On the Criticism of Others

If we stop rejecting the criticism of others, be it justified or unjustified criticism, and see such criticism as profitable for our salvation, we will have gained a great spiritual treasure. When we gain the ability to see our own sinfulness, we see that even the good deeds we do are saturated with sin. When we have gained the humility that comes from embracing the criticism of others, we will see that we are unable to heal ourselves, but are entirely dependent upon God as our only source of healing.

When we take notice of our own sinfulness, we will stop judging others, seeing in them the same pitiful state, and realize they are our kinfolk, and we are all journeying together, towards God. They can no longer hurt or offend us with their criticism, for we pity them, just as we pity ourselves for our own sinfulness, and we see them as our friends in this common struggle for sanctification and holiness.

The famous Russian abbot of the 50's and 60's, Father Nikon, was said to have told a spiritual child that once he sees his own sin, he will stop exalting some and belittling others, seeing everyone as his brother or sister. He will begin to love everyone as his co-strugglers.

- Abbot Tryphon

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Picture of the Day: Wiggly & Beany with Dad

I just got through sorting the pictures from the Easter weekend Kid's Passover Seder I was graced enough to be able to spend with my brother, his family & in-laws two weeks ago.

One of my favorite images from that weekend:

I have some thoughts about the assonances between the Passover seder and the mass that I'll put to pixels sometime soon.  One of the many essays I intend to eventually (someday) inflict on you my devoted audience of a dozen.  Belated Blessed Pasch, anyhow..



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"Everything in the World Can & Will Be Made Better, the Only Question is by Whom & How.."

Side by Side, review. A- , 4/5 *,  95% Tomato Meter.

This documentary is an interesting exploration of the current revolution in film making away from celluloid (photo chemical exposure) toward digital exposure.  It treats the evolution of the technologies, their respective strengths and flaws, and includes interviews with many directors and other people involved in film making, discussing the trend.

"Filmaking" has always been a somewhat insubstantial exercise, the "projection" of light through a film of chemical gauze; casting light, color and shadow on a blank wall.  The one substantial aspect of the experience has until now been the film itself, the alchemaic artefact that gave film it's material reality, gave it its "there, there."

Now, the industry is abandoning film for algorithmic traces on a silicon chip, fleeting ever further into insubstantiality, into ephemeral abstraction. There is more freedom to create greater fantasy there, they say. This is what progress is, in its lack of essence: slipping material bonds, consummating consciousness in a triumphant manipulation of and victory over matter, ultimately ascending to the point that we finally escape the constraints of matter altogether. Intellect and imagination slip their material bonds, and achieve gnostic transcendence.

So it is somehow oddly appropriate that Keanu Reeves - the star of Bill & Ted's Excellent Time Traveling Adventure (for isn't time travel one of the most fundamental subversions of this material space time continuum in which we are enmeshed?) and the Matrix Trilogy (one of perhaps the purest gnostic fantasies that Hollywood has yet graced us with) - is the auteur of this interesting documentary.  Fantasy land is becoming even more fantastic, and even less substantial than ever before. And Ted is there to report back to us upon progress's inexorable march.

Until the 19th Century humanity kept its artistic and intellectual record on substantial matter such as paper, plaster, animal skin and canvas. Camera film is is different from these in that light is not reflected off it, but rather through it. It is also more delicate than most of these more ancient media, and it poses more difficult challenges to archivists who seek to preserve it. In 1902 there was an international congress of film makers, who in the spirit of the French Revolution and the positivist tradition, came together to set an international standard for film, guaranteeing that film making and projecting technology would be universal and standardized, ensuring that all film shot from then until now would all be accessible using the same tools, the same industrial paradigms. 35 mm film is always 35 mm film, and can be fed into any projector manufactured to that standard in the last century.

In the 1970's and 80's however, video tape and computer imaging was developed. In the rush of technological development there has been much that has been produced that no longer can be viewed, because in that short rush of evolutionary change we now no longer have the tools to access some of the things created only ten to thirty years ago. Imagine trying to access information stored on a floppy disc, an 8 track or VHS tape. Not so easy, these days. Such technology is all too quickly obsolete and the information recorded with it now inaccessible.

Because now rather than  using film, or electromagnetic tape, or even paper, most imagery and text is being recorded on silicon chips, hard drives. What is the nature of this new medium? What are its weaknesses, its strengths?  In this film Sad Keanu

has found his voice, and while he gives quite a bit of time to advocates of film and critics of the dawning digital age, it's ultimately pretty clear that Keanu is proselytizing for the new order. It's hard not to be impressed by the power of the new technology.. Still, nagging questions linger.

For while it is true that the rush of technological advance has given us in some ways greater freedom - we can now watch movies on four inch screens that we carry in out pockets - it may be also true that we could be simultaneously eradicating our relationship with the past. The great paper libraries, archives and museums that used to be the main way we accessed knowledge and art - which meant interacting with the past, the authors and artists who created that record - are now largely obsolete, in that the record has been impixelated, recorded in magnetic patterns of 1's and 0's on an electric grid. It is both more immediate and manipulatable, while verging utterly insubstantial.

Is this new network more resilient than thousands of paper libraries - which while they can be burnt, can also be turned into samzidat? Is this new modality easier to censor and track?  Is knowledge and art now simply more accessible, or is it also more easily repressed, tracked and eradicated?  Is this brave new world an electronic tyranny like that of Tron, or an anarchic paradise like that in Avatar? Or something else, utterly different or something in between?

I seems we are about to find out.

A few closing thoughts concerning Keanu: I remember when I used to dismiss guys like him (or Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, Leonardo DiCaprio, etc.) as being somehow unserious. Feminists complain about how women's voices and pov's tend to get discounted. Try being a very pretty boy. That seems to me an even harder row to hoe, in terms of being taken seriously, somehow.  Handsome man is not the same as pretty boy - most of them get discounted, sneered at.  If there's a Tiger Beat spread of you out there,

where you've been "lucky" enough to tap the collective libido of teenaged girls, you are finished. It's far, far worse than being a Playboy centerfold. No adult - male or female - is ever likely going to take you truly seriously again. Pity Justin Beeber and the Jonas Brothers, because when they hit their late twenties no one will ever pay attention to them again, and they won't know what to do about it. Expect to see them dishing to Dr. Drew on celebrity rehab in about a decade or so. That's how we treat our idols. Ours is a truly profane and irreligious society.

But wait.. Maybe not. Keanu is running counter the rule, here. Giving reviewers at venues such as the New York Times a reason to pay him respectful attention.. What is this?  Perhaps beauty, character and intelligence are not mutually exclusive. As much as we ugly people may find it hard to accept, beautiful people may occasionally be serious and smart, too.  Keanu has gone a proven it can be so, with this film.

Well done, Keanu. Bravo. Thanks for feeding my head. Now go do it again.



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Pictures of the Day: Mercy Sunday, National Shrine of Divine Mercy

I drove a couple hours south yesterday, down to the National Shrine of Divine Mercy in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.  That's right where Massachusetts meets New York, about 20 minutes from the Vermont border.

It was cool and blustery, but there were 15-20,000 other pilgrims there with me. The crowd was heavily Latino, Pilipino and (this was a bit of a surprise to me) there were many black folk there as well.  Most of them were Haitian or Caribbean, but some were Afro-American as well. A good third of the people there were probably speaking Spanish or Tagalog. I was quite amused and pleased by all of it.

There was a mass in the afternoon, but I arrived late because - after departing not giving myself quite enough time - I got briefly lost (a difficult feat with a GPS, but I still somehow managed it) trying to find a gas station with diesel along the way, and then took well over a half hour to find parking and walk a half mile up the hill to the shrine. I arrived just in time for the consecration, and decided to spend an hour and a half in line to confess while mass concluded. There were a few hundred of us in line, so they came and gave us all communion while we waited, granting us dispensation to receive before confessing if we needed one. We were singing the Chaplet of Mercy as we stood there. It was beautiful.

There were over a dozen priests hearing confessions in Spanish and English, and (I thought this was great) one of them was the local bishop. My confessor was a Franciscan of Primitive Observance from Boston, who wear grey habits and scraggly beards (like the Friars of the Renewal, Fr. Groeschel's group) but are probably even more hard core.

(No, edit that, they are more hard core. Follow the link there - they have little to no web presence beyond their wikipedia page, which states that the Franciscans of Primitive Observance live a strict observance of the Rule of St. Francis. They do not carry money, and rely on the donations of individuals to pay for their needs. In their houses they do not utilize modern appliances and seek food door-to-door in the neighborhoods in which they live. The FPOs live a mixed contemplative and active life, spending considerable time in prayer each day in the chapel, as well as time in the community. The FPOs do not wish that details of their penitential life be widely known, living by the Lord's admonition to "pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly" - Matthew 6:6.)

(Not mine, I stole this image from here.)

This fellow seemed very unimpressed by me at first, but I shot my mouth off in fine form, and he came around, stroking his beautiful beard, saying "hmm, I think that was a pretty good confession.." 

High flattery, that. I was pleased. I often wonder how it would be to confess to Christ himself, or one of the apostles, Augustine, Francis, Ignatius, Dominic or Padre Pio.. I got the next best thing, yesterday. That alone was worth the drive.

We were joking that with the wind and rain we were chalking time off purgatory whether we received the indulgence or not. One of the conditions of the indulgence is detachment from venial sin. I am not even sure what that means, precisely, and I've long since decided that I will be very happy if I am received into purgatory. I really do not understand why people used to be so obsessed with suffering there. I want that. To be there would be a great joy, because it means that you will see God. Right now, all this suspense and uncertainty is really terrible. To suffer for the sake of love is what we are meant for, and it is a beautiful thing.. I'm just too much of a sloth and coward to do it very well here. So, let me do it then. Please.

I never got to see the icon in the formal shrine, that charming gothic chapel that you can see in the image above here, because they had closed it by the time I'd confessed. You can see the line there filing into the chapel, there were thousands of people filing through after mass to venerate the icon.

I did spend a while in one of the tents they had set up for adoration, after they had removed the monstrance but had left an icon, though:

A truly great day. I'll be back there later this spring when there's less of a mob scene, to see the chapel.


Today, incidentally, is the Annunciation. A significant feast in my mythic universe. I've got a bit that I'll post tomorrow on that. It needs a bit of polish, and I'm not really up to finishing it off it tonight.. Until tomorrow, then.  



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Notes Upon the Feast of Saint Joseph

One of the things I've been doing lately is cultivating my relationship with Saint Joseph.

He brought the Messiah into Egypt, anointing balm into the land of sin & jahiliyah

I have a short litany of saints I invoke at the end of every rosary, of saints that have a particular meaning to me.  I have begun beginning it with him, then going to SS Joachim and Anne, then SS Anne and Simeon, then SS Elizabeth & Zacharias et S. Jean Baptiste, then SS Charles Borremeo, de Foucauld, of Austria and Wotyla, and so on, all the way through to Saint Philip Neri and Father Solanus Casey. I always end with those two, because I love them.

Anyway, in the course of this prayer, I have been thinking how great he is, Joseph:  a silent saint, whom we know relatively little about.  He may not even have been alive during Christ's public ministry. He is I suppose then of the Old Testament order, like John the Baptist.

He's mysterious, isn't he? Like so many things about the Faith, I like how his role seems best understood axiomatically.

You start with a recognition, a reality, a revelation "Blessed are you, Simon Bar Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you.." then the truth unfolds from it, by implication. The Incarnation is radical in this way. Faith in it is the greatest revolution then, in all human history. It is a transfiguring and radicalizing reality. If this is true, then..

So many other amazing things are, too. 

For example, Mary: her title, her role in salvation, is expressed by way of a simple syllogism. Her son is God. Therefore, she is the Mother of God.  So then is it likewise true that Joseph is the husband of Mary. The patriarch of her family. He is therefore the patriarch of the mother of God. Likewise, he is thus the patriarch of her son. Quod erat demonstrandum.

He becomes what he is through her, and she through her son.

سلام عليك  يا مريم الرب معك

It is interesting, because she in herself is nothing. A mere frail reed, an insignificant vessel. But through her faith and humility, she becomes the means by which our history is redeemed.  The eternal cycle of meaninglessness in its great grinding nihilism is caught and brought to a cataclysmic halt by the assent of a young woman to the will of God. God, who is always independent and transcendent and sufficient to all things unto himself, chooses this thin reed to span all the works of hell, and smash them. The empty eternal void is filled by the grace over- welling this tiny vessel. Her gentle acceptance of this will, that incredible prophetic burden, is an act of this grace.

It is the same with her betrothed, Joseph. He is asked to accept the putatively impossible, the incredible. And he does.     

It's also interesting how the protestants usually ignore him, and her. They talk and talk, babble on for hours in those talkathons they call church about any other person in the Bible - finding the oddest characters (like, say, Jabez) to fixate on. The only time I seem to hear Joseph brought up in that quarter is when they are stridently denying the Blessed Virgin's perpetual virginity. That terrifying chastity.. It's too much for them, the poor buggers. I understand them.

Because it is rough. Rough, just like the grain of the cross. But when Joseph realizes that he has been betrothed to the Spouse of the Holy Spirit, he has to imitate her: offer himself in total surrender to that same Spirit. He has to gird his loins like a man, and offer his life in complete surrender, just as she has already done.

In this way, he is her first devotee. Every one of us who has since been entrusted to her, and had her entrusted to us (cf. John 19:26-27) is therefore following after him, except that his relation to her is not one of discipleship, but is rather one of husbandship, of authority.

He takes her, then offers her intimately to God, our Father. And then he is entrusted with her son, the Only Son of the Father, and receives him intimately into his own hearth. His home becomes the hearth of God himself (le Foyer de Dieu lui meme) in the most literal ways.

"Lord, I am not worthy to receive you under my roof.. "

Think of how Paul says that the family, marriage, images the relation of Christ to the Church (cf. Ephesians 5) and therefore somehow images the inner life of the Trinity itself. In the Holy Family this mystery is  manifested in the most primordial manner. 

It's again interesting how so much about the early history of the Faith is hidden.  We do not know much about the intimate life of the Holy Family. It's similar to how the Acts of the Apostles just ends in mid-story. There are so many things you think they would have told us. Why are there no canonical records of the apostles' martyrdoms? The life of John and the Blessed Virgin at Patmos and Ephesus? Her ascension or dormition? What about Christ's childhood and adolescence, then his young adulthood prior to his baptism and Cana? We have the odd tale of his being lost then found at the Temple, and nothing more.

Why do we not a have a few more books of the infinite library (cf. John 21:25) that we would need to recount all the stories of his life and the life of his Church?  John 20:30 tells us there were *many* other things that Christ did that are not recorded in the Bible.  Not just a few.  Many.  What is this about?  Why must we be left so tantalized, gazing through all this glass so darkly?  

I am certain that it is because the things that are cloaked are so good, too very good for us to understand. We have been told enough to draw us toward that revelation. What is obscure is hidden for our own good.

It speaks to the sacred nature of the life of Joseph's family, this cloistered quietude and anonymity. That great scriptural silence testifies to his humility. He is one of those great silent saints.  Most of the saints are hidden.  I believe most of the greatest saints are hidden. They are unnoticed by the world, and have no interest in drawing any attention to themselves. Joseph is exactly like this. Very likely the greatest saint apart from his bride, and just as humble as she is.  He retires in silence and is consumed by prayer.

The world gets all exercised over the question of whether they had sexual relations.  What they fail to see is that the Holy Family is eschatologically ordered, a prophetic intimation of what is coming, when there will be no male or female, no marrying nor giving in marriage (cf. Galatians 3:28, Matthew 22:30), when we will be like angels in transfigured bodies, and all of our relations will be characterized by utter charity.

I suspect the sexual pleasure we're so obsessed with now will be somehow obsolete then. Just a gut hunch, that.

So, Joseph.  The saint who was the patriarch of the Blessed Virgin, the patriarch of her son.  In the economy of grace and humility this is the meanest office.  How is it that our God is so humble as to accept the authority of a man in this fashion?  Because he did. As he still does, see Matthew 16:19 for that incredible gift of authority. "What you loosen is loosened, what you bind is bound.." Isn't that astounding?

Joseph's name, incidentally, means "God increases, adds" or "God does it again"- the idea is one of divine augmentation, intensification. Like with Joseph the son of Israel in the court of Pharaoh, God's grace is manifested in the life of this quiet man in ways exponential infinitely beyond our poor hope and understanding.

And as I say, that my friends is why we don't know much about him. Because that knowledge is far too great for us.

Passover Consummate: Israel's Universal - "Orthodox Ecumenical Catholic" - Triumph.

And that reality should make you very glad and create in you great hope. Rejoice, and be not afraid.

This my friends is why today is a great feast. The Feast of the Patriarch of Humility, Our Dear Saint Joseph. 

Happy St. Joseph's Day everyone.

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Picture of the Day: Bean Feeding the Kid

This is from the archive, back from a few months ago.  But I'm going to start going deep into those stacks as I start getting it all completely organized, collated and copied these next couple months.  I've done enough organizing so that all my images and video is in basic order, now I just need to work through and cull and tag things.  As I do, I'll share some, and tell relevant tales hoping they'll be of interest..

So tonight, I begin with a recent shot of Beanie feeding a kid goat.  It's cute, and I like the composition.  A proud uncle shot. Humor me.

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Song of the Day: Keep it Light Enough to Travel..

I've had this one in rotation off and on for years, but this week it keeps jumping out of my special ski mix that I shook up last week.  It captures my mood these days. 

What kind of people go to meet people where they can't be heard or seen?  I've never been able to figure that one out..   

(YouTube has gone and changed their embedding protocol for Blogger, and it isn't working properly at all.  Annoying.  Click on the YouTube button on the embedded window there on the right if you want to hear the song and it won't play.  It'll open the clip in YouTube. )

Wound up drunk again on Robson St.
Strange, 'cause we always agreed
At the start of every evening
That's the last place I wanna be

Coffee drinkers dressed in black with no sugar
They don't give me no respect
They say: "Look, here comes another one,"
And I don't know what they mean yet

And I say keep it light enough to travel
Don't let it all unravel
Keep it light enough to travel

Promise me we won't go into the nightclub
I feel so fucked up when I'm in there
Can't tell the bouncers from the customers
And I don't know which ones I prefer
Promise me we won't go into the nightclub
I really think that it's obscene
What kind of people go to meet people
Someplace they can't be heard or seen?

Keep it light enough to travel
Don't let it all unravel
Keep it light enough to travel

I broke the windows of the logging company
Just to get a little release
I had to throw down my accordion
To get away from the police

And I say keep it light enough to travel..



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De-Crypting Jonas's Sign: Semaphore From the Belly Of Leviathan

As I say, I am head over heels for the new pope so far based on what little I have heard or seen. My gut is telling me that he's the bees knees.  I'm really very pleased.

But..

There have been a few discordant notes that I have marked.  The most important is a comment Cardinal Bergoglio made in what is an otherwise inspiring interview, that can be found here.

I'll excerpt it, because it is very interesting, and worth a read and meditation.  The interviewer's questions and interjections are bold face, he begins by asking Cardinal Bergoglio what he would have said to a recent consistory of Latin American bishops he has just missed if he had had the chance.  Cardinal Bergoglio had been called to Rome and then become sick while there, forcing him to miss the consistory where Benedict XVI had addressed the bishops. This is his response:

BERGOGLIO: I would have spoken about these three key points. 

Nothing else? 

BERGOGLIO: Nothing else… No, perhaps I would have mentioned two things of which there is need in this moment, there is more need: mercy, mercy and apostolic courage. 

What do they mean to you? 

BERGOGLIO: To me apostolic courage is disseminating. Disseminating the Word. Giving it to that man and to that woman for whom it was bestowed. Giving them the beauty of the Gospel, the amazement of the encounter with Jesus… and leaving it to the Holy Spirit to do the rest. It is the Lord, says the Gospel, who makes the seed spring and bear fruit. 

In short, it is the Holy Spirit who performs the mission. 

BERGOGLIO: The early theologians said: the soul is a kind of sailing boat, the Holy Spirit is the wind that blows in the sail, to send it on its way, the impulses and the force of the wind are the gifts of the Spirit. Without His drive, without His grace, we don’t go ahead. The Holy Spirit lets us enter the mystery of God and saves us from the danger of a gnostic Church and from the danger of a self-referential Church, leading us to the mission. 

That means also overthrowing all your functionalist solutions, your consolidated plans and pastoral systems …

BERGOGLIO: I didn’t say that pastoral systems are useless. On the contrary. In itself everything that leads by the paths of God is good. I have told my priests: «Do everything you should, you know your duties as ministers, take your responsibilities and then leave the door open». Our sociologists of religion tell us that the influence of a parish has a radius of six hundred meters. In Buenos Aires there are about two thousand meters between one parish and the next. So I then told the priests: «If you can, rent a garage and, if you find some willing layman, let him go there! Let him be with those people a bit, do a little catechesis and even give communion if they ask him». A parish priest said to me: «But Father, if we do this the people then won’t come to church». «But why?» I asked him: «Do they come to mass now?» «No», he answered. And so! Coming out of oneself is also coming out from the fenced garden of one’s own convictions, considered irremovable, if they risk becoming an obstacle, if they close the horizon that is also of God. 

This is valid also for lay people… 

BERGOGLIO: Their clericalization is a problem. The priests clericalize the laity and the laity beg us to be clericalized… It really is sinful abetment. And to think that baptism alone could suffice. I’m thinking of those Christian communities in Japan that remained without priests for more than two hundred years. When the missionaries returned they found them all baptized, all validly married for the Church and all their dead had had a Catholic funeral. The faith had remained intact through the gifts of grace that had gladdened the life of a laity who had received only baptism and had also lived their apostolic mission in virtue of baptism alone. One must not be afraid of depending only on His tenderness… Do you know the biblical episode of the prophet Jonah? 

I don’t remember it. Tell us. 

BERGOGLIO: Jonah had everything clear. He had clear ideas about God, very clear ideas about good and evil. On what God does and on what He wants, on who was faithful to the Covenant and who instead was outside the Covenant. He had the recipe for being a good prophet. God broke into his life like a torrent. He sent him to Nineveh. Nineveh was the symbol of all the separated, the lost, of all the peripheries of humanity. Of all those who are outside, forlorn. Jonah saw that the task set on him was only to tell all those people that the arms of God were still open, that the patience of God was there and waiting, to heal them with His forgiveness and nourish them with His tenderness. Only for that had God sent him. He sent him to Nineveh, but he instead ran off in the opposite direction, toward Tarsis. 

Running away from a difficult mission… 

BERGOGLIO: No. What he was fleeing was not so much Nineveh as the boundless love of God for those people. It was that that didn’t come into his plans. God had come once… “and I’ll see to the rest”: that’s what Jonah told himself. He wanted to do things his way, he wanted to steer it all. His stubbornness shut him in his own structures of evaluation, in his pre-ordained methods, in his righteous opinions. He had fenced his soul off with the barbed wire of those certainties that instead of giving freedom with God and opening horizons of greater service to others had finished by deafening his heart. How the isolated conscience hardens the heart! Jonah no longer knew that God leads His people with the heart of a Father. 

A great many of us can identify with Jonah. 

BERGOGLIO: Our certainties can become a wall, a jail that imprisons the Holy Spirit. Those who isolate their conscience from the path of the people of God don’t know the joy of the Holy Spirit that sustains hope. That is the risk run by the isolated conscience. Of those who from the closed world of their Tarsis complain about everything or, feeling their identity threatened, launch themselves into battles only in the end to be still more self-concerned and self-referential. 

What should one do? 

BERGOGLIO: Look at our people not for what it should be but for what it is and see what is necessary. Without preconceptions and recipes but with generous openness. For the wounds and the frailty God spoke. Allowing the Lord to speak… In a world that we can’t manage to interest with the words we say, only His presence that loves us, saves us, can be of interest. The apostolic fervor renews itself in order to testify to Him who has loved us from the beginning. 

For you, then, what is the worst thing that can happen in the Church? 

BERGOGLIO: It is what De Lubac calls «spiritual worldliness». It is the greatest danger for the Church, for us, who are in the Church. «It is worse», says De Lubac, «more disastrous than the infamous leprosy that disfigured the dearly beloved Bride at the time of the libertine popes». Spiritual worldliness is putting oneself at the center. It is what Jesus saw going on among the Pharisees: «… You who glorify yourselves. Who give glory to yourselves, the ones to the others». 


So,  on one hand this may perhaps be the best exegesis of the book of Jonah I have ever read.  I really  like the story, and have always thought it amusing that God's chosen prophet is an angry pill.  I've commented on this before, here on the blog.

Cardinal Bergoglio- our new pope -  helps us here to really inhabit Jonah's perspective, and explore his motivation:  Jonah is not slothful.  He's not afraid. I used to read the book superficially thinking that Jonah is like me, in that sloth and fear are most often my motivations for avoiding what I believe God wants me to do, and projecting my sins onto him.  I'd rather not inconvenience myself, I'm afraid of criticism and failure.

I don't often consciously find myself wanting to actively frustrate what I think God wants..

But that is precisely what Jonah wants to do.  He doesn't want to preach mercy to Ninevah, because he hates the Ninevites.  He doesn't want them to be saved.  (I always found that amusing, and odd.. ) I've always thought that "the sign of Jonas" was a sign meant for the sinners in Ninevah, ignoring the irony that what the story may be signifying is that the really great sinner here is Jonah himself.   He flees to frustrate God's desire to show mercy to those he hates.

(Aside: I do not want to imply that my sloth and fear are less sinful than Jonah's hatred - hatred, even if sinful, is at least not lukewarm, and in Jonah's case is rooted in Jonah's righteousness - I think he hates the Ninevites because they truly are evil; not merely because they are from Iraq, inscrutable proto-muslims, and different than him.. )

The sign of Jonas is therefore perhaps also a sign to Jonah himself, maybe in the essential sense.  It's a sign unto the pharisees,  of whom Jonah is the prophetic forerunner.

Cardinal Bergoglio says the scripture is warning us not to let our pride; our sense of propriety, orthodoxy, our need to control things, judge things, to sit in Moses' seat over others; keep us from loving our brothers, and so keep us from loving God.

That's spot on, I think, and beautiful.  Judge not least you be judged.  Forgive, and you shall be forgiven.  Love, and you shall be loved. For to love is to have God. We are meant therefore to love everyone, especially our enemies and those we are tempted to hate.. For God is love. That's the gospel in it's purity.


But, on the other hand..  Two things he says give me pause:

So I then told the priests: «If you can, rent a garage and, if you find some willing layman, let him go there! Let him be with those people a bit, do a little catechesis and even give communion if they ask him». A parish priest said to me: «But Father, if we do this the people then won’t come to church». «But why?» I asked him: «Do they come to mass now?» «No», he answered. And so! Coming out of oneself is also coming out from the fenced garden of one’s own convictions, considered irremovable, if they risk becoming an obstacle, if they close the horizon that is also of God. 

I've also read Cardinal Bergoglio calling priests who refuse to baptize babies born to unmarried mothers  pharisees, as well.  It's the same theoretical principle.

But the two things strike me to be in practice different.  Baptizing an illegitimate child seems to me to potentially have strong pastoral justifications; to be a legitimate ekonomia, an act of gratuitous mercy.  While giving the eucharist to a person who is not actively trying to live a life of normal Christian virtue - the baseline of which is going to mass on Sunday - seems a very different thing.  Paul warns that if you receive unworthily you receive unto your own destruction.  I think that means at least a modicum eucharistic discipline is called for?  People should be encouraged to examine their lives and aspire to holiness - meaning living a life of some discipline in prayer and virtue - before receiving?


Then, and even more puzzlingly, he says "and to think that baptism alone could suffice." implying I think that ministerial priesthood is unnecessary, and conducive in any case to sinful clericalism.

That is another apparent radical denigration of traditional eucharistic theology.  Moreover, the ministerial priesthood is what makes the Apostolic churches.  Renouncing it is the existential hallmark of protestantism.  This is hugely problematic to me.


What the Holy Father says about "spiritual worldliness" - which is turning religion into essentially a mere ideology, a means of social control, a spiritual fetish that one uses to primp the ego and marginalize others who fail to meet our standards - is I think true and wise.  Well worth praying over.

But here's the thing: dogma and liturgy and tradition are not incidental. They are critical.  While it is clearly true that without charity - love - it is all dross, and that many people I think have fixated on tradition and liturgy and dogma in distorted spiritually destructive ways - I was, and perhaps still am one of them - it remains that the normative way that truth is expressed is through dogma, and that tradition and liturgy are organic realities that must be respected and nurtured as the rich soil in which the culture of our faith is renewed.  These things with charity are salvific, and without these things charity is endangered.

To value, and to seek to protect and promote them is not pharisaical. It's essential to being Catholic.


Asking people to come to mass, and encouraging them to fully participate in the life of their parish - which means things like asking them to make an annual confession, and not to miss mass without a serious reason - should be the norm.

The idea that someone unwilling come regularly to mass, who is not homebound or in some other serious way  prevented from coming regularly to mass, should be allowed to receive communion anyway while in an objective state of serious sin..  Well, that's scandalous.  I don't know what to say.

Maybe I do not understand all that the Holy Father meant there.  Maybe.  But if he meant what it seems he meant, I have some serious questions and reservations.


Look, I watch him talk in a clip like this,

And my heart melts.  I love him.  I do.


But.  But.   He receives the unconditional endorsement of the likes of Fr. Leonard Boff and Roger Cardinal Mahoney, and then does odd little things like quote an unnamed "German poet"

("es ist ruhig, das alter, und fromm.." It is peaceful, old age, and religious.. See his March 15th audience, 2nd to last paragraph for the context - again, I love this old man)

In one of his addresses, who turns out to be Fredrich Holderin.. Well, this as I say is a quibble, but old Friedrich is an early 19th century romantic poet and political radical; a supporter of the French Revolution and Napoleon, the German peer of Byron, Keats, Shelley; who went nuts and died painfully after having a insane affair with his patron's wife.  He had strong influences on the likes of Nietzsche and Hegel, and then later thinkers like Foucault, Derrida and Heiddeger..

Not a big thing at all, in itself really, but it strikes me as slightly odd, that citation being made publicly by the pope..


It all still makes me perk up a little bit and wonder if I should be concerned.


The people over at Rorate Caeli are going a little jigga-boo over all of this sort of stuff, and while I think it's beyond premature to get really upset, I still get why they are worried.


Because there is a popular apocalyptic backdrop to this election.

There's the entire Peter Roman and St. Malachi prophecy of the popes thing, most famously..

Then there's the controversy over the supposed suppression of the entirety of the 3rd Secret of Fatima gig, where the speculation is that Tarcisio (anagram of "Iscariot") Cardinal Bertone is hiding the part of the secret that prophesies apostasy in the curia and hierarchy..

And then there are the many other Marian apparitions prophesizing imminent tribulation, the most important being the apparitions at Medjugorje and Garabandal.

Google all that at your own risk.


All of that is way too lurid for me to spend much time on.  I used to be much more absorbed by such things.. In fact, Lourdes and Fatima are really two profound childhood influences that really incited my interest and faith, back then..

But to lend all of that too much attention and energy now, would be a mistake I think.  I'm just mentioning it here because it's there, and I think it bears some consideration.

We'll know soon enough if there really is anything to be actually concerned about.  In the meantime, I'm praying for our dear Holy Father.  I hope he's truly the mensch he seems to be.

Otherwise, things are going to really suck.



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Miserando Atque Eligendo: Lowly And Yet Chosen - A Few Brief Reflections On Our New Pope

Tonight, before bed, I proffer a few thoughts on our adorable new Holy Father.  He keeps growing on me, the more I read and pray for and about him.  Details, such as that his first act as pope the morning after the election was to visit Maria Maggiore, which is the great Roman shrine to our Lady, just sing to me.  He arrived by stealth, with ten minutes notice, eschewing the usual papal motorcade. That is simply beautiful.

Note that the title of this post is his episcopal motto.  Again, like almost everything I read about him, I think it is great.

He reminds me of John Paul I - unassuming, exuding gentle kindness, but with a hint of toughness.  Not at all radiating with the charismatic charm of John Paul II, not even the calmer, nebbish charisma of Benedict.. He seems often impassive, expressing little emotion.  Subdued, humble in appearance.  Not the type of fellow you'd tend to notice in a crowd, unlike his two recent predecessors.  

But that common air is perfect.  Very apt in a priest:  "He had no majestic bearing to catch our eye, no beauty to draw us near him.." Exactly.  Just so.  

I think in practical terms his election is explained by two things.  First, Rome is an Italian archdiocese.  It should have an Italian pastor, or at least a pastor who knows them and their language.  And too, the curia is dominated by Italians, and Italian ways.  The curial voting block in the conclave, and those cardinals who would like to see them disciplined in light of the scandals that are festering there, would both want someone who would will relate well to all of that, immediately.  Second, the Church is now no longer mostly European.  We need leadership from the larger world.  A universal pastor from Europe, or worse Italy, would be a parochial choice..

How to solve this paradox?  In Francis we have the perfect resolution.  An Italian, but from outside Italy. Better, one from Latin America, where the strength of the Church now resides.

He has chosen the name Francis, which means of France, or Frank.  Many have commented that it's a homage to Francis of Assisi whose ministry reinvigorated the late medieval Church, and Francis Xavier, the great Jesuit who converted the East. It is of course both of these things.  

But it is also interesting to think how the German Franks, the French, while the "first daughter of the Church" were also simultaneously the great antagonists of Papal supremacy throughout the Middle Ages.. In that great struggle between the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy over rule of Europe - Guelphs versus Ghibellines - dating back to the moment Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne Emperor on Christmas 800, where the pope surprised the king by refusing to hand the crown to him for him to place it on his own head, the pope himself crowning the Emperor in a symbolic act of supremacy over the secular power.. Through to the moment that Napoleon seized the crown from the hands of Pius VII and crowned himself Emperor in 1804.. 

The term "emperor" of course signifies Emperor of Rome, which is shorthand for the civilized world.  The fact that the Franks, the Germans, had the temerity to claim that title while the historical line of emperors descending from Constantine was still extant in Constantinople, was not exactly appreciated in Byzantium.  Indeed, it is the single most important catalyst creating the Schism we still suffer from today between the Orthodoxy and Catholicism.

This is a major theme I want to continue to treat here on the blog, that I have yet to touch upon at all: the role of political power and ethnic divisions in creating the great schismatic blocks in the Church -Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant.. The struggle over the imperium, the legacy of Rome, is at the heart of that.  

I think the name Francis may in a sense resonate somehow in terms of that struggle - Our new pope may in some way be signaling that that struggle is finally over.  That the papal claim to secular imperium is finally utterly dead. Our Pope Francis reconciles that tension in himself and resolves it.

The pope is now asserting the plenitude of spiritual power.  The reason the Church exists is because people respond to Christ. His humility. God comes to us as a child. Then he offers himself to us, up for us, on the cross. 

This is what love is. This is the form that true power takes. This is our God.

When the Church is humble like this, she conquers the world. When we surrender all pretension to worldly power, and bear the cross with the suffering and poor, we triumph.  

In Christ, like Francis and all the other saints.  Francis of Assisi's example, however, is one of the most radical. Our new Holy Father Francis is calling us to that extremity of love and humility.

Pope Francis has only one lung.   Odd fact, that.  Pope John Paul II always used to use the metaphor of two lungs of the Church in discussing our Orthodox brothers.  That we are one organism, breathing through two lobes.  

Here, we have a pope who as Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires was also bishop of the Eastern Rite in Argentina.  This is unusual, usually the Eastern Rites have their own separate bishop.  

And he has got only one lung.. A single pnuema if you like.  Like I say, odd..  Isn't it?

I'll end this rumination by quoting our Holy Father's first public homily as pope, given at mass on Wednesday, March 13th.  I really thought it was good, so I'll share an excerpt.  The extended homily is pithy - I read it aloud to myself and it took me 2.5 minutes - and profound.  That's the essence of good preaching.  Succinct and powerful.  

I give you about half of it here, what I think the best part:

[W]e can walk as much we want, we can build many things, but if we do not confess Jesus Christ, nothing will avail. We will become a compassionate NGO, but not the Church, the Bride of Christ. When one does not walk, one stalls. When one does not build on solid rock, what happens? What happens is what happens to children on the beach when they make sandcastles: everything collapses, it is without consistency. When one does not profess Jesus Christ – I recall the phrase of Leon Bloy – “Whoever does not pray to God, prays to the devil.” When one does not profess Jesus Christ, one professes the worldliness of the devil.

[...]

The same Peter who confessed Jesus Christ, says, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. I will follow you, but let us not speak of the Cross. That has nothing to do with it. I’ll follow you on other ways, that do not include the Cross.” When we walk without the Cross, when we build without the Cross, and when we profess Christ without the Cross, we are not disciples of the Lord.  We are worldly.  We may be bishops, priests, cardinals, popes, but not disciples of the Lord.

I would like that all of us, after these days of grace, might have the courage – the courage – to walk in the presence of the Lord, with the Cross of the Lord: to build the Church on the Blood of the Lord, which is shed on the Cross, and to profess the one glory, Christ Crucified. In this way, the Church will go forward. My hope for all of us is that the Holy Spirit, that the prayer of Our Lady, our Mother, might grant us this grace: to walk, to build, to profess Jesus Christ Crucified. So be it.

So (utterly not mote) be it, indeed.  I love this man.  I think we have ourselves a wonderful new pastor.  Thank God.

May God bless and keep our Holy Father.

Now it's midnight.  Sleepytime.  Goodnight, everyone.

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On the Wealth & Autonomy of the Church, Part I.

I wrote the following in response to a bit by Matthew Yglesias over at Slate on the wealth of the Church.  (Aside: his last name in the byline of this article is bracing mild irony, no?)  It's buried in the comment thread there, along with another comment that I post below.  See the head of the next post for more commentary on that.

Here I skewer the stupid vulgarity of people who spew criticism at the Church for being rich, especially  attacks on priests and bishops (note that secular/diocesan only earn between 20 and 30k a year in the United States, being the richest Catholic church on the planet, and religious/monastics usually receive much less than that) and the criticism that the "Church should sell all its priceless art to feed the poor."

My mom says that I shouldn't use the word idiot here.  She's right, but it felt good to throw some skat back, you know?  My comment:

The art and culture that is the Church's patrimony doesn't "belong to" the Church. It belongs to, and is meant to succor all humanity. It is merely the Church's gift to humanity. It doesn't belong in some rich jerk's private collection. It belongs where it is: In the case of the really historically significant stuff in the few museums and archives maintained, like national archives or museums, to edify us all. In the more significant case of the iconography common to our churches, it is meant to do what *we generation upon generation* of faithful have created it for: to help us worship the God who made us, and made all such beauty possible.  

This lame argument, "that the priceless treasures" should be sold to feed the poor is exactly the line that hypocrite Judas fed Christ when the repentant woman poured her expensive unction on Christ's feet. All the rich schmuks who salivate at the idea of using their filthy lucre to collect the beauty of the Church to their own vanity use Judas's same argument. As if the Sistine Chapel and Chartes were created, and exist, to enrich the pope or something, and would be better used as the private preserve of billionaires who have truly *earned* it. That's intellectually and spiritually idiotic.  

That beauty exists because we believe. Because the faithful have created it to worship God, and it is almost without exception freely accessible to anyone who cares to go seek it out. Rich or poor. I've been to hundreds of Catholic churches, and the only one I ever paid to enter was the Sistine Chapel, and that is not normally used for worship, and is effectively a museum. You will never pay to enter a Catholic church where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved. That - the most important presence in the world, as sacred as we human beings ourselves - can be encountered for free everywhere. 

Because the poor need beauty too, and we the Church give it to them. 

As for the idea that the Church is merely a charity, it's not. But its charitable works are greater by far than any other organization in the world. We feed, teach, and heal the poor, and rich, everywhere they come to us.  

There is corruption, but it is - in the context and scale of the work - small. The idea that the Congress should confiscate the wealth of the Church - which is mostly in real estate, most of that for charity or worship - is risible. The Congress is far more corrupt than the Church, financially. Anyone who thinks the rich buying our patrimony, or the government spending it for us is a good idea is simply an idiot.  



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On the Wealth & Autonomy of the Church, Part II.

I am well into my promised post on What Happened in Caracas.  It's gotten unwieldily, and needs to be edited with a good re-write, and then split into two parts, one about Chavez and my inchoate take on the politics and such down there, and then one with the straight narrative of my trip.  I've been too busy the last few days to get that accomplished, but will try to tonight and tomorrow.

In the meantime, I'm going to post a couple things I wrote in a comments thread over at Slate under an interesting article by Matt Yglesias about the wealth of the Church.  I spent too much time on them to have them get buried in a thread for no one to read.

One of the main problems I have in starting to write on the things I've been mulling and want to express, is that on the one hand I have quite a lot to say, while on the other the basic thrust boils down to essentially a half dozen "tricks" or themes that I am going to play over and over again a few dozen times with various inflections.  I've been hesitating because of this, but there's really nothing for it but to just put on my show and hope that all the acrobatics don't get repetitive and boring.  So here we go, my first flip:

Yglesias suggests in his article that the Church (a word that in my usage always refers to the apostolic Church, all the churches in union with Rome, and the Orthodox and other Eastern Churches that descend from the apostles - protestants are merely heretics who relate to the Church by virtue of their baptism and faith alone. Their organizations are not Churches in the sense that they are vested with any true authority like apostolic bishops have), should be subject to taxation and auditing by the State.

I disagree. This is why:

Another point: Mr. Yglesias and many commenters here seem to think that the State curtailing Church's freedom and power would be an unambiguous good. That is in effect what giving the State the power to tax and financially audit the Church (and divers churches and other religious groups) would do.  

But he misses an important thing: the separation of Church and State is not merely an innovation of the American Constitution. It's deeply embedded in the Christian, which is to say European, hence Western, experience. ("Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's, give unto God what is God's.")  Unlike in Islam where the Ummah theoretically constitutes the government and there is therefore no public distinction between the sacred and secular spheres; or in the Orthodox annoiting of the imperium, which has stunted the political life of Russia and made the Church there essentially a department of the state, creating an incestuous relationship between political and religious power; the Catholic Church has effectively created a tension in Western society that creates a sphere for conscience and then even legally legitimate political action *supported by the churches* as institutions. The churches act as catalysts or spaces for political action that have often counterbalanced, even frequently opposed, the otherwise overwhelming power of the State. This is counter the Enlightenment narrative of Catholic obscurantism, of course; but I submit that the Catholic Faith - with its doctrine of freedom of individual conscience (human beings are ontologically free, our fate is not predetermined, our actions have meaning) which is concomitant with the doctrine of the  sacredness of the human person; as well as the doctrine that political sovereigns are bound *legally* by the Church's law, which demands fair treatment of the poor and places critical limits on use of power such as just war doctrine (which essentially still constitutes the basis for modern international law and human rights doctrine) - is at the core of the Western cultural ascendency.  

See Boniface VIII's (the sucessor of the last pope who resigned, Celistine V, whom Boniface imprisoned) 1302 bull Unam Sanctam. It articulates the principal of dual authority. I argue that dichotomy vitally reinforces the moral and spiritual authority and freedom that the churches have had in our society to agitate for everything from emancipation to suffragism, from economic justice for the poor to opposition to war, from prohibition to opposition to (and support for) abortion flows from the legacy of that dichotomy. 

The universities are incidentally adjunct institutions that are utter creatures of the Church, and until now have provided a intellectual clerical caste (with authority in the sciences, medicine, law and humanities that is preeminent in our culture) that grew out of, and has now secularized the prior Christian clerical ascendancy. As we eradicate the influence of the Church, the authority of this class will - I predict - also be called into question and eroded. That our universities are now behaving like hedge funds; and tenure is being eroded, only to be replaced by teachers for hire; and universities are now being re-cast as businesses (U of Phoniex type abuse of the student loan system); is actually symptomatic of this. The dogma that human beings are iconic of God; are always ends, never mere means; is fading. Now, the market and cash, and homo economicus are all that is left. 

Absent this lingering Catholic dichotomy where an institution like the UN apes the Church in moderating the power of states and arbitrating disputes peacefully between them; we are utterly in the world ruled by the logic of Stalin, Hitler, Hobbes and Machiavelli. Just because we bourgeois think we are just too darn nice to be baldly brutal like them, does not mean that we should glibly dispense with the Church - and the various Christian splinter churches and other religious authorities - merely because we see them as backward and irrelevant in light of progress, which means merely because we disagree or think them ridiculous. 

Civilization is a thin skein, and it was woven by religion. Tear at it at our collective risk.



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Self Portrait: Aux Nuages Au Dessus La Piste, March 2013.

I've been meaning to write and post daily since the beginning of Lent, but have been a victim of demon sloth, as usual.  My one fragile excuse is that I have been skiing, reading my magnificat, saying my rosary and going to mass daily, with the exception of a few days this past week, when I took a break from all that discipline.  My ambition to write here, and elsewhere, has been too easily sloughed off as vanity, and needless self exhibition. But today, I re-embrace my croix doux..

(because even if it takes slight discipline, praying the hours and going to mass is actually almost a carnal pleasure for me these days.. I've even learnt how - or rather, have been granted and taught - to mediate on the rosary with pleasure - what used to be a chore to say even a decade, now I could easily say all the mysteries without pause or difficulty.  The key is realizing that all prayer is a grace, and asking for it.. Bit slow on the uptake, here.  But I have kind of gotten it, at last..)

And have decided that these coming few weeks I will finally post some of the things I've been gestating  and threatening to inflict on you all, my slight public, ever since I began this blog.

Tomorrow, I'll recommence by finishing my tale of Venezuela, of how my foray into that place went awry.  I didn't feel like writing about it all last fall when it happened, but now that Chavez passed this week, I thought I ought mark the occasion with the story of my misadventures in his country..

Alors, à demain.



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