A Christmas Message 2016

As a child, I impatiently waited for Christmas to come; in more recent years, I eagerly wait for Christmas to be past.  It is not that I do not love much about Christmas, for indeed I do, as you do, too. But Christmas is so packed with meanings and memories that the entire event called “Christmas” feels overwhelming.  Seemingly out of nowhere, as we approach our Christmas celebrations, emotions flood one’s soul.  Tears unused to flow suddenly well up at the sound of an old favorite Christmas song.  Memories of Christmases past, and especially of “precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,” come powerfully and vividly to mind.  With the joy and grace of Christmas come hours of “remembrance of things past,” and then you and I intensely miss the presence of those whom we have loved, and who are now absent from us physically. More than any other day on the calendar, Christmas is emotionally demanding year after year. And it can even be emotionally draining.  To make matters worse, all sorts of folks show up for our church services, and expect to hear some refreshing, enlightening, or just upbeat sermon. Then here am I, an aging man, filled with memories, and having to speak in public when my feelings urge me to retreat in silence. 

           In silence I am happy, one, and free;
           In silence what becomes begins to be.

Although each of us may express our feelings differently, I think that many of us feel the surge of similar strong emotions at Christmas:  love, joy, peace, renewal, refreshment, delight—and sorrow. The sheer beauty of Christmas—not just the music, or the feastings, or the quiet joys of nature sleeping, but the story of Jesus Christ, of God come among us—so much beauty and meaning packed into several days each year. The sight or sound of Beauty itself has the power to draw out tears. And there is so much beauty in Christmas to stir the heart with sudden showers—even the beauty of the earth stripped bare, awaiting renewal: 

           “In the bleak mid-winter, frosty wind made moan,
           Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.
           Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
           In the bleak mid-winter, long ago.”   [Christina Rossetti}

Long ago. And yet today. Time is telescoped at Christmas, with past, present, future all present together at once.  That was not the point of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” but one sees this fusion of time in that story, too. All of our Christmases past are present today, and what will come is present, too, even though we do not see it clearly yet, “for now we see through a glass, darkly.”  Indeed, Eternity itself is present to us here and now, whether known or unknown to us, and that presencing of God is the core meaning and beauty of Christmas.  Light streams into the human heart, even in one dwelling in darkness, living under the shadow of death.  Light streams in, just as surely as the stars send down their lights to chilly earth.  Light and joy stream in, and one feels the frozen ground of heart and mind begin to thaw, and the rivers of one’s life flow in ways beyond all telling. What was dark, begins to shine; what was heavy, lightens up; what was frigid, is warmed; what was dying, is renewed; what was numb with pain, begins to throb with Life again.  Such is Christmas. In famous words from Eliot’s “Four Quartets”:

           “The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
           Here the impossible union
           Of spheres of existence is actual,
           Here the past and future
           Are conquered and reconciled…”.  

O holy Night, when Christ is born.  O holy Night, when the light of Christ floods into a human soul, longing for God, hoping, waiting.  O holy Night, O holy Now, when sweet divine peace stills and consoles the human heart.

  
To all who have come to worship the living God with us, we wish a very Merry Christmas. On behalf of our parishes of St. Mark’s, St. Mary’s, and Holy Trinity: May you receive God’s blessing to you personally, and so become a blessing to all whom you know.  Merry Christmas!

Mary: The God-Bearer

For the One, eternal God to be present in space-time, He needs a receiver, a receptacle.  God is present, and all is present to God, as the ultimate cause of all that exists.  God’s “personal presence,” if we can use this language, depends on human cooperation, for God and man meet in the in-between of the divine-human. The Almighty seeks carriers, human beings in whom He may dwell, and through whom He may act.  For the ancient Israelites and the devout Jews before Jesus, God was experienced as dwelling especially in chosen men and women as prophets, as those who “spoke the Word of God.” And God was understood to dwell on occasion in certain chosen individuals into whom His Spirit rushed, leading to action on behalf of God’s People, Israel. Israelite and Jewish scriptures (our Old Testament) provide much evidence of the belief in God’s presence as a spirit of power, charisma, insight, vision, and decisive action.  Finally, the magnificent stories that open the Book of Genesis (chapters 1-2) present the belief of Jewish spiritualists that what we recognize as human being is essentially that into which God inbreathes his spirit or breath (ruach). To be human is to carry God.

What God does apart from His action as the ultimate cause of all that exists, and His presencing action in particular human beings, we do not know, for we cannot experience God in Himself.  To speak to you, God needs a human carrier. God in effect borrows a voice, an image, silent thoughts stirring in your heart. That which is utterly silent needs a voice to be heard by human ears, and that which is pure Love needs a loving receiver of His love to bless human beings.  Although God has indeed “spoken to us in many and various ways” as we read in the opening of the Letter to the Hebrews, there remains the unique God-bearer:  According to our Gospels, Mary is the human being who utterly disposed herself of God, and through whom God directly entered our human condition—a truth expressed in the belief that God took flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary.  She clung to nothing of her own—no ego, knowledge, reputation. Mary allowed herself to become an active-docile receiver of the God who is ever coming, that is, always presenting himself to human beings.  And so we honor her as the Godbearer par excellence: as the mother of God in the flesh, as the mother of Jesus Christ.

John the Baptist loves God as the Almighty, as the Just Judge of the world, and in his preaching John presents what he imagines as the coming wrath of God to destroy evil and evil-doers.  In the same Gospels we see that John had difficulty accepting Jesus as the coming of God, because Jesus did not bring destruction to evil-doers, but mercy and conversion to those who welcomed his word.  And we see that Mary’s way is simpler than John’s:  Mary loves God as the One who has presented Himself to her, in her, as the One we call Christ.  John proclaims; Mary adores.  John speaks of what he partially knows; Mary loves the One who is utterly intimate to her.  The Church cannot dispense with either John or Mary:  John as the voice warning us in the wilderness of our lives; Mary as the most humble, loving servant of the One who “has come to set us free” from bondage to sin, self, death.

  
 Her head is bowed, she sits in silence, she beholds with a wide-open heart Christ Jesus dwelling in her. As St. Bernard wisely wrote, “Mary conceived Christ in her mind before she conceived him in her womb.”  And conceive she does.  By silent adoration Mary understands more of God than can ever be reached by prophets, philosophers, spiritualists, or knowers of one kind or another. Mary has become, by God’s sheer grace, the home of God in the world.  She is the human manger, she is the stable, she is the womb where Life itself grows in sheer silence.  Her response is quiet, still, “filled with love beyond all telling.”   

Apart from Mary, we do not have, we do not know, the Gift of God that is Jesus Christ. God did not use Mary and throw her away. This young woman of Nazareth has become for all time the chosen vessel through which Christ entered the world in divine fullness. And His entrance began, not as an adult, nor as a child, not even as an infant in Mary’s arms. Christ’s entrance in the world began as the unseen Presence, the conceptus-fetus-infant growing in Mary’s womb.  With the most childlike, loving faith, Mary conceived Christ in her womb, and adored the unsurpassable Gift of God.  

On The Coming Of God Into Time

The eternal God presents himself in time. The prophets of Israel and of Greece, and of other cultures, heard the word of God in their minds, and communicated that word to their people. Sages and mystics through the centuries lovingly opened their hearts and minds to the presence of the eternal God in their souls. Philosophers in ancient Greece discovered the divine intellect moving and radiating into their minds, and they explored the effects of God’s reason in structuring reality around them as they used science to explore the wonders of nature.Through the centuries, lovers of truth have responded to the divine presence both in-yet-beyond the borders of their souls, and as the cause of beauty and order in the world.  Those who explore the presence of the divine within are prophets, mystics, philosophers; those who explore the effects of the divine intellect in the cosmos are philosophers and scientists.   

God Himself is both ever present and ever beyond the searching mind. What we call God is that which draws us to seek truth, beauty, and goodness beyond our confined selves.  To those who seek God, He is both the cause of the seeking and the One being sought, both the One who is utterly and simply present and the One ever beyond our questing.  The mystery of God can be discovered by human beings, and has been; but it ever remains beyond any final grasp or  comprehension. In the wise words of the Apostle Paul to his disciples, “Now that you have come to know God—or rather, to be known by God…”. The lover of God is ever discovering the face of the Beloved Lover here, there; but the human lover also knows that the Lover sought is still greater than the Lover found.  All that one can experience or know of God is as a drop of water in the vast ocean, or as a single sand on the sides of the sea. The true lover of God, and of human being, knows that his or her love “has only just begun,” is ever blossoming into greater loving, further knowing, and ever-deepening joy.  

Many have speculated on the coming of God in particular ways, at particular times, and they invariably are disappointed.  For God’s comings are never fully expected, nor accurately predicted. For we are human beings, not God.  John the Baptist was a lover of God, who expected the just God to appear quickly with blazing wrath to destroy evil and evil-doers.  And then came Jesus, and John was puzzled.  He sensed the presence of God in Jesus, but Jesus did not fit John’s expectations:  “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?”  “Go and tell John what you see,” Jesus declares.  “Open your eyes to what God is doing here and now, even in me, and relax your futuristic speculations.”  Perhaps in prison John discovered the One he proclaimed, present in Christ, and present in the depths of his soul.“Behold, I am the One whom you are seeking, here and now, moving you in your quest.  Be at peace, John, for you are mine, and I will never abandon you. Even when a foolish evil-doer has you beheaded, John, you are mine, and I am yours.  I AM ever now.” 

The Church in its wisdom presents to us the truth of Christ—the truth of God-with-usand-beyond-us—in many and various ways. In the preaching of the Word and in the gift of the Eucharist, Christ comes. In the silent cries of the needy and oppressed, in the infant in the womb and the elderly man living alone, Christ speaks to us. In the use of our God-given abilities to love and to seek the truth, Christ is at work in us. To the true lover of God, he or she ever hears afresh, "Here AM I, the One you are seeking, the One with you every moment from now into the unknown, unexplored depths of eternity."

 

2nd Sunday Of Advent

There is a strong tension in our readings today, between the prophet Isaiah’s metastatic dream of universal peace, when “the lion lies down with the lamb,” and the urgent, intense cry of John the Baptist:  “You brood of vipers!  Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?  Produce good fruits as evidence of your genuine repentance!”  In their zeal for God, prophets and the faithful must struggle against allowing their imaginations to lose grip on reality:  Isaiah’s dream of complete peace on earth—of a radical change in reality—is an illusion, which the Church Fathers corrected by projecting the blissful state to the realm beyond death, into eternity.  Secular souls, bound to a temporal perspective, still get drunk on Isaiah’s illusions of radical change.  John the Baptist’s imagination of the coming wrath of God clashed head-on with the coming of God in Christ Jesus, whose merciful deeds and words tasted of wrath only in those who hated him, and rejected God.  And still one encounters preachers of the word who are overly absorbed in visions of wrath, and seek to “scare the living dickens” out of their flock.  Love and truth are far more powerful agents of change for the better.

First Sunday of Advent

Advent has often been called “the season of hope.”  A question must be asked:  “Are you, am I, hoping for the right things, or the wrong things?”  Hope to live a long and healthy life, hope to prosper in one’s work and to do well, hope for peace in one’s family or country—all of these are “natural hopes,” and good things.  Ultimate or divine hope is in God: the hope of sharing God’s divine life forever, beyond death.  But there are also false hopes, and the first reading, from Isaiah, presents such a false hope that has had an enormous influence on history:  “They will beat their swords into pruning hooks.. and never will they train for war again.”  The history of utopian dreaming, of metastatic faith, has begun.  Its offspring can be seen in Enlightenment belief in the spread of progress and democracy; in Marxism’s belief in a global world society where “all are free and equal;” and in the American naive belief in the “promised land.”  In Advent, one should sit still and seek to give up false hopes.  We in our present society and world are bombarded with false hopes, as from the mass media, entertainment, sometimes even in the churches.  “Time to wake from sleep,” as St. Paul admonishes us.

The best, brief commentary on the Presidential Election of 2016 that I (Fr. Paul) have seen:

Why Trump Won

by Victor Davis Hanson

Friday, November 11, 2016

Throughout the course of the 2016 election, the conventional groupthink was that the renegade Donald Trump had irrevocably torn apart the Republican Party. His base populism supposedly sandbagged more experienced and electable Republican candidates, who were bewildered that a “conservative” would dare to pander to hoi polloi [the many] by promising deportations of illegal aliens, renegotiation of trade agreements that “ripped off” working people, and a messy attack on the reigning political correctness.

It was also a common complaint that Trump had neither political nor military experience. He trash-talked his way into the nomination, critics said, which led to defections among the outraged Republican elite. By August, a #NeverTrump movement had taken root among many conservatives, including some at National Review, The Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal. Many neoconservatives who formerly supported President George W. Bush flipped parties, openly supporting the Clinton candidacy. 

Trump’s Republican critics variously disparaged him as, at best, a Huey Long or Ross Perot, whose populist message was antithetical to conservative principles of unrestricted trade, open-border immigration, and proper personal comportment. At worse, a few Republican elites wrote Trump off as a dangerous fascist akin to Mussolini, Stalin, or Hitler.

For his part, Trump often sounded bombastic and vulgar. By October, after the Access Hollywood video went viral, many in the party were openly calling for him to step down. Former primary rivals like Jeb Bush and John Kasich reneged on their past oaths to support the eventual Republican nominee and turned on Trump with a vengeance. 

By the end of the third debate, it seemed as if Trump had carjacked the Republican limousine and driven it off a cliff. His campaign seemed indifferent to the usual stuff of an election run—high-paid handlers, a ground game, polling, oppositional research, fundraising, social media, establishment endorsements, and celebrity guest appearances at campaign rallies. Pundits ridiculed his supposedly “shallow bench” of advisors, a liability that would necessitate him crawling back to the Republican elite for guidance at some point.

What was forgotten in all this hysteria was that Trump had brought to the race unique advantages, some of his own making, some from finessing naturally occurring phenomena. His advocacy for fair rather than free trade, his insistence on enforcement of federal immigration law, and promises to bring back jobs to the United States brought back formerly disaffected Reagan Democrats, white working-class union members, and blue-dog Democrats—the “missing Romney voters”—into the party. Because of that, the formidable wall of rich electoral blue states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina crumbled.

Beyond that, even Trump’s admitted crudity was seen by many as evidence of a street-fighting spirit sorely lacking in Republican candidates that had lost too magnanimously in 1992, 2008, and 2016 to vicious Democratic hit machines. Whatever Trump was, he would not lose nobly, but perhaps pull down the rotten walls of the Philistines with him. That Hillary Clinton never got beyond her email scandals, the pay-for-play Clinton Foundation wrongdoing, and the Wikileaks and Guccifer hackings reminded the electorate that whatever Trump was or had done, he at least had not brazenly broken federal law as a public servant, or colluded with the media and the Republican National Committee to undermine the integrity of the primaries and sabotage his Republican rivals.

Finally, the more Clinton Inc. talked about the Latino vote, the black vote, the gay vote, the woman vote, the more Americans tired of the same old identity politics pandering. What if minority bloc voters who had turned out for Obama might not be as sympathetic to a middle-aged, multimillionaire white woman? And what if the working white classes might flock to the politically incorrect populist Trump in a way that they would not to a leftist elitist like Hillary Clinton? In other words, the more Clinton played the identity politics card, the more she earned fewer returns for herself and more voters for Trump.

In the end, the #NeverTrump movement fizzled, and most of the party rightly saw, after putting aside the matter of his character, that Trump’s agenda was conservative in almost every area—immigration, energy, gun rights, taxes and regulation, abortion, health care, and military spending. In areas of doubt—foreign policy and entitlements—voters reasoned that sober and judicious Republican advisors would surround and enlighten Trump.

As a result, Republican voters, along with working class Democrats and Independents voted into power a Republican President, Republican Congress, and, in essence, a Republican judiciary. Trump’s cunning and energy, and his unique appeal to the disaffected white working class, did not destroy the Republican down ballot, but more likely saved it. Senators and Representatives followed in Trump’s wake, as did state legislatures and executive officers. Any Republican senatorial candidate who voted for him won election; any who did not, lost. Trump got a greater percentage of Latinos, blacks, and non-minority women than did Romney, and proved to be medicine rather than poison for Republican candidates. With hindsight, it is hard to fathom how any other Republican candidate might have defeated Clinton Inc.—or how, again with hindsight, the Party could be in a stronger, more unified position.

In contrast, the Democratic Party is torn and rent. Barack Obama entered office in 2009 with both houses of Congress, two likely Supreme Court picks, and the good will of the nation. By 2010 he had lost the House; by 2012, the Senate. And by 2016, Obama had ensured that his would-be successor could not win by running on his platform.

A failed health care law, non-existent economic growth, serial zero interest rates, near record labor non-participation rates, $20 trillion in national debt, a Middle East in ruins, failed reset and redlines, and the Iran deal were albatrosses around Democratic Party’s neck. Obama divided the country with the apology tour, the Cairo Speech, the beer summit, the rhetoric of disparagement (“you didn’t build that,” “punish our enemies,” etc.), the encouragement of the Black Lives Matter movement, and a series of anti-Constitutional executive orders.

In other words, even as Obama left the Democrats with ideological and political detritus, he also had established an electoral calculus built on his own transformative identity that neither had coattails nor was transferrable to other candidates. Indeed, his hard-left positions on redistribution, social issues, sanctuary cities, amnesty, foreign policy, and spending would likely doom candidates other than himself who embraced them.

The Bernie Sanders candidacy was the natural response, on the left, to Obama’s ideological presidency. But the cranky socialist septuagenarian mesmerized primary voters on platitudes that would have proven disastrous in a general election—before meekly whining about Clinton sabotage and then endorsing the ticket. What then has the Democratic Party become other than a hard left and elite progressive force, which without Obama’s personal appeal to bloc-voting minorities, resonates with only about 40 percent of the country?

The Democratic Party is now neither a centrist nor a coalition party. Instead, it finds itself at a dead-end: had Hillary Clinton emulated her husband’s pragmatic politics of the 1990s, she would have never won the nomination—even though she would have had a far better chance of winning the general election.

Wikileaks reminded us that the party is run by rich, snobbish, and often ethically bankrupt grandees. In John Podesta’s world, it’s normal and acceptable for Democratic apparatchiks to talk about their stock portfolios and name-drop the Hamptons, while making cruel asides about “needy” Latinos, medieval Catholics, and African-Americans with silly names—who are nonetheless expected to keep them in power. Such paradoxes are not sustainable. Nor is the liberal nexus of colluding journalists, compromised lobbyists, narcissistic Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, family dynasties, and Clintonian get-rich ethics.

The old blue-collar middle class was bewildered by the leftwing social agenda in which gay marriage, women in combat units, and transgendered restrooms went from possible to mandatory party positions in an eye blink. In a party in which “white privilege” was pro forma disparagement, those who were both white and without it grew furious that the elites with such privilege massaged the allegation to provide cover for their own entitlement.

In the aftermath of defeat, where goes the Democratic Party?

It is now a municipal party. It has no real power over the federal government or state houses. Its once feared cudgel of race/class/gender invective has become a false wolf call heard one too many times. The Sanders-Warren branch of the party, along with the now discredited Clinton strays, will hover over the party’s carcass. Meanwhile, President Obama will likely ride off into the sunset to a lucrative globe-trotting ex-presidency. His executive orders will systematically be dismantled by Donald Trump, leaving as his legacy a polarizing electoral formula that had a shelf life of just two terms.

An Advent Prayer

You wait in silence and darkness, hidden to wandering eyes, unheard by noise-filled ears. You wait, silent and alone, like the moon in the dark-night sky.  No sound, no movement, nothing seen, nothing known. You alone truly know what or who you are.   

I wait in darknesses and in lights, not hidden, eyes wandering, mind wandering, ears filled with noises. I wait, noisy and busy, like dried leaves blowing across a frozen yard.  Many sounds, movements, things seen, nothing truly known. The mystery of being has melted in the heat of much busyness.  So busy living, no time to live.    

I say, “Come, Lord God Almighty,” but if You were not here, how could I—how would I—possibly seek You? You were here before I turned towards You, and You will be here long after I, too, have scurried across the frozen ground, a dried leaf. What does it mean that “You are here?” You are no object, nothing seen, nothing known by your boundaries or limits, nothing heard nor felt. You are here in the darkness from which I turn away, in the silence I cannot hear. You are present, but I am absent—now here, there, perhaps nowhere at all. You are present in ways that nothing is or can be present. You are present in your apparent absence.  

How can I seek You when I am dispersed everywhere? My mind is fragmented in so many thoughts, feelings, sensations, that there is no room for your still nothingness. Are our parties and liturgical services truly an aid to seeking You, when they resemble Santa’s sack of stuffed toys? Not silence, but noise; not stillness, but motion-commotion; not darkness, but infatuations.   

And still, You wait. You come to the one who sits alone in silence, waiting, as You wait, and listening, as You listen. You speak in silence; our speech drowns out silence, leaving You unheard. You shine into darkened minds, which turn themselves away from your penetratingly bright, discerning gaze. You come, only if I will sit still, and allow You to draw me empty-handed, empty-minded into the Cloud of Unknowing.  

A Note To My Family...

A note to my family, supposing that my brother Andy is Donald Trump, and my sister Jeanie is Hillary Clinton.

My dear sister and brother:

I feel very bad for both of you, after such a humiliating and mud-slinging campaign. It has been brutal and ugly for all of us, really. I also feel bad for you because one will win the Presidency, and one will not. And I know that each one of you, my brother and sister, has flaws and weaknesses. And you have personal motives for wanting the highest office in the land, some perhaps not even clear to you in the depth of your heart.  You also each have your conscious wishes and plans for the country, for improving our common life here according to your lights. And you both have large swarms of people around you, including some very sharp advisors on both sides—and some who just like to be near the center of power, and could even betray you if they thought it served their own interests.

For the one of you who loses the election, I feel genuine pity.  But I will feel even more pity, if less immediate and intense, but sustained over your years in office, for the one of you who wins this bloody election.  What you gain, you may live to regret, as other powerful leaders have regretted their terms in office—often ending in shame, humiliation, violent or natural death.

Whichever one of you wins, our country remains deeply divided.  We have divided for years, but the intensity and severity of division keeps growing.  Whoever wins, more than half of the electorate will be highly critical of you (remember that perhaps 30% of eligible citizens will not bother voting—just a rough guess). Whoever wins, you will be hated by many.

The one of you who becomes President will face a highly turbulent international scene, with grave crises awaiting:  Islamic-fundamentalist terrorism; resurgent Iran; Russia and China pressing to expand their spheres of influence / power; wicked regimes as in N Korea; violent unrest blowing up in one country after another (such as in Venezuela recently).  So you will face extremely grave crises and challenges—most of which we cannot even now guess. You and your inner circle of advisors—and our whole country whom you will represent—will be utterly tested.  Surely you know and expect such tests.

But furthermore, whoever wins, you will face our country struggling with numerous serious problems: breakdown of families and community bonds; spiritual-intellectual-moral decay in many citizens; a poor educational system for many Americans; profound racial tensions; breakdown of order in inner cities; rampant drug abuse; influx of millions of “undocumented” migrants; increasing concentration of wealth in large cities, with third-world poverty in small towns and rural areas; sluggish economic growth and perhaps a recession; an enormous and growing national debt; and so on.  You will face an empire that is, in my opinion, dying from within. You may disagree, but surely you will have to deal with many symptoms of internal disease and disorder.

You may win the election, dear brother or sister, but I think that you will often feel enormous burdens on your shoulders, and be deprived of quiet rest.  You will have sleepless nights as you must struggle through many difficult decisions—all the while as you are mocked and even vilified by the mass media and entertainment industries. Few will be concerned for you as a person.  Even friends and associates will see you as a means to their own gain. You will wonder, “Who are my real friends?”  You will often be alone in the quiet or turmoil of your own heart.

So whichever one of you wins, my brother and sister, my heart goes out to you. I owe you and promise you my love and support, and well-intentioned advice should you ever ask me for it. No matter what happens to you, you are my brother and my sister.

"To God All Are Alive"

Each one of us faces the prospects of dying as our body suffers death.  And each of us knows bodily death to be the fate not only of every human being, but by observation and reflection, of every living being:  whatever lives in a body must die.  This is the one certainty in existence.

How our animal friends deal with death, I do not know, but many of us have observed dogs or horses grieving the loss of a companion, and elephants seem to practice some kind of ritual at the site where one of their members died. Our primitive human ancestors buried their dead, and archaic cave drawings suggest early beliefs about life beyond death.  

The ways of dealing with death and the possibility of existence beyond bodily death that show up in recorded human history are highly varied, all pointing to the desire of every human being to endure in some form beyond death, even if only in the memories of loved ones. Living on in the memories of others, “in history,” is the weakest form of immortality, but the only form known to imaginations bound to space-time, to secular souls. Another pale or weak form of existence beyond death was held by ancient Israelites, who speculated little on life beyond death, other than conceiving of death in “Sheol,” a kind of shadowy underworld, about which nothing could be known. A far more elaborate set of beliefs is embodied in what is called metempsychosis, or the “transmigration of the soul” from one form of existence to another. We may be familiar with this belief in the form of “reincarnation,” as taught, for example, within Hinduism. The soul of the being, its interior life, may return in some other bodily existence.

I know of two other speculative beliefs about “after life” which have had millions of adherents. One is the “resurrection of the body,” as believed in ancient Zoroastrianism and then in Pharisaic Judaism and early Christianity.  We hear this belief in the ancient creeds of the Church:  “I believe in the resurrection of the body.”  Given his experience of Christ as “Resurrected” beyond death, the Apostle Paul accepted resurrection, but not in a physical form, but as a “spiritual body” (I Corinthians 15). The Apostle strains to make a vital distinction. The second major speculation on a form of life beyond death was held by the ancient Greeks in the teaching of the “immortality of the soul.” What this meant, and which parts of the soul might endure beyond death, received attention even by the best Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle. The general agreement in Greek teaching was that at least the divine intellect in human being endured beyond death.  

As recorded in our Gospels, Jesus offered no speculation on life beyond death: he did not teach the “resurrection of the body” or the “immortality of the soul,” and surely not “reincarnation.” Hence, he broke from Pharisaic Judaism and from Greek culture. But he did not share the secularist view that after death—nothing.  What we find in the Gospels is far more simple and profound:  “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living; to God all are alive.”That is Jesus’ definitive statement on life beyond death, and perhaps all that can be said. He does not restrict his claim to “all human beings,” but says, “to God all are alive.”  In a similar teaching in John’s Gospel, Jesus says, “Because I live, you also will live.” Period. Again, that is all, devoid of speculation on how, when, and so on. All he adds, in refuting his clever questioners, is what we read in Luke 20, read at Mass today:  that one cannot die again, so there is no need for marriage. Christ’s simple assertion is crystal clear: “To God all are alive.”In that phrase I place my hope in Life, life eternal. “The rest is silence.”

Thoughts On American-Global Totalitariamism

To fellow Americans who may read this:

I call to mind words of Thomas Jefferson written to his friend John Holmes in 1820, on the occasion of the Missouri Compromise and what he saw coming in American politics:

...But this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened
 and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the
Union. it is hushed indeed for the moment. but this is a reprieve only,
not a final sentence…

“The fire bell in the night,” the death-knell of our American political order is what one can hear if one is listening, and thinks about what we see unfolding in American political and social life. What we experienced in years past as a democratic republic has ceased being a republic and a democracy, but has increasingly become a totalitarian empire ruled by Progressive Gnostics seeking to “transform America” into part of a globalist society of fellow-traveling rulers, intellectuals, bureaucrats, bankers, multinational corporate head, educationists, and media-propagandists.Their domination over American political and social life is nearly complete. 

That our American political regime and way of life are in truth becoming totalitarian I submit, for the present, a few facts: 

1. It is increasingly evident that our country is dominated by a closed ruling elite, made up of members of both major political parties, who know that they have much more in common with each other than they do with the masses whom they dominate and seek to continue to control. This ruling class seeks total domination over the citizens, and endless perpetuation of their ever-increasing power. 

2. The ruling elite is dominated by forms of Gnosticism, especially of a Progressivist-Socialist variety, amalgamated from Comte’s Progressivism, Marxian Socialism, elements of classical Liberalism, with other planks pulled from various ideologies. They are close-minded in thought, certain that they possess “the truth,” and seek to impose this “truth” not only on the USA, but on the entire world. To an alarming degree, they have been successful. 

3. The killing of the unborn, increasingly with public funds and statesponsorship, is not incidental or just one promoted policy, but a revealing model of the "brave new world" they seek to create: a realm of total domination of powerful rulers over the ruled. The most helpless, defenseless members of our human community-infants in the womb-are subject to a reign of terror in the form of "abortion on demand." It is one step towards power to put to death any individuals or classes of citizens deemed "unwanted," or deplorable," or "unproductive." In addition to the unborn, most vulnerable victims include newly born infants (some of whom are left to die), unwanted children, various "irredeemables," elderly persons declared to be "socially useless," and the terminally ill who may be "euthanized." American death camps include abortion mills, hospitals, "care facilities," and even inner cities where often drug-crazed gangs terrorize citizens with real and threatened violence. Abortion mills and inner cities together show the accepted and promoted reign of terror in America. 

 4. The ruling elite has proven itself willing to use totalitarian techniques to keep their monopoly of political power. One primary means of control are the mass media which enter nearly every home and every citizen’s consciousness, especially through television and movies, but also through the internet, and which seek to dominate thinking, prevent independence of thought and judgment, and remake all citizens in the image of the ruling elite. 

5. Another primary means of ongoing control of the citizens is through Progressivist domination in mass “education” (propaganda) from pre-school through secondary education, into college and graduate schools. The lack of freedom of thought in American academia is astonishing, but well known to anyone who has spent years in this system and dared to “think outside of the box,” that is, outside the realm of Progressivist Gnostic ideology. The grip on teachers and students is ironclad and nearly complete. The cost for refusal to accept the dominant ideology is poor performance, failure, or unemployment in the area of one’s expertise. 

6. As we have seen in the recent Presidential election, a challenge to elite domination has been met with rejection of virtually the entire ruling class, media manipulation, screening out of diverse views, character assassination, and even covert, fomented violence at political rallies to make it appear that the interloper is “a dictator,” when in fact the monopoly of power belongs to the ruling clique. Citizens have been mugged, property has been stolen or damaged (as in “keying cars,” and defacing campaign signs), persons have been threatened. What shows up to discerning eyes is the severe loss of freedom of expression and action in American politics. 

In short, the United States of America is neither a republican form of government, nor a mass democracy. These terms are used and promoted as part of a democratic mythology intended to keep the masses uninformed and living in a dreamlike state of illusion, as the rulers continue their quest for domination over all aspects of American life. The American regime has increasingly become a form of Gnostic totalitarianism, similar in form to the Soviet Union, Communist China, National Socialist Germany, Communist Cuba, Socialist Europe, and such regimes. What is called “American democracy” is in reality a virulent cancer destroying our body politic. 

What are we to do?

First, we must open our eyes and try to see clearly what has been happening to us as a people in history. Living in illusions—such as the myth of being “democratic”—prevents clear sightedness and coming to grips with reality. 

Second, the use of violence to overthrow the regime, as our Founders rebelled against the British Crown, is neither possible nor beneficial. The monopoly of power in the hands of rulers in government is extreme. And too many innocent lives would be destroyed in any attempted coup d’état. 

Third, the Gnostic-Progressive ideology must be examined and dissected for the diseased non-thought that it is. And it must be rejected as spiritually and intellectually diseased. For example, when candidate Obama proclaimed, “We will transform the world,” American citizens foolishly accepted such nonsense, rather than rejecting the verbiage and its goal as destructive. It was accepted because we have been instilled with such nonsense for over a hundred years. The origin of such thought in the young Karl Marx was neither analyzed nor understood. As President Obama has shown himself to be living in a Gnostic dream world, with dire consequences for American domestic and foreign policies. The man is not stupid, but he is a blind fool on account of his ironclad Progressivist ideology. 

Fourth, we must not be deceived: Mrs. Clinton would continue the same would-be totalitarian domination of American life evident in our leaders for decades: from the reign of Progressives such as T Roosevelt and W Wilson, through recent rulers—Clinton, Bush, Obama. Those who can observe and think should now understand that both major political parties are, at the top levels, part of the same dominating clique bent on changing American society into part of the globalist utopia of their dreams. One result of this utopian dream is perpetual warfare, as our rulers seek to impose their diseased vision on an often recalcitrant world. Here we find not “one empire, one people, one leader” of National Socialism, but “one world under our total domination” by the globalist, Gnostic elites. What the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were on a national or imperial scale, we are now becoming on a global scale.

On Those Who Trust In Themselves

A tree praying

For all of our lives we have read on U.S. coins and currency, “In God we trust.” Historically this phrase was a slight modification of words from the poem we know in the “Star-Spangled Banner”:   “In God is our trust.” Whatever the specific origin, the phrase, “In God we trust,” embodies the immersion of our Founders and Forefathers in the biblical tradition of Judaeo-Christianity. For the usage of similar phrases is common throughout the Bible, the book most read by generations of Americans.  Especially in the book of Psalms—“the prayerbook of the church”—one finds repeated instruction to place one’s trust in the LORD (YHWH), in God (Elohim). At the root of distinctly Christian faith is the act of placing one’s faith, one’s trust “in Jesus Christ and in the God who sent him,” to use a typical phrase. The foundational, grounding experience of the Apostles and earliest Christians was the act of entrusting one’s self, one’s life, soul, loved ones, to the providential care of the all-good, all-merciful God.This experience of entrusting oneself to God-in-Christ was in turn a response to discovering in Jesus the presence, life, mercy, liberating power of the Creator-God. A man or woman first spiritually discerns that God is present in Jesus and acting for our salvation, our complete benefit; and the inspired response to this spiritual insight is self-surrendering, self-abandoning trust. This action is not done once, but often, in words or in a more direct glance of the heart. And we see it beautifully expressed by Jesus on the cross in St. Luke’s account of the Passion: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” In agony or in joy, in times of plenty or of great want, the faithful soul lovingly entrusts itself to the One in whom alone we find true life.

The parable of two men going up to the Temple to pray, given to us only in St. Luke’s Gospel, depicts two ways of life—one leading to fulfillment and peace with God, the other condemning oneself to the hell of a self-absorbed, self-centered life. Once again, Luke is a master story-teller, and in this short parable summarizes these two ways of life in a way that all of us can understand and remember. One person’s “prayer” is itself nothing but self-absorption, and is even spoken “with himself,” or, more literally, “to himself.” (What kind of human being prays “to himself”?) God does not enter into this prayer at all, because the one offering it is closed to God.  How can God enter into an ego-filled consciousness, into a person whose thoughts are ever about himself? This person can love neither God nor human being, but despises others as beneath contempt, as deplorable, perhaps not even as truly human at all.This big shot, trusting in himself, has both feet squarely on earth, and his mind has not risen up into the Kingdom, into the Presence of God. He is empty, alone, self-satisfied, spiritually dead. In himself he now lives; in himself he will die. He looks impressive from the outside, but inside is all “waste and void.”

The other man does not take pride in himself or in his life. Rather, conscious of his own shortcomings and failures, humbly faces the ground—an outward expression of inner surrender. And he cries out to the one who is Love itself: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner” (or literally, “to me, to the sinner”). To this person, there is one who is merciful—God—and only one known sinner—I myself. This man, this sinner, not only addresses his heart and prayer to God, but is already graced by God, for it is the LORD himself who is moving this man to be conscious of his failings, and to turn to the LORD in his need.This man prays to God, with God, in God. Although he may not know it, his very words are being moved by the Creator, to lift his heart and mind into a union with God possible only to the humble—that is, to the self-emptying. Casting himself onto God, he is in reality already in the Kingdom of Heaven.  

St. Luke knows this experience from the inside, because he lives, prays, writes his gospel not out of himself alone, but out of his faith-union with God. As he writes at the end of his Gospel: “Did not our hearts burn within us when he spoke to us along the way and opened to us the Scriptures?” He knows

well of what he speaks, for he is focused not on himself, but on the presence of God as Christ and Spirit in his own soul, his consciousness.

What I have offered is an example of reading a spiritual text, such as a passage of a Gospel, in light of the experiences out of which the author is writing. To do otherwise, and to offer another kind of interpretation, disrespects the text and its author, and allows one to read in anything he wishes. An example of such reading would be a doctrinal interpretation (to fit with dogma), or an allegorical interpretation, as the Church Fathers often used. Others get caught in minutiae of biblical games. Remember, Christ is far greater than ourselves.  

Questions and a Note

Two weeks ago at Mass, I asked each of us a question: Does your faith bring you into contact with God? Does your faith make a difference in your life, in how you experience the world around you, and within you? Do you have an ongoing sense of God’s Presence in you, or do you feel alone, apart from God? 

Now I ask you little question based on our readings last week. Let’s see who can guess the answer. Why did Naaman the Syrian want dirt? Naaman says to the prophet Elisha, “Please let me, your servant, have two mule-loads of earth, for I will no longer sacrifice to any other god except to the LORD.” What is the connection between dirt and worshipping the LORD? 

And now my note: An anniversary is an occasion to remember milestones in one’s life, and to recall the original event with gratitude. Today I remember 15 October 1988, the day I was ordained a Catholic priest. My sense of being a priest, and what it means to me, came vividly to mind this past week as I visited a former parishioner from Great Falls who is dying. The family honored me by asking me to pray for their mother, Rose, and we prayed the Last Rites. Priesthood is not a matter of status or possession, but a means to help others in time of spiritual need. In loving service one feels gratitude and joy in God.

A Mini-Homily

Last week at Mass I asked each of you a question:  Does your faith bring you into contact with God?  Does your faith make a difference in your life, in how you experience the world around you, and within you?  Do you have an ongoing sense of God’s Presence in you, or do you feel alone, apart from God?  

Now I ask you one little question.  Let’s see who can guess the answer.  Why did Naaman the Syrian want dirt?  Naaman says to the prophet Elisha, “Please let me, your servant, have two mule-loads of earth, for I will no longer sacrifice to any other god except to the LORD.”  What is the connection between dirt or earth and worshipping the LORD?

Let’s see who figures this out. 

A Few Thoughts On Thinking

To be conscious is to be awake, alert, purposeful, aware of one’s “place” in the whole of reality. 

Some persons appear to be awake, but when questioned, it turns out that their mind was unfocused, or barely awake, or almost in a semi-dreaming state: You speak to them, and they say, “Whaaaat? Where am I? What’s happening’, man?” It seems to me that many persons, much of the time, are in this semi-dreaming state between genuine alert wakefulness and full sleep. They are unconsciously conscious, or unwakefully awake. To be truly awake and alert, open to reality and responsive, takes much work, practice, dedication, love. It is all too easy for a human being to sit or lie down, and enter into a kind of twilight zone of mindlessness. Television watching encourages this kind of unconscious consciousness. By the effects on consciousness, every television show is, to some extent, a variety of “The Twilight Zone.” 

To be mindfully conscious, alert and responsive, is no easy task, and seems to be especially difficult and all-too-uncommon in our present culture. Bodies move around, or sit on a sofa, or mouths move, but not much thought or awareness of reality is exhibited. For example, much of what passes for political discourse is nearly a mindless mouthing of words, slogans, or lawyerly smokescreening, detached from practical reality. For a man of common sense, such verbal meanderings are quickly recognized as “b s.” The politician I have heard the most words from in my life is Barack Obama, as he has so often appeared in the news, talking—more Twilight Zone. Much of what he says exemplifies what I call lawyerly smokescreening. He says many words to avoid saying something of pithy and of consequence. Politicians of both parties engage in the same verbal games. They are not thinking or dialoging with us, or engaging our minds, but seeking to dominate minds by mere verbiage. The right purpose of speaking is to engage other minds, to open us up more fully to reality, and not to dominate, confuse, baffle, or entomb our minds. 

                                                        Dialectics and eristics 

What is thinking? Thinking in the proper sense is a movement of thought from one point to another, if in the practical sphere, leading to a decision and taking action. Intellectual thinking, in which one explores some problem or question, is far better done in writing, because writing channels and disciplines the mind. “Wool gathering” or anxiously going over any matter is not really thinking, but a form of neurotic worrying. Much of what people call “thinking” is anxious worrying, not a genuine search for truth leading to insight or to concrete action in the world. 

To think in the intellectual sense is to pose questions and to explore answers. For example: What are the differences between constructive thinking and anxious, worrisome “thoughts”? Much of what is called “thinking” in our society is not thinking in the proper sense, but spinning of words or images in the mind, not leading to action or definite insight. Genuine thinking requires a discipline of the will, hard work, and an ongoing search for truth. If one is not seeking, how can one find? If one does not question, what could “answers” possibly mean? 

Following Plato, I wish to distinguish two kinds of “thinking” that may appear as intellectual, or constructive, or as searches for truth. One kind he terms “dialectics,” the other he calls “eristics.” Dialectical thinking is a search for truth within the in-between of existence, as the human inquirer questions reality as it presents itself to him in consciousness. This genuine thinking is in truth a movement between the divine and human partners in being. One who thinks in this mode is not alone, isolated, or self-enclosed, or “introspecting.” Nor is he or she speculating on what might be, or on some imagined deity dwelling “out there” somewhere—in the Twilight Zone. Dialectical thinking is a response to the divine mind moving one to question and to seek the truth. And this kind of thinking is limited to the exploration of concrete experiences, to reality as it presents itself to consciousness. It is a movement within reality; or in other words, reality is becoming conscious in the thinking of the one seeking truth that emerges between the divine and human partners. Dialectically, one questions because one is moved to question; and the one who seeks, finds. “What are you seeking?” are the first words of the Christ in the Gospel of John. One seeks by questioning reality as it presents itself to consciousness. 

Eristics is argumentative, speculative, intellectualistic, and not grounded in experienced reality. The best examples of eristic thinking in our western culture came from hardened religious positions taken over centuries: one accepts or “believes” certain dogmas or opinions, and then argues about them, trying to instill the same opinions in others. At least since the Enlightenment of the late 18th century, religious “thinking” or “beliefs” became far less tolerated by the intellectual elites, who turned instead to ideological, secular, political, inner-worldly eristics. Whether liberal, conservative, progressive, Hegelian, Marxist, feminist, or so on, these “thinkers” engage in the semi-conscious and more or less irrational practice of eristics: speculating or “reasoning” about matters outside of the human-divine in-between, and seeking to replace reality with a second reality, an imagined world. The genuine exploration of reality engaged in by scientists exploring real problems is a wholly different matter; but speculating on science and its place in culture is often a matter of either “science fiction” or scientism, the latter being an ideological elevation of “science” to the position of a monopoly of truth about reality. A physicist may know much about the causes and effects of gravity, for example, but that knowledge tells him virtually nothing about the nature of consciousness and the human condition. Philosophy dialectically explores the in-between reality of consciousness; eristics speculates on reality or realities more or less divorced from concrete experiences of consciousness. 

In this regard, a Christian or Muslim fundamentalist, a progressive intellectual, and a Marxist are essentially doing the same thing: speculating on reality without due recourse to concrete experiences of consciousness. If one were to examine actual states of consciousness rather than mere doctrinal or scriptural beliefs, one may well discover that there is no essential difference between a Christian or Muslim fundamentalist or “believer.” Differences among concrete human beings may emerge if one asks real questions: “Does this person truly love God and neighbor? Is this person seeking to do good, to enhance life, or destroy it? Is this person seeking truth, or does he presume that he has already discovered truth? What actions is this person actually taking to do the will of the that which he calls “God” or “Allah”? Similarly, one can ask of the true believing Marxist: “How does he or she really live? Are they open to the truth of reality as it presents itself to consciousness, or do they seek to impose on reality pre-conceived intellectualistic categories? What is the end state of human society according to the Marxist conception? Can violent action now truly produce a state of peace and justice? Can human beings truly “change the world” as Marx said; or are there fundamental structures in reality which all beings, including human beings, must observe and respect? What are these fundamental structures that transcend human volition and action? What is the nature of reality in which we exist? Or should one follow Marx’s dictum: “Do not think. Do not ask questions,” because the “socialist man” does not ask such questions, but “knows” that he “creates himself by his own labor.” 

To think properly requires that one work within the given structures of reality, and seeks to explore these structures, “the nature of things” as they were called by the ancients. The sphere of human action, and what may be changed for the better, requires discovery, and working within the limits set on human activity. It is the old lesson taught by the story of Daedalus and Icarus: one must not seek to fly either too high, or too low, but stay within the limits set by reality. Dialectical thinking, or philosophy, seeks to understand human being’s place within the mysterious whole of reality, and to help us adjust to that reality, and make the best of our apportioned time of living on earth—or rather, our existence between time and eternity. For present human existence is mysterious indeed, as we participate by our bodies and minds in the whole range of reality, from inert matter up to the mind of God. Our lot is to explore the realms of reality, seeking truth and doing good within the relatively brief compasses of our lives; and to do so even as we stretch ourselves out towards “that which is immortal and everlasting,” sharing even now, by “faith working through love,” in what is by long tradition called “God.” 

To be conscious is to explore the truth of existing within the whole of reality, and to move, by “the voice of this calling and the drawing of this love” into eternity present here and now.

On Listening to Beethoven's Late Quartets

Sitting quietly at Felix House, I have been listening once again to the slow movements from Beethoven’s late quartets.

A few observations:  In Beethoven’s major compositions, he is ever concerned with God, in some form. In such works as the Eroica and 5th Symphonies, Beethoven is in a state of open rebellion against God, against his fate, against going death, against mortality itself.  He may have conflicts with particular human beings, but they largely reflect his inner conflict with God.

In the late quartets, for reasons of which I am not sure, one can hear that Beethoven is communing with the divine partner of his soul.  Some struggle remains, but it is within the partnership, not against it. Beethoven’s late quartets are composed within the Metaxy, within the Platonic in-between, the realm of the spiritual, between God and human being.  In listening to these quartets, one is listening to an inner dance, a conversation between two lovers in four voices.  It is not that some instruments represent the one, and some the other partner; rather, the two are ever together, moving in harmonies with one another, playing together in various senses of the word.  

If one wants to know what Plato-Voegelin means by the in-between, and the mature Jung by the psyche, listen to Beethoven’s late quartets.  They arise from within the in-between, and this reality gives the music not only its unearthly-earthly beauty, but a kind of inevitability or ineluctability about it:  from the first few notes of a given (slow) movement, one can hear the seemingly effortless, “natural,” inevitable unfolding of sound.  It is what it must be, and its being is a sheer gift, not only to the composer, but through Beethoven to anyone who enters into his songs of divine-human communion through the art of listening between.

Ah, the Cavatina: adagio molto espressivo from the Quartet #13 in B-Flat.  Listen.  How thankful to be alive, to be able to sing together, to listen to one another.  Beethoven is delighting in his immortal Beloved, who may be embodied in a human being, but who is first and foremost the divine presence within his soul, and is now embodied in exquisite, metaleptic music.  And not only in one movement, but in the whole set.  Listen to the Adagio ma non troppo e molto cantabile from the Quartet #12 in E-Flat. To listen well is to enter into that which is heard, so that it is coming, as it were, from the depths within one’s psyche. The music truly heard is also one’s own communal song with God.

Goethe wrote words to the effect that listening to a good string quartet is like listening to four adults in conversation. Perhaps, as when hearing Mozart or Haydn, or early or middle quartets by Beethoven. But in listening to the late quartets of Beethoven, one is hearing two in conversation:  the divine and human partners of the in-between, the psyche open to the fullness of reality, and especially to the ground from which all blessings flow. 

Closed Heart + Closed Mind = Living in Hell

Christ’s story of the rich man and Lazarus, as told by St. Luke, packs a punch. If you do not feel personally confronted or convicted by it, then you should wonder if you are spiritually dead. Or at least take your pulse to see if your heart is still beating. To be spiritually dead is to have a heart insensitive to the workings of God and the sufferings of human beings; to be spiritually dead is to have a mind closed to the divine breaking in Here and Now. 

The rich man in the story is not named, because he is you, he is me. He is not moved by the man dying of hunger on his doorstep; nor is he aware that God is visiting him in the same beggar. Indeed, the living God is pleading for the rich man to get up from his table and feed the one who is starving, feed Jesus Christ in the form of the dying man. If the rich man were open to the presence of God in his own soul, he could not be closed to the real needs of the man-Christ on his doorstep. No one can love God and be deaf to the cries of his fellow human beings. A hard-hearted human being is less moved by the God of compassion than is a dog who licks the poor man’s sores, seeking to heal his wounds and comfort him. As the end of the story tells us, this man has cut himself off from God, now and into eternity. In his lifetime, he may hear Moses and the prophets, but his hearing is superficial, does not penetrate his stoney heart. As many times as he has heard the Scriptures read, he is not moved to action by the impassioned words of the prophets: “I was hungry, and you gave me no food; I was grieving, and you did not comfort me.” The rich man lives in luxury and at ease, but in fact he is already living in hell. And what is hell? A self-enclosed, self-contracted, self-absorbed life. Hell is a human being closed to the life-giving God. 

I wonder if those who knew this rich man realized that he was living in hell on earth? Knowing people, most of them probably envied this fellow because he was rich. They wanted to be like him. They did not stop and think about the rich man’s soul—or inner life, or sheer lack of inner line. Nor did this fellow consider his inner wretchedness. No doubt he thought about his “stuff,” his loot, his belly, and “having fun,” to use our terms. His body may have been sleek and sound, his balding head well-oiled and shiny, but his soul was like a shrunken head, and rock hard. Although alive in body, he is dead in spirit. And that is what we call “hell.” 

The story is not meant to provide fodder for speculating on the afterlife, but that is the way it has often been used or abused by Christian interpreters. Words about Lazarus being “carried by angels to the bosom of Abraham,” about “a vast chasm that prevents anyone from crossing over,” about “suffering torment in these flames,” and so on, are all poetic images meant to communicate spiritual reality: being open to God and alive with God’s love; or being hard-heartedly closed to God and to his creatures, and living a hellish life even on earth, as sketched out above. And of course how we live now affects our eternal destiny, for living in eternity begins now. In telling this story, Jesus is not trying to feed speculation about what happens after death. Rather, he is warning his hearers to wake up, open one’s heart and mind to God coming to them in the needs of others, and to leave one’s self-contained “comfort zone” and take God’s compassion to those who suffer. 

To be hard-hearted, indifferent to the sufferings of others, closed to the cries of God in his creatures, is the worst fate for a human being. To allow the real needs of others to penetrate one’s heart and mind is the price of being truly alive with and in God. That is the lesson I hear Jesus teaching in this powerful little story. What do you hear? Or are you listening?

A Note On Forms Of Knowing: Philosophy-Science-Mystical Experience

Voegelin demonstrates that and how the complex consciousness-reality-language must be held together in tension, and studied together.  I think that there is another complex, one of knowing, that must be explored together:  philosophy-science-mystical experience.  None of these three forms of knowing reality is sufficient in itself, but all three must be used together to understand reality.  

Without philosophy, mystical experience can degenerate into incoherence, or gnosis, or dogmatic fundamentalism.  In common usage, the word “mystical” often means a kind of incoherent truth—“begins in mist and ends is schism.”  Without philosophy, science can degenerate into scientism, grounded on mistaking intentionality (knowing of things in the external world) as the only form of knowing; and science blossoms into philosophy when the scientist asks the questions beyond the range of intentionality, questions of ultimate reality.  To borrow Leibniz’ two fundamental questions:  “Why is there something, why not nothing?”  and “Why is the world as it is, and not some other way?”  These are questions for a philosopher, and I would think that at least some scientists allow them to bubble up into consciousness from time to time as they pursue their knowledge of structures in the world, of “de rerum naturae.”

Philosophy without mystical experience degenerates rapidly into logic chopping, into word games, into sterile definitions, or sophistry, or “metaphysics,” or even atheism or nihilism.  Anyone who seeks to speak about the divine, for example, must ever keep in mind the tension between knowing and unknowing, between revelation and unrevealed reality, so well summarized by Voegelin:  “Even when the divine Beyond reveals itself in its formative presence, it remains the unrevealed divine reality beyond its revelation”  (In Search of Order, p. 97).  Without such awareness, any claim to “revelation” degenerates into dogmatic beliefs, fundamentalism, biblicism, or at its worst, gnostic claims to certainty.  I know of no “religion” that does not embody the problem of degenerating mystical experience, and more generally, of the loss of contact with reality as experienced.  

Philosophy and science both begin in wonder, and proceed by questioning and seeking the truth about reality—seeking insights into the mysterious Whole in which we find ourselves. Science studies particular parts of the whole; philosophy seeks to understand something about the whole in which everything participates.  Philosophy has flourished without science, as in Plato; but Plato had a sharp knowledge of mathematics, language, political reality, and the like.  In Aristotle, philosophy and science blossomed together, although Whitehead’s claim that “Aristotle founded science, but ruined philosophy,” deserves at least some consideration.  (I have not seen a destruction of philosophy in Aristotle, but I am aware that some of Aristotle’s summary insights became taken as definitions or axioms for thinking in generations after him.  Example:  “man is the rational animal,” or “God is the First Mover,” and so on; and even compared to Plato, one often senses in drier passages of Aristotle some weakening of the grounding in mystical experience.)  The history of philosophy amply demonstrates that philosophers need to know what other philosophers have thought, as they enter into the historical dialogue that is an essential part of philosophy; and the study of history, as in the history of philosophy, requires historical science.  

In every direction in which my mind searches, I am quickly faced by the reality of my ignorance.  The Whole, the divine ground, the particular structures of reality, exploring consciousness itself—all arouse in me an undying, often disturbing sense of not-knowing.  This sense can be, and often has been, so intense that I have been tempted to give up the search for knowledge.  But then I ask myself:  What is the alternative to some search for truth about reality?  To indulge in a life of pleasure-seeking, or of money-making, or of various diversions?  It seems to me that the human task is to respond to beauty, to do good, and to seek the truth.  Beauty awakens wonder and gratitude.  Doing good brings happiness and pleasure.  Seeking truth enlightens the mind and delights the heart.  What else is life for, but these fundamental human activities?  

Addendum:  Three wonders.

Often I experience three wonders, or have three wonder-filled experiences, at the beginning of each day:  the move from sleep / dreaming into waking; seeing that Moses is alive, although usually soundly asleep at that time; and seeing the stars above when I first step out of the house.  In a sense, these three experiences all affirm life:  that I am alive; that one I love is alive; and that the whole cosmos is alive with astounding beauty.

"Who Is This God?"

Who is Christ? And who is the God working and speaking in him? What is this God, who can be at once fully present in Jesus, present in those who respond to the divinity in Christ, and who at the same time is known to be beyond all understanding? What is the divine mystery unfolding around us and within us at every moment? Why do some find God in Christ, and others find only a fraud, or a “mere man”? Questions such as these are provoked by nearly every passage in the New Testament, as well as by our daily life experiences. One must be spiritually quite dull not to have such questions stirred up as one hears the Gospel read at Mass, sits down to read the Scriptures, or wonders about the Stranger who is always breaking into consciousness: “Who are you, LORD?” In the words of the Apostle, “If you think you know, you do not know as you ought to know.” 

To those who were spiritually dull, resisting or simply inattentive to the actions of God in and around them, St. Luke presents Jesus telling three parables of the lost. Taken literally, the stories are sufficiently absurd as to provoke wonder in those who are still able to be curious and ask questions. Why would a shepherd leave ninety-nine sheep in the desert to go in search of one stray? It would be foolish to do such things—to risk the safety of so many sheep for one lost stray. Is it possible that Jesus is not actually talking about human shepherds, or about a woman searching for a lost coin, or about a father with two spiritually dull boys? What is he talking about? Jesus is allowing the unknown God he calls “my Father” to work on the minds of his hearers through seemingly absurd stories. And the first divine action is to break through dullness by provoking wonder and questioning. The third story, known as the “prodigal son,” demonstrates the refusal of Jesus’ own contemporaries to recognize divine presence in him. Those who “believe in God,” who are the Chosen People, are blind to the reality of God in their midst. Jesus does not fit into their religious categories—nor into ours. The older son in the story represents those who resent God’s mercy and grace given to others. Jesus is verbally confronting his self-important hearers, who are disgusted at seeing Jesus forgive known sinners, and show favor to the “unwashed masses.” They are refusing to renounce their own thoughts and feelings and enter into the joy of God’s inexplicable action in Christ. 

Many of us Christians are as spiritually insensitive and dull as were the Jewish scholars and righteous folks to whom Jesus spoke these parables. Thinking ourselves Christians, or instructed in the gospel through the Church, all too often we become fools—human beings who have lost our openness to the divine mystery. Told too many answers, we forgot our role to be seekers, questioners. At times we may realize that we have received God’s mercy and forgiveness, but we do not realize how we resist the actions of God, and refuse to “enter into the joy of the LORD.” We do not see how we Christians are the like the older son in Christ’s parable, who resent it when someone else receives divine mercy, treated as a returned child. We show ourselves to have the hardened and resentful attitude of the older son by failing to appreciate God’s mercy on the Chosen People, on unbelievers, on every being in this mysterious cosmos. To us Jesus says, “Refusing to enter in God’s presence yourselves, you prevented others from entering.” 

Jesus taught us no doctrine of God or of Christ.The New Testament documents, beginning with the letters of the Apostle Paul and the Gospels, present the truth of God through actions, images, stories, and puzzling words. To one longing for God, still seeking “the face of God,” the account of the merciful father in Jesus’ parable brings joy and hope. As you may have noticed, the father in the story of the prodigal son has a remarkable resemblance to Jesus himself. He cannot be confined by religious practices or doctrinal formulations. He is alive, waiting for our response, even running out to meet those who seek to turn back to him. Christ himself is “the exact image of the unseen God,” because “in him dwells all the fullness of God.” The spiritually dull and blind did not only fail to respond to God in Christ; they had the brutal Romans crucify him.

"Son Of Man, Can These Bones Live?"

Recently at a week-day Mass we were privileged to hear the living word of God spoken through the priest-prophet Ezekiel. With the Chosen People in captivity in Babylon (c 580 BC), in present-day Iraq,many were dispirited, feeling abandoned by Yahweh-God. When the captivity began, the Jews believed that their God dwelled far away in Jerusalem, “on the holy mountain.” Ezekiel is moved by God, present in the depths of his soul in Babylon, to revive the spirits of his people through the power of the Spirit and the creative word of God. Gifted with a vivid imagination, Ezekiel accomplished his task.

In the justly famous vision of the valley of dry bones (Ezekiel ch 37), God brings to the mind of his prophet Ezekiel the complaint of his people experiencing the absence of God: “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.” In his spirit-moved imagination, Ezekiel sees the valley filled with bones. But by his faith, he knows well that the listless, depressed spirits of his people, symbolized by the dry bones, present no real obstacle to the all-creative, all-curative God. In vision Ezekiel sees the bones coming to life, bone joining bone; and prompted by the divine Spirit, Ezekiel calls on the wind to in-spirit or in-breathe the dry bones, bringing them back to life. Such is the word of God for his Chosen People, even in captivity in a foreign land: “Prophesy, Son of man, prophesy, and say, `I will cause breath [ruach] to enter you, and you shall live…I will put my Spirit [ruach] in you, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the LORD [YHWH], have spoken and I will act,’ says the LORD” (Ezekiel 37). Yahweh-God does not abandon his people; even in captivity, the God of all the earth is present and reviving spirits, and he will return His people to Judah and Jerusalem. 

Such is the creative power of the living God. In symbolism and in meaning, Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones is remarkably similar to the masterful creation story of Genesis 1, which scholars claim one or several priests composed probably shortly after the preaching of the prophet Ezekiel, about 500 years before Christ. In both Ezekiel and in Genesis 1, God creates order and life by two powers at work: his word and his Spirit; where there had been disorder and waste, God creates or restores order and life. In the great creation story of Genesis 1, we see an image, not of dry bones, but of the earth itself being “waste and void.” And God again takes life-giving mastery over the emptiness. God’s Spirit (ruach) is pictured as brooding over the face of the deep, over the stormy sea. And by His word and Spirit, God creates, forms, and orders the world, filling it with life and goodness. Literally from the Hebrew: “And God said, `Light! Be!’ and light became.” (Gen 1). 

“Son of man, can these bones live?” His prophet responds: “You know, LORD.” Our task is to receive into the depths of our hearts and minds the all-good, creative Word of God, spoken here and now, bringing order out of our internal chaos, peace into troubled hearts, wisdom into those who are small enough to allow God to enter in. Without responding to the creative Word with trusting faith, our spirits, too, become listless, lifeless, confused, sorrowing. But as we listen, and open up, the creative, restorative divine Spirit flows in, penetrating even the depths of our souls, however waste and void they had been. Dry bones or a hardened, closed heart are no obstacle to God. Indeed, as “mere flesh and blood,” we all carry that “waste and void” within ourselves, in our egos, in our essential nothingness. But God acts for us through his Word: “I will cause Spirit to enter you, and you shall live,” says the LORD, the Creator. One hears God’s word with faith, considers the word in his mind, and shares in the Spirit, that is, the enlivening Presence of God. 

From another prophet speaking God’s word shortly after Ezekiel—from Zechariah—we hear this moving claim: “Not by power or by the sword, but by my Spirit, says the LORD.” Apart from God’s Spirit in man, God’s creative and restorative Presence, all is waste and void—in us, power-driven ego. But all that is human can be enlivened, energized, renewed in the man or woman who hears the word, and humbly receives with joy the in-breathing Spirit of God. And then, indeed, “these bones can live.”