It's A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall

De Mendacio Non Est Disputandum?

2011-05-17T05:27:00.015-04:00

I promised myself (as well as several people dear to me to whom I was becoming a bore) that I was done with the whole Lying and Live Action controversy - you know, after this, that, and the other thing.

But, lo, from the American Chesterton Society come lately three rejoinders, in the form of contrary editorials in the hot-off-the-presses issue of Gilbert Magazine: from David Beresford, Sean Dailey, and Dale Ahlquist. Sean Dailey explains that the Gilbert editorial board arrived at an impasse on this particular issue. Unable to reach their customary unanimity in doling out the task of the editorial on the subject, they decided to present the competing views to the readership. It's provocation! A gauntlet cast! Just begging me to get back into it, even! (I rationalize to myself and the aforementioned bored loved ones, anyway.) So, it's back into the fog, go I.

I must add a couple more prefatory notes before jumping in: First, I want this to be a discussion, really and truly, so please don't be shy! Second, there'll be multiple posts on this, so be courteous in replies and give me the benefit of the doubt that I might not be completely overlooking something, but maybe only waiting. Third, the last having been said, if it seems obvious that I'm "through" a point and you note errors in my logic, I welcome - indeed I desire! - your correctives and counterpoints, because I intend to try to shape something of an official reply for the magazine out of this discussion. Or, you know, my scrapbook.

I want to begin with David Beresford's piece because his is the one which most obviously stands opposed to the position on the Live Action debate which I took the last go-'round.

And in beginning with Beresford's piece, I'm going to prescind momentarily from discussing the beginning half of his article, for reasons which I hope will become apparent further down. Instead, I'll begin in the middle of his article, where he proposes to "strip away the emotion" that often belabors this matter in debate, and offers an example which will make the issue "clear." Allow me to quote at length:

Suppose, for example a four-year-old girl comes to her father and shows him a crayon drawing of a cow. “Look at my cow, Daddy! Isn’t it a good picture?”

What is the right response?

For literalist, truth-at-all-costs-and damn-the-consequences types, the situation is stripped of the heroic sacrifices associated with telling the strict truth, and reveals this position as that of a heel. “No, it is not good,” they must answer. And shame on them.

The equivocators among us may want to craft a clever response with a mental reservation: “It is a wonderful picture and the colors are so bright!” Congratulations, this verbal dexterity will allow one to maintain self-respect and fool the small child in the process by dodging the question. But, this is no better than the previous answer.

There is only one morally right answer, one answer that does not sin against charity, against duty, and against innocence: “That is the best picture of a cow I have ever seen!”

This is the only answer that is not encumbered by “self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control.” We do not know if it is lying or not, by definition. We do know that in this case equivocating is a disgusting pose almost as despicable as answering that the picture is no good. [SOURCE; emphasis mine]

From this situation, Beresford argues, we can appreciate "the common sense of ordinary people: the natural law written on men's hearts."

Now, there's something very wonderful about this argument, and I mean that truly. It's a refreshing appeal, just as was Dr. Kreeft's appeal so many month's ago to the power of synderesis. And both these good men are right: there is a common sense element here. But as I argued back then, I will argue now: common sense leads in the opposite way than what is suggested here.

Let's look at Mr. Beresford's analogy more closely. What is it about the four-year old girl that informs this common sense judgment that she deserves to be affirmed in her cow drawing? I do not deny that she should be so affirmed! But I ask, again - isn't it that she should be affirmed that is the crucial thing here?

Suppose it's not a four-year old, but my fourteen year old daughter. She brings me a painting she made up in her room, whence she rarely comes because the world is so tragic, and only she and the wailing voices in her music really "get it." And she expresses this tragedy that she just gets so well, because she's suffered and lost love (even though she never actually talked to the boy one has in mind), she expresses all this pain and ennui in her edgy, stick-figure and glitter art.

Suppose that's the situation. She brings me this painting and says, "Daddy, isn't this just the best? Ohmahgawd, I'm totally dropping out of school and becoming an artist!"

Now, how would anyone with common sense respond? All good parents will tell my daughter that she should stay in school and make sure about her choice of career path. But what about commenting on the quality of her art? If it really is awful (which, let's presume it is), there's suddenly something different about saying it's not, because she's fourteen and not four.

Okay, now press pause. We're going to a third scenario.

Press play.

I'm with my thirty-four-year-old yuppie daughter and my four-year old granddaughter (by another child) in the local art museum. We come across a sculpture involving legs pointing upward from a urinal that has teeth painted around its rim. Both my daughter and granddaughter exclaim, "That's great! I love it!!!... Grandpa [Daddy] - what do you think?"

Pause.

Now it's time to turn the disc over...

There seem to be different demands upon our common-sense notion of truth-telling in these situations, even though the questions and the quality of art are constant. What's changing is the person. And if you want to write that down as one of my central theses throughout this whole debate - that the other person matters fundamentally to the demands of truth-telling - you can go ahead and do that now.

Mr. Beresford, while suggesting that he is going to eschew all of the emotional attachments which belabor this argument, doesn't make a very good show of it by conjuring the heart-string-tugging image of a four-year old tyke holding up a crappy picture for doting dad to drool over! But why do we drool? Because four-year old art is all good, to all of us, because it's done by four-year olds. None of us has to lie to say it's great. Nor is this a lie to the other.

Truth-telling is about communication. What does a four-year old want to know when she asks, "Isn't this a good picture?" What does a four year old mean by "good"? Child psychology has shown that children of that age operate by a very pure inductive method of reasoning, and that they cannot apply abstract axiologies to form evaluative judgments. In the four-year old vocabulary (which is what we'll be responding in), "good" means "good for me" and also probably means something very much like "morally good." Contrariwise, to a four-year old, "that's a bad picture" means "you're a bad artist" and, in all likelihood, "you're a bad person." We know this by common sense reasoning - there, Mr. Beresford is right. And so we say what we say in order to communicate truth to the four-year old: to validate her worth, even with a hyperbolic statement like, "That's the best picture of a cow I've ever seen!" Because it's the "best"-loved by us, for the artist's sake.

Some might object though that we have also communicated falsehood about the objective nature of art. But that's precisely what we have not done because we cannot have done. A child of four couldn't intuit that because they can't understand those kinds of evaluative systems. They can't conceptualize "best amongst all cow pictures" in any way such that we could be accused of genuinely communicating it to them as a falsehood. How many times have we heard kids say, "Blue is my favorite color, and so is pink!" They don't understand the axiological weight of "favorite" and "best," so we can't really have communicated much falsehood to them by our use of the phrase in our line about the cow drawing. Instead, "best" here meant what it ought to mean for that child.

Similarly, in the museum with my granddaughter, my granddaughter is "right" when she says that the urinal sculpture is "great." Because, as far as my granddaughter as a four-year old is concerned (barring any gross and perverse anomalies or aberrations), it is "great" - if it makes her giggle, if it makes her happy, if it gives her imagination fuel.

What about my thirty-four-year-old daughter, though, who also said the sculpture is "great"? Well, no, she's wrong. Because really it's not great, it's a piece of shit. And a thirty-four year-old ought to know that; and I'll tell her when I get the chance. Why ought she to know? Because it bears consequences for her that it doesn't for my granddaughter. And so with my fourteen-year-old and her emo nonsense. She might cry if I tell her the truth; and in charity I'm bound to try to help her learn the truth gently. But I'm a bad parent and a perverse sycophant if I tell her it's good art. I have obligations towards these two that I didn't have formerly, and it's all conditioned by how the other is able to get the truth from what I say, and what the truth that benefits the other is considered to be.

To put it simply, one might say that for children under the age of reason alone does the adage really hold true: de gustibus non est disputandum.

So, we must wonder at this point, how does any of this relate to Live Action? Well, according to Mr. Beresford's logic:

If mothers and fathers cannot rear children without daily having to choose between crushing a child’s heart or telling what some call lies, then lying has become a meaningless term. In the same way, if men of good will cannot save the lives of children without being accused of lying, then again, lying has become a meaningless term.

But here is where we're talking about apples and oranges. As I have tried to demonstrate, these two sentences largely refer to separate moral universes; it is for that reason that I am leaving the earlier half of Beresford's piece to discuss in a future post. The first sentence is too sweeping in its scope, encompassing as the analogy of the four-year-old's drawing is not. Parents don't have to - and shouldn't have to - worry in such a way about the daily struggle to be honest and communicate truth. When the troubled teens come along, though, and the topics are pot and sex and God-knows-what, don't mom and dad choose their words a little more carefully? But I digress...

I will add one final comment on the analogy here.

If one were to apply the logic of this analogy to the Live Action stings, I think common sense derives a very different conclusion than what has been urged in Beresford's article. We have seen that common sense tells us to speak to our daughters - of whatever age - in love. And we have also seen how this always involves the hearer knowing a kind of truth from our statement. We want to love our daughters through what we tell them, and so we tell them the truth - as they are able to understand it. We speak the truth to those we love.

If the analogy has any connection, the only one I can see is this: If my daughter gets the truth because I love her, why not somebody else's daughter behind the desk at the abortion clinic? If I correct my daughter when she's in error and teach her right from wrong without lying and prevarication and "stings" - why do I deal any differently with God's beloved daughter working for the terrible organization? Doesn't she, after all, need the truth all the more? Maybe she's only there because she didn't have a Daddy who loved her enough to tell her so, in all the ways that that truth can be told.

A Quick In-And-Out

2011-04-06T01:07:00.002-04:00

Sounding off to all of the readers out there who still follow my posts (and I know there are at least as many as see them reduplicated over at Facebook).

It's been a long-running theme here that I can't seem to sustain any kind of regularity with blogging, and thereby do I fail to maintain stable readership. Time and effort involved in the writing process and the other demands of my schedule are the converging factors which seem to make this problem endemic.

I'm toying with the idea of beginning "video blogging." Generally speaking, I am able to put together at least somewhat cogent thesis presentations in extemporaneous interlocution, so I think this could - at least potential - facilitate much more frequent posting. I would also write occasionally, to be sure.

I'm looking for feedback on the proposal. Be honest, don't hold back. I'll be posting a sample video with some thoughts on an argument in which I'm currently embroiled. This will serve to give a preview of production type and quality, as well as to test whether the feed will be transmitted to the aggregates I use.

Thanks in advance for your consideration.

A Rhetorical Response to Dr. Kreeft

2011-02-20T16:03:00.006-05:00

In my previous post, I outlined some distinctions about how moral intuition is only one step of the moral reasoning process.

Dr. Kreeft, I believe, does recognize this; but his essay leads to confusion by dismissing reasoned discourse over situations - which is what discernment in conscience is all about - as less important than the intuitive "sense" about right and wrong. But what about our "growing inability to discern right from wrong"?

A red flag in Kreeft's essay - and one that attests to the problem of using intuitive reasoning in this way - is in the argument he makes about the "ticking time bomb" scenario with regard to lying. To quote:

If lying is always wrong, then it is wrong to lie to a nuclear terrorist... to elicit from him where he hid the nuclear bomb that in one hour will kill millions if it is not found and defused. The most reasonable response to the "no lying" legalist here is "You gotta be kidding"—or something less kind than that. Thomas Aquinas said that even torture is sometimes justified; in emergency situations like that; if torture, then a fortiori lying.

Now, most of us will remember a while back the debate about this ticking time bomb scenario on the exact subject of torture. Back then, there were those who argued from Aquinas's allowance of it. There were also those who argued that it just seems obvious that, if the only way to "elicit from him where he hid the nuclear bomb that in one hour will kill millions if it is not found and defused" is to torture him, then of course this must be allowed. They continued to argue that "the most reasonable response to the 'no torture' legalist here is "You gotta be kidding'." We just know that torture isn't always wrong. It's moral intuition. And Aquinas said so too.

How did we respond in that debate? We responded that John Paul II and the Catechism had included torture under the list of sins which were "intrinsically evil" - evil "by their very nature." These sins, sua natura, are wrong and can never be justified.

Such a sin is lying. But here, proponents of Dr. Kreeft try to waffle on the point and say it's apples and oranges. That the moral intuition of those who thought torture was right was in error. But that with lying, it's different, because now we feel that way. And besides, okay, we're not saying that this means lying isn't always wrong, because, yeah, the Catechism says it is; and that's just a singular moment of imprecision in Dr. Kreeft - after all, he says above that "if lying is always wrong, then this isn't lying." So it's not lying. It's something else, because this is right and not wrong - we just know it is. And, as to torture, well, that's a whole other matter, because yeah, Aquinas was wrong there, torture is intrinsically evil.

But I repeat: lying is intrinsically evil too. That is not to say all lies are culpable sins, much less all mortal sins. But lying is, according to the Catechism, "by it's vary nature" an evil.

Call this something else other than lying? Fine, then I'll call waterboarding "enhanced interrogation." In fact, as a good friend of mine has pointed out, in this scenario lying must be "enhanced interrogation", too. And this is no red herring of argument: by relating torture and lying, Dr. Kreeft has invited my objection. For if you're going to make this argument of association between two sins that are "sua natura" wrong, then you mustn't put much stake in the distinction that lying is "always" wrong. The avenue of reasoning, remember, is a fortiori: something which is "always" evil can sometimes be allowed, like Aquinas said torture is, and therefore this - even if it is lying - isn't wrong, because torture isn't and torture is worse. So if torture can be sometimes allowed, then how much more should lying be sometimes allowed!

So, allow that a lie is sometimes okay despite being intrinsically evil, and you must allow that torture is, too. Reconcile matters with the Catechism from there - but don't try to get out of the relation. Otherwise, admit that if what seems to be lying is allowed, then it is not really lying - but recognize that you are making the same rhetorical move that the proponents of torture made which so frustrated us who argued against it: to demand that we enumerate all the things that torture could ever possibly be, to show why waterboarding counts.

And if you don't see how this all constitutes the same line of reasoning; if you answer me by falling back on moral intuition and the fact that you just know this is different: then I can offer only one reply.

I just know it's the same. Try to argue with that...

A Philosophical Response to Dr. Kreeft

2011-02-20T13:04:00.011-05:00

[I have tried, in this treatment, to take a philosophical and investigative approach and not dig too deeply into the argument's exact tenets; for this latter approach, see my follow up. - JLG]

Dr. Kreeft's essay at Catholic Vote, "Why Live Action did right and why we all should know that", has provoked a lot of discussion around the internet.

Dr. Kreeft bases his argument on the idea of moral intuition. He says that this moral intuition is what Aquinas speaks of as "synderesis." He says that human moral reasoning begins "with moral experience and imagination and the innate power and habit of moral understanding and judgment, moral 'common sense,' which makes instinctive judgments about moral experiences."

Based on this process, says Doctor Kreeft, when we encounter situations like the problem of Lila Rose and Live Action (which he says is analogous to hiding Jews from Nazis), normal people (i.e., in his words, those who are not "morally stupid") reason thus: "They do not know whether this is an example of lying or not. But they know that if it is, than [sic] lying is not always wrong, and if lying is always wrong, then this is not lying." Dr. Kreeft says that such intuitive reasoning is not infallible, but that when we start reasoning in ways that is contradictory to this intuitive common sense, we are most often going to turn out wrong.

Now, I want to look at some typical renderings of synderesis and see how Dr. Kreeft's aligns with them.

Servais Pinckaers, in "Conscience, Truth, and Prudence," explains that, for Aquinas, synderesis is a habitus, the function of which is "to condemn evil and tend toward the good."

Moral theologian Fr. Wojciech Giertych, O.P. - presently theologian to the Papal household - explains the process of practical moral reason as follows:

[P]ractical reason is endowed with the first principle of action, known as synderesis, which, in an innate and infallible judgment, assesses that good is to be done and that evil is to be avoided.... Practical reason begins with the spark of synderesis, and, using the light it receives from the instinctively known moral law and from its own experience and education, and taking into account the unique circumstances with which it is affronted, it issues a judgment concerning the act to be executed or passes a judgment on the act that took place.
- from "Conscience and the Liberum Arbitrium"

Here we find that "it" - the practical reason - has "instinctive" knowledge of moral law as well, which aligns with Dr. Kreeft's analysis. We also have a distinction, though, that synderesis itself is the very limited idea that good is to be done and evil avoided, and not a matter of judgment about situations, per se. These steps of practical reason are distinct.

While distinct, though, the conscience and the synderesis operations are ontologically related according to modern moral theologians. Cardinal Ratzinger, commenting on the "anthropology of conscience", likens synderesis to the Platonic "memory" of the formal good and true (anamnesis): this is "instilled in our being [but] needs, one might say, assistance from without so that it can become aware of itself." Thus, even though it is an infallible first instinct, synderesis is not to be separated from the elements which "form" the larger conscience. Specifically, Card. Ratzinger mentions the Papacy [and all kinds of Magisterial authority], which are not coming from "without" in regard to synderesis, but function to "bring to fruition... its interior openness to the truth" (see Ratzinger, "Conscience and Truth").

Turning to Veritatis Splendor 59, John Paul II explains that the judgement of conscience "applies to a concrete situation the rational conviction that one must love and do good and avoid evil." Here the entire process of practical reasoning is included. Synderesis is that "rational conviction" about good and evil which then becomes part of the process of analyzing the moral values in given situations.

So, synderesis is, indeed, a moral "intuition" of a sort, which forms the basis of judgments of conscience. It is the essential insight about good and evil which forms the basis for the discernment of conscience. And there are other aspects of "intuitive reasoning" involved in the process of conscience even after synderesis, as Giertych points out, calling these facets the "instinctively known moral law." And, indeed, conscience and synderesis are part of one whole ontological structure of relation to truth in man, as Cardinal Ratzinger points out; thus, there are intuitive aspects to both processes and there are also aspects of both which are open to some kind of formation, which does not deny the "infallible" judgment of synderesis nor the immediate quality of intuition.

How, then, do we evaluate Dr. Kreeft's arguments? Well, I think he is right in noting that intuitions and experience have a value in moral reasoning. The problem with using synderesis in the way Dr. Kreeft has done, though - or even more generally using moral intuition as a closing of debate over issues based on the premise that those whose intuition does not seem to grasp the same things yours does are "morally stupid" - is that the Church does define certain things as "intrinsically evil", and lying is one of them.

John Paul II explains that the purpose of these kinds of definitions is "to serve man's true freedom...; there can be no freedom apart from or in opposition to the truth" (VS, 96). This impact by authority on reason is even on the level of synderesis, as Ratzinger has shown, as the Church's distinctions guide the operation of synderesis toward venues where it applies and where its infallible judgment can be free to work. In this case, the definitive statement that lying is always wrong is directed to freeing synderesis to make this moral sensibility part of our relation to the truth of natural law and a fundamental premise for our moral reasoning. In a sense, it makes our process of practical moral reasoning shorter and easier in cases having to do with lying, where the Church has directed us to use our innate moral sense.

However, the intuition that operates when we encounter a situation of hiding Jews from Nazis, or a situation of Lila Rose spying on Planned Parenthood, is not the infallible intuition of synderesis. Rather, it is an aspect of the intuitive moral process which is involved in the reasoning part of discernment in conscience. Synderesis applies to the situation only in telling us that "lying is bad," from which we can then reason toward conclusions that this, if it is lying, is also bad, which may not seem evident. On the other hand, we might reason that this is not lying, and therefore not necessarily bad - although it might relate to a different intuition of synderesis about what is bad and then be judged to be bad based on that other relation. But the point is that we still require a process of reasoning.

The reason we cannot stop at intuition - as even Dr. Kreeft admits - is evidenced in the title of the work that I took the above theological essays from: Crisis of Conscience: Philosophers and Theologians Analyze Our Growing Inability to Discern Right from Wrong (New York: Crossroads, 1996). This title and the concern of these authors - particularly the direction of Ratzinger's essay which seeks to put even the "infallible" intuition of synderesis in relation to moral authority such as is embodied in the Magisterium - makes plain that intuitions are harder to rely upon in this day and age. We need to form ourselves in virtue and in knowledge of the truth and in conformity to authority in order to use conscience properly and not too-subjectively.

A Treatment of the Live Action Debate

2011-02-19T18:42:00.002-05:00

I've been working on an attempt at an academic treatment of the debate surrounding Live Action's undercover video work. This is still a work in project and the document will update as I revise and revisit it. Still, I wanted to share it sooner rather than later so that it can - hopefully - benefit the dialogue somewhat.

An Approach to the Debate Surrounding Live Action

Hateful Speech

2011-02-12T03:01:00.017-05:00

Saturday morning, 2 AM.

I sit in my comfortable recliner, grading students' papers.

As happens every Saturday and Sunday morning at about this time, the bar next door finishes last call and issues forth from the doors of the grimy Club National all that pent up pandemonium that has been erstwhile restrained among the dizziness of strobe lights and the din of hip-hop.

To say that I am annoyed would be an understatement. Tonight, I happen still to be awake. On other occasions, my sleep is disturbed by this event; less often, I am aided by the effects of my own weekend conviviality and manage to preserve my rest despite the noise. Yet whether I sleep through it or no, the hellish scene plays out unfailingly, and I indignantly wonder how many dreams of babes living in my building are interrupted by all the hollering and honking of horns.

I cast this phenomenon in diabolical terms not merely to be inflammatory. Rather, it is because I have sensed other Spirits than gin and vodka to be operative in its issue. On this occasion, for instance, I am sure that one has flown along with the sound of the ruckus into my living room, and that the rage to which I am tempted is a dangerous mixture of righteous wrath and rueful repugnance. Terms like "unwashed masses" and "urban refuse" spring unbidden to mind and it takes all my power to remind myself that these hooligans are my brothers and sisters in the human family. I cannot let my anger become personal; but I cannot either ignore that there is a profound problem involved in this situation and that the behavior of these folks is symptomatic of a deep disease in our culture of which it must be cured or die.

As much as the next one, I enjoy good drink and the elation it brings. I like a night out with friends and even a bit of rabble rousing. But I don't think I've ever grown unrestrained so that I have not been able to show courtesy to neighbors. More importantly, though, I try hard never to let my passions escape the control of my reason, whether due to drink or any other drug or influence. And yet, in places like this club next door, the whole atmosphere and purpose seems aimed at fevering man's animal heat. The music, the dancing, the clothing, the socialization - mechanisms which ought to serve to civilize and engender culture here converge to barbarize and destroy culture. And, lest anyone take exception to my rhetoric, let me be clear: the denizens of such places are no way animals, except as man is an animal and may well act like one; nor are such barbarians, except insofar as they engage in what is barbaric. All connections with the essential human things - gender, ethnicity, race, age - are incidental and accidental; to take me as insinuating anything else is to misunderstand me.

But other connections attain which coincide with these other categories - as causes coincide with effects - connections to situation of neighborhood, of education, of economics, of religion. The material fact is forever generating the moral fact in our society, because we have opted for materialism over morality. Those who critique the moral situation and the underlying material exigence are only too liable to be libeled for casting moral aspersions on the basis of material coincidence. The irony becomes, for example, that the person who notes the eugenic tendencies of Planned Parenthood in exterminating black people is the one accused of racism, rather than the ones exterminating black people. As a result, this and so many other serpentine evils in our society continue to wind more and more tightly round the heart of culture and squeeze it to death, and the victim - mistaking the threat - thrashes against the knife-wielding friend coming to break the vicious circle, and this thrashing only serves to speed asphyxiation.

Yes, I despise the club next door; I despise everything it represents as a symptom of dying culture; I despise the coincidence in the makeup of its clientele as symptomatic of the same deeper ills in culture; I despise the related symptom that makes me despised for despising all this; and I despise most those spirits of distortion who formulate all confusing speech, the hell-babble pandemonium of parties and parking lots and professional politics. Renaming love hatred and mixing personal affront with general criticism, these spirits disarm us by fear of all language except in two equally useless forms, namely the mere shouting of acerbic argument or the effete niceties of political correctness. Such speech is a blunted weapon, pointless in the proper sense of the word. The demons know what they are about, for they know that without precision of speech we cannot name them, and naming them take away their power.

But I don't want to be thus disarmed by fear. So, I risk sounding hateful to avoid using the only speech that is truly hateful - that is, worthy of being hated. I cannot see my way around being misunderstood by confused society unless I say nothing at all (even if it be with many words) - and I simply cannot accept that option. Therefore, I've taken a risk here at naming some demons I see at work. No doubt they will, like Legion, endeavor to throw their victims into a fit and frenzy at the affront. But no matter; I am convinced that my words aim to heal rather than hurt. Not only that, they aim to protect myself as much as anything else - for, I, too, felt tonight an attack and onslaught in my own home, and as my anger waxed I may easily have fallen victim to the very thing I deplore. So, I aim these words to deflect that temptation. I aim them to gain power for myself so that I can help empower others. I aim them to cut Moloch and Mammon and whomever is haunting Club National loose from their addled victims and, hopefully, to help in some way put an end to all hateful speech.

Control Freaks (Not Normal People)

2011-01-13T00:17:00.006-05:00

As the news cycles continue to spin absurd tangents off of the tragedy in Arizona, I'm venturing another opinion about an issue which I really think unrelated to the current events but which is the center of much discussion in the wake of them. The issue: gun control.

I'll keep this short.

I am not a member of the NRA. I do not own a gun. I have no inordinate love of guns.

Furthermore, I think that many of the defenders of gun rights give an absurd reading of the second amendment and present a figment of a constitutional right.

There is, however, a common sense approach to this matter which, if overlooked by gun advocates, is even more frequently missed by their opponents.

I have fired weapons in my lifetime. I've shot paper targets and tin cans. Perhaps, in my youth, I once or twice made sport of small birds and mammals with a carefully aimed bee-bee. [I do not doubt that this admission could itself form an inroad to a whole other controversy. Bring it on!] All in all, my experience with firing guns has been entertaining, a sporting affair - even when it was in the context of military training. In the back of my mind, I always prayed I would never have to use a weapon in earnest. I enjoyed the skill of marksmanship, learning my way around the weapons' intricacies, the thrill of the trigger pull after a controlled exhalation. And I've never shot anyone. Never even thought of it.

Now, sure, there's an argument to be made about defense of home and property that a person ought to be allowed a gun in the home. Most moderates (I consider myself, all in all, to be among that political class) will admit this. Ordinarily, the gun control argument gets hairy when someone drops this ballistic bombshell: "There's no reason that somebody needs a whole collection of guns or semi-automatic weapons in the home." And, as far as it goes, this argument is sound: there is, in the pragmatic way of looking at things, no reason. And, according to the same system of evaluation, there are many reasons indeed that such arsenals ought to be "controlled".

But - here's the rub - it all depends on what we regard as most reasonable. It all depends on what we consider to be the reasons - that is, the philosophical causes - that inform our day to day existence in the most profound ways. For me, those reasons are not ultimately the practical and the pragmatic. They are more holistic. In my ideal view of things, man's pleasure is often found in the things that don't have the immediate reason the rationalist looks for: stamp collections, idle walks, improvised whistling, falling in love, joining a political party, shooting a gun at inanimate objects.

Why does a man need a machine gun? I don't know that any man does. But I can think of why a man may want one. If a man likes shooting cans or paper targets, he might like shooting them in a variety of ways. With each weapon comes a different skill, a different pleasure, a different art - art, the quintessential pleasure of man, and what Dante calls the grandson of God. Indeed, there is much in our divinely imprinted nature that shines through in our ability to manipulate machinery to such precise ends, to aim and to cause reactions faster than our physical natures could ever cause without our artifaction.

There are some who will find this a weak argument for non-restriction of weaponry by device class, and I respect their concerns. The truth is that the effect of certain weapons can be very much more terrible when aimed at a living being than other weapons'. However, the aim is the most terrible part. And it is more causally, more philosophically, related to the effect which we all (of course) desire to avoid. The question is whether we want to cede control of a thing which may be used harmlessly and for pleasure because of the perverted individuals who use that thing for pernicion.

This relates, of course, to what I said in my last post about our propensity as a people to respond categorically to aberrations and to try to "control" every aspect of our lives; I've tagged this post with many labels, including subsidiarity, and there is the reason why. We are always and everywhere giving up ordinary freedoms and passing laws to restrict the liberties of normal individuals in order to control against those abnormal few who abuse the gifts of freedom and will. It is a strategy which perhaps is justified in a Kindergarten, but it has no place amongst the affairs of civilized men and women. I need not make any of the slippery slope arguments (which only may be fallacious) about how a restrictive society will continue in its rut; for, if you, dear reader, have not yet felt sympathy for my philosophical appeal, I don't know whether we'll ever come to agree on this.

For my part, I doubt I'll ever start a gun collection: it's cost prohibitive. But I'd like to know that I may do so if I choose - if I win the lottery or get my wits about me and get out of academia so that I can earn money. My aim in doing so, however, would not be to take life, but to give it: to live more vitally, more freely, more artfully, more pleasurably. To shoot with friends at things which there is no harm and all fun in shooting, to feel the rush that it gives, to respect the awful power it represents, to deplore the terrible violence that is its perversion. In short, to revel in controlling what is my right as a normal man to control, and what needs no other to control on my behalf.

Ordo Amoris

2011-01-10T14:47:00.008-05:00

I'm going to be brief, for the sake of tact as well as for having little to say.

When a tragedy such as the recent shooting in Arizona occurs, we tend to figure things out as a culture. Often we respond to these sorts of things in a way which I call "programmatic." We have, in my opinion, a habit of overcorrection in our society. We've been convinced by the theorists and social scientists that everything can be planned and managed. When aberrant people do aberrant things, we go to a system and try to somehow correct for the aberration. (Meanwhile, we normalize countless other aberrations - it all depends what we can convince the majority is an aberration. When a mother murders her prenatal child, this is no longer considered even problematic.)

I say all this firmly with no intention to offend those who have suffered, either directly or empathetically, from the recent events. I am sympathetic to all involved and commend each person affected to God in my prayers - the victims and their families, and, yes, even the shooter. But having been asked by several people several times already for my thoughts on the matter, I must honestly say that these reflections are the ones dominating in my mind. I fear our society's tendency to over-correct, to respond to extraordinary breaches of conduct on the part of strange individuals by disrupting the ordinary freedoms of normal folks.

The example that comes most readily to mind is in the way that the media is reporting what this tragedy "means" for politics. We're already hearing a lot about how politics has become too angry and too emotional, and how we need to calm down and become more rational. Now, I see several problems with this - for one, the fact that this idea can't eve really be managed; we could pass laws about the rhetoric of political speeches and ads, probably, but we can't really overtly reshape public sentiment, not while remaining at all free anyway. But the bigger problem is in the premise: that is, I do not think "calming down" is always tied with being more rational. The village idiot in his sedentary reserve is less risible than the blokes at the public house or the ones at the Houses of Parliament. But it is not necessarily because he has his wits more about him. Conversely, the fellows in Parliament may be very cooly intellectual indeed and go about their poking and prodding of the human condition with all the disinterest of a scientist with his rats, and I do not think politics better for it. The gents in the public house, now, they seem to have found a balance. They get angry at the things which ought to make a sane man angry, but they argue without spite and keep their reason and their emotions in check to one another, based on the mutual conviviality and a view of the common brotherhood of man. They love each other; it's love that makes them so angry when they see error in one another's ways.

Augustine said of virtue that it is the ordo amoris - the directing to each object the kind and degree of love (passion) which it deserves, no more and no less. I do not think we will gain a better political discourse by getting folks simply to be less angry - nor even to be less angry and more intelligent. Because, frankly, as I've said often enough on this site, there are plenty of causes in our world today to which the only properly ordered response is anger. But anger is not blind rage - it is a passion, governed under the reason in man and exercised in accord with virtuous will. Or, it should be. Such is what we need, and such is what we need to learn from this state of affairs that has transpired. Anger without reason will become rage; but reason without passion (more importantly, compassion) can lead to crimes even more terrible. No, we need a political discourse that holds emotion and reason in tension and orders them together according to the demand of the matter being discussed, rather than based on some arbitrary sense of propriety or political correctness.

Emphatically, I think this response the only one both feasible and just. We cannot ask people not to care about things that deserve to be cared about; we cannot expect them not to be angered by what merits anger. Nor can we expect them to know what to do with that anger, unless we endeavor to augment it with good philosophy, rationale, and discernment.

Perhaps this course is difficult; perhaps we can't even imagine what it would look like. But try either extreme and we'll end back where we started, looking at the man we've rebuilt lopsided and wondering why he cannot walk a straight line.

A Short Exegetical Argument

2011-01-09T15:36:00.006-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, after attending Midnight Mass for Christmas, a friend of mine inquired about the apologetics problem that often arises in discussion of Matthew's infancy narrative. The passage in question is at the end of the first chapter of that Gospel, which reads: "When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took his wife, but knew her not until she had borne a son; and he called his name Jesus" (Mt. 1:24-5; RSV). The problematic phrase, highlighted in this excerpt, is sometimes used to argue against the Virginity of Mary during and after the birth of Christ. Of course, for Catholics, the consistent teaching on the Virginity of Mary is that she is semper Virgo, always Virgin - in the words of Saint Augustine, quoted in the Catechism, "concipiens Virgo, pariens Virgo, Virgo gravida, Virgo feta, Virgo perpetua: a Virgin conceiving, a Virgin bearing, a Virgin pregnant, a Virgin bringing forth, a Virgin perpetual" (CCC 510).

However, according to the argument, the word "until" from Matthew's birth narrative makes it plain that the abstinent marriage of Joseph and Mary ceased after the Nativity of Christ.

At the time my friend brought this up, I made reference to him of various other passages in Scripture where the word for "until" - donec in the Latin, eos in Greek - simply denotes passage in time and doesn't imply anything about what comes after. (In fact, there's nothing essential about the meaning of the word in English that it would imply a change in a course of events coming after the moment modified by "until" - it simply has come to be that we use the word thus idiomatically. English authors have sometimes used the word in its literal sense simply as a way of describing a passage in time without setting up some kind of apposition. For example, one could write, "We were in the restaurant until around 1:00 when Bob showed up, and he sat down and had lunch with us. We spoke about many things." Here, the implication is clearly not that we left the restaurant after Bob showed up; the "until" simply takes care of describing the expanse in time before he did arrive.)

The reason I bring this up this week is that the Old Testament reading for today's Mass gives us an instance of this usage of the Scriptural "until" that illustrates the kind of reading one should give Matthew's. In Isaiah, the Prophet describes the Lord's Servant in this way: "He will not fail or be discouraged till he has established justice in the earth, and the coastlands wait for his law" (Isaiah 42:4). This is the same word "until" as we have in Matthew 1:25. And here, we can clearly see that what the Servant is not doing before (failing and being discouraged) doesn't suddenly begin happening after justice is established. In fact, this usage relates perfectly to the passage in Matthew because it is idiomatically very similar in its use of a negative description in the time described by the "until." Just as the Servant did not suffer discouragement or failure before and neither will start to suffer them after justice comes to pass, so Mary and Joseph had no relations before and none after the birth of their Son. At least, while the text may not establish certainly that it was NOT the case (either that the Servant then suffered or that Mary and Joseph became intimate), it doesn't necessarily imply the contrary.

If anyone has any examples at the ready from English literature, I'd appreciate them: I know this usage of "until" is a common formula which I've come across, I just can't recall where at the moment. For whatever reason, Dickens seems to come to mind. Anyone have any more thoughts?

Happy Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God!

2011-01-01T10:34:00.005-05:00

A short post today, to wish everyone a very happy and blessed Feast of the Most Holy Mother of God, Mary Our Hope.

Today is the Octave of the Feast of Christmas, the culmination of that Feast which celebrates the manifestation of God as Man (a mystery upon which we nevertheless continue reflecting through Epiphany and even so far as the Presentation of the Lord).

The Christmas Mystery is not simply the celebration of the Incarnation: that was already underway from the other Feast of the Incarnation nine months previous, the Annunciation to Our Lady. But at Christmas we intensify our reflection on this mystery, seeing for the first time fully manifest the Lord's plan of salvation. This is why the season is so rich in the writings of the Prophets of the Old Testament - for we are told, in John 1:45 (where Nathanael is called by Philip), that this Christ is "Quem scripsit Moyses in Lege et Prophetae" - the one written in the Law and the Prophets (notice, not merely the one written "of" or "about" - He is, in John's kerygma, the Word Himself).

The saving plan which has been underway since the beginning of Creation comes to its final and consummate chapter now, with Christ made manifest to the nations. It is therefore only fitting that the fulfillment of the Feast of this Manifestation directs us toward Mary, the human person most instrumental in that plan, from the very beginning. Mary is "the woman" of Genesis, included in the proto-evangelium which first announced God's saving plan in crushing the head of the Serpent who brought sin and its sting, death. This mysterious prophecy is recapitulated in the Apocalypse, where the woman returns, shown in childbirth and still engaged in her ancient enmity with the dragon.

Mary is not an incidental player on the stage of the drama of salvation: she is essential, a sine qua non. It is significant in this regard that the Gospel visitors to the manifestation of Emmanuel at Bethlehem do not merely find the God-Man alone. The Shepherds find "Mary and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger" (Luke 2:15); and - more emphatically - the Magi, representative of the nations of earth to whom Christ's birth promises salvation, "went into the house and saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him" (Matthew 2:11).

Such was the plan from the beginning, and so it remains as it is made manifest to us in this Christmas mystery. Jesus was to be born of a woman, born of the woman of promise, the new Eve, the woman preserved from sin like no human person had ever been: not merely created sinless as Adam and Eve, but conceived already perfected by Grace, emphatically preserved from every stain and fault.

And this Jesus, who has been made known to us in this last age, whom all the prophets promised, is to be worshiped indeed, but it is the will of God that He be worshiped - always and everywhere - with Mary his mother. In the ineffable wisdom of God, He willed to come to us through Her - not just once, but in each and every coming, in every instance of Grace, in every sacrament. And it His will, further, that we return to Him through Her as well - no other way. Ad Jesum, per Mariam.

So it is that the Church points us in the fullness of Christmastide to Mary, so that we can find Christ where He may be found, and worship Him as He wills. Let us do so this day, and every day.

Ora pro nobis, Sancta Dei Genitrix.

What Christmas Is All About (..., Charlie Brown)

2010-12-24T15:55:00.004-05:00

I had to run to the grocery store for some last minute items needed for Christmas dinner. On the way out, I was privy to overhear part of a conversation between two women in the entryway. The segment I heard started out agreeably enough, but soon went (in my opinion) askew.

"... and the true meaning of Christmas is not about how many presents you have underneath that tree," said one woman.

"Yep, that's right," agreed the other.

"I told him what it's really all about is that we're all together..." she continued as I left through the door, probably wincing visibly at this last part.

Now, of course, Christmas is not not about being all together: surely, the Church in Her Wisdom proclaims this day an Obligatory Holy Day, which carries - along with the requirement of assisting at Mass - the duty "to abstain from those works and aVairs which hinder the worship to be rendered to God, the joy proper to the Lord's day, or the suitable relaxation of mind and body" (CJC 1247; emphasis added). Enjoying family and fellowship are part and parcel of "the joy proper to the Lord's day" certainly and arguably have some connection as well to rendering due worship, considering that family life is a vocation and essential to offering acceptable praise to God is living well one's vocation.

But, what Christmas is all about? Not quite - that is, not all.

You hear this sort of thing a lot, sometimes in forms much less innocuous than the one expressed by the lady at the grocery store. This simplistic watering down of the meaning of Christmas is really at its best in my example, stemming from undoubtedly good intentions and some degree of mere ignorance; at its worst, it can be a very deliberate and seditious ploy typical of the dictatorship of relativism.

I offer this short note as a reminder for us Christians that we must witness to the true meaning of Christmas in all its vitality and power; we should take this opportunity to reflect upon the fullness and depth of that meaning so that we can manifest it forth in more compelling ways.

And what is that meaning? It is Christ Himself: there is no easy reduction or formulaic distillation of this meaning. The babe in the manger is God Himself: He is God the Son, co-eternal with the Father, sent in time as a Man to live as man - and, lest we forget, to die as man, in reparation for the sin of man and the sins of men - each and every sin from the creation of the world to the end of time. God the Son, truly born in time of a Woman - a woman perfected in grace, the new Eve, so that redemption may begin in the manner that sin began.

Christmas is the revelation of God among us (not the beginning of it, mind you - that was 9 months ago). The hope and joy that Christmas brings to us are bound up with the fact that this gift is not merely the gift of a birth, but the gift of a life - the singular life of God as a man, which becomes the gift to all men of participation, if they accept it, in the life of God.

There's no end to the meaningfulness of this moment in time and eternity, but something it means definitely for us is humility. God humbled Himself this day, born by lowliest birth. We must be humble in turn, recognizing this mystery and speaking about it always with wonder and awe, at the grocery store or any place. In sight of what He's given us, we owe Him that much at least.

So, What Would Dorothy Day Do?

2010-12-18T23:45:00.026-05:00

About a fortnight ago, I posed a question and promised to return to it.

And so, let's get to it. But how?

It would be tempting to start with an invitation, dear reader, that you reflect with me upon the world in which we find ourselves, now nearly a full year into the second decade of the second millennium of the Christian era. But what use is it? I don't know how it goes for you, but for me the reflection overwhelms me almost the moment I've begun. How difficult it would be even to try to catalog the major problems we face, to pick perhaps the top ten maladies plaguing society, and then even tentatively to suggest how Dorothy Day's example might help us in addressing just one of them! How, then, to begin?

Well, in short, not there. We have already been warned against the wrong-headedness of such an approach by the great Chesterton, who called it - in What's Wrong With The World - "the medical mistake":

[T]his scheme of medical question and answer is a blunder; the first great blunder of sociology. It is always called stating the disease before we find the cure. But it is the whole definition and dignity of man that in social matters we must actually find the cure before we find the disease.... The only way to discuss the social evil is to get at once to the social ideal. We can all see the national madness; but what is national sanity? I have called this book "What Is Wrong with the World?" and the upshot of the title can be easily and clearly stated. What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right. [Source]

And so we will undertake a different approach, a positive project: we will outline certain aspects of the example of one modern saint and see whether these qualities suggest anything to us that can be transfered into and emulated in the context of our own age, not so distant from her own. I might suggest certain crises of culture which seem to line up in particular ways with Dorothy's life, but the choice of how exactly and to what extent her own actions apply in a given situation calls for personal discernment and the diligent exercise of prudence.

But here I must take one more tangent. I own that this list is by no means exhaustive; but even with that caveat I know some will disagree with what I have remarked as "essential" to Dorothy Day's character based on my own study of her life and works. I fear this is unavoidable - yet, I will not apologize nor over-correct for the possible disagreement. I cannot enter deeply here into any discussion of where and why I see these features figuring prominently in Dorothy's biography (nor discuss why I choose these particular qualities above others equally worthy of consideration). My main goal is too modest for all that; I am concerned here to explore the usefulness and fruitfulness of our question as a practical one for translating the Gospel in our age. I welcome dispute and conversation on the matter and will happily work to justify my observations at a length in the comment-boxes that would be cumbersome to this main post. [For those who are simply unfamiliar, there are plenty of good resources out there to get started in a study of this fascinating woman's life: here are just a few.]

Today, I offer for our consideration three manners in which Dorothy Day is a modern exemplar of the Christian life and the practice of the Gospel: as a radical, as a personalist, and as a woman with an apostolate.

Dorothy Day: Radical

In identifying Dorothy Day as a radical, I borrow from the wisdom of Archbishop Charles Chaput who recently offered some reflections on her witness to our age on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of her death. In his own choice to call Day a radical, the Archbishop returned to the etymological root (pun intended) of the word: "She was radical in the truest sense of the word," Chaput said, "committed to the root of the Christian vocation." She witnessed to the Gospel in season and out of season, and "refused to ignore or downplay those Catholic teachings that might be inconvenient."

Thus we find the first use for our question, "What Would Dorothy Day Do?" It translates into the many situations in which the relation of the Christian vocation to the status quo is one of paradoxism. We might think especially, in our age, of situations which seem to imply a binary choice, wherein neither proposed way seems really consistent with the demands of the Gospel. How often are we choosing "the lesser of two evils" - when do we give into compromise for the sake of social manners and communal comfort? Such are situations which probably call for radicalism.

We may ask, what would Dorothy Day do in political life? Whose "side" would she have taken in the many conflicts which define civic discourse in our age: in the airports, at the borders, outside the abortuaries, across the world from the battle zone? I think that her life gives us clear indications of what she might have done in any of these scenarios; but it does not finally matter so much whether we choose to do exactly as she might have done, rather it is important for us that we, when once we've discerned the way that our vocation seems to indicate, do not hesitate in following through to the radical consequences that may unfold. We need not seek ridicule, strife, indignation, or imprisonment: consequences which Day's social actions earned for her with striking regularity. But when the cause of righteousness seems to lead to these things - which seems more and more likely an event - then we may find a useful measure of the full extent of our call in the radicalism of Dorothy Day. And if the situations of paradoxism plaguing our world discomfort only our minds but do not otherwise affect us, then we may well ask whether we are truly fulfilling our Christian call. If the times call for radical response and we do not give it, who will?

Dorothy Day: Personalist

I have remarked before on how the personalist vision is essential for rightly-ordered social action. I believe that it is, philosophically, the key to unlocking the import of the Catholic Church's Social Teaching.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of Christian Personalism - a response to and development upon Christian Existentialism - I think a useful encapsulation can be found in a teaching by Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day's own tutor in this school. She recounts somewhere (I am paraphrasing) how Peter described "selfhood" as being essential to living in true communion: He said that when any number of "I"s are present - that is, truly thematic selves - then there is a "we", and "we" is the essence of community; where, on the other hand, there is only "they", there is not community but "a crowd".

Crucial to the living of the Christian vocation is finding the other truly as a "self", a fully realized person with whom we are called into relationship. For Day, the importance of this is that the very self of the other is transformed by the Incarnation and by Christ's teaching on the judgment: when we serve others who are hungry, thirsty, naked, imprisoned, we serve Him: and discovering Him in this way is crucial to having true relationship with Him. This is an inimitable aspect of Christian life which prayer and even the sacraments - even the Eucharist - cannot replace. Thus, for Dorothy, the exercise of the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy became essential expressions of the Christian vocation: not merely peripheral concerns or even fruits of some deeper experience of holiness and grace. Christ is waiting to be met in personal encounters with the poor and needy in a way that is necessarily complementary to the manner in which He comes to us through sacrament.

[[It is an interesting side-light on this matter that the present Holy Father's social teaching seems to take a very similar tact to that of Dorothy and Peter Maurin. I have written about the Pope's work here in light of his affinity with the Christian Personalism of Dietrich von Hildebrand. I also treat of an instance in section IV) where, on the unique category of love of neighbor, Benedict seems to go beyond the master's theology; it occurs to me now that the direction he seems to be taking in this respect is really foretokened in the examples of Day and Maurin.]

So, what would Dorothy Day do as a personalist in our age? Where - in whom - would she find Christ waiting for compassion, for respect, for love? Would she wait for Him to come to her, or go to seek Him out? ... which leads us to our next category:

Dorothy Day: Woman of Apostolic Living

Dorothy's apostolicity comes in two categories: word and action.

In Word

Dorothy challenged the orthodoxies of her day with words seeded by the Gospel's teachings. What conversations call for authentic Christian voices in our world today? In her own age, Dorothy published a paper for a penny-a-copy with a pittance of resources. We have unprecedented technological means for spreading the Christian message, for reaching untold audiences at the click of a mouse. On our own Facebook Walls we have, in all likelihood, audiences which numerically equal or surpass the initial subscribing membership of The Catholic Worker. Do we use this to our advantage - rather, to the Gospel's advantage? Do we choose our words to discomfort the smug and comfort the afflicted? Do we challenge with our words? Do we respond to the errors that cross our screens and add our voice to the conversation, or for the sake of anonymity and convenience turn a blind eye?

In Action

Dorothy was not content merely to wait for the challenge of the Gospel to cross her doorstep. She went out and gathered the lost and forsaken. She let her lodgings be overtaken by those in need and found larger ones when she ran out of space so that more could have the advantage of her aid. To our jaded age it may seem she was often taken advantage of. Perhaps she was. But this seemed to her less of a risk than the risk of doing too little, of missing a chance to engage in the apostolate.

The answer to our question here is so vast and varied as to almost seem unhelpful. There are so many ways in which we can help, so many ways in which we can make a difference. We know this much from the Gospel - so how does Dorothy's example really help to elucidate and distill that teaching for us and make it practicable?

I would argue that Dorothy's apostolic action is a useful model for us in its ambition and scope. In the name of humility, and in the name of the virtues of prudence and temperance, it seems that Christians today might let themselves too easily off the hook for simply not doing more that they could. (I should note that here, as in all of the above - in case you haven't realized it yet - I accuse myself first of all!)

This is, again, something I have written about before. In our age excuses are not hard to come by. Furthermore, -and I know this will be one of my more controversial points - it seems more in vogue these days to encourage the ordinary ways of holiness, to call for Christians to be more perfect in their day-to-day lives as husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, businessmen, workers, painters, writers, etc. And, surely, this is needed. But I think we also need to intensify our call for Christians to do more - to go beyond the ordinary, to become immersed in the apostolate in a thorough-going manner, to go to the brink of when it seems they can simply do no more and then give even a little extra.

Perhaps it will seem that we are being taken advantage of, that the needy are bleeding us dry. But, then, perhaps this is the kind of bloodshed called for in this apostolic age, a new kind of martyrdom. And so, rather than asking what action Dorothy would undertake among the many social imperatives that need the work of good Christians, we can ask our question as a measure of degree: when we wonder whether we should do more, we can ask: "What Would Dorothy Day Do?"

I began this series of reflections by looking at the question, "What Would Jesus Do?" The question emblazoned on bracelets adorns the hands of believers throughout the world; what should really be found at the hands of believers is the answer to that question. In the hands of Dorothy Day, that answer was found: hands cuffed in radical action against injustice, hands lovingly stroking the face of a stranger, hands typing the words of evangelistic love, hands serving food to Christ in the breadlines. Ultimately, our purpose in asking our new question is not the question itself: it is the answer we will give: the answer we must give: the answer that reveals how Jesus already had done and continues doing "what He would". He calls us - and sends us forth.

WW3D?

2010-12-03T14:16:00.016-05:00

One of the most distinguishing features of Catholicism, when compared with other Christian faith communities, is the Doctrine of the Communion of Saints. In much Apologetics discourse, this seems very often to be the bone of most heated contention.

Many have commented upon and analyzed this point of difference. Most of the discussion I've read seems to focus on the need for intercessory prayer or on the concept of solidarity with Christians who have gone forth from this life. The image of a lit votive candle placed before a statue or a holy card stuck in a car visor are emblematic for many people of Catholics' strangeness, their medieval sentimentality, the "cult" of the Saints. There is another image, though, which - for me - highlights the difference that this quintessential Doctrine makes in living out the Faith of Christ. That image is the W.W.J.D. bracelet.

Now, of course Catholics have been known to wear and to celebrate the mantra on the bracelet, but it is at least somewhat significant that its origins seem to be in Congregationalist writings. Of course, for any follower of Christ, the question is important. But asking, "What Would Jesus Do?", is really only a starting point, it's no kind of end. It is an invitation to reflect, with the next step being to consider more deeply the particulars of any given situation in the aspect of the Gospel; after a first asking of the question, we usually come round again to the very same question, only re-emphasized: "What, indeed, would Jesus do?" That is, in this particular moment, in this set of circumstances which I now confront as a baptized Christian, what is the demand of the Gospel upon my choice of action? And in such questions of praxis, we can see the starting points of many of the divisions which have separated Christian groups throughout history: the question of interpreting the Gospel mandate forms the background of debate over liturgy, mortification, prayer, or Christian Social Action as determined by the Beatitudes and the Spiritual or Corporal Works of Mercy. "What Would Jesus Do?" Good question, and sometimes a head-scratcher.

Christ himself is of course our chief and primary exemplar in learning to be sons and daughters of the Father - nay, really, in becoming part of the One True Son of the Father. For many Christians, no further example seems to be wanted - but here is that point of difference made by the Doctrine of the Communion of Saints upon which I choose to focus. Christ, at His Ascension, promised to give His Spirit and invigorate the Church. The Spirit has sometimes thus been called the Soul of the Church, whose members are the Body. Christ left us a plan for His continued Presence - in the sacraments, the liturgy, etc. - but also for His continued example, in the lives of Saints.

We are given Saints in every time and place in order to have some better idea how to translate into practice the teachings of Christ. This is not a by-route around an intimate knowing of Christ, but simply a recognition of the economy of salvation as He has established it in His Living Body, the Church. His Word is alive and acting - it is not two-dimensional figments on a page, the theological abstractions and minutiae which we spill so much ink (and sometimes blood) in working out. But He comes to us in a Living Word which includes also the font of Sacred Tradition, a three-dimensional reality, constantly demonstrated in new ways and changing times, by the holy men and women whom His Spirit moves to witness to His Truth.

This may all sound very preachy, but it's really finally very practical. Saint Paul, in his letters, never hesitated to hold himself up as an example to his community. Since Christ had gone from their sight, or had never even been seen in the flesh by many of the new disciples, Paul didn't hesitate to give them a yardstick which appealed to the immediacy of their call as Baptized Christians: "Be ye followers of me, as I also am of Christ" (1 Cor. 11:1). "Not sure what Jesus would do? Watch me."

We are Baptized in Christ and bear His Name as Christians. Implicit in the question, "What Would Jesus Do?" is the translated notion of what Christians must do. And we look to the Saints for examples of how, in each era, this question can best be answered: What would Paul do? What would Agnes do? What would Gregory do? What would Francis and Clare do? What would Ignatius and Francis Xavier do? What would Isaac Jogues and Elizabeth Ann Seton do? What would Maximilian Kolbe and Theresa Benedicta do? And - yes - what would Mother Theresa and John Paul II do? They would do - they have done - what Christ teaches through His Spirit to His chosen Saints, to reify in their present actions the Hands of the Carpenter's Son.

And now, all of this being really only a background reflection to prepare for something lately burning in my mind, I will leave you with the question which I signify in this post's title (indeed, in the image at the top of this entire blog): a question to which I'll return pointedly in another post shortly: In this day and age, where the world is gone mad and the choice seems always to be for the lesser of two evils, what would our Lord do? What would he have us do? I think the answer, in part, comes to this: What Would Dorothy Day Do?

How to Swallow a Camel

2010-11-24T16:12:00.005-05:00

The sideshow in the Press goes on unabated as the usual suspects (the "Catholic experts" whom the liberal media keeps on speed dial and who are conversant in Newspeak) get trotted on to the scene to clear things up for us. Thus, Fr. James Martin, SJ - a "prominent Jesuit," mind you! - proclaims Benedict's declaration on condoms to be a "game changer." (What exactly does "prominent Jesuit" mean? Prominent within the Jesuits? Within the Church? Or, having a few book deals and a familiar face with a collar beneath it?) FoxNews, at least, in an odd instance of really being fair and balanced acknowledges that not all theologians see it that way: Fr. Fessio - not called here a "prominent Jesuit" but I for one would like to see him and Martin arm-wrestle - says "nothing new has happened." John Haas and Germain Grisez (whose prominence is actually substantive and pertinent to the matter we're discussing, which is moral doctrine), both lament the confusion engendered by this unfolding of events.

And then there's I, who am neither prominent (alas!) nor a Jesuit (hooray!), but presume to try to add to this discussion within the small sphere of influence that I do (inscrutably) inhabit.

I wanted to urge a couple more points of consideration which - regardless of what the Pope actually intended to say - must shape our perception of this entire debate.

So, first, I want to make a point about language. Our impoverished capacity for nuance is contributing in an important way to this entire discussion. For one thing, there is the conflation of the notion of contraception with the tools which are often used to that end, but which are not bound inextricably to it. What I mean to say is that contraception is a moral object and not a (or several) material object(s). Thus, condoms are sometimes put to contraceptive use, and when this is the case, they may be spoken of as "contraceptives". However, they are not always "contraceptives", as in a situation when used between two men in an act of sodomy, an act to which the contraceptive end does not - and cannot ever - attain to the act. As such, I would propose another term which encompasses a broader meaning, namely prophylactic. If a condom is used in a situation to which the contraceptive end does not attain, for purposes of sanitation, then the condom is not a contraceptive at that point - it is, however, still a prophylactic. When, on the other hand, the contraceptive end attains - regardless of the intention of the individual - then, the prophylactic functions as a "contraceptive", whether a condom or an IUD or what have you. We need to be clear on this point, and I think it needlessly confusing to use the term "contraceptive" to describe the use of an object in an act to which the contraceptive purpose is irrelevant. This is regardless of whether the Pope's remarks actually do extent to cases when that end is relevant (as some have suggested they do, such as Father Lombardi, although I am skeptical whether the Pope meant to include such circumstances).

Once that bit of language is understand, we can begin to articulate meaningful distinctions on this issue. One could say that when a condom is used as a prophylactic but not as a contraceptive, it may be allowable per se.

Let's move on, then, to consider hypothetically whether the Pope's remarks can be taken in a broader way, to include scenarios of dual use for the prophylactic.

Now, as I mentioned in my early post on this matter, if the Pope is making such an argument, this is not "same old" theology and does represent a new turn in the discussion - at least, for the Pope, considering that this very issue was the subject of a commission at the Vatican a few years back which (significantly) never issued a concluding report. Nevertheless, there is a theological strain of argument that could make sense of the Pope's remarks even if they were taken to extend to heterosexual acts outside of marriage where a condom would be used to prevent the spread of HIV but also result in the prevention of conception.

Now, let us first note that this isn't a "double effect" argument per se, since contraceptive activity is inherently evil and certainly flows directly from the act with as much immediacy as the prophylactic function (it should also be always kept in mind that condoms are inefficient in achieving either end). But the argument would be that Humanae Vitae condemnation of contraception applies only to the bond of marriage; that is, since sex belongs in marriage, along with its two functions - the unitive and the procreative - then, outside of marriage we're already dealing with a disordered situation and the only effect that contracepting would have would be to perhaps increase the gravity of the situation.

An analogy could be drawn to the Church's Just War Doctrine, and its component of "proportional means." An aggressor in battle is bound to observe the rule of proportionality in order to maintain justice in its cause. Now, this only applies properly to situations in which the agent is capable of just action in the first place: only a legitimate State has the authority to wage war. Suppose an instance where an illegitimate agent undertakes to wage war. Here, the action undertaken already is illegitimate and disordered; in this case, whether the agent chooses to demonstrate proportional restraint is less consequential and somewhat a moot point. In such a case, demonstration of proportional use of force would be similar to what the Pope said about a male prostitute using a prophylactic to protect his partner: a step in the right direction, but a step taking place in a process which is already problematized by a higher level moral concern.

The gist of this would be in line with Fr. Lombardi's approach to this discussion: that the Pope is objecting the trivialization of sex that this whole line of discernment implies: that, in the context of sex being abused outside of its naturally ordered context (within a loving marriage that is open to new life), the use of condoms - and perhaps even the contraceptive use - is a matter of straining gnats while swallowing a camel. And if there's anything the media is good at doing for the sheeple of America, it's getting them to swallow a camel.

Again, I'm not entirely sure of the cogency of this approach. For example, I would argue that in the context outside of marriage, the rejection of contraception - remaining open to life, and abhoring the contraceptive function of prophylactics - would represent the same positive sort of step in the right direction as the use of a condom by a male prostitute infected with HIV. Note that the Pope said that part of this moral value was in the "acceptance of responsibility", which moral value is lost when the contraceptive end attains.

I won't go further on about this matter in this post, but I offer these considerations as another means of understanding what's at stake in this media circus. Let's bear these kinds of things in mind as the matter unfolds.

The Pope and Condoms

2010-11-20T13:09:00.007-05:00

UPDATE - (11/20/10 at 1545 EST): Professor Janet Smith, a moral theologian of some repute, seems to be taking basically the same tact on this as I have done below.

This is going to get ugly - you've been warned!

I originally titled this post The Object of an Objectionable Act - which I'll come back to. But I've changed the title since this is sort of a breaking story, and I figured I could enhance my web-footprint a bit (and also disrupt the misinformation campaign rapidly ensuing) with this more straight-forward title.

It seems like we've been through all this before. You remember the score. The Pope, on a plane flight, observes to some journalists that condoms are not the right approach to stopping the spread of AIDS. A Harvard don backs him up. Chagrined, mass media lets slip its mask and becomes pandemonium seething.

Well... here we go again.

Now, for anybody who has taken any time in studying moral theology, this whole situation wants a stiff whiskey and a staunch wall against which to bang one's head. But I'm going to try to pre-emptively wade into this matter and make some distinctions which are necessary for understanding what the Pope is - and is not - saying.

First things first: the story. A new book coming out recounts an interview between Papal pundit Peter Seewald and Papa Benedict. This is not the first time this pair have met; Seewald interviewed then Cardinal Ratzinger for his book God and the World. This book will likely sell a bit better, though, for two reasons: one, Ratzinger is now Pope and it is the first book of its kind; two, a comment from the book with which the media is having a field day.

Here's the quotation from a representative news story:

Journalist Peter Seewald, who interviewed Benedict over the course of six days this ummer [sic], revisited those comments [i.e., the ones from the plane] and asked Benedict if it wasn't "madness" for the Vatican to forbid a high risk population to use condoms.

"There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility," Benedict said.

But he stressed that it wasn't the way to deal with the evil of HIV, noting the church's position that abstinence and marital fidelity is the only sure way.

Now, let's tuck in, shall we?

First, note that the quotation itself is the only direct wording from the interview that is selected for the news story. The paraphrase which follows the longer quotation is likely to be passed over in most of the media's treatment of this matter - and the content of that paraphrase is a very important caveat for fully appreciating the moral issues at hand in this discussion. It must be noted that this is not a reversal of the Pope's earlier comments on the use of condoms in preventing the spread of HIV. The Pope understands the scientific evidence, that condom distribution has not been correlated to reduced frequency of infection, and in fact that their distribution can cause a spike in high-risk behavior. The Pope's quotation from this latest interview does not address the issue of social organization and the treatment of epidemics: he is speaking about individual moral choice and responsibility. This is a crucial point.

Nor is this latest remark a reversal of the Church's long-standing teaching on contraception and condoms in general, which are seen to be intrinsically evil. But here we need to make some distinctions. The confusion caused by the press in coming days will be largely due to the fact that people don't understand in the first place what the Church means by Her condemnation of contraceptives. So, let's look to the Catethicism of the Catholic Church.

CCC 2370 - quoting the encyclical Humanae Vitae - succinctly states that

'every action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible' is intrinsically evil" (emp. added).

The italicized text is important to our understanding. The dictum of moral theology is that a moral act is conditioned by the object of the act. This is not the "intention" - an important point, since intention is another of the sources of evaluation for the quality of a moral action and not to be conflated with the end of the act itself. Rather, the object (CCC 1751) "is a good toward which the will deliberately directs itself. It is the matter of a human act." This chosen object "morally specifies the act of willing" (CCC 1758) and, in the case of intrinsically evil actions, can never be chosen, is never ameliorated by the intention or the circumstances. In the case of contraception, the moral object is not reducible to the material and genital particularities, althought these tend to be bound up with the act: the contraceptive act is the one which chooses "to render procreation impossible."

The use of a condom, in and of itself, is not the greatest concern in this regard. The use to which the condom is put is essential. For the sake of example, a condom could be envisioned as taking part in the (already disordered and perverse) act of masturbation. Yet, it would be absurd to see the role of the condom in this case as substantially changing the nature of the moral action. It might add in degrees to the gravity of the act, according to how it shapes the perverse intention of the person doing it. But here, the condom becomes primarily a factor in the other two criteria of moral action, namely intention and circumstances, rather than being bound up with the object of the act. The condom is being used: but it's not, morally speaking, "the use of a condom."

From there, we step over into the moral situation with which the Pope is grappling in his interview: the case of a male prostitute who is himself infected or servicing an infected client. We have seen at least how a condom is not necessarily bound up with the object of the contraceptive act (which is intrinsically evil). Now, in the quotation from the Holy Father which I provided above, we don't see any explicit address of this issue. However, in the Associated Press article floating around out there, there is a common trope being used:

Benedict said that for male prostitutes — for whom contraception isn't a central issue — condoms are not a moral solution. But he said they could be justified "in the intention of reducing the risk of infection."

We the readers are left wondering whether this notion of contraception not being "a central issue" comes from something the Pope explicitly stated in the interview, or is material implied by the context in which the discussion took place. To my mind, this question is central: because, as far as I can see, it will determine the difference of whether we're talking about a condom being used or morally distinguished "condom use" (i.e., the contraceptive act).

I cannot put words in the Pope's mouth, nor have I read the book. I'm only trying to make sense of the burgeoning firestorm in the media. This situation wants clarity, but until we have it, I think we can at least direct the matter to the appropriate evaluative measures by means of hypothetical consideration.

I'd suggest that the AP account of the interview implies a context for the dicussion - perhaps an unspoken understanding about the moral "players" of the hypothetical situation - which took "male prostitutes" to mean "homosexual male prostitutes." Now, I offer this because it's really the only way I have of making sense of what the Pope might have meant - if he really said it - by saying that, for these folks, "contraception isn't a central issue." In male-to-female (vaginal) sexual relations, it would be very hard to see how the use of a condom doesn't translate into an instance of the contraceptive moral act. However, in homosexual relations - a perversion of the life-giving act of sex between a man and a woman - the condom is not bound up with the object of the act in the same way, as with the example of masturbation given above. In this case, there's not question of disrupting conception since conception is impossible. Thus, - in terms of individual action, which is the focus of the Pope's remarks (as distinct from social planning to combat an epidemic) - the choice of the male to use a condom could be the kind of "first step" toward "responsibility" the Pope acknowledges. Plenty of objections will be raised to this, and it really forms the kernel of a whole other discussion. Suffice to say for now that the condom in this situation is not part of the intrinsically evil act of contraception; rather, it is something impacting the circumstantial and intentional parts of the moral action of sodomy, which is already intrinsically disordered. On the finer points of this we can - and I imagine will - have further debate.

In the meantime, we will have to wait and see what clarification comes out about these comments - as surely some clarification must. If the Pope meant male prostitution in general... well, then I simply must join the droves of perplexed readers waiting with eyebrows raised. Regardless,though, of what may be forthcoming, it is essential for any understanding of this discussion to know ahead of time what the Church means in Her teaching about condoms and contraception, about the end of the sexual act and the problems of its disordering. These notions a little clearer in our minds, we will be better poised to make sense of whatever it is the Holy Father really did say to Peter Seewald, and therefore help give this issue the nuance it requires (which certainly will be wanting in the main-stream media's treatment).

Planes, Porn and Prestidigitatory Passenger Searches

2010-11-17T23:03:00.010-05:00

I love alliteration, what can I say?

Time was in this country when if you wanted an "enhanced pat-down", there was naught for it but $25 dollars and a shadowy venue on a side street. Now, it's the cost of a plane ticket, some obstinacy, a well-lit room, and an underpaid federal goon of the same sex. [I might digress here into how I can't reconcile this latter requirement with our Cultural Overlords' ever-engaged project of eliminating gender difference and identity. Perhaps soon an amended procedure will include a coin-toss as some point....]

Yes, I'm on about the recent media kerfuffle about the TSA's sexy new procedures. The "hand-sliding" methodology of the new technique has some passengers crying foul. As if naked body imaging weren't a privacy violation enough.

Now, on the surface of it, this is just another personal liberties hysteria, isn't it? I mean, we all want to be safe, don't we? We should all be expected to pay some price for our liberty.

Perhaps it's because I savor satire, but I must concede to appreciating a sort of irony in this whole situation. Because, back in the days of the Patriot Act, it seems that much of the same crowd that is now so up-in-arms was making just that argument that they're now rejecting as lunacy. And part of the argumentative strain, that this kind of search shouldn't be allowed without suspicion, of course begs the question of what engenders such suspicion. I can't help but wonder if, for many of these folks, that question isn't too easy to answer...

Nevertheless, the current protests have plenty of good arguments to go on. And I'm sure among the protesters are many who, like myself, have consistently rejected the whole mania of "added security measures" our country has been putting in place for fear that they might lead to profiling or, well, things like this.

The best arguments are just common sense. A recent editorialist in The Guardian put it nicely:

Listen to this: "My freely chosen bedmates and doctors are the only ones allowed to see my naked body or touch my genitalia." For a sane person in a sane country that's the ultimate in "no shit, Sherlock" statement. But not where I live.

Not the United States of America.

I would wholeheartedly agree if "freely chosen bedmates" were switched to the more sane "spouse," but for the time being I'll give due credit to the sanity which is there, rather than fixate upon the (significant) bit which is lacking.

The canard of "protection" that keeps getting trotted out is a laughable attempt at justification. What the above author calls "pointlessly superstitious security theatre," I call a childish sleight-of-hand - so much smoke and mirrors. If it comes right down to it, I'd rather take my chances with less draconian measures which leave the off-chance of a violation of my safety rather than the sure violation of my privacy which the current measures represent. I feel not at all assured that these new measures will likely ensnare a determined terrorist; rather, I see the likelihood of their being abuses as a much more real exigency. But these are trusted government employees! They're screened and undergo psychological batteries! Yes, like the military personnel at Abu Ghraib? Or - to anticipate the insensitive smart ass who would seek to strike the low blow against my argument - what about the priest pedophiles who abused children? It doesn't deflate my point - it proves it: screening processes fail. And I'll gladly admit that the problem in the Church evinces a similar social phenomenon as that in the military, i.e. that bureaucratic structures can easily become breeding grounds for corruption without the necessary balances of transparency and accountability - and virtue. (I also would add, though it is not essential to my point: at least with the Church the scandal stands against real motives of credibility that urge me to keep trusting Her divine constitution in spite of human failures; where are the proofs that would impel me to a similar fealty toward the government, I ask?)

It is simply too great a price to pay for liberty to subject to pornographic exploitation and what would, in any other context, more than meet the base definition of sexual harassment.

But, what else can they do? I mean, they have to do something! They can't just do nothing! Yes. Yes they can. I'm not being insensitive to the tragedy and travesty of 9/11 in saying this. But we're not honoring those folks' memories who were murdered that day by invading people's personal space in this way; actually, we're dishonoring them. We're giving those who would attack us a small victory in allowing one more invasion into the life we love.

Yes, we have a right to feel safe and to not have to fear when we travel, or simply when we get out of bed to go to work in the morning. The attack in 2001 violated this right and shook us into the understanding that we weren't so safe as we supposed. We have something to fear, it is true. It is not entirely irrelevant (and not the least irreverent, to my mind) to point out that we now can have some solidarity with the people who live, say, in Israel or in Iraq. Yes, we deserve better than to have to fear - so do they. But we're robbed of that, as they are. It sucks, no bones about it. But some factors are simply beyond our control: we only have certain choices left to us. And it is those choices about which we must be careful and considerate. It seems we're destined, at least for a time, to live in fear - it's not an unknown condition for a people. But I would much rather live in fear of a wily and unscrupulous (but thankfully limitedly capable) enemy than to live in fear of my own government...

Wouldn't you?

More Thoughts on Yuletide (of My Philosophy of Decking the Halls)

2010-11-14T14:00:00.012-05:00

Lo, the day is coming, blazing like an oven, when all the proud and all evildoers will be stubble, and the day that is coming will set them on fire, leaving them neither root nor branch, says the LORD of hosts.
Malachi 3:19

"The day is coming..." - these words from the first reading of today's Mass present a good jumping-off point for yet another discussion of due seasonal awareness in our existential encounter of the meaning of the Christmas season.

In the Church, for some weeks now, we have been looking toward the prophetic day, the adventus of Christ the King. Next week, we celebrate the Solemnity of Christ the King - the final Sunday in the Novus Ordo calendar of the ordinal Sundays following Pentecost. It is a celebration of arrival as well as of expectation: it is, in a sense, a nice microcosm of the whole meaning of the season of Advent which we enter the following week. We are at once joyous, but also restrained - penitential, sober, alert, watching. Watching for Christ to come again, in the consummation of time and the fulfillment of the Kingdom, and also watching with a different emphasis of attention Christ's daily arrivals in our lives as Baptised members of His Holy People.

Now, so far I am very much in agreement with the sort of philosophy propounded by many good Christian apologists on the correct posture of religious experience at the ending of the Church year: see, for example, this excellent resource. But I part ways - really, just a bit, although it might seem more pronounced - in terms of how we should approach the day-to-day experience of this restrained joy and anticipation.

I have taken a bit of flack this week for having already put up my Christmas tree. Now, it should be noted that, while I have placed the tree (a fake one, but nicely made) and hung it with lights (actually, they came pre-arranged on the branches), I am not going to regularly light the tree just yet. But while I'm easing into that, I will be lighting it before the recommended date given by FishEaters, December 24th. I want to deal with that recommendation here, as well as address some of the objections that I've taken against my having put up my tree "so early" - and I apologize if some of this will seem redundant to those who have read my other ruminations on this subject, but I will try to cast the matter in more precise terms here than I've done before.

So, on to the objections:

It's not even Thanksgiving yet!

Well, this can be dispatched with rather easily, I think. What is Thanksgiving, anyway? And why should it have any bearing on our understanding of the cosmic realities surrounding the revelation of the Son of God as Man? Thanksgiving is, in a sense, a Hallmark Holiday. It is a secular celebration tied in some ways to the tradition of harvest festivals, and useful insofar as that goes. But it is, on the other hand, an observance of an American heritage - largely imagined - of making friends with our displaced aborigines. In fact, there's something ironic in hearing people who disparage the secularization of the Christmas observance appealing to Thanksgiving as some sort of meaningful time-marker that ushers in the appropriate time of anticipation. It is, to say the very least, question begging: for those who object that I've put up my Christmas tree before Thanksgiving, I reply, "Why do you put up your Christmas tree after Thanksgiving? Or, more to the point, why do you put it up at all, whenever you do put it up?" And there's the rub. The why is the heart of the matter, so let's get at that, shall we?

It's not even Advent yet!

Now, we're getting a little closer to a meaningful discussion, as Advent does at least relate in a meaningful way to the matter at hand, a way that Thanksgiving does not. So, let's look at this one more closely. A first approach here is the same Socratic question with which I ended the last paragraph: "So, when do you put up your tree, and why? What does it mean?" Now, to this, there is the answer of FishEaters first of all, which situates the question in the meaning of the season of Advent:

The mood of this season is one of somber spiritual preparation that increases in joy with each day, and the gaudy "Christmas" commercialism that surrounds it in the Western world should be overcome as much as possible. The singing of Christmas carols (which comes earlier and earlier each year), the talk of "Christmas" as a present reality, the decorated trees and the parties -- these things are "out of season" for Catholics; we should strive to keep the Seasons of Advent holy and penitential, always remembering, as they say, that "He is the reason for the Season."

And so it is that FishEaters recommends putting up the tree on Christmas Eve - certainly not lighting it before that night. But, here, the argument is all non sequiturs: we haven't really identified why the trees go up at all, what lighting them is meant to symbolize to begin with. After all, any conclusions we derive about propriety of time-frame will depend upon this information. Thus, if the Christmas tree is somehow part of the commericalized secular abuse of Christmas, then we should want nothing to do with it at any time. There is, on the other hand, the notion of the Christmas Tree as a "baptized" symbol representative of Christ Himself: the tree anagogically associated with the Cross, the evergreen with His eternity, the lights with the kerygma directed to the conditions of the poor and lowly. But penitential preparation and expectation doesn't mean we hide Christ from our experience: we don't pretend during Advent that He's never come. [Indeed, the first half of Advent - and the foregoing weeks in the liturgical cycle - aim to prepare us for and focus on the Second Coming at the end of time. What does the tree have to do with that?]

But the symbolism of the tree, while indeed representing truths about the Person of Christ, has even richer meaning. The symbol includes its pagan connotations before the baptized meaning: the Norse and Germanic celebrations of Yule, the winter ritual of warding off death with symbols of life (the tree's vitality) and warding off dark and cold with warmth and light (the candles hung upon the boughs). Not just the symbol itself was baptized and given new meaning, but the Christmas event transforms these earlier associations as well. These pagan ideas - as symbolized in a tree - in a sense recapitulate the entire pagan ethos of pre-Christian expectation: those seeds of the Gospel that were implanted through natural law and the experience of nature. The tree here is meaningful not in its similitude to Christ, but in its difference: it represents our wants and desires for light in darkness, warmth when we are cold, life that escapes or cheats the ever ominous threat of death. We lose this meaning somewhat in our technological age, when winter doesn't mean the threat of starvation or exposure, the testing of our harvest and our hearth against the ferociousness of a fallen world. G.K. Chesterton's reflection from The New Jerusalem puts this meaning quite nicely: "Anyone thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate." The effect of all this is that the tree becomes part and parcel of our expectation, our anticipation, even our somberness: the tree reminds us of Christ, but it is not Christ. The lights combat the darkness, but they do not conquer it as He will do when He comes. It is a species of logical fallacy to suppose that the tree must necessarily distract us from this difference. The notion of holding off on the use of the tree as decoration ironically gives it more power than it deserves, rather exalts it instead of "putting it in its proper place." It all depends on what the tree means and why we put it up when we do. If we see the tree only as an embodiment of Christ and as some sort of panacea for the winter blues, then I agree that it has no place in Advent or before. But if it is, instead, a reminder of our own feebleness, a symbol of the futility and fragility of our battle with darkness and death, then it can very truly have a proper place throughout the entire darkening part of the year. In the one approach, the culmination of the tree's meaning is when its lights are hung on the night of Christ's arrival, demonstrative of the light he brings; in the other, the culmination is when the tree's lights fade and our attention redirects to the child in the manger that was once empty, His own ethereal light and power making a joke in the darkest time of year of our own weak dwimmer-craft.

But... the department stores! The commercialization of it all! Doesn't this give in to that cheapening of Christmas, and shouldn't we as good Christians fight against that trend of secularism?

Once again, this is typical of the approach that FishEaters seems to take along with many well-meaning preachers. I reiterate here that we run the risk of mistaking, a la post hoc ergo propter hoc, a common result for an inevitable one - or, in the terms of philosophy, we give perhaps sufficient cause the more potent meaning of necessary cause. As my defense against this objection, I'll appeal to the secondary players in the Christmas drama: John the Baptist, Herod the Great, and the Oriental Magi. As a preliminary, though, I present another Socratic question: "What should we do?" It's all very well and good to grumble about the commercialization of Christmas and determine that we will not participate, but all our efforts and words spent upon this determination can sometimes distract us from the pressing question of what we ought to be doing instead. Many people I speak with on this issue have very good reasons for rejecting the culture's observances at this time of year, but they're much less salient about having reasons for their own practices. Don't we concede too much to the culture, don't we let them have their way with Christmas, by simply stopping our ears and closing our eyes and running around all gloomy and disgruntled, "tsk"-ing in the check-out aisles and frowning at the office decorations?

Enter the Gospel players. John the Baptist is the figure of knowledge about the meaning of Advent and Christmas; Herod the figure of missing the point; and the Magi the figure of those who half-understand, who are charmed by the signs and search for meaning. Take any one of these away, and you lose something of the power of the drama. There are plenty of Magi in our world today who are, as the Biblical Magi did, running into Herod and being put on a wrong track. Who will announce, as the Angel did, the error of Herod's ways? Who will warn them off the mistaken path and usher them into the true recognition of the mystery? It must be we who do so, taking John the Baptist as our model.

To put it succinctly, it is precisely because Christmas has been commercialized and demeaned by our culture that we must become more knowing, more articulate, more robust in the manifestation of its true meaning and power. If we don't do it as a sign for the world, we must at the very least do it for ourselves and not succumb to pride. We can't think we're unaffected by all of what's happening around us from mid-November until December 25th, and then suddenly ending. When we return home after a saccharine-soaked swim in our cultural soup, we must have cures for it. On the one hand, we can drive past the decorated trees on mainstreet and pass the Salvation Army Santa Clauses and retreat behind our door with a grumbled "Bah humbug," seeking to purify our minds entirely from all this untimely joy. But it seems to me to be just as effective to put up our own tree, with our own meaning and intent, and to allow ourselves to be struck by the difference of it all. The tree can serve as a true herald who disabuses us of Herod's lies. We should keep the season robustly and vitally within our own homes, very aware of the meaning behind all that we do. Doing so will at once highlight the vapidness of the culture's indulgences and soberly remind us what is being missed - it might even spur us on to find ways of expressing the distinction to the world (such as writing a blog post, for example). Are we giving in to the culture more by maintaining our own observance with added vitality rather than by simply retreating from it all?

And so goes my attempt at justifying my seemingly untimely tree. I welcome discussion, even debate, on the matter. Because, for me, what we do and when we do it are less important questions than why we do them at all. I respect the person who puts up his tree on Christmas Eve, provided he has good reasons for it. It puts Christmas ornaments and decorations in the proper place to realize them as manipulable symbols that have meaning according to their use. They are not ex opere operato fixtures that necessarily add to or detract from our religious awareness. Rather, they are expressions of our awareness - or of our ignorance - to the extent that we use them deliberately and use them well.

It's Just Not Cricket

2010-11-11T12:59:00.007-05:00

In a schoolyard, a game of Simon Says. A boy stands in the middle of a circle of classmates, each of whom has one foot raised in the air, a hand on the head, and eyes tightly shut.

"Open your eyes," the boy says. None do. "Simon says, open your eyes." And their eyes are opened.

The boy, a shrewd young man who is perhaps feeling a little too haughty in his position of arbitrary power, has begun to grow rather bored with the game. To his right sit another half-dozen or so kids who have gotten caught doing or not doing the sundry activities commanded, but none from real inattentiveness: most have deliberately thrown the game to mix things up a bit, to gain a chorus of appreciative laughter and to reinforce the idea that this is fun, after all, what they're doing. But the illusion has lost its power for the boy who is Simon. He is no longer entertained: he sees the absurdity of it all. And so, he contrives his own way to have fun.

In a yawning sort of way, he says matter-of-factly, "Aiighh-ooohaayysmm, put down your foot." Two of the children around him stand down. He points triumphantly, "Ha! I didn't say Simon says!"

"Yes, you did!" Even those who were wise to the ruse feel empathy for the injustice, because they had been as unsure in keeping their feet raised as their fellows had been in putting them down.

"No, I didn't," Simon shouts back, "I yawned. I never said 'Simon says.'" And he smugly folds his arms. Defeated by his certainty, the losers slink off to sit in the row of rejects, muttering under their breath. And, hearing them, another inspiration strikes him.

"Simonssaysdont put-your-foot-down," he mumbles, quickly, with the flattest of intonations, but carefully enunciating the last few words. The remaining three contestants lower their raised feet, and Simon raises his arms in victory above his head. "Ha! I said don't! You didn't hear me, but I said it! I said don't! You're all out! I get to be Simon again," he finishes, turning to the gaggle seated nearby, appealing to them for a new round.

But no one stirs. Eyes all around him aim arrows of animosity.

"It's not fair," one boy complains. "It doesn't make sense if we can't understand you."

"But it doesn't make sense, anyway," Simon tries to explain, wondering to himself how they cannot have been equally disenchanted with the stupidity of the game before his innovations made it interesting again.

"We'll play again," offers another boy, but caveats in a sinister tone: "Only, you can't be Simon."

"Hey, no!" Simon pouts. "If nobody is left at the end, the same person goes again! That's the rule!" Granted, he said to himself, we never had to use that rule: but that was with the old way, the stupid way. But his appeal does not silence the malcontent around him: the other children have seen that rules can be played with, can be improvised.

And so the circle gathers once more around a new demagogue, but Simon goes off to sulk. He has learned a lesson, today; indeed, they all have - a terrible and important lesson about politics and laws, about despotism and democracy, and about the philosophy of rule-making and rule-breaking.

In the news recently, there's been quite a dust-up over an e-book recently posted for purchase on Amazon.com. The work, The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-Lover's Code of Conduct, was of course bound to be provocative. The title alone is enough to make me recoil in disgust; I have no need even imagining what would be its lurid contents. The concept is despicable, and it is a sign of the times in which we live.

But the outcry about the book strikes me as frankly ironic. Perhaps this is some of my cynicism about our culture, but the calls for Amazon to remove the listing and to censure the author strike me as simply inconsistent.

The manufacturers of our culture are constantly doing away with taboos and norms. The popular culture trajectory for the past half-century has seemed to be simply searching out those things which "simply are not done," and doing them. And, having done, promoting them. And having promoted them, normalizing them. And having normalized them, legalizing them. And having legalized them, turning with the same attitude of open-mindedness and tolerance to the things which used to be normal (or normative) and persecuting those instead.

What logical argument can the doyens of our ethical elite possibly mount against this new book, I wonder? How must the author feel hearing their outcry, the same voices that have always and forever been crying out for more license and liberty and the stripping away of taboos, now warning, "No, you can't do that, mate; it's just not cricket"? They have mumbled their commands; he could have sworn he'd heard "Simon Says." And now this sudden changing of the game? And the fact is, when you get right down to it, that his critics have no argument: many of them, at least. They have sown a philosophy of rules and are now reaping its fruits. Isn't the present author simply taking a page out of their book and asserting a strategy they used in the past to make what wasn't done suddenly okay to do?

This is not to say that the author is ultimately right. Of course, he isn't. He's wrong according to the natural law: but they've denied that. He's wrong according the Church's law: but they've abolished that. He's wrong according to men's laws: but they've changed those before. And he's wrong according to cultural sensitivities and mores and commonly held values: but isn't he simply reshaping them as his present critics have so laudably reshaped them in the past?

It's a sad, silly state of affairs. It's the state of affairs that moralists and preachers have warned about for years and years. But that's a slippery slope, they were told. "It'll never come to that: that's simply not done; it's just not cricket." But it came to that, and then went past. And then another sticking point, another event horizon, a place at which we'd surely never arrive - see it retreating now in the rear view mirror? Every voice of caution, every prophet who stood to withstand the tyrannical march of progress and social experimentation has been mowed down by their tanks: the academic hierarchy, the Hollywood execs, the bought-off politicians. And the blood that soaks the battleground of the culture wars cries out as eloquently as the blood of Abel: "I told you so."

The lesson of the schoolyard is the lesson today. The author might be the loser today, he's waiting on the sidelines. The present Simons one day may learn how rules can turn against you when once you've shown how to turn them; they may find that their game is suddenly somebody else's.

Watch Out for the Goose Droppings

2010-11-09T21:19:00.004-05:00

It's been a too-long hiatus here at the blog for me, and I'm going to make an attempt at a comeback of sorts. I've too often made myself a liar by promising levels of consistency and subsequently failing to live up to them, so you will have no such oaths from me today. I'm going to try, that's all.

I'm back today to riff on an old theme with a new variation: cheap, maybe, but the same thoughts preoccupy me this year with the same intensity as in autumns past, and there's something to be said for that. I've written on this same matter in other places: here and here. Personally, I quite like what I wrote there, so you should go read those earlier thoughts if you have the time. Or do not, that's just as well. Anyway, on to the matter at hand...

I stepped in goose droppings today.

In the past week or two, Marquette's campus has been invaded by a flock - maybe several flocks, I don't know (how can one tell these things?) - of geese. Now, I'll admit straight away that I don't know about geese. I don't know why they're here, where they've come from, where they are eventually going. I don't know whether they're flying south from climes that are growing colder to places where it's warm, or whether they're flying north from... well, as I said, I don't know where the hell geese come from. But for my purposes, it doesn't really matter. It is enough for me that there are here, now, on my campus, geese - geese that weren't here before, that were someplace else. The point is that they are here - and they're here n o w. Since I've been at this campus, I've been able to walk its breadth without having to watch out for goose droppings. I could cut across a space of lawn as easily as take the pavement and had not to worry about a suspicious smell lingering around me for the rest of the day. But I can no longer. Now is different than before.

Now is different. I might have noticed, what with it getting colder and darker and leaves falling off trees. In fact, I have noticed - I picked apples a few weeks back, and I've lit a pumpkin pie candle in my apartment because it seems fitting now. Fitting now in a way that it was not before.

But today, I stepped in goose droppings, absenting my attention for just long enough from the treacherous trek to class so that the calamity caught me unawares. I sorted it out quickly enough with a spot of wet turf and what probably looked from afar like a serviceable impersonation of a chicken sorting through a cow-pie for worm larvae. But the event piqued my attention: the change that has been happening all around, that I've noticed but not really attended to became suddenly very real and very important. Where did all these geese come from? Why are they here? What does it all mean?

In ancient times, seers and prognosticators examined the droppings of birds to find cosmic importance. Today, I joined their company. I had been inattentive this autumn to the "end times" manifestation that the Church rather heavy-handedly observes in these days of the liturgical cycle each year. As I wiped the bottom of my shoe today I thought of a line from the Gospel for the coming weekend: "And awesome sights and mighty signs will come from the sky" (Luke 21:11b). Now, surely our Lord had something other in mind than goose droppings. The meaning attains, though. The ancient augers weren't a scientific bunch, but they noticed that birds migrated and that the patterns of their travel meant patterns in their diets (and thus in their droppings). And they tried to make sense of these patterns and to forecast important events. They were inspired by birds' adaptive nature and the way that they modify their lives to fit the seasons. We should have some of the same inspiration.

Now is different than before, but we might not live as though it is. We might not even think differently. But the Church - She who reads the signs of the times so much more reliably than the ancient bird-watchers - the Church wants us to think differently in these days. She wants us to tune in to the eschatological meaning breathed by the Creation surrounding us. Things are here that weren't here before. And things that were here have gone missing.

We tread daily over leaves dead on the ground, but how often does it spur us to think of the bodies that are the dust beneath the leaves: the bodies of loved ones passed on to judgment, who may suffer now in purgation for the sins of their flesh and for want of our prayers? We step around goose droppings, but do we stop to reflect on what it means that such things have suddenly come - out of the clear blue sky - as were not here just a few weeks ago?

Now, it may be objected that this is a fine reflection of the aptness of the seasons of the year to the calendar of the Church, but what about those living in different climates? Well, for those folks - as well as for us who are lucky enough to have nature's help - the Church and culture have provided other ways of marking time. [Of the parishes that elect to decorate their sanctuaries at this time of year with pumpkins and cornucopias, I will not speak for fear of opening a can of worms. Come to think of it though, I think a can of worms could very effectively enhance the sorts of decoration we see so much of during this season: a rotting pumpkin, perhaps, next to a skull, seated nicely in a basket of dirt near a side altar?] But for those of us who wish to attend more deeply to the import of these times, there's plenty to go around: the ember days of September, the building apocalyptic vision of the readings throughout October, the Dies Irae and other mementi mori during November. And from Culture, we have ciders and mulled drinks and other harvest foods, and the hanging of lights and greens in our homes. The point is that, whether we can observe the trajectory of the death of the year in our climate or not, we do well to enhance our experience however we can of the immediacy and immanence of the eschaton.

Finally, one might ask why it's good to notice these things? Why the attention to change, to the ephemeral quality of life, to decay and death? Why the gloom and doom? Well, simply: because it's the only way to understand Christmas. And that is what the Church, in her wisdom, has set this pattern in place to do: to help guide us gradually and consistently into a deeper experience of Christ's arrival in our lives: in the past, in the present, and at the end of time. Unless we appreciate the cold, we cannot feel the warmth he brings; unless we enter into the darkness, we cannot see the brilliance of his light; unless we witness the harvest, we will not feel so compelled in our labors to bear fruit for the gathering that will one day force us to give a full account of our profitability.

Now is different than before. These days are not entirely like the ones that have preceded them: much has passed away from them, and some things have arrived unexpectedly. And the whole importance for us is that those days before and these days now are all leading to a point: that day - that day of the prophets, the day of reckoning, the day of wrath, the day that will dissolve the world into ashes - the day when Our Lord appears. Ecce, venit.

Watch where you step.

Even His Own Life

2010-09-07T12:12:00.008-04:00

We live in a very sentimental age. I'm mired in the muck of it from day to day, and mostly grin and bear it, although many an encounter could easily enough prompt me to hold forth here on the matter. I've been a very lazy blogger this year, preoccupied with other business and expert in making excuses for neglecting this organ of mission. But once in a while, a homilist will annoy me so greatly that I feel positively compelled to write something in response - so any faithful readers who continue to watch here for some kind of update can always pray for the certain provocation that a bad sermon will provide.

This Sunday at Mass, Our Lord in the Gospel gives one of those hard-sayings that astonish disciples and halt us in our tracks:

If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. - Luke 14:26

Now, the most interesting thing in this brief saying to my nerdy sensibilities is its structure.

In the Greek text, there's a turn of phrase before the last item on the list - his own life - which is rendered in the NAB translation as even. Even, of course, gets the job done, but there's an emphatic weight that is sort of lost to us unless the one proclaiming the Gospel really nails that word. The fact is that the Greek phrasing does contain an adverb meaning "even", but that its situation amongst a conjunction and a particle make it a very emphatic, very insistent "even." It's a "moreover" even, a "yes, even" (as the RSV renders the phrase).

An illustration might help us get deeper into it. Another Lukan use of this phrase can be found in the moreover in the 28th verse of Chapter 21 in Acts. The Jews from Asia are bringing accusations against Paul:

Men of Israel, help! This is the man who is teaching men everywhere against the people and the law and this place; moreover he also brought Greeks into the temple, and he has defiled this holy place.

Now, observing the effect of the "moreover" in this sentence, we can see that it is an obvious signal for a particular kind of argument: namely, the a fortiori, the argument that builds up from weaker to stronger reasons and ends by emphasizing the strongest evidence. This is a kind of argument found throughout the Scripture: recall the place where Christ compares the goodness of human fathers in giving good gifts to their children in order to highlight how "much more so" the Father in Heaven will give good gifts to the persevering supplicant.

Well, the a fortiori is in full operation in the passage from this week's Gospel as well. And this is where the bad homily and sentimentality comes in.

Good-natured modern folks are often guilty of a very blithe kind of altruism. It's a dressed-up aping of the virtue of humility that forgets the self rather than transcends the self, and - in an ironic solution - ends by disallowing self-transcendence because of that very forgetfulness. How to better illustrate what I mean?

Let's look at this reading as an example. Now, a good modern preacher's first approach to a reading should always be a response to a "concern." What is the concern, the felt need of the community, the point of friction or challenge, that a particular pericope pinpoints? The bad homilist I have in mind from this weekend was, emphatically, not a bad preacher - he responded directly to the most obvious felt need of his congregation in engaging this passage. What I will be taking issue with here is the nature of that need, what it means for modernity, and how the fact of feeling it ought to become to focal point for the preacher's sermon. The preacher in this case focused on why Our Lord demands such terrible things as that we hate our mom and dad, and oh isn't that terrible? He succeeded, I suppose, in making some sense of the matter, but he left out the main part: the denial of self to which all this ordered and from which all this stems.

Admittedly, a modern listener is jarred by the admonition to hate anything at all coming from Our Lord's mouth in the first place - and further discomfited by the specific direction given that it's our own parents, siblings, spouses, and children that we must hate in order to follow the call of discipleship. By the time the argument spins round - a fortiori - to the emphatic call to hate even one's own life, it glances off. In a strange way, the moral and ethical self-consciousness of this Gospel's hearers swallows the hardest part of this saying most easily: we can almost imagine the congregant saying, "Well, the call to deny self I'm used to; I can do that, sure, and who does that hurt but me? But how can I hate me dear old mum?!"

It's the same sort of distaste that creeps into our perception when Christ generically addresses his Mother as "Woman." (Of course, this is not so generic as it seems on the surface, but to discuss that here would be too long a digression.) We often get another hint of the problem of sentimentality when people talk about or teach the "law of love." How many times have you heard someone interpret the saying, "Love your neighbor as yourself" or draw the inference from it that we're to love our neighbor MORE than our very selves? Now, there's a drawing toward truth in this inference, but the fact is that most of the time its utterance is too easy, too glib, and devoid of depth or meaning. It's a sentimental altruism, a sort of stoic generosity. We swallow the hard pill of self-denial (in theory) and suddenly find it's not so hard anyway, because gosh isn't it swell to be so loving and selfless and all?

But the a fortiori will not abandon its strength, and finally we must confront its deeper signification: in this saying, in the law of love itself, in every place where Our Lord tells us without confusion that there's a "better way" of reading His message. It does no good to reconcile ourselves to the hardness of His words if we simply throw ourselves against them without discernment of the meaning of the pain. What is the difficulty? What do we understand from this hard saying? Why is it hard - and what does the challenge mean for us?

Well, I'm for reading the Gospel as a whole, and for the answer to this paradoxical question, I'm going to turn to an ulikely source. Whether intentional for this purpose or not by the Church authorities who constructed the lectionary, I think the Holy Spirit offers a solution to the problem of this Gospel in the reading situated before it in the liturgy: the section from Paul's letter to Philemon.

In verses 15 and 16, Paul gives a very beautiful rationale for the slave Onesimus's temporary absence from the community to which Paul is returning him:

Perhaps this is why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back for ever, no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother, especially to me but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord.

Now, I don't think I take undue liberty with this text if I argue it to be an intepretive text for the Gospel of the day. Paul has given us a rubric, a hermenuetic if you will, for understanding what happens when we "give away" something to the Lord's will and service: we get it back, a hundred-fold.

I don't see this as a liberty with the text because of Our Lord's own words to this effect in a different Gospel passage, which bears a resemblance to the "hard sayings" given this week by Luke: "And every one who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name's sake, will receive a hundredfold, and inherit eternal life" (Matthew 19:29). (Another interesting note is the proximity in both Gospels of this saying to the one that "the first shall be last, and the last shall be first".)

Our Lord is making a radical proposal demanding a real trust on the part of the disciple. There was not so much confusion about this for the Apostles themselves: they had literally left family, fields, and all manner of other things behind, and eventually followed Christ even to death.

This is not a sentimental suggestion about merely being willing to walk away, but a challenge to put our actions in line with our words - and if not our external actions, our internal ones. There's nothing stopping a single disciple from fully renouncing all that he's been given in this life, today, by an internal act. For those familiar with the method of Saint Louis de Montfort's consecration to Our Lady, you might recognize in this something akin to where de Montfort speaks about "giving up" even our own intentions and concerns of intercessory prayer, and relinquishing them to Our Lady. In fact, we don't really give them up, but we begin with that total dedication, that total commitment to her, and accept our own intercession - even our own will - back as gift.

Why is sentimentality the enemy? Because sentimentality forgets that the "giving up of ourselves" which we find so easy, in contrast to the difficulty of denying our loved ones, is not a real giving up. We're taking refuge in the things we love, and the very pleasure we have in loving them becomes a consoling balm. We forget that what we struggle with in the saying about hating mother, father, sister, brother is the pronounal reference of these: they are abstract terms, situated primarily in our own relation: it's MY mom, MY dad, MY sister, MY brother, MY spouse, MY kids. And that's why the a fortiori drives so hard at the self: it's getting after the MY. All of those things which are MINE must first be severed from my ultimate desires in order that the ME may follow. Contrarywise, if we truly accomplish this abandonment of self - of all our desires, hopes, dreams, pains, sorrows, loves, wishes - into the Lord's service as perfect disciples... well then of necessity all of the things which were MINE become HIS along with my very self. And the new point of reference for all relating to the things which might have been MINE is now centered in Christ: if I love them, it's primarily because they're His; if I deny them, it's ultimately because I'm His.

Once again, and important to remember, the long road of martyrdom and some external act to finalize and concretize this commitment is not our immediate concern. No, the Cross is ours to carry today, and every moment of prayer affords us an opportunity of total abandonment, of relinquishment, of renunciation. This is a hard saying indeed. Will we, today, "hate" these things and give them away? Will we, that is, deny them unless and except they are His? Will we accept them only as return from Him, and not as already given? Will we love them only when they come back to us through their being His and our being His together? And when sentimental love begins to ache in our heart, will we tear our heart away and place it within His own pierced heart, never to beat again or to love again unless in perfect harmony with His?

The a fortiori does not give up its strength. We can't stop at moreover.

Christian Views on Homosexuality Deemed 'Hate Speech' by Rights Agency

2010-06-30T19:57:00.001-04:00

Trying out yet another module that will let me blog from across the web. Just a test, no need for concern. The contents of the article, on the other hand...

Christian Views on Homosexuality Deemed 'Hate Speech' by Rights Agency - International - Catholic Online

Roots in the Furrow

2010-06-28T11:40:00.010-04:00

Now hollow fires burn out to black,
And lights are guttering low:
Square your shoulders, lift your pack,
And leave your friends and go.

Oh never fear, man, nought's to dread,
Look not to left nor right:
In all the endless road you tread
There's nothing but the night.
A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad LX

There are occasional phrases in the New American Bible that make me wince. This Sunday contained one of them.

In the Gospel passage selected for this week's reading, the rendering of the first verse (Lk. 9:51) reads: "When the days for Jesus’ being taken up were fulfilled, he resolutely determined to journey to Jerusalem...." Omnis traductor traditor, the saying goes. The Greek phrase in this verse describing Jesus' determination is idiomatic, and rendered literally in the Latin of the New Vulgate: "Et ipse faciem suam firmavit, ut iret Ierusalem." Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem.

Now, the Gospel selection chosen in the lectionary at first glance seems a hodge-podge of events and sayings. But there is an intrinsic unity that argues for interpreting the verses from 51 through 62 as a coherent pericope, exactly as the lectionary has it. This unity, however, does not show forth so clearly in the New American translation - hence my wincing.

The first section of this passage is about Christ's determination to set out on his journey to Jerusalem, where he will undergo his passion. Immediately following this, we are told that Jesus is rejected by a Samaritan village, and that Christ rebukes the indignation of his followers. Luke deliberately chooses these events to show Christ's resolution to become the Suffering Servant, and to foreshadow his rejection by his own people. Finally, we have several sayings on discipleship which, placed into the context of this foreboding doom, take on a much weightier significance. Discipleship means rejection by the world (v. 58); it means an eschatological worldview of mortification and attentiveness to the last things of man (v. 60); and it means unwavering and unswerving commitment (v. 62). This last condition, encapsulated in the saying, "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God," is a literary recapitulation of the idiom with which Luke begins the passage: Jesus "sets his face" toward Jerusalem. He looks toward the city of destiny, and he never looks back. Luke displays Christ first exemplifying the words he is about to preach. As Jesus looks toward his trial in Jerusalem, so the disciple must not look to what is left behind once having determined to follow in Christ's path.

Discipleship begins with baptism. Now, the infant baptism ritual can be a very tidy and sanitary affair. Pretty white dresses, adorned with lace; pictures; the inevitable tiresome jokes from the minister about the baby's reaction to the water, like it's something the parents haven't seen at every bath-time: all of this can make us lose sight of the terrible magnitude of this sacrament. Dying with Christ, and rising to new life with him: yet not so early the final rising to glory, but rather rising to the life of discipleship, to the toilsome weight of a lifelong cross. Easy and light though his yoke and burden are with grace to help us, this is no mean undertaking. A child is marked on that day with the sign of the cross: he is marked for execution, for rejection by the world and for a sign that he will have no stake in its pleasures; he is marked like a criminal to be hunted by the world, the flesh, and the devil until an hour not of his choosing, when his fugation should end.

No, discipleship isn't easy. And if we find that, for us, it is - then, maybe this week's Gospel calls us to consider how firmly our face is set toward our final destination, whether we ever swerve in the plowing of our furrow for the Lord's great harvest.

There are many roots in the way of our plow, roots cast up by the seeds of sin and ignorance. Everyday the news reveals how much more the world has been overgrown with the destructive weeds of modernity, and if we do not feel our work getting harder with each sunrise, that might be a sign to us that we're not going about it with enough vigor.

I remember hearing once that ancient Christian art used to represent the plow as a Cross. It's an interesting carrying on of the Old Testament prophecy that words and sheilds should, in the Messianic age, be beaten into hooks and plowshares. It gives an added depth to the fact of the Cross being our only weapon in this world: a weapon by which to sow and reap rather than to maim and kill.

The harvest needs laborers. Elections coming up, the economy in shambles, social justice being compromised each day for money or power or just plain lazyness: plenty of soil that needs to be upturned; plenty of roots in the way. We have, of course, just the tool for the job. But how well do we use it?

Cutting Through | Register Exclusives | NCRegister.com

2010-06-18T09:33:00.001-04:00

Testing out some blogging capabilities with this, but it’s a good article to check out.

Cutting Through | Register Exclusives | NCRegister.com

The Distributist's Bookshelf: G.K. Chesterton's What's Wrong With The World

2010-05-13T07:46:00.002-04:00

What's Wrong With The World by G.K. Chesterton. ♦♦♦♦ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994).
200 pp.

"I have called this book 'What Is Wrong with the World?' and the upshot of the title can be easily and clearly stated. What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right."
- from the first chapter, The Medical Mistake

In 1910, G.K. Chesterton presented to the world this "thundering gallop of theory" because, as he put it in the Dedication, "politicians are none the worse for a few inconvenient ideals." The ideals which he presented for the consideration of both politicians and the man-in-the-street are as provocative and challenging today as they were when the book was first published.

Chesterton divided his book of impractical politics into categories addressing the three major subsets of any polis: men, women, and children. These categories comprise the three central sections of the book: "Imperialism, or the Mistake about Man"; "Feminism, or the Mistake about Woman"; and, "Education, or the Mistake about the Child". Like bookends to these varied discussions, Chesterton addresses in the first section "The Homelessness of Man" and recapitulates in the fifth and final section with "The Home of Man".

Apart from the figures of the man, woman, and child within society, three other characters figure into Chesterton's examination of modern society: Jones, the average man in the street, and his old mortal enemies, Hudge and Gudge, representing the liberal political aristocracy and the conservative respectively. Chesterton introduces the machinations of Hudge and Gudge in section one, demonstrating how their constant give-and-take about what to do with Jones only ends up disenfranchising and alienating Jones from the State which is as much his as it is theirs.

Hence, the homelessness of Jones. Hudge and Gudge, being practical men, set aside "idealism" in order to scrutinize the problem of Jones's poor situation and come up with a practical solution. Hudge builds tenement houses and bustles Jones into them in order to get him out of the ghetto, but his ideal charity ward degenerates into the slum of the modern welfare state. Gudge, reacting against Jones, repudiates the slums with vigor, but soon convinces himself - in support of his indignation - that Jones was better off where he was before and ought to have been left alone in his poor state. And Jones is left to choose between the poverty of abandonment and the poverty of degradation. "[T]he mistakes of these two famous and fascinating persons arose from one simple fact," Chesterton says: namely,

that neither Hudge nor Gudge had ever thought for an instant what sort of house a man might probably like for himself. In short, they did not begin with the ideal; and, therefore, were not practical politicians.

When, in his final section, Chesterton returns to Hudge's and Gudge's parsimonious practical politics, he proposes a theory which should give modern readers pause as they contemplate the binary political calculations to which we are reduced every election day:

And now, as this book is drawing to a close, I will whisper in the reader's ear a horrible suspicion that has sometimes haunted me: the suspicion that Hudge and Gudge are secretly in partnership. That the quarrel they keep up in public is very much of a put-up job, and that the way in which they perpetually play into each other's hands is not an everlasting coincidence. [...] I do not know whether the partnership of Hudge and Gudge is conscious or unconscious. I only know that between them they still keep the common man homeless.

The lack of idealism resulting in this age-old conflict also gives rise to the specific problems relating to men, women, and children. In the case of Man, the ideals of patriotism, comradeship, of self-rule and equality, give way to another poisonous philosophy, one which manifests itself in Imperialism and Social Engineering. Chesterton rails in one instance against the obsession with "hygienics" which was in vogue in his day, but we can easily see in this instance hints of our own current welfare projects: the tyrannical war against personal choice of lifestyle and health, the removal of table salt from restaurants, etc. Chesterton boils it down into what he calls "the huge modern heresy of altering the human soul to fit its conditions, instead of altering human conditions to fit the human soul."

In the case of Woman, the ideal of the domestic woman, Queen of her domain, gives way to a lesser ideal with the ironic pretense of trying to achieve something greater. The ideal of Woman becomes en-masculated and adopts ideals meant for men, which only serves to degrade the potential of women. A specific instance Chesterton uses here is the example of women's suffrage. One might take exception to his particular characterization, but one cannot deny the veracity behind his observation of the philosophy underlying the suffragist movement.

[T]here has happened a strange and startling thing. Openly and to all appearance, this ancestral conflict has silently and abruptly ended; one of the two sexes has suddenly surrendered to the other. By the beginning of the twentieth century, within the last few years, the woman has in public surrendered to the man. She has seriously and officially owned that the man has been right all along; that the public house (or Parliament) is really more important than the private house; that politics are not (as woman had always maintained) an excuse for pots of beer, but are a sacred solemnity to which new female worshipers may kneel; that the talkative patriots in the tavern are not only admirable but enviable; that talk is not a waste of time, and therefore (as a consequence, surely) that taverns are not a waste of money.

Thus, according to Chesterton, the modern Woman has abandoned her role of the Universalist, the Queen of a much larger domain within the domestic household, for an ancillary role in the much smaller domain of the larger State.

Finally, in the case of the Child, Chesterton observes that modern education has gone wrong by trading in the ideals of Tradition and Authority for trendy scientism and novelty. He says, "It ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school to-day the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself." In education, says Chesterton, there's a certain "need for narrowness," a discernment. The modern educator dissembles the fact that he is indoctrinating youth by indoctrinating them with the firmest and most stifling dogma that was ever known: namely, the impossibility of dogmatic fact. And so the modern educator abandons "the true task of culture," which is "not a task of expansion, but very decidedly of selection — and rejection. The educationist must find a creed and teach it." This is an inescapable practical fact; the educator, whether he would or no, instills fundamental attitudes about the world into his student, which take the form of a practical creed in discerning facts about the universe. Chesterton simply suggests that the broadest of such attitudes - which also happen to be the oldest, classical postures - ought to be the ones used.

To the Distributist reader today, some of Chesterton's examples and the exact issues he chooses for debate may seem antiquated. But his project of discernment, and his fundamental distinction about the practicality of idealism is an ageless sentiment, and one which ought to be brought to every debate about politics today. Every Distributist should have this work on his shelf and return to it often, in order to absorb the spirit of that project into his own worldview, to begin viewing the world as Chesterton did - with clarity and insight, and with a solidaristic love for Jones.

Who Is My Neighbor?

2010-05-03T22:39:00.006-04:00

Now the whole parable and purpose of these last pages, and indeed of all these pages, is this: to assert that we must instantly begin all over again, and begin at the other end. I begin with a little girl's hair. That I know is a good thing at any rate. Whatever else is evil, the pride of a good mother in the beauty of her daughter is good. It is one of those adamantine tendernesses which are the touchstones of every age and race.
G.K. Chesterton

The preceding passage is taken from one of the most stirring and rhetorically brilliant passages in all of Chesterton's writing. It is a brief chapter at the end of a too-brief book. You can read the entire passage here. When you're done that, you really should read the whole book. When you've done that, why not attend a conference on the book to learn more?

In an earlier post, I spoke about the ramifications for our spiritual lives of the Gospel's teaching that we "belong" to Christ, and, by extension, to one another. I promised to come back to the subject and relate its meaning to our socio-politico notions.

The Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37) is often used in addressing issues of social justice, and rightly so. It should be borne in mind that Christ's parable is addressed as an answer to the question, "Who is my neighbor?" We tend automatically to think of the poor man beset by robbers who receives the service of the Samaritan as the "neighbor." But, when Christ reiterates the question at the end of the parable, he asks which of the three passers-by - the Pharisee and Priest who ignore the man's plight, or the Samaritan who shows mercy - are neighbor to the afflicted person. The Good Samaritan is the neighbor in answer to the question.

This, then, begs the question: why were the priest and the teacher not neighbors to the wounded traveller? The answer lies in their choice not to commiserate with his sorrow and enter into relationship with him. Their coldness was a result of their attentions to other precepts of ritual purity which took precedence over the command to help the migrant man left in the ditch at the side of the road by brigands. The translation of Christ's answer, then, is not that "neighbors are people who help us" - remember that the question had been asked in the first place as a means to interpreting the command to love one's neighbor. Christ's answer, we must say, is indirect. It answers the question of who neighbor is by answering the more ultimate question of what neighborliness consists in. The command to love one's neighbor contains all of the information that the questioner needed: love is what creates neighborhood. Love draws person to person and establishes relationship. Love of neighbor does not need a qualifying question to answer who neighbor is: when love reigns, the lover sees his neighbor and, seeing him with love, he does what a good neighbor ought to do.

An important point to remember, here, theologically, is that the command to love God fully is placed first. This, then, becomes the basis - theoretically and formally - for the love of neighbor. For love of God will actually beget the virtuous disposition of charity - or, if you like, infuse it - in the believer. This disposition then serves as the answer key for finding a neighbor and responding according to the command to love.

Now, the upshot of this, following from the previous post, is that our social order needs to be one in which this disposition can realistically become the basis of personal action. In the engagement of every social work, including our economic service, human beings must be able to realize this potential which is begotten by the theological virtue of love.

And this has consequences for how we organize the relationships we have in society and the economy. We must remember that the human person is at the beginning and end of all our work in these matters. When we become too abstract, speaking about the migration of peoples as a labor force, or as laborers as an aspect of economic capital, or as the roles of people within society as their determinative value or worth to the social good, we do so at our peril. Economic rationalization has its place. Abstract theory of government and the rhetoric of policy have theirs. But all of these things are at the service of the ultimately important things, the human things.

A social order's efficiency and value may be seen in terms of what can be accomplished and achieved. But the matter of how things are achieved and who achieves them is even more important to consider. People need a space in which they can have the vision that love demands: a vision directed toward human ends, toward the good for themselves and the good for others.

This should be a staggering thought for us to consider. I'm not saying that I know the necessary ways to transition to a more personalistic atmosphere for modern society, but I know that the Church's Social Teaching demands us to consider it. Think of the line in the supermarket, the stands at the major sporting event, the traffic jam on the freeway, or the cubicle in an office building: maybe a lot like that road to Jerico. The end of the road might be the commercial city, or a mis-placed sense of civic, economic or even religious duty. But our way is strewn with real people, real people who would be loved - regardless of whether or not they'd love in return. And it's our job, it's the whole purpose of the love God gives us, to see them fully, to become neighbor to them by considering them under the aspect of a full personalist humanism, and if necessary by rendering them a service in charity.

The difficulty of this excercise should sober us. But it's also worth considering whether it needs to be so difficult, or how it might be less so. In our earlier post, we looked at how our membership in the Mystical Body of the Church bears a mark of personalism by our individual recognition within the unity to which we are ordered. We are called to communion, yes, but we are called by name - the name we are marked with at the same time as our marking with the sign of the Cross in Baptism and our "being claimed" for Christ. We retain that mark of individuality and it's what enables us to be in real relation with others, to belong to them while still being ourselves.

And so, another question that must confront us and that should inform our consideration of social ethics is how we enable people to become truly "thematic" to one another (to borrow a term from the personalist philosophers). What this means is that people need opportunities to excercise their humanity, their full activity of reason and will, their talents, quirks, and even just to be seen and felt in their fleshly individuality. To the extent that this thematicity is diminished, it becomes harder to become neighbor to one another - we're missing the spur that drives loves on, that awakens it in the heart of the lover and draws him to the other.

So, there we have reached the answer to our question - and it is, paradoxically, no more than a more fundamental question. Just as Christ's parable sort of threw the question back upon the questioner and made him look in the law of love to discern whether he was a good neighbor to others, so must we return to the basics and find a new beginning to looking at the social order. Let's start where Chesterton did: with our neighbor.

A Welcome British Invasion

2010-03-27T22:52:00.004-04:00

Last Monday, I had the opportunity to hear Phillip Blond of Res Publica deliver a lecture at Villanova University about the future of Western politics, "After the Market State." The University has just published videos of the event, which I am pleased to post here:

Meeting Our Membership Goals

2010-03-27T16:22:00.006-04:00

You may be a construction worker working on a home,
You may be living in a mansion or you might live in a dome,
You might own guns and you might even own tanks,
You might be somebody’s landlord, you might even own banks

But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody,
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.
- Bob Dylan

When Anthony Card. Bevilacqua, Archbishop Emeritus of Philadelphia, retired, he took up residence at Saint Charles Seminary. It was not uncommon for seminarians to meet him walking the halls. Looking with consideration at them from beneath his bushy eyebrows, he would sometimes ask, "Are you one of mine?" - by which he presumably meant to find out whether it was a seminarian who had been accepted to Philadelphia during his term as Archbishop.

The amusing question became a popular joke among the seminarians, but few ever stopped to consider the rather profound ecclesiastical implications behind its unconventional wording. The Shepherd had a sense of real possession over the members of his flock and his phrasing evinced this theological posture.

The mystery of membership in Christ's Body is one which provides for copious reflection. Indeed, the concept of personal identity is radically different for the Christian than for any other kind of person: the defining question in Baptism changes from "who we are", as the individual dies in the sacred waters and is claimed for Christ through the power of resurrection, and thenceforth the matter becomes a question of "whose we are" - we belong to Christ, living as members of His Mystical Body, the Church.

Our understanding of the social order ought to be framed by the theological import of this ultimate relation. The simple dialectic between the radical individualism of Western liberalism, on the one hand, and the depersonalizing solution into an absolute Social State, on the other, fails adequately to cope with this ontological transformation brought about by the Incarnation.

Even in the Christian tradition, the popular interpretation of the social Gospel has been insufficient in this regard. I'm thinking particularly of the work of Prof. Michael Novak, who sees something analogous between the ideal of the American market economy and the mystery of the Mystical Body.

The problem seems essentially to be that Paul's discourse on the Body in 1 Corinthians 12 lends itself to an organismic interpretation. Although this idea is by no means explicit in the Apostle's words, one can easily see how someone might begin to understand "membership" in the social order as a functional reality, with the different parts performing their specific roles as members or organelles of an organic whole. Yet, it is important to realize that the Body of which Paul speaks is a unique kind of Body. It is not merely metaphorical, true; but our understanding is problematic when the interpretive hermeneutic begins from the biological reality of the human body as we know it, and proceeds thereby toward an understanding of Paul's teaching. Rather, Paul's teaching is to be itself an interpretive key to other aspects of the Revelation in Christ, and vice versa. Taken in such a way, the guidelines for understanding the symbol become more cogent.

Number six of Lumen Gentium contains a taxonomy of metaphors from Revelation with the Body of Christ as foremost, but all of which are contingent for a full understanding of ecclesiology (and, by extension, these formulae condition our interpretation of the Church's evangelical mission with regard to the social order). The Church is a sheepfold with Christ as the one door; She is a flock to whom He is the Good Shepherd; She is a fecund land, a vineyard, "the tillage of God"; She is the building of God with Christ as cornerstone; She is "mother" and the "spotless Bride of the Lamb"; and She is finally the Body of which Christ is head. The document then goes on to speak extensively of the Church as the holy People of God, "a nation of Kings and Priests," with Christ himself as the High Priest.

The vision imparted by this rich tapestry of symbolism is not easy to summarize, but the major outline might be said to be one of distinction within unity. The individual is not annihilated by the role of service, but rather fully realized and actualized by the very "belonging" - again, the question is best put in terms of "whose" we are: into whose flock we have been cordoned, onto which building we have been built... and so on. However, the question is certainly not one of function. The gifts and charisms which are committed to the individual parts are secondary to the primary identification established by the ordering of the whole to its end. These aspects do not define the members in themselves, but are ordered to the service of the same ontological reality to which the members are ordered as persons, namely Christ. Put another way, all individual services and ministries, vocations and callings, are contained within the basic Baptismal call to holiness and relationship with Christ.

Now, the Church's proclamation of the Kingdom of God contains as an essential element the building up of a more just social order. And since this mission of the Social Gospel is nothing more than the extension of Christ into the world, it follows that the same kind of formal structure applies to that message as the one we've seen defining our ecclesiological ordering.

In a forthcoming post, I will speak about the shortcomings of a too-functional view of social justice. I will try to demonstrate that the same dual integrity of distinction and unity must apply to the social order as applies to the Body of Christ as a sacramental reality. Only in this way is the ordering of society truly analogous to the Mystical Body. It is not something brought into being by diversity of function and roles, but rather something primary to which any diversity of function and roles is contingently ordered. Finally, I will try to show that personal realization - what in the order of the Church is the "calling by name" of each sheep in the flock, the Baptismal claiming of each particular member for unique relation to the end - is just as crucial in the ordering of a just society, which is sadly lacking in our current arrangements which relegate economic players to the position of functional technicians rather than fully thematic persons.

Zippy on Usury

2010-03-18T22:19:00.004-04:00

Zippy Catholic has been back and blogging strong for some time now.

I would recommend in a particular way a recent series of posts that he has offered on the topic of usury. Since I don't see an index there at his site, I've taken the time to compile one here for ease of access, because I think the whole lot worth reading and considering:

March 05: How about some non-usurious loans?

March 07: Usury, or Burning Down the House

March 08: Fisk Pervenit and The Dumb-Ox on non-recourse productive investments

March 09: Usury and the Language Barrier

(Also, pay attention to follow the internal link in the first post to the conversation on the matter Zippy had last March on this topic. It's all very fine reading.)

If you finish all of that (and the wonderful extended discussion in the comment strains), then I encourage you to also check out this brief assessment of the matter by the great Belloc himself, or this slightly longer excerpt.

I'll be doing some updates to the blogroll over the next few days, and making a couple more additions to the Distributist's Bookshelf. Stay tuned.

A Quick Note...

2010-03-17T20:57:00.004-04:00

... to direct your attention to two wonderful catechetical utterances by the Holy Father during these past few weeks. The first, his Angelus message from the Second Sunday of Lent, coincides remarkably with the little reflection I offered here on that same occasion. In short, the Holy Father recognizes a focus of eschatology in the significance of that event:

[T]he Transfiguration reminds us that the joys sown by God in our life are not the destination, but they are lights that he gives us on the earthly pilgrimage...

Recently, the Holy Father has been offering a series of catecheses on the figure of Saint Bonaventure. The third one, published today, is particularly remarkable. Since it is short, I reproduce it here in full:

In our catechesis on the Christian culture of the Middle Ages, we turn once more to Saint Bonaventure. Bonaventure was a contemporary of Saint Thomas Aquinas, and the two great theologians reveal the rich diversity of the theology of the thirteenth century. Whereas Thomas saw theology as primarily a theoretical science, concerned with knowing God, Bonaventure saw it as practical, concerned with that “wisdom” which enables us to love God and conform our wills to his. Thomas’s emphasis on truth complements Bonaventure’s emphasis on love within the unity of a great common vision. As a Franciscan, Bonaventure reflects the primacy of love embodied in the life of Saint Francis. He was also deeply influenced by the theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, with its emphasis on the heavenly hierarchies which serve as steps leading the creature to communion with the Triune God. Pseudo-Dionysius also inspired his reflections on the darkness of the Cross, where, in the ascent of the mind to God, reason can go no further and love enters the divine mystery. As a great master of prayer, Bonaventure invites us to let our minds and hearts rise from the contemplation of creation to rest in God’s eternal love.

The Holy Father's Lenten "project", if you will, has a coherent strain of attention to the final end of man and the "practicality" of the Gospel and love of God.

I think this is worthy to reflect upon especially as it bears significance for the understanding and implementation of the Social Doctrine of the Church. It is precisely the dimension of Divine charity which is the most practical thing in terms of transforming our own lives to configuration to Christ, and, by extension, transforming the world into the Kingdom of the Social Reign of Christ. Knowledge, the Thomistic focus, is complementary to this: for he who knows better loves better.

Economics and politics can often become very rationalistic fields, even amongst confessing people. Those who would try to apply the Doctrine of the Church, or the tenets of Distributism (one school of interpretation of said doctrine) would do well to meditate on the practicality of charity. I personally think that understanding Benedict's ideological formation, especially the influence of Bonaventure and also of personalist philosophy, helps to elucidate his teaching in his most recent encyclical. The obsession with the "rationalization" of the economy must be placed squarely within a human context where love is seen to be the highest and ultimate end of man: the logic of love, more than cold numbers and mechanisms of scale, is the decisive determining factor for how we live our lives as individuals in communion.

Freedom Ain't Cheap - and Cheap Ain't Free

2010-03-15T20:49:00.007-04:00

Nobody living can ever stop me
As I go walking that freedom highway.
Nobody living can make me turn back;
This land was made for you and me.

This land is your land, this land is my land,
From California to the New York Island,
From the redwood forest to the gulf stream waters,
This land was made for you and me.
- Woody Guthrie

Americans love freedom. We celebrate it in all our songs, wear it proudly as a badge as we parade in defiance of the world. But too few of us know what it really means.

Freedom is a potency. It is necessarily bound up with the power to act. It contains in it the possibility of action, of moral choice. Freedom implies a properly ordered pursuit of a good end - that is, a choice among goods which are duly directed to be goods for the individual choosing and which at least do not interference with goods destined for man in general (i.e., moderated by the objective of the common good as well as the universal destination of goods). When one's pursuit of a legitimate good, the attainment of which would do no one else harm, is arbitrarily restrained - and, consequently, the choices left to him are for lesser goods or even no good things - then, his freedom has been compromised.

This occurred to me the other night as I viewed the documentary Fresh at a local community gathering. Food, one of the basic natural goods of man, is one for which Americans have a scant amount of freedom left to choose.

The decision to buy local, healthy, organic produce is extremely difficult for some people. Often, it can be cost prohibitive. It always requires a degree of perspicacity that can be straining for someone working a full week, trying to service debts and raise children and take care of the sundry duties that go along with owning (or, more often, mortgaging) a home. Instead, most of us fall uneasily back into convenience. We shop at BigBox Mart for high-fructose corn-syrup laden goods produced by large agribusinesses heavily subsidized by the government. Rich in additives and impoverished in nourishment, the food stuffs offered us by our manufacturers of culture are a motley assemblage of promiscuous produce, packaged and shipped from all ends of the earth with copious toxic chemicals intended to kill the lethal bacteria that nevertheless increasingly turn up like bad pennies.

We take our lack of choice on the chin, blind to the threat to our freedom, namely that the seeds which grow our veggies and the grain which feeds our livestock are monopolized commodities that keep squeezing the market into thinner and thinner corridors - as we grow fatter and fatter. The names of our consumables and their shiny packaging belie the fact that there's little more variety to our diet than the often parodied slop-meals offered to inmates of the most austere prisons. We free men accept our three squares and return to our cots with indigestion at best, allergies aplenty, and even the occasional bout of salmonella poisoning. The hidden costs of our cheap convenience are chains upon our freedom, and they are a bitter price.

But there is another way. Agrarian reform is underway in America beginning - fittingly - at the grass-roots level. Farmers and communities of concerned consumers are finally beginning to break the chains of our surreptitious enslavers. And we can all become a part of it.

If you have some spare time and spare change, spring for a copy of the movie "Fresh". Get a few neighbors together to watch the movie, and then discuss what you can do to regain some freedom for food.

Start small. Pool some money between you and your neighbors, and support a local CSA. Get together once a week or every two weeks and have a dinner with your shared produce, and taste the difference freedom makes. Plant a garden with some cooperative labor amongst your friends and dole out the harvest. Put in a compost bin and take turns in managing the layers, and collect your refuse to replenish the soil.

It might not save you any money. It might even cost a little more than the convenience to which we've become accustomed. Anyway, some things are beyond the worth of money to buy. Freedom isn't cheap. But bought dearly, it is a value to be savored, and will surely make you hungry for more.

Freshening Up

2010-03-10T18:08:00.002-05:00

Tonight I am going to be attending a screening of the movie Fresh at the local Swarthmore Co-op. There will be a discussion opportunity and hopefully a chance to find out more about what the Co-op is doing as a model for community supported agriculture.

Whatever our thoughts on environmental activism, a sustainable and localized food economy is a necessary step toward a healthy, human-scale economy. I'll be blogging after the movie more about this subject. Stay tuned.

The Rationality of Topsy-Turvydom

2010-02-28T18:22:00.006-05:00

Even in more normal moments he seemed to be one who singly pursued a solitary train of thought, and he was still talking, like a man talking to himself, about the rationality of topsy-turvydom.

"We were talking about St. Peter," he said; "you remember that he was crucified upside down. I've often fancied his humility was rewarded by seeing in death the beautiful vision of his boyhood. He also saw the landscape as it really is: with the stars like flowers, and the clouds like hills, and all men hanging on the mercy of God."
G.K. Chesterton, The Poet and the Lunatics

Today, the Second Sunday of Lent, the Church invites us to consider the Transfiguration of the Lord.

I've always been partial to Mark's account of this event, because of an oft-overlooked phrase at the end of the pericope: "So they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what rising from the dead meant" (Mark 9:10 - NAB).

Now, Mark's Gospel is arguably the one most situated within the "eschatalogical dimension," that is, the one most concerned with the immanence of the Lord's return (although the focus is certainly present to the other Evangelists' accounts, especially Luke's).

The reason that this phrase in Mark particularly strikes me is that, in the immediate context, Christ has just finished emphatically his first prediction of His passion (see Mark 8:31ff). Also, more remotely, Jesus has already been depicted miraculously restoring the daughter of a synagogue official to life (Mark 5:35-42). That the man whom Peter had affirmed to be Christ, the Son of God, was given power even over life and death could not have escaped his followers' attention. So, why the confusion about "what it means to rise from the dead?"

The key to the answer is the meaning of the Transfiguration itself. Six days before the Transfiguration, Christ had been teaching his disciples about the eschaton, and the "coming of the kingdom of God in power":

He summoned the crowd with his disciples and said to them, "Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and that of the gospel will save it. What profit is there for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? What could one give in exchange for his life? Whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this faithless and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of when he comes in his Father's glory with the holy angels" (Mark 8:34-38).

Then, on the mountain-top with Peter, James, and John, he provides a glimpse of the glory to be revealed in that day. The root of the question: "What does it mean to rise from the dead" seems to rest in this vision of glory, accompanied by Christ's paradoxical teaching about laying down one's life in order to gain it. This is not mere resuscitation that Christ intends to accomplish for Himself and for all who follow Him: it is not simply the restoration to former life. It is an inauguration of a new being, the recreation of nature in a glorified state, turning inside-out and upside-down all that was once twisted and distorted by sin and death.

In the early Church, this vision became manifest in the witness of the martyrs. Stephen, dying, realizes the eschatological promise of Christ: "He, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God; and he said, 'Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing at the right hand of God'"(Acts 7:55-56). Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and that of the gospel will save it. Rising from the dead means rising to new life; and it means, first, dying to the world and sin. Resurrection "means" the death of martyrdom, in the sense that an effect "means" or intentionally manifests its cause. Indeed, the vision of Christ glorified on Tabor might even have included a glimpse of His future wounds shining in splendor as they do in Heaven now for eternity.

For the evangelist Mark, the Gospel was meant to shine light and meaning on the sufferings of his present-day community. The persecution by Rome challenged the believers of Christ to place their hopes in the eschatological dimension: to see future glory present in immediate sufferings, to find future gain in present loss. And the Gospel bears this message as meaningfully for us today.

It is really fortuitous that the seasons of Paschal-tide coincide each year with tax season. As we fill out our earnings statements and take stock of our worth, we would do well to ask what we really have "gained" by our year's efforts. Have we gained even the whole world, at the cost of our soul? Have we stored up treasure on earth like the fool in the Gospel, whose life would soon be demanded and find him sorely lacking in the accounting book of Heaven? Or have we acted instead like that other Fool in the Gospel, the Fool for Christ's sakes who bumbled his way along as the head of the Apostolic Church and found himself at his life's end hanging upside-down in a comical testimony to the dramatic reversal brought about by Christ?

The Transfiguration teaches us that Resurrection means death, that hope of future glory can only be substantiated through acceptance of present shame. "What it means to rise from the dead" is to have first died the death worthy of a follower of Christ. It is not only our final end that matters in this regard: it encompasses all the little daily deaths, the denials of self and turnings away from sin.

Of course, the focus of this website is economics and the social order, but this reflection is easily brought to bear in that context as well. As we go about our business these next five weeks of Lent and beyond, we may find that the building up of the kingdom of God here on earth is a drudgery and a plodding affair. Rome was not built in a day. But the kingdom of God in glory shall come like a bolt of lightning out of the clear blue sky, and we must always be ready to stand judgment on that day. Every economizing decision, every political motive, must be informed for Christians by this eschatological focus. The rationality of topsy-turvydom demands reckoning this very day - in our nightly examen, in our filing of our income tax return. May all our testaments in this world, from the lives of our children to the ledgers of our accounts, bear witness to the things which truly matter, to what it means to rise from the dead.

On the Libertine Getting His Way

2010-02-22T21:53:00.018-05:00

[NB: I am highly indebted in the content of this post to some of the fine research and writing done recently by my friend Doctor Thursday over at the American Chesterton Society. His ongoing commentary on the principle of Subsidiarity has touched upon many of the same issues that I will address here, and I will be borrowing several of the Chesterton quotations which he has culled in support of his own project.]

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
G.K. Chesterton, The Thing

"'Common good'!? That's a Russian term!" The girl grew redder in the face as she boldly pronounced this truly novel assessment of the time-tried ethical construct.

I only overheard the interlocution she was having with my colleague, but I felt exasperated in sheer empathy. Invincible ignorance and pseudo-knowledge had married with all of the emotionalism and fear of the Red Scare in one facile phrase, and what could be done but to shrug?

The offense against reason occurred during just one of several conversations all of which followed a predictable outline. First, a youthful zealot would approach our booth at CPAC with feigned interest and invite us to expose our position. The invitation was charitable at least. I'll even give them the benefit of the doubt that more than half of them more than half listened to what we actually said in response. But even those who may have attempted to digest our reasoning had their canned reply at the ready: "I think the Government should just get out of it altogether."

The institution under consideration was Marriage. Now, it is not my intention to here debate the public good of marriage or its fundamental definition (which, indeed, lies beyond the power of any man-made authority to re-construct or de-construct); nor even is it my purpose to show that there is a benefit or at least just cause for "the Government" to be "in it."

My issue here is with Libertarians. Or, at least, that's what they called themselves. But they weren't. They were Libertines.

When I first arrived at CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference), I fully intended to have a good time. I largely sympathize with the Libertarian position, but I get a kick out of their rhetoric and their general posture. I thought instantly about approaching the Tea Partier in costume as a New England Minute-Man and asking whether he oughtn't to be dressed as an Aboriginal American. But I decided not. I hadn't the gumption to have a go at the gentleman with the "Pot should be legal - ask me why" tee-shirt. Perhaps I lacked the charity to offer him the opportunity of a defense; perhaps I had an inkling that I could infer his answer. Anyway, I think I was well-intended enough entering into the affair, and certainly felt that I had more in common with the revolutionary set than I did with your typical Cheneyennes and Palindrones.

I anticipated argument from Libertarians toward the position which I was representing: the defense of traditional Marriage, i.e., ya know, marriage. I even thought of it as an opportunity to provide a bit of an intro into what the Catholic Doctrine of Subsidiarity might have to offer regarding the issue: that it is a matter which the lower communities should define as they will, and that the State hasn't any rights to circumvent the logic of the institutions which sustain marriage (i.e., communities and Churches). I knew even then there would be some disagreement on whether or not marriage benefits and incentives from the State (even the independent States of the Union, which still theoretically exist) are a good thing.

But I suddenly found myself confronting a position I had not expected, and one which struck me as truly sinister. It was anarchism. Not the anarchism of passive resistance, the anarchism of mere complacency and compliance such as Dorothy Day espoused. No; this was anarchism with a gun in the pick-up truck, the anarchism of the dank holes of fin de siecle Europe, the full-bodied lowerarchy of upper Pandemonium. It was the anarchism of the Libertine.

"Government is just a loaded gun," they said, greedily licking their lips, with all the fervor of a Jacobin. Government is the enemy and sic semper tyannis; surely, these were the just progeny of our forefathers, no?

No. Because while our forefathers did revolt, they also wrote. They wrote a document of legal genius which these louts had tucked in the pockets of the breasts they thumped, with a foreword by Ron Paul to boot! It is the Constitution of the United States, and it establishes a government for the safeguarding of the common good. And this government was a free undertaking, a noble experiment, and no mere "necessary evil." It was an attempt to seat authority in Justice, the Authority derived of God in the Justice decreed by Him.

Now, please do not mistake me as criticizing the Libertarian position. I do not. Most Libertarians seem to have an implicit understanding of the principle of Subsidiarity, and also a due appreciation for concepts like authority and the common good. In short, most of them have sufficient knowledge. But a little knowledge... now that, it has been said, is a dangerous thing. These were not Libertarians at all; they were Libertines.

My young friends seemed to have at least a snippet of Mill and Locke under their belts, and certainly a Libertarian tract or two. But of deeper metaphysics and epistemology, there was sore little to be found. I tried illustrating a point about "discrimination" several times with an appeal to the square of opposition, and might as well have been stating the point in Greek.

Founded on their smattering of Enlightenment-dim reasoning, the young Libertines held forth on "victimless crimes" and sanctioned to the bedroom an obscurity and sacred inviolability fitting only to the Holy of Holies in Herod's temple. That a man's private choice of pederasty might impose a burden on society as a whole, for example, seemed a bridge too far for their principles. They made it a moot point, saying, "Anyway, that doesn't matter, because it's a crime against the other person; it's statutory rape." (Statutory, mind you - I had want of high-waters for the depth of the irony). But that such a crime was damaging to the larger culture, to the milieu of society, I dare say to society's morals: of this they would here none. To quote one, "Societies are amoral." And as for offenses against the "natural law," these too were swept curtly from the table: "Law must be decreed," one told me, he who had only minutes before commented on the "accidental" circumstance of the "shape of one's genitalia."

I wondered wryly how many of their platitudes they gleaned from textbooks purchased with Pell Grants, or whether when any of them ascended from adolescence and started trying to raise kids of their own "within the system," they might not change their tune. I wondered also whence they derived their concept of the liberty of which they were so fond, having abolished the natural law and being unable (usually) to articulate just what degree of government could even conceivably exist that would be "a good thing." How, say, would they respond to Chesterton on this point:

It is the fashion to talk of institutions as cold and cramping things. The truth is that when people are in exceptionally high spirits, really wild with freedom and invention, they always must, and they always do, create institutions. When men are weary they fall into anarchy; but while they are gay and vigorous they invariably make rules. This, which is true of all the churches and republics of history, is also true of the most trivial parlour game or the most unsophisticated meadow romp. We are never free until some institution frees us, and liberty cannot exist till it is declared by authority.
Chesterton, Manalive [emphasis added]

History is rife with warnings of the dangers of revolution. How many permutations did the French Republic endure after sweeping away its monarchy? The fickleness of the revolutionary mob is a feature to be feared, and one should be wary to take a fallen crown upon his own head, because it may be marking him the next target.

My readers surely know that this blog is not fundamentally opposed to revolutionary sentiments. But it strives to found arguments on first principles and final causes. If I seek to tear down the current system, it's only because I have a sure and definite idea I'd like to replace it with. I may be right or wrong, but at least I can say I have more than a muddy conception of what I'm going to build upon the rubble. I myself appreciate, and have offered before to others, the caution of tearing down anything without a blueprint ready to hand.

If it is liberty we seek to secure by disrupting the current system, then it must be a liberty only to bind ourselves to the dictates of justice, to a firmer solidarity with the whole society across strata of income and diversities of race, to a subsidiary order with definite functionality and proper autonomy. This, as I see it, is the true liberty of Libertarianism. But, if our liberty aims merely at doing what each pleases, at tearing down what encumbers us, damning caution and reason and natural law with its "accidental shapes" - well, then, this is the foul and festering liberty of a libertine. And if ever such libertines get their way, we should all beware. For, having torn down all constraints that might have protected them, and with no laws by which to secure the liberty they so relished, they may very soon find that one particular Libertine rising above the fray seeks to take liberties with the liberty of the rest. Sic semper tyrannis.

Whence, Whither and Wherefore

2010-02-13T22:28:00.021-05:00

The LORD'S message was, Halt at the cross-roads, look well, and ask yourselves which path it was that stood you in good stead long ago. That path follow, and you shall find rest for your souls.
Jeremias 6:16a [Knox]
Simon Peter saith to him: Lord, whither goest thou? Jesus answered: Whither I go, thou canst not follow me now; but thou shalt follow hereafter.
John 13:36 [Douay-Rheims]

Our culture is in a crisis. It is a crisis of direction and discernment. It is a crisis of ends and means. It is a crisis of causality. It is a crisis at a cross-roads.

A wayward generation looks for a sign. Ours is a wayward generation in the most literal sense. We wander capriciously, blindly led by the blind, ever clutching at new mess-making demagogues for want of rescue from the messes made by previous ones. We put our hope in change, in changeable objects that have no business bearing the aspirations of that holy virtue. We look for signs, maybe. But our sign has been given us: the sign of Jonah. We too little heed its clear indication, the Way which it signifies; but brazenly march forward down our own path - headlong, mad, and dangerous footsteps down a mired and muddied road.

Prophets were sent to the people of Israel to call them back to the Lord, that they might walk humbly with God (Micah 6). The gift of prophecy is still given, as Saint Paul observes (see 1 Corinthians 12-13). And prophecy consists in much the same task as it did in times past. Prophets call us to task for waywardness and point out the true road. What has changed is that the Way has been revealed to us in its fullness: it is Jesus Christ himself. Prophets now point to Him and to His Word to be our guide. Our urgency should be no less than the people of Nineveh, who feared the Lord when they heard the preaching of Jonah. That whole great city, its whole political order (from the King to the chattel), underwent upheaval in order to follow that sign and embark in the way of righteousness. Our social order has also been given a sign: the Church has proclaimed the Gospel of Truth and Life to the modern world. But we have been slow in donning our sackcloths.

In What's Wrong With the World, G.K. Chesterton (one of many modern prophets sent to show us Christ more clearly) attempted "a rambling and elaborate urging of one purely ethical fact" (Part V, Chapter 5: Conclusion). This fact he pithily states in his first chapter: "I have called this book 'What Is Wrong with the World?' and the upshot of the title can be easily and clearly stated. What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right."

Another way of putting this is to say that what is wrong is not merely that we do not heed the sign given us to show the Way, but we do not even look for one. We are not so concerned with where we go, but myopically center in on the fact of our going someplace.

Chesterton railed against the cult of progress, and this cult is perhaps even healthier in our day than it was in his. It is the worship of Mammon, an obsession with means to the detriment of the fair consideration of ends, the very essence of materialism.

In our mad rush from one crisis to another, we forget where we've come from and give no thought to where we should ultimately end up. It's a mad game of musical chairs, having a laugh with a moribund shrug that it seems somebody, after all, must always end up without a seat each time the silence falls. The Gospel of Wealth can only afford so many places round the table, and we figure perhaps the poor left out of the game are only there for lack of effort during the last interlude. We're just following the rules.

But Chesterton suggests that we might change the rules; nay, we might even change the game. Our Lord's banquet table has seats for the poor and maimed and blind and lame (Luke 14:21), and for Chesterton, securing our invitation should be the end of all our actions, even our political and economic ones. If this requires taking a seat on the floor and bowing out of the mad rush, then so be it.

Whence, whither and wherefore do we go along our way?

This patchwork of ideas that I have dumped onto the page above is an inroad to exploring this question. It is not a question to find an answer unknown: the answer is self-evident. But the question helps one to find where that answer lies in each of the sundry affairs of modern-day life: every moment of discernment and decision, big and small, finds us at a cross-roads. Which is the way that stood us in good stead before? Which is the way of the Cross?

I have above suggested several ideas that I invite my readers to reflect upon with me in the coming months.

I have decided to begin writing a series of papers which I will germinate here on the blog. If all goes as planned, these papers will become the formula of some kind of small book aimed at bringing the Catholic Social Teaching's answers to bear upon the questions of modernity. I propose to put these questions in a somewhat novel (but also very old) way.

My focus will be the four causes of classical philosophy. I said above that our culture is in a crisis of causality. We suffer most of all for losing sight of our final end, our telos: to know, love, and serve God in this life and to be happy with Him in the next. We suffer also from post-Cartesian metaphysics; formal causation has been largely subsumed into the consideration of the efficient or agent cause. This cause, too, is effete in our day: because an agent without an end lacks its ultimate definitive trait of directedness. We are left with a capricious efficiency and robust materialism (a kind of primacy given the material cause).

My goal will be to approach these topics in "primer" language, so that they can be freed somewhat of the technical language of philosophy and placed before the layman. I would consider this an injustice if my object were to train philosophers, but it is not. My object is to invite the question: whence, whither and wherefore? I hope to persuade that there is an ethical satisfaction in seeking full causality for our individual actions, as well as our social and political ones. We must bring the discernment of proper ends back into the discussion of appropriate means, and heed the signs of the times.

Finally, I will propose one path which places man (as an individual and as a member of a society) more easily and efficiently within reach of his ends is not a new road, but a very old road. It is a road that has stood men in good stead for many ages, a road that many Distributists sought as a way of transforming Nineveh. I will suggest this road as perhaps not quite necessary but at least expedient for one's own good and his contribution to the common good...

So, this is my project. This is how I plan to demonstrate the answer to my question, whence, whither, and wherefore. I beg your input, your reaction, your patience, your criticism: in a word, your help. And I beg the help of your prayers, because any builder labors in vain who has not the Lord's help.

The Distributist's Bookshelf: Henry David Thoreau's Walden

2010-02-04T21:59:00.011-05:00

In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers / Walden; Or, Life in the Woods / The Maine Woods / Cape Cod (Library of America) by Henry David Thoreau. ♦♦♦♦♦ ♠ ♠
(New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1985).
pp. 321-587

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.... I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life..."
- Thoreau, What I Lived For

In 1845, Henry David Thoreau took to the woods near Concord, Massachusetts with the goal "to live deliberately." He meticulously recorded the practical exigencies of his experiment and set them down in several hundreds of words which are amongst the finest prose ever composed in the English language. Whether or not Thoreau succeeded in his Quixotic experiment, he certainly did succeed in crafting one of the finest and most beautiful books ever written by an American.

It may seem a similarly Quixotic experiment to make Thoreau's treatise a hallmark of the ideal Distributist's Bookshelf. His philosophy of transcendentalism, for example, is rather at odds with the traditional metaphysical axiology of distributist thinkers like Belloc and Chesterton. His romantic notions of ideal pagandom and his fetish for Oriental wisdom would fain have met Belloc's approval, if quoted to him over a beer in a homely British Inn. But let's take a look at Walden and see why I think it deserves a place in every truly humane reader's library.

A good place to start is Thoreau's discussion of Economy. In the first chapter of his book, he outlines the "necessaries of life for man" which include "Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel" (332). He distinguishes these from luxuries, which he says are not merely unnecessary, but often times positive distractions from more important things (334). He continues, in the same place,

When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced... (op. cit.).

Thoreau embraces the ideal of leisure. He observes that once man has taken care of the essentials of life, he should look at his freedom from want as an opportunity to contemplate higher things, rather than a chance for getting surplus wealth. Yet, this latter object is what he found occupying most of his contemporaries: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" (329). This desperation is largely due, Thoreau contends, to the industrial system, which begets a cyclic obsession with wealth, rather than true value:

The mass of men... are discontented, and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they might improve them. There are some who complain most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters (335).

Now, this is an observation which the distributist critique of modern economy certainly shares. Thoreau's ideals may differ; he may have given his contemplative energies over to principles with which we do not sympathize. But he speaks to the fundamental drive in man to look beyond the merely material for more important things. His view of work and labor are, in the main, somewhat problematic. Sometimes, he seems only to view pejoratively the Divine mandate to "till the earth," which we know is a holy and meaningful occupation. Yet, even here, there is a point of contact with distributist principles. Thoreau is grappling with that special punishment which God selected for Adam after his fall in Eden: that he would henceforth only bring forth his food from the soil "by the sweat of his brow" (Gen. 3:19). The end of human labor is not in itself, but only meaningful within the context of a fully Christian anthropology, which takes into account the restorative power of grace. But Thoreau grasps that there is something deeper and beyond mere toiling.

Thoreau's complaints with the modern life do not stop there. He moved into relative isolation in order to commune with Nature. The hustle and bustle of modernity, for him, was disruptive to meaningful communion, as he explains in his chapter on solitude:

What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another. What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, the grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five Points, where men most congregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction. This will vary with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man will dig his cellar... (428).

Once more, that Thoreau found his own roots to be in a romantic deification of nature is surely not an agreeable end to the argument. But he starts out on the right path. He knows what Chesterton called "the homelessness of man." The agrarian ideal of many distributists, the movement "back to the land," is similar in its pursuit of this "perennial source of our life." Thoreau's cabin in the woods is the place where he goes in order to find himself: it is typical of that place which Chesterton describes in his essay, The Surrender of a Cockney: "Every man... has waiting for him somewhere a country house which he has never seen; but which was built for him in the very shape of his soul. It stands patiently waiting to be found... and when the man sees it he remembers it, though he has never seen it before."

Many other specific ideas and virtues of Walden might be referenced: its cunning ctiticisms of industrial squalor, its celebration of the value of home and homestead, its wry sarcasm about the many material possessions which man uses to prop himslef up (literally - in one place, Thoreau offers a wonderfully amusing satire on furniture: "Furniture! Thank God, I can sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture warehouse") (see 374).

The greatest asset of Walden, however, is hard to put into words. It is its very ethos. The sheer beauty of Thoreau's prose is in some places literally enough to move one to tears of empathy. His descriptions of crickets chirping, or the sun rising, all the sundry wonders of creation which modern man takes so much for granted - these are the crown jewels of Walden. If not a single ethical principle articulated as such finds its way home when one reads the book, he shall still be somehow a better man for having poured through its pages - or rather, had them poured into him. For Thoreau's liquescent sentences speak directly to the romance in the heart of man which Chesterton knew to be the practical form of reverent awe and wonder. A distributist should return to the pages of Walden often, if only to re-sensitize himself to the miraculous renewal of creation that happens in each moment of every day: the budding of every flower, the falling of every snowflake.

Somehow, this ethos behind Walden is the ultimate communication of its words to the reader, and perhaps no digest is possible. Even Thoreau himself, a peerless master of our language, found it difficult to convey summarily this finding of his own practical experience. So, I shall end at a loss for words, and allow the author one final attempt of his own:

If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal—that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched (495).

Browner

2010-01-23T22:32:00.003-05:00

That is, more Brown. Or a pun on "downer." Take your pick.

Any way you slice it, the lessons we learn here are wide-reaching. A lot of good currents coming to the surface with this recent election in Massachusetts. A lot of murky flotsam, too.

This is opportunity for healthy, robust discussion amongst those working to bring about the Reign of Christ the King. Such a discussion is happening over at Mark Shea's blog. I really recommend checking it out. Mark brings his usual acerbic wit to the matter, and the combox is all abuzz.

For my part, I continue to urge caution and balanced perspective. We must remain sober and not allow the triumphalism of the ruling classes in their victories to distract us from the lacunae that the little ones of YHWH always manage to fall through. Remember: the best measure of the justice of any social order, or society, is its treatment of its least members. And remember what a myriad of faces Christ wears when he takes to the breadlines in rags or returns naked to the womb of women in crisis. We still have a lot of work to do, and there is no victory that we can really celebrate except His.

Headlong, Mad, and Dangerous Footsteps

2010-01-20T18:29:00.005-05:00

A while back I posted some ruminations on the Manhattan Declaration. [The manifesto, by the way, continues to gather signatures and doesn't show any signs of running out of steam. Quite the contrary: the most recent issue of the Philadelphia Archdiocese's newspaper, the Catholic Standard & Times, contained a front-page article urging Cardinal Rigali's flock to add their signatures.] I noted that the document contained a certain air, an attitude of - for want of a cleaner word - "revolution." That revolutionary spirit continues to undulate in our society, and those of us who have sensitized ourselves to its visceral rhythm know that the force of its undertow has only increased as the months have waxed on.

In recent comments, President Obama himself acknowledged this force. In an interview following the special election in Massachussettes, Obama offered this analysis:

[T]he same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office. People are angry and they are frustrated. Not just because of what's happened in the last year or two years, but what's happened over the last eight years.

I don't think only a cynic would read into these comments a swipe at the previous administration: I think it's pretty evident. But, no matter: the previous administration deserves its stripes plenty. Nevertheless, I do think it would be naive to name the Bush administration as the effective cause of this spirit of increasing disillusionment with our government and this revolutionary mood building up in movements like the "tea partiers" and the rest. I think, rather, that the national tragedy of September 11th, 2001 would be a better place to look for the kind of sociological shock and trauma which could feasibly cause the existential angst so many are feeing today. I predict that historians and anthropologists a generation removed from us will be able to look back with more clarity and will likely analyse that event as a signal one for many changes in our society, good and bad.

I have my reservations about Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts. I do not see it as the great ideological monument that others have euphorically announced it to be. In fact, I see the Brown-Coakley race as a good case-in-point for why caution is needed in these times.

Most people you talk to about Brown don't know all that much about him. They will be shocked, for instance, to find out that he posed nude in Cosmopolitan in the 1980s. (You can google it if you want confirmation; I don't typically direct people deliberately into what might be an occasion of sin.) Now, I don't think that Brown's decision to bare all in 1982 matters much to his political candidacy for today. He may have been converted between then and now; he might have repudiated his decision publicly for all I know; for that matter, he might secretly have lived as a mafia don in the intervening years. It was a long time ago; many years have passed. My point is that it hardly got mentioned and the sort of vetting and investigation that candidates are usually put through seems to have been swept under by stronger currents in this recent election. Therein lies the danger.

Revolution is a dangerous thing. When I read the President's remarks today, I had to give him credit for his sober insight. And for whatever reason, all I could think of was the motif of eerie footsteps with which Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities symbolizes the dangerous and inscrutable forces of revolution:

Headlong, mad, and dangerous footsteps to force their way into anybody's life, footsteps not easily made clean again if once stained red, the footsteps raging in Saint Antoine afar off, as the little circle sat in the dark London window.

The novel, of course, is about the lives of several people who find themselves swept up suddenly in currents that are somehow greater than the sum of all their individual motives. It typifies well the danger and the power of the revolutionary spirit.

Revolution can be merely reactionary. It can be fueled by anger, or fear, or even boredom. And when revolution is such, it is perilous. The Catholic hesitancy to revolution was always based on this insight: that revolution which merely reacts, which bases itself upon the premise that "anything would be better" than the status quo is dangerous and irresponsible. The status quo, at least, is static: it stands. Chesterton also remarked that the world does not progress, it wobbles. And wobbling, it is always susceptible to toppling and to falls. A revolution that blindly seeks to destroy the current state of affairs and does not care with what it shall supplant those conditions may result in nothing more than a crumbled society, a crippled thing that cannot again be made to stand.

Real revolution, Chesterton pointed out, is aimed at restoration. Real revolution - which the Church embraces under different names, such as "conversion" or "reform" - only tears down in order to build something better. Chesterton called this continual process in Christian orthodoxy "the Eternal Revolution."

I am glad that folks are beginning to get angry and to get fed up with the status quo. I am glad that the two-party dominance of American politics has begun to leave a sour taste in many people's mouths. I am glad that they are calling for a greater voice and ability for action within the political process - that they are demanding transparency and accountability.

But we must continue to be vigilant lest we get caught up in anger and forget what we're angry about. We should not be angry mostly because things are organized such and such a way, but because they are NOT organized in some definite, better way. If Scott Brown becomes an ideal merely because he's not Martha Coakley, then we have cause to pause. We must ask ourselves whether we've settled for something less than ideal because it's expedient for the time being, or whether we have temporarily forgotten our grander ideals in the energy of the moment. If there is any hint of the latter sentiment, then that is the dangerous and perilous spirit of revolution sweeping us away down some unknown path. If it is true - and I think it is, at least partly - that the same spirit that swept Obama into office also swept Scott Brown into his seat, well then that is a cunning and wily spirit with a powerful strength to sweep, and it might end up sweeping the legs of our standing Republic right out from under us.

So, caution; vigilance! Let us continue to remember our ideals and to talk about final goals. Insofar as a revolutionary spirit leads us to give our heart over to what could be rather than what is, then it is a wholesome and healthy spirit to be embraced. That spirit will sound in our hearts as an organized marching tune, a rhythm with which we can fall in step and progress towards some definite goal. But let us be wary of the confusion of footsteps that the other spirit of revolution brings: headlong, mad, and dangerous footsteps that may, if we fall into line with them, leave us trampled on the road to nowhere.

Movie Review: Demographic Winter

2010-01-12T21:42:00.007-05:00

In troubling economic times such as these, there tends to be a lot of discussion about bubbles and bursts, dwindling resources and bottlenecking. The world's diplomatic leaders, gathering a few weeks ago in Copenhagen to discuss the impact of human economy on ecology, highlighted the sensitive and crucial import of these questions. Drastic times, as they say, call for drastic measures. There may be disagreement among the masses as to whether the times really even are drastic, but that doesn't stop the powers that be from suggesting some dire solutions.

Infamously, at the height of the Copenhagen summit, a Canadian journalist started a buzz about adopting China's one-child policy for the good of the planet. The suggestion is pretty audacious, but not only for its macabre Malthusian methods. It is outrageous because it would actually put the final nail in an already tightly clamped coffin-lid.

I speak of the coffin of Demographic Winter. I am not here suggesting that the human race, as a whole, faces imminent extinction - unless the cosmos smacks us to honor its commitment to the Mayan prophecy for 2012. No, I don't fear the extinction of our whole race. But parts of it are certainly in that coffin, buried alive, and if ever rescued, they will only be wraiths of their former selves.

The two-part documentary Demographic Winter and Demographic Bomb are a must-see for all Distributists, or for anyone who wants to think sanely about the human economy and the proximate future of civilization.

It's really difficult to sum up these two films. They're well-made documentaries polling the opinions of many scholars from a wide disciplinary background in order to contradict a myth that's been plaguing our culture in a particular way since Malthus and the Eugenics craze. The myth basically goes that the world is only so big, and what with better medicine and better resources and such, we're starting to crowd the place. Despite a well-publicized statistic that all of humanity could live with reasonable comfort within the confines of the state of Texas and maybe some land in neighboring parts, nevertheless the overpopulation idea still gets a lot of credence. Look at China's one-child policy.

In fact, please do look at China's one-child policy: its current state, that is. It's a Social Security nightmare. And it's not just China. In nearly every developed country, human beings are undercutting the necessary "breeding rate" of replacement (2.3 children per family) by a significant margin. In China's case, this margin - institutionalized - is a whole half deficit.

A simple tree chart would suffice to illustrate. A sustainable population depends on parents having children enough that the children are able to care for their parents in their old age while also raising families of their own. But in the industrialized nations of the world (and increasingly in underdeveloped nations, due to enforced policies of sterilization and the like, employed by the UN and other "aid" organizations), you have an aging population. Each four grandparents are represented, maybe, by only one grandchild. When the baby-boomers retire, the "bust" of the demographic cycle will have an inordinate demand of intergenerational sustainability placed on its shoulders. Social Security is only the tip of the iceberg. Medicare and Medicaid are huge vacuums that will continue to put the squeeze on the diminished working population.

Demographic Winter and its sequel aim to explain how this happened. They identify several factors - some of which are rather provocative, like the move of women to workplaces outside the home - as contributory to the decline in fertility.

Note, the movies aren't for the weak-minded or faint of heart. They're meant to sober and steel us for facing hard times; not to encourage or buck-up. After all, demographics isn't really so much a predictive science as a descriptive study. Most of the trends these folks observe are already in place and drawing to their inevitable conclusions. It will take generations to turn things around.

But knowing is half the battle. Hope is still available, but it remains where it could always and only be found: in the Gospel of Life. For those of us inspired by that Gospel and called to share it as light and salt for the earth, we would do well to know what challenges we face, to ascertain the dark corners to be illumined and the decaying entities to be preserved and seasoned with joy and vitality. Time is of the essence: learn the facts and use them: check out Demographic Winter.

Perceived Obsolescence: A Dental Diary

2009-12-17T07:41:00.006-05:00

There I stood: in the dental care aisle of Big-Box Pharmacy Store. Been there lately? Amazing place. First of all, on coming in the door, you can easily note how all these places are set up remarkably similar. There're always women's products within eye-sight of the door, as well as seasonal products (shovels and pails and such in the summertime, Christmas decorations this time of year). The pharmacy, sbeing presumably the raison d'etre of the store, is of course always in the very back. You have to walk past all the other products to get there. There are food products, miscellaneous cheap technology (it seems to be one of the only places left where one can buy a portable CD player), cards, stationery and office gadgetry, and basic houseware-type stuff (light bulbs, hose connectors, weed killer).

The health stuff is all on one side of the main aisle. Usually somewhere in the middle is the dental care area.

So, there I stood, in the dental care aisle, looking at a wall of products. I didn't take time to count, but I think it reasonable to assume that there were about 25 different kinds of toothpaste and twice as many different varieties of toothbrush. I was in the market for a toothbrush.

Now, my last toothbrush was, by any consideration, a roaring success. I've had the same model multiple times now, and my experience is consistently excellent. It's just a good toothbrush, despite all of the advertising gimmicks. It looks like the Swiss Army Knife of toothbrushes, and might be priced about the same, but it's really that good. It has rubber edgy thingies that get your gumline, and a protruding nose of sort that ducks down behind the molars. It has a magical color change item that tells you when it's getting tired, and a tongue-washer on the back. Honestly, the tongue-washer I'm not too thrilled about. The bristles seem to do a better job on that essential task, even if that might somewhat reduce the life of the brush.

I should note here that I'm a yeoman when it comes to my routine in the washroom. I've admitted some technology to the process over the years. For example, I used an electric razor before I had a beard (now, I shave my neck the old-fashioned way, that is to say the "plastic blade-cartridge with moisturizing strip on the end of a battery-operated vibrating stick" sort of way). My shower and toilet are scrubbed by Elves who take the form of bubbles that are automatically dispensed after each use. But when it comes to the work of cleaning my mouth, I like to do the work myself. Although I'm intrigued by newfangled brushes that utilize sonic booms or whatever to blast the plaque off your teeth, and the spinny-jobbers and shaky-doodads that are becoming increasingly "affordable" (that is, to the consumer in the instant of purchase), I stick to the normal arm-operated brush.

Well, after much searching and bewilderment by the bright colors and variety of the display, I finally located my reliable brush in the fray. I was dismayed to find that I couldn't purchase a single unit, but only two-for-the-price-of-(slightly-more-than)-one. I've tried that before. It never works out. Invariably, I either lose the spare brush, or leave one at my parent's house so that I have it available when I travel and end up never using it, because it doesn't feel right and I'd need to run boiling water over it and I bring mine along anyway. If I manage to keep and not to lose the spare brush, I find that I am uncontrollably urged untimely to begin using it. Although my last brushing with each of these brushes is good on an objective scale, it must be admitted that nothing compares with the first time, when the bristles are brand new. And having one laying around that can provide such an experience is too great a temptation. I end up throwing my old one away before the magical color indicator tells me to, and travel back to the Big-Box Pharmacy within the same time frame that I would have done had I bought only one brush.

I didn't want to buy two toothbrushes. I only needed one. On the same level, hanging a few brushes away from my old faithful, was another brush. It was shiny. And it cost much less than the two brushes I knew to be excellent. They weren't shiny, but they were good. This new brush, on the other hand, was shiny. It caught my eye. I knew it was shiny - this was not a subconscious perception. I might have said aloud, had I had someone in the aisle with me (not necessarily someone with whom I'd traveled to the store, but just a fellow shopper) - I might well have said, "That's shiny." But there wasn't, so I didn't. But I did think to myself, "Well, just because it's shiny doesn't mean it won't be good." And I went the way of all flesh. I gave in. I submitted to the allure of shininess on which our whole modern consumerist state depends. And I have found like so many other shiny-consumers, that it seems very little which glitters anymore is gold.

The gimmick of my new brush (all brushes have a gimmick) is a grippy-spot. On the front and back of the brush, right around where it contorts between the handle and the bristles, is orange, bumpy grippy stuff in a little spot on one side and a big spot on the other side. Presumably the little spot is for the tip of the thumb and the big spot for the side of the index finger.

Last night, I used my old brush one last time in a sort of mournful decommissioning. The hazy blue indicator area made me think how true it is that "old soldiers never die, they just fade away."

I tried out my new brush this morning. The bristles perform well. It lacks something of the gum-sexing that the old brush offered, but I need to learn to floss better anyway and maybe this will motivate me, because I'll miss that tingly feeling. My new brush is annoying, though, in its gimmicky grippy-spot. I found that the rest of the handle of the brush seems to have been made deliberately slick and slippery in order the enhance the perceived benefit of the grippy-spot. I took my old brush from the top of the trash pail and felt the bottom of each handle. Sure enough, my new brush is remarkably less grip-able. The grippy-spot isn't an enhancement on a normally grip-able brush. But it's a gimmick, placed on a brush that has been manufactured to (outside of it's special place) be less grip-able than a normal brush. Perhaps someone will tell me that, for effective brushing, one ought to grip the indicated spot because it's on the pressure pivot of the brush and enables the best control and maneuverability. I say, hogwash! I do grip my brush in the proper place, but occasionally a repositioning or what-not is in order, and I want to be able to perform these tasks without the risk of dropping my brush in the sink and needing to boil the damned thing before I'm satisfied with its sanitation.

Anyway, I tell this story so as to invite a reflection on the role of perceived obsolescence in our consumerist culture. I think the principle - which, basically defined, means the creation of an impression on the part of the consumer that old stuff isn't good anymore and they need new stuff - is apparent in many ways in Big-Box Pharmacy Store. I think you can find it operating in many instances in the story: in the superabundance of dental care products in the aisle; in the technology-enhancements of toothbrushes to vibrate and make noise; in the psychology that operates on me when I have purchase two of the same brushes at the same time; in the grippy-spot being manufactured to seem more necessary by the compromise in the grippyness of the rest of the brush.

The concept of perceived obsolescence is an important one of which to be aware at any time, but especially in a season of heightened commercialism and consumerism like the month of Christmas. I hope my story serves in some way to illustrate how this principle can motivate us both without our knowing it (my "two-for-one" woes) or with our knowing it (my attraction to the shiny). I invite any further reflection anyone might have on the matter with another gentle reminded that this is, hopefully, a place for discussion.

Also, this would be a good time to remind everyone of my lexicon post from a while back. I'll be revising this soon to add some new terms, like perceived obsolescence. Since I sometimes do get technical around here, everyone should know that this post can be easily accessed at any time by clicking the Terms label in the sidebar. Should it seem necessary at a later date, I'll add a permanent link somewhere. For now, I'm trying to keep the sidebar tidy.

The Pope Worships Gaia!

2009-12-16T23:02:00.012-05:00

... at least, such a headline would not be a stretch to approximating the sensationalism in the press over the Pope's recently released message for the 43rd World Day of Peace.

First of all, it's worth pointing out that this isn't anything new.

Secondly, LifeSiteNews.com, at least, has a good editorial on the matter. They allude to the noteworthy fact that the Pope's document remained largely unnoticed by the media until somebody had a slow news day and decided there was something to be sensationalized here.

Third, the document itself isn't anything earth-shattering. Or, rather, it isn't remarkably innovative. It's earth-shattering in the sense that the Gospel and its ministers are like fire upon the earth and always seem supersubstantial in contrast to the mundane truisms we encounter each day. But it isn't like the Pope is sounding a clarion call of liberalism or saying that, after all, maybe trees is people too.

No, this is the same sort of thing we've heard before, although I have to say I love more and more Benedict's style. His message for last year on this occasion, as well as this one, have a neat style of recapitulation where the "theme" becomes something like an affirmative command at the end.

There's really not much in the document to parse. You really ought to read it yourself - it isn't long. And hopefully, if anyone tells you that this should be best understood under some divisive hermeneutic between the real Benedict and his Marxist "handlers," you can tell 'em where to go. (No, no, I didn't mean there. Here.)

It is noteworthy that the Pope does not in the document explicitly mention anthropogenic global warming, per se. He speaks of an "ecological crisis," which can mean anything from the depletion of drinking water sources to overfishing to deforestation. He also condemns any policies or philosophies that "end up abolishing the distinctiveness and superior role of human beings."

From a Distributivist point of view, there are certain passages in the statement which warm the heart. My favorite is from paragraph five:

Prudence would thus dictate a profound, long-term review of our model of development, one which would take into consideration the meaning of the economy and its goals with an eye to correcting its malfunctions and misapplications. The ecological health of the planet calls for this, but it is also demanded by the cultural and moral crisis of humanity whose symptoms have for some time been evident in every part of the world. Humanity needs a profound cultural renewal; it needs to rediscover those values which can serve as the solid basis for building a brighter future for all. Our present crises – be they economic, food-related, environmental or social – are ultimately also moral crises, and all of them are interrelated. They require us to rethink the path which we are travelling together. Specifically, they call for a lifestyle marked by sobriety and solidarity, with new rules and forms of engagement, one which focuses confidently and courageously on strategies that actually work, while decisively rejecting those that have failed. Only in this way can the current crisis become an opportunity for discernment and new strategic planning [emphasis in original].

His holiness goes on to saliently observe that "the issue of environmental degradation challenges us to examine our life-style and the prevailing models of consumption and production, which are often unsustainable from a social, environmental and even economic point of view" [my emphasis]. This is a particularly important point for Distributists, who alone seem to be very cognizant of the economic imperative arising from legitimate sustainability concerns. Infinite wealth creation, or reliance upon price mechanisms rather than on changing and shaping values toward better stewardship, are ill-conceived plans by theoreticians who would view sustainability as a threat (see, for example, Tyler A. Watts, "Sustainaibility: An Assault on Economics" on Mises Daily).

I was also very pleased by the Holy Father's handling of the need for "intergenerational solidary," which he called for in his encyclical. This is a sort of late-comer onto the scene of Catholic Social Teaching, and has very profound economic implications, especially with a fiat currency, money-as-debt system fueling Western nations' economies. We're running future generations not only into an unsustainable position with regard to natural resources, but in terms of financial sustainability as well. This all ties in very well with some research I'm doing currently into the idea of a "demographic winter" - that the homes and resources being used up and required by the current aging population will leave us, 30 years down the road, in quite a predicament. We think there's a bad housing market now? Well, what will happen if people continue to conceive and bear children at such a severe deficit compared to their grand-parents' generation? What will happen when only a quarter of the number of people currently retired in Florida, for example, are set to retire in a future generation when all those folks have died? Only every fourth house may be occupied. Think that won't cause problems to banks on the mortgage front? And that's just one of many scenarios in which we face disaster in light of current demographic trends. Intergenerational solidarity is going to become increasingly important: but all this is a for a future post. I'll be reviewing the documentaries Demographic Winter and The Demographic Bomb in the days to come. So stay tuned.

In the meantime, if you haven't yet, go and check out the Pope's message and keep an eye out for these important economically relevant points. Of course, really, the whole thing is economically relevant - a fact which is, itself, a major point which the Holy Father is making: "economic activity needs to consider the fact that "every economic decision has a moral consequence'."

I'm sure there are plenty more points worthy of discussion that I haven't hit. Please come back to the combox and share them. I'll take this opportunity to reiterate that I want this to be a place of discussion. So, please, lend a hand!

The Distributist's Bookshelf: Peter Maurin's Easy Essays

2009-12-13T13:57:00.022-05:00

Easy Essays by Peter Maurin. ♦♦♦ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠
(Washington, DC: Rose Hill Books, 2003).
216pp.

“Peter’s teaching was simple, so simple, as one can see from these phrased paragraphs... that many disregarded them.”
- Dorothy Day

“[T]o create a new society within the shell of the old” – this was Peter Maurin’s aim. This was the goal he articulated for the Catholic Worker when, with Dorothy Day in 1933, he co-founded that movement and its publication.

Houses of Hospitality and Cooperative Farm Communes where the rule of life was the daily practice of the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy: this was his vision. It was a vision that changed many people’s lives, Dorothy Day being one of them. And, with her help, it was a vision that seemed at times as though it really might change the world. And it may yet.

But neither Peter’s goal of reconstructing the social order nor his vision of the shape of that new order within the shell of the old – neither of these was his real passion, the substance of his vocation. Peter’s love was doctrine. He was a born teacher. He loved conversation, although it doesn’t seem that you could say he loved debate per se. He didn’t pretend such sophistication. His goal in discussion was conversion. He wanted his interlocutor to see things his way. The thrill of the melding of two minds and the shining of the light of what he was convinced to be true on a darkened intellect – that was his muse.

He articulated in several places an antipathy for “technicians.” The average worker, skilled or unskilled, was a technician, a functionary. And scholars, too, were cogs in a wheel of academia. In the Houses of Hospitality, Peter wanted to foster an atmosphere where “Catholic scholars are dynamic and not academic and Catholic workers are scholars and not politicians.” He wanted a place where the ideas he embraced and propounded would find right soil, sink in, take root, grow and blossom. And the means of sowing this crop were his Easy Essays.

The essays are not quite prose. Nor could they properly be called poetry. They’re thought-capsules in a rudimentary form. They are a delivery system. There’s some pith and some ornamentation, but it never distracts. The goal in Maurin’s writing is clear: indoctrination. The point is hammered home, concisely and without conceit. There’s nothing to distract from the main goal. There’s none of the atmosphere of Dorothy’s writing, in which you can smell the dank apartment or the wet soil. Peter’s words are like pills to be swallowed in a gulp rather than savored. But they have in common with pills something other than the bland delivery mechanism: they give good medicine to the mind and soul.

It might seem a strange first choice for the Distributist Bookshelf to pick Peter Maurin’s aphoristic “essays.” But there is a wealth of good information contained in these brief locutions. In the background can be easily discerned the influence of Chesterton and Belloc, Gill and Pepler, Maritain and Mounier. But unfamiliarity with this background is no impedance to appreciating Maurin’s writings. His thoughts are crystal clear. No need to refer to footnotes or an encyclopedia.

Not all of Maurin’s advice will be practical for modern Distributists. People may take some exception to his “true communist” sympathies or his agrarian ideals. But Maurin is a great way to get in touch with the soul of Distributist philosophy. Aquinas and the Papal Social Teachings run like bright threads throughout the tapestry of his writing. These, like other themes, are generously repeated (or better, recapitulated), so that a few reads of his essays gives one a very good familiarity with the “spirit” of Distributistism. He holds personalism in tension with communitarianism, revolution in tension with tradition, idealism in tension with realism.

My favorite of Maurin's essay, and a good sample of his writing, is the one entitled “When Christ is King.”

In the essay, Maurin identifies himself as a "radical" and then distinguishes this from both "liberals" and "conservatives":

If I am a radical
then I am not a liberal.
(...)
Liberals are so liberal about everything
that they refuse to be fanatical
about anything.
And not being able to be fanatical
about anything,
liberals cannot be liberators.
They can only be liberals.

(...)

If I am a radical,
then I am not a conservative.
Conservatives try to believe
that things are good enough
to be left alone.
But things are not good enough
to be left alone.
(...)
And conservatives do not know
how to take the upside down
and to put it right side up.
When conservatives and radicals
will come to an understanding
they will take the upside down
and they will put it right side up.

Maurin wants radical change, and notes the difference that this implies with other ideologies. Conservatives want no change. Liberals' New Deal is merely a "patching up." Socialists and Communists want a change that can't really be.

Maurin wants to "change from an acquisitive society / to a functional society, / from a society of go-getters / to a society of go-givers."

A society of go-givers. Where have we heard that before? Sounds like certain amounts of gratuitousness would be involved in such a society, at least it sounds that way to me.

The Easy Essays of Peter Maurin are too-little appreciated today. As we try to find a way to make the wisdom of the great lights of Personalist and Distributist thought accessible to all of society, the summations of Peter Maurin can be a great aid. Many workers were made scholars sitting at that man's feet. And much more important, they were probably made saints almost as often.

The way to reconstructing the social order isn't through welfare programs or stimulus packages, nor through liberated market mechanisms paying heed to no extrinsic value or meaning. The social order will change when men are changed: when they are made saints who love the good, and scholars who love the true.

Pick up a copy of Maurin's Easy Essays and put it on your Distributist shelf today. His ideas just might change you. And through you, they may - even in a little way - change the world.

The Distributist's Bookshelf

2009-12-09T22:47:00.011-05:00

A while back on this page I undertook an ill-fated venture which I called the Ship's Manifest. The idea was that this website was something like my ark in which I hoped to weather the storms of ideological hail swirling about the modern world, and the "manifest" was meant to detail the cargo (intellectual) of the ship. In plain terms, it was my reading list. (NB: The "Manifest" project has since been dismantled and the entries removed, so don't drive yourself nuts looking for them.)

This was ill-fate for a few reasons. For one, I had become a little too trigger-happy in employing the (perhaps somewhat melodramatic) conceit of my blog's name, A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, and was stretching metaphors a bit. The result was that the somewhat melodramatic began to border on the histrionic.

A second reason the venture was ill-fated was that my seminary pursuits at the time precluded my posting with as much regularity as I moved through books.

A third and final reason the idea failed was that nobody ought really to give a damn what I'm reading at any given time. Sometimes, I don't even care. Not everything I read is easily related to my vocation and I felt I was shoe-horning certain things into place in order to derive Distributist wisdom from works that were only tangentially related. This is not to say that Chesterton's maxim does not hold true, that "there is no such thing as a different subject." But if I'm going to spend time writing about books here, I want it to be in a precise and valuable way such that my readers can discern what might or might not be worth their while. And I also want a way to be able to denote when a literary work is being discussed particularly for its relation to Distributist thought. Thus, I have reviewed recently the beginning of Dawson's The Judgment of the Nations and commended it to my readers, but if pressed I would not say it is essential reading for the Distributist.

So, I'm going to try this again. Only this time 'round, I'll be employing a different format and mechanism and hopefully make much less a hash of it. The new feature will be called The Distributist's Bookshelf. I will be making a little virtual bookshelf (or stealing one from the web if I can find a neat code that fits my purposes) either in the side-bar or on the bottom of this page. It may end up being nothing other than an Amazon.com "list" of books and reviews that are good for Distributists to have, with my explanations of why I think so and maybe some other insights I may want to share. I will employ a rating system for these books. I will rate them from 1 to 5 diamonds (♦) in terms of overall quality (literary merit, content, achievement, etc.); and I will rate them in terms of 1 to 4 spades (♠) in terms of their "necessity" to the Distributist's library(one being least and four most essential).

The list of labels in the left-hand margin of the page will include Distributist's Bookshelf as a new easy-click way of finding all of the entries for the topic. Entries detailing other books that I consider from time to time just for fun will simply bear the label books as is the case now. All of the entries for The Distributist's Bookshelf will appear as well under the label for books, since that is what will be considered in this project. So, in order to isolate only those books highlighted as more-or-less essential reading for Distributist, the new label for the bookshelf project will be the way to go.

Now that this messy bit of housekeeping is out of the way, I ask you to stay tuned for the first entry in my new project. It's a selection which I consider an absolute must for all Distributists (♠ ♠ ♠ ♠), and the choice just may surprise you...

Fix Bayonets!

2009-12-07T08:12:00.003-05:00

I know next to nothing about this guy. I am not endorsing his political platform, or his candidacy, or his character. I would need to do much more research before I would even think of doing such. The little that I have read on his "issues" page contains much that I could see eye-to-eye with him on, and a bit that I would want more nuanced.

But he made a speech, and the speech was good. And the reason it was good is that it's true. He gets what's happening. That music I talked about before - he's heard it. And he's starting to march to the tune. And others seem to be hearing it. Can you?

Mark me again: we're going to see more like this as we go forward. There's something brewing, and it may turn to good or ill, but it's out job to be attuned to it and know what's going on and not get caught unawares. We can harness the power of revolution and the fire of men's hearts for doing good. We need to act, though. The storm is coming...

All of This Has Happened Before...

2009-11-27T23:37:00.015-05:00

... and all of this will happen again.

I have to admit that there's something haunting and stirring about that catchphrase from Battlestar Gallactica, and indeed in the series' whole trajectory as it showed that humanity seems forever doomed to repeat the history from which we are ever so slow to learn.

This has hit home with me in a particular way recently as I work my way through The Judgment of the Nations by Christopher Dawson (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1942). Dawson's reputation for speaking prophetically is rote for modern students of theology and the philosophy of culture. Still, some of his words can be particularly striking in their prescient insight and indeed unsettling as we observe the slow slouch toward Gomorrah.

It is... important to distinguish two elements in the modern reaction against liberal democracy. There is the reaction that has arisen out of democracy itself, as a result of the progress of man's organization and the mechanization of our culture which has destroyed the economic and social basis of liberal individualism; and, secondly, there is the national reaction of those countries which had no native democratic tradition and which had accepted liberal ideas as part of the material culture of Western Europe, which they felt to be the symbol not only of progress, but also of foreign exploitation [p. 20].

Dawson's diagnosis of the blocs coalescing in the conflict of the 1940s is a remarkably penetrating view given that he was living and writing in the midst of a war during which it was easier than ever to get caught up in mere jingoism. Dawson (along with, history has finally come to demonstrate, some erstwhile maligned administrators within the Vatican) perceived a parity between the Russian and German threats to modernity which the leaders arranging the day's State alliances were slow to recognize.

Dawson's conservatism, also, was carefully nuanced: "It is necessary... to understand what we mean by democracy, and... to distinguish between what is living and what is dead in the democratic tradition we have inherited from the nineteenth century" [p. 21; emphasis mine]. A modern conservative could learn much from Dawson's fey analysis of that cultural heritage.

[T]he rise of Western democracy like that of Western humanism... were the results of centuries which had ploughed the virgin soil of the West and scattered the new seed broadcast over the earth. No doubt the seed was often mixed with cockle, or choked with briar, or sown on barren soil where it withered, nevertheless the harvest was good and the world still lives upon it.

We must therefore realize that when we say we are fighting for democracy, we are not fighting merely for certain political institutions or even political principles. Still less are we fighting for the squalid prosperity of modern industrialism which was the outcome of the economic liberalism of the [nineteenth] century [p. 24; my emphasis again].

It is clear, however, that Dawson - rich in the Christian tradition with its many parables of mixed harvest and weeds growing along with the wheat - had no doubts about whether the work-intensive harvest of the Western experiment in countries like America, Britain, and France was preferable to the totalitarian regimes bred in opposition to it. His attitude in this respect, too, is a lesson for our day. A good summary of Dawson's argument may be to say that Western democracy is enough of a rough and tumble affair to keep on track toward good without worrying about attacks from outside itself; therefore, we must contrive to preserve a unity of spirit and a cooperative attitude in our internal affairs lest we become vulnerable to the dangers of opposing ideologies. Democracy, for all its good, is prone to this unique danger: the foundation of "individualism" can too quickly lead to an atomization within a particular society or between allied States, making it no easy match for more organized, totalitarian regimes. In our own day, we might say the unity of purpose and mores in the Muslim world is a similar structure against which the pastiche of our own pluralism competes rather poorly. Even leaving aside hostile aggression, the spread of Muslim culture and demography is strong enough an ingredient to overwhelm the other weakened and mixed flavors in our Western soup.

Dawson knew that democracy's survival depended upon compromise between liberality and order, organization and laissez-faire. Dawson again:

The great problem that the democratic states have to solve is how to reconcile the needs of mass organization and mechanized power... with the principles of freedom and justice and humanity from which their spiritual strength is derived [p. 26]

Democracy will not be destroyed either by military defeat or by the discipline and organization which it has to impose upon itself in order to gain the victory, if it can maintain its spiritual value and preserve itself from the dangers of demoralization and disintegration. But this is not an easy task [p. 27].

Thus, Dawson is advocating something of a "third way" between anarchic liberalism and militant absolutism. But the dilemma of how to keep a strong military and a well-organized State while maintaining the core, domestic virtues of liberal democracy was a puzzle then, and remains so now. Indeed, the arms race of the Cold War blindly ran us even further into that quagmire. Breaking down the Pentagon juggernaut and cutting military spending (and thereby taxes) is a sentiment many Distributists and Libertarians hold dear, but each day's news from Iran or North Korea makes one more than a little uneasy in playing out the hypotheticals...

Dawson's noble thought experiment in Judgment of the Nations deserves a rediscovery today, as many of its questions weigh as heavily on our world as they did a half-century ago. One final observation of Dawson's, in particular, is worth keeping in mind for those of us who would ponder the problems of our time. Dawson spoke of the visceral reaction of traditional, dogmatic Christians (particularly Catholics) against what he called the "sublimated Christianity" of liberal democracy as it had been inherited by the West. In our day, we can see this frequently, whether it's well-meaning Distributists anathematizing members of the Austrian school, or Christian Democratic Socialists condemning all of Capitalism outright, or free-market cheerleaders selectively reading Magisterial teaching in a defensive posture against anything that would threaten their preconceptions. Of course, I have my own views on the matter and might easily set up a line to show where I think these various systems fall with regard to Catholic Social teaching. But I recognize, too, that each of these schools contains scholars who are on their own journeys, constantly in motion, and each one in very good faith and conscience. I try to avoid the kind of reaction Dawson describes against "sublimated Christianity," and acknowledge that while certain theories leave much to be desired, I can at least give credit where it is due to the common pursuit of the "spiritual strength" of democracy: the virtues of freedom, and justice, and humanity.

While I would not go so far as to say that it is a good dictum to apply universally, there is nevertheless a kernel of truth in the saying that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." In our day, when new ideological blocs are forming, and the cultural inheritance of the West is under renewed threat from without, may we all pay heed to Dawson's rich insights and recognize that there are many "on our side" with whom we embrace much in common; that infighting and name-calling are vulnerabilities we cannot afford; and that through common pursuit in good faith, our more minor disagreements will resolve in truth and justice.

Back to the Future

2009-11-25T15:33:00.005-05:00

... via the news media. I took this picture while touring the Yuengling Brewery in Pottsville, PA. It's an editorial dated December 18, 1913. But one might easily imagine a similar one being published in a few short years, in 2013.

Ya know, if the world doesn't end, I mean.

Just a Quick One

2009-11-25T14:11:00.002-05:00

I know this is old news in its way, but in an email I got today reference was made to the joint pastoral letter written on health care by the Archbishop of Kansas City and the Bishop of Kansas City-St. Joseph. The letter contains a very interesting statement which I somehow passed over before:

Subsidiarity is that principle by which we respect the inherent dignity and freedom of the individual by never doing for others what they can do for themselves and thus enabling individuals to have the most possible discretion in the affairs of their lives.

Now, the reason this quote strikes me is because it isn't, really, the definition of subsidiarity. While this extrapolation may be just - while the meaning the Bishops derive from the teaching could be argued to be implicit in what has been said about the principle - I'm not aware of a precedent for applying subsidiarity in a lateral way like this. Now, in context, the letter is speaking about the higher order of the State not interfering in the functions of lower orders (such as the health care industry privately run, or families, etc.), and that notion is a strict interpretation of subsidiarity. But the sentence above doesn't really say that. It doesn't make clear the traditional "vertical" understanding of this principle, and seems to argue it on a "horizontal" plane.

The reason I bring it up is that it interests me. I wonder if it's fair to bring this horizontality into the discussion of subsidiarity, or whether a separate principle within the realm of solidarity is really meant for this application. Again, I'm not concerned with the broader point in the context of the letter, but I'm concerned with the exact meaning of this quotation (which, such as it is, is actually irrelevant to the context in which it is found if you want to get technical). Personally, I prefer keeping very closely to the Church's traditional language on subsidiarity and its application primarily to the question of the justice due to individuals on the part of the whole of society and the political organizations therein. But the "we" in this quotation might be, say, a next door neighbor. And is that relationship, and the demand "not to do for the other what the other might do himself," properly governed under the principle of subsidiarity as it has been explicated in Magisterial writings? Thoughts, anyone?

Christus Rex

2009-11-22T20:45:00.005-05:00

Today is the liturgical solemnity of Christ the King. In a way, today might be considered the feast day of this blog, which is dedicated to bringing about the reign of Christ the King to the greatest extent possible within society.

The homily where I attended Mass today called for attention and devotion to Saint Thomas More: to the lessons to be learned from his life and the help to gained by his intercession. He has been on my sidebar since day one, because he is a crucial figure for the proposed reclamation of the social reign for Christ's dominion.

The recent "Manhattan Declaration" is a worthy embodiment of the ethic of this great saint, who was always "the King's good servant, but God's first." As the health care debate kicks into full swing, and the battle over the redefinition of marriage and all that that contest entails finds its way into new States, we need to remain vigilant, pray for our leaders - social and ecclesial - and remember that Christ has no voice in this world if not our own.

Something in the Air...

2009-11-20T22:17:00.005-05:00

Update: This post refers to the Manhattan Declaration, a momentous manifesto that deserves more notice than might be directed to it by the original buried link within my text; so, I am highlighting it here. Feel free to read my ruminations on the matter (and there are more forthcoming), but be sure to go and read this wonderful work.

“I wrote it at the time of the Cuban crisis. I was in Bleecker Street in New York. We just hung around at night – people sat around wondering if it was the end, and so did I. Would 10 o’clock the next day ever come?... It was a song of desperation. What could we do? Could we control the men on the verge of wiping us out? The words came fast – very fast. It was a song of terror. Line after line, trying to capture the feeling of nothingness.
- Bob Dylan, speaking about his song, "It's A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall."

Well, reader, whoever you are: if you're here, you've noticed: so am I. It's difficult to describe the pull that I've felt increasingly the past few weeks drawing me back onto the pages of my blog. Blogging for me can be a tedious, sometimes even painful process. I fight with the ordinary pretensions of an aspiring writer, struggle with the natural vanities incumbent upon the same disposition, and torment myself with the constant question of whether or not anyone really gives a damn what I have to say. But, at the end of the day, I realize that I do have something to say. And I have a whole lot I'd like to hear. I set up this place as a venue for conversation and I'll keep up my part even when it seems hopelessly one-sided. I'll keep holding out hope that the discussion will be joined by some searcher after meaning and expression like myself. But even if it's not, I'll feel better for having said what has boiled over inside of me and has been so painful to keep in.

There's something in the air. Thunderclap Newman put it quite groovily in the song of that title: "Call out the instigator, because there's something in the air. We've got to get together sooner or later, because the revolution's here, and you know it's right."

Sure, that was the sixties. But there was, in the sixties, a sense - a feeling - an electricity of which everyone, even the most sheltered suburbanite, was at least dimly aware. There was something in the air. Maybe the revolution was overestimated. It's fruits have certainly been a mixed bag of the bad along with the good, and I really wonder sometimes which is the majority. But somewhere near the heart of it all, a flashpoint that put the matter beyond doubt whenever it was touched, was the issue of rights. Some folks had 'em, and some didn't. And some people just wouldn't take it. They got pissed. They shouted from the rooftops. And they got changes made.

I started this blog because I felt the electricity I'd read about, and heard about, and experienced vicariously through art and song. And I got the sense I wasn't the only one. And in the center of it all was this song, this song that said it all, of which the words weren't mine but yet somehow were - and I set out here to sing that song and see if anybody would pick up the tune.

I know there are others who have the song in their heart, who feel something moving around them at this moment that's just somehow different than things were 5 years ago, or 10 years ago, or 15. Sure, you might say, we were different then. And it's true. Time is a great equalizer that way, there isn't one of us that's isn't different now. But I still maintain that there's something else, some inscrutable, even ineffable thing, that's different - something in the air.

I've been hearing the song more loudly lately and so I came back and thought I'd post some thoughts and see what happens. And then today, I read something, and I found my song there, too, and 148 folks - some very different from me - singing that song loud and clear:

...we are especially troubled that in our nation today the lives of the unborn, the disabled, and the elderly are severely threatened; that the institution of marriage, already buffeted by promiscuity, infidelity and divorce, is in jeopardy of being redefined to accommodate fashionable ideologies; that freedom of religion and the rights of conscience are gravely jeopardized by those who would use the instruments of coercion to compel persons of faith to compromise their deepest convictions.

So, the song is still there. And that's why I'm here.

Just thought you'd like to know. If you're here too, I'm sure you have your reasons - and I'd love to hear 'em.

Follow the bier of the dead cold Year

2009-11-15T18:33:00.023-05:00

[NB: It might make sense to read this first.]

"It's too early!" Every year the plaint is heard in the checkout aisle of the drugstores, which seem to be the first place where Christmas decorations go on the shelves. There, next to Halloween candy, we find special sales on tree skirts and icicle lights, or bows and wrapping paper in discount packages. There is a seeming incongruity in the images of skeletons populating the side of the aisle opposite Saint Nick and his merry reindeer.

Certainly, when a country twang is heard on the radio belting out the climax of Silent Night - "Christ the Savior is born" - in early November, it is something of a jarring experience.

But let's be precise. What is problematic in November in this regard is equally irksome on the afternoon of December 24th. It is the premature celebration of the event of Christmas, and this does rightly deserve repudiation by discerning folks who want to keep Christmas well.

But once this primary error has been cautioned against and put in its most exact terms, we're left with a dilemma: what is the alternative? If there's a way properly to prepare for Christmas, then how early is too early to begin this preparation? Is the first Sunday in Advent the benchmark? Or perhaps Thanksgiving, when Santa arrives at Macy's to begin his arduous work?

Let's remember that the liturgical seasons, like the seasons of the year, are somewhat fluid and have semipermeable borders against one another. The season of Advent used to be longer than four weeks, but was also kept as a more intense fast in those days. As such, it was thought that lightening the fast - coming as it did in the dead of winter - was a beneficent thing. This remembrance serves as a double critique for us: first, pointing out that we probably keep our own shorter Advent much more laxly than we ought; and second, indicating that perhaps a longer period of (albeit less intense) preparation for the Christmas Season is in order.

Acknowledging that it is difficult to fix any kind of precise schedule, I'm going to try to indicate what I think is a better plan for how we should approach Christmastide, and supply a general time-frame. This is a recommendation only; hopefully, through my explanations and rationalization of my suggestions, the grounding philosophy behind them will become clear, so that if the proposed dates are disputed, at least the general principles will be found agreeable.

So, when do I recommend beginning to look forward to and even prepare for Christmas? Before Thanksgiving. Certainly not before Halloween? Indeed. Try September 14th.

Now, I know this may seem absurd, but it's not. I think that much of the symbolism and meaning of our Western celebration of Christmas (both the customary and the liturgical) will be enriched if we follow my proposal.

Let's consider for a moment the liturgical year as it reflects the life of the Church and the life of the world. The Exaltation of the Cross, the feast falling on September 14th, is an eschatalogical moment. Although the date of the Feast relates to historical exigencies surrounding the finding of the Cross's relics, nevertheless there may be something more than coincidental in it falling on the octave on the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Mary comes onto the scene, the first "player" in the final act of the Divine Drama of Redemption, and now we get a sort of preview of the climax. The Gospel is about judgment: we either hear Jesus telling Nicodemus that the Son of Man has come to save rather than condemn, or else we hear the stirring verse from John 12 after Jesus has predicted his death: "Now is the judgment of this world, now shall the ruler of this world be cast out."

Now, in mid-September, as the season of Pentecost begins to dwindle and the summer wans, this Feast serves as a watchword for us and a note of expectation surfaces. We have seen in the Easter Season Christ dying and rising again, and with Pentecost was ushered in a new age, of the Church. But Christ promised to come again; He proclaimed His cross as a victory and set us to look forward watchfully to His glorious reign after having cast out the devil.

The Exaltation of the Cross reminds us of this eschatological promise of Our Lord and begins a period of expectancy and preparation which lasts until the Feast of Christ the King (the last Sunday before Advent)*. During that time, we focus on the end times: death, judgment, heaven and hell. For example, we fast for Michaelmas Embertide (at the end of September) and look to that Heavenly Prince to protect us from evil things in the long night of winter. And the relationship with our departed brethren becomes more intense as we look forward to the Feast of All Saints and the month of All Souls. And, coinciding with this development, is the harvest.

In our industrial age, we miss out on the richness of harvest time. In previous times, September saw the earnest use of the cider press while laborers worked under the harvest moon as the daylight dwindled. And then October came on apace, the first frost threatening, and the harvest being gathered into the larders. Of the early grain, a brew was put down to ferment so that the excess would not be wasted, and an Octoberfest was held to clear some of the perishable food and drink to a good harvest. In November, spent grain and more perishable excess could be thrown together for a final bock-brew, and more feasts (whence the traditional Thanksgiving arose) were celebrated from the necessity of consuming what could not be stored and could otherwise go to waste.

During these times, man passed his days like a long sabbath. The darkness and cold out of doors found families gathered around their hearths for longer hours; games and warming drinks served to pass the time, now that the year's hardest work was past. Pagan lore and superstition abounded, and while the priests encouraged prayers for the dead, peasants quite easily imagined in these dark months that they could see many of the dead stalking the night. For after all, is that not what the Lord had promised? The lessons of Scripture spoke of the end of the world, and an atmosphere of tension throughout the harvest months became more and more palpable. The Lord will return! It was time that men took stock, and had ample opportunity to do so, since they were forced by necessity into their home and around their hearth where the most important things could be found.

As the days grew shorter and shorter, luminaries and evergreens were hung around the home to provide cheer and to serve as a reminder that winters had, historically, come to an end, and hopefully such would be the case with the present one. What with all the talk about about the end of the world, the peasants reserved a little corner of their hearts to look forward with symbols of life - evergreens, light, etc., - to something a little more cheerful as well. And the Church ratified this desire and provided them a focal point: the birth of Christ.

In November, Advent began, and while the eschatological dimensions of the lessons remained, nonetheless the focus on the birth of the Savior came more and more clearly into view. Within an octave of the feast, the "O" antiphons began, their first syllable expressing how the expectancy and anxiety had reached such a pitch that it practically leapt from the throat. And then finally, right around the darkest day of the year, "light shone forth in the darkness" and the great feast of Christmas began. I say began - for it lasted in earnest until Candlemas in early February, when the first real hope of Spring could begin to break through the Winter gloom.

* The feast of Christ the King, in the old calendar, was celebrated on the last Sunday of October, where it was a further punctuating mark of eschatology. The readings for the "Final Sunday of Pentecost," which was the celebration of the ultimate Sunday of the year, were also apocalyptic in nature. So regardless of what calendar you observe, the general trajectory and meaning is the same, and is in fact only intensified in variation.

So, what can we practically apply from this consideration to our modern observances? I would suggest that we need to be more attentive to the death of the year as it symbolizes in nature the end of all things. We need to use the season of autumn as a gradual but continual "tuning in" to the eschatalogical dimensions of the Christmas mystery: that the babe in the manger is also the mighty Judge of the world, Who comes with power, Whose tongue is a sundering sword of Truth.

If it takes putting up Christmas lights in October to alert us to the reality of the shortening days, then so be it! If we must hang a bare wreath on our wooden door even before Halloween to ward off the gloom of death which has begun to hang on the wood of the trees - then so much the better, because it shows we are paying attention.

Songs and movies, games and festivals, and the richness of harvest foods ought to be part of this season. Without admitting of Christmas joy too early - which can be easily avoided with a little discernment - still this should be a time of shutting out the world and the dark, gathering our families around our hearth - even if our hearths are televisions and our cheering lights consist of Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye.

If the smell of cider has not begun to permeate our homes by mid-November, then it must be asked whether we have any idea what violent travails Nature is undergoing in solidarity with us. We're not (most of us) farmers who are in touch with the earth. We don't see through our macadam and chemically-embellished lawns that great change has been underway. But this is all the more reason for us to find ways of augmenting our sensibilities so that the full impact of God's creation and the mysteries of the year can bear upon our consciousness.

So, if we have not done so already, let's begin to tune in to the death of the year. Let's begin to deprive ourselves of some of the comforts with which in previous ages it would be a necessity now to do without. And let's make up for that with cider and cocoa and cheerful music so that the poignancy of our fast becomes doubly effective. Let's retreat to the hearth away from the dark and the cold, and begin to look forward to the deadest dark of winter where a light will shine beyond all expectations, toward which it is really NEVER too early to begin looking.

My final word on this is not mine, but Chesterton's:

There is heard a hymn when the panes are dim,
And never before or again,
When the nights are strong with a darkness long,
And the dark is alive with rain.

Never we know but in sleet and in snow,
The place where the great fires are,
That the midst of the earth is a raging mirth
And the heart of the earth a star.

And at night we win to the ancient inn
Where the child in the frost is furled,
We follow the feet where all souls meet
At the inn at the end of the world.

The gods lie dead where the leaves lie red,
For the flame of the sun is flown,
The gods lie cold where the leaves lie gold,
And a Child comes forth alone.

History is a pattern of timeless moments

2009-11-15T13:40:00.017-05:00

It's an experience familiar to most college students. On a lazy autumn day, you have taken time for your mid-afternoon nap. Waking with a start, you glance at the clock. 5:42 it says. Your room is dark; no light filters in through the windows and the bedsheet you've hung for a makeshift curtain. You wonder how you've slept all the way through the night; but then it comes back to you suddenly that you recently adjusted your clock by order of the United States Congress, so it may just as well be PM as AM. You check your cell phone to confirm this hypothesis and find you are correct; you have not, after all, missed chicken nugget dinner day at the Cafeteria. Relieved, you throw on assorted sweats (bottoms and top assorted in color and even more in degree of cleanliness) and stumble out into the cold, dark evening. The stars are obscured by clouds, and the moon gives no light. You get into line for your chicken nuggets with several minutes to spare before 6 PM, but your appetite is not what it might be for the a vague uneasy feeling deep inside - or memory of a feeling - which seems to sit somewhere near the top of your stomach; the feeling that something is altogether queer about the experience you've just had, even though you might have had the same experience several times before. You can't quite put the quality finely into words, but there is an unparalleled uncanniness in waking to a darkness you cannot comprehend, to an unknown dark hour which may easily be early evening or early morning, or an hour of untold time and darkness - the hour before no sunrise at all, or following the sun's final setting in the sky, the hour of dark which will be ended only in a flash and a trumpet blast....

The unsettling untimely dark of mid-November is an importantly meaningful experience for those who attend to its rich symbolism. Even on days of so called "Indian Summer" (such as this glorious afternoon in which I could walk out in shorts and a tee-shirt), the season asserts itself at the day's early end - however gaily the Sun shines during the daylight, he must keep the same somber curfew. In "The Four Quartets," T.S. Eliot called such unseasonal days their own season: midwinter spring. Elsewhere in the same poem (East Coker, II), he ruminates on the meaning of the autumn's encroachment on the sun's freer summer reign:

What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?
Thunder rolled by the rolling stars
Simulates triumphal cars
Deployed in constellated wars
Scorpion fights against the Sun
Until the Sun and Moon go down
Comets weep and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.

Today, a perfect embodiment of "midwinter spring," found me walking out of Church after hearing these chilling words from Our Lord in the Gospel: "Jesus said to his disciples: 'In those days... the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from the sky, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.'" Looking into the bright blue sky, feeling the warm sun on my face, it was somewhat difficult to feel that we were "in those days" of which Our Lord spoke. But I knew that within a few short hours, already the sun would be retreating from sight and leaving the world to its long vigil of night, and that this night might be the night that does not end in dawn.

This is what November "means," and it means it quite insistently and intensely. And it is well for us to "get it." The world as we know it is ending. If we don't see it, then we're not reading right the signs of the times. No, I'm not talking about 2012 or the dive of the dollar or any of that. I'm talking about the annual "death of earth" which T.S. Eliot poetically celebrated in "The Four Quartets" (read them today if you get the chance). I'm talking about the end of the year, and about a certain event that happens in the dead of winter on the same day annually and yet still manages to find the great majority of us unprepared.

I offer this brief reflection as a sort of pretext to an observation I'd like to make about Christmas and its proper celebration. I'm sure many of us already have seen Christmas lights going up around our home towns, in people's houses or on the light poles. And perhaps some of us find this distasteful or untimely or a corruption. But I would like to suggest another view, one which I think is particularly urgent for our day and age, when the seasons too easily become monochromatic, and the hypnosis of electric light and the constancy of the 9 to 5 workday lull us into a routine that desensitizes us to the visceral life-cycle of the physical and spiritual world around us.

So, please check back for my next post, but in the meantime read T.S. Eliot if you can and ask yourself: What does November mean?

And the winner is...

2009-07-10T17:16:00.002-04:00

... I cringe to admit it. But so far, the most salient thing I've read in the mainstream media about the Pope's encyclical - the most understanding, fair-minded view of the document - comes from (gulp) the Republican Party. Father Z. has it:

Statement by House GOP Leaders Boehner & McCotter on Pope Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate

WASHINGTON, DC – House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and Republican Policy Committee Chairman Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI) today issued the following joint statement regarding Pope Benedict XVI’s new encyclical, Caritas in Veritate:

"Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, is neither an indictment of capitalism nor an endorsement of any political or economic agenda, and ideologues and politicos hoping to spin it as either are destined to be unsuccessful.

"The Holy Father’s central point in Caritas in Veritate is that at times of economic challenge, the inherent dignity of the individual must be preserved and sustained through genuine charity and compassion. This message is clearly distinct from efforts to ‘remake’ government into a soul-crushing centralized welfare state in which independent citizens are remade into dependent servants. In the encyclical, the Pope stresses that the human being must remain as the center of our free-market system. He warns that individuals, families, churches, communities, and businesses must never become subservient to the state. He emphasizes that the sanctity of all human life must always be protected. And he advocates conservation, not radical environmentalism.

"Caritas in Veritate is not a political document, but rather a complex work that warrants careful and thoughtful contemplation by American Catholics and non-Catholics alike at this time of economic anxiety."

Encouraging! And a bit... surprising? Odd?

Not to name drop...

2009-07-08T19:18:00.002-04:00

... but Mark Shea seems to agree with me, too:

I find Weigel's attempt to parse the R sources from the J&P sources and tells us which bits of the encyclical *really* give us the Pope's thought to be as credible as the work of the Jesus Seminar in color-coding the gospels.

Seldom has there been such a ham-fisted pass at trimming Church teaching to fit an ideological box.

Well put. Certainly better than I. Now, let us hope, 'nuff said.

And now...

2009-07-07T16:39:00.003-04:00

... the sound of one hand clapping.

The money quote:

What Benedict XVI has not spelled out yet is another forgotten lesson from St. Augustine: the ever-corrupting role of sin in the City of Man. Augustine points out how difficult it is even for the wisest and most detached humans to discover the truth among lies—and how even husbands and wives in the closest of human bonds misunderstand each other so often. The Father of Lies seems to own so much of the real world.

What are the most practical ways of defeating him? The Catholic tradition—even the wise Pope Benedict—still seems to put too much stress upon caritas, virtue, justice, and good intentions, and not nearly enough on methods for defeating human sin in all its devious and persistent forms.

Even the Pope’s understandable nostalgia for the European welfare-state too much scants the self-interests, self-deceptions, and false presuppositions that are bringing that system to a crisis of its own making. This was a crisis John Paul II saw rather more clearly in paragraph 48 of Centesimus Annus.
- Michael Novak

Where, O where, to begin? First of all, Joseph Ratzinger came of age in Nazi Germany, and I don't think a socialistic state gives him any warm-fuzzies of nostalgia. And how can Mr. Novak claim that it is the Holy Father (a confessor for over 50 years) who is naive about sin, when it is he who naively believes that market motives and the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest will somehow spark a society of justice and equity. Where does the corrupting power of sin enter into the market? O, that's right, I forgot, the market is amoral - not like there are sinful human agents operating within it, just automaton consumers responding to economic laws and mathematical motives. What a crock.

Finally, what the hell is more practical for defeating sin and overcoming evil in the world than "caritas, virtue, justice, and good intentions"? These are things which private individuals must foster and which a State cannot enforce, so it surprises me to hear Mr. Novak calling for something more "pragmatic" and "programmatic." But, apart from that surprise, I am still left to wonder - what is more practical for overcoming sin than caritas in veritate? Anyone? Bueller?

Now, I know I said I wasn't going to get into parsing and analyzing this document just yet. But apparently, people in the blogosphere are very concerned with a phrase from paragraph 39. Mr. Weigel doesn't understand what is meant by "forms of economic activity marked by quotas of gratuitousness and communion."

Now, first, let's read paragraph 39 in full:

Paul VI in Populorum Progressio called for the creation of a model of market economy capable of including within its range all peoples and not just the better off. He called for efforts to build a more human world for all, a world in which “all will be able to give and receive, without one group making progress at the expense of the other”. In this way he was applying on a global scale the insights and aspirations contained in Rerum Novarum, written when, as a result of the Industrial Revolution, the idea was first proposed — somewhat ahead of its time — that the civil order, for its self-regulation, also needed intervention from the State for purposes of redistribution. Not only is this vision threatened today by the way in which markets and societies are opening up, but it is evidently insufficient to satisfy the demands of a fully humane economy. What the Church's social doctrine has always sustained, on the basis of its vision of man and society, is corroborated today by the dynamics of globalization.

When both the logic of the market and the logic of the State come to an agreement that each will continue to exercise a monopoly over its respective area of influence, in the long term much is lost: solidarity in relations between citizens, participation and adherence, actions of gratuitousness, all of which stand in contrast with giving in order to acquire (the logic of exchange) and giving through duty (the logic of public obligation, imposed by State law). In order to defeat underdevelopment, action is required not only on improving exchange-based transactions and implanting public welfare structures, but above all on gradually increasing openness, in a world context, to forms of economic activity marked by quotas of gratuitousness and communion. The exclusively binary model of market-plus-State is corrosive of society, while economic forms based on solidarity, which find their natural home in civil society without being restricted to it, build up society. The market of gratuitousness does not exist, and attitudes of gratuitousness cannot be established by law. Yet both the market and politics need individuals who are open to reciprocal gift.

Alright, the phrase which has so many people so upset is "forms of economic activity marked by quotas of gratuitousness and communion." Now, this is understandable in some ways, since "quotas" are common in Socialist models of economy, and we would not want to say the Pope is encouraging that here. So, just what is he encouraging? What does this expression mean?

Well, on the one hand, I think knee-jerking at the word "quota" is a bit hasty. There is no Latin version of this document on the Holy See's website, yet. The Italian indeed does have "da quote di gratuità e di comunione." However, the French rendering is "par une part de gratuité et de communion" and the Spanish, "por ciertos márgenes de gratuidad y comunión." Certain margins characterizing a form of economy gives a much different sense than "quotas." So, perhaps we're reading too much into a word. Even so, what does this marginality mean and how does it get defined and who defines it? This too seems simpler than is being made out. The paragraph speaks before and after this quotation about the concept of "solidarity" as a necessary characteristic of economic activity, and also notes that globalization is not necessarily letting more people in but simply letting fewer people benefit at the expense of more and more marginalized (people only ostensibly enfranchised of power). If our motives to give are simply to receive in return, or because it is by mandate of the State, this falls short of the ideal and will not lead us to truly include others in economic life - just use them.

I could conceive of various Distributist models which capture the idea of this phrase, like Belloc's incentive-based taxation which tries to keep more people participatory in the economic activity of a region by making bigger business only WANT to accrue a certain part of property. They leave off what would be surplus and unprofitable, allowing others a chance to work with that property; then as others succeed and are able to pay their own greater share of the upkeep of the commonwealth, the larger owners benefit from a fall of their own taxes. The success of the other would be thus an incentive for a particular owner, albeit not until the system had been in place and begun to succeed.

Another thought is that it seems any small, family run business is already a local form of what Benedict is talking about. Two brothers open a store, and one day Brother A gets sick on his day to manage: will Brother B really take it out of his salary for his own coming in, knowing that Brother A had to pay the copay for a doctor's visit that day? No. The brothers will act first of all like brothers, and their business will be characterized by certain margins of gratuitousness and communion. They will be a family first, and a business second. This is what Benedict means by "economic forms based on solidarity, which find their natural home in civil society without being restricted to it." He means take what works (and is virtuous) about the local and try to keep the global in the same ethos. It might seem pie-in-the-sky, but given that the human race really is a family, under God, spread accross the globe, then this as a model for "globalization" is not all that far-fetched. So, the job of people like Novak and Weigel ought to be asking, "what would this look like on a bigger scale, and how could we do it?" rather than decrying it as nonsensical drivel.

Anyhow, I'm open for discussion whether this phrase is really as unmeaning as others make it out to be. To me, it does convey a sense, perhaps indeed somewhat imprecise, but only because it's not something to be seen so much in finer details as in the "big picture." Thoughts?

Exhibit A

2009-07-07T12:14:00.004-04:00

Caritas in Veritate in Gold and Red by George Weigel on National Review Online

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I have nothing but respect and admiration for Mr. Weigel. However, this is such a clear example of the kind of intellectual audacity with which I feared this encyclical would be met, that I simply can't pass it over. Mr. Weigel identifies two "strains" in the encyclical, some which are clearly "Benedictine" and thus may be marked in gold (ooooh, gold!), and other which are from the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and must be marked in red (bloody fascista nonsense). Mr. Weigel's suggestion is to apply this hermeneutic to reading the document: "Those with eyes to see and ears to hear will concentrate their attention, in reading Caritas in Veritate, on those parts of the encyclical that are clearly Benedictine...."

Ok. Where to begin? Well, first of all, the Pope isn't some copy writer for a cheap news item playing and pandering to his cronies and appeasing them so that they all get their say. Did he play to every special interest group in the Vatican when he published Summorum Pontificum? I think not. Vatican politics are a reality to be reckoned with, but with due respect to Mr. Weigel, when Our Holy Father placed his name at the end of this encyclical letter, I think he intended the whole of it to be carefuly studied and reflected upon. And it is an insult, not to the PCJP, but to Benedict XVI to say that sections of the encyclical sound like "the warbling of an untuned piccolo." Perhaps the preconceived hermeutic of bifurcation with which the encyclical has been read make some passages seem obscure. Rather than trying to see the "red" sections in light of the "gold" and how elucidation might result from such an application, it seems far easier to just chuck half the paragraphs out the window as unsubstantial addenda only published in the first place to appease old Cardinals who might get in a tissy if they're not paid attention to. Yeah, cuz that seems like Benedict XVI's way of action...

Read the letter. Read the whole letter. And think about it. If it seems like it's meaningless, even in part, give the benefit of the doubt to the name at the end of it and try a little harder to wrap your mind about it before drawing in a scapegoat.

UPDATE - 07/07/09 @ 1450 hrs

I'm not the only one: Father Z. apparently has not fully grasped Mr. Weigel's "beef" either.

Very Initial Thoughts...

2009-07-07T09:57:00.003-04:00

First of all, consider this thread an OPEN FORUM for any discussion that anybody wants to have in the com-boxes. I will turn off comment moderation for the time being (reserving the right to delete if that becomes necessary). I hope to shuttle some traffic over here from Facebook.

Anyway, here are my initial thoughts:

WOW! Benedict has been known for some heady writing, but this... wow.

I am initially very pleased after scanning the Encyclical, and find many points resonating therein which I will need to reflect upon here at length over the next few days. In the meantime, one that jumped out at me immediately is from Chapter 3:

Charity in truth places man before the astonishing experience of gift. Gratuitousness is present in our lives in many different forms, which often go unrecognized because of a purely consumerist and utilitarian view of life.... [W]e must make it clear, on the one hand, that the logic of gift does not exclude justice, nor does it merely sit alongside it as a second element added from without; on the other hand, economic, social and political development, if it is to be authentically human, needs to make room for the principle of gratuitousness as an expression of fraternity.
Caritas in veritate 34.

Which rather reminds me of the dearth of "humane" principles in economic theory, which I reflected upon earlier.

There's a lot in here, though, and it seems that nearly every paragraph can be subject for reflection, so pardon my silence today as I chew on this and try to organize my own response.

Stocking the Larders

2009-07-06T22:29:00.002-04:00

Over on the USCCB's Media Blog are two posts worthy of consideration in preparation for the "big day" tomorrow (I am not one of the lucky ones who have gotten an early leaked copy of the encyclical). Check out Groundbreaking Encyclical on the Way by Sr. Mary Ann Walsh (a worthy little reflection, although notably leaving out mention of Quadragesimo Anno and Sollicitudo Rei Socialis); and also Don Clemmer's nice roundup of resources, Social Encyclical Primer.

Obviously, I will have some things to say here not long after I've ingested the forthcoming words. And there's still more I have to say about the preventative, preemptive strike launched by certain nervous Pervuses.

Divine McMandate?

2009-06-30T15:17:00.007-04:00

Answering an objection against "globalization," the following was posted in the discussion to which I've been drawing attention:

As a matter of fact, Catholicism is in no way opposed to globalization. Consider Christ’s mandate to the Apostles, which closes out the Markan Gospel: Go, make disciples of all nations. And, to be sure, the grand projects of evangelization and mission work which spread across much of the New World were the first exercises in globalization. After all, the word "Catholic" is another word for globalization—it means, "universal."

Catholic does indeed translate as "universal," but does that mean globalization?

Here we have our first example I'd like to deal with of people debating with different definitions and different categories. First, let's talk about this word "Catholic." The usage in the early Church was not necessarily meant to say that Catholicism or the Church had indeed spread everywhere so as to be ubiquitous. Indeed, the missionizing of the Empire had been impressive by the time of the first instances of this term in writing, but Christians were still not a majority in most places. The "universality" of the Church was attributed to the fact that where the Church was, She was recognizable and the same. She did not get taken over by the culture, but remained true universally while still taking on a unique "localism" in each of Her manifestations. And as the understanding of the Church's universality developed, it came to include the idea that the Church contained a "fullness" - that She embraced all that was true, all that was good, all that was holy. And she also embraced all peoples, and each contributed to the characteristics of the local Church while not changing the essentials of the whole Church.

Now, to me, this conjures a very different image than what normally comes to mind when we speak of a global marketplace or the global economy. (As a matter of fact, trying to conflate the two images in the way the commenter does rather makes one feel that the moneychangers have entered the Temple, so to speak.) For one thing, the work of evangelization, to use John Paul II's famous phrase, is about "proposing" and not "imposing." The spread of the Gospel to the four corners of the globe is about planting seeds. But the local soil and the local weather have a lot to do with what the crop ends up being like, and the Church adapts Herself wonderfully in order to accomodate diversity within unity. But "globalization" and the spread of Western corporations to the Third World have often been impositions and done little to accomodate the local flavors. In fact, it is often one of the gloating points of Capitalist cheerleaders that a McDonalds in any given country is the same thing - and often they celebrate this with a propagandist statistic that no two countries with McDonalds have ever fought an all-out war.

The audacity of this comparison comes through most poignantly when someone like Michael Novak compares - as he does in more than one place - the "American global market" to the "Mystical Body of Christ." The analogy is alluring - members each performing a function, each contributing for the good of the whole of the organism, and if one part fails the rest suffers. I do not deny the aptness of comparing America's world interests to an organic body. It's that it is said to be like Christ's that rubs me the wrong way. The reason for this comparison is that supposedly such interests breed peace and harmony and promote the common good. It would be easy to point to exigencies such as the Iraqi conflict or the squalor of the slums in India as failures of this, but such exceptions admittedly would not disprove a rule.

So, let's see if there's a deeper level on which the "universality" of the Church and of the global American-style economy differ, why one is more aptly called the Body of Christ and the other better compared simply to a body. This deeper level of consideration gets to the level of philosophy and the way we approach the question, - that is, that level which I have been proposing for discussion all along.

A nice formula by which I should like to draw the distinction between "evangelization" and "globalization" is this: one fails and other succeeds. This difference cannot be understated. The whole motivation, the whole ethic of the two enterprises, is radically different. And if the ethic, the philosophy, of the former (evangelization) really were adopted by the latter (economic globalization), the picture would radically change.

The Body of Christ of Christ given up on the Cross for others is the same Body glorified in Heaven and mystically present in the Church. And the mechanism of growth is still the same as it was at that foundational moment: the members give themselves up, offer themselves out of love and service, and the Body is continually renewed from Her immolation and raised in glory. The blood of the martyrs is ever the seed of the Church. Every remarkable evangelical mission in the history of the Church (Saint Paul, Saint Maximillian Kolbe, Saint Isaac Jogues, Father Walter Chiszek) has ended in appalling failure! Heads cut off, poisons injected, fingernails ripped out and skin shorn off: and from such suffering and pain new life begins. Through spectacles of failure comes spectacular success.

Now, it would take a very flippant person to suggest that this is a manifestation of the Capitalist virtue of risk-taking. But many people have done just that. In fact, this virtue is totally other than "risk-taking." The courage of the martyrs is infused by love and utter lack of self-interest, and is sure of ultimate victory; if this courage becomes the courage of the Capitalist... well, then that Capitalist becomes a sort other than the type with whom I am here concerned. The ones with whom I'm concerned here operate by the ethic of success. They look for the march of "progress" accross the globe. Every Golden Arch raised above a stinking city becomes a gold star up on their walls. They pat themselves on the backs for the fewer who die in the indignities of war, but pay never a mind to the many more who die in the indignities of their stale "peace": the overdosed stars and suicidal moguls.

The ethic of progress and success aptly fits the analogy of a body other than Our Lord's, and I am sure that those who compare globalization with evangelization really have that kind of comparison in mind. Admittedly, the thing spreads, it grows, it consumes and takes into itself and becomes stronger in the process - very organic. But this sort of bodily structure is not operating with the same ethic as the Body of Christ. It is not motivated by the placement of others' interests above self or the willingness to suffer for the sake of others.

Now, I would just point out in closing that the ethic of success is also the ethic of Communism and State Socialism, so I should by no means be mistaken as supporting that kind of economic outlook in favor over Capitalism. I am uncertain how I might analagously apply the ethic of Communism to the image of a body in order to demonstrate what a monstrosity that would be. Suffice to say that whereas at least Capitalism, for all its omnivorous obsession with growth and success, does actually achieve a great degree of bodily health, Communism creates a half-starved but super-strong wraith, something like a skelatal zombie with the energy to bend iron but not the strength to bend its own knees.

So, the Church's mission of evangelization operates on a different ethic than America's mission of expanding the free market. One seeks only to propose, the other seeks to impose (albeit "for their own good"). But, - the objection may arise - certainly doesn't the Church's social mission of helping the poor and improving their condition also look for success? I would answer yes and no. Yes, success is hoped for; but then, success is not the ultimate goal. The ethic here is consistent. I would argue that the Church's social teaching would be implimented in practice if and when people began focusing more on their own solidarity with the least in society and less on their own success. Again, I cannot here see an analogy on the economically liberal side, because the approach woud have an inconsistent ethic. To claim solidarity with the poor while struggling every waking breath to get richer, only hoping so that something might "trickle down"... well, that course does not sit well on top of the terrain of philosophy I have tried to illustrate. Working side by side with ones brother in solidarity so that his successes are yours and so also his failures: this is the Distributist way.

UPDATE - 07/07/09 @ 0100 hrs.

In my reading over the past 24 hours, the following popped up, which seemed apropos to append here:

The ethical implications [of globalization] can be positive or negative. There is an economic globalization which brings some positive consequences, such as efficiency and increased production and which, with the development of economic links between the different countries, can help to bring greater unity among peoples and make possible a better service to the human family. However, if globalization is ruled merely by the laws of the market applied to suit the powerful, the consequences cannot but be negative. These are, for example, the absolutizing of the economy, unemployment, the reduction and deterioration of public services, the destruction of the environment and natural resources, the growing distance between rich and poor, unfair competition which puts the poor nations in a situation of ever increasing inferiority. While acknowledging the positive values which come with globalization, the Church considers with concern the negative aspects which follow in its wake.
- John Paul II, Ecclesia in America 20

Reclaiming Homo Economicus

2009-06-29T23:40:00.003-04:00

However, certain concepts have somehow arisen out of these new conditions and insinuated themselves into the fabric of human society. These concepts present profit as the chief spur to economic progress, free competition as the guiding norm of economics, and private ownership of the means of production as an absolute right, having no limits nor concomitant social obligations.

This unbridled liberalism paves the way for a particular type of tyranny, rightly condemned by Our predecessor Pius XI, for it results in the "international imperialism of money."

Such improper manipulations of economic forces can never be condemned enough; let it be said once again that economics is supposed to be in the service of man.
(Populorum Progressio 26)

With the Pope's new encyclical signed and set to come out, debate rages over at Father Z.'s blog, and I must say I am not very impressed with any of the interlocutors at this point - neither in their display of tact and charity, nor in their argumentation.

The "camps" in the discussion are such as one might expect to find. There are those arguing something of a "collectivist" programme; and then there are standard free-market apologists waving the banners of Hayek and Novack. Both sides claim the body of Catholic Social Doctrine to support their claims. Accusations are made in either direction of "cafeteria Catholicism" and a "hermeneutic of discontinuity." Some hope that the Pope will provide specific policy directives in his new encyclical (and of these, some hope for more liberal economic advice, others for a collectivist sort), and there are still some who tremble that the specificity will resemble past statements (like the one quoted above) which still unnerve so many.

To all of this, I have simply to say: let's wait and read what the current Pope has said, and in the meantime, let's spend time going back and praying over what the previous Popes have said (yes, all of them, not just John Paul II). But whilst we study, we can try to continue discussion on some fundamental issues which seem to shape our understanding of what the Papal Magisterium offers us in this regard...

I will be working through a couple of the major philophical question which seem to be logically prior to any consideration of what the Pope might say, as they seem to condition us as to how we'll read and interpret what he does have to say. Put more simply, and to use an illustration: Michael Novack and I read Centesimus Annus very differently. And at the risk of sounding presumptuous, I simply will not defer to Professor Novack's greater learning and experience on this because I have read his reasoning as to why he reads that document how he does, and I see fundamentally different philosophical approaches. It is not a matter of greater or lesser understanding on different levels. It is a matter of ways of understanding. I hope to provide here over the next few posts suggestions of ways to read the Papal Magisterium on Social Doctrine.

So, please stay tuned, and chime in at any time.

And, oh yes, my title.... As I hope to demonstrate, the differences between the arguers on the post that has me so miffed lie deep down prior to any technical discussion of economic policy. The differences are philosophical: they concern what economics is all about, what the economy is, and what it is for. They concern how economics as a science should relate to other disciplines and questions. Anyway, at the end of all this, I will suggest that the Distributist position understands economics in such a way that, really, we might say that man is indeed homo economicus with no harm to the school. This is because economics is wider and interpenetrated with other concerns and "humanized" so to speak. And thus, perhaps the recovery of a true sense of man as an economizer (in our sense of the term) is precisely what is to be desired.

And so let us proceed.

(NB: The quote from PP at the top is not meant to relate substantively to this or any of the following posts, and I do consider this to be one of the many statements in the Social Magisterium that needs interpreting and careful consideration. In fact, I picked that quote as an intro precisely because it invites that question of "What do we do with this?" - discussion of which I hope can take place on this blog and elsewhere in the weeks to come.)

Nearly Here

2009-06-29T09:56:00.002-04:00

Rocco has it, from the Pope's noon Angelus address today: the Encyclical, Caritas in Veritate has been signed and will now be prepared for translation/publication.

The Calm Before the Storm...

2009-06-28T23:48:00.000-04:00

Well, I'm coming out of hiding. There is a lot to talk about. A lot of change, facing the rising seas and the waxing storm - both in my personal life and in the world at large. My mind has not been idle. I've been thinking, reading, praying about social charity and social justice every day. But I just haven't been able to catch fire and write. Something in me has been poised, waiting with a kind of baited anticipation, a still and serene snowscape before the pebble that starts the avalanche. Not that the flow down the mountain will be strong enough to overcome anything; please don't mistake me as trying to characterize my output here as formidable thought. I doubt whether I am very well equipped indeed to enter the discussions into which I will shuffle with my two cents. But my thoughts are honest thoughts, and they are I think thoughtful. And I will continue to share them with whoever will accept them in charity, and wait to receive any who will share their own in kind.

The "pebble" aforementioned is this: a rigorous discussion (although, I fear, somewhat heated and overblown with occasional meanness) taking place over at Father Z.'s. The catalyst for debate is rumour of the Pope's new encyclical which pundits expect may be signed tomorrow. When the translation will be prepared is uncertain.

The thought of a new social encyclical, the many possibilities that entails, obviously has me pondering. I am anxious to see Pope Benedict's mind turn to these issues for which John Paul II showed famous academic interest and solicitude. I am struck even with some trepidation, both for the encylical's contents and its reception. Like one of the commenter's at Father's blog, I hold my breath when the Vatican begins to express specific opinion about economic policy. I do believe in a certain autonomy to the (albeit soft) science of economics. However, I cannot subscribe to the classically liberal tenets of many squawking over at WDTPRS.

So, there the stage is set for my own holding forth on these matters. Whether the letter comes tomorrow or not, I'll have something to say, so stay tuned. And thanks for sticking with me through the long winter. There'll be more said of that, too, ere long. Oremus pro invicem, friends.

Red Herring with that Cheese?

2009-03-09T19:57:00.009-04:00

Anticipating an argument which may be made against that which I've argued down below, I have this to observe:

"There are limitations of the claims made by the law of supply and demand; there are things that it is supposed to do, and those it does not propose to do. For one, it presupposes an economic situation and stands as a way of predicting what will happen in a market."

So, at first glance, my example of a friendly gift of cheese is far-removed from the law of supply and demand...

The argument would continue, "Had Joe chosen to sell the cheese to his friend, then his ownership of the wanted quantity would enable him within the 'market' in a remarkable way, which would be captured by the law. But, supply and demand is not supposed (nor is it claimed) to create the situation or the choice whereby Joe would end up motivated to sell his cheese."

I know this. And I know that market apologists know this. And I hope that these apologists would concur with the argument I've presented on their behalf as at least not conflicting with their view (even if it is haphazard). But the existential fact which these same apologists miss, and which is the gist of my little anecdote, is this: an "economic situation," or, rather, man's economic life, is not other than his day to day life. The Welt in which man operates as an economic agent is the same one in which he plays with his children and eats cheese and drinks beer with his friends. But the economic Weltanschauung today either isolates the "economic sphere" (from the aesthetical and ethical), or claims to invade and overshadow them. Man is too often homo economicus.

So, we get into a situation nowadays where market apologists are always downplaying claims about the extent and applicability of their economic "laws," while at the same time but in a backhanded way they are seeking to methodically assert an economic rationalization or materialism over the systems of ethics which run our lives. Granted that the cheese emporium itself was not a market situation; my point is that the individual human beings within that cheese emporium might the next day occupy a cheese shop, or a cheese factory. And they will continue to be shaped by the same philosophies, the same prejudices, the same affections, the same biases which so strongly influence their appetites (intellectual and other) in that former place and time.

When I was a child, there was a toy phenomenon known as "Pogs." These were little collectable cardboard chips worth cents apiece, with images of various cultural icons (or pagan totems) drawn on them. They became a trading item on the playground, and some schools even banned them. A situation had begun developing where kids would trade items from their packed lunches or snacks from home for "pogs" with which their classmates were willing to part.

Once an economic anthropology and worldview begin to overtake the other sources of ethics and motivation in man's life, the laws of economics will begin to beg recognition further from their conventional locations and they will also begin to be asserted to have the same "necessity" (which is an inherent characteristic of law) as the laws traditionally felt in those spheres (e.g., on the school playground). The law of supply and demand will never contain within itself the means of creating a situation for its application. But the law is at the service of human beings; and mankind, in our current cultural milieu, will be more and more tempted to rationalize in economic ways and to turn situations into ones which can be exploited by economic laws.

So, my illustration holds water. A situation existed for which an economic rationalization existed which would have been (scientifically) as satisfactory as other modes of rationalization. But it would not have satisfied in other ways: there is something deeper, something on the level of being, in man which repels from this temptation even though all of culture and media pushes him toward it. We would do well to empower and encourage this part of man before it is too atrophied by disuse to ward off the lure of mammon.

Finding Our Cheese

2009-03-07T23:51:00.006-05:00

“Here, try this – it’s good, you’ll like it.”

Such began a complex sociological and economical phenomenon known as “goods exchange” between a real, living acquaintance of mine and my own rational self, on an actual historical date not long ago. The good in question was a piece of cheese: to be precise, a sliver of Mahon Reserve.

Now, certain acknowledgments are in order. First, it should be noted that this experiment was not conducted under the most rigorous circumstances nor in a laboratory, but rather in a cheese and beer tasting emporium in a crowded industrial city. Second, the individuals in question, myself and my acquaintance, should be observed as having certain personal predispositions favoring the remarkable result which precipitated, to wit: we both like cheese, a fact which might have been inferred by our haunting said emporium.

Upon my recommendation of the Mahon, I made this commodity available to my friend by extending the plate across the table, and he – after hardly a moment’s consideration – summarily snatched up and consumed the morsel. His findings were that it satisfied the desire occasioned in him by my accolade. His expectation was fulfilled: the cheese, indeed, was good.

Now, I am not a trained economist. Neither do I expect that most of my readers are. I can, however, assure them that many trained economists probably would find me flippant for proclaiming this exchange to be a primary example of the so-called “law of supply and demand.” Nevertheless, I presume to do so. And for the purposes of us non-initiate persons, pursuant of the point I hope to make upon this matter, I hope my presumption will be justified.

Every day, in the market, certain goods and services are made available and offered to consumers who engage in exchanges for these goods and services at certain contracted “trade values.” The availability of the goods (their numeric amount, immediacy to acquisition, etc.), in tension with their desirability in the sphere of the consumer (occasioned by need, perceived worth, etc.), are the realities which influence the value in exchange. Exigencies such as occur in the production of the goods and in the creation of a desire for such goods ultimately terminate in the relations involved in a concrete instance of this particular good being demanded and in turn supplied; the complex ways in which those former exigencies factor into such concrete instances in the market, taken as a whole or system as they influence the values which people are willing to exchange, are supposed to constitute the law of supply and demand.

Take now the example of the piece of cheese. Through my purchase of a certain quantity of Mahon Reserve, I possessed a good. My friend had none of this same good. Perhaps, as yet, no market reality existed. However, after my exaltation of the cheese created in my friend a sense of its desirability, it would seem that all of the necessary rudimentary elements for market exchange existed. Whether my cheese was a commodity for trade was still a matter in doubt. But there was nothing stopping my friend from asking for some of it, for initiating a situation of exchange. As it happened, I took this initiative and offered the cheese, and my goods became his; value which was mine passed from my possession and was acquired by another.

Now, because I received nothing in remittance, this might not seem like an economic situation, but I think that a question-begging distinction, for I easily might have asked for, say, some of his Gruyere. I could even have had the cheese-monger lend us his scale to ensure equitable weights for the traded bits. The “law” seems to have been applicable if only in potentiality; it merely happens that the full rights and duties attendant to this law (as with any law), were not in this case fully exploited or exercised.

Yet there is something unsatisfactory, unsavory (pardon the cheesy pun) about looking at this situation in such a way. For one thing, there were other dynamics influencing the situation at least as much as (I would argue more than) the existence of goods-possessed and goods-lacked and a corresponding willingness and desire for exchange. And it seems to me that these other dynamics were more rooted in reality, more fundamentally human, even more fundamentally economic. As a point of fact, in this particular situation (albeit unscientific and biased by certain predispositions of altruism, friendship, and cheese-lust), those other dynamics indeed did influence the outcome more so than the “law” which, I think, has been shown to have been at least theoretically applicable.

It is neither my purpose to debunk the law of supply and demand, nor to discount it, nor even to attenuate it. It is my purpose to talk about a piece of cheese and a value exchanged between two friends. Father Vincent McNabb famously asserted as a formula for Distributist economics that, “as far as possible, the area of production should be coterminous with the area of consumption.” This has been celebrated and written about often enough as an application of the subsidiarist principle (or, put another way, of the desirability of as much “smalleness” within business as possible), as a formulary for “human-scale” economics, and the workability of such has also been discussed at length (especially by writers of the “Back to the Land” movement in promoting self-sustaining agricultural endeavors). But the “why” of this principle is sometimes hard to bring to light. I submit my piece of cheese as an illustration of this rationale.

In the gustatory ambiance of a bohemian beer emporium, between two friends who share much more in common than a liking for cheese, an economic “law” somehow lost its power of governance, and I hold this to be a remarkable fact. Remarkable, because there still persists in the world today an idea that the market, left to itself, will somehow simply “work,” and this due to a certain character of necessity in the “laws” which govern it. Yes, economic laws and market principles are indispensable for predicting behavior with commodities and persons in exchange processes; but I balk at the sort of scientism in this field which all too often tends to lose sight of the essential realities at the root of all economic life: human beings, human volition (desires, values, beliefs), and real goods with metaphysical value. The substance of cheese, when consumed by human digestion, most certainly “works” and its effects are measurable and certain (sometimes terrible and seemingly magical, but measurable nonetheless). But there is also a mystical, a sacramental quality about cheese, a transcendent goodness which moves the soul with eros, which it is the object of all philosophy and art to capture and express (despite the fact which Chesterton observed, that “poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”) The substantial reality of cheese, and its interaction with other individual substances of a rational nature (viz., human persons), is a force to be reckoned with in any sufficient picture of human life; and, consequently, it is a force which must be acknowledged alongside and held in tension with other forces and “laws” in the so-called sphere of “economic life.” This, because, as we have seen, in some concrete instances where all of the exigencies of economic life pertain, the forces within persons and cheese might in fact have more influence than all of the laws and forces taxed by the cold, hard science of the market. Because the sphere of economic life is a smaller sphere with porous circumference within the larger reality of human life.

In light of all of this, the practicality – indeed, the necessity – of Father McNabb’s formulation demands consideration in our day. When commodities in exchange are held to have a value apart from their basis in human exigencies; when worth is “created” by programmatic desire-impulse creation exercised by media, government, and sundry other movers; when increasingly the human beings behind economic exchange are alienated by automation and internet purchase, and by the abstraction of economic worth from goods-given-for-goods-received (or even money-in-hand) to electronic ledger entries and portfolios; when the area of consumption and the area of production are not only increasingly bifurcated but disintegrated in their own integrity as consumers themselves become commodities and the very desire for goods becomes a value to be produced; in such an age, we need the wisdom of men like Father McNabb to call us back to basics.

If the market is ever to “work,” human volition and action will be the factors that motivate it most. And the greatest assurance we have that this human action will be ethical and tend to the common good will come by re-grafting economic life onto the metaphysical roots of things and persons, goods and desires. That is to say, when fewer things come between a man and his cheese, the fundamentals for a sound and ethical economic life will be in place. Granted that a piece of cheese, placed within the mechanism of the market and its attendant laws, can achieve various other goods as well; nevertheless, the further the mechanism manages to abstract the cheese from its essential good as food-for-man, the more our peril. Values will become distorted; the forces and laws working upon real substances will spin out of control and warp or obscure their metaphysical images; and, suddenly, in the midst of his own economic life, man will finds himself alien and neglected, if not exploited and abused. A man, a friend, and a piece of cheese are wholesome realities, and as long as they are kept integral and whole they can even operate to great good within a market. But once let the laws and forces of that market eclipse for a moment the wholesome metaphysical realities operating therein – let the cheese be seen merely as commodity and the friend merely as consumer – and man’s alienation has begun. No value which the market may tell the man he has will ever be felt to measure up to the value he once had. He has lost his friend. And, perhaps more tragic, he has lost his cheese.

Distributist Buzzwords in the (Catholic) News

2009-02-07T12:52:00.004-05:00

SOLIDARITY AND SUBSIDIARITY TO OVERCOME SOCIAL EXCLUSION

VATICAN CITY, 6 FEB 2009 (VIS) - Archbishop Celestino Migliore, permanent observer of the Holy See to the United Nations in New York, yesterday addressed the 47th session of the Economic and Social Council's Commission for Social Development.

Speaking English the archbishop turned his attention to the question of social integration, underlining how a recent report on that subject from the U.N. secretary general "states that the absence of social integration, resulting in social exclusion, is pervasive in developing and developed regions alike and has common causes, namely poverty, inequality and discrimination at all levels".
The framework for development, he went on, "is marked by the conviction that the logic of solidarity and subsidiarity is the most apt and instrumental to overcome poverty and ensure the participation of every person and social group at the social, economic, civil and cultural levels.
"A broad consensus around the commitment to promote development has been revealed in this last decade in the fight against poverty and in fostering the inclusion and the participation of all persons and social groups", he added.

(Emphasis added; SOURCE)

The increasing frustration which people are feeling with the financial crisis here in the U.S. and its global ramifications might be an important opening for the injection into the maintstream of some orthodox, Catholic economic thought. Crucial, though, is that we do not allow ourselves to be outdone in zeal (as we are traditionally wont to do) by apologists for other doctrines (such as the neo-Marxism which is becoming ever more fashionable in the press). This is nothing new, however; the voices calling for a "New Evangelization" have become almost shrill in their insistance over the past decade. The current crisis is just another spot of hurt needful of the healing that only Catholic truth can bring...

One Day At A Time

2009-02-04T11:38:00.001-05:00

“Now, Master, you may let your servant go in peace, according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you prepared in sight of all the peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and glory for your people Israel” (Luke 2:29-32).

“A promising future.” The expression is one which we have heard so often that perhaps we never stop to think about what it really means. Perhaps it is better that we never do, because I wonder if we did whether our optimism would fail us completely. Really, when we consider it in the ultimate sense, this phrase contains something of a problem, or at least a sort of riddle. For if there are any promises which the future holds, they are our promises; and, as this world teaches us with increasing clarity, our promises can be broken.

A week ago, a young man with what many would have called “a promising future” was taken suddenly from this life. At the age of twenty-six, he was an ordained deacon in the Church and completing his final year of preparation for the ministry of priesthood. He would have been ordained this summer – in just a few short months. In family and friends, in the many lives he had touched through his years of training and witness to the Gospel, seeds of hope and expectation had been planted; and with the promise of a fruitful ministry ahead, a shoot had begun already to sprout. But all too suddenly, the shoot withered. The promise was broken. Those whom had nurtured these hopes and expectations in loving friendship and admiring camaraderie were left to grapple with the mystery of why. And in the quiet hours of mourning and grief, there was felt a sense of abandonment and even betrayal. For if a promise had been made, then who could be said to have broken it, if not the One who gives life and takes it away? Bourn from many hearts, with not a few bitter tears, the cry went up: “Why, God? Why?”

Although I met him five years ago, unfortunately I never got to know him as well as I should like to have done. I knew him to be a kind and generous man, an impressive and faithful witness to God’s Providence who gently accepted in all things and circumstances some expression of the will of God. I can honestly say that I never heard an uncharitable word pass his lips. In formation he was diligent and sincere, and manifested true love for the Church. I, too, had recognized the promise...

He was buried on February 2nd, the Feast of the Presentation. Sitting in the Cathedral at the funeral Mass, I reflected on the words of Simeon’s Canticle from the second chapter of Luke’s Gospel running through my head: “Lord, now let your servant go in peace, for your words have been fulfilled....” As a deacon of the Church, this young man had prayed these words from the Divine Office every night before laying his head on his pillow, along with the haunting responsory: “Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit. You have redeemed us, Lord, God of truth.” The promise made to Simeon – the promise of eternal salvation and happiness and oneness with God in the life to come – this had been God’s promise to this deacon untimely dead; it is God’s promise to each of us, the baptized.

A priest friend told the story that when the young deacon would speak of his first Mass or any other aspects of his future ministry as a priest, he would always add the caveat, “God willing.” He understood the nature of his promise, and of God’s. He knew that man’s promises can only attain for a day; that tomorrow is a new day and we must either recommit ourselves or fail in the promises we’ve made today. Our promises can be broken, and sometimes not through any fault of our own. This young man had once lain on that same Cathedral floor where his coffin was greeted by hundreds of loving faithful, and he had dedicated his life to God. He promised, in a solemn act, his fidelity and chastity and obedience. He promised his service to God, as God would have it. And, for however short a time, that promise was faithfully kept.

But our promises can be broken. Not just because we fail, but because we are frail – because we are mortal, because tomorrow takes care of itself and sufficient to a day is its own evil. Each night, when the Church prays the Canticle of Simeon, together we thank God for our faithfulness throughout the day which has ended. We can only express our desire that we will remain faithful the next day, if such be given us. But we also commend our spirits into the hands of God, knowing that, sometimes, another day is not given. Then it is the promises of the day which has ended which will attain into eternal life, and not the promises of the future. Death may break our promises for tomorrow, but cannot touch the ones we have kept today.

Today’s promises are God’s promises, too, for us. Today we will hear his voice, and must be take care that our hearts be not hardened. A former coworker of mine, when you asked him how his day was going, would always respond: “I woke up this morning. Everything after that is a bonus.” Here there is a profound truth. The lives of the saints, and good Christian men like our deceased brother deacon, teach us time and again the valuable lesson: this is the acceptable time, the promised day of salvation. If we have been given this day at all, then we have been given it with the full pledge of eternal peace and joy, if only we hear and accept the word of promise. Now is the time, we cannot delay. We must make our commitments today: for tomorrow will take care of itself. Each dawn that greets us is rife with renewals of God gift to each of us: the momentous offer of eternal salvation. We must never take for granted that another day, another encounter of the fullness of time, shall be ours. And this is after all only just. God knows as well as we that our promises might only last the day, that tomorrow we might stray. So, we are led along at a pace most manageable for us in our weakness, and God’s continual promise is expressed in each new dawn – each day, every day, but only one day at a time.

He will be greatly missed. Our community mourns him as we celebrate his memory and emulate his virtues. For my part, I can at least hope that I will pray more fervently now the Canticle of Simeon in Compline before bed. I pray that my head falls to the pillow in peace as I commend my own soul each night to the Lord; that at least I will have tried to respond that day to the Lord’s promise, knowing that the promise of any future days rests solely on the mercy and Providence of God. May we all strive to live lives full of promise in the present, rather than in the future; such are lives like those of the saints, like the one lived by our dearly departed brother: such are lives of promise, lives well lived – one day at a time.

Switchfoot's American Dream

2008-11-30T20:36:00.002-05:00

Like a puppet on a monetary string, maybe we’ve been caught singing red, white, blue – and green. But that ain’t my American Dream.

For a few years now, the music of the Christian rock band Switchfoot has frequented the audio queue of my car. I was initially hooked by their edgy, punk sound and the unabashed morality propounded in their lyrics. Since then, their sound has matured, taking – in my opinion – a few beneficial cues from the masterminds of U2. The theological and philosophical insight of their lyrics has intensified as well. One notable hallmark of this growth is their theology of suffering, which is very much in line with the Catholic Tradition – it can be observed in songs such as “The Beautiful Letdown” (The Beautiful Letdown, 2003), “The Shadow Proves the Sunshine,” “The Fatal Wound,” and especially “Daisy” (all from Nothing is Sound, 2005).

One facet of Switchfoot’s work which can be seen throughout all their albums is an anti-consumerist philosophy. This particular point, often overlooked, has become particularly striking in their latest two albums, Nothing is Sound and Oh! Gravity. The young rockers show a dissatisfaction with the materialist and consumerist trends of modern society. More cynical observers might see this concern as exceptional amongst the denizens of Generation “Y,” but I personally think that the angst to which Switchfoot gives voice is more typical. Whatever we think of the outcome of the recent election, no one can reasonably deny that the months of debate leading up to that event struck a nerve with the young adults of our nation. The catchy verve of Switchfoot’s music might be a way of striking this chink in our youth’s armor of apathy. I would also argue that it is a good means of encouraging an open-minded approach to issues of economic justice, and perhaps awakening people to the possibility of a “third way” embodying the changes which we all seem increasingly to be seeking.

A good starting point for the discussion is the bouncy and playful “Gone” from The Beautiful Letdown. Painting the character of a superficial and frivolous young woman, the song advises: “Don’t spend today away / because today will soon be gone.” Later, the lyrics call attention to the realm of “infinity” to which we are all destined, and challenges listeners with the question, “Where’s your treasure, where’s your hope / if you get the world and lose your soul” – once more lamenting the state of the female character on whom the song focuses: “she pretends like she’s immortal.” In the closing section of the song, the singer advises that God be a center of our attention since “life is more than money.” It is clear from this song that Switchfoot has their finger on the pulse driving America, as well as a good analysis of the malady plaguing us and compromising our happiness.

A second exhibit of Switchfoot’s philosophical perspicacity is the sardonic “Happy is a Yuppie Word” (Nothing is Sound). This, one of my personal favorites, offers a summary form of several of Christ’s Beatitudes in the simple formula, “Blessed is the man who’s lost it all.” Reflecting on the ephemeral ideal of worldly happiness, which war and the simple course of nature continue to prove transient, the singer resolves himself to the fact that “Nothing in the world can fail me now.” The reason for this is that he has placed his hope beyond the world – having not relied upon the world, he cannot suffer its failure. Instead, he accepts earthly failure with the hopes of a future (Resurrection) event, wondering “when will all the failures rise?”

The socio-economic criticism of Switchfoot becomes most explicit on their most recent album, Oh! Gravity. From start to finish, the album calls attention to the various manifestations of the culture of death within American society – from corruption in government, to sexual depravity, to individualism, to plutocratic materialism. I encourage everyone to listen to the album from beginning to end and confront its challenging messages.

I will call attention only to a couple of songs. A look at the lyrics to the second song, “American Dream,” show evident distaste for the economic individualism that has become identifiable with “the American way.”

When success is equated with excess,
When we’re fighting for the beamer, the lexus;
Yes, the heart and soul breathing the company goals
Where success is equated with excess...

I want out of this machine
It doesn’t feel like freedom...

This ain’t my American dream.
I want to live and die for bigger things
I’m tired of fighting for just me
This ain’t my American dream...

Later on the same album, the haunting ballad “Faust, Midas, and Myself” recasts the story of the mythical king in a modern retelling which highlights the timeless message of that ancient story: wealth is not the highest value, and sometimes we can become monsters in its pursuit. Of course, the traditional story of Midas does not identify the sinister root of the love of money. But Switchfoot makes the clear connection in the title by allusion to the story of Faust...

As Saint Paul tells us: “The love of money is the root of all evils; it is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced their hearts with many pangs” (1 Timothy 6:10). The love of money is a deal with the devil. The worship of Mammon is among the greatest threats to our souls and to society’s common good. Saint Paul knew this. And Switchfoot knows it, too.

It is common for musical artist to exploit the weaknesses of culture as a means to their own success. Switchfoot strives against this trend, even explicitly. In a song from The Beautiful Letdown, they rail against the business and noisiness of modern culture, ending with the ironic suggestion: “If we’re adding to the noise, turn off this song.” With all due respect to Switchfoot, I’ll contradict them on this one point. Take a time out from the world’s noise, and turn them on for a bit. Give them a listen. More importantly, give them a hearing. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed; and you may gain an ally in the culture war and in the work of proposing a new American dream.

This Modern Machine

2008-08-08T08:28:00.003-04:00

I've been meaning for quite a while to link to two great posts by Tim Jones: "On the Industrial Revolution" and on "Post-Industrial Revolt" - really some great insight there.

And the title of this post is taken from the lyrics of a Switchfoot song on their album, Oh, Gravity! I'll be blogging soon on the economic and philosophic implications coming through in various places on that CD - stay tuned!

There Will Be Excuses Always

2008-08-07T14:51:00.007-04:00

“The poor you will always have with you” (Matthew 26:11).

Every conversation on the application of Christian values to economic theory will eventually careen into this quotation from scripture. Usually it is produced with an air of triumphalism or at least finality and resignation, taken as a pin to a balloon. Often prefixed by phrases like “after all,” or “anyhow,” its rhetorical packaging not infrequently involves a slight frown, the furrowing of the brow, and a slow shaking of the head. Sometimes, for good measure, there is a shrugging of the shoulders and – amongst its more daring practitioners – a considerate and pained sigh.

The atomized quotation falls like an atom bomb into logical discourse and it seems, at least in this singular case, that sola scriptura rules the day. There will be no questioning the matter: Christ himself has said so: “the poor will always be around” – and that’s the brakes. And isn’t it comforting, anyhow? For when we finish the conversation we’ll usually leave a restaurant and hop into an extravagant vehicle to drive home to a comfortable lodging. Sure, anyone could give more... but why go and impoverish ourselves when we have the very words of Our Lord making it clear that no amount of giving and self-sacrifice will completely solve the problem? We’ll give when we can, but the best we can do after all is pray. We can talk and think all we want about changing society and revolutionizing economics but, “after all, the poor you will have with you always.”

It’s usually at this point of the conversation that I want to fashion a cord whip, overturn the table, and... well, you know the rest. The devil himself can quote the Bible (cf. Mt. 4:1-11); and I am personally become convinced that this little verse is one of his favorites. Too frequently is it hijacked as an excuse for apathy, laziness, or indifference. It is delivered with all of the confidence of a scripture scholar, but rarely with one’s acumen. And while people go on suffering squalor and starvation, our ears ring with this conveniently chosen chastisement of Christ’s, deafened to their plight; yet, the Lord hears the cry of the poor.

First of all, let’s take a deeper look at this quotation. The full sentence is nearly identical in Matthew and John, and runs thus: “The poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me” (Jn. 12:8 RSV; cf. Mt. 26:11). Often forgotten is the small but significant insertion in Mark’s version: “For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you will, you can do good to them; but you will not always have me” (Mk. 14:7 RSV). The weight of this insertion alone is enough to clear up the matter of this verse being used as an excuse. But the thrust of the quotation is the second phrase: “you will not always have me.” What is the meaning of this phrase?

The context in Matthew and Mark both suggest an interpretive placement by the evangelists. Matthew locates this incident directly after the parable of judgment. Christ has just finished describing the criterion for final judgment: the wicked shall be separated from the righteous based on their treatment of the “least” of Christ’s brethren (cf. Mt. 25:31-46). The rationale given has been that, “Whatever you did for one of these... you did for me” (Mt. 25:40). It is after this discourse that the incident at Bethany is told, and that the anointing of Christ’s feet is criticized as a “waste” of resources that could have been spent on the poor. In context, the absurdity of this complaint becomes clear and the thrust of Jesus’ correction is likewise elucidated: it is precisely Christ’s presence in the poor which gives meaning to our charity toward them. To complain of a direct reverence toward Christ as a misappropriation is missing the point of such charitable action. In no means is this a justification for lacking urgency in the mission to save the poor: “you will not always have me” reminds us of the time formerly described in which Christ will come to us directly in the visage of the least in society.

Mark’s context is also noteworthy. Beginning a few chapters earlier, Christ has been teaching by word and action about the true nature of worship. He has cleansed the Temple and cursed the unfruitful fig tree (Mk. 11); he has spoken of rendering unto Caesar but paying essential tribute and worship to God alone (Mk. 12). Now, Mark is setting the scene for Christ’s crucifixion; but these former theological trains continue. Look first at the opening verses of Mark’s fourteenth chapter: “The Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread were to take place in two days’ time. So the chief priests and the scribes were seeking a way to arrest him by treachery and put him to death. They said, ‘Not during the festival, for fear that there may be a riot among the people’” (Mk. 14:1-2). In the incident which follows, the disciples complain of the squandering of what is equivalent to “three-hundred days’” wages on Christ’s feet. Taken together, these scenes hearken back to the lessons about paying proper tribute to God and rendering authentic worship. The chief priests and scribes have demonstrated their own lack of understanding with regard to Temple worship (cf. Mk. 11), and now have shown a perverse lack of appreciation for the essence of the “festival.” The tension of this entire section of the Gospel is the manipulation of God’s law and even God’s House for human ends. Now, the whole issue is brought to an end, and it is God Himself who is rejected in favor of lesser concerns. The point of “festival” is not to make money or profit (cf. Mk. 11:15-17), but to liberally spend in honor of God. Jesus’ time of physical presence with His disciples is like an extended Sabbath – after all, “the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath” (Mk. 2:28). The incident of the anointing and the commotion shows how greatly flawed are the perspectives and priorities of the religious spirit of Jesus’ time.

There is still more, and it follows from this juxtaposition of the meaning of “festival” worship. It is argued that the woman’s liberality with the oil should have been spent on the poor. Now, the particular part of Christ’s response which is most frequently quoted (“You will have poor with you always”) is itself nearly a quotation. Turning to Deuteronomy 15, we find directives for the celebration of a “Sabbath year” every seventh year in which debts are to be forgiven and liberality shown to the poor. Here we find it said, “The needy will never be lacking in the land; that is why I command you to open your hand to your poor and needy kinsmen in your country” (Dt. 15:11). The context of the place in scripture to which Christ is likely referring serves to make exactly the opposite point of that one often urged by those quoting Christ. The “festival” in the Old Testament is seen as a time of particular charity toward the poor because of the Lord’s special favor for them; and in the New Testament this idea is illuminated by the revelation that Christ has a special identity with the downtrodden in society.

One final consideration might be brought to bear on this often misused quotation from Scripture, and it is this: rather than using Christ’s words here to defend ourselves who are unjust, why not use them to defend the Lord who is just? There are many reasons for the inevitability of poverty in our world. Some are man-made; others are not. Even the most just economic system (such as that which this website was founded to promote) would suffer from the inevitability of natural disasters such as hurricanes and blights of crops. Despite the best efforts, it would be found that “there will be poor always.” But we will not have made those poor; or, at least, we would have tried our best in solidarity to lift their burden. We would not have made excuses for ourselves by a misappropriation of the Lord’s words; but we will excuse the circumstances of nature which sometimes destroy what we work to build. We would see Christ’s words then as a challenge and a call to continued and sustained effort: yes, there will be poor always, but we would do for them as we would do for Christ were he among us still, spending freely and liberally of ourselves lest we be found guilty in the judgment to come.

There Will Be Work Always

2008-08-07T14:48:00.002-04:00

I feel I owe my patient readers an apology for my hiatus of late. I would use an unusually busy workload as an excuse, but I know that my desk will always be full; I should look to find excuses to put my work aside and take leisure, rather than to excuse myself from leisure to work even more.

Thank you for your patience.