Hope in desolation: the burning of Notre Dame

Yesterday's belated Palm/Passion Sunday post felt right. Sometimes I get carried away with words. Once in awhile, I think, I manage to say something worth reading or listening to. In his song about the Incarnation, Michael Card sings: "You and me we use so many clumsy words/the point of what we often say is not worth being heard." This rings very true with me, especially in this age of instantaneous electronic communication that tempts me to weigh in an anything and everything.

The first casualty of my wordiness is silence. Observing Holy Week, especially these few days between Palm Sunday and the beginning of the Triduum, requires a heavy dose of silence.

I don't know about you, but watching in horror yesterday as Notre Dame de Paris burned summoned forth no words, just a gasp and feeling of great sorrow and loss, the beginnings of grief. Like virtually everyone else, I was forced to helplessly watch the fire at a distance as the fire brigades of Paris did desperate battle with the flames. What could I say except perhaps a Hail Mary or a Memorare, invoking the intercession of the Blessed Virgin as a beautiful cathedral dedicated to her was besieged by fire?

Photograph taken in the nave of Notre Dame after yesterday's fire

It seems to me that in the wake of such a loss, I need to remind myself that the Church is made of living stones. Yes, the burning of Notre Dame cathedral is a painful way to be reminded of this! Another reality, one of which I was reminded on Ash Wednesday, is that, sooner or later, everything will be reduced to dust, including myself. I suppose my consolation is my belief that I will not remain dust.

Like the woman taken in adultery, I hope that Christ Jesus will lift me from the dust, making me a new creation. The audaciousness of this hope is often lost on me. I am not sure how such a belief ever becomes routinized. Yet, somehow I succeed in doing just that. Witnessing the burning of Notre Dame is but one more proof not only that hope lies beyond optimism but that desolation is the soil from which of hope arises.

Salvation history shows us time and again that the opus Dei is bringing hope from desolation by bringing life from death. This is what Holy Week invites us to experience, whether we observe it in a magnificent cathedral or in the crudest of chapels.

Palm Sunday: Holy Week begins

Prepare ye the way for the Lord; prepare ye the way for his Kingdom

Blessed is the king who comes
in the name of the Lord.
Peace in heaven
and glory in the highest (Luke 19:38)

Better late than never

Good Friday, Black holes, fascination w/ nothingness

It's the final Friday of Lent. Next Friday is Good Friday. Last night my diocese celebrated our annual Chrism Mass. We celebrate our Chrism Mass the week before Holy Week because our diocese consists of the entire state of Utah, some 85,000 square miles. Therefore, it would be impossible to celebrate it during the day on Holy Thursday and for everyone to be back in time to celebrate the Mass of the Lord's Supper. It is always moving for me to participate in the Chrism Mass. I look forward to Holy Thursday because at the Mass of the Lord's Supper when my parish will receive the oils consecrated by our bishop into our parish for use during the ensuing year.

Even though is is 12 April, here along the Wasatch Front of Northern Utah we received several inches of snow overnight. Yes, snow. When I arrived home from the Chrism Mass last night about 9:45 PM, I went for a walk. It was lovely, a bit warm. As I was finishing my walk, it began to rain a bit. Then, about 3:30 AM this morning, my wife, who had gotten up to get a drink of water, told me it was snowing. Yes, the snowplows are out this morning.

Anyway, this week we all saw the first picture of a black hole. This was made possible by the diligent work of a brilliant young woman named Katie Bouman. Our Friday traditio, then is the late Chris Cornell with his early grunge group, Soundgarden, singing "Black Hole Sun." I was told by a friend, after posting this video on FB, that NPR used this as the lead-in and fade to their story on the picture of a black hole.

When you think of it, picturing Jesus on the cross, which is the image of Good Friday, we see something like the black, existential hole that life sometimes seems to be. For some, it often or always seems this way. What Don Giussani asserted is true: "[Jesus] mounted the Cross to free us from the fascination with nothingness, to free us from the fascination with appearances, with the ephemeral." In light of all this, I would invite you to look back at my post "Dreams have never made my bed".

Confusion and division must not continue: Benedict's letter

I suppose at least some of my readers know about the ill-advised letter composed by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI (see "Full text of Benedict XVI essay: 'The Church and the scandal of sexual abuse'") that became public over the past few days. Writing the letter was ill-advised. Making the letter public comes close to a catastrophe. I have no desire to denigrate a very old man who, as the letter indicates, is clearly not at the top of his powers. I cannot imagine that those close to the former pope did not dissuade him from writing about this. Failing that, how did it leave his dwelling?

I don't mind stating up-front that I hold Pope Benedict XVI in the highest regard. Over the decades I have been Catholic I have benefited enormously by reading the theology of Joseph Ratzinger. When it comes to the issue of the sexual abuse of children and young people in the Catholic Church, Josef Ratzinger did a lot. First and foremost, he recognized it as a problem that needed to be dealt with. To the extent that priestly sexual abuse was acknowledged and dealt with at all during the papacy of John Paul II it was largely due to the efforts of then-Cardinal Ratzinger. When he became pope, the matter began to receive the attention that it deserved. He sustained this throughout his papacy. As we all know, it took Pope Francis some time to come to grips with this issue himself, despite the efforts of his predecessor.

Back to the letter- I am amazed at its anecdotal and rather shallow contents. At least to me, it reads like a tightly-written apologetic tract, the kind that makes a very tight but not very cogent argument, one that ignores many relevant facts and issues. If one were to take the letter at face value, it would seem that there was no pedophilia or ephebophilia in the church until the mid-to-late-1960s. But my own diocese's disclosure is enough to disprove this. One can read the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report. Even with its flaws, you can see that the analysis applied in this letter fails to account for a healthy number of cases that happened before the much-vilified sexual revolution. For these instances, Benedict's letter has no explanation whatsoever.

The so-called sexual revolution certainly had many downsides and created a lot of causalities. However, there were some good things that emerged from this societal movement. Some of the good things found their way into Humanae Vitae. For instance, in teaching that sexual intercourse has a "unitive" dimension, Pope Paul VI was quite revolutionary. Progress that is true progress usually requires some short, tentative, incremental steps before gaining momentum.

If you don't believe there wasn't sexual weirdness among ecclesiastics before the 1960s, I urge you to pick up a copy of Hubert Wolf's The Nuns of Sant' Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal. It is an engrossing book. Wolf tells the tale of a rather lengthy and strange series of events that happened in Rome on the eve of the First Vatican Council. In this book, Wolf also provides deep insight into how inhumane church teaching had become with regard to sexuality. For example, confessors manuals and moral theology works held that French-kissing between spouses was a mortal sin (see "Humanae Vitae at 50").

Even if one takes the sexual revolution as the starting point, the sexual abuse of children and young people, male and female, was at least as prevalent among traditionally-inclined priests as it was among so-called progressives, if not more so. I will just note in passing that Benedict's characterization of what is called "revisionist" moral theology amounts to a gross caricature. Often revisionist moral theologians, like Bernard Häring, were more aware of the complex and ambiguous nature of human sexuality and understood that one could apply an atemporal set of norms to govern this unruly aspect of humanity. I write this as someone who, along with my wife, has sought to adhere to church teaching on marital sexuality throughout our marriage. We still do. So, I am not dismissive of the church's teaching in least.

One could drive a truck through the gap between Benedict's admission that it is impossible to build a systematic sexual ethic on the basis of Scripture alone. In his letter, Benedict points to the efforts of one moral theologian to do just that. His summarily dismissive attitude toward contemporary moral theology as it seeks to address human sexuality in light of the paucity provided by the Scriptures, especially the New Testament, as well as accounting for the deeper understanding we have the human person overall and human sexuality in particular.

As an amusing side note, I was unaware of something Benedict asserts in his letter, namely there was a time when one could watch "sex movies" on commercial airliners. And that this was a bad idea because violence would break out. Yeah, anyway...

I could go on, but I will limit myself to 3 further observations:

1- Benedict's "history" is narrow, incomplete and overly simplistic to the point of not only being misleading, but laughable

2- Isn't it interesting that nowhere is clericalism (a term that I grasp is rapidly being overused and misused) part of his diagnosis? This stands in stark contrast to Pope Francis's Letter to the People of God, written last August from last summer. In that letter Francis grasp the really troublesome dynamic in play, which he identifies as "clericalism." Rather than being the source of the problem, for Francis the communion ecclesiology of Vatican II, characterized by the phrase given us by the Council, "hierarchical communion" (communion modifies and flattens hierarchy), is the solution, not the problem

3- Back to the issue of Christian sexual ethics, natural law and Stoicism are poor substitutes for the Gospel. Perhaps some things do not lend themselves to the kind detailed systematic approach the church has sought to impose on human sexuality

If popes resigning becomes a common feature of church life, then we require clearer guidelines about the comportment and engagement of former popes. Taking my cue from many people who are more knowledgeable about these things than I am, I think there should be no such title as "Pope Emeritus." There can only be one pope at a time, lest there be confusion. One of the major reasons for the existence of the papal office is to guarantee authoritative teaching.

Therefore, should a pope resign, he should be designated as "Bishop of Rome Emeritus." He should be forbidden the use of any and all papal insignia, including wearing white. Rather than being known by his papal name, he ought to revert to using his given name.

While it may be lost on Benedict/Ratzinger, it is not on those close to him that his unfortunate letter plays into the hands of those who seek undermine Francis and the important work of reform he is undertaking. As a result, it compounds division in the church. To say I am deeply disappointed in this development is to state my feelings in a muted manner.

__________________

Addendum:

This morning, I ran across Austin Inverleigh's piece on Pope Emeritus Benedict's letter- "Pope Benedict's letter on sex abuse is not an attack on Francis (or Vatican II)". It is a good piece but ultimately unconvincing article. I don't see the intent of Ratzinger's letter as an attack on anyone or on the Council. However, I think the letter plays into the hands of Francis's enemies. They will weaponize it. I do not back down on my view that the letter is embarrassingly shallow. Again, I wish Benedict and the church had been better served by those around him.

Year C Fifith Sunday of Lent

Readings: Isa 43:16-21; Ps 126:1-6; Phil 3:8-14; John 8:1-11

Our first reading from Isaiah bids us not to dwell on things that are past, to obsess over what happened long ago. Rather, we are encouraged to look and see that God is at work “doing something new!”¹ It’s easy on a Spring morning to believe that God is at work as we hear birds singing, see and smell the trees and flowers coming back to life, and see the grass becoming green.

More than half-way through Lent, it is important to be reminded that “Lent” is an old English word that means “springtime.” During Lent, the church invites us to open ourselves in an intentional way to the new thing God is doing in each of our lives and in our life together.

God’s work is bringing joy from sorrow and wholeness from brokenness. Above all, God brings life from death. A few weeks ago, our Gospel reading from Luke was about Jesus’s Transfiguration. This preview of the resurrection was witnessed by Peter, James, and John. On Luke’s telling, it is clear that these disciples were confused by what they saw and heard. What they heard was Jesus discussing with Moses and Elijah the “exodus that he was going to accomplish in Jerusalem.”² The text makes clear that Peter’s suggestion of building three tents was the result of not knowing what else to say.³

Making sense of a mystery is difficult. If the Lord’s Transfiguration is a mystery, then how much more mysterious is his resurrection? It’s easy to say that Jesus died and three days later he rose from the dead. In fact, believing this is the most fundamental profession Christians make. While it’s important to believe that because of Jesus’s resurrection we, too, will rise from the dead, what does Christ’s resurrection mean in the here and now? How do we experience this new thing God is doing?

A number of years ago, a friend of mine, who is not Catholic, was going through a divorce. In the midst of this, her soon-to-be ex-husband took his own life. Understandably, this was devastating for her. Knowing my beliefs, she asked if I really believe in life after death and in the resurrection and, if I did, how I could be sure? In other words, she wanted to know if my belief in the resurrection is wishful thinking or if it is rooted in something more solid. I responded by telling her I in believe the resurrection of the dead because it is something I have experienced for myself.

How does one experience resurrection? First, in baptism you died, were buried, and rose with Christ to new life.⁴ What baptism demonstrates is that eternal life starts the moment you are reborn of water and spirit. I was baptized as a young adult and so I remember my baptism. It remains one of the two or three profound moments of my life. But whether you remember your baptism or not, if you were baptized, you were reborn to eternal life. How else is resurrection experienced? This is where our Gospel reading today comes to our assistance.

Like the story of the Prodigal Son, which we heard last week, the story of the woman taken in adultery is a Bible story that, even now, almost everyone knows. It shows us, as did the Parable of the Prodigal Son, that God deals with sin and evil by extending mercy and not by punishing. So, like last week’s Gospel, this week’s contains a revelation about the nature of God.

While the story of the woman caught in adultery raises some questions, like where is her partner in crime, the fact remains that she was caught doing something for which the Law of Moses required her to be stoned to death. It is essential to the story to recognize that she is guilty. After no doubt being publicly shamed and humiliated, she is brought to Jesus. The leaders of the mob remind him what the Mosaic law demanded- that she be put to death for her sin. Testing him they ask Jesus, “So what do you say?”⁵

Recognizing that the mob was trying to trap him so they could bring a charge against him, he did not answer their question immediately. Rather, he bent down and wrote in the dust with his finger. As he wrote, the mob continued pestering him for an answer.

Finally, Jesus stood up and said the words that most people still know by heart: “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”⁶ After saying these words, the Lord bent back down and resumed writing in the dust. As he did so, one by one the mob dropped their stones and walked away.

The point of the story is clear: Jesus’s intervention brought this woman back to life from certain death. After saving her, the Lord invited her to live a new life, one no longer tainted by sin, shame, and guilt; a life not lived in the valley of the shadow of death. By refusing to condemn her, Jesus did a new thing for her, a surprising thing. Speculating, perhaps what Jesus wrote in the dust was “Choose life.”

On Ash Wednesday you were urged to remember that you are dust to dust you will return. Like the woman caught in the act of adultery, Jesus seeks to raise you from the dust to life eternal.

Getting back to how you experience Christ’s resurrection in the here and now beyond your baptism, you have this experience each time you receive God’s forgiveness. Being an extension of the sacrament of baptism, upon making a good confession and completing your penance, it is through the sacrament of penance that God, in his mercy, restores you to the state of grace. Making your Act of Contrition, you promise to go your way and sin no more. In other words, you say “Yes!” to Christ’s invitation to eternal life.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus provides us with a concrete example of what St. Paul writes about in our second reading: not having any righteousness of your own based on the law. It was precisely on this point that Jesus challenged the would-be stone-throwers, all of whom apparently realized that they, too, were guilty of serious transgressions against God’s law.

In Hebrew, “Satan” means “accuser” or “adversary.” Scripture tells us that the devil accuses us “before our God day and night.”⁷ What the devil accuses you of before God are not false charges. He accuses you of your sins, imploring God to give you your just desserts. Your righteousness, as Paul points out, comes “through faith in Christ,” who is himself the righteousness of God and the mercy of God.⁸ And so, even as Catholics, we can say that we are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.

The sacraments are the primary and surest means for receiving the grace that saves you. It is faith that causes you to hunger and thirst for God's grace. Faith prompts you to get up and come to Mass on Sunday morning. Faith prompts you to go confession. It is faith, which is a gift of God and the work of the Holy Spirit, that urges you to say, “Jesus, I trust in You.”

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1 Isaiah 43:19.^↩
2 Luke 9:31.^↩
3 Luke 9:33.^↩
4 Romans 6:4-5.^↩
5 John 8:5.^↩
6 John 8:7.^↩
7 Revelation 12:10.^↩
8 Philippians 3:9.^↩

It's impression that remains

While it is uncharacteristic of me lately, I am in a decent mood today. Why? A number of reasons:

First, I have an amazing wife who I love very much. For reasons I can never quite fathom, she loves me
Second, I have six wonderful children, all of whom I love very much
Third, I went to confession today with my usual confessor
Fourth, looking at the apricot trees in blossom on my morning walk, it's clear that here along the Wasatch Front Spring has sprung Finally, yesterday I presented the findings of my Doctor of Ministry dissertation to my committee and completed my comprehensive oral examination

I will participate in next month's Mount Angel Seminary commencement as a graduating member of the seminary's first Doctor of Ministry class. Oh yeah, I had nachos for lunch!

Not bad for a Lenten Friday. I know that going four months between confessions is too long.

I took the entire week off prepare for yesterday's presentation and exam. While I have not gotten everything done that I hoped, I did finish what I needed to finish. There is always more ahead, like preparing to preach at a parish I am visiting this weekend. Of course, in addition to school, I had a number of other things to do. Some of these were planned and others kind of popped up.

For today's traditio I am reaching back about twenty-five years. The Mighty Mighty Bosstones song "The Impression that I Get" is our Friday traditio. Why? For whatever reason, today I remembered that that my oldest son and I, when he was toddler, would put this song on the stereo and sing and dance to it. Since he was born 11 months after my wife and I married, the venue for this activity was the living room of our first apartment. Calling this to mind today made it seem like it wasn't that long ago. Where does the time go? For some reason, the passing of time has been on my mind a lot during this Lenten season. I do think that in our fast-paced and relentless world that values memory less and less, it is important to remember that memories matter.

Let's not forget that traditio refers to what is handed on. Tradere, a verb, is the act of handing on. So, the Friday traditio is always tinged with memory.

Gentleness heals your fractured self

Begging pardon up-front for what will certainly be a rambling blog post, I begin by noting that what I love about A.M. Allchin, Rowan Williams, and John O'Donohue and their retrieval of Celtic spirituality is their rejection of Stoicism, or at least the substitution of a peculiar form of Stoicism for Christian as well as other spiritualities. For whatever reason, Stoicism is deeply rooted in the Western psyche. Hence, Westerners, particularly Americans, have a pronounced tendency to turn everything into a Stoic-inspired moralism.

Because it is Lent, I will resist the temptation to digress backward starting with Jansenism, moving to Calvinism, then to Scholasticism, before arriving at Stoicism.

As Marx demonstrates, this Stoic-inspired mindset, which he correctly characterizes as bourgeois, has deep social roots. The trunk and barren branches that sprout from these roots are the economic and political implications revealed by Marxian analysis. This only serves to show us our need to do what Bob Marley urged us to do: free our minds. Jesus came to enable us to do just that! As an aside, I don't mind admitting that I find Alasdair MacIntyre's leap from Christianity and Marxism to After Virtue quite incomprehensible.

As proponents of Stoicism would no doubt insist, what I have described is not only a reduction of Christianity, Buddhism, et al., but of Stoicism as well. Even so, I cannot personally square Stoicism with Christianity. My experience of it amounts to what I can only describe as spiritual constipation. What a lot of people still don't recognize is that many forms of Christianity are really just forms of warmed-over Stoicism.

If we take "faith" to mean what the late Anglican systematic theologian John Macquarrie insisted it means- a mode of being- then its concrete aspect is a way of life, which, in turn, gives birth to particular lifestyles. Taking "way of life" to refer to Christian praxis, which comes in threes: faith, hope, and love; leitourgia, martyria, diakonia; prayer, fasting, and alms-giving, there should be as many Christian lifestyles as there are Christians. Christianity is a mode of being not merely in but for the world.

Like a lot of people, I experienced a very moralistic religious upbringing. It was an upbringing that traded in guilt and shame. Being made to feel guilt and shame for being human malformed how I perceive myself. Without going into detail, one example of this is that for decades after becoming sexually aware, I lived with a very fractured sexuality. This fracture was the result believing, deep down, that sex is inherently dirty and having sexual desires is depraved. This meant I saw myself as a depraved person for having sexual desires and urges. My experience has taught me that denying every pleasurable impulse is at least as destructive as giving into every pleasurable impulse, if not more so.

This was all brought to mind this morning by reading a section of John O'Donohue's Anam Cara. In this section, as he does throughout the book, he writes of the importance of being gentle with yourself, the importance not only of being a friend to yourself but, in this instance, of being a kind parent to your own waywardness:

In a sense, you are called to be a loving parent to your delinquent qualities. Your kindness will slowly poultice their negativity, alleviate their fear, and help them to see that your soul is a home where there is no judgment or febrile hunger fir a fixed and limited identity. The negative threatens us so powerfully precisely because it is an invitation to a art of compassion and self-enlargement that our small thinking utterly resists

As any reader of my blog can quickly learn, I am not opposed to practicing disciplines, be they spiritual, physical, or intellectual. I just don't want to judge myself, let alone others, on that basis. After all, disciplines are but means to ends. Too often we mistake them as ends in themselves. Mistaking disciplines as ends instead of means is one example of our tendency to think small.

Several years ago, a beautiful friend of mine, Casey, suddenly took his own life. He was a popular, kind, and successful person. I met Casey in one of my annual confirmation prep classes for adults. We remained friends until his untimely death at his own hand. At the banquet celebrating his life, every place-setting featured a note printed on card-stock:

O'Donohue, a native of Western Ireland, uses the image of a hearth with a fire in it as the image of one's soul. I like this because it is consistent with the ancient Christian "divine spark" anthropology. We encounter the divine within in the most immediate way we are capable of encountering it. In O'Donohue's thought, the Celtic equivalent for a burning bush becomes burning dried peat in the fireplace. This is very earthy. Earthiness is important because earth is the "stuff" of which we are wonderfully made. Besides, as the inspired author of the Letter to the Hebrews avers: "our God is a consuming fire" (Heb 12:29).

For those like me, who are wondering "febrile," "poultice"? In this context, "febrile" means "having or showing a great deal of nervous excitement or energy." "Poultice" refers to "a soft, moist mass of material, typically of plant material or flour, applied to the body to relieve soreness and inflammation and kept in place with a cloth."

Hey, it's April! One quarter of 2019 has come and gone. As the Smothers' Brothers sang years ago: Whatever happened to time?/It doesn't come around anymore/The last time I saw time/It was walking out the door. Play a friendly trick on a few people today.