Counting all as rubbish

Today's readings from Cycle C for the Fifth Sunday of Lent have me meditating even beyond the solid homily I heard at a vigil Mass last night. Given by an Italian-Argentinian Oratorian, the homily's theme was the significance of baptism because it preceded the baptism of a (particularly beautiful and alert) baby. And today's first reading, whose theme is water in the desert, is certainly apt for the purpose, as well as for the baptism of catechumens that will occur, in most parishes, at the Easter Vigil. What struck me more, however, was the question what the "woman caught in adultery," the forlorn figure in today's Gospel, resolved to do after she left Jesus in what must have been a flood of relief and gratitude.

Clearly she is a figure for us all, not just for that ample number of women and men who have committed literal adultery. In the Old Testament, adultery is the primary metaphor used for Israel's unfaithfulness to her covenant with God; he, the ever-faithful husband, remains soliticious for his unfaithful bride. In turn, the unfaithfulness of Israel is a real, outward metaphor for every person's sinfulness before God. We are sinful not so much because of particular acts, though there is that of course. We are sinful because even when we are redeemed by Christ's blood and justified by incorporation into him through faith and baptism, the effects of original sin remain and incline us to commit sin. The first human couple, whom God had created in "original justice"—i.e., in the closest fellowship with himself possible for them—chose to be "like God, knowing good and evil" by disobeying God, and thus lost their share in God's very life. The effects of that first sin were mortality, blindness, and weakness of will. Even after baptism, which restores us to God in Christ, they remain as effects and signs of that alienation from God which we each have inherited just by being children of Adam and Eve. They make some-or-other actual sins inevitable, though our free will is preserved inasmuch as no particular actual sin is inevitable. Such is the tragedy of the human condition: no matter how much goodness, beauty, and truth we may discover, enjoy, and exhibit in life, without a deep and voluntary adherence to Christ our lives are destined to nothing but ruin, both spiritually and physically.

But like the woman caught in adultery, we can always turn to Christ for mercy even when it seems we cannot escape judgment. Such mercy is not mere indulgence and not merely a forensic pronouncement. It is transformative. It is what empowers us to "go and sin no more." But to be thus empowered, we must live our lives as ones in which it is Christ, and only Christ, who lives in us. That means leaving behind much that seems good. And that's a Lenten message we can barely hear. Usually, it is forced upon us.

In today's second reading, St. Paul says: "For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things
and I consider them so much rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having any righteousness of my own based on the law but that which comes through faith in Christ,
the righteousness from God..." In his case, the loss of all things consisted most obviously in the loss of that security and comfort which most people long and work for. Once he accepted Christ and his mission from Christ, he would have no permanent home and no financial security. He would not marry or have children. He would suffer persecution from Jews and pagans alike, and much misunderstanding even from believers themselves. In the end, he was killed for Christ. And he went through it all gladly. Why? Because, in comparison with the self-immolating Christ who lived in him, all other good things might as well be rubbish. To be conformed to the self-immolating Christ is to be willing to give up all other goods for his sake, as he emptied himself for us. One must be willing to count all besides Christ as rubbish.

Few of us are prepared to do that. Indeed our materialistic, pansexualist society makes its necessity almost inconceivable to us. In the developed world, many Christians are willing to go to church and do good things for the less fortunate; but it does not even occur to most of us to abandon the houses, the cars, and all the accoutrements of middle-class life for the sake of Christ. Even many clergy and religious have a very comfortable lifestyle they have no intention of giving up: generous vacations; paid-for conferences and retreats; humane and secure living arrangements. I would probably do the same if I could.

But fortunately for me, I have been gradually forced to accept "the loss of all things." I have experienced depression so severe as to require hospitalization, which resulted in further severe losses: of family, home, work, and even at times of my self-respect. I have been forced to learn detachment from all things in this world so that I may attach myself to God alone. What has kept me going is accepting all such losses as part of my walk with the Lord, who sustains me even he purifies me, so that I may learn anew to love amidst the ruins. My prayer this Lent is that I, and each of us in our own way, may continue to do so without bitterness, so that it is not we who live but Christ who can live in us.

Reditus

Normally I post my meditations on the Mass's Scripture readings on Sunday night, after people have heard their pastors preach. In my experience, that leaves me looking good enough in most cases. But not always. There are enough fine preachers out there, such as Fr. Philip Powell, OP, to put my sermonettes to shame. Today's Gospel, the parable of the prodigal son, brings out the best in many preachers. So I've decided to post my thoughts tonight, before I'm rightly ignored, leaving the Orthodox-Catholic debate over DD for tomorrow. A few, I know, will hear them.

St. Thomas Aquinas crafted his great Summa Theologiae on a theogonic model drawn from the sixth-century Pseudo-Dionysius: that of the going forth from and return of all things to God. Scholars call that "the exitus-reditus model." Now 'theogony' means 'origin of the divine'; and I use the associated adjective because the Pseudo-Dionysius thought of creation as destined to be 'divinized' through our theosis: a gift from the Father given through the Son and in the Holy Spirit. Theosis is indeed the purpose of this our life. (I am not now concerned with the sense in which we are to become God; I merely note that, in some sense, that is what life is about.) When Jesus speaks of the return of the prodigal son, he is giving us an extended metaphor for all that. But it works at two levels.

On one level, the exitus is creation itself, and reditus is simply the right ordering of creation to its source. Thus both would obtain even if man had never sinned. But Jesus is speaking more directly of our return to God from lives of sin. "All have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God," but none of us baptized can get away with ignoring the call to attain glory anyhow by God's grace. Grace in the primary sense of the term is God himself, communicating his life to us as unmerited gift. Bestowed through baptism, that life changes us forever; we abide in the eternal whether we want to or not; hence, to sin and fall away from God leaves us worse off than we could ever have been had we never been called to be "partakers of the divine nature." So, given that we belong to the eternal anyhow, resuming the process of theosis by repenting and returning to God is elementary good sense.

But it's not just good sense, as if life were just about being a solid citizen. It is an occasion of joy. C.S. Lewis spoke of being "surprised by joy," and anybody who's read that book of his knows what he means. The ineffable joy we can experience even without knowing God explicitly is restored and deepened when we return to God after dissipating our primal joy in the darkness of willful ignorance and sin. I have experienced that. But it cannot be communicated in words, and it cannot be manufactured. It can only be facilitated by how we choose to respond to the father who awaits us in patient love and infinite mercy.

This Lent, let us remember that emptying ourselves through prayer, self-denial, and charity is just we would want to do if we recognized that what we so often feed on is pig fodder far from home. When we so empty ourselves, we are really resuming our walk on the path of theosis because we are removing obstacles to our interior journey back to God. His Spirit will propel us on the way. Soon or eventually, if we persevere, the joy of returning to our true home will be the fruit.

Turning toward the Lord

The Latin conversio, whence comes the English "conversion," is a translation of the Greek metanoia, meaning a change of mind or heart. Metanoia is the New Testament word for conversion, meaning repentance and turning toward the Lord for one's very life. It is a repudiation of the old, doomed self in favor of the self one will become in eternity if we let Christ truly live within us. Lent is a time for renewed conversion in that sense. And liturgy is meant to facilitate that. Unfortunately, that's exactly what liturgy in many quarters of the Catholic Church today fails to do.

Last night I attended a Sunday Mass at an average-sized parish in Charlotte. That was unusual for me. Having worked third shift Saturday night/Sunday morning, I could not get up for the liturgy I usually attend, the 11:00 am Mass at Belmont Abbey. I must say that I was appalled. The music by the teenaged choir was, without interruption or mixture, the worst of the saccharine, 70s Jesuit stuff I thought I had left behind for good after abandoning the Catholic campus ministry in college three decades ago. The priest—whom nobody would mistake for an intellectual, or even for an NPR listener—practically tied himself in knots with solecisms. His five-minute homily, which relied on The Lone Ranger as an extended metaphor, preceded a long presentation by a portly, middle-aged woman about the Diocesan Support Appeal. The chief feature of that was exhaustive number-crunching done dialogically with the congregation in the format of a quiz show. (Don't ask any more, please.) That lasted fifteen minutes; they ought to give partial indulgences for having to sit through such a thing. Toward the end of it I began reading the classifieds in my search for an affordable apartment. Catholic Social Services in the diocese, I had recently discovered, doesn't "do housing."

The announcements that immediately followed the usual drab Liturgy of the Eucharist took another ten minutes. In good Catholic fashion, I left after five of those minutes so as to beat the crowd out of the parking lot; there are, after all, few places on earth more dangerous than the parking lot of a Catholic church after Mass. All I could do as I sped forth was grit my teeth, offer it up to the Lord inside me, and make my way to my favorite pub for an oatmeal stout.

What can one say? In the Catholic Church, it is time to "reform the reform" of the liturgy so that Mass once again becomes a place where the eternal can be perceived as penetrating and elevating the temporal. One gets the sense that many Catholics, including clergy, don't even know what that means anymore. Yet as I've also observed, enough do to make such a reform doable.

A good place to start is to, um, turn toward the Lord physically. Let's bring back celebration of the Mass ad orientem, which means that both priest and people symbolically face the Lord together by facing east during those parts of the Mass when the priest addresses God on the people's behalf. For more on that topic, I recommend Fr. Scott Newman's recent post and the book he himself recommends.

Pope John Paul II's private chapel did Mass that way. There's no reason why it can't even be offered as an option for the mass of laity. I'd bet the bishops would be surprised at how well received the option would be.

The Catholic citizen's Lenten ascesis

That's on top of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, folks. The purpose of those things is to empty ourselves so that Christ can fill us and thereby give himself to others. Even in the blogosphere, it is still possible for him to do that. All of us are called.

A good manifesto about the call is from Robert P. George's NRO article "Families and First Principles," available in full only to digital or hard-copy subscribers. So I rely on Vivificat for the most pertinent passage:

Our task should be to understand the moral truth and speak it in season and out of season. We will be told by the pure pragmatists that the public is too far gone in moral relativism or even moral delinquency to be reached by a moral argument. We will be advised to make the moral arguments to the social-conservative "base" but to frame those arguments in coded language so as not scare off the soccer moms or whoever is playing their role in the next election cycle. All of this must be resisted.

We must, to be sure, practice the much-neglected and badly underrated virtue of prudence. But we must have faith that truth is luminously powerful: so that if we bear witness to the truth about, say marriage and the sanctity of human life—lovingly, civilly, but with passion and determination—and if we honor the truth in advancing our positions, then even many of our fellow citizen who now find themselves on the other side of these issues will—some sooner, some later—come around.

To speak of truth frightens many people today. At least they seem to be frightened when conservatives speak of truth. They evidently believe that people who claim to know the truth about anything—and especially about moral matters—are "fundamentalists" and potential totalitarians. But this is silly. As Hardley Arkes has patiently explained in the pages of NATIONAL REVIEW and elsewhere, those on the other side of the great debates over social issues such as abortion and marriage make truth claims—moral truth claims—all the time. They assert their positions with no less confidence and no more doubt than one finds in the advocacy of pro-lifers and defenders of conjugal marriage. They proclaim a woman's "fundamental right" to abortion. They insist with moral conviction that "love makes a family." They condemn "Bush's immoral war in Iraq." The question is not whether there are truths about the morality of abortion and the nature of marriage; the question in each case is: What is the truth?

That last question is not to be asked with the relativistic cynicism of Pontius Pilate, so common today. It is to be asked with the expectation that we have already been given enough of the answer to act upon. This Lent, let us empty ourselves of worldliness so as to be filled with the courage and hope to act accordingly.

Reveling in ashes

My thinking about Lent has been stimulated by a trenchant criticism of The Episcopal Church made by an Episcopalian, an old college roommate and debating partner of mine who now blogs as RatherNot. Apropos of the favored themes of its current presiding bishop—an ex-Catholic who, of course, is not a bishop—RatherNot writes:

In the end, a church that emphasises questions and not answers will be the same church that emphasises blessings without repentance. Its message will indeed be union with God, but union on our terms, not His.

Now the Catholic Church in this country has not quite got to the point where questions are emphasized more than answers. But to judge from how things are in most parishes and dioceses, we certainly do see a great deal of blessing without repentance. There is relatively little repentance by anybody, from the top on down. A great deal is wrong; but what's wrong is almost always "their" fault, whichever "they" happens to be in the crosshairs. And so the questions, though frequent enough, are less troublesome than the refusal to accept what the answers demand of us individually. The problem with American Catholics is that few seem to feel the need to repent in light of their faith and be converted to their own faith.

I myself am very bad at Lent, the season in which the Lord's call to repentance and conversion comes to the liturgical fore. It begins in mid-February, when I'm so sick of winter that I'm almost desperate for sensory consolations and seek them more than usual. Even the modest self-indulgence I can afford allows me at first to forget what a wretched sinner I am; but of course, once the knowledge returns, I feel myself to be all the more wretched a sinner for ignoring Lent. Then I decide that such scruples are unproductive; so I become less scrupulous than I need to be, and the cycle starts all over. But I've found a way to short-circuit such spiritual childishness. Perhaps some could benefit from hearing about it.

As I've hinted before, one of my favorite prayers is a paraphrase of Galatians 2:20. To our Lord Jesus Christ, I pray daily and more than daily: "Let it not be I who live, but you who live in me." I know of few formulae that serve as well to focus my mind on what the Christian attitude should be all the time. On our own, we are hopeless and useless: so warped by the effects of original sin, our own sins, the sins of others, and just plain misfortune that we have no power to become what God created us, in love, to be. It is with certainty that I know this of myself, but I am not unique. We all of us can only attain our destined glory if a new "subject" takes the place of what we are: one that is still "I," yet not I, because it is Christ living in and through me. That must be our goal, striven for by grace through the prayer, self-denial, and charity we are enjoined to show during Lent. The old, unviable "I" must be killed so that it may be resurrected in the new one destined for eternal life.

The ashes of Ash Wednesday serve, or are meant to serve, as a salutary reminder of that. It's easy to sniff at the "ashes-and-palms" crowd who only come to church for such freebies; but many, I'm sure, preserve a residual sense of the symbols' meaning. That's something to work with. Still, as we fall fall short of acting on that sense, we can and should seek strength from Jesus in the desert. His prayer at various times in the wilderness, as a facet of the great Mystery that is his Pasch, is what has made it possible for us both to recognize our poverty and primal solitude and to be enriched and befriended by God himself. Yet the latter is inseparable from the former, which must somehow precede it.

That's why I revel in the ashes most Catholics will receive today. They keep me from forgetting the order of spiritual priorities. But this Lent, I go further. I ask for the grace to revel in the ashes that are my life, as a reminder that the more I let myself be reduced and emptied for the sake of being filled by the Holy Spirit, the more of his love, power, and glory I will be able to exhibit for others.

Care to join me?