needs both.

Honor your Mother- the Blessed Virgin Mary

Traditionally, Saturdays are the day of the week we honor the Blessed Virgin Mary in a particular way. One way we can still see this is in Morning Prayer for Saturdays, especially in the Intercessions. For example, today the Church prayed Saturday Morning Prayer from the Week III of the Psalter. Therefore, we began the intercessions with this: "With confidence let us pray to the Father who willed that the Virgin Mary should surpass all creatures in heaven and earth." One might retort, "Wait a minute! What about our Blessed Lord?" Well, Jesus Christ is not a creature, but "true God from true God."

With all of this already in mind, I opened the first volume of Hans Urs Von Balthasar's Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics (I quickly made it through the first half of the book during Lent and since have bogged down in my effort to re-read it due to so many commitments) and started to read "The Marian Experience of God," which begins thus:

At the point where all roads meet which lead from the Old Testament to the New we encounter the Marian experience of God, at once so rich and so secret that it almost escapes description. But it is also so important that time and again it shines through as the background for what is manifest. In Mary, Zion passes over into the Church; in her, the Word passes over into flesh; in her, the Head passes over into the body. She is the place of superabundant fruitfulness (pg. 338)

St. Anne, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the Christ Child, by Leonardo da Vinci

Identifying Mary as "the place of superabundant fruitfulness" puts me mind of the way we respond to silly accusations of worshiping the Blessed Virgin. Of course, in accordance with the Decalogue, we worship God and God alone- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Greek word for worship is latria. We also venerate the saints and the Greek for that is dulia. The Mother of God, however, occupies a unique space between God and the saints. The reverence due to her we call hyperdulia, which is just what it sounds like, the prefix hyper meaning over and above, or beyond. So, while hyperdulia falls well short of latria, it goes over and beyond dulia

Since Mary is not only the Mother of God, but also the Mother of the Church, that is, as Jesus said from the Cross to the beloved disciple (John 19:26-27), our Mother, and since I have already invoked the Ten Commandments (i.e., the Decalogue), it bears noting that the first three commandments have to do with loving God with all heart, might, mind, and strength. But it is not exactly accurate to then lump the remaining seven commandments together and say they are about loving our neighbor. The fourth commandment enjoins us to honor our parents. It is the commandment with a promise. For each of us, even if our parents, or one parent, are absent from our lives, our mother and father occupy a space between God and everyone else. In this schema it makes sense to honor the Blessed Virgin. It also helps us to see that Von Balthasar in no way exaggerated her importance either in this passage or elsewhere, especially in his ecclesiology, which holds that the Church is essentially Marian.

"They like to get you in a compromising position"

Earlier this month, writing for the American Conservative, David Masciotra did a piece on the music of John Mellencamp. Mellencamp began his career as John Cougar, then John Cougar Mellencamp, before settling on using his real name- John Mellencamp. He is from southern Indiana- the town of Seymour to be exact. It's true that Mellencamp identifies as an ardent uber liberal, one with a populist bent. But I think the article, "Rock for Republicans? How the GOP misunderstands John Mellencamp’s heartland ethic," does a pretty good job of fleshing out some of the more salient themes found in his music. I remember learning that before he became a rock star, Mellencamp worked for the phone company and also that he was once a welfare recipient. When he started making good money he paid back all the money he received while he was on welfare. Even though he has strongly expressed his views as social liberal, in many ways Mellencamp stands for the kind of ideas that the Democratic party used to stand for, that is, for the little man. Sadly, that brand of American politics is dead and may well be be buried.

Here's the extract I found most interesting in Masciotra's piece:

Mellencamp was raised in the Nazarene Church and left when he was 16 because, as he tells it, “They said, ‘no smoking, no drinking, no dancing, and girls can’t wear make up.’ And I said, ‘That doesn’t sound like much fun’.”

He might have left the church of his childhood, but he never fully left the faith. The image and name of Jesus hovers over Mellencamp’s music. He often performs on stage with a white porcelain statue of Jesus in front of his amplifier. A painting of Jesus hangs over a jukebox on the album jacket for his best record, “The Lonesome Jubilee,” and he invokes Christ’s teachings in many of his songs, from some of his biggest hits to some of his most obscure album cuts. On “Jack and Diane,” his only number one single, he combines both of his belief systems into a visceral prayer: “So let it rock / Let it roll / Let the Bible Belt come and save my soul…”

I can say in all honesty that Melllencamp's music has always been a hit with me. I remember listening both to The Lonesome Jubilee and Scarecrow over and over again when they came out. I still know the words to all the songs on those albums, which date to back when records, that is, albums had some thematic content and a coherence all their own. But the song that has meant to the most to me over the years is his "The Authority Song." Hence, it is our traditio for this July Friday- the performance is from his Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame induction, which happened on 10 March 2008:

...They like to get you there and smile in your face/They think they're so cute when they got you in that condition/Well I think it's a total disgrace

It's like Camus' The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt turned into an American rock song. It was in that essay that Camus wrote, 'Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being."

"Go and do likewise"

"[I]t is something very near to you, already in your mouths and in your hearts; you have only to carry it out"- Moses (Deut. 30:14).

Jesus (referring to the two observant Jews and the Good Samaritan): "Which of these three, in your opinion, was neighbor to the robbers’ victim?"

Scholar of the Law: "The one who treated him with mercy"

Jesus: "Go and do likewise" Jesus (Luke 10:36-37).

We all know that this is easier said than done because there are times when each one of us have not only been guilty of not showing mercy by way of omission, but have deliberately refused it to someone in need.

The Greek word for "mercy" that issues from the mouth of the scholar of the law in this passages is eleos, which also connotes "compassion" and "kindness." Eleos is a word that occurs with some frequency throughout the New Testament. In our uniquely Christian Scriptures, it usually refers to what God has done for us in Christ. For example, consider Ephesians 2:4, where St. Paul describes God as being "rich in mercy." In Latin, "rich in mercy" translates as dives in misericordia. Dives in misericordia is the title of Pope St. John Paul II's second encyclical letter, which begins by citing Ephesians 2:4: "It is 'God, who is rich in mercy' whom Jesus Christ has revealed to us as Father: it is His very Son who, in Himself, has manifested Him and made Him known to us."

It is certainly true that we should be merciful because of the mercy the Father has given us in Christ, but it is often only God's mercy that enables us to be merciful. Many times it requires God's grace to bend us outward from ourselves toward the other in an effort to connect us to one another in charity. This is especially the case when it comes to those towards whom we may have some enmity, or who may have some towards us. This is summed up well a bit later in the second chapter of Ephesians:

But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have become near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, he who made both one and broke down the dividing wall of enmity, through his flesh, abolishing the law with its commandments and legal claims, that he might create in himself one new person in place of the two, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile both with God, in one body, through the cross, putting that enmity to death by it (2:13-16)

As Jesus seeks to teach in today's Gospel, what we do we must do out of love, not by way of compulsion or obligation. I believe it was C.S. Lewis who noted that if you feel you don't love your neighbor, begin acting as though you do and your heart will usually follow. But if it doesn't, so what? Like prayer, reaching out to those in need is not first foremost about our feelings and affective disposition. In fact, it very often makes us nervous and uncomfortable.

We must begin to allow ourselves to be "moved," as was the Samaritan when he saw the man who was beaten and left for dead, by the plight of the other. Not least of which because in his need the other reflects my own need back to me, which is why, as Luigi Giussani powerfully asserted, "The true protagonist of history is the beggar." It is never enough for Jesus Christ to make Himself known to us. He bids us to make Him known to others in the manner of the Good Samaritan. This, my friends, is the New Evangelization and will be until Christ returns in glory (see Matthew 25:31-46).

It is our need to show kindness, mercy, and compassion that causes Jesus to hold up the Samaritan as an example and to say things like this to the Pharisees: "tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you" (Matt. 21:31).

"Homo curvatus in se" - attempt at skimming the surface

I have written before that in many ways being a Catholic is the way I hold the tension between my Protestant and Orthodox proclivities. In no way is this truer than when it comes to pondering the depths of human sinfulness, that is, our collective and individual estrangement from God. This is why the witness of the saints is so very vital for me. The saints give me hope, even as I realize that in the end the Church of Christ is made up only of the saints. My hope arises from the fact that, by-and-large, the saints are those who were willing to engage in the struggle, the agon, as St. Paul referred to it (Yes, the word from which we derive "agony").

It is easy to forget something that Sacred Scripture teaches: "our struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens" (Eph. 6:12). Stated succinctly, our struggle is against evil, manifest in each of our lives as sin. As is also set forth clearly in Scripture: "If we say, 'We are without sin' we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we acknowledge our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from every wrongdoing. If we say, 'We have not sinned,' we make him a liar, and his word is not in us" (1 John 1:8-10). It seems to me that individually and collectively we expend an extraordinary amount of effort finding ways around these truths, one of the many ways we try to reduce God to our own measure in order to let ourselves off-the-hook, as it were. But it also has the effect of reducing Divine Mercy, which is a sacrilege. All I have to do to verify that this is true is to contemplate my own heart.

It was interesting, along these same lines, to read some of the reactions to Dr. Ralph Martin's book, published earlier this year, which merely restates what the Church has always taught, something reinforced, not done away with, by the Second Vatican Council: Will Many Be Saved?: What Vatican II Actually Teaches and Its Implications for the New Evangelization. To wit: if you ain't a sinner, you don't need a Savior and Christianity is rendered incoherent. St. Paul begins the earliest Christian creed that has been handed on to us with, "For I handed on to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures" (1 Cor. 15:3). In the Letter to the Hebrews, on which I am currently leading a parish Bible study, we find something similar towards the beginning: "When he had accomplished purification from sins, he took his seat at the right hand of the Majesty on high" (Heb. 1:3). The missionary mandate given by Christ to the Church, known as The Great Commission (Matt. 28:19-20), to take the Gospel everywhere to everyone remains as valid today as ever.

Homo curvatus in se, "man curved in on himself" is how St. Augustine described the unjustified human condition. Sticking with this image, Christ comes to straighten us out, or, perhaps more accurately, bend us outward. Simul iustus et peccator is how Martin Luther described the justified man, who is simultaneously justified while still a sinner. Think of St. Paul's "But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:8). Consider also the whole phenomenon of our post-baptismal proclivity to go on sinning, which necessitates the need for the Sacrament of Penance. I believe it was Archbishop Sample of Portland who noted on Divine Mercy Sunday this year that the Sacrament of Penance was the first gift Christ gave to His Church after His resurrection.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux- Doctor of the Church

I am currently making my way through Franz Posset's Pater Bernhardus: Martin Luther and Bernard of Clairvaux. Eventually I hope this will bear fruit and allow me to further some thoughts I shared in "Discipleship costly for all who follow."

Especially after reading Christoph Cardinal Schönborn's treatment of Luther's understanding of justification exactly a year ago in his book God Sent His Son: A Contemporary Christology, I have been trying to determine how Augustianian I can be with regard to human sinfulness without falling into Lutheranism, or the very tempting, but philosophically and theologically inadequate, Calvinistic doctrine of total depravity. While I found Cardinal Schönborn's comparison of Luther's doctrine of justification with that of St. Thomas Aquinas useful and informative in this regard, I find Posset's more apt because Luther, who was steeped in monastic theology, as opposed to scholasticism, tended to look to St. Bernard and not St. Thomas and the schoolmen, whom he held in contempt because he felt they viewed Scripture as secondary and not primary.

"Self-centeredness," Posset writes, "is the essence of curavtio of the warped soul. In this regard Bernard and Luther thought alike." As Bernard viewed the matter, Posset continues, "evil stems not from the body, but from the heart." He goes on to suggest that "[t]his idea may also have rubbed off on Luther." He notes that in Luther's lecture on one of the passages above, 1 John 1:10, Luther "spoke of human beings as carrying 'a monster in our flesh', which may echo the bernardine brutus and bestialis spiritus." In his lecture on this verse from 1 John, Posset continues, "Luther declared that we are weakened, not only by fleshly sins, not only by the fervor of libido, wrath, false wisdom, by also by carnal affect which flees hope and faith; and that we are always inclined to wrath, which is graver than any in the flesh."

What is more striking to me is Luther's insistence, in light of our inclination towards wrath, is the human "tendency to seek a remedy on [our] own." While there may be differences between Bernard and Luther about the depth of human sinfulness, both believing that it runs rather deep (as Posset summarizes it, in his 82nd sermon on the Song of Songs, Bernard "reflected on whether man resembles more God or a beast"- St. Bernard is a Doctor of the Church), they agree that there is only one remedy for what afflicts us: Christ Jesus crucified and risen. However, there remains the constant temptation to give into antinomianism, which, as defined by Merriam-Webster, refers to "one who holds that under the gospel dispensation of grace the moral law is of no use or obligation because faith alone is necessary to salvation," which is contrary to Scripture, not least of which because it reduces "faith" to mere belief and one that does not move us.