The Church …
According to Romano Guardini:
… the specific task that the church has been given to fulfill: to reconcile Christ’s demands (which seem to exceed human strength), with man’s present possibilities; to create a pass, a bridge between them: to come to our aid.
… behind the Church’s attitude, lies a profound sense of realism, a will to Christianize that begins with the possible in order to end on the peaks of sanctity. (The Lord, 96,97)
Apropos the previous post:
Having quoted the line from Victor Hugo, “World, all the ill comes from the form that gods take,” Henri de Lubac, one of the great Catholic theologians of the mid-20th century, wrote, quoting François Fénelon along the way:
Away, then, with all the projections, sublimations and creations of our passions or our dreams, of our fears and anger, of our nightmare or desires! Away with the gods who “seem to have been invented of set purpose by the enemy of mankind, in order to sanction crime and turn the divine to ridicule!” Away with the gods of nothingness which leave us to ourselves and keep us in bondage! Away with all the false gods! [The Discovery of God, 6]
The current gaggle of late-comers to the task of riding the world of “religion” are predictably naïve in thinking that they are the avant-garde, when in truth they are merely preparing for the next doomed but disastrous attempt to bring the old gods back.
Martin Heidegger spent his last years busily retouching a reputation tarnished by his membership in the Nazi party during World War II. In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, he spoke in the oracular tones required by his delicate circumstance, saying, among other things: “only a god can save us.” Friedrich Nietzsche, however, also late in life, wrote The Antichrist, in which he lamented: “almost two thousand years and no new god.”
For all his madness, Nietzsche here glimpsed an important anthropological effect of the Christian revelation, and he recoiled from it. The word Nietzsche used to characterize what he loathed most about the cultural effect of Christianity was the word pity. He failed to see the specificity of the moral impulse he repudiated. It isn’t pity; it is empathy for victims as victims that the Gospel awakens, and it is that empathy that has had a mounting effect on cultural life during the last “two thousand years,” Nietzsche’s obvious allusion to Christianity.
Nietzsche was under no illusions as to why no new gods have emerged; he knew full well it was because of Christianity, and the titanic task he undertook was to set aside this tradition once and for all in order that humanity might return — his famous “eternal recurrence” — to the greatness of classical culture, which is to say, culture hospitable to the emergence (out of violence) of new gods.
“As soon as man ceases to be in contact with great mystical or religious forces,” writes de Lubac, “does he not inevitably come under the yoke of a harsher and blinder force, which leads him to perdition? It is what Vico called the age of ‘deliberate barbarism’, and that is the age in which we live.”
Indeed, Giambattista Vico’s cyclical theory of history, so reminiscent of Oriental notions of time and culture, find more than an echo in Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal return, a flat rejection of biblical historical consciousness. Barbarism was for Vico what Dionysian madness was to Nietzsche, the necessary and unavoidable prelude to the greatness that would mysteriously issue forth from violence in the form of a new epoch and/or a new god. Martin Heidegger, his gnomic verbal elusiveness notwithstanding, was perfectly aware of this.
Nietzsche set his face against the empathy for victims aroused by a Christianity, and his task was to find a way to override or outflank precisely this empathy, this “pity.” The way he finally proposed, quite logically, is pitilessness. Nietzsche addressed his homilies about the Übermensch and his hymns about the generative power of Dionysian chaos to those who he knew would come after him, urging them not to flinch. (Many have tried not to, with varying degrees of success.) The task from which they are not to flinch was never explicitly defined, but it was to coincide with humanity’s reacquisition of its ancient god-making and Reich-founding powers. Seen anthropologically, and precisely through the anthropological lens represented by the work of René Girard, this represents the unique problem of evil in our time: evil no longer self-concealing, no longer carried out by those able to inoculate themselves to the moral horror of what they are doing, but evil presided over by those who, terrifyingly, know what they are doing. Nietzsche might not call these things evil — except to beckon his acolytes “beyond good and evil” — for he was as averse to this staple of Judeo-Christian moral thought as he was to the word sin. The supermen (and superwomen) to whom he issued his call were those who know that to be delivered from banality they must not shed tears over the victims lost in the Dionysian god-making procedures.
Nietzsche must be given credit for recognizing what nineteenth century Christians were unable to recognize: that it was Christianity that was desacralizing the world, but even before René Girard provided substantial anthropological and theoretical substantiation, perceptive thinkers began to see the effect of the Gospel in this regard. “One of the signs of a mature spirit,” wrote Henri de Lubac, “is without doubt to renounce false forms of transcendence.”
One must ‘reject the gods’ … ‘all the gods’. That is precisely what the disciples of Jesus taught us to do from the beginning. If they were taken for atheists, it was not because they were making the banal claim to have discovered another god — who would simply have been one among many: but because they proclaimed him who is totally different from the gods, and who frees us from their tyranny. They denied everything that the men around them took for the divine — everything that man, at every epoch, tends to deify in order to adore himself and tyrannize over himself, in and through his gods. [The Discovery of God, 179-80]
“The Gospel,” de Lubac insisted, “is the only ‘twilight of the gods’.”
René Girard has shown us what the god-making laboratory looks like. It looks like Golgotha, but one that ends, not with the realization of the victim’s innocence and the dispersal of the confounded mob, but with the mob’s celebration of its victory in a holy cause. Archaic myths are replete with precisely this variation on the story that the New Testament tells from the point of view of its victim, each of them coinciding with the birth or rebirth of a “god” — the idol in whose service the community feels it has performed a sacred duty. The efficacy of such rituals, of course, depends on how thoroughly intoxicated by the violence its perpetrators are and that depends on the degree to which the truth about the victim has become irrepressible. This is not to say that those exposed to the revelation of the Cross will not succumb to the logic of sacred violence, for the power of the social contagion it sets in motion remains enormous. It means, rather, that, to the degree that they have been exposed to the truth of the victim, people will be both less completely caught up in the madness of scapegoating violence and/or that they will awaken from its spell with a moral hangover more readily than will those not exposed to this truth.
The form of one approaching through a fog is at first ambiguous. It can be almost anyone. Only two will know him: he who loves him and he who hates him. God preserve us from the sharpsightedness that comes from evil. [The Lord, 255]
Commentary on yesterday's Supreme Court ruling, which returned to the state legislatures the responsibility for controlling the appalling practice of partial-birth abortion goes by rights to those who have worked so diligently to curtail this barbarous practice.
We would be remiss, however, if we left what we hope will be a momentous turning point in the moral life of our society pass entirely without comment. Aside from breathing a sigh of relief at the prospect that we may be at the beginning of the end of a dark chapter in our national history, I would call attention, as have many others of course, to the vitriol and religious bigotry that the decision has occasioned. Joseph Bottum at First Things spotted this:
A headline on a weblog by someone who goes by the name Ed Waldo reads:
"Catholics – 5; The Rest of Us – Nothing"
To which the blogger added this:
Well, as I warned in these pages a year and more ago, the five conservative Catholics who make up the new majority of the United States Supreme Court struck today, in a ruling that follows straight Catholic dogma, in upholding a largely symbolic nationwide enforcement of the so-called "Partial Birth Abortion" ban.
All the Supreme Court did in Gonzales v. Carhart was to allow state legislatures to pass legislation regarding the barbarous act of infanticide, yet this blogger and a great many other people act as though what is barbarous is this minimal restoration of moral seriousness and constitutional propriety. To say that the moral concern that brought about this change "follows straight Catholic dogma" is to intentionally obscure this undeniable fact: Until a very few years ago, Western civilization – and the Jewish and Christian moral sensibility that brought it into existence and was the engine of its moral and political advances – stood four-square against the idea of abortion. It followed straight from moral commonsense.
The fact that all five members of the Court majority are Roman Catholics is predictably an occasion for indulging in "the last acceptable prejudice," but it is to the credit of the Catholic Church that it has not, as so many others have, capitulated to the moral revolutionaries who are now struggling to find yet another euphemism with which to hide from themselves and from those whose political support they need the reality of partial-birth abortion and, indeed, of abortion in all its forms.
The reaction, of course, has been predictable. Rick Garnett, associate law professor at Notre Dame, reproduced on the Mirror of Justice weblog the Tony Auth cartoon that appeared in today's Philadelphia Inquirer:
Abortion has long been the procedure that dares not speak its name, but this is most especially the case when it comes to partial-birth abortion. The accompanying Philadelphia Inquirer editorial complained that the Court had resorted to verboten terminology, like "partial-birth abortion," rather than the Orwellian double-speak used by the pro-abortion movement: "intact dilation and extraction," or even better – because even more coded and sanitized – "intact D&X." Language is everything; if it can be corrupted, the game is in the hands of those whose euphemisms become the political and moral lingua franca. "Intact dilation and extraction," exactly how descriptive is that stainless steal phrase?
As for the larger implications of the Catholics Justices voting to return the matter to the states, Rick Garnett adds:
It is, increasingly, thought to be enough to discredit an argument or position – any argument or position – merely to note that the person who makes it is a religious believer, and to write off any moral argument with which one disagrees as "religious." (This practice, of course, does not run both ways: arguments against torture, the death penalty, race discrimination, and income inequality are "secular"; arguments against partial-birth abortion or the creation of embryos for research are "religious.") It appears, increasingly, that arguments whose trajectory is not in line with the standard liberal / autonomy / choice line are not only rejected, but declared not to be permissible arguments.
Again, Joseph Bottum at First Things has taken a quick glance at the predictable:
The five Catholic justices on the Supreme Court formed – for the first time since Alito joined the Court – the complete majority on a decision. I think that we're probably going to have to wait for the new fund-raising letters from NARAL and Planned Parenthood before we see the highest pitch of anti-Catholic rhetoric coming out of the Carhart decision.
Statistically, in our society, the months from conception to birth are the most dangerous months of a person's life; the time when a person is most likely – by a very large statistical factor – to die violently. Catholics and many others who have struggled to bring us back to our senses on this issue can expect more heat than light from their opponents, but if even a portion of the countless tiny, innocent, defenseless children can be saved, the minor social opprobrium we may experience will be well worth it.
The problem of the late-comers, that of excavating the living Son of God from sermon, book and example, from the sacred measures of divine worship, from the work of art, pious practice, custom and symbol, is difficult, certainly, but probably not more difficult than that of recognizing him in the son of a carpenter. [The Lord, 255]
... only reveals himself to the one whom he can entrust with a mission. He does not reveal himself to curiosity but to love ...
Into the black, yawning grave fly all hopes, plans, habits, calculations, and -- above all -- meaning: the meaning of life. Meaning has lost its meaning, and another incomprehensible Meaning has caused wings to grow at one's back ... And I think that anyone who has had this experience of eternity, if only once; who has understood the way he is going, if only once; who has seen the One who goes before him, if only once -- such a person will find it hard to turn aside from this path: to him all comfort will seem ephemeral, all treasures valueless, all companions unnecessary, if amongst them he fails to see the One Companion carrying his Cross.
All around us we see activity, organization, operations of every possible type; but what directs them? An inwardness no longer really at home with itself which thinks, judges, acts from the surface, guided by mere intellect, utility, and the impulses of power, property and pleasure. An "interiority" too superficial to contact the truth lying at life's center, which no longer reaches the essential and everlasting, but remains somewhere just under the skin-level of the provisional and the fortuitous.
Before all else, then, man's depths must be reawakened. ... In a word, man must learn again to meditate and pray. ...
Therefore we must return to the essence of being and ask: What is the connection between a man's work and his life? ... What is obedience, and how is it related to freedom? What do health, sickness, death really signify? ... When may attraction claim the high name of love? What does the union of man and woman known as marriage mean (at present [1951!] something so seedy, so choked with weed, that few people seem to have any serious conception of it, although it is the bearer of all human existence)?
"If you hand yourself over without reserve to the God who loves you he will be the one who gives you to others, enriching you with all the necessary power to put yourself at their service."Archbishop Bruno Forte of Chieti-Vasto
Easter, like other Christian holidays, is illegal in Saudi Arabia, a country where Islam is the only recognized religion and hours of searching is necessary to find even a few chocolate eggs. ...What is it with the Associated Press and its fixation on chocolate eggs? It appears that in a word-association test the Associated Press' response to the word "Easter" is "chocolate eggs." Is there any more pathetic symbol of the attenuation of the Christian message than its reduction to "chocolate eggs"?
But even the smallest decorations are hard to find during Easter. Among four stores in this city that usually carry Christmas items, only one store stocked chocolate eggs. A sign beneath the sweets at the end of the chocolate isle said "seasonal collection."
St. Joseph's Abbey ChurchYears of experience with cassette tapes, CDs, and videos has taught us how spontaneously our work tends to move out beyond the limited face-to-face gatherings in which it originates. So while the Emmaus Road Initiative begins in a number of relatively small gatherings congenial to discussion, dialogue and the building of friendships, the sessions are recorded, and thanks to today's technologies of distribution (CDs, mp3 files, streaming audio), the discussion quickly and easily moves out to a wider audience by way of friendships and word-of-mouth recommendations -- a very effective and organic form of transmission. This modus operandi makes it possible to combine the friendly intimacy of the live sessions with a marvelously unpredictable distribution system which takes on a life of its own.
I will be going to California mid-week to meet with Randy and others as we plan the Emmaus Road Initiative series which will begin in several cities in the fall. If you are interested in taking part in one of the ERI gatherings or in helping us organize one in your area, contact Randy Coleman-Riese or call our Office at: 707-996-4704.
...the more acutely one feels what is being prepared, the closer and more intimate will the connection with the Mother Church become, and the easier and simpler it will be to endure out of love for Her the dirt that is cast upon Her. What will be will be in Her and through Her, not otherwise. With quiet joy I await what will be, and Nunc dimittis is being chanted and resounds in my tranquil heart for days at a time. When that which is awaited comes, when the Great Easter of the world is revealed, all human disputes will end. I do not know whether this will happen soon, or whether it will be necessary to wait for millions of years, but my heart is at peace, because hope already brings to it that which is awaited.Pavel Florensky
The Eucharist was at the center of Liz's religious life, and this is simply one of the many indications.
These are the words spoken by priest and communicants at the elevation of the Eucharist just before the distribution of communion. The last ones -- "The Body of Christ" -- are spoken by the priest as he gives the consecrated bread to the communicant, the word "Amen" is the communicant's response.
The inscription at the bottom, as I noted in an earlier post to the weblog, is: "May He make us an everlasting gift to You," taken from one of the Eucharistic prayers.
Skellig by Lorenna McKennittHave a holy Holy Week.
O Light the Candle, John
The daylight has almost gone.
The birds have sung their last,
The bells call all to Mass.
Sit here by my side,
For night is very long.
There’s something I must tell,
Before I pass along.
I joined the brotherhood
My books were all to me
I scribed the words of God
And much of history.
Many a year was I
Perched out upon the sea
The waves would wash my tears;
The wind, my memory.
I’d hear the ocean breathe;
Exhale upon the shore
I knew the tempest’s blood
It’s wrath I would endure
And so the years went by
Within my rocky cell
With only a mouse or bird
My Friends; I loved them well.
And so it came to pass
I’d come here to Romani
And many a year it took
Till I arrived here with thee
On dusty roads I walked
And over mountains high
Through rivers running deep
Beneath the endless sky.
Beneath these Jasmine flowers
Amidst these cypress trees
I give you now my books
And all their mysteries
Now take the hourglass
And turn it on its head
For when the sands are still
‘Tis then you’ll find me dead
O Light the candle, John
The daylight is almost gone
The birds have sung their last
The bells call all to Mass.
My beloved Liz grew more radiant and faithful
