Assumptions

The most important assumption to note today is that of the Mother of God into heaven. Among Eastern Christians, that reality is known as the "Dormition" of the Theotokos (depicted left). As the paradigmatic instance of what we are all meant to become, Mary helps to bring about what we are to become. Her very person is sacramental to a degree no other human person's is. Even so, and as the now-hoary title of this blog is meant to suggest, human life itself is sacramental. The basic goodness of what we are helps to constitute, and to bring about, the goodness of what we are meant to be. I often forget that. And so I've decided to resume blogging by reminding everybody of it.

In its basic goodness, human life expresses the divine goodness, which has no need of it. But precisely because it has no need of its human signification, divine goodness is fittingly expressed by the creation into which it overflows. Rational creatures, such as ourselves, enhance that expression by appreciating and responding to it. That's what divine "glory" is. By becoming what we are created to be, we give God glory. In prayer, I've learned once again that this blog is a means for me to become that and give God glory. That's why I've picked today to resume blogging after eight months of silence.

With that resolution, I can now proceed on several other assumptions. For example, this summer I finally joined the lay wing of the Dominican order as a novice. For several years I had hesitated to do so, sincerely believing such a move would be hypocritical. Joining a religious order, even as a mere tertiary, means acknowledging a charism and taking on a mission. That requires resolving to preach Christ by deeds as well as words. And though I have preached Christ with my lips and keyboard, I have not done so successfully with my life. But my confrères persuaded me that, if I wholeheartedly desire to become whatever it is I am meant to be, God will give the increase. I now proceed on that assumption.

Another assumption is that many of my online friends and acquaintances will be willing to follow me again. I hope that's a safe assumption. A few weeks ago, I warned my Facebook friends that I would switch to Google+ for my social networking. I do not regret that decision; I find Facebook annoying for any number of reasons, and am impressed with G+'s implementation of sharing as well as with its integration with other Google services I use, including this one. I am still allowed to invite people; if you're a friend and not on G+ already, please let me know either on my Facebook wall or by email, and I'll get you here.

Finally, you may safely assume that this blog will see many changes in format and usage over the next few months. The online world is moving fast, and I strive to move with it.

Taking Stock of our Inner Scrooge

The unregenerate Scrooge got and gets a bum rap. Of course he was cruel, selfish, cynical, and unbelieving. But so are all of us, to the extent we fail to internalize the message of Christmas. Scrooge is the old Adam (and Eve) within everybody past the age of reason, saying secretly or not so secretly "Bah, humbug" to the vulnerability of God in the Christ Child. It is not obvious that our inner Scrooge is wrong. If it were, divine revelation would have been unnecessary.

Nor is the truth of the revelation in Jesus Christ itself obvious. That a baby, sucking at a breast and needing diaper changes, was God, is not obvious. It is not obvious that, as an adult, he would save humanity from itself by letting himself be tortured and executed as a threat to the powers-that-be. It is by no means obvious that the vulnerability of God is the most important means by which he manifests his love and power to us. The Manger is as much a paradox as the Cross, and for the same reason. That must be recognized and acknowledged before we can internalize the message. Until we do, all we have are scapegoats for cleansing ourselves of evil. Scrooge unregenerate is a literary scapegoat; but not even creating real ones, which we do all the time, can effect transformation.

By the same token, however, it is not unreasonable to embrace the paradox. Our world teems with violence, exploitation, and filth that pose their own paradoxes. Wars are always breaking out, simmering, or threatening; most are the usual grabs at power and wealth, wasting countless lives in the process. But a certain class of monotheist still kills the innocent in the name of God "the Merciful, the Compassionate." Before they can see the light of day, when they would become even more inconvenient, children are regularly slaughtered in the name of freedom and life for women. Drug- and sex-trafficking entrench forms of slavery even worse than the buying and selling of human beings for their unpaid labor—itself a practice which it took humanity until the 19th century to begin to see as wrong. We degrade the ecosphere as a whole to support "economic growth," thus coming ever closer to killing the goose while we debate whether there is any problem at all.  We rack up unprecedented levels of debt, public and private, thus robbing our children and grandchildren—who, thanks to contraception and abortion, won't be numerous enough anyhow to support us in the style to which we have grown accustomed. We are now on the verge of recreating life through genetic manipulation when we can't even live life now with enough sense and compassion. Those who most loudly champion "science," a human discipline that has indeed increased knowledge and improved life, expect us to believe that life is from nothing, to nothing, for nothing. Does life not seen and appreciated through the paradox of the Manger and Cross make more sense than life seen through it? I for one cannot think so, and I have a lot of company.

Yet even I and that company often have a hard time seeing the urgency of living the message of Christmas. Even when we do, we have a hard time living it. That signifies the unregenerate nature which made redemption necessary. We are animals commanded to become gods (cf. John 10:34; 2 Peter 1:4). On the other hand, we can thank God that our nature is not wholly corrupted. That is why even unbelievers can appreciate Christmas. The challenge for believers as well as unbelievers is to move beyond sentimentality to celebration, beyond appreciation to transformation. Since we cannot meet that challenge ourselves, the first step is to get out of the Child's way. My prayer is that we have the courage to do so.

Another trinity of days

The primary trinity of days in the Christian religion is the Easter Triduum: Holy Thursday evening, centered on the Mass of the Lord's Supper, through Holy Saturday evening, which centers on the Easter Vigil. That's three days in kairos time; it's really two-and-a-half days in chronos time. I now ponder another trinity of days that is of interest for American Catholics. Though it is is only two days in chronos time, it is a coincidental three days in kairos time.

In the Roman-Catholic calendar, yesterday was Trinity Sunday and today is the Feast of the Visitation. In the American civil calendar, today is Memorial Day. As soon as I realized that, the thought occurred to me that all the themes can be connected with one another. As always, we must start with God even as we will end with God.

The Divine trinity of persons, which is God, is a infinite community of love. That is why the Apostle John says "God is love," and that is why the life of God, which it is our destiny to share, is inexhaustible. What the Latin scholastics called "the Beatific Vision" will not be a Big Long Stare at an Undifferentiated One, but a participation in the life of a community whose members "indwell" one another in a dynamic, mutual self-giving. Thus do they enact by choice the unity they enjoy by nature; in fact, and ultimately, the enacting and the nature are the same. By analogy, the community of saints will do the same among themselves in the world to come, and do so in part even now in the Church Militant. Imagine being called to do that forever without having to worry about bills!

But in this vale of tears, such love starts small. In the run-up to the Cross, its primary expression, it buds with babies. The Feast of the Visitation (why can't they just call it 'The Visit'? I hate words only used in churchy contexts...) has a young woman miraculously pregnant with the Messiah making a trip through rough country to visit her cousin, an old woman miraculously pregnant with his herald. The fulfillment of a family duty becomes an important episode in salvation history: the Old and the New covenants join in the Spirit as they meet in the flesh for the first time. Mary's Magnificat, uttered on just this occasion, celebrates the magnificent love with which God makes use of the humble, and thus enters the world as a baby, in order to fulfill his promises to Israel. Thus began the decisive self-emptying of God for our salvation, whose eternal model is the inner life of the Trinity itself.

Those whom we commemorate today, Memorial Day, made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. Perhaps not all did so willingly or well, but that is no matter; even the best of us, the saints, are saved by grace alone. And grace is not some sort of spiritual fuel for which we pull up, pay up, and tank up before we pull out of the filling stations known as churches. Grace, in the primary sense of the term, is the life of God himself lived within us, transforming us to become partakers of his nature, which is self-emptying love. To live and die by grace is to attain glory, and the only glory worth acquiring is that of self-emptying love. Many women show that in bearing and raising their children. The Americans, mostly men, whom we commemorate today poured themselves out by dying in their country's wars. In so doing, most showed the sort of love to which we are all called, even when the policies of the men who sent them to their deaths were not wise, and even though their motives were never pure.

Courage and love are closely related. Mary showed courage by saying 'yes' to the conception of her Son by the Spirit, knowing what could befall her if she turned up pregnant from a source not her husband. She showed courage as a pregnant teenager doing her duty by making a trip over territory haunted by brigands. Any woman who gives birth willingly shows courage. Soldiers in combat show courage. And courage, for the most part, is an manifestation of love: the greater the courage, the greater the love. And "greater love has no man than this: to lay down his life for his friends..."

Then there are the people who don't get to love in the ways that mothers and soldiers do. I don't. I will never be a mother and have never been a soldier; though I volunteered for Iraq in 2003, I was told what I should have known already, that I was too old and slow. And so my prayer this day is not only for those who have made the ultimate sacrifice, but for those who don't quite know how they are supposed to do the same: how they are supposed to live for Christ, which is to say die for Christ. If they are faithful, and care more about God than themselves, they will be shown.

Pentecost and metanoia

As individual Christians, including and especially as contemporary Catholics, we tend to forget that it's not about you. I was reminded of that truth, and the forgetting of it, by a fine homily of that title posted by Msgr. William Pope of the Archdiocese of Washington. "It," of course, is not just not about you. It's about nobody in particular but God.

If we're going to get "it," we have to care more about the Lord Jesus Christ than about any other human being or value. "It" is the whole "economy of salvation," all that God has done and continues to do for us. Of course that's paradoxical: if it's we who are being saved—God needs no salvation—why would the whole thing not be about us? But our redemption is itself paradoxical: God saved us from ourselves by becoming one of us and then letting people torture and execute him as a threat to public order. By rising from the dead into glory, he demonstrated that abundant life is attained by giving life away. At Pentecost, the disciples were empowered to overcome their fear and confusion and go on to proclaim that kerygma to the whole world. Following that model, indeed participating in it, we must realize that the conversion, the metanoia, needed for salvation is that we come to care far less about what God does for us as individuals than that God himself be glorified.

That is hard to understand and appreciate in our self-indulgent, narcissistic age. Many indeed think that, if it were true, then God himself would be a self-indulgent narcissist--which is only further proof of how spiritually degenerate our age is. But the truth was hard to understand even in harder ages, when people took the centrality of sacrifice for granted because most of them could expect no other sort of life.

St. Paul got it, of course. He said that "it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me." That's the attitude we must aspire to. Baptism is only the inauguration of that reality to which said attitude is our only rational response. Thus, the indicative statement should coordinate with a hortatory-subjunctive prayer: "Let it not be I who live, but you who live in me." I have made that one of my daily prayers. But I have only begun to learn its lesson.

For reasons a few of my readers know, and that most probably wouldn't care to know, my life was thoroughly deconstructed during the 1990s. By the end of 2000, I had to be hospitalized for really major depression. I got depressed partly for biochemical reasons, but mainly because I felt that God had been playing a long, cruel joke on me. Since my recovery, in which the objective circumstances of my life have actually been harder than they were in the 90s, I've been having a long debate with God. I've wanted him to show me that my life wasn't and isn't one long, cruel joke. Of course he has been showing me that. Many of his children have shown his love to me at some cost to themselves. In fact I sometimes get impatient with myself, and God, about the extent to which I find myself the object of their heartfelt charity. But recently I've begun to notice that I've avoided a relapse not because I have the right pills and people in my life—I can't afford the pills, and no adult can expect others to solve their problems for them—but because I've slowly, grudgingly come to recognize that it's not about me.

My life is not about what I want or would prefer. My life is a gift meant to bring others closer to God. For that, it's not necessary that my life be what I want or would prefer. It's only necessary that I find Christ in the circumstances he wills for me, love as he would have me love in those circumstances, and let myself be loved by him in those circumstances. Yet I often find that fact immensely frustrating. I still tend to feel that I deserve a "better" life, more of a domestic and professional niche, than I've managed to achieve since my exit from the psych ward nine years ago. I think of myself as a wandering pilgrim at this point. That partly results from my own sins and failings, but I have grown certain that it is the positive will of God. I don't know why it's that, but I don't think I'm just being "made to pay." And I certainly don't think anymore that it's all just a cruel joke. Maybe I'm just supposed to be a knight-errant of faith. If I'd seen myself that way earlier, I would have handled things very differently indeed.

But of course I don't and can't know exactly what God sees for me. None of us needs to know that; we'll find out soon enough at the judgment seat of Christ. We need only know that he wills only our good. That willing consists in the Trinity's striving, often gently and sometimes forcefully, to make its home within us. That is why "it" means turning our very lives into a prayer to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit—my preferred form of the Doxology. For that, we need to look for the incarnate Son every day of our lives, and adhere to him who obeyed the Father.

Pentecost is a great day to recall that. For as the Pope has said in his homily, the "Son who speaks to the Father exists and they are both one in the Spirit, who constitutes, so to speak, the atmosphere of giving and loving which makes them one God." "It" is ultimately about participating forever in that.

Independence Day

Paul Cella and Lydia McGrew have posted excellent observations for today at W4. I have only one thing to add.

As Lydia implied, the United States remains the West's last best hope for preserving what makes Western civilization worth preserving. That would be recognizing, in Jefferson's phrase, "the laws of nature and of nature's God." What Peter Berger termed "ethical monotheism" is the basis for recognizing certain human rights as inherent and inalienable rather than bestowed by cultural evolution or political fiat. That recognition is essential for the preservation of liberty without sectarianism. We have struck a fine balance between ethical monotheism and sectarianism. As we confront the twin challenges of secular liberalism and jihad, let us not imperil our liberty by losing that balance.

The Prayer and the Fool

I thought I'd observe the feast of St. Anselm today by pointing readers to a truly remarkable little essay by Brandon Watson on Anselm's argument for God's existence in Chapter 2 of the Proslogion. Though written three years ago, and garnering zero comment, it's well worth discussing. I'd like to initiate discussion of it here.

To that end, I'll just post the heart of it; but I caution those interested to read it all before commenting.

....the Fool either understands what he says does not exist, in which case he contradicts himself, or he does not contradict himself because he does not understand what he is saying does not exist. As Anselm says, "Even though he may say those words in his heart he will give them some other meaning or no meaning at all." So what is to be made of this?

I myself take Klima's view that the argument is sound. However, most of what I will say here does not require agreeing with me on this point. All it requires is that we ask, "Even supposing it is sound, what then?"

A sound argument is one that is logically valid and has true premises. But not all sound arguments are particularly helpful for coming to a conclusion. For instance, it is fairly easy to create arguments that are sound but that beg the question -- that is, arguments that are logically valid and have true premises, but whose premises can only be known to be true if we already accept the conclusion. When our interest is persuasion, the discovery of the truth, or anything else that relies on going from the unknown to the known or from the not-believed to the believed, we need something more than soundness. Klima argues, and I think that he's right, that the problem Anselm's argument faces is precisely at this level. Despite the fact that it is a sound argument, and shows that the atheist (the one who denies there is a God because that than which no greater can be thought does not exist) would be contradicting himself if he were seriously to reflect on that than which no greater can be thought, nonetheless it's possible to rationally reject the argument. As Anselm himself recognizes, understanding the words "that than which no greater can be thought" is not the same as having that than which no greater can be thought as an object of the understanding.

If Christ be not risen...

In this year of St. Paul, it's worth noting for the Easter season something he says about the Resurrection: "If Christ be not risen, our faith is vain and we are the most pitiable of men" (1 Cor 15: 14). That statement is just as fitting today as when Paul made it. The Western world as a whole is sliding into a new paganism as hopeless as that of late antiquity. Even the U.S., still a "religous" country, is headed down the same path as Europe and Canada; we're just not as far along yet, but the secularist rot is clearly setting in. Many "theologians"—i.e., professors of various academic disciplines pursued within theology departments—treat the Resurrection as theory not history. In such a cynical, sterile environment, it is fitting that the Pope transmits Paul's message in the following paragraphs from his urbi et orbi address last week:

The resurrection, then, is not a theory, but a historical reality revealed by the man Jesus Christ by means of his “Passover”, his “passage”, that has opened a “new way” between heaven and earth (cf. Heb 10:20). It is neither a myth nor a dream, it is not a vision or a utopia, it is not a fairy tale, but it is a singular and unrepeatable event: Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary, who at dusk on Friday was taken down from the Cross and buried, has victoriously left the tomb. In fact, at dawn on the first day after the Sabbath, Peter and John found the tomb empty. Mary Magdalene and the other women encountered the risen Jesus. On the way to Emmaus the two disciples recognized him at the breaking of the bread. The Risen One appeared to the Apostles that evening in the Upper Room and then to many other disciples in Galilee.

The proclamation of the Lord’s Resurrection lightens up the dark regions of the world in which we live. I am referring particularly to materialism and nihilism, to a vision of the world that is unable to move beyond what is scientifically verifiable, and retreats cheerlessly into a sense of emptiness which is thought to be the definitive destiny of human life. It is a fact that if Christ had not risen, the “emptiness” would be set to prevail. If we take away Christ and his resurrection, there is no escape for man, and every one of his hopes remains an illusion. Yet today is the day when the proclamation of the Lord’s resurrection vigorously bursts forth, and it is the answer to the recurring question of the sceptics, that we also find in the book of Ecclesiastes: “Is there a thing of which it is said, ‘See, this is new’?” (Ec 1:10). We answer, yes: on Easter morning, everything was renewed. “Mors et vita, duello conflixere mirando: dux vitae mortuus, regnat vivus – Death and life have come face to face in a tremendous duel: the Lord of life was dead, but now he lives triumphant.” This is what is new! A newness that changes the lives of those who accept it, as in the case of the saints. This, for example, is what happened to Saint Paul.

Most of us are not saints and do not experience what Paul did. We get knocked off our horses and blinded, but we do not hear the risen Lord himself asking us why we persecute him or telling us which Christian house will be the place where we come to our senses. To be sure, it is a commonplace of preaching and spiritual writing to claim that committed disciples will and ought to undergo much "dying and rising" in the course of their journeys of faith. And that is true. But without faith, it will not serve either to hear that or undergo it; for "without faith one cannot be saved." And that faith would be vain if the Lord did not rise as the Apostles and the current pontiff say.

The Resurrection has everything to do with history, even with evolution, on which the "new atheists" stake their worldview. In his Easter-Vigil homily three years ago, the Pope preached:

Of what exactly does this "rising" consist? What does it mean for us, for the whole world and the whole of history? A German theologian once said ironically that the miracle of a corpse returning to life - if it really happened, which he did not actually believe - would be ultimately irrelevant precisely because it would not concern us. In fact, if it were simply that somebody was once brought back to life, and no more than that, in what way should this concern us? But the point is that Christ’s Resurrection is something more, something different. If we may borrow the language of the theory of evolution, it is the greatest "mutation", absolutely the most crucial leap into a totally new dimension that there has ever been in the long history of life and its development: a leap into a completely new order which does concern us, and concerns the whole of history.

The Resurrection is the "great mutation" pointing to what we are destined for and making it possible. We are animals destined to become gods; but God himself had to make the transition so that we can. It is up to each of us to choose whether to hitch that ride or not. We can choose to see ourselves merely as animals with a better computer in the cranium, or we can treat that status as the biological base for a great transformation that animals and computers cannot make.

If we choose the former, we will eventually destroy ourselves: we will effect, as CS Lewis said, the "abolition of man." For our power over Nature will increasingly become that of "some men over others with Nature as its instrument," and those wielding such power will acknowledge no higher norms than their own appetites. We will have "evolved" into a particularly savage animal hierarchy. If we choose the latter, we will be spared none of the difficulties of life. But we will be able to bear them as instruments for being taken up, obediently, into the life of infinite love himself.

Our hope, then, lies in receiving divinity as a gift rather than striving to be gods while denying God. Even the God-man received it as such, from all eternity and by being raised. He is thus "the source of eternal life for all who obey him" (Heb 5:9). To obey him, though, we need to believe he lives as a transformed man even now. Otherwise he is an abstraction, the kind of god who leaves us alone, the kind many seem to want. But of abstractions the world has more than enough.

Descending into hell

Today is a good day to meditate on two kinds of descent into hell: the kind some people undergo by refusing to repent of serious sin, and the unique one that Jesus undertook after his death. The key is to remember that the latter is part of the remedy for the former.

Commenting on earlier sources, Ephesians 4:8-9 does after all read: "Therefore, it says: "He ascended on high and took prisoners captive; he gave gifts to men." What does "he ascended" mean except that he also descended into the lower (regions) of the earth?"(NAB translation). The idea is that the ascent and descent are all part of the same process of redemption. Many Christians don't seem to know what to make of that. What little we can make of it, indeed of the very nature of the Atonement, is mysterious enough. But that doesn't mean we can't benefit from meditating on the mystery.

The Apostles' Creed echoes Ephesians in saying that Jesus descended into the underworld. In English, said destination is often translated as 'hell', from the Latin infernum, the same word used in the Western tradition for the place of sempiternal punishment. But, I am told, the Greek text is the original and echoes the scripture verse just cited. Thus the earliest extant "creed," itself an expansion of a still-earlier baptismal formula, metaphorically describes a complex reality which most modern Christians barely pause to consider. The received doctrine, no doubt true as far as it goes, is that the place in question of "the limbo of the fathers," i.e. of our fathers in faith who lived before the time of Christ. An ancient homily even has Jesus, having descended to the underworld after his death, preaching to and liberating Adam himself. That's in keeping with John 12: 32's reference to the Crucifixion: "When I am lifted up, I will draw all men to myself." His "lifting up" on the Cross—an event which, to the ancient mind, was supremely humiliating—is also the first stage of his "glorification." That glorification continues with Jesus' descent after his death. But that should tell us that the further descent ad infernum is not just glory and triumph. It is descent and dereliction, for it is part of the Passion as a whole: and the glory consists in a love willing to reach down to us even as far as that. In fact, the descent into hell is the completion of the Son's loving descent on our behalf: the very descent by which he "became sin" (2 Cor 5:21) for us so that we might be freed from slavery to sin.

I came to think that way by reading Hans Urs von Balthasar. As far as I know, only he among major theologians has thought hard about all this. According to my own interpretation (which, along with several dollars, will get you a latté), his argument was that, in order to complete our redemption, Jesus had to experience what it's like to be alienated from God even though he could not, objectively speaking, ever have ceased being in communion with the Father. Given the patristic dictum "whatever is not assumed is not redeemed," Jesus had to "assume" all the effects of sin while being sinless. That's how he could "become sin" without sinning. So it wasn't enough that our Immortal King became sin by dying, in a supremely humiliating way, as a condemned criminal. He had to become sin by going to the furthest place from heaven one could go: "the lower reaches" where the souls of the dead were imprisoned. But because his is an unconquerable love, Jesus's presence in such an apparently desperate place was a victory for him and for the souls of the just abiding there. They greeted Jesus with joy and were liberated. Tradition does not say how the souls of the unjust greeted him. It doesn't have to. They are there to stay. But that is not for want of divine love manifested to them. The same, I believe, has been true ever since.

Some who pride themselves on their orthodoxy suspect that von Balthasar's speculation about the descent into hell is heretical. There was a dustup about that in First Things last year, calmly and judiciously reviewed by Richard Reno, who provides links to it. In my own view, such a suspicion overlooks the pattern of descent-as-ascent that is so clear in St. John. There is no contradiction in saying that Jesus achieved the best by experiencing the worst, even emotionally. He didn't just quote Psalm 22 in saying on the Cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" He felt that. But in due course he got his answer because, in the economy of salvation, the two go hand in hand.

And so it is for us, to the extent we get serious about following him. It is as much in our weaknesses and failures, our sufferings deserved and undeserved, as in our virtues and successes that our loving Savior abides with us. His power is most manifest when we are powerless. I cannot always remember that when I contemplate the great failures and disappointments of my life. I feel very far from God at such times, when I am not even grateful for the gift of life. Sometimes, in my impatience with reality, I don't even remember it amid my lesser weaknesses and disappointments. The least I can do tonight, whens I enter the church in darkness for the Easter Vigil service, is to offer such failures with the petition that I remember to remember that He has been through it all, and worse.

The undying light in the darkness

Today, in the calendar for the Roman liturgy according to the ordinary form, we celebrate the Baptism of the Lord. In the New Testament, the Baptism of the Lord affords the only occasion when all three persons of the Trinity were sensibly manifest. I love that partly because I love trinitarian theology, but more because our world is in ever-more desperate need of the undying light that pre-existed and, for those with eyes to see, suffuses it.

Two news items today bring home the darkness for me, and a third brings out the light.

The first bit of darkness that enveloped my spirit, out of the countless ones that could have, is what's been going on in Gaza this month. It seems like pure darkness not because either side is purely evil—as Solzhenitsyn said, the line between good and evil runs through each human heart—but because the evil in each side so much obscures what's truly good about them.

The Palestinians cannot be faulted for desiring their own homeland, or for resenting the Israeli blockade of Gaza that persisted even during the fragile cease-fire of the last six months of 2008. But the Gaza Palestinians are governed—if one can call it government—by people whose avowed aim is to destroy Israel, not to live alongside it. They hate Israel more than they love their own children whom, forsooth, they educate to glorify "martyrdom" for the cause. One Hamas leader has agreed with an al-Qaedist's proclamation that "we are going to win, because they [the opponents of radical Islam] love life and we love death."

When Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it tore down synagogues and left behind greenhouses. Instead of turning the greenhouses into farms, the Palestinians tore them down too. Instead of turning other buildings into factories for goods to be exported for sale, Hamas turned them into factories for making Qassams to rain down on Israeli homes and schools. As soon as last year's ceasefire expired, they started shooting other rockets, imported from Syria and Iran, that reach further and explode in a wider radius. Now that the Israelis have become so fed up that they've gone into Gaza to destroy Hamas' military capability, the Palestinian civilian toll mounts because Hamas fights mostly from civilian areas and structures. If you want to attack Hamas militants, you often can do so only at the cost of shooting or blowing up the children and women all around them. It's a brilliantly, fiendishly cynical Hamas tactic—as evidenced by the fact that there's far more media attention to and world outrage about Palestinian civilian casualties caused collaterally by the Israelis than about Israeli civilian casualties caused deliberately by Hamas.

Not that the Israelis avoid all sin, mind you. Not everything done by the soldiers of a country at war is right. But exactly what, in the grander scheme, is Israel supposed to do about an enemy that attacks its territory daily as a putative religious duty, sometimes causing civilian deaths? Another ceasefire that leaves the Hamas infrastructure intact will only allow Hamas to rearm for the next round while being protected and motivated by all the outrage over this one. And that's exactly what most of the world seems to want. Once again, the Jews are expected to acquiesce in their own slaughter. Only Satan is laughing.

Another bit of darkness is of interest mostly to that minority of the world's population which either loves or hates the Catholic faith. Apparently, the Dutch foreign minister has summoned the papal nuncio for that country to "explain" the Pope's opposition to the proposed UN declaration on human rights and homosexuality. Now I doubt that the Dutch government is particularly concerned about the Vatican's stance on homosexuality; rather, the homosexualist lobby is so angry that it's become politically necessary for the government to appear concerned about the Vatican's stance. This is really depressing. I have only recently digested the fact that, in my lifetime, the majority of Westerners with higher education have moved from regarding sodomy as immoral to regarding opposition to its sanctification by the state as immoral. The Netherlands in particular has had gay "marriage" for years. But now the Vatican arouses fury there by suggesting that countries which still penalize sodomites should not be penalized in their turn by the United Nations. All pretense of tolerance is dissipating. It won't be long before churches which still preach against sodomy, or even use the term, are persecuted in the name of an enlightenment which is really an endarkenment.

There is a bit of light, however. With hat tip to Taylor Marshall of Canterbury Tales, I note that Dr. Carl Djerassi, a co-inventor of the birth-control pill, has now repudiated it. Dr. Djerassi merely points out the obvious: we now have a "demographic catastrophe" in Western Europe. Of course this is not a bit of light. The light shines from the fact—on which I have often remarked—that by the end of this century, the only surviving Westerners will be those whose parents had enough faith in God and creation to replace themselves. Next to its parents, that generation will have the Catholic Church to thank for its existence. For she is the only Christian body that has not only maintained the ancient ecclesial consensus against contraception but also articulated the purely spiritual reasons for that consensus.

"This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Listen to him."

Brief meditation on the Holy Family

The 14th-century Dominican Johann Tauler wrote as follows on the Gospel for today's feast in the Roman calendar for the ordinary form of the Mass:

Herod, the one who pursued the child and wanted to kill him, represents the world which clearly kills off the child, the world that we must by all means flee if we want to save the child. Yet no sooner have we fled the world exteriorly… than Archelaus rises up and reigns: there is still a world within you, a world over which you will not triumph without a great deal of effort and by God’s help.

For there are three strong and bitter enemies that you have to overcome in you and it is with difficulty that we ever win the victory. You will be attacked by spiritual pride: you would like to be seen, taken note of, listened to… The second enemy is your own flesh, assailing you through bodily and spiritual impurity… The third enemy is the one that attacks by arousing malice in you, bitter thoughts, suspiciousness, ill will, hatred and the desire for revenge… Would you become ever more dear to God? You must completely forsake all such behaviour, for all this is the wicked Archelaus in person. Fear and be on your guard; he wants to kill the child indeed…

The worst thing about today's world is how evidently it wants to "kill the child." It does not want God to be its Father, begetting each of us in love; it does not want the Christ Child to be its brother, born shivering in a barnyard stall; it does not want the Holy Spirit to be its comforter and guide, filling it with a life to be poured out in maturity for God and neighbor. It wants to be "grown up," independent, a law unto itself, bending things ever more to its own pleasure and devising. The result is misery, even for those who have many of the world's most cherished goods. The prevalence of abortion, the greatest holocaust in history and set only to expand, is a gruesome sacrament of this evil. The killing of children in the womb signifies the spiritual disorder within; and in signifying that, reliably helps to bring it about.

As Tauler indicates, this "world" is in each of us, if only because of original sin. Even the redeemed must struggle against "the world," within and without, so as to recover their real "inner child" and thus become what God created them to be. I do so daily, often without apparent success. Life for the disciple, if one really wishes to be a disciple, is a spiritual combat. And this, I believe, is the true message of the story of the Holy Family, commemmorated so peacefully in our beloved crèches.

Things have got so bad that I shall deliver myself of another Yogi-ism: in America today, an overtly healthy, intact family is assumed to be covertly dysfunctional. Normalcy, according to the norm of bygone days, is suspect. But consider what the family is for. It is the incubator of human beings, not so much in the physical sense, in which it is dispensable, but in the spiritual sense. It is where we are equipped to become what God created us to be; parents are merely the stewards of that process. But in a world determined to kill the child, the family cannot achieve its purpose well. In a world determined to be "autonomous," the divine and natural law is steadily supplanted by human law. It is we who now decide, by mores and statutes, what marriage consists in; it is we who now decide whether we shall reproduce naturally or technologically; it is we who decide when conceived children will be allowed to see the light of day; it is we who reserve the right to break up a family, ostensibly for the good of its members. In the so-called developed world, the family is increasingly an artifact of convenience at best.

That "kills the child" because we can no longer accept the family as a gift, the way Mary and Joseph accepted Jesus as a gift, and the way all children are gifts. We have done this to ourselves.

Kyrie, eleison.

The Lady Militant

No, I don't mean Sarah Palin, though I would enjoy applying that theme to her. I mean the Mother of God.

Today is the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, instituted by Pope Pius V in thanksgiving to Mary for the victory of the Catholic fleet over the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. All that victory did was save Western Christendom from conquest by the Ottoman Empire, which had extirpated the Byzantine Empire in the previous century. I have said my rosary today for victory over the culture of death in the West, which is a much bigger killer today than Muslim terrorists. Our Lady of Medjugorje is reported to say that the Rosary is the only way to defeat Satan.

Prof. Ralph McInerny says that the young should memorize GK Chesterton's poem Lepanto. For the convenience of the young of all ages, I present its full text here:

White founts falling in the courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard,
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips,
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross,
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard,
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,
Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half-attainted stall,
The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall,
The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung,
That once went singing southward when all the world was young.
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
Don John of Austria is going to the war,
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold,
Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums,
Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.
Don John laughing in the brave beard curled,
Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world,
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free.
Love-light of Spain - hurrah!
Death-light of Africa!
Don John of Austria
Is riding to the sea.

Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri's knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunset and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees,
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.

They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn,
From temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn;
They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be;
On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl,
Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl;
They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground, -
They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound.
And he saith, "Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk may hide,
And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide,
And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest,
For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west.
We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done,
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces - four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not 'Kismet'; it is he that knows not Fate;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate!
It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth,
Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth."
For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
Sudden and still - hurrah!
Bolt from Iberia!
Don John of Austria
Is gone by Alcalar.

St. Michael's on his Mountain in the sea-roads of the north
(Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.)
Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift
And the sea-folk labour and the red sails lift.
He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone;
The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone;
The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,
And Christian dreadeth Christ that bath a newer face of doom,
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.
Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse
Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips,
Trumpet that sayeth ha!
Domino gloria!
Don John of Austria
Is shouting to the ships.

King Philip's in his closet with the Fleece about his neck
(Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin,
And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in.
He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon,
He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon,
And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey
Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day,
And death is in the phial and the end of noble work,
But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.
Don John's hunting, and his hounds have bayed -
Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid.
Gun upon gun, ha! ha!
Gun upon gun, hurrah!
Don John of Austria
Has loosed the cannonade.

The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke,
(Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.)
The hidden room in a man's house where God sits all the year,
The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.
He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea
The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery;
They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark,
They veil the plumed lions on the galleys of St. Mark;
And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs,
And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs,
Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines
Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
They are lost like slaves that swat, and in the skies of morning hung
The stairways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.

They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on
Before the high Kings' horses in the granite of Babylon.
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell,
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign -
(But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!)
Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate's sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.
Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,
Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade. . .

(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)

- G.K. Chesterton

The Marian Papacy

I had meant to post this yesterday, the feast of Mary's birthday, but got rather full of myself writing about freedom. Still, I remain pleasantly surprised.

John Allen, of the National Catholic Reporter no less, has convinced me that Pope Benedict is consciously placing his papacy under the mantle of the Virgin, just as his predecessor did. Actions speak even louder than words. I doubt the Pope knows something that Tradition doesn't; but he sure knows something a lot of his theologian colleagues don't.

See this page for a good account of the feast. Meanwhile, I suspect Rome is catholicizing Mr. Allen, in spite of who signs his paycheck.

My new blogging venue

If all goes as planned and prayed, this will be my last post at this blog. I have launched a new blog at Wordpress called Philosophia Perennis. I shall be posting there from now on.

The new blog-in-the-making is a group blog with Catholic philosophers as the authors. Several of my friends, erstwhile colleagues, and would-be colleagues have already agreed to come on board and contribute. But as the idea for this blog originated with me, the chief responsibility for administering it has fallen to me.

I'm making the shift for three reasons. First, I don't have time to post here as often as I'd like to, and doing a group blog with like-minded friends and colleagues would enable me to intersperse the posts I can manage with those of others I trust. Second, the new blog will in due course expose my readers to a wider array of talent and personality than just my own. Finally, the focus of the new blog is likely to be more academic and less personal than this blog's, and that's exactly what I need for the sake of facilitating my eventual return to academia.

I thought it peculiarly appropriate to launch the new blog on the liturgical feast day of St. Augustine, who was a philosopher before he became a Catholic. Once he underwent his conversion, a process so eloquently documented in that classic of Western literature known as his Confessions, Augustine adopted a different set of priorities for his thought. He became a Catholic first, a theologian second, and a philosopher—well, he gradually abandoned philosophical inquiry for its own sake. He prayed, he preached, he meditated, he theologized; but philosophizing for its own sake, he came to suspect, was something only pagans did.

Some philosophers think that meant he ceased to be a philosopher; some believers think he didn't leave philosophy nearly far enough behind. On my own account as a Catholic, I'd say that I do philosophy for the sake of understanding myself, the world, even God better than I would if I didn't do philosophy. I know by long experience that studying philosophy in depth, and constructing serious philosophical arguments which do not require any divinely revealed truth as premises, is an excellent discipline even for committed believers.

That good philosophy is intrinsically valuable remains so even for those of us who believe that, in the final analysis, our response to divine revelation and grace, as manifest in how we are thereby transformed as persons, is far more important than philosophy as an academic discipline. Divine revelation is for everybody, after all—as is philosophy in the original sense of the Greek term, which means "love of wisdom." Everybody who comes to love God and neighbor comes to love wisdom too. But philosophizing in a systematic way is for the (relatively) few. I think most of my contributors at the new blog would agree with that. Of course they would have qualifications to add, and probably wouldn't say it the way I have, but that's a philosopher for you. We wouldn't have it any other way.

It's been a great three-year run, and I am grateful to all of you for making this blog as useful and interesting as it's been. See you all over there. Thanks especially to Jesus Christ, my Alpha and Omega, for heeding his Mother's intercession on my behalf.

For the culture-war tactical manual

On this Feast of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, I just thought it appropriate to post this vignette from the pro-life front.

Peter, Paul, and the Pope's fashion statement

Today is the Solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul, who were martyred in Rome together. The Church of Rome still "has the bones"--a fact whose providential signifcance is often unappreciated. I do not refer merely to the claim of the popes to have inherited Peter's authority as leader of the Apostles. I also and especially mean the continuity between the Petrine and Pauline charisms in the Church.

Peter, the uneducated fisherman, represents the ordinary believer being faithful to what he knows. That is why the chief function of the papacy is not to innovate but to conserve: conservation takes less learning, if more humility, than innovation. But what the Peters thereby know is too limited just by itself. In Acts, for example, it is clear that Peter needed a good deal of prodding to accept the idea that Gentile converts to Christ did not have to become Jews in any recognizable sense. He was given a vision in the house of Cornelius; more painfully, he needed to be upbraided by Paul for backsliding on table fellowship with the non-kosher. In the end he was brought along, even as his leadership was never questioned in principle.

Paul, on the other hand, was the educated Pharisee. Lacking the advantage of having known Jesus in the flesh, he persecuted the Church zealously at first, and had to have a vision of the Lord to blind him to what he thought he knew before he could open his eyes to Truth. But once in possession of that Truth, he saw its implications with greater range and clarity than his apostolic colleagues. It took the first "council", with Peter presiding even over James at Jerusalem, to vindicate Paul's vision of God's call to the Gentiles. His theology was much more elaborate and thoughtful than Peter's even though the Gospel he preached was the same as Peter's. In due course they could die as brothers at the hands of the Romans, not long after James had been killed by the local Jewish tetrarch.

The story of Peter and Paul is rich fare for meditation. It tells us, among other things, that we need both the conservatives and the visionaries. That's because the faith-once-delivered shows its full integrity and scope in how our understanding of it develops. We must see the unfolding of revelation recorded in Scripture as continuous, just as the authentic development of doctrine and tradition generally since than has been continuous. That is important to recognize in every age of turmoil and growth. It is especially important today.

Most readers of this blog have become familiar with the concept of "the hermeneutic of continuity," and with my advocacy of that theological program. As a theologian, Joseph Ratzinger was one of its primary exponents. He very much remains so as pope. Apparently, the HC has become such a priority with the Vatican that even the Pope's choice of liturgical vestments is touted as a way to reiterate it. Check out this story.

This is another one of those cases when a fashion statement is not just a fashion statement. Actually, it is an anti-fashion statement. The fashion being countered by the papal fashion statement is of course the hermeneutic of discontinuity. As I've often pointed out, the HD is alive and well on both the left and the right in the Church. One can even observe trads and progs, in support of the HD, quoting each other's accounts of Vatican II and its aims--for completely opposite purposes, of course. Each side of the HD has its own reasons for depicting the Council as a sharp break with the Church of the past: the trads criticize the "post-concilar Church" as having thrown off too much of the past; the progs criticize the "post-conciliar Church" as not having thrown off enough of the past.

It's a pleasure to see the Pope's wardrobe saying that both are wrong. And why not? He does sit over the bones.

The Visitation

No, I don't mean the scrap commonly thrown to divorced dads if they're lucky, though meditation on today's liturgical theme might help some of them. Today is the Feast of the Visitation, the celebration of the visit of the pregnant Virgin Mary to her cousin Elizabeth, who at the time was even more pregnant with John the Baptist, and no less miraculously. This is one of the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary, and a personally significant anniversary for me. But until now, my meditation on it has never borne much fruit beyond reminding me that charity begins at home. I kept forgetting that it includes the Magnificat, and magnificent it is.

See this page for an outstanding aid to meditation.

St. Patrick and the TSA

The Transportation Security Administration is supposed to protect air travelers from terrorism. Given the results of various tests since 2002, its utility probably lies less in keeping weapons off planes than in reassuring, by its clumsy intrusiveness, a public anxious to be reassured. My confirmation saint, St. Patrick, also reassures me. By most accounts, such as Thomas Cahill's, he composed his justly loved Breastplate prayer to ward off "the spells of women and smiths and druids" as well as of demons directly. Believing I faced no specific, unseen personal enemies, I used to use it less as self-defense and more as just a beautiful prayer. I was wrong. Now I use it for both purposes. On my spiritual journey, he's an important part of my own personal TSA.

I picked "Patrick" as my confirmation name when I was 10 because even then I had an inchoate sense that I had a vocation to teach people about the Trinity, specifically. As crude an image as it had to be for his illiterate, heathen audience, I could not get his three-leaf clover out of my mind. I still can't. Every time I see clover I am reminded of my vocation. I doubt I have fulfilled it as intended.

That's why I pray with the Breastplate and many similar aids. To fulfill my vocation as intended, which is doubtless a greater thing than I see, I must press on with my spiritual journey with as much protection as possible against whatever would terrorize me out of it. As the world grows ever more nihilistic, we all need to be doing that. You have many TSA agents to pick from. Let us thank God for the one we celebrate today.

Theophany and vocation

For the benefit of the few readers who don't already know, I note that today's feast in the Roman calendar, the Baptism of the Lord, is really the same feast that the Orthodox celebrate as the Holy Theophany or "Epiphany." When I first learned of that correlation in college, I at once associated the idea of theophany with that of vocation and that of baptism with both. Apparently, that helped fool some progs into thinking I might be one of them. For back in the 1970s, Roman Catholics were still trying to wrap their minds around the idea that baptism was something more than the spiritual equivalent of mandatory neonatal therapy: the "washing away the stain of original sin" the Church did for babies lest they die and get stuck in limbo before we got round to doing right by them. Vatican II had quite explicitly recovered the richer, ancient understanding of the "baptismal vocation," of course; but the idea that people other than priests or vowed religious had vocations seemed, and in many quarters still seems, a rather newfangled idea among Catholics.

Still, it is no coincidence that the only place in the Gospels where all three persons of the Trinity are presented as manifesting themselves perceptibly and together is Jesus' ritual baptism by his cousin John. The occasion was the inauguration of Jesus' public ministry: the end of his time of preparation and the beginning of his actual mission. Just as it was the baptism he would undergo in his humiliating Passion that would give all baptism its power, so the humility he showed by letting his divine Person be baptized, when he himself did not need it, was the beginning of that passion. That the power of sacramental baptism ex opere operato, by which we are initiated into the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church, is our ontic incorporation into the divine life, is manifest in the theophany of the Trinity at Jesus' own baptism. When baptized into Christ, each Christian becomes the Father's pure and beloved child, filled with the Holy Spirit to carry out in this world a mission special to them.

Many people have little or no idea what that mission is. That is partly because most of us who have not undergone a well-conducted RCIA grasp only dimly, at best and if ever, what baptism itself makes us into and calls us to. Whether our day-to-day environment is secular—as in most cases—or religious, the lingering effects of original sin seem a lot more real to cradle Catholics than our divinization; and so it seems even to converts once the initial glow wears off. It has long been so. Once the Roman world became nominally Christian, so that being baptized became the cultural norm, it was inevitable. Most Catholics even today were baptized as infants and therefore remember nothing of the event. For them, there's no there there. Consequently, and absent a kind of spiritual progress that is all too rare, being Catholic can seem more a burden than a blessing: either a set of cultural and psychic baggage one can't quite shake, or another compartment of life with its own ceaseless demands and challenges, ones that must somehow be balanced with all the others in all the other compartments. It does not occur to most Catholics that the most beautiful and important thing about each of them, as individuals, is a pure divine gift: their being re-fashioned, in baptism and on through to the grave, in the image of Christ. For they are each members of his Mystical Body, whose purpose is to bring her Head, God's only-begotten Son, into the world even as each is formed for life eternal. Most of us are much more concerned with measurable performance, especially in tasks the world sets us and approves. The minority who consistently succeed at all that are often among the least likely to understand what their most important task really is.

And so today, with full knowledge of my failures in love and work, I am grateful to God and hopeful for the future. God has allowed me to retain no illusions about my worthiness or success; but neither am I exempt for a moment from obeying his commandments and using my gifts to the full. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, each the same God as the others, do not exempt me because, calling me to become one of the "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4), the Trinity offers me the power to do those things. That power is the life of the Trinity itself, drawing me into itself, beyond this world but very much in it. My prayer today is that I never lose sight of that, and that I always act accordingly. That is my prayer for each of us.

Mother of God!!!

The title under which the Virgin Mary is honored by today's feast is the most sublime title a human being could bear. I don't know quite how and when it entered the lexicon of expletives, but my hunch is that such usage originated in the Middle Ages as a faith-filled invocation of Mary herself in face of an unusual and overwhelming occurrence. By now the expletive has been vulgarized, like so many other words in our age. But given what was probably its original sense, the title as expletive is an apt reaction to the reality referred to by the title as description.

Why? Well, really think for a moment about this line from an ancient hymn: “He whom the entire universe could not contain was contained within your womb, O Theotokos.” Catholics and Orthodox tend not to think about that much because they take it so much for granted. It's like: "Yeah, sure, what else is new?" But taking such a reality for granted is just plain silly, at least from the standpoint of faith. We have here what should be a constant source of meditation and inspiration. For that purpose, I shall say two things.

First, as a callow young conservative I learned to love that line because it is so very un-PC. It reminds us of how Christianity differs from other religions. As Pope John Paul the Great wrote:

Jesus was born of the Chosen People, in fulfilment of the promise made to Abraham and constantly recalled by the Prophets. The latter spoke in God's name and in his place. The economy of the Old Testament, in fact, was essentially ordered to preparing and proclaiming the coming of Christ, the Redeemer of the universe, and of his Messianic Kingdom. The books of the Old Covenant are thus a permanent witness to a careful divine pedagogy. In Christ this pedagogy achieves its purpose: Jesus does not in fact merely speak "in the name of God" like the Prophets, but he is God himself speaking in his Eternal Word made flesh. Here we touch upon the essential point by which Christianity differs from all the other religions, by which man's search for God has been expressed from earliest times. Christianity has its starting-point in the Incarnation of the Word. Here, it is not simply a case of man seeking God, but of God who comes in Person to speak to man of himself and to show him the path by which he may be reached. This is what is proclaimed in the prologue of John's Gospel: "No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known" (1:18). The Incarnate Word is thus the fulfillment of the yearning present in all the religions of mankind: this fulfillment is brought about by God himself and transcends all human expectations. It is the mystery of grace.

Second, this distinctive mark of Christianity, the Incarnate Word, is also a paradox: "He whom the whole universe could not contain..." God brought us eternal life by dying as a man; but given the purpose of his dying as a man, he had to be born as a man. As the living, active receptacle of the paradox of the Incarnation, the Virgin Mary is herself part of it: Mother of her Creator. She didn't understand the thing when it was first announced to her; but never doubting it, she never withheld her cooperation.

Meditating on such facts is no mere pastime for those who have little else to worry about. By experience, I learn that the littleness of God in the Christ Child is what brings his greatness to me and strengthens me when all else fails. The littleness of Mary is also what enabled her to become the greatest among us. Starting as the humble maidservant by whom the Creator of the world entered the world to save it from itself, she continues to bring him to us by her prayer, intercession, and appearances. She as great power over that Adversary whose power in the Church can sometimes seem to approach his power in the world. In all such ways, she is the one through whom her divine Son now saves the Church from the Church. Very timely, I should think.

Contemplating the Holy Innocents

The following homily for today's feast is by one of my favorite preachers, Fr. Robert Altier:

Today as we celebrate this feast of the Holy Innocents, we certainly commemorate one of the most heinous events in human history, the fact that someone, because of his own insecurity as well as his own arrogance, would command the destruction of innocent human life. He was afraid that a little baby was going to take his throne, therefore, he wanted to get rid of this Child and was willing to destroy all the children just to make sure that the one Child he was after would certainly be among them.

In our own time, we have seen far worse things. We can look at what Stalin did to over 20 million people. We can look at what Hitler did to nearly 10 million people. We can look at what goes on every single day as 4,000 babies in this country are destroyed daily because people do not want them, and how many others throughout the world, as millions upon millions of babies are destroyed over and over again each year because of the selfishness of our society. So we see that human nature does not change. We have the same kind of pride, we have the same kind of selfishness, we have the same insecurities as Herod himself did. Therefore, we rush around trying to get rid of our “problem”, as we would say, trying to make it like it is not real, and thinking that if somehow we can do this that that will solve the difficulty. Of course, all it does is cause more problems.

As we heard in the first reading, as well as in the Gospel, there is an awful lot of deception. Herod realized that he was deceived by the Magi. The Magi realized that they were deceived by Herod. Saint John talks about how if we claim we are without sin that we deceive ourselves. There is an awful lot of deception that goes on, and that is exactly what Satan does to us. In our fear, in our confusion, in our selfishness, he causes a huge amount of deception. We listen to his lies and we do some of the most unfortunate things. All of us, if we look over the course of our lives, would have to admit that we have fallen into his deception many, many, many times.

But in the midst of all of this, there is great hope. God, Who brings good out of evil, certainly brought about a great good through the slaughter of the innocents two thousand years ago, and He is going to bring about a great good out of the slaughter of the innocents in our day, as well as throughout the centuries. The innocent blood that has been shed is a powerful witness before the throne of God, and it is all going to be addressed, it is all going to be made up for. But we have, as Saint John tells us, an intercessor who is just, one who is before the throne of God, another Holy Innocent who was spared at the time of Bethlehem only to be slaughtered 33 years later to unite His blood with the blood of all those innocent people which had been shed so that innocent people throughout the generations would be able to unite their blood with His.

In a way which seems to be exactly the opposite of what one would think, it is in this way that sin is forgiven. It is a strange thing that in order for sin to be forgiven we would commit the worst possible sin, that we would put God to death, that we would destroy innocent life. Yet it is through this means that God has chosen to bring innocence back to the guilty, to forgive the sinner. It is a mystery that we do not fully understand. Yet this is the way God has chosen to work.

So each one of us, as we look at our own sinfulness, needs to look at the Cross. We need to look at what the cost of our sins truly is. And rather than despairing in the face of our sins – no matter what they are, no matter how horrible they are, it does not matter – we have only one place where we can go to be forgiven, and that is to come before the Lord with all of our guilt, with all of our sinfulness. We need to come to the One Who is perfectly innocent. We need to beg Him for His mercy, for His forgiveness, for the innocent blood that He shed for us so that our sins could be forgiven. It is the only way. It would seem to make no sense. But for anyone who recognizes their own sinfulness, it makes perfect sense. The guilty can only be forgiven by the innocent. We can only be forgiven by the One Who prayed on the Cross because we knew not what we were doing.

In all of our sinfulness and in all of our foolishness, we have on the Cross, we have in the Blessed Sacrament, we have in the confessional, and we have before the throne of God the Father an intercessor who is just, One Who united His innocent blood with all the blood of the innocents that would be shed, One Who was willing to take on the guilt of those of us who are not innocent so that our sins would be forgiven and He Himself would become the expiation for our sins.