tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70088137868060837582024-03-13T05:46:51.323-07:00Patria BolivarianaRandom musings on politics, religion, tropical agriculture, and plant ecologyUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger120125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7008813786806083758.post-26033345153436866552011-09-13T19:10:00.000-07:002011-09-13T19:12:03.163-07:00A personal take on the Afghan WarAs most of you on this blog know, I’m Indian by descent. A very Westernized and deracinated Indian, of course: I was born in the United States, raised in a family that spoke English far better than they spoke any Indian language, and without much Indian culture in an obvious sense. I never formally learned any Tamil, for one thing, though the ‘sound’ and ‘feel’ of the language is familiar to me and I can understand a little; nor was I raised a Hindu, nor was I deeply educated in Indian history. Nevertheless, my descent and my cultural roots sometimes have an effect on me, I think, in subtle ways that I might not be able to perceive at the time.<br /><br />I was around 20 when the United States army entered Afghanistan, in response to the terrorist attack on New York, and began the long and bitter war that has occupied us for most of the last decade. I had just begun another semester at college when the call came from my mother at eight thirty or so in the morning, that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. It was just two days after the Lion of the Panjsher, Ahmed Shah Massoud, had been murdered by two Taliban agents posing as reporters, which gave the green light to Osama bin Laden to order the attacks on America, and thus to begin what many have already started referring to as the Third World War. <br /><br />My reactions to that horrible day were probably the same as most Americans’ and I won’t belabour them here. When the United States went to war with Afghanistan, two months later, however, I found myself at odds with much of the undergraduate student community, and I’m still at odds with much of America’s youth today: and perhaps more interestingly, I found myself at odds- in a curious and strange way- with what I had previously believed. I’ve always, since I became old enough to read about politics and history, been bitterly opposed to most American foreign policy over the last two centuries. The Second World War, of course, was a noble cause to end all noble causes, and so was the Civil War: but our post-WW II history, and much of our dealings with our southern neighbours in the previous century, filled me with loathing or disgust. I saw- and I still do see- most of our Cold War policies in places like Vietnam, Greece, and Latin America as blatant and ugly power-plays, meant to defend the interests of the rich and powerful, and I was as incensed and ashamed by the United States interventions in Nicaragua or the Dominican Republic as by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Perhaps more so, since it was my country that had done them. I was deeply disgusted by America’s conduct during the Cold War, and almost equally so by the foreign policy of our first post-COld War president, the insufferably smarmy and sleazy Bill Clinton. Clinton put a liberal face on the quest for American hegemony, just as Reagan had put a conservative face on it, but I saw them as two heads of the same rotten coin, and I saw American power and international hegemony as ugly things, the sooner ended the better. Clinton’s intervention in Ecuador in 2000, to suppress a revolution there, struck me as just more of the same, nor was I particularly sympathetic to his interventions in Yugoslavia, or his support for globalized capitalism. If someone had told me in 1999 that within two years the basically soulless, meaningless and self-centered culture of late twentieth century America was to be ended, I would have been all for it. <br /><br />Well, it ended, though not in a way any of us could have hoped for, or even foreseen. I did have a premonition that something terrible was going to happen: when my best friend at the time graduated in the summer of 2001 I remember walking with him around Boston, on a cool spring night, talking about this and that. I had just read St. Augustine’s ‘City of God’, as well as the Apocalypse of St. John, and though I wasn’t then a Christian, I was very struck by both of them; I had also taken a class on medieval Europe, and was struck by the similarities between Rome in its heyday, and America in our time. I said to my friend that I had a sense that something was about to break- this was in August 2001- and that soon America would face a calamity akin to that which Rome had faced in the fifth century, when Alaric and his Goths stood at the gates of the City on Seven Hills. <br /><br />When the World Trade Center fell, and it became clear that the bearded villain in Afghanistan, who had previously run drug farms in the Sudan with the labour of Ugandan slave children, was responsible, my longstanding hostility and distrust of American capitalism and imperialism took a back seat. I am still as anti-capitalist as I ever have been, of course: but I began to feel, in the fall of 2001, that as much as I sympathized with the enemies of globalized capitalism in Latin America and in the Slavic world, the primary fight in our time wasn’t against capitalism. Not any more. In the 1960s it had been, just as it was against Fascism in the 1930s and against Stalin in the 1950s: but today it was, first and foremost, against the barbarians at the gates, the prophets of a new Caliphate, who would enslave us to the words of an epileptic camel driver, and drown the world in blood to do so. I got into some heated arguments in the fall of 2001, because in contrast to the generally pacifist sentiments on many college campuses, I was all for war with Afghanistan. I was driven largely by a mixture of fear and outrage, and I wanted the Taliban and their allies to pay for what they had done to us. <br /><br />But there’s something more to it, I think. As I mentioned, I’m Indian by descent, though a fairly deracinated one: and to Indians, however deracinated or Westernized they may be, Afghanistan- the name itself- means something different than it means to most Americans. To most Americans, at least prior to 2001, Afghanistan was just a remote place with a funny sounding name: someplace impossibly far away. That was the genius- to Reagan’s mind and those of his allies- of funding the Mujahideen. They were on Russia’s doorstep, not ours: they were impossibly far away from ours. Whatever nasty elements might exist within the heart of Pashtun militancy, they weren’t our problem.<br /><br />Of course, they were on India’s doorstep too, and there’s the rub. Throughout Indian history, for at least a thousand years, the name ‘Afghanistan’ has had a deep and chilling resonance. It means something like what ‘Assyria’ connoted to the Biblical Jews, or what ‘Norway’ connoted to European peasants of the tenth century. Afghanistan was a hidden, obscure land beyond the Khyber, veiled in the snow and clouds that form around the peaks of the mountains, full of green pastures and dry valleys: it was known for many things, including its apples, its almonds, its sheep and goats. But most of all it was known for one thing, that came out of Afghanistan with depressing regularity: vast hordes of men on horseback, heavily armed and deeply skilled in the arts of war, brimming with self-confidence and with the conviction that they, the descendants of the Tribes of Israel and the carriers of the banners of Allah the One, were entitled by right to all the land, gold, and political power that they could seize. <br /><br />As it turned out, they could seize a hell of a lot. I don’t know a hell of a lot about the history of pre-Islamic Afghanistan, but I do know that beginning in the tenth century, when the new faith spread from the deserts of Arabia to the shepherds’ villages and almond groves of the Pashtunwali, the Pashtun- they are the dominant group in Afghanistan, and traditionally the two names were synonymous- they aquired a new driving spirit and thirst for conquest. No longer were they merely motivated by the lust for power and for gold: now, like the Spanish Conquistadores, they were motivated by the desire to spread the One True Faith, and to smack down the Hindu idolators. In wave after wave they came, one Afghan dynasty after another: often with one Afghan king supplanting another, and establishing a new dynasty: as the Ghor family overthrew the Ghaznavids, as the Slave Dynasty overthrew the Ghorids, as Babur of Kabul overthrew the previous Lodi dynasty, also of Afghan origin, that had held the City of Delhi. Over the fertile plains of the Gangetic Basin they established their power, and from the point of view of the long-suffering peasantry of the northern Indian plains, who struggled each year to raise enough wheat, rice and lentils to survive and pay their taxes, they brought a long dark night of tyranny. The stories of the Muslim invaders’ depredations became legion, and passed from the realm of history into that of folklore. You can read today the legends of Muhammed of Ghor, who was chivalrously released by his Rajput enemy Prithviraj, and repaid that chivalry by coming back in greater force, capturing Prithviraj, and gouging out his eyes. You can read the history of Muhammed of Ghazni, who slaughtered fifty thousand unarmed pilgrims at the temple of Somnath, so that the rivers ran red with blood and the water was undrinkable. You can read the memoirs of Tamerlane, Emir of Samarkand, who boasted of building a pyramid of human skulls outside Delhi, in the name of the One True God. You can read of how temples were razed to the ground and mosques built on their ruins, including by Babur himself. You can read of the mad Sultan Muhammed bin Tughluq of Delhi, who arbitrarily moved the capital from Delhi to Daulatabad and from Daulatabad back to Delhi two years later, causing immense death from thirst and famine both times. You can read of the opium-addicted, orgiastic Nawabs of Lucknow, and the fantastically kleptocratic Nizams of Hyderabad, both of whom initially won power in the name of the Mughal Emperors of Babur’s line. You can read of the massacres of Sikhs and Hindus, of the martyrdom of the Sikh Guru Arjun, who was roasted alive on a hot plate on the orders of the Mughal: of the usury with which the Afghans, Mughals, and other invaders exploited the peasantry: of how the poor were worked to death to profit the merchant and the moneylender. All this, and more, was the legacy of the invasions from beyond the mountains. <br /><br />For the better part of a millennium the invasions came, again and again. One after another native Indian power, each of different cultural and ethnic origins, rose up to establish itself in the northwest of India, and each time they were forced to resist Afghan incursions and win the independence of their motherland. The Jats, the Chauhans, the Rajputs, the Marathas, one after another, fought to push back Afghan expansionism: sometimes ending in success, sometimes in defeat. Towards the closing days of the eighteenth century, an eighteen year old boy succeeded to the baronetcy of his late father in a small Punjabi fiefdom, and would eventually become the man who would resist the Afghan imperialism more successfully than any Indian leader ever had. This youth- handsome, self-confident, beloved by beautiful women, a brilliant military leader and a fearless knight, respected by his Afghan and British rivals as much as by his own people- was Ranjit Singh, the Misldar of Sukerchakia, and who was later to become (at the age of twenty) Maharaja of the Punjab. <br /><br />The Sikhs, of which Ranjit Singh was one, were a minority in their own homeland of the Punjab, which was majority Muslim and had many Hindus as well. They had sat out the last series of wars, between the Afghans and the Maratha confederacy, waiting to see who would win, and when the Afghans won, it became clear that the next great rivalry would be between Sikhs and Afghans. In the event, Ranjit Singh unified most of the western Punjab, and defeated the Afghans, who a half century earlier had destroyed and defiled the Golden Temple, the holiest citadel of the Sikh faith. He drove them back to the borders of what would later become the Northwest Frontier, won back Kashmir from them, and for the first time seized part of the Pashtun homeland, the border city of Peshawar. (This might not have been such a good idea: when the British conquered his empire in 1849 they were stuck with the border he had established, and that’s why the Pashtuns today are divided between Pakistan and Afghanistan, which has promoted destabilizing irredentist sentiment). Ranjit was famed throughout India, and is well spoken of today, not merely for his military prowess and the economic growth of the Punjab, but for his tolerance and ecumenicism. This was, after all, a Sikh king aided by a largely Hindu intellectual class, ruling over a mostly Muslim population, using Persian as their court language, and aided by British, American and Italian advisers. Unusually for the time, there was no religious persecution, nor forced conversion, nor discrimination under Ranjit’s rule. <br /><br />No good ruler lasts forever, of course, and when they shuffle off the mortal coil there always comes the problem of succession. The Sikh Empire was a big prize: it contained some of India’s most fertile farmland, and stretched from the peaks of Tibet to the marches of Afghanistan, including what is now Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh as well as the western Indian Punjab and northern Pakistan (the easternmost parts of the Punjab were in the process of being absorbed into the British Empire). It had an immensely powerful army of sixty thousand, well trained and well armed, self governed by elected soldier’s councils, conscious of its own power; that army had fought the Chinese Empire to a standstill in Tibet, had successfully invaded the Afghan homeland, and not even the British wanted to mess with it. They had originated as a religious order, formed to resist Muslim persecution, and were inspired by religious fervor and the chivalric ethos as much as the Knights of the Crusades had been: their very name, ‘Khalsa’, meant “the Pure”, and was steeped in mystical meaning. Factional fighting ensued between various pretenders to the throne when Ranjit Singh died in 1839, none of whom lived long (the second successor, Nau Nihal Singh, reputedly died when a building suspiciously collapsed on him, and another queen was murdered in her bath). In 1845 the British went to war with the Sikh Army under the boy king Dalip Singh and his mother, Regent Jind Kaur (whose own drug-addicted brother had been assassinated by the army the previous year): they were outgunned and outnumbered, and some contend (I don’t know how accurately) that the British only won because the Sikh military commanders, distrustful of their own army, decided to turn traitor. The British took over part of the Sikh empire in that war, includeing the northern fastnesses of Kashmir, and in 1849 after the second Anglo-Sikh war, took over the rest: and they integrated the Sikh military into their own colonial army, to make a fearsome and powerful military force, that would stand loyal to the Crown in the rebellion of 1857 and, among others, help ensure the rebellion’s defeat. <br /><br />The British were the next power to try intervening in Afghanistan: they had done so first in 1839, around the time Ranjit Singh died and the Punjab began sliding into disorder. They entered Afghanistan with an expeditionary army, to secure the country against Russian influence and prop up the unpopular Shuja Shah, and sat in Kabul for two years while the country became increasingly hostile to them, and as their own political agents were assassinated: in 1842 they left, and out of a party of over 15,000 British and Indian men, women and children, only a single survivor, the doctor, made it back to India. All the rest were either killed by Afghan tribal raids, or died from cold and the hardship of the journey. The British would fight two more wars against Afghanistan, but the country would resolutely maintain its independence: in 1979 the Soviets would try their hand, doing in the name of Socialism what the British had done in the name of capitalism and the Sikhs had done in the name of their faith, and again, like the British and Sikhs before them, would find Afghanistan too tough a nut to swallow. <br /><br />This is the history between Afghanistan and India: a history of well-justified fear and resentment, on the part of India, towards their neighbour to the northwest. Perhaps this history plays a part in the way I have felt about the Afghan War since 2001. On the day that Osama bin Laden’s death was announced, I acted like I was happy since it seemed the thing to do: a wicked man had paid for his crimes. But in truth, I wasn’t sure what to think. It made me realise that at some level, my support for the Afghan war might have been tied into some deep, hidden sense of ethnic nationalism, and resentment over the fact that for a thousand years, people who looked like me had been oppressed, invaded and murdered by the Afghans. Afghanistan was the ancient enemy, for India far more than for America, and as someone with cultural roots in India, perhaps at some deep, subconscious level I saw in the Afghan war an opportunity for a great and final retribution for a thousand years of invasion and tyranny, for the Hammer of the Lord, held in the hand of a rather stupid and incurious businessman-politician from Texas, to descend upon the heirs of Ghazni and Durrani, and an opportunity to finally and permanently pacify the Pashtun nation, and rule over it until the last vestiges of extremism and militarism had been burned out, the same way that they were burned out of Japan and Germany. I think I hoped that the defeat of Afghanistan and the Pashtun would be as final, as total, and as terrible as the defeat of Japan or of Germany, and that out of the American occupation would come a total transformation of the Pashtun culture into something as innocuous and milquetoast as Japanese culture today. This, the pacification of the Pashtun nation, was a sacred duty, something we simply could not escape, and even if it took America fifty years, or a hundred, it would be worth it if the threat to India- which now took the form of an ideological, religious and terroristic threat rather than a military threat- could be ended. All my burblings over the last ten years about the existential threat of Jihadic Caliphates, all the comparisons of the Taliban to the Vikings and the Visigoths, all the dire warnings about women getting their noses chopped off: maybe this is what was always at their heart. And then again, maybe not. Psychological motivations are difficult to tease apart, especially when they’re youre own. <br /><br />On a rational level, of course, I know this is nonsense. Cultures simply don’t change that easily, and why would I assume that America could succeed in doing what the Persians, the Sikhs, the British, and the Russians couldn’t do? Evil, too, is in the long run indestructible, because as long as humans have free will, evil is always a possibility: it will never be possible to eliminate the threat of your neighbors deciding to go to war with you, because the will to power, and the temptations thereof, is an inescapable result of original sin. And finally, on a moral level, the atrocities the American Government has committed in Afghanistan- destroying wedding parties with drone strikes, razing the countryside, holding people for years without trial, torture- are unacceptable, no matter what we hope to gain by them. As evil as the Taliban are, and as boundless a rage I feel against the history of Afghanistan, and as critical my feelings about Islamic doctrine and about Jihadism in particular, that we are fighting a wicked enemy does not leave us exempt from the moral law. “Ye shall not do evil that good may come of it”, said St. Paul to the Romans, and if that applies to anything, it certainly applies to bombing a wedding party in the belief that there MIGHT be a terrorist in the vicinity. As well as torturing suspects to death, which we have done, too. <br /><br />On a rational and moral level, I know these things. But of course, a lot of this isn’t decided on a rational or moral level at all, but on an emotional one. I’ve come to realise, I think, why St. Paul says that “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, and I will repay,” when he counsels Christians against trying to seek revenge. The thirst for retribution is a natural one, and not inherently a bad thing: justice demands that people be rewarded for doing good and punished for doing evil. But retribution needs to be limited by the laws of justice, and of mercy, and of love, and needs to be their servant, not their master. Because if we separate the idea of retribution from the broader context of justice and mercy, it becomes an insatiable lust that can never be satisfied. How do you avenge a thousand years of tyranny, after all? Is it over when Osama dies, and can we then say ‘That’s enough, the debt has been paid?’ How would we possibly know? How could the Greeks be ‘paid back’ for the four centuries they suffered under Turkish rule? Was the Megali Idea a fair way to pay back the Turks? Who knows? <br /><br />Any subordinate love, when we separate it from the broader context of our love for our neighbour and for God, can become, not a goddess, but a demon. This is true of the love of justice, as much as of anything else. Wanting to see the guilty pay is perfectly understandable, but we always need to limit that desire, to constrain it by the general requirements of morality, and especially by the desire to seek our neighbour’s good as well as our own. Because the danger of wanting payback, by itself, is that it’s a lust which just keeps on growing, an itch that gets more itchy the more you scratch it. Osama is dead, and he has paid for his crimes, which is a very good thing. But I’m not sure that I really feel any less resentful over the sack of Amritsar or the massacre at Somnath than I did before. It’s like I ate a sweet dessert and I’m totally unsatisfied, and feel like I didn’t eat anything at all. Maybe the thirst for payback is actually something dangerously addictive, and perhaps that’s part of the reason that St. Paul counsels so strongly against it, as does Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount. <br /><br />I have no suggestions about whether we should stay in Afghanistan or not. Nor do I promise that I won’t revisit this post in a few days and disagree with what I have just written. Much of our political thought, I think, comes down to our mood on a given day. But right now I’m in a reflective mood, and this is my thought for the day: that perhaps, before we think about what we want as the endgame in Afghanistan, we should pause and re-assess our own motivationsUnknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7008813786806083758.post-17017927288109231482011-03-27T19:23:00.001-07:002011-03-27T19:23:48.885-07:00St Photina at the Well: Part 1This is a reflection on today’s reading; I’d especially like to hear Lynn Gazis Sax’ thoughts on it, since she often writes on the interface of Christianity, gender, and sexuality). <br /><br />“Jesus came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.<br /><br />“A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, `Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”<br /><br />“Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, `I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”<br /><br />“Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” They left the city and were on their way to him.”<br /><br />-John 4:5-29.<br /><br />This is (part of) today’s reading, from the Gospel of St. John. I quote it here in the contemporary language of the NRSV: though normally I prefer the King James version, the translators of the King James for some reason decided to put this passage into the historic present tense, which is awkward and grating on the ear. It sounds better this way.<br /><br />There’s a lot that this passage says to us- and a lot, as our priest (FTR, it’s a woman priest) said today, that it doesn’t say, and that we have read into it. And then of course there is a lot that isn’t said or even read into the passage, but that the tradition of the church has supplied for us. This woman isn’t named in the text, but the tradition of the church gives her a name- ‘Photina’, or ‘Light’ (in the church of Russia she is called ‘Svetlana’, the near equivalent), and a whole story of what happened to her after she met Jesus. There is a lot we are told about St. Photina, Equal to the Apostles, after this fateful encounter with Jesus at the well. But about her life before she met Jesus, we actually know less than we think.<br /><br />The passage is powerfully interesting to us, in twenty first century America, for a number of reasons, some good and some ill. It’s interesting on one level because it shows us an example of the miraculous, and the supernatural, though on a fairly subtle level. Here Jesus breaks the veil that his humanity cast over his divinity, and for just a moment appeals to the gift of divine clairvoyance. He wasn’t from Samaria, and shows no sign of having been to the town of Sychar; we know he wasn’t coming from there, since his disciples had just made a trip to get meat, leaving Jesus behind. So it wasn’t through listening to gossip, or talking to friends, that Jesus had learned of her story. It was through peeling back, for a moment, the limitations of his human nature, and seeing with the eye to whom all is revealed. He glanced, for a moment, into that pool of wisdom that C. S. Lewis writes about in his ever-evocative children’s book ‘The Hose and His Boy’, in which a desert hermit is able to see, in a moment of time, everything that is happening in the world, anywhere, at that moment. He saw with the eye of true and perfect vision, and showed that woman who he was, as he said of himself decades later to John: “And all the churches shall know that I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts: and I will give unto every one of you according to your works” (Revelation 2:23). <br /><br />We live in a skeptical age, when it often seems that miracles have faded away, when it seems to us, too often, that the world is a machine working along purely natural processes, and we long for a miracle, for a drawing back of the veil (the literal meaning of both ‘apocalypsis’ and ‘revelatio’), when we see that supernatural realities exist after all. The clairvoyance and supernatural vision that Jesus showed on that hot afternoon at Jacob’s well are one example of that kind of unveiling, that we crave to see, and that no doubt the men and women of first century Palestine craved as well. <br /><br />The passage is also interesting to us, of course, because it ties in three of our preoccupations in twenty first economy, three topics that are endlessly interesting for us to talk about: race, gender, and sex. The woman that Jesus talked to, called in tradition St. Photina, had several strikes against her in the eyes of first century Judaean society, which is probably why she was getting water in the hottest part of the day, when everyone else would have been taking a siesta. She belonged to the Samaritan people, who were looked down upon by many first century Jews, as being partly Assyrian in origin. Her people were viewed as practicing a degraded form of Judaism, and as being traitors and impure Jews: the passage makes that clear, and puts into context how much Jesus was perturbing the comfortable sentiments of his time when he told the parable of the Good Samaritan. She was, of course, a woman in a patriarchal society. And then, of course, there’s the history of her marital and sexual life. She had had five husbands, Jesus tells us, and the man she was currently living with was not her husband. This would have been enough to brand her, under the law of Moses, as guilty of sexual immorality, and of what was called then, ‘fornication’. And possibly, depending on the circumstances of her previous marriages, of adultery as well. Many people reading this passage have immediately concluded that she had divorced five husbands, or been divorced by them, and was thus an adulteress five or six times over. It’s not difficult to see why she would have been viewed as a woman set apart and cast out, and one who went to fetch water during the most unpleasant part of the day, to avoid contemptuous eyes and nasty tongues. And it’s been easy for all too many people to dismiss this poor woman, Photina, as a ‘sexual sinner’.<br /><br />And yet, and yet. One of the interesting things about her discourse with Jesus is the tone that Jesus takes. He draws out, pretty quickly, that there is something irregular about her marital situation: “You are right in saying, `I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband.” One thing he doesn’t do, however, is condemn her himself. And nor does she respond to his remarks by expressing guilt, and falling at his feet and saying, ‘Yes, I have been living immorally, and I want to give up my life of sin.’<br /><br />This is quite different from the encounters that Jesus had with people who were, genuinely, living lives that neither we, nor they, nor Jesus would want to defend. When confronted with people guilty of serious sins, Jesus normally either asked them to repent, or else they themselves were only too happy to acknowledge their sin and repent themselves. Consider the woman taken in adultery, to whom Jesus said, ‘ Go, and sin no more’ (John 8:11), or consider Zacchaeus the tax collector, who on meeting Jesus almost instantly said, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor, and if I have taken anything from any man by false accusation, I restore to him fourfold” (Luke 19:8). Or consider the woman in the house of Simon, who no sooner sees Jesus than she begins weeping all over his feet, that she might wash them with her tears. Or consider the repentant thief on the cross, Dismas, who as soon as he saw Jesus, before he even implored him for remembrance and heard the words of the promise, acknowledged his own criminality, and that he and his companion ‘received the due reward of his actions’. Or consider the crippled man healed at the Pool of Bethesda, to whom Jesus bade to sin no more, lest a worse fate befall him. The encounters of Jesus with genuinely guilty people tend to have a theme of repentance, of people being confronted- either by Jesus, or by themselves- with their own need to change. Of course this woman needed to change, as do we all, but it’s interesting that neither Jesus, nor she herself, appears to bring up the theme of guilt and sin here. <br /><br />In fact what we see here is that almost instantly the scene slides into a discourse between Jesus and the woman, about theology; it goes from there into a scene where the woman expresses her faith, and Jesus reveals himself to be the final end and the goal of that faith, and following that, she runs into the city, declaring Jesus to be the Christ. And is believed. Jesus in his discourse with her almost skips over her sex life, bringing them up merely as a tantalizing hint that he knows every detail of her life, and in this way revealing himself as more than an ordinary man. It leads us pretty quickly- especially in an age where we are spending a lot of time, words, and ink on debating Christian teachings about sexuality- to this question: what did Jesus, actually, think about this woman and her sexual life. If he condemned them, then why didn’t he do so more explicitly; and if he didn’t disapprove of them, then why bring them up at all?<br /><br />In answering this question it’s important to deal, first of all, with the issue of why this woman would have been viewed by her society as a sinner, because this is a different question than whether she had, objectively, done something wrong in the eyes of Jesus (as well as what we, today, would think about her life). And it’s also important to separate the issues of her five husbands, and the issue of her current nonmarital relationship. Let’s take the first issue, first.<br /><br />There are at least three ways that a woman could have ended up with five husbands: through actively leaving them, through being divorced / deserted by them, or through being repeatedly widowed. The first would raise eyebrows both in our society and in hers, and assuredly would fall short of Jesus’ ethic about divorce as well. The second would probably not raise many eyebrows today, and would make us sympathetic to her more than anything else. It would, though, still fall short of Jesus’ strict ethic on marriage and divorce. Christian teaching, beginning with Jesus himself and continuing for the first few centuries, prohibited remarriage for the innocent party as well as the guilty party in a divorce. Cf. the Shepherd of Hermas, that intriguing and mystical text that was read as inspired literature in the early church, regarding the duty of an innocent party to a divorce: <br /><br />“And I said to him, ‘What then, sir, is the husband to do, if his wife continue in her [adulterous] practices?’ And he said, ‘The husband should put her away, and remain by himself. But if he put his wife away and marry another, he also commits adultery.’” (Shepherd of Hermas, Fourth Mandate, 1:5-6). <br /><br />The Eastern church relaxed this prohibition in, I believe the fourth century, but they viewed this as a loosening and a departure from the teaching of Jesus, and from the strict ideal that he had set forth. Nevertheless, we would certainly have more sympathy for this woman if she had been the innocent party in her divorces.<br /><br />To my mind, though, there’s no real reason to believe she was divorced at all. One could equally well postulate that she was widowed. Because we have ample reason to believe that a woman who had survived five husbands, would be viewed with scorn and contempt by the society of her time: as a kind of adulteress, or perhaps even as a witch and a murderess, and certainly as a disreputable woman. Consider the hypothetical story that Jesus’ intellectual opponents asked him, testing him, regarding a woman who had had seven husbands.<br /><br />“Then came to him certain of the Sadducees, which deny that there is any resurrection; and they asked him, Saying, Master, Moses wrote unto us, If any man’s brother die, having a wife, and he die without children, that his brother should take his wife, and raise up seed unto his brother. There were therefore seven brethren: and the first took a wife, and died without children.And the second took her to wife, and he died childless. And the third took her; and in like manner the seven also: and they left no children, and died.Last of all the woman died also. Therefore in the resurrection whose wife of them is she? for seven had her to wife” (Luke 20:27-33).<br /><br />Implicit in this story is a bit of contempt for the woman; there’s certainly no question raised about her husbands, whether they are adulterers, but only about the poor woman. Some argue (in a few cites I was able to dig up, but I have no clue about how accurate they are) that remarriage on the part of a widow was frowned upon in first century Judaea, as it was in Hindu culture until very recently. It’s certainly possible that the Samaritan woman was an outcast not for being serially divorced, but for being serially widowed. We get a hint of this response when we look at the story of Sarah, the daughter of Raguel, who had married seven men and had each one die on their wedding night, slain by the demon Asmodeus. (Asmodeus is an Old Persian name, meaning literally ‘demon of wrath’: the suffix ‘dai’ from ‘daeva’ is apparently cognate with the Latin deus and the Sanskrit deva,which ironically both mean ‘god’. Asmodeus is said to have been a powerful dark being, that King Solomon had some command over; he plays a big role in Jewish and Christian mystical and extracanonical writings, and this evocative name gives us a hint of the influence that Zoroastrian demonology had on later Jewish and Christian though). <br /><br />“On the same day, at Ecbatana in Media, it so happened that Raguel’s daughter Sarah also had to listen to abuse, from one of her father’s maids. For she had been married to seven husbands, but the wicked demon Asmodeus killed them off before they could have intercourse with her, as it is prescribed for wives. So the maid said to her: “You are the one who strangles your husbands! Look at you! You have already been married seven times, but you have had no joy with any one of your husbands. Why do you beat us? Because your husbands are dead? Then why not join them! May we never see a son or daughter of yours!” (Tobit 3:7-9: New American Bible).<br /><br />It’s very likely, then, that Photina of Samaria wasn’t an adulteress at all, but a widow, a serial widow. In the context of that time, a patriarchal desert culture in which women could easily be blamed for anything wrong that happened in her household, and especially to her husband. One need only look at the kind of honour killings that happen in the Middle East today, or the long and sad history of women being accused at scheming to betray or kill their husband. It’s not at all unlikely that Photina had been accused, unfairly, of the same sort of faithlessness that Sarah had been accused of, and was viewed as a woman set apart and accursed, if not actually a schemer and a murderess. This would provide a good reason that Jesus refused to explicitly condemn her: it tells us both why he brought up her sad family history (to prove his divine clairvoyance) and why he refused to judge her as guilty. It’s quite possible that, like Sarah, she was guilty of nothing but bad luck: something that would make her a sinner in the eyes of the town of Sychar, but certainly not in the eyes of the God that sees the heart. <br /><br />All this, of course, still leaves the second aspect of her sexual history that she would have been criticized for: living in a (presumably sexual) relationship outside of marriage. There’s much to say about that: regarding what scripture and church tradition have said about sexuality, why they said what they did, what Jesus actually said (which is actually not a whole lot), what underlying principles are meant to guide sexual behavior, and underlying it all, what reason and intuition, illuminated by scripture and tradition, tell us about what sex is for. There’s a lot to say about that. But that’s another story, for another time. Hopefully I will get to it later this week. In the meantime:<br /><br />Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost: as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7008813786806083758.post-40281094620982180192010-09-24T20:41:00.000-07:002010-09-24T20:42:12.199-07:00Lazarus and Dives: a meditation on heaven, hell, and repentanceToday's Sunday reading (in the Anglican, Catholic, and many mainline Protestant churches) is a very interesting one. The Gospel reading focuses on the story of Dives and Lazarus. This story, found (as with many of the really interesting stories of Jesus) only in Luke 16: 19-31, deals with the nature of the afterlife, with the promise of ultimate justice for the downtrodden, and with the magnitude of our human capacity for evil and indifference to the needs of our brothers and sisters.<br /><br /><br />It tells the story of a rich man (generally called 'Dives', Latin for 'rich man'), indifferent to the suffering of his poor neighbor Lazarus. Lazarus suffered from hunger every day, 'desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table', while Dives ate sumptuously and was clothed in purple and fine linen. It's implied that Lazarus was a leper, for 'the dogs came and licked his sores'. When the two of them die, Dives, who lived his life indifferent to the hunger, poverty, and sickness of Lazarus and those like him, and who delighted in the pleasures and pomp that great wealth had bought for him, ended up in hell. Where Lazarus ended up is less clear; it's important to remember that this happened before the Incarnation, when presumably human beings could not yet enter heaven. The traditional belief is that he was in some kind of blessed state but outside the true Heaven; the medieval church called this intermediate place 'Limbo', and the story simply refers to it as 'Abraham's Bosom'.<br /><br />The story goes on from there:<br /><br />"And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.<br /><br />"But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented. And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence.<br /><br />"Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send him to my father's house: For I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment. Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them. And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent. And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead."<br /><br />This story probably refers to real people- Jesus refers to Lazarus by name, which is unlike all the parables he told, so it suggests that he intended this story, not as a parable, but as a real description of the afterlife. It's a powerfully ironic story when we remember that Jesus Himself was telling it. It features Abraham scoffing at the idea of one returning from the dead, and saying essentially that would change nothing. But we know that very soon after this story was told, quite possibly in the same year, Christ Himself would die, and rise from the dead. His resurrection would be the miracle that would turn millions to God, and would once and for all reconcile God with man. It would, pace Abraham, 'persuade' innumerable men and women to turn away from sin and dedicate themselves to faith, hope, and love. And more than that, it would bridge the gap, not just between Lazarus and Dives, but between Lazarus and God. No one, not even good people like Lazarus, not even the greatest of the saints or prophets, had been able to enter heaven prior to the death of Jesus, for his blood was the price of our salvation, and our ransom from the bondage to sin, death, and the devil. As big as the difference between Lazarus and Dives, it was nothing compared to that between Lazarus, and other imperfectly good men on the one hand, and the perfect, unfallen goodness of Heaven. Yet Christ himself, within just a couple short years, would bridge that gap, and open up the way to heaven for all those who would accept it. Lazarus would sit, no longer, in 'Abraham's bosom', but in the Paradise of God.<br /><br />This story ends on a chilling note, for it seems to tell us that the gap between Lazarus and Dives is unbridgeable. From this story we get the traditional Christian teaching that hell is definitively eternal, a place from which there is no return, and in which there is no longer any possibility of repentance. The traditional teaching of orthodox Christianity about hell is that the damned are forever fixed in their sin, like Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggiero eternally gnawing each other's flesh in the ninth circle of the Inferno, and that death, or the moment immediately after death, is the last moment we have to repent. The dead, we are told, had their chance while on earth, and must pay eternally for refusing to accept it. Some of the early heresies, including (I think) the Donatists, went even further and held that some sins were so grave they could never be repented of even while still on earth. Read alone, the story of Lazarus and Dives would seem to support this kind of harsh, uncompromising interpretation. But of course, it's always a bad idea to read any piece of scripture alone; it needs to be read in the context of other scriptures, of tradition, and of reason.<br /><br />That teaching about hell is hard for many of us to accept, and it's worth remembering that it's never been fully or universally accepted in Christianity. One of the most common themes in the visions of heaven and hell which proliferated in the patristic and medieval periods, is that God's mercy is present even in hell, and that He will intervene in some way to make their sufferings less then they would be otherwise. Some of the medieval mystics claimed that God would grant 'vacations' to the damned, allowing them to wander on earth or even to visit heaven; at least one such mystic personally claimed to have spoken with Judas on one of his holidays from hell. Others claimed that God would grant to the lost a reprieve from suffering- for Easter Day, for Easter Season, or for Easter and Pentecost. Some of the visionaries hinted that God would listen to the intercession of the saints, and for their sake would forgive the damned. In the last few centuries, a much bolder (and, in my view, wrong) teaching has become increasingly popular in Christian circles, called Universalism. Universalists hold that in the end, all will be saved. They take inspiration from the third century Bishop Origen, who held that in the end even the devil would be saved. <br /><br />Personally, I _don't_ agree with universalism, but I also don't agree with the idea that there is no mercy, and no possibility of repentance, for those in hell. I suppose my thoughts are somewhere in between. I believe, in short, that God's mercy is present even in the uttermost and farthest depths of hell, and that He will always welcome to his embrace anyone who is truly repentant: but I also believe that he respects our free will, that He will not force his love on anyone who rejects it, and that corrupted human nature is such that there will always be those who do reject it, even in the depths of hell. I think if we read the story of Lazarus and Dives closely, it's not incompatible with this kind of view, that ultimately everlasting torment is not something God imposes on us, but something we choose for ourselves.<br /><br />Listen again to Dives' lament in hell. All he can think about is himself. He thinks of Lazarus, but only in terms of what Lazarus can do for him; he imagines him as a servant, bound to give him a drink of water: "Send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue...". He then asks Abraham to tell Lazarus to go attend to his brothers. Never once does he ask about Lazarus' own well-being, or his experience in heaven. He wants to be saved from torment, but he is incapable of even beginning to step outside his own needs and his own suffering. He doesn't pray, or implore, or ask forgiveness, he thinks of his own needs and those of his brothers. "Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send him to my father's house..." Never is there a hint that he understands why he is there, or that he's genuinely sorry for his own sins.<br /><br /><br />The reply that Abraham gives him isn't really a statement that repentance is impossible; it's more a statement that Dives is not, at least at present, in a truly repentant condition. Heaven is a place characterized by pure, self-giving love, which takes as much delight in the joy of those around us as it does in our own joy. Until we have begun to step outside ourselves, and attempt to love each other as we love ourselves, we haven't begun to take the first steps towards heaven. Dives, in hell, knows that he is in pain, and that he wants to be out of it; but as yet he shows little sign of true self understanding, or of attempting to become capable of repentance and of love. Like the lost in Dante's Inferno, all he can talk about is himself.<br /><br />In this passage, Jesus is warning us away from one error about the afterlife: that hell is a myth, that it doesn't really exist, that we will all be happy and comfortable in the end. He is seeking to warn us that hell is real, that it's a place of unimaginable pain and torment, a place of cold worse than the farthest wastes of the Arctic, and heat worse than the Arabian desert, and worst of all a place from which love is absent, in which human beings, the devils, the fallen angels, and the Enemy himself are all divided against each other and against themselves. And he seeks to warn us, too, that there is an ever present danger that we will condemn ourselves to that place of suffering and hatred, by choosing self-interest over self-giving, pride and hatred over love, and by being as indifferent to our neighbours as Dives was. Even if repentance is possible in hell, a lifetime devoted to serving ourselves can make it very, very difficult for us to truly repent and to truly love.<br /><br />Yet it's important not to fall into the opposite error, too. We should remember that this story happened before the Incarnation, and that it even features Abraham saying- incorrectly, as we all know- that it would make no difference if 'one rose from the dead'. The Incarnation changed everything: it made possible things that had been impossible before. It made it possible for a virgin to give birth, for lepers and blind people to be healed with a touch, for the dead to be raised, and ultimately for God Himself to descend into hell and free the lost. And maybe it made it possible for the gap which Abraham called unbridgeable, to be bridged. Dives was among those sinners who Jesus descended into hell to save, and we don't know if, when he beheld the face that "was like the sun shining in all its brilliance" (Revelation 1:16) he at last repented and believed.<br /><br />We know that suffering can be redemptive, that through suffering we can empty ourselves of pride and self-love, and lay our souls open to be filled with humility, love, and submission to the source of everything good. Perhaps it was so for Dives, and perhaps on Holy Saturday he looked at Christ and loved him. We don't know. We do have the assurance that no one who, in the end, truly seeks salvation, and truly has a heart full of love for God and their neighbour, will be denied it. "Ask and it shall be given to you, seek and ye shall find" says the Lord (Matthew 7:7) and he makes no exception for those even in the depths of hell.<br /><br />St. John says in his vision of heaven that 'the gates of that city will never be closed by day, and there shall be no night there' (Revelation 21:25), and what can this mean but that heaven is always open, always welcoming, always inviting to anyone who truly desires to walk in the light of God and of the Lamb. For a city to throw open its gates and leave them open forever is the clearest token of welcome and invitation that there could possibly be. "The spirit and the bride say 'Come'," (Revelation 22:17) and it's implied that that invitation is extended to everyone, not just the righteous, and not just those who died in a state of grace. Those who remain in hell, in the long run, will be those who choose it for themselves, for no one who truly seeks salvation, knowing what it means and what it entails, will be denied it. I can't read the magnificent vision of the city of God, in the last chapters of St. John's Apocalypse, and think that anyone will be stuck outside the gates craving to be allowed in. Those outside will be those who prefer their pride to the humility of the city of God, who prefer their self-interest to the self-giving of the city of God, and who prefer self-love to the love of others. If the gates of hell are closed, as C.S. Lewis said, they are closed on the inside, and only on the inside.<br /><br />I think, in short, that we should hope that salvation is a gift available to anyone who will accept it, even in hell, and that we shouldn't give up on the salvation even of those who died, seemingly, outside a state of grace. But we should also take warning, and the story of Lazarus and Dives gives us good reason for that warning. The reason Jesus told us this story was to remind us that hell is a terrible place, and that while it need not be eternal, it can be eternal: for those who, like Dives, find themselves unwilling to love, unwilling to empty themselves of pride and self-love, unwilling to truly repent or turn to God. Milton's Satan said, 'Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven', and it's more than likely there will be those who agree with that credo, into eternity, though of course none of us can be sure. The apocryphal 'Gospel of Peter', dating from the early second century, recounts the same story Luke tells us of the repentant thief on the cross, who received this beautiful promise from Jesus: "Verily I say unto thee, this day shalt thou be with me in Paradise" (Luke 23:43). But he goes on to say that the Roman soldiers, seeing this unmerited, unaccountable display of grace and love, responded by becoming even more spiteful and cruel: "And having become irritated at him, they ordered that there be no leg-breaking, so that he might die tormented" (Gospel of Peter 1:14). This is the story of corrupt and fallen human nature, that repeats itself in every age: we see love in action, and find ourselves hating it. Just as those who react this way in this life, I think it's likely there will be those who react that same way in the hereafter, and for those people, who are always prideful, always self-sufficient even in their pain, always intoxicated by themselves, it can be truly said, "the smoke of their torment rises for ever" (Revelation 14:11). A moment of real, true love on their part would set them free, but it would also involve them giving up their pride, their vision of themselves, their self-love, and that's a sacrifice some of us are unwilling to make. Now, and probably in the hereafter too. That's the true lesson, in my view, of the story of Dives and Lazarus, and of all the chilling scriptural passages about hell.<br /><br />The story of Lazarus and Dives gives us reason to be warned, just as St. John's vision of heaven as the welcoming city with its gates cast open gives us reason to hope. To deny the warning would be just as big an error as to deny the promise. As we go through the next few weeks, and try to allow the grace of God to infuse us and makes us better people, let's try to live less like Dives, and more like those people in the Gospel whom Jesus commended for their love and their charity. Every choice we make changes who we are, and makes us either more of a heavenly creature or more of a hellish one. That even death isn't a final and irrevocable Rubicon isn't a reason to put off trying to change our lives: it's a reason to try to make ourselves better people now, because what we do today affects who we will be in the future. But let's also remember that as human beings, all of us will fail at some point or another, and that in spite of that, in spite of even the greatest failings and mistakes we may make, that ultimately no one whose heart is in the right place will be denied salvation if they genuinely and sincerely long for it with all their heart. Justice is important, but ultimately hope is greater, one of the three greatest virtues in the world (1 Corinthians 13:13), and Christ has given us reason to hope that in the end, we will all have what we truly seek. <br /><br /><br />Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost: as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7008813786806083758.post-37292618573905579582010-08-30T19:26:00.000-07:002010-08-30T19:33:10.120-07:00The Beheading of St. John the ForerunnerToday, August 29th, is the day that the Church has chosen to remember the martyrdom of St. John the Baptist, or as the feast is sometimes picturesquely known, ‘The Beheading of the Forerunner.’ It’s a fairly minor feast day (except apparently in Puerto Rico, whose patron saint is St. John the Baptist, and perhaps some other places) so most of us probably didn’t observe it today. But the story of John’s death is a powerful one, and well worth writing about. It’s one of the Christian feast days- like Good Friday, and like the Feast of the Holy Innocents- that remind us, painfully and starkly, of the magnitude of human evil, and the darkness that our species is capable of.<br /><br /><br />Many of us probably find it difficult- I find it almost impossible- to think about the Beheading of St. John strictly through a biblical lens. When we think about John’s death, we almost inevitably think of Oscar Wilde’s play, ‘Salome’, which makes the story come alive for us through vivid poetry that’s alternately ethereally beautiful and horrifyingly dark. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The best art, after all, has the same source as scripture has; like all good things, it comes ultimately from God, and whether or not Wilde’s version of the story is true in every detail, it conveys powerful truths to us; it serves the function, in other words, that myths are intended to serve. It might seem strange to call Mr. Wilde a Christian poet, but it’s none the less true for all that. Oscar Wilde’s famous ‘aestheticism’, and his often expressed view that art and morality had nothing to do with each other, were, I think, never something that he truly accepted at the deepest level of his being. While he converted to Catholicism on his deathbed, he was haunted by Christ for a lot longer then that, and there are deeply moral, and deeply Christian messages running through so much of his plays, poems, and short fictions. ‘Salome’ is no exception. The play is sometimes called ‘pornographic’, which would be annoying if it weren’t so absurd. I detest real pornography with a passion, and it saddens me that so many people nowadays, especially young men, patronize this kind of unnatural, antisocial and immoral rubbish, but as Justice Potter Stewart once said, ‘This is not that’, i.e. ‘Salome’ is not by any stretch of the imagination pornographic. On the contrary, it’s a deeply moral play, and a deeply religious one.<br /><br /><br />I’d call it a deeply religious play because it gives us a demonstration of what Bulgakov, in his ‘The Master and Margarita’, calls ‘the seventh proof of the existence of God.’ Namely, the demonstration of God through the demonstration of his opposite. The seventh proof relies on an evidential step: amassing evidence that this world is an evil place, in which people and other beings routinely exploit and abuse one another in truly horrific ways. It relies, then, on an intuitive sense; it asks us to accept that the magnitude of evil in this world is greater than what we would expect in a strictly materialistic and naturalistic world, and that we can explain the amount and degree of evil in this world only by postulating an agent of supernatural evil, the devil. And it relies, finally, on philosophical and theological reasoning, to infer the existence of supernatural good from supernatural evil. For shadows are only comprehensible if there exists such a thing as light; shadows are the absence of light, and the existence of shadows testifies to the existence of light. As another great twentieth century work of fiction ruminating on the nature of good and evil put it, “It is folly to think that in the triumph of evil there could be a winning side, in terms of anyone’s gaining anything by it. Without good to oppose it, evil is simply meaningless.’ Precisely, and this is why- according to Bulgakov, and I think correctly- the existence of supernatural evil implies the existence of supernatural good. Intuitively I accept the existence of supernatural evil- and the amount of evil in this world tells me that such an agent must be truly awesome in his power, intelligence, in the force of his will and in the ability to master nature and the world. “He doeth great wonders, such that he maketh fire come down from heaven on earth in the sight of men’ (Revelation 13:13). If there exists an even greater source of supernatural good, and it’s not hard to deduce why there must, then that source must be truly eternal, truly unbounded and unlimited by the laws of nature, truly perfect in power, in goodness, in vision, and in love, and truly a being ‘greater than which none can be conceived.” And as St. Anselm said, “You, Lord God, are this being.” <br /><br /><br />‘Salome’, like ‘Titus Andronicus’, is a deeply religious play in that it portrays for us- brilliantly and vividly- the horrific nature of a world from which God is absent. It gives us a snapshot, as clear as glass and as bright as the morning sun, of the City of Man in all its glory. And through our revulsion at what human beings are capable of doing to each other, at the magnitude of our capacity for lust, greed, hatred and pride, we are sent running away from the City of Man like frightened toddlers running away from a bear at the zoo. And when we run away from the City of Man, we sooner or later find us running towards its opposite pole, the only ultimate alternative to that city: the eternal, perfect, and superlatively beautiful alternative of the City of God.<br /><br /><br />Wilde’s play ‘Salome’ consciously echoes images from the ‘Song of Solomon’, that enigmatic book of the Old Testament which can be interpreted- correctly, I think- as a paean to romantic love, as a celebration of the erotic, as a prefiguration of the Ever-Virgin Mary, and as an allegory of the love of Christ for his people. Captivated by passion, Salome speaks thus to St. John as he stands before her in chains:<br /><br /><br />"Thy mouth is like a band of scarlet on a tower of ivory. It is like a pomegranate cut in twain with a knife of ivory. The pomegranate flowers that blossom in the gardens of Tyre, and are redder than roses, are not so red. The red blasts of trumpets that herald the approach of kings, and make afraid the enemy, are not so red. Thy mouth is redder than the feet of those who tread the wine in the wine-press. It is redder than the feet of the doves who inhabit the temples and are fed by the priests. It is redder than the feet of him who cometh from a forest where he hath slain a lion, and seen gilded tigers....:<br /><br /><br />But Wilde cleverly twists the imagery of the Song of Solomon, turning all that beauty to ugliness, by putting these verses into the mouth of Salome, a young woman for whom love and hate are inextricably tied together. She desires John the Baptist, and when she can’t have him, all her love turns to hate, and she wants to destroy him. The biblical narrative said that Salome was prompted by her mother to ask for St. John’s head: “And she went forth, and said unto her mother, What shall I ask? And she said, The head of John the Baptist” (Mark 6:24). But Wilde makes the decision to ask for John’s head the fault of Salome herself, prompted by her bitter anger, and by her longing to destroy the man who spurned her caresses. He shows us, brilliantly, what <em>eros</em>, sexual and erotic love, can become when it’s separated from <em>caritas</em>, the love that seeks the good of the beloved, and not one’s own good. These two kinds of love were intended to be connected to each other, to be tied together within the context of romantic relationships. And when we separate them, as our society risks doing with its increasing acceptance of casual sex, we risk unleashingly truly dangerous storms of passion that set us against each other and against our own deepest natures, that drive us apart instead of bringing us together. As C. S. Lewis said, if you try to make<em> eros</em> into a God, she will become a demon. Wilde’s portrayal of Salome is a great example of this, a great portrayal of the nature of passion when it becomes centered on our own good and our own desires instead of on the good of our beloved, and a warning to his time- which in its way had even more erotic sin then ours, as the widespread prevalence of prostitution shows us- as well as to all times since.<br /><br /><br />Of course, in Wilde’s portrayal, Salome was a victim as much as a perpetrator of evil, and as guilty as she was, greater still was Herod’s guilt. The biblical account doesn’t make this especially clear- it says that Herod was ‘pleased’ with her dancing: “And when the daughter of the said Herodias came in, and danced, and pleased Herod, and them that sat with him…” (Mark 6:25). In Wilde’s play, however, it’s very clear, and explicit, that Herod lusts after Salome, and that his desire to see her dance is rooted in sexual desire. This desire, one can quickly see, was incestuous; in truth, it’s triply incestuous, for Herod and Salome were related in three different ways (due to the Herod family’s long history of practicing incest, and to Herod’s incestuous marriage to his brother’s wife Herodias). Salome was simultaneously the niece, the grand-niece, and the stepdaughter of Herod, and if you wanted an explicit biblical text warning of how evil and unnatural incest really is, you couldn’t pick a much better example (which may be part of the reason that this episode made it into the very short, and very concise, Gospel of St. Mark.) If Wilde was right and Salome secretly desired John, then the fact that she was presumably the object of sexual molestation by her stepfather/uncle/grand-uncle hints that she may have been a victim as much as a perpetrator of evil. We’ve learned over the centuries that people who are victims of abuse often become abusers themselves- a glance at the crime stories in the newspaper tells us that much- and personally, I can’t think of a much better example of the power of evil to beget more evil, or a better testimony to how much this is truly a fallen, and corrupt world.<br /><br /><br />Beyond just the relationship (which isn’t even suggested in the Bible, but which Wilde makes clear) of Salome and John, the connection of Herod and Salome, then, makes it clear that this is a story about sexual sin and the dark side of sexual passion, as much as it is a story about political tyranny and the death of a prophet. Herod, inflamed with wine and tempted by incestuous desire; Salome, frustrated in love and willing to turn all her lust into hate; Herodias, willing to leave her husband and enter an incestuous relationship with his brother; all of them show us Romantic love, at its best, is a mirror of the love that exists between the Persons of the Trinity, and between God and man. But when we separate the physical aspect of love from its spiritual and emotional aspects, when we separate desire from affection, when we separate the good that we seek for ourselves from the desire to seek the good of the person we love, then we open the door to a set of stairs that lead ever downward, into the black cellar where Herod’s executioner went to seek John the Baptist, carrying an axe on his shoulder and wearing the tetrarch’s Death Ring on his finger.<br /><br />Down those stairs lies the path to the central square of the City of Man, the city founded by ‘the love of the self even to the contempt of God,’ and Herod’s pained cry at the end of the play, “I have committed a great crime, a crime against some unknown God’, tells us all we need to know about that City. Wilde’s play, and the biblical text on which it is based, give us all the reason we ever needed to set our feet in the path leading away from that city, and to start walking- as far as it may take us, as difficult as the path might be, up the highest mountains and through the hottest deserts- towards that other city, the City of God, which stands forever ‘as a bride adorned for her husband’ (Revelation 21:2), in a permanent and perpetual symbol of the beauty of true, genuine, and sincere romantic love.<br /><br /><br />Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost: as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.<br /><br /><Photo 1>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7008813786806083758.post-70924910470341584492010-08-17T19:03:00.000-07:002010-08-17T19:05:31.410-07:00A third year's reflection on the Assumption of the Mother of GodToday, August 15th, is the Feast of the Assumption (for the Roman Catholic church and for many Anglicans), and the feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos for the Orthodox and Oriental churches. (‘Assumption’ comes from the Latin ‘assumptio’ = ‘taking up’, do not be confused that it’s used in a sense contrary to the common English sense.) The two names connote more or less the same thing, with slight differences of emphasis: the day that Mary the Mother of God, most glorious and ever-virgin, was taken up into heaven, ‘body and soul’. You can look all throughout the world for the remains of Mary, for her tomb and her bones, but you won’t find them; they aren’t here. Mary, with her whole being and person, body and soul united, is in heaven. It’s important to remember that this isn’t just about Mary’s soul rising to heaven. Of course her soul is in heaven; we knew that, for where else would it be? The meaning of the Feast of the Assumption is a bunch more bold and startling one: that Mary’s body did not remain here on earth either, but was lifted up to heaven, and that she is there in her full corporeality, body and soul, as all good people shall be when Christ returns and we experience the resurrection of the body. <br /><br />There are slight differences of emphasis between the West and the East in regards to the question of whether she died and was then resurrected, or whether she was transported to heaven without dying. My understanding is that the Eastern churches tend to believe the former (this was the older belief) while Catholics and Anglicans who accept the doctrine believe she went straight to heaven, body and soul, without dying. I tend to favour the second interpretation: it seems to fit better with some enigmatic verses that seem to foretell the Assumption, for example, ‘In kinship with Wisdom is immortality’ (Wisdom 8:17, using ‘Wisdom’ of course as a symbol of Christ), but in fairness, the early legends and apocryphal writings concerning the Assumption do include references to her soul ascending to heaven first, and her body ascending three days later, in an echo of Christ’s resurrection. Of course, it’s not impossible that this did not represent _death_ in the sense we understand it, but rather some alternative temporary interruption of the relationship of body and soul, some hypothetical means of leaving this earth, that would have been meant for an unfallen humanity. C.S. Lewis speculates a little bit about what the end of life would be like for an unfallen race, in his book ‘Out of the Silent Planet’, and his account of ‘unbodying’ a dead creature on Mars bear some similarities to the accounts of the Assumption. It’s death in a sense, but not death in the sense we understand it on earth (he makes this point very clearly in the sequel, ‘Perelandra’.) Death had no power over Mary’s body, as St. John makes clear when he depicts her escape from the clutches of the dragon: “And to the woman were given two wings of the great eagle, that she might fly from the dragon’s wrath….” (Revelation 12:14). Understood in this way, the Catholic/Anglican and Orthodox understandings of the end of her life may not be incompatible at the deepest level. <br /><br />The apocryphal stories about the Assumption aren’t history, of course, nor canonical scripture, but it seems reasonable to take them as having some core of remembered traditions and some kernels of truth which were passed down over the roughly five centuries, and it’s worth taking a look at them to see what we can extract. One particularly touching aspect of the accounts of the Assumption, purportedly deriving from the memories of St. John himself, suggests that Christ responded to a direct prayer from his mother. It wasn’t a prayer for her to be assumed into heaven- quite the opposite! One can’t imagine the embodiment of humility and modesty, she who had said of herself, “For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden” (Luke 1:48) and submitted to her God by saying, “Be it unto me according to thy word,” (Luke 1:38), asking for the estate of Queen of Heaven. In contrast, she asked for something much more modest: “As the all-holy glorious mother of God and ever-virgin Mary, as was her wont, was going to the holy tomb of our Lord to burn incense, and bending her holy knees, she was importunate that Christ our God who had been born of her should return to her”. <br /><br />Picture this woman, who had lost her only child, whom she had loved more than anything in this world, and seen the Apostles go their separate ways, left behind with only St. John to take care for her. St. John tells us that she regularly burnt incense at his tomb as an act of worship, but that in her loneliness, she was pining for her lost child and wishing, no doubt with any hope of the wish being granted, that Christ should return to her. It’s a wish that we can all identify with, at some level. I lost my father when I was about seventeen, and for a year or two afterward I would have periodic dreams where he was somehow returned to my family, and where he was talking with us and living with us again. How much more does this have to be the case for someone who loses a child? When I lived in Madagascar I knew quite a few families who had children die, and it tears people apart like few other things can. One couple I knew ended up separating after their child died of malaria; the relationship had been forever destroyed by the memory of what they had lost. And for Mary, it was even worse in a sense, for her son had been returned to her for forty days, before leaving again, this time for good. She had had a taste of the sweetness of resurrection, the wonder and joy of having her dead child returned to her, in the fullness and strength of new life; but all too quickly, the taste turned bitter as she realized this was just temporary, and that she would soon have her child taken from her again. Of her experience of the Lord’s resurrection, it could truly be said, “It was in my mouth sweet as honey, but as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter” (Revelation 10:10) and I’m sure St. John, who had lived with her and cared for her every day since Christ ascended, was thinking of her when he wrote these words.<br /><br />Of course, on another level, what she was asking for was impossible, and I’m sure she realized it. The dead don’t return to this earth; even when resurrected, their destiny is somewhere else. I’m sure she knew that, and she was praying more than anything to console herself, asking for something she knew was impossible, more out of blind, baseless hope then out of any belief that the prayer could be answered. She had no idea, of course, that God had plans for her that were much greater, deeper, and richer then she could ever have imagined. The goodness and glory of God, and the destiny he has planned for each of us, is something that with our limited imaginations, and our horizons and thoughts limited by the contours of a harsh, fallen, and often painful world, we can’t even conceive of. “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9) says St. Paul, and there are good reasons for this: our ability to think and envision the future is limited by our experiences and by our capacity to imagine, and finite creatures that we are, these are limited and often pitifully small. God doesn’t share our limitations, and while we can’t see or even accurately imagine the destiny he has in store for us, we can be assured it is greater and better than anything we could ever conceive of; any analogy we make to heaven must necessarily fall short of the reality. Imagine the best thing in this world you can, take it to its perfection, and even still, we can be sure heaven will be better, for God loves us and wants the best for us even more than we do for ourselves. So it was with Mary, the Mother of God. <br /><br />Christ had mercy on his mother and granted her prayer, but he granted it in a way that she could never have foreseen, something beyond the capacity even of this sinless and morally perfect woman to imagine. Rather then descending once again to share life with his mother, he promised her, and his promises are always fulfilled, to raise her into heaven, where she would be crowned forever as its Queen, and where she could remain forever close to her Child; as it was said of old, “Upon thy right hand did stand the queen in gold of Ophir” (Psalm 45:9), and as much as this was true of Solomon, it was fulfilled even more truly when the Mother of God took her place in heaven. The most St. Mary could imagine, the greatest promise she could ask for, was for her son to return to her, at least for a little while; but God the Word, who had taken human nature from her, was able to imagine a greater and better good for her than she could imagine for herself, and where she had hoped to be united with her son on earth, he summoned her to be united with him forever in heaven, perfect in her corporeal being, with no need of death or resurrection. In her earthly life, Mary never imagined what she would one day become. We can search the New Testament for hints that Mary was aware of her full glory, and find nothing, for she seems to have seen herself as nothing more than a carpenter’s wife, socially downtrodden and economically poor, living off bread and occasional broiled fish. Perfect in other virtues, as tradition tells us, St. Mary the Mother of God was perfect also in humility. But God had greater plans for her, and of this meek and humble Palestinian peasant girl, he one day intended to make the Queen of Heaven. He granted not only her prayer, but those of her parents who had asked, “Bless her with the last blessing, that shall be forever” (Infancy Gospel of James 6:4). No doubt they had merely meant ‘forever’ to mean a very long time, in the figurative sense that people normally use it; perhaps they were asking for a blessing that would last all of Mary’s natural life. But God understood them more deeply than they even understood themselves, and granted them a blessing that would, truly, last forever; the blessing of immortality, spiritual and corporeal, that would raise Mary to heaven and allow her a resting place there for all of eternity. <br /><br />Consider again St. John’s beautiful and haunting vision; consider it in detail, and let the words wash over you like the ocean’s wave at high tide; drink their beauty as you would drink the water of a cool and pure mountain lake. “And there appeared in heaven a great portent: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon beneath her feet, and crowned with twelve stars” (Revelation 12:1). The stars, sun and moon represent, I think, the holy angels, for St. John calls the angels, “the stars of heaven…” (Revelation 12:4).. It’s a very old tradition in the religions of the world to associate various gods, or angels, with the sun, moon, and planets of the solar system (C. S. Lewis, again, uses this tradition in his Space Trilogy, in which the moon and various planets are associated each with their own tutelary angel, which he identifies with the Greek gods). In the Hindu temple near my hometown, there’s a piece of devotional statuary depicting nine important deities, associated with the highlights of our night sky: the sun, the moon, and seven of the planets in our solar system (the seven of which we were aware before modern astronomy). Of course this association isn’t literal, it’s symbolical; the sun, moon, and stars (or planets; in ancient times the distinction wasn’t clearly made) are used to represent and symbolize high spiritual powers- as we can see, in Hindu, Greek and Christian tradition alike, and in other traditions as well. <br /><br />St. John borrows that imagery here, and by showing Mary clothed with the sun and crowned with the stars, he is illustrating that, though a created human being with human limitations, she has been raised to a rank higher then the highest angels. As the ‘Axion Estin’ tells us, she is ‘more glorious than the cherubim, and incomparably more honourable than the seraphim.” Who could possibly have expected, or hoped for this? How far had she come, this Palestinian peasant girl, wife of a carpenter, a consecrated virgin who had seen her only son handed over to horrible death, who had spent her life in poverty and oppression, mocked as Galilean provincials, struggling for each day’s food, enduring heat and drought in a dusty backwater of a vast and tyrannous empire. For this unassuming, humble, gentle and giving young woman who said ‘Fiat’ to the angel’s entreaty, was raised to a throne higher than any of the angels, and far higher than any other human being could ever aspire to. “Every one that exalteth himself shall be abased,” said Jesus, “and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted” (Luke 18:14); could there be a better fulfillment of Our Lord’s saying than the assumption of Mary? For above us are the holy angels, but above them is the Mother of God; and her heavenly throne she owes to two things; to the humility that led her to give up all she had been planning for her life, and to submit to the request of the heralding archangel, and even more importantly, to the boundless and limitless love of her Son.<br /><br />This is always the way with the promises of God: that the good that He desires for us is greater than the greatest good we can desire for ourselves. Ask yourself what you desire in life, and remember that the most and best we can desire for ourselves in a shadow of what God has planned. The trees of heaven, after all, will be green, fruitful, and life-giving to a degree that the trees of this earth can only be pale copies or shadows of. The light of heaven will be a light so bright that the sunlight we experience on earth is only a shadow of it. So it is with everything good that God intends for us. We spend so much of our time pursuing the things of this earth- food, sex, wealth, fame, beautiful things- but we forget that these things, good in themselves, derive their goodness from God, and that to pursue them to the detriment of pursuing Him is only to harm ourselves. Because the greatest good and most intense happiness we can enjoy on our own, is always less than the joy we will one day enjoy when we are in his presence, and enter into what he has prepared for us. “Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Matthew 25:34); how happy will we be when we can hear these words spoken and know that they are sure and true? Because what the Assumption of Mary tells us is that what God has prepared for us is greater than anything we can hope for, and that he has a plan for us, as he had for St. Mary, greater than any plan we could possibly make for ourselves.<br /><br />Mary’s sojourn in heaven, of course, was not to be continuous. The prayer of the Abbe Perreyve invokes her thus, “Most blessed virgin, in the midst of thy days of glory, forget not the sorrows of this earth….” This prayer, devoted to Our Lady of Lourdes, was inscribed on a Marian prayer card that was given to me by an Episcopal priest of my acquaintance. This happened just before I left for Madagascar, on an adventure unlike any I could have expected, and on an experience that was to change me, as much as (I hope) I was able to bring change into the community where I worked. When I started the three years of my life in Madagascar, I was often lonely, worried about the future, unsure whether my work would bear fruit, and whether I would be welcomed, and concerned about a whole slew of tropical diseases. I would take solace, often, in looking at the prayer card, remembering the love with which it had been given to me, and praying in Abbe Perreyve’s words. I felt protected while I was in Madagascar, watched over by a guiding and protective force, and I felt that, in some sense, the Mother of God was looking out for me. I was already on my road to the Christian faith then, but my experience helped me to realize the importance that the Mother of God has to our faith, and helped to push me in the direction of those traditions, like Anglo-Catholicism, that give her due honour. <br /><br />Many people have experienced the presence of St. Mary in their lives of course, and not just as a protective force as I have, but in much deeper and richer forms; through direct mystical experience. I had a friend once who, when travelling through South America, spoke with an imprisoned former drug lord; the drug dealer had had a change of heart, abandoned his life of crime, and handed himself over to the police, when he looked into the clouds and had a vision of St. Mary in all her glory. Some of these experiences are explicitly commemorated as sites of pilgrimage today, like the town of Fatima where the three children had a direct experience of the Virgin Mary and were given visions of the future, including the re-conversion of Russia to Christianity. This must have seemed impossible when it happened; Russia was then a Christian power, so it must have seemed unlikely it would turn to atheism. But the turn did come, less than a year after the three children at Fatima has their vision; and twenty years later, at the darkest hour of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, it must have seemed impossible that the words of St. Mary at Fatima would ever be fulfilled. Yet fulfilled they were. Stalin died twenty years later, possibly poisoned at the hands of his own henchmen, and gradually that long-suffering country began the slow process of dismantling his terror-state that had enforced atheism by the sword. The Soviet regime fell in 1990, which brought many evils to an end, but brought more, equal and opposite evils to replace them; yet one sign of hope amid the turmoil was that Russia began returning to its spiritual roots. Who could have imagined this, in 1928 or in 1948? Yet by that same token, which citizen of Nazareth in A.D. 12 would have imagined that the peasant mother of the precocious boy Jesus, would one day be exalted higher than the angels, ‘more glorious than the cherubim?” God always has a plan that we can see only dimly, if at all, but is better than anything we could imagine. <br /><br />The Mother of God is not merely passively enthroned in heaven, but continues to try to help us, and to seek our good, in heaven and on earth. St. John, at the culmination of his brilliant vision of heaven, tells us that ‘the Spirit and the Bride say, Come……and whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely’ (Revelation 22:17). The image of the “Bride” is often taken to represent the church, but that can’t be the case here, for just previous to this John makes it clear that he is speaking to the church, not speaking of it: “I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches” (Revelation 22:16). I think that the Bride here represents St. Mary, the Spouse of the Spirit, as described by Prudentius, "The unwed Virgin espoused the Spirit", and figuratively spoken of in the Song of Solomon. St. Mary, always full of pity and solicitude for the human race, cares for us with perfect human love, just as her Son cares for us with perfect Divine love. She pleads for us, at the gates of heaven, just as her prototype, Queen Esther, pled for her people in the court of the Persian King. To those outside the gates of heaven, she says, along with the Spirit, “Come!” None of us can be good on our own, we can do so only with each other’s support and help, and one of the most precious supporters and helpers we have is the Mother of God, who in her charity and love cares and prays for each of us from her throne. And we can be sure that her Son hears and honours her requests and prayers, just as he did at Cana. Her cry, “Come” at the end of St. John’s Revelation is a reminder to us not only of what she does for us, but of what we can do, and must do, for each other. <br /><br />This week following the Assumption, let’s remember the power and love of God, that brings glory out of humility, strength out of weakness, and splendour out of poverty and oppression, and let’s remember too, how much we need St. Mary, and how much we need each other; and that whatever God has planned for us will be as far beyond anything we could hope for, as His plans for St. Mary were beyond her meek and humble prayer. <br /><br />Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7008813786806083758.post-16119718399232314712010-08-07T23:33:00.000-07:002010-08-07T23:34:28.013-07:00A reflection on the Feast of the Transfiguration, and the dawn of the Nuclear AgeThis Friday, August 6th, is the Feast of the Transfiguration. This is the day on which Christians commemorate the appearance of Our Lord to his disciples, on the holy mountain, in dazzling white clothes, infused with light and splendor. This is the day upon which Peter, John, and James saw him talking with Moses and Elijah, and on which they knew with a certainty- with no need for testing, for doubt, for skepticism, or for proof- that the carpenter whom they followed was truly the Second Person of God, the Word made flesh. I had the opportunity to go to a beautiful cathedral in Pittsburgh this Friday, for a short weekday Eucharist, and heard a great homily. The priest emphasized that the Transfiguration can’t be taken as a myth or a metaphor, or a pretty story. It was a miracle, but it was also a piece of literal history, a moment when heaven literally, for a moment, opened up and allowed three of the Apostles to see a glimpse of the world beyond this one. St. Peter mentions that he personally witnessed it: “And this voice we heard brought from heaven, when we were with him on the holy mount” (2 Peter 1:18) and his recollection probably found its way into the Gospels of Mark and Luke as well. If we are to accept that he wasn’t lying, or crazy, then we pretty much need to accept that the story happened as he described it. <br /><br />Here’s St. Luke’s description of the event. <br />“And it came to pass about eight days after these sayings, He took Peter and John and James, and went up onto a mountain to pray. And as He prayed, the appearance of His countenance was altered, and His raiment was white and glistening. <br />And behold, there talked with Him two men, who were Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory and spoke of His decease which He should accomplish at Jerusalem. But Peter and those who were with him were heavy with sleep. And when they were awake, they saw His glory and the two men who stood with Him. And it came to pass as they departed from Him, Peter said unto Jesus, "Master, it is good for us to be here; and let us make three tabernacles: one for Thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elijah" -- not knowing what he was saying. <br /><br /> While he thus spoke, there came a cloud and overshadowed them, and they were afraid as they entered into the cloud. And there came a voice out of the cloud, saying, "This is my beloved son; hear him!" And when the voice was past, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent, and told no man in those days any of those things which they had seen.” <br />It would be nice to focus on this miraculous, strange, and mysterious event on the feast day dedicated to it, and to meditate on the vision of the transfigured Christ that the apostles were privileged to see. But of course, August 6th, especially this year, has another resonance for people in the modern era, a darker and more morbid one that nevertheless has strange echoes of the Transfiguration. On August 6th, exactly 65 years ago, the United States used nuclear weapons- alone of any country in human history- upon the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Just a week later, we repeated that act, using them upon Nagasaki, the ancient port city of Japan and its gateway to the West, and in doing so won the war for good. We bought peace, security, and an end to the bloodiest war in human history, at the cost of some two hundred thousand civilian lives. This date, as much as the Feast of the Transfiguration, is also run through with theological meaning. As the early church lived in the shadow of the Transfiguration, our own age lives in the shadow of Hiroshima. What happened on that morning of August 6th, 1945, changed our world forever. Our thoughts, fears, dreams, worries, the language of our moral discourse and of our political debates, has been shaped permanently by the fact that we live in the world of total war and the atom bomb. For good or for ill, we live haunted with the knowledge of how to make and use nuclear weapons, and with the legacy of actually having used them, and with the fear that they may be used again in the future. This is, in truth, the age of Hiroshima. And so it’s worth stopping a minute, and thinking about the strange connection of these two events. <br /><br />The Reverend Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, in a radio talk that I heard while driving back from Pittsburgh, and also in a piece released the same day on the Huffington Post, draws some interesting parallels. He isn’t the first, of course- people have been drawing these connections since the bomb was dropped 65 years ago- but his piece was a powerful and compelling one, and I’m indebted to it for my own thoughts. He points out, first of all, that there are some strange similarities and parallels in the imagery of the two occasions. On August 6th, 1945, the world saw a blinding light, more brilliant and fiery than any light the hand of man had ever been able to create. On that day, a cloud enveloped the city of Hiroshima and rose up to the heavens, as it did on the day of the transfiguration. On that day, the world was struck with fear and trepidation, as we contemplated the reality that we had just entered into a new and unpredictable age, with many more questions than answers. And on it, we knew for the first time that we held in our hands an unfathomable power, that we weren’t really sure what to make of, just as the Apostles on the holy mountain got some vague and dim sense of the divine power that was inherent in their Master. <br /><br />In the transfiguration of Christ, we see the City of God plant a small outpost on this earth, and we see, through the eyes of Peter and Luke, a glimpse of what that city will look like: a city in which the dead are raised, in which our clothes are washed to a pure and glistening white, and in which we are illuminated by the light of Christ himself, whom the Nicene Creed calls “Lumen de lumine”, Light of Light. And in the destruction of Hiroshima, and in the deliberate killing of two hundred thousand civilians- women, babies, the aged, the sick, schoolchildren, farmers and industrial labourers who had never done anything to any one of us- we saw, in the vivid halo of the burning city, and in the light of that fire that burned to death tens of thousands of people in unspeakable agony, a vision of the ultimate opposite of the City of God. We saw, in all its peacock-bright glory, the City of Man. <br /><br />St. Augustine gives us a good definition of these two cities. “Thus two cities are formed by two loves: the city of God by the love of God to the contempt of the self, the city of man by the love of self to the contempt of God.” The city of man is, he goes on to say, that city formed when we see ourselves as masters of our own fates, entitled to choose and to make our own good, rather than cleaving to the true Good which comes from God. We see the difference between these two cities in vivid detail, when we consider the image of Christ talking with Moses and Elijah. We don’t know exactly why Christ chose to have this conversation, but one part of it might be to show that, as he did with Lazarus, he had the power to call the souls of the dead out of the shadowy afterlife. In this scene he showed that his Father- and by extention, he himself- had power over life and death, and in particular, the power to conquer death and to bring life and renewal back to the dead. Christ brought life out of death, just as we, on that dark day of August 6th, chose to bring death out of life. <br /><br />The morality of what we did then is a controversial issue in America today. But it shouldn’t be a controversial issue for those of us who believe either in a natural-law moral framework, or in Judeo-Christian morality. (Most Christian churches, including mine, also believe in natural law, so the distinction is somewhat vague. As Pope Benedict said at the Regensburg address some years ago, our God is a God characterized by reason. God doesn’t forbid things because He likes to forbid; He forbids them because they are inherently wrong, contrary to our good, to our natures, and to our ultimate purpose). One could argue the morality of the nuclear attacks back and forth, and people have done so for six decades, spilling reams of ink: but my position is simple and straightforward, and I’ll make no bones about it. It was a war crime, a violation of the laws of God and man, against natural law and against sacred tradition, a spilling of the blood of innocent civilians on a grand scale, and can’t be plausibly defended within any just-war moral framework. <br /><br />Defenses of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki generally revolve around the idea that 1) it was necessary for our safety and survival, 2) the Japanese were far worse than we were, and have no grounds to complain, and 3) it saved lives in the long run. All may well be true, but they’re also irrelevant. For a variety of reasons, Christians, and other people who believe in natural law moral reasoning, tend not to judge actions solely by their consequences (I’d argue that consequentialism, judging solely by consequences, is ultimately an insupportable and self defeating way to think about morality, but that’s a separate argument for another time). But before I get into just why Hiroshima was so wrong, let me deal with these three points. <br /><br />Most people, at some point, have a line that they won’t cross, for any reason whatsoever, including their own survival. I’d hope, and suspect, that most of us would decide that there are certain things we would never do, even if our lives- or the lives of those we love, or of our countrymen- was at stake. As Elizabeth Anscombe put it eloquently in her essay on Hiroshima, would you boil a baby alive to save your own life? If you wouldn’t, then you’ve conceded that some things are wrong even if our survival or that of our country or loved ones depends on it. Now all we have to decide is whether Hiroshima fits on the far or near side of the line. I’d point out that this isn’t a bad thing- it’s indeed, exactly what makes us human. Quite a few animals are driven by the goal of survival, and do whatever they need to ensure their own survival (though not all- there are many examples of animals sacrificing themselves for their kin, which should give us pause). One of the evidences that we are rational, moral, human creatures with a mind and a soul, is the fact that we can choose to obey drives beyond just physical survival. If we didn’t, then we would be no higher and no different, ultimately, than a wolf or a sea slug. But we can so choose, and we do, all the time. Christians and Jews alike, for example, honour the memory of the Maccabean martyrs, killed under the regime of Antiochus Epiphanes, king of the Seleucids. These seven brothers chose to be boiled alive rather than eat pork: “For we are ready to die rather than transgress the laws of our forefathers” (2 Maccabees 7:2).. If this is true- and we have no reason to doubt the story, for many people throughout history have chosen such sacrifices- then how much more must we believe they would have chosen to die rather than commit murder? These seven brothers preferred to die rather than ignore a minor dietary law, how much more would they have preferred to die rather than transgress one of the greatest laws of all, the command that the Israelites were given to “Choose life?”<br /><br />Necessity, then, can’t excuse _everything_, unless you’re willing to swallow Anscombe’s gambit and boil the baby alive. Which we did, at Hiroshima, deliberately targeting what we knew was a civilian city, full of noncombatants including many, many children. Most of us agree that a line exists. I hold that what we did to end World War II- deliberate destruction of a whole city- was well on the far side of that line, and violated the laws of war, of nature, of morality, and of God. <br /><br />If necessity can’t excuse it, neither can the greater good. It’s said that the bombing saved lives, American and Japanese, in the long run. Maybe so. But the distinction is that those lives that would have been lost, during a hypothetical invasion, would have been the fault of the Japanese military, not ours. They could have stopped it at any moment, and who knows, God willing, they might have. Such deaths would have been foreseeable, but not _intended_. Our intent- impossible as it might have been- would have been a quick surrender following an armed military invasion. The Japanese would probably have resisted, and there would have been many deaths, but those deaths, again, would have been _side effects_ of our decision to invade, not the direct _means_ or _end_ of the invasion. In that little distinction, what the moral theologicans call the doctrine of double effect comes into play. It’s sometimes permissible to do things you know will have terrible side effects, as long as you don’t intend those terrible things either as a means or an end. It’s _not_ permissible to use the killing of children or other innocent noncombatants as the direct means of achieving a military goal. In the destruction of Hiroshima, those 200,000 deaths were the direct means- not a side effect, but the whole intended purpose of dropping the bomb. It was done to terrorize the Japanese into submission, and it achieved its goal admirably: those 200,000 deaths were the means of achieving it. Had only a dozen people died at Hiroshima, our whole effort would have been in vain, which tells you right away that there was something immoral about the whole enterprise.<br /><br />And neither, of course, can the horrible acts of the Japanese military excuse it. That our enemies behaved abominably doesn’t excuse us from following the moral law. It’s said, by Our Lord himself, “Repay not evil for evil”. Our Lord overturned (in the main) the law of Moses, “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, blood for blood, stripe for stripe, life for life”, but even the Law of the Talion, eye for eye, is incomparably superior to the ‘law’ that we followed when we bombed civilian cities. The ‘law’ of World War II would be something like, ‘If you pluck out my eye, I’ll pluck out, not yours, but your baby daughter’s.” For those people that we destroyed at Hiroshima weren’t predominantly the soldiers or (much less) the military, political and economic elites who had waged war on us and had spread death, torture, and oppression across Asia and the Pacific. They were innocent civilians- labourers, industrial workers, farmers, teachers, doctors, librarians, priests- going about their daily lives, who shared nothing in common with Tojo and his armies besides a nationality. (And not even always that- a seventh of all the people killed at Hiroshima weren’t even Japanese, they were imported slave labourers from Korea. Wonder how we would have explained that to their families.) <br /><br />I am not a pacifist, to say the least. I believe most rules have exceptions, and the general rule against killing has exceptions, too. It’s permissible to kill soldiers in war, as long as the war is a just one. It’s permissible, I think (though this is more controversial) to kill tyrants and the elites (military, political, economic) who are carrying out direct acts of oppression in such a tyrannical regime. In context of a just revolution, killing government officials, soldiers, and police of a fiercely oppressive regime can be justified. You can push this a little- though you start getting into morally murky territory- by executing collaborators, spies, enemy agents, and the like. Execution of people responsible for the worst crimes- think the Saddam Husseins, John Gottis, Jeffrey Dahmers- can, I think, be justified too. Abortion is the great ‘life’ issue being debated in our time, but even there, though I’m generally pro-life, I’d recognize exceptions on the ground of self defence, when the baby is a serious threat to the health of the mother. But all of those, with the exception of the last, involve people who are actively doing harm to others, or who have committed grave acts of harm in the past, and by their crimes have placed themselves liable to judgment. This is the difference, in other words, between using violence against the guilty and using it against the innocent. As the Mosaic law said, again, “The just and innocent man ye shall not put to death” (Exodus 23:7).<br /><br />Why do Judeo-Christian morality, and natural law, make such a distinction between the guilty and the innocent? It would take a while to explain, but in part, it stems from the fact that it’s implicit in our nature to be rational moral agents, to make free choices to do good or evil, and to treat us in a way reflective of our human dignity means that the treatment we receive should in some way be reflective of the consequences of our choices and our actions. This is why we don’t sentence insane criminals to prison, because we recognize that a person can’t be held responsible for something they didn’t choose to do. In order for our choices to have meaning they must have consequences, and that means that the treatment we should expect when we do something wrong, or harm others, is different from the treatment we should expect when we have done nothing wrong. When we harm another person unjustly, they have a right to resist us by force, because we have merited that by our actions. But when someone else has harmed them, we’ve merited no ill treatment whatsoever, and to harm us would be an injustice by itself. It’s been said that you should never use violence against someone unless you can give them a good explanation of why. Some explanations work- they would be convincing to me, if my opponent were right on the facts. “You’re an enemy soldier, actively trying to kill me.” “You’re a tyrant who has murdered your opponents and stood by while your subjects starved and died of poverty and neglect.” “You grew rich off directing murderous gangs.” In all these cases, these explanations are plausible because they refer back to something the person has chosen to do, and show that the use of force is justified because of their own actions. But some such explanations are completely unworkable. “You must die because you’re Japanese”, or “You must die because you live in this city”. Would anyone find that a plausible reason they should die? Being Japanese, or living in Hiroshima, are incidental, accidental facts about a person, they’re not _essential_ to who they are in the same way that their moral choices are essential, and that’s part of the reason why, if we take natural law seriously, killing the innocent and those actively doing (or having done) serious harmful or unjust things, are two very separate enterprises. No one would want to suffer for something that they personally didn’t do, or weren’t responsible for. And if we wouldn’t want to be killed for something that wasn’t our doing, how can we decide that we should do this to other people?<br /><br />It’s worth thinking back to the Transfiguration, and to remembering who was speaking with Christ: one of the two, of course, was Moses. Moses was, among other things, a war leader as well as a lawgiver, and was at the same time a deeply flawed man, and one through whom God chose (in some sense, maybe in a fairly attenuated and indirect one) to work. He was a controversial figure in early Christianity, and remains one today, not least because of his status as a war leader. (Some of those wars, and his guidelines for conducting a war, are rather hair-raising; I’m not up on my Leviticus and Deuteronomy, but I don’t think they quite match up to either the modern or the medieval ideas about conducting war in a just and moral fashion. To say the least, though I’m not about to start quote mining Deuteronomy. Spare me.). Quite a few of the early Christian heresies threw out the Old Testament entirely. The Marcionites and the Manichaeans were among them, and they pointed out, reasonably enough, that all the business about killing the men and male children of hostile tribes, and taking the women as wives, were incompatible with the law of Christ. And that’s quite true (Judaism, just like Christianity, evolved over time, and to judge the whole religion by some of its earliest and murkiest writings would be quite unfair). The broad Christian tradition, though they did accept the Old Testament as scripture, never saw Moses as a perfect man, or his writings as a perfect record of morality (Christianity didn’t agree with the Mosaic law on divorce, for example, and neither Christians nor later Jews followed its views on the conduct of war). Revelation is a gradual process, and moral progress happened between the time of Moses and that of St. Augustine. <br /><br />We see this in what the Christian tradition tells us about Moses himself. We are told that the devil argued with the Archangel Michael over Moses after he died: “Yet Michael the Archangel, when contending with the devil he disputed over the body of Moses, durst not bring a railing accusation….” (Jude 1:9). This is apparently a reference to some Jewish apocryphal texts which I haven’t read; I should though because they sound interesting. The apocryphal tradition is that the devil claimed Moses’ body, on the grounds that he was a murderer. Now the Enemy is a liar, but he is also a smart cookie, and doesn’t claim things unless he has a hope of getting them. Implied in this passage is that the Enemy had a hint of a legitimate claim, in that Moses, as great as he was, had some serious flaws and limitations, and one of those moral flaws was an overly sanguine approach to war and to the ethics of war. Moses wasn’t welcomed into heaven because he was a perfect man, or because his moral code was perfect, or a perfect reflection of God’s commands; on the contrary, his flaws ran deep, just as his virtues did, and he was welcomed into heaven because of divine grace (as with us all), not because of his righteousness. He wasn’t a perfect moral authority any more than we are, as the story of the Enemy’s claim to his body makes clear, and that means that we need to look for where he was wrong as well as where he was right. And tradition tells us that the most questionable thing about him was his approach to war. The story of Jesus conversing with Moses on the holy mountain is a perfect reflection of how the new ethic of just and limited war overcame and superseded the old ethic of total war, Assyrian style. <br /><br />Of course, Jude didn’t know, nor did Peter, that total war was gone but not forgotten. And that it would come back, on a grand scale, starting in the nineteenth century and reaching unheard of abysses of destruction in the twentieth, and would come close to drowning civilization in blood. St. John, another witness to the Transfiguration, gave us a hint of the terrible future, when he suggests that the powers of evil in this world would use the powers of nature to do strange and terrible wonders, and to envelop the world in flame. “And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on earth in the sight of men” (Revelation 13:13). As we reflect on the horrors that we wrought 65 years ago, this quotation seems particularly prophetic and chilling. When the world heard the radio broadcasts on that August day, it must have seemed to many that indeed, at last, fire had been made by human hands to come down from heaven on a greater scale than ever before. And they must have wondered whether, as St. John had foretold, this new age would be one in which the Enemy would have found a great new tool to work in the hearts of men to bring about hatred, evil, and destruction. <br /><br />The nuclear age, unfortunately, is the age that we live in. Lamenting the destruction of Hiroshima is something we ought to do, but it isn’t enough. It happened 65 years ago, and most of the people involved have left this earthly coil; I hope all of them, Americans and Japanese, Chinese and Koreans, British and French, Russians and Australians, have been able to make their peace with God, and that the people on both sides who did evil that good might come of it, have repented and found forgiveness in the light of God and His peace. What’s left for us is to strive for a world in which that kind of horror never happens again. I’m glad that President Obama is striving for a world without nuclear weapons, and other weapons of mass destruction, but that will never happen without great and massive popular pressure. All of us- not just Jews and Christians but all of us- should be striving to ensure a world free of the weapons that could destroy all life on this planet several times over. And all of us should hope and pray that our military men and women are safe, healthy, and preserved not just from physical danger but from moral danger, and that the United States Government does not ask of them to break the laws of war, to deliberately target civilians and innocent noncombatants, and to do evil that good may come of it. Let’s hope and pray that there will be no more deliberate killings of the innocent in the name of the United States government, not now and not ever. <br /><br />Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7008813786806083758.post-82440645566495201782010-05-24T18:28:00.000-07:002010-05-24T18:35:43.158-07:00The Gates of Heaven: Reflections on the Sunday of Ascensiontide<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S_spZy1ffUI/AAAAAAAAACM/lqmMe2w0who/s1600/800px-Cirrus_over_Warsaw,_June_26,_2005.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S_spZy1ffUI/AAAAAAAAACM/lqmMe2w0who/s320/800px-Cirrus_over_Warsaw,_June_26,_2005.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5475015295118572866" /></a><br />The reading of Sunday before last, from the Book of Revelation (Revelation 22:14-21).<br /><br />“ ‘And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last. Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city. For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie. I, Jesus, have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.’<br />“And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely. He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.”<br /><br />What a magnificent and beautiful close to the Christian scriptures, coming at the end of the last book of the New Testament. There were many other ‘revelations’ written by various people in the first few centuries of the Christian era, some of them as ancient as this one, and they are certainly worth reading and probably describe genuine visions of heaven, hell, and the Last Things. This, however, was the one Apocalypse that the church decided to include in the official canon, and they did so probably because of the tradition that it came from the pen of John the Apostle, and because it has the greatest power and scope of them all. It ranges from the angelic fall to the final redemption of the world, and that final redemption is what we see described here, in this excerpt which is read in Catholic and Anglican churches on the last Sunday of Easter this year. <br />As with the other excerpts from St. John’s Revelation, there is a lot that could be said about this passage. Every sentence is resonant and beautiful, and you can almost here the triumphal trumpet call between each verse, announcing the advent of the heavenly kingdom. Every sentence could provide us with spiritual food for meditation, for exegesis, for prayer, and for inspiration, and lots could be written about each verse. But I’m struck, first and foremost, by this sentence: “Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city.” It uses images that we’ve seen used often through the Book of Revelation: of the tree of life bearing twelve kinds of fruit, one for each month of the year, and of Heaven as a city with gates. John describes the gates of heaven earlier in the vision: “And the twelve gates were twelve pearls: every several gate was of one pearl,” giving us the phrase ‘pearly gates.’<br />The pearl, in Christian scripture and tradition, is symbolic of two things, knowledge and love, and inasmuch as these are two of the most basic attributes of God, and two of the most valuable things we are capable of, it’s a symbol of all things that are precious. Jesus tells us that the kingdom of heaven is like ‘one pearl of great price’ that a wise buyer would be willing to sell everything else he owns, in order to attain, and by comparing the gates to heaven to pearls, St. John is telling us how precious is the privilege- for it is a privilege, not a right- to enter through the gates of heaven. <br /><br /> But the pearl has another meaning too, and this meaning is clear to us when we consider what pearls are. Pearls are crystals largely of calcium carbonate- the same material that is the basic component of chalk, lime, and many mollusk shells- that form within the body of oysters when their soft flesh is irritated by a speck of dust or some other irritant. Obviously, oysters are sessile, stationary animals, filter feeders which can’t physically reach within their shells and pick out the dust speck, and can’t easily flush it out. They respond to irritants not by removing them but by isolating them: they deposit calcium carbonate layers, linked together by chitin and proteins, around the dust speck to make a smooth, sterile crystal surface that is no longer an irritant or a threat to their soft, vulnerable tissues. Out of the same common material that makes up chalk or clam shells, something of surpassing beauty and preciousness is born. Out of the pain and irritation caused to the oyster by a little grain of sand, is created something of dazzling beauty. <br /><br />What a compelling symbol this is of the kingdom of heaven. For we are often asked, and we often ask ourselves, why evil must exist in this world, and why God allows it to exist. The answer is that for God to be perfect, there must be something outside him in order for him to relate to; evil must exist, specifically, so that God can bring good out of it. One example of this is that heaven could not truly be heaven if it had not been won through trial, through pain, and through suffering. Human virtues are largely defined in opposition to natural and physical evils: there could be no courage in this world if there were no dangers from war, disease, earthquake, or fire, there could be no virtue of charity if there were no one suffering in order to show charity to, and there could be no true sacrifice in a world without death, for as our Lord said, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man should give his life for his friends.” St. John talks in his Revelation of the crowned martyrs in the courts of God, who had demonstrated their faith by standing firm in the face of persecution, and of the Holy Innocents who enjoy a specially close relationship with Christ: “they followed the Lamb wherever he goeth.” These early Christian martyrs were crowned with glory through what they suffered, and the author of the Letter to the Hebrews tells us this was true of Christ as well: “And learned he obedience through the things which he suffered, and was made perfect.”<br /><br />The irritation of the oyster’s tissues gives rise to the beauty of the pearl: similarly, the sufferings and afflictions that we experience in this life give us the occasion to triumph over evil and to show forth Christian virtues in our lives. Some of the best people I know, who most clearly exemplified the Christian virtues in their lives, were also some of the people who suffered some of the most painful personal tragedies. Yet in spite of all that they suffered they weren’t embittered or corrupted by it, but instead just grew deeper in the love that they showed to others. Their afflictions were the raw material from which God made saints, and made pearls of their lives and characters as bright as the pearls of heaven. <br /><br />This life is the necessary preparation for heaven. This life is where we are tried, and found worthy or found wanting. There may be redemption in the next life, if we choose it- I believe there certainly is, and many saints and mystics through the history of the church have hinted that no one who truly desires salvation, in this life or the next, will truly be denied it. But whether we choose it, whether we desire it, is affected by what we make of our lives and souls here on earth. An existence lived entirely in heaven- without the experience to grow, to experience life in the material and physical world, to be tempted and overcome temptation, to suffer and overcome suffering- would be something less, and less perfect, than the prize of heaven won by struggle through the pains and afflictions of this life. We can’t go to heaven without living and dying first: as Christ tells us, “Unless a grain of wheat fall in the earth and dieth, it abideth alone; but if it dieth, it bringeth forth much fruit.”<br /><br />Christ tells us, “Blessed are they that….may enter through the gates into the city.” Earlier, during his earthly ministry, he differentiated what it means to ‘enter through the gates’ from what it means to jump the fence or climb the walls: “He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but by some other way, is a thief and a robber. But he that entereth in by the door is the shepherd of the sheep.” I’m always reminded, when thinking of the gates of heaven, of the image that the writer C. S. Lewis gives us in his children’s book, “The Magician’s Nephew.” Here he envisions the tree of life, in the paradisiacal garden of a new world, as a tree bearing golden apples giving life. An inscription on the gate of a garden states that whoever takes the fruit for himself, rather than for others, and who steals fruit rather than entering as bidden through the gate, will ‘find his heart’s desire, and find despair.” <br /><br />This is what happens when we try to seize heaven for ourselves, or to create a simulated heaven here on earth, instead of trusting in God to bring us to the true heaven. Aldous Huxley, in his book ‘After Many a Summer’, satirizes one form of this desire to create an earthly heaven, the quest for eternal life: in the book, one character discovers the secret of long life, and manages to buy himself hundreds of years of life, but at the cost of losing his humanity and ‘maturing’ into a gibbering ape. Within history, we’ve seen the outcome of the capitalist attempt to build an earthly heaven of unlimited wealth and comfort, and the Bolshevik attempt to build an earthly heaven in which ‘innocence and virtue were compulsory’, and we have seen how such attempts are doomed to fail. The capitalist world succeeded in creating wealth and comfort on a scale never seen before in history, the Bolsheviks succeeded in creating a society beyond the profit motive, but sadly, both did so at a tremendous cost in human suffering and in the deformation of the human soul. We can and must strive to make this world as perfect as we can make it, but when we see perfection as something achievable in this life, we are tempted to break all kinds of moral laws as the price of getting there. The book of Revelation tells us that heaven is achievable only one way: after death, by the invitation of Christ to enter through the gates into the city. Whoever strives to jump over the wall, like Dante’s Ulysses who tried to take Purgatory by storm and ended up in hell, will ‘find his heart’s desire, and find despair.’<br /><br />But let’s remember again, how trustworthy the promises of heaven are, and how sweet and gentle the invitation to us to enter through the gates. For this description of heaven is given to us by Christ Himself, “the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End”, and the invitation to enter heaven is given us by “the Spirit and the Bride”, who tell us, “Come!” The Bride, here, is often taken to be the Church, but that’s unlikely: St. John has written a good portion of this book to address the church, and here he speaks of the Bride as separate from himself and from his audience. The Church is the bride of Christ, but she who is called ‘spouse of the Holy Spirit’ in a spiritual, not a carnal sense, is someone quite different: Mary, the Most Glorious Mother of God, the Queen of Heaven. Mary, and the Holy Spirit, ask us in the most intimate and gentle way, to come into the kingdom of heaven, and Christ promises us that whoever thirsts- no matter what their sins, no matter what their corruption, no matter what their lack of belief- are welcome to quench their thirst in the fountain of the water of life. We are told of the gates of heaven, that “they shall never be closed by day, and there shall be no night there”: i.e., once the victory of life over death and good over evil has be won, when ‘there shall be no [more] night”, the gates of heaven are open forever, to all. The call of the Spirit and the Bride is addressed not merely to those inside the city, but also to those outside the city, of whom Christ tells us are included, ‘sorcerers, and whoremongers….’. No one who truly craves repentance, and the mystical communion with God, will be denied it. Not now, not in the world beyond. <br /><br />A long poem from early in the Christian era, attributed to St. Thomas, is called the Hymn of the Pearl, and it symbolizes the mystical quest for heaven and salvation as the quest of a young man who goes into Egypt in search of a precious pearl, is distracted and seduced from his quest, and falls into enjoying the earthly pleasures of Egypt. A letter is sent to him from “your father, the King of Kings, and your mother, the governor of the East” inviting him to turn from sin and pleasure and to seek out the pearl. The young man is awakened from the deep sleep into which he had fallen, he seizes the pearl and returns with it, casts off his old garments and is clad in new, clean robes, with which he ascends into heaven. The pearl here is symbolic of the kingdom of heaven, and the call that Christ gives us- here through the book of Revelation, through the other scriptures, through the various other religions and mystical experiences through which we apprehend and dimly perceive God, through the love of other people, through our reverence for nature- is to awaken from our ‘deep sleep’, to sharpen within us the thirst for eternal life, and to remind us that within the kingdom of heaven, there and only there, that thirst can finally be quenched by drinking of the waters of life, that water from which after we shall drink, we shall never thirst again.<br /><br />Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7008813786806083758.post-39035931276642499692010-05-13T19:09:00.000-07:002010-05-14T20:54:28.082-07:00Ascension of the Lord: 2010<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S-4a6QXeNfI/AAAAAAAAAB8/S8gNJTY3BlI/s1600/400px-AscensionofChrist2.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 214px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S-4a6QXeNfI/AAAAAAAAAB8/S8gNJTY3BlI/s320/400px-AscensionofChrist2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5471340185429882354" /></a><br />Today marks Ascension Thursday, the day on which Christian tradition tells us that Jesus Christ left this earth and ascended into heaven. Forty days after Easter, ten days after Pentecost, Jesus Christ took leave of the Apostles for the second and last time in his earthly existence. He had said good-bye to them once before, on Maundy Thursday, as he sat with them at the Last Supper; this was his second good bye, and this time it was for good.<br /><br />He would return to earth to interact with believers on an individual basis, of course, and to appear to his followers in dreams and visions, as he did to St. Peter and to John the Beloved Disciple. And he would return in the form of the Eucharist, which every day He transforms into his body and blood. But no more, until the Last Day, would he return to this earth in public, large-scale appearances, and to walk and live among us. From now on, the church would be led by mere human beings, and we ourselves would have to figure out how to conduct ourselves in the world, with only the memory and example of the Lord to guide us. <br /><br />We often don’t think about the importance of the Ascension- it’s hard for us to relate to the idea of Jesus Christ ascending into heaven, and we tend to forget this feast, coming as it does at a busy time of the year- when farmers are busy planting and weeding crops, and students are busy finishing up the spring semester. But the Church Fathers certainly thought it was important enough to be included in the Creeds. When you think about it, it’s amazing how little the Creeds tell us about Jesus. They don’t mention his teachings, his fasting and temptation, his healing miracles. They tell us only the bare minimum: and among those bare minima, one of the few things the early Church could agree was necessary that all Christians believe, was that ‘he ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father’. <br /><br />The Ascension marks the day that Jesus, the eternally existing Word, consubstantial with the Father, who had taken on a human body for the duration of his 33 years on earth, left our physical, natural and material world behind. He ascended into a realm which was supra-physical, supernatural, and supra-material. It’s important to note that that realm, the kingdom of heaven, is spiritual not in the sense of being unnatural, or extranatural, but being supernatural. It doesn’t exist outside the laws of nature, and of physics, so much as it transcends them. Jesus, as he is in heaven, as we will be someday, is not bound by the limits of his physical body, but nor is he separated from it. The kingdom of heaven is a place where the material is obedient and in perfect harmony with the spiritual, and where the spirit can take on different material and physical appearances as it pleases. Jesus appeared in a disguised form to the disciples on the road to Emmaus, he then appeared in his real human body, and then vanished from their sight: “And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight.” His risen, incorruptible body was ethereal enough to pass through walls and appear in the midst of a locked room: “Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut..…came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you.” Yet it was also real enough, material enough, and physical enough to desire food, and to bear the marks of the crucifixion. It would be fair to call such a risen, glorified body, not insubstantial so much as supersubstantial. At every moment, it existed and displayed exactly those physical properties that Jesus called on it to display. It was matter, not in opposition to spirit, but in perfect obedience to it.<br /><br />How could such a risen body, spiritual and yet physical, answering to the laws of physics and of nature at some times but not at others, leave us behind? That’s an almost impossible question to answer, because it is equivalent to asking: how can something that exists as part of the material world, become something supernatural and immaterial? How can something be material and spiritual at the same time? What sort of transition could take place between those two worlds, the worlds of the perceptible, the tangible, the world of solid stones, wet water, burning fire, and the world of the ethereal, the misty, the intangible? To have remained on earth forever would be to be unfaithful to Christ’s divine nature, for surely it was fitting that he who had existed for ever in heaven, begotten of the Father before all worlds were made, should return to the heaven that was his rightful place. Yet to simply disappear from heaven, to blot his material body out of existence and return to a purely spiritual form, would be to be unfaithful to His human nature, for as we expect the resurrection of our bodies some day, so should Christ, the prototype of our resurrections. <br /><br />The glorified and incorruptible body into which he was resurrected solved part of this problem; for it left Christ spiritual first and foremost, but with a material body when he chose to have one. The Ascension solves the other part of this problem: it allowed Christ to gradually withdraw himself from this material world of ours, fading away smaller and smaller, until he was imperceptible to the eyes of his followers: yet never, at any distinct moment, failing to have a physical body. Who knows the exact moment at which He ceased any longer to be materially present in this world, and returned to heaven? It can’t be pinpointed, any more then we can pinpoint the exact moment in the Mass when the wine ceases to be wine and becomes the blood of God. All that matters is that when Christ vanished from the skies, he did so beyond the sight of the Apostles; no man would ever be able to say that they saw Christ disappear for good. And like all other things he did, it was for a reason. He didn’t want anyone to say that they had seen Christ leave this material world behind. For in truth, he hasn’t left it behind: he is present invisibly in the Eucharist, he is present as he speaks to us in our hours of prayer, our hours of pain, our hours of despair, and he is present watching over us, weeping with us in our suffering and sharing in our joys. Christ wanted the last image of him to be burned indelibly on the minds of those who had seen him leave: the image of him watching over them in the skies, lifted up on clouds, carried by the wings of angels, just like the angel’s wings with which Satan had tempted him when he stood on the pinnacle of Herod’s Temple. <br /><br />The Ascension is the answer to how Christ can be absent from us and yet present with us. As he rose into the clouds, the apostles could see his presence, and could see that he still existed as part of this material world, incarnate as he had been made incarnate at Bethlehem: yet every second he was drawing further and further away from them. When does a curve reach its asymptote? The answer, of course, is never. This wasn’t true of Christ, for at some point he must have left this material world behind: if earth and the physical universe are distinct from heaven, and we have the assurance Christ is in heaven, then he can’t anymore be present on earth in the same sense he was present then. Yet at the same time he is present in a deeper sense; he retains the power to work through us, to appear to us, to make present his body and blood in the eucharist, when we ask for it, just as he retains the power to appear in physical form as he appeared to John as a slain lamb. He isn’t outside of nature, he is over and above it, and can enter it again when He chooses: and indeed, we have the assurance that he will enter it again at the end of all things, just before, through him, a new and better nature is given to us. <br /> <br />This is part of the meaning of the Ascension: that Our Lord withdrew himself gradually instead of vanishing, because he had such love for us that he wanted to make sure we remembered him slowly rising away from us, not simply leaving us behind: he wanted our last sight of him to be of a glorified body rising higher and higher, becoming smaller to our eyes even as he became greater and more glorious in reality. He savored every moment that he spent with his disciples, and rose up slowly into the clouds, rather then suddenly disappearing, because he longed to spend his last few moments in material form looking upon us, and because he couldn’t bear to quickly and suddenly leave his friends and disciples. As he was lifted upwards into the clouds, preparing to leave behind material form and enter heaven, his last sight was of the apostles looking up at him in praise and awe, and his first act, from heaven, was to send two angels to reassure the apostles, and to remind them that He would one day come again in glory. This was the last image that our Lord gave us to remember him by, and this Ascensiontide, let’s remember the way that our Lord chose to leave us: rising into the skies, wrapped in clouds, hovering over the Mount of Olives from which he had foretold the end of all things, looking down on the Garden of Gethsemane, with his eyes fixed upon those whom he had called friends, whom he would continue guiding and watching over, from his seat in heaven, for the rest of their lives. <br /><br />Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7008813786806083758.post-80352383360328779532010-05-09T14:50:00.000-07:002010-05-15T15:47:21.405-07:00Lady Julian of Norwich: May all men be saved?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S-8kciZpCJI/AAAAAAAAACE/gLQNWUfVyGk/s1600/800px-Heaven_Hammamet.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 215px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S-8kciZpCJI/AAAAAAAAACE/gLQNWUfVyGk/s320/800px-Heaven_Hammamet.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5471632144967731346" /></a><br />Yesterday, Saturday, was the feast day of Lady Juliana of Norwich. She was the first woman to write a well-known piece of literature in the English language, her 'Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love', which were a big hit in the fourteenth century, and are still read today. <br /><br />She had a number of rather heterodox ideas, and in retrospect it's interesting that she wasn't called to account by the church hierarchy. Perhaps they couldn't; she was a nun of unquestionable virtue and saintliness, and her 'Revelations', which she claimed were accounts of direct experiences with Jesus Christ, had the ring of something compelling. <br /><br />One of the ideas she was known for, is her hope that at the end of time, all men- perhaps all beings- would be saved. She claimed that Christ Himself had said to her, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well," implying that at the end of time sin, hell, and death would cease to exist. She made it clear, though, that she couldn't be _sure_ that all would be saved, and her universalism was strictly a 'hopeful' universalism. <br /><br />Many people would like to agree with Lady Julian on this. The problem comes, of course, when we set her testimony against the testimony of so many other mystics, who said that they had seen visions of a literal and fiery Hell. Now I happen to be a person who sets great store by the experiences of mystics and visionaries. Indeed, this is (in my mind) one of the strongest arguments for the existence of God, and for the existence of the supernatural. But if we are to credit the argument from mystical experience, that means that we are bound to credit that the people who wrote the 'Apocalypse of Paul', or the three children of Fatima, had as much claim to have genuinely experienced the supernatural as Lady Julian. Is there some way, then, that they could both be right? Can Lady Julian's hopeful universalism be reconciled with the vivid visions of hell that so many other mystics through the ages- Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian, and those of other faiths- claimed to see?<br /><br />I'm not sure how to reconcile these two points of view- the torments of hell, and the belief that all may be saved- but I think reconciliation is possible. The key lies in a verse from today's scripture reading, in which St. John tells us of heaven, that "its gates shall never be shut by day, and there shall be no night there" (Revelation 21:25). The gates of the city of God are never closed, once the judgment has happened, and 'there shall be no more night.' Heaven is always open to those, even in the depths of hell, who truly repent. We are told that on Holy Saturday, Christ descended into hell to preach to the damned, and broke open the gates of hell that they might be saved. If he did it once, he could do it again. <br /><br />The early Christian literature is replete with visions of Hell, attributed to Peter, Paul, the Mother of God, and others. These visions are terrifyingly graphic, and depict sinners being tormented in all kinds of creative ways for a multitude of sins. People who dressed immodestly, who took interest on loans, who carried out abortions, who committed sins like murder and robbery, each being punished in a way befitting their sin. The style and conviction of these visionary writings is compelling, and they appear to be genuine accounts of mystical visions; whether or not these people really saw hell, they clearly saw something. And if you give credence to the argument from mystical experience, as I do, then you're more or less bound to believe that these people really saw, in some sense and in some degree, visions of hell. Hell is an unfortunate but inescapable reality. <br /><br />But just as graphic, horrific and terrifying the pictures of the torments of hell that these writers give us, equally powerful and compelling is their insistence that in some measure, the mercy of God penetrates even to Hell, and that even death and damnation do not mark a final and irrevocable break with God. One of the most common themes in the visionary literature of the early Christian and the medieval periods is that God's mercy is not absent even in hell. The writer of the 'Apocalypse of Paul' has the narrator praying to Jesus for intercession for the damned, and Jesus responding to his prayers by granting all sinners in hell a respite from suffering on every Easter Day forever. As the writer puts it: <br /><br />"Yet now because of Michael the archangel of my covenant and the angels that are with him, and because of Paul my dearly beloved whom I would not grieve. and because of your brethren that are in the world and do offer oblations, and because of your sons, for in them are my commandments, and yet more because of mine own goodness: on that day whereon I rose from the dead I grant unto all you that are in torment refreshment for a day and a night for ever." <br /><br /> The writers of the other two apocalypses say something similar; one of the common themes of the medieval visionary literature was that the mercy of God was such that He would allow the damned little 'vacations' from hell, respites from their suffering, and one even claimed to have seen Judas, on such a vacation, out in the Atlantic Ocean. <br /><br />If we accept the visions of Hell we also have to acccept the visions of God's infinite mercy. I believe that His mercy is truly infinite, and that even in hell, if anyone is truly repentant, and truly wants to be with God, their wish will not be denied. St. John tells us that the gates of heaven will never be closed, and never means never. Anyone who wishes it- even after death, even in hell- may, I think, be saved. <br /><br />But will everyone truly wish it? I don't know. With Julian of Norwich, I hope so. But I think the answer is no. If a game is played, it must be possible to lose it, and I believe that there will be some who choose hell, even unto the rest of eternity, rather then submit to God and to the fire of his love. Dostoyevsky said that hell was the condition of being unable to love, and there will be some that are so wrapped up in themselves, so drunk on their own pride and self-absorption, that as horrible as the pains of hell are, they still prefer them to the joys of heaven. The apocryphal 'Gospel of Peter', written around the end of the first century, tells us of the Roman soldiers who witnessed the dying Christ forgive the repentant thief hanging next to him on the cross. Seeing this immense, inconceivable act of mercy, they weren't overcome by love but rather by hate, and 'they resolved that there should be no leg breaking, that he should die tormented.' There are some, even in this world, who respond to love by becoming even more embroiled in hate, in pride, and in impotent selfishness. This is, perhaps, the inner meaning of all those cryptic references in the story of the Exodus to how God 'hardened Pharaoh's heart': not by design, but by the free choice of Pharaoh.<br /><br />We can, then, believe in hell as a place from which redemption is possible, but not assured: hoping with Julian that all will be saved, but recognizing that it is quite possible that some may choose not to be. For God honours our choices to the end: and perhaps for those who choose hell, as painful and horrible as it is, it is less painful to them then the fiery love of God would be; and maybe, in this sense, it is true that 'all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well'. And above all, we should remember, that when we talk about sin and separation from God, we should talk first and foremost about ourselves. We should never talk about hell and death without remembering what Paul said, and applying it to ourselves: that 'this is a true saying, and worthy to be received: that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of which I am the chief.'<br /><br />Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7008813786806083758.post-68625059007925373122010-05-08T11:42:00.000-07:002010-05-08T11:50:19.411-07:00The Tree of Life: Reflections on the Sixth Sunday of Easter<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S-Wx4o5R7FI/AAAAAAAAAB0/CkZW7TmQJ5U/s1600/395px-Mountain_Hemlock.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 211px; height: 320px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S-Wx4o5R7FI/AAAAAAAAAB0/CkZW7TmQJ5U/s320/395px-Mountain_Hemlock.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5468972909119794258" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S-Wx1Izr-uI/AAAAAAAAABs/YKKiCTmD_S4/s1600/Calapooya_Mountains,_Umpqua_National_Forest,_Oregon.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 213px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S-Wx1Izr-uI/AAAAAAAAABs/YKKiCTmD_S4/s320/Calapooya_Mountains,_Umpqua_National_Forest,_Oregon.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5468972848966793954" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S-WxxlAKnCI/AAAAAAAAABk/Lgm3aBgFQyI/s1600/Cherry_blossom_in_Nepal.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S-WxxlAKnCI/AAAAAAAAABk/Lgm3aBgFQyI/s320/Cherry_blossom_in_Nepal.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5468972787815848994" /></a><br /><br />This Sunday’s reading, from the Book of Revelation (Rev. 21:10, 22-22:5).<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />“And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and shewed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it. And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. And the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour into it.<br /><br />“And the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day: for there shall be no night there. And they shall bring the glory and honour of the nations into it. And there shall in no wise enter into it any thing that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie: but they which are written in the Lamb's book of life.<br /><br />“And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. <br /><br />“And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him: And they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads. And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever.”<br /><br />This is one of the richest, most beautiful, and most vivid passages in Scripture. In it, St. John gives us his vision of Heaven, and of the everlasting City of God which awaits us in the world to come. He describes- as well as anyone can describe that which is inherently indescribable- the beauty and splendour of that City. St. Paul said of heaven, that “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him,” and again he said that in his journey to the third heaven, he saw things “which it is not lawful for a man to utter,” but nevertheless St. John gives us a sense, and a kind of foretaste, of what Heaven will be like. Many homilies, paintings, songs, stories, and creative imaginings could be based on every single one of the sentences in this passage (and indeed, the passage is just a short excerpt from the much longer discourse on heaven in these two chapters.) How much we could write just about a single image, say that “the twelve gates were twelve pearls: every several gate was of one pearl.” But I can’t write about everything in this haunting and beautiful mystical passage. I’ll just say a little about one particular image, this one: “And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.”<br /><br />The Christian story is a story based around the icon of the tree. It begins with the Fall of Man, during which our first parents ate of the tree of knowledge, and became liable to sin, hell and death. It ends with our return to paradise, and our vision of the Tree of Life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, one for every month of the year. In between, of course, stands a third tree, that on which all else depends, the Tree of the Cross; in his sermon to the people of Jerusalem, Peter preached about Jesus “whom ye slew and hanged on a tree”. The parallels between these three trees were remarked on by the early Christians: the apocryphal Acts of Pilate, possibly drawing on ancient traditions from the first century, envisioning Christ’s descent into Hell on Holy Saturday to free the souls in prison, says “O Prince Satan, possessor of the keys of the lower regions, all your riches which you had acquired by the tree of transgression….you have now lost by the tree of the cross.” Between these three trees, the whole of the Christian story, and its explanation of why we suffer from sin, evil, and death, and of how we can eventually triumph over them, unfolds. <br /><br />Genesis is a myth, of course- we know now that humans and other animals were not ‘created’ in their current form, but evolved from other life forms, in a chain going back to the first life on earth. But then, it wasn’t intended to be read as literal fact. The early church fathers saw Genesis as authoritative because Christ quoted from them and because they prophecied Christ, not because they provided a factual account of the origins of the world. All that matters for the purpose of the Christian story is that at some point in the history of life, God gifted some highly developed primates, products of a long history of biological evolution, with rational and spiritual faculties, and that almost immediately they chose to use those faculties to rebel and assert mastery over their own lives, instead of submitting to God. The whole of the Christian story takes off from there. <br /><br /> This point in the story- the end of our earthly story, and the beginning of a whole new, and better, and greater story, centers around the Tree of Life. The tree of life made an appearance at the beginning of the Bible, just after the Fall of Man, when God has pronounced judgment on the first humans, and also foretold the coming of Christ. He then expels them from the garden, “lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.” Ross Douthat, the conservative Catholic writer, elaborates on this line, and how it hints, in an intriguing way, that death could be a gift as much as a punishment. “[this] could be read as a suggestion that the only thing worse than a life corrupted by sin is an eternal life corrupted by sin.” <br /><br />But we should never forget that though we are not ready for the tree of life now, and though we need to die in order to truly live, we will be ready for it someday. The day will come when we are ready to “eat, and live for ever”, and when we will be allowed to taste of that fruit which was forbidden to us once. The day will come when we are allowed to “enter in through the gates into the city”, not jumping over the fence as a robber, but invited in as permanent and everlasting guests. C.S. Lewis, in his beautiful children’s book “The Magician’s Nephew,” gives us the beautiful image of the tree of life as encased in a garden: it yields its fruit to whoever will take it, but to those who enter through the gates and take of its fruit for others will find it sweet to the taste, and conferring long years of happy and fulfilling life; those who steal it, and take it at the wrong time and for the wrong reason, will “find their heart’s desire, and find despair.” <br /><br />The tree of life epitomizes all that is beautiful in heaven, and that’s why St. John takes it as his icon of the afterlife. Like the branches of a tree, heaven is a place where we will keep becoming more and more unique, more and more individual, more and more different in healthy and good ways from one another. The branches of a tree divide and ramify into twigs bearing little leaves; in a similar way, our existence in heaven will be a deeply individual existence. It won’t be a place where we are all dissolved into a formless ocean, where we become little sparks of light incorporated into the one Light, or where we are simply ‘remembered’ to eternity by God, as some have thought. As every branch of a tree is a unique module by itself, so in heaven we will continue to be unique individuals, becoming more and more ourselves then we ever were on earth. <br /><br />But the tree of life isn’t merely a symbol, it tells us that there will be real trees in heaven, more beautiful and more amazing even than the most beautiful trees of earth. Most of us have planted trees, at some point in our lives, and watched them grow, and those of us who have, can appreciate the pleasure we get out of watching our trees grow. The seedlings rise up through the dark soil; there is no light around for them to strive towards, but they can sense the presence of gravity. Plant roots have dense starch grains contained in little organelles, and the function of the starch grains is to sink in response to a gravity gradient. The plants can tell which direction is ‘down’, even if they can’t perceive the presence of light, and they grow upwards, away from gravity. Later they break through the soil surface, at least if it’s not too hard and unyielding, and enter into the bright and sunlit world. If they experience a gentle environment- partly shaded, well watered, not too fiercely cold or hot, with enough nutrients in the soil- they grow upward, towards the sun, getting taller and spreading out. Almost immediately we see the young leaves, often reddish in the first flush of their youth, then turning to a deep green, a vivid and rich green, the green of chlorophyll. Individual leaves live out their lifespan, turning yellowish and then fading and dying as the nitrogen and other nutrients in them is absorbed and recycled to new leaves; and newer leaves succeed older ones, all carrying out the same function of catching light and using that light energy to produce food for the plant. Eventually we see the seedling branch out, and divide. We see the green sapling begin to produce wood, the pliable young stem become firm and tough, We see the development of tough and dry bark, we see the tree grow to the height of our knee, our waist, our chest, above our head; we see it begin to produce flowers- white flowers, pink flowers, blue flowers- and then fruits. We see it, at last, become full grown- maybe in our children’s time or our grandchildren’s time. Many trees can live for decades or centuries, some of them even thousands of years. <br /><br />The happiness that we get from seeing our tree grow is the happiness of seeing the process of life unfold, and witnessing the miracles that evolution has given us through plants and what they do. It’s something akin to the happiness that God experiences when he sees his children unfold their destinies, learn and grow, become greater in virtue and love. What an amazing thing the green plant is; Shakespeare said, “what a piece of work is man?”, but the same could be asked of green plants as well. Green plants are the workhorses of life on this planet. They convert the light of the sun into usable chemical energy, and they convert the gases of the air into food sugars, and they incorporate dissolved nitrogen in the soil into proteins. The plant leaf, thin and flat, exposed to the sun, often (in many species) changing its angle depending on the hour of the day, is perfectly built for catching energy, allowing water to escape and carbon dioxide to be dissolved. Flowers, for their part, are in many cases nearly perfectly adapted to the needs of their pollinators- bees, wasps, butterflies, moths, hummingbirds, bats, in a few cases even bizarre situations like rodent pollination. The depth and angle of the flower, the colors of the petals and sepals, the height of the anthers, are exquisitely adapted to allow for pollination to happen and for pollen to spread to other flowers of the same species. The scents of flowers and tastes of fruits can be wonderful sensations, and God promises us that what evolution has done on this earth, he will replicate for us in heaven, but at an even higher and better level. <br /><br />Do you love the feel of the resins on a pine tree, sticking to your hands and drying to aromatic, yellowish-brown beads? Heaven will have trees like that, but even better. Do you like the scent of magnolia flowers and cherry blossoms in the springtime? Heaven will have trees like that, even more beautifully perfumed. Do you love the grayish, almost blue color of a blue spruce tree? Heaven will have trees like that. Do you like the reds and oranges of maple trees in the fall? There will be reds and oranges like that in heaven, and the pink of the cherry and magnolia and dogwood flowers in spring, too, for there will be seasons there; as it is said, “[she] yielded her fruit every month”. Do you like the euphorbias of the tropics, with almost no leaves, with succulent green stems that bleed white latex when you break them? Do you like the swollen baobab trees, that store water in there trunks, whose crumbly soft wood the mushrooms grow on when the trees die? Do you like the bristlecone pines of the southwestern desert, that can live for up to 5,000 years, and some of which are alive today, and were alive when Christ walked on earth? Do you like the flamboyant trees of Madagascar, planted all over the tropics today, with their brilliant red flowers like a particularly feverish sunset? Do you like the fig trees of the tropics and subtropics, each of whose inflorescence contains a myriad of hidden and enclosed flowers, inside of which the male fig wasps live out nearly their whole life cycles? Do you like the moringa trees, with their edible leaflets, contained on finely divided leaves like feathers? Do you like the citrus trees, which can be grafted with related species such that they really do, like the tree of life, bear more than one kind of fruit? Do you like the apple trees, with their fruits ranging from sweet to tart to crisp tastes, from brown to green to red in color? Do you like the trees of the rain forests, which support little bromeliads (in the pineapple family) on their trunks, that get all their nutrients from dust carried by the air and the rain? Do you like the trees of the north, with their ability to survive temperatures down to 60 degrees below zero? Do you like the way the trees of the winter regions can evacuate the water in their cells of all dust and impurities, and allow it to stay liquid at temperatures well below freezing, because its near purity will keep ice crystals from having any surface on which to form? Do you like the way other trees can allow water to be withdrawn from their cells as it freezes, so that the cells stay unfrozen even as ice forms outside them? Heaven will have trees as beautiful, and as wondrous, as all these, and even more. <br /><br /> A third century Christian text called the ‘Apocalypse of Paul’, probably drawing on earlier visionary experiences and traditions, goes into more detail of what the trees of heaven will look like. The writer sees date trees, with branches dividing into clusters, and clusters into dates: “From the root of each tree up to its heart there were ten thousand branches with tens of thousands of clusters, [and there were ten thousand clusters on each branch,] and there were ten thousand dates in each cluster…..And there were other trees there, myriads of myriads of them, and their fruit was in the same proportion.” Some ecologists nowadays tell us that this isn’t a bad structural model for the way many plants are built: they consist of ‘fractal’ structures in which a main stem divides into two or three smaller stems, each of those divides into two or three smaller stems, and so on, with each point of division involving a similar proportion of daughter to mother stems, or branches, or veins. Think of a parsley stem, for example. That a pseudonymous writer in the early Christian era would anticipate something that no one really thought about for many centuries afterward does suggest that he really had some kind of vision and insight into the hidden nature of things, and in itself suggests there was some core of genuine supernatural experience behind this vision, and that perhaps we should take the writings of this and other mystics seriously. <br /><br />But more important to our point, the writer of the Apocalypse of Paul is telling us that the order, and proportion, and beauty, and fertility, of trees and other living things on this earth are just pale shadows of the order and proportion and beauty and fertility in heaven. The trees of heaven will have more fruit then any tree could bear on this earth, and will be better proportioned, and more beautiful. All the beauty that we see around us in this world is a foretaste and a signpost towards the beauties of heaven; the wonders of nature on this earth are foretastes of the wonders of transformed, resurrected, transfigured nature in heaven. As St. Paul tells us of our own bodies, “It is sown corruptible, it is raised incorruptible”, and so it is with all good things in this world, including plants and animals. <br /><br />We live in a world of shadows, like the benighted cavemen in Plato’s cave, and though we can see the shadows, which are real things and pretty in our way, we can only imagine what the substance behind the shadow must look like. For the existence of a shadow testifies to the existence of the substance, and from the existence of partial and imperfect good we can infer the existence of pure and total goodness. Which makes it all the more necessary that we treasure and cherish those rare moments in human history, including but not limited to this powerful and beautiful vision that was vouchsafed to St. John the Apostle, the best friend and adopted brother of our Lord, as he laboured in the mines of a Roman prison colony, in which individuals were given flashes of insight into the nature of heaven and allowed to share that vision with others. We walk in a world that is often dark, bitter, and lonely, and to have hope, which is a theological virtue as well as an existential necessity, we need to know what we are hoping for: as the Creed tells us, “We look to the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.” We don’t know what the life of the world to come will be like, but we can and do know that it will be better then anything we can imagine, and that it will have trees in it, lots of trees, more amazing and more beautiful then the most beautiful tree of this earth- in its shape, its structure, its height, its scent, its leaves, its flowers- could ever be. <br /><br />Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost: as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7008813786806083758.post-2643237276165524042010-05-05T09:51:00.000-07:002010-05-05T21:24:29.989-07:00Death Shall Be No More: Reflections on the Fifth Sunday of Easter<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S-IKTJyxPuI/AAAAAAAAABc/DE93M_VZx3o/s1600/Cloud_Ocean_Taiwan_Big_Snow_Mountain.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S-IKTJyxPuI/AAAAAAAAABc/DE93M_VZx3o/s320/Cloud_Ocean_Taiwan_Big_Snow_Mountain.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5467944221743857378" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Last Sunday’s reading, from the Book of Revelation (Rev. 21:1-6). <br /><br />“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.<br />“And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful. And he said unto me, It is done! I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely.”<br /><br /><br />This beautiful vision of the new heaven and earth is a favourite of the Christian liturgical calendar, and is often included in the readings. It is read liturgically (during some years) on All Saints' Day (Nov 1), on the Feast of the Holy Innocents (Dec 28th), on this fifth sunday of Easter, and during the Burial Service. It’s included in this Sunday’s reading, probably, because it speaks of renewal: “Behold, I make all things new,” or in Latin, “Ecce, omnia nova facio.” But it’s included in those other feasts (one of which is concerned with the afterlife, and the other with a particularly tragic episode of martyrdom) and in the Burial Service, most probably, because it speaks of victory over death. <br /><br />Death is the most basic and ultimate reality in our lives. It is the one thing that can’t be denied, nor escaped. All of us, as children, go through a particularly painful and traumatic stage when we realize, for the first time, that our lives are finite, and that we are going to die. Yet there’s no getting around it. And from the beginning of human history, the minds of thoughtful people, and the hearts and souls of sensitive people, have been captivated and tormented by the challenge of death. The great French scientist and mystic Teilhard de Chardin said, “We are not material beings leading a spiritual existence, we are spiritual beings leading a material existence.” But more then that, we are creatures of the infinite leading a finite existence: creatures who were meant for eternity, leading an earthly existence which terminates, inevitably, in the grave. <br /><br />My priest back home likes to tell the story of one Cyril Alington, headmaster of Eton College, who was once asked by a particularly annoying and stupid parent, “So, Mr. Alington, in a word, what are you preparing my son for?” His answer was short and to the point: “In a word, madam? Death.” How true. Any worldview or philosophy- and there have been many- which seeks to evade the reality of death, is in the end futile and sterile. <br /><br />There are many ways to deal with death that people throughout history have chosen. One of the most common- and from a Christian point of view, the worst and most opposed to morality and decency- is to see life as a contest of strength, in which death is the penalty paid out to the losers. Lots of warlords, kings, big businessmen, and other ‘successful’ people throughout history have taken this view: it’s one that appeals to the winners, not so much to the losers. Of course, it’s based on a lie: for if death is the loser’s hand, then all of us are losers in the end, and whether it comes for us in one year or after fifty, does it much matter? A much less immoral- but still incorrect- way to view death is as simply a part of life- the end, to be seen as neither good nor evil but simply a fact of the world. This was the path taken by people like the Stoics. Finally there are those who have seen in physical death the ultimate evil, and have tried to avoid it by any means necessary. This has really become popular, and feasible, since the invention of modern medicine that allows us to extend life longer and longer. But even before the invention of modern medicine, people _tried_ to extend their lives through all sorts of bizarre and sometimes creepy means. Through fruitless quests for the Fountain of Youth, through drinking rejuvenating tonics made from animals and plants, and through magical rites. Mr. Aldous Huxley’s book, “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan” portrays, witheringly to my mind, the ultimately unnatural and dehumanizing (in a very literal sense) logical outcome of the quest for earthly immortality.<br /><br />The long and sad history of people trying to evade death through medical and magical means, nevertheless says something about our natures. It says that at some level we recoil from death, and crave to be eternal. And that in turn suggests that what we are seeking for actually exists, though at a different level than the prophets of 200-year life spans have been looking for. Though the people who strive to radically extend the human lifespan are doing something wrong, the thirst that they are seeking to quench is a real thirst, which suggests that it was intended to be really quenched in some way. If we found a fish suffocating on dry land, it would be reasonable to conclude that lakes and oceans existed, even if we had never seen one; if we found a keyhole in a door, it would be reasonable to conclude that keys really existed. Pascal said that ‘at the center of each heart is a God-shaped vacuum’, from which we can infer that God himself must exist, for why would the vacuum exist unless there were a real object for which it was striving? In the same way, the human thirst for eternity and immortality is a hint that beyond this life, eternity and immortality really do exist. <br /><br />We don’t know what life would have been like in an unfallen world, but death as we know it is an expression of our fallen nature. In the Christian worldview it isn’t simply a good thing, a neutral thing, or a bad thing: it is all of the above. It’s a bad thing in that it separates two things, body and soul, that were never meant to be separated, and in that it causes the tearing apart of human loves and relationships. As it separates body and soul, so it also separates us from those we love, and from the world we know, and plunges us into the great void of the unknown and the unknowable. Death is a tragedy: we are told that when he saw the death of Lazarus, “Jesus began to weep.” We don’t know why, since he was even then preparing to raise Lazarus in just a few minutes; but perhaps we aren’t intended to know why. Like many other things, it’s a mystery. <br /><br />But in a way, death is also a good thing, for as Christ tells us, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man should give up his life for his friends,” and the corollary of this is that a world without death would be a world without sacrifice, and therefore a world without love. This is how we know, incidentally, that Christ was really a man as well as God, because if he had not really lived as a man he could not really have died, and his sacrifice could not have been perfect. Death is the greatest limitation to our lives, and as the essence of our human nature is limitation, to seek to avoid death is to seek to make ourselves less human. Simone Weil said that death can be seen not just as a result of the Fall but also as an amelioration of it: “Man placed himself outside the current of obedience….consequently, labour and death, if man undergoes them in a spirit of willingness, constitute a transference back into the current of supreme good, which is obedience to God.” Death is one of the key moments in our lives when, if we accept it willingly and humbly submit to it, we can strip ourselves of the pride and rebellion that caused our separation from God in the first place. Original sin consisted in seeing ourselves as masters of our own destinies: submission to death is the ultimate expression of the idea that we are _not_ masters of our own destinies, and the ultimate expression of the sentiment of our Lord, when he prayed in the garden of Gethsemane, “Father, if it be thy will, take this cup away from me; nevertheless thy will, not mine, be done.” This is a sentiment that some of the most thoughtful minds in history have at some level perceived: as Shakespeare said, “Nothing in his life became him as the leaving of it.”<br /><br />Yet we should remember that inasmuch as there are good things about death, they are only secondarily good. Death is a necessary part of life on earth, so necessary that Christ himself had to go through it; as he said, “whoever loses his life for my sake shall gain it.” But this is a result of our fallen world, and in the world to come, unfallen and perfect, there shall be no death, not now and not ever. “Death shall be no more….for the former things have passed away.” As long as this world exists, and as long as life exists on it, there must be death; St. Paul tells us that death will be “the last enemy to be destroyed.” But we have the promise that there will be a new world, not only without death, but without sorrow: “Neither shall there be any more pain….”. <br /><br />We cannot achieve the fountain of life by ourselves, and merely to try, in this life, is immoral and irreligious. We are not intended to be immortal, and to try and escape from death is to try and escape from our human limitations, which is the essence of sin. But we are promised that what we cannot do for ourselves, God will do for us: “To him who is athirst for the water of the fountain of life, I will freely give,” and again he says, "Whosoever shall drink of the water that I give him shall never thirst...". The Latin version here uses the emphatic pronoun, ‘ego’: Jesus here is stressing not just that we will receive immortality, but that He Himself will give it to us. “Ex aqua quam ego dabo ei.....” In the end, no matter what we suffer in this world, no matter what the pain and sorrow of our life and the horror of our death, Christ the Lamb will recompense us. For he is truly the good shepherd, who will lead us to drink of living waters, and of him who is the Water of Life, and once we have drunk of that we shall never thirst again. <br /><br />Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7008813786806083758.post-90695412851875696832010-04-25T20:30:00.000-07:002010-04-25T20:40:14.987-07:00Hymn of the day: "Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus"This is a great hymn, by a minister of the Presbyterian church in the mid 19th century. Written on the eve of the Civil War, it was inspired by the life and death of his friend, Reverend Tyng, who had been forced to resign from his church due to his strong antislavery views. It's an important reminder that the Christian life is a struggle, and that between the City of God and the City of Man there can be no lasting peace. Check out the great reggae/calypso version by Ms. Carlene Davis of Jamaica. <br /><br />The song is fairly clearly inspired by the 'armor of God' imagery in Ephesians 6, and the last verse alludes to Christ's letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2-3. <br /><br /><br /> 1. Stand up, stand up for Jesus! ye soldiers of the cross;<br /> Lift high His royal banner, it must not suffer loss:<br /> From vict’ry unto vict’ry, His army shall He lead,<br /> Till every foe is vanquished, and Christ is Lord indeed.<br /><br /> 2. Stand up, stand up for Jesus! The trumpet call obey:<br /> Forth to the mighty conflict, in this His glorious day;<br /> Ye that are men now serve Him against unnumbered foes;<br /> Let courage rise with danger, and strength to strength oppose.<br />'<br /> 3. Stand up, stand up for Jesus! Stand in His strength alone,<br /> The arm of flesh will fail you, ye dare not trust your own;<br /> Put on the gospel armor, and watching unto prayer,<br /> Where calls the voice of duty, be never wanting there.<br /><br /> 4. Stand up, stand up for Jesus! the strife will not be long;<br /> This day the noise of battle, the next the victor’s song;<br /> To him that overcometh a crown of life shall be;<br /> He with the King of glory shall reign eternally.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7008813786806083758.post-91559740950305277022010-04-25T12:51:00.000-07:002010-05-01T10:27:38.809-07:00Washed White in the Blood of the Lamb: Reflections on last Sunday's reading<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S9xkaI--o8I/AAAAAAAAABU/y4kTZFuTCrc/s1600/landaue1.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 296px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S9xkaI--o8I/AAAAAAAAABU/y4kTZFuTCrc/s320/landaue1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5466354447971951554" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br />Here is last Sunday's reading from the Book of Revelation (Rev 7:9-17).<br /><br /><br />"After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands;<br /> And cried with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb.<br />And all the angels stood round about the throne, and about the elders and the four beasts, and fell before the throne on their faces, and worshipped God,<br />Saying, Amen: Blessing, and glory, and wisdom, and thanksgiving, and honour, and power, and might, be unto our God for ever and ever. Amen.<br />And one of the elders answered, saying unto me, What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they?<br />And I said unto him, Sir, thou knowest. And he said to me, These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.<br />Therefore are they before the throne of God, and serve him day and night in his temple: and he that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them.<br />They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat.<br />For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes."<br /><br />This passage was the second lesson for last sunday's readings. I love the Book of Revelation, the most mystical and enigmatic book in the Bible, and I love coming back to its beautiful and haunting imagery. When thinking about this passage, I’m struck in particular by the image of the multitude praising God with palm branches, clad in robes that have been ‘washed white in the blood of the Lamb.’<br /><br />The palm branches, of course, recall the way the Jerusalem crowd hailed Jesus when he entered Jerusalem five days before he would be crucified, on Palm Sunday: for we are told that the crowd ‘took branches of palm trees, and went forth to meet him, and cried, Hosanna: Blessed is the King of Israel that cometh in the name of the Lord’. The people of Jerusalem recognized Jesus Christ as their King and their Redeemer, and in the moment that they saw him riding on the colt, gave him the love and honour that was his due. In that moment, they fulfilled what we are called, as humans, to do for our God, and could not have done it any better. That wasn’t to last, of course. Even then, the voices of a few were raised in discontent, saying, “Nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not”. And the voices of evil prevailed, as is the nature of things in this fallen world, and they convinced enough people to join them- or to stand by out of fear, and do nothing, that within five days the crowd had abandoned Jesus to die the death of the most vicious common criminals. Yet the love and service that they had shown him could not be erased, any more than the wounds of the crucifixion could be erased, and the proof is that it would be mirrored and echoed at a still deeper level in heaven. That love was temporary, and tarnished by the weaknesses of fallen human nature: it will be mirrored, at the end of time, by a true and undying love that will never be tarnished and will never falter. <br /><br />The things of this earth are real, but we have the assurance that they are just shadows and reflections of an even deeper and even more permanent reality. Plato saw this, dimly, in his allegory of the cave. The shadows that his benighted cave-dwellers saw on the rocks were real: they represented, in a real and actual sense, the absence of light. A plant couldn’t grow in those shadows nor could an animal grow warm in them. The shadows were not an illusion. But they were, just as clearly, simply reflections of something even more real and even more concrete. The shadow of a tree, or of a man, is something interesting; but how much more interesting is the real tree, or the real man? In the same way, we can trust that in heaven, all that we love and cherish about this world of ours will be replicated in an even richer and more fascinating way, that we can cherish more deeply than we could ever cherish things in this life. Heaven will have real rivers, and real trees, for St. John tells us, again, “in the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruit…” And a very early Christian vision of heaven, which was never added to the Bible but was widely read in the early church, said that “Every vine had ten thousand branches, and each branch had upon it ten thousand bunches of grapes, and every bunch had on it ten thousand grapes. And there were other trees there, myriads of myriads of them, and their fruit was in the same proportion…” The fact that this doesn’t characterize real trees, or real grapes- no tree, unless it’s been carefully grafted, really bears twelve kinds of fruits- in our world, only means that heaven will be different, and better, then our world. It won’t be lacking any good thing that our world has; on the contrary, all good things will be present, only raised to perfection, and made even better then they are today. As we delight in the fruit of a tree today, we will be able to delight in the twelve kinds of fruit on one tree that heaven will offer us. And as the anonymous writer of the ‘Apocalypse of Paul’ suggests, as the vines of heaven had tens of thousands of times more fruit then any actually existing vine we see in the world today, so the good things of heaven will exceed those of this earth by factors of tens of thousands. <br /><br />“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them”, said Isaiah, over six hundred years before Christ, foretelling with remarkable clarity the beauty and mystery of Christ’s heavenly kingdom. If we know anything about heaven, it’s that we can’t really know anything about it in detail: again, Plato had some dim and cloudy sense of this when he quoted Socrates as saying, "The only real wisdom is knowing you know nothing". But though we can’t really understand heaven, we can get some sense of what it will be like by inference from the things of this earth. Beauty comes from God, and no real and lasting beauty will be absent from heaven, on the contrary the beauties of heaven will surpass the beauties of this earth as a real tree surpasses the shadow of a tree, or as a real cherry surpasses the nasty cherry flavoured cough syrup. We are told that there will be lions in heaven, and calves; that there will be wolves and leopards, lambs and kids. But they won’t be the same, they will be better, and perfected. Think of a creature with all the beauty and grace of a leopard, with the black spots standing out of a golden fur, with the lithe form and liquid eyes, but without being dangerous to life and limb, and without thirsting to devour the kid. That’s hard to imagine: but that’s precisely the point. Heaven is impossible to understand: we can only envision it through inference and analogy. This metaphor of peaceful and meek leopards suggests that heaven will have all of the beauty and good things we see in this world, without any of the bad things that are, in our world, inextricably mixed with the good like weeds are inevitably mixed with flowers in a field. If this combination of all the good things in this world, and none of the bad, seems strange and unearthly, it’s because it is unearthly: such things could never happen on earth, for our earth is irretrievably tainted, under the domination of ‘the prince of this world’. Only when ‘a little child shall lead them’, i.e. when Christ Himself, the Lamb, shall be our King, can we finally experience the peace, joy, and love for which we were intended, and that we crave at the deepest levels of our being. “For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them”, and that Lamb shall do for us what we could never do for ourselves, and will change us into men and women who so far surpass our flawed earthly bodies and personalities as a meek and gentle leopard would surpass the leopards of this earth. <br /><br />As it is with physical things like dates and grapes, so with emotional and moral goodness as well. We are able to be good, to a degree, in this life: to love God, and to love our neighbor, but not perfectly. Very far from perfectly, for all of us are tainted by original sin, and by the myriads of sins, large and small, that we choose to commit every day. The Jerusalem crowd knew Jesus for who he was, and loved him, in a way that the authorities of the day did not. But they “fell away from the love that they had at first”, just as we all do, and under the influence of fear they fell into sin, just as St. Peter himself, the first Bishop of Rome, was to do on at least three momentous occasions. In heaven, though, those of us who choose to love God and to love our neighbor will never be tempted to fall away from that love. St. Augustine, in the last book of his ‘City of God’ differentiated two kinds of freedom: “For the first freedom of will which man received when he was created upright consisted in an ability not to sin, but also in an ability to sin; whereas this last freedom of will [in heaven] shall be superior, inasmuch as it shall not be able to sin.” The kind of worship that the crowd of Jerusalem offered to Christ with the palm branches, partial and faltering as it was, was none the less real and intense: in heaven, this passage tells us, it will be mirrored at a deeper and higher level. They shall worship him with palm branches that can never dry up and turn to dust, with voices that never grow hoarse, with “love [that] never faileth” and they will enjoy and revel in the delights of a kingdom that, as the Creed tells us, “shall have no end.” The Apostle Jude tells us that God alone “is able to keep [us] from falling, and to present [us] faultless before the presence of his glory,” and that is why in heaven, when we finally “see [God] face to face”, we will no longer have to worry about falling- falling away from our love of God and of our neighbor, of humanity in general, of our family, friends, and partners in particular- ever again. <br /><br />Those who hold the palm branches, in St. John’s vision, were clad in white robes: robes that had been made white by being washed ‘in the blood of the Lamb’. I heard a homily once which touched on the point that it’s difficult for us, living in the era where you can just buy some bleach at the store to whiten your clothes, to realize how difficult it was in the age before washing machines to turn clothes really white. Even now, in some parts of the world it’s difficult: living in Africa, my white clothes faded under the hot sun and got discolored by dust very quickly. How much more was that the case in the first century Mediterranean world- a hot, dusty, sunburnt place- and especially on the backwater island of Patmos, to which John the Beloved Disciple had been condemned to work in the mines. Whiteness was something very difficult to achieve, something rare and precious: and as we know even today, certain kinds of stains- from wine, from blood, from juice- can discolour white clothing permanently. St. John promises us, however, that in heaven our robes will be white with a whiteness that could never be achievable on this earth: for white clothing, just like all other earthly things, will be made perfect and reach heights of beauty and purity that we can’t even conceive of in this life. It’s paradoxical to think that washing them ‘in the blood of the Lamb’ could make them white and clean: we know that blood stains are among the most impossible to get out of clothing. There are few things that stain the way blood does. Yet Christianity is full of paradoxes, most notably how, in the Gospel reading that goes with this reading, Jesus can say that ‘the Father and I are one.’ We can believe and accept the teaching of the Trinity, and of the Incarnation, as Christians are bound to, but we can’t really understand it: it’s a mystery, and at some level all we can do is revel in the mystery, and receive it with wonder and awe. <br /><br />Christ died for our sakes, that by sharing our lives and deaths he might allow us to share in his victory over death and in his triumphal reign. When we suffer, we can remember that he shared our suffering through the thirty-three years of his life, and that he spilt his blood that we might be washed in it, and become clean. This isn’t limited to certain kinds of suffering, though. This passage honours those who ‘came out of the great tribulation’, which is a phrase often used to connote religious persecution and political oppression. I don’t think that’s what it refers to here, though. St. John talks elsewhere about specifically seeing the early Christian martyrs in heaven: “I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus,” and he talks specifically about a vision of the Holy Innocents, the children who were martyred under Herod for having been born around the time of Jesus: “And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on the mount Sion, and with him an hundred forty and four thousand, having his Father's name written in their foreheads.” It seems likely that if he had been talking about Christian martyrs under the Roman persecutions in this passage, he would have included some reference to that fact. No: I think the tribulation he is referring to is something broader than political persecution or religious martyrdom. He refers specifically to how the Lamb shall deliver the multitude from hunger and from thirst, and how “neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat.” The multitude being honoured in this passage includes all those who suffer oppression, not merely from political tyrants but from the elements and from the evils of this world: from famine, from thirst, from earthquakes like those in Chile and Haiti, from having their homes destroyed, from having their crops destroyed, from bitter cold or scorching heat. St. John speaks to all of them in this passage, just as Christ did when he said, “Blessed are ye poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” <br /><br />This world is often a cruel, bitter place, in which people suffer from no fault of their own, in which a heavy rain can wash away a family’s farm on the hillside and a long drought can cause a whole years worth of crops to wither and shrivel up, abandoning some of the world’s poorest people to desperate hunger. Christ, and his Beloved Disciple, call on us to help those of our brothers and sisters who suffer from hunger, from thirst, from lack of adequate shelter or housing, from disease and lack of medicine. But he also calls on those of us who are suffering to have hope, for he shared our suffering, and by his own suffering made us worthy to share in his eternal kingdom. And he is, at long last, the Lamb in whose blood we have been made white, and who shall lead us to living waters, cool and refreshing, that will refresh our souls as much as the waters of this earth refresh our bodies. As much as we weep in this world for our sufferings and pain and for the pain of others, we have the promise that “God shall wipe away all tears from [our] eyes,” and the assurance that in heaven, we will be the flock of the one true Shepherd, the one who leads his flocks to living water, who protects them from all scorching heat, from hunger, and from thirst, and who loves us with a perfect and undying love that will truly never fail.<br /><br />Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7008813786806083758.post-53895710727815495032010-04-24T09:37:00.000-07:002010-04-24T17:28:19.274-07:00"Simon, Do You Love Me?" Reflections on the Third Sunday of Easter<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S9MevrGBDAI/AAAAAAAAABM/d4bRW6cbhv4/s1600/tissot-feed-my-lambs-495x737.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 215px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S9MevrGBDAI/AAAAAAAAABM/d4bRW6cbhv4/s320/tissot-feed-my-lambs-495x737.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5463744577301187586" /></a><br /><br /><br />“So when they had dined, Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me more than these? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee. He saith unto him, Feed my lambs.”<br /><br /> We lose something when reading the English translation of this passage, because we lose the distinction between different words (different in Hebrew, in Aramaic, in Greek and in Latin) that mean quite different things, but that English translates by the word ‘love’. It’s often been said that in English, ‘love’ can have a whole range of meanings, and can connote very different things. We can speak of love for nature, for animals, for abstractions, for ideals, for nations and classes, for parents, for children, for friends, for lovers, for God, for particular individuals. A schoolboy who says ‘I love baseball’ means something very different then someone who says, ‘I love my girlfriend’, and in turn that’s a different thing from what we mean when we say ‘Paul Farmer loves the poor’ or when we say ‘So and so truly loves God.’<br /><br />In the Latin Vulgate, Christ says, “Simon Joannis, diligis me plus his?” ‘Diligere’ is the root of our word ‘diligent’: it means to care for, to have a regard for. The noun form corresponding to ‘diligere’ is ‘dilectio’: care for someone or something, disinterested love that is concerned only about the good of the person or thing loved, and not about oneself. This is what the experts in animal behavior call altruism (pure other-centered love, from which all motives of selfish gain and self satisfaction have been removed) and which they have been trying to explain for a very long time. Selfless love, in other words. Latin has a close equivalent to ‘dilectio’, ‘caritas’, from whence we get the English word ‘charity’: traditionally these words have been used at various points in the New Testament to translate the Greek ‘agape’. Theologicans have debated whether or not there are subtle differences in meaning between the Latin words, but they are in any case very close in meaning.<br /><br /> “Do you care for me?” asks Christ, in essence. Peter answers, “Te amo”, I love thee, but with the meaning of brotherly love. The Greek word here is ‘phileo’, to love as one would love a brother or a family member. This refers to a human kind of love; in the love between brothers, one can distinguish both self-directed and other directed strains of love. For as the evolutionary biologists tell us, love of close relatives came about, in large part, because it was favoured by evolution for ‘selfish’ reasons: in protecting and defending our relatives, we are protecting and defending people who share a good portion of our own genes. Of course among humans, and perhaps among some animals as well, love of kin has become something much more than simply a strategy to spread our own genes, and it is in most cases largely, or mostly, other centered. But still, it refers to a merely human love: ‘dilectio’ refers to something higher, the pure and self-emptying love that God pours out on his creation, and which God the Father and God the Son eternally express towards each other. ‘Dilectio’ is also the kind of love that we are called to show to each other, and to humanity in general: love of our fellow human beings simply because they are human, because they are as capable as us of suffering, and of taking joy, and of making choices for good and evil.<br /><br />Beyond brotherly love and sacrificial, self-emptying love, there are other types as well. There is romantic love, sexual and erotic love. There is natural affection, such as that we feel for a child. We can feel affection, too, tinged with pity and compassion, for anyone who is suffering or in need. Still another kind of love characterizes what we feel for a good friend. There is the kind of love that we feel for parents, the ones who gave us the gift of life. Still another kind of love is felt for figures who hold authority over us, a love that is bound up with the desire to obey and honour them. There is the kind of love that we feel for our country, or for our church, or for a religious or political ideal, or for nature. These are all very different emotions, with different obligations attached to them and which makes us feel very different things, but they all have one thing in common: they When our friend, or our brother, or our lover, or our child, or even a country or church or movement with which we sympathize comes to suffer, we suffer with them (this is where we get our word ‘compassion’, from Latin, ‘to suffer with’) and cannot be truly and completely happy until we are happy. And when they are happy, even though we might at that moment be in a tragic and unpleasant situation ourselves, we are raised out of our own pain a little bit, and can share in theirs. <br /><br />Love- in all of its forms- teaches us to identify with another person, to share in their joys and pains, and to devote ourselves to trying to make them happy. And in this way, we are able to share in the eternal love which the three Persons of God pour out for each other, and to participate in that love ourselves. The myth of Genesis tells us that the Serpent said to the first men, ‘And ye shall be as gods’, but as is the nature of the divine economy, God brought truth out of the enemy’s lies, for when he taught us- through our instincts, through the natural law written on our hearts, and through his own Incarnation- to truly love each other, he showed us how, when that love is eventually perfected in the kingdom of heaven, we will really be, in our small and paltry way, ‘like gods’. When ‘the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us’, he recognized all those individual forms of love as good in their own right, but also as just special, and especially intense, cases of something broader: the goodwill and concern for others that we are called to show for everyone. Through his presence at the wedding in Cana, he recognized romantic love as something good; through his brotherhood with the twelve apostles, which the medieval writers called ‘the greatest fellowship the world had ever seen’, he sanctified friendship, and through his Assumption of his mother into heaven, and his coronation of her as queen of heaven, he sanctified familial love forever.<br /><br />Peter responds to Christ’s question, though, with a half response. He tells Christ that he loves him, but he confesses a mere human love: he loves Christ as he would love a brother, but not (yet) with the selfless care and devotion with which God loves us, and with which God calls us to love each other. Indeed, there was a lot lacking in Peter’s love. He fell away from love when he betrayed Christ three times on Maundy Thursday night: ‘Then Peter remembered the word of Jesus, which said unto him, Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. And he went out, and wept bitterly.” The Apostle Paul tells us in his letter to the Galatians that Peter fell away from the truth a second time, out of fear: ‘For before that certain came with James, he did eat with gentiles, but when they were come, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing those of the circumcision…” The noncanonical Acts of Peter tells us, famously, of a third great episode of cowardice and betrayal on the part of the first Bishop of Rome, when he allowed himself to be talked into fleeing the persecution of Nero. He had originally wanted to stay and accept his fate, saying, “Shall we be runaways, brethren?” But his flock had prevailed on him that it would be better to escape and live another day, to preach the Gospel elsewhere, then to be crucified. Peter fell victim to cowardice and to the voice of the crowd, as he had twice before, and fled out of Rome: but on his way out, he ‘saw the Lord entering into Rome.’ The Acts tell us that Peter asked Christ, “Whither goest thou?” and that Christ answered him, “Yea, Peter, I am being crucified again.” St. Peter was so ashamed of this rebuke that for the last time in his life he repented of his weakness, and went back into Rome to accept his fate. <br /><br />In the history of Peter we see, then, his devotion to Christ, which led him to preach the Gospel as bishop of Antioch and of Rome, and eventually to die for his beliefs. But we also see the limits of a purely human love. Peter had shown himself willing to love Christ with the love of a brother, but until the end he struggled to show the love that Christ called him to show: the love that descends from God, the love that is called ‘dilectio’ and ‘caritas’, the love that ‘beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.” This is true of all of us; for with the exception of Christ (and depending on whom you ask, his Mother as well) we are all touched by sin, and by the fall.<br /><br />St. Augustine said that there are only two real and permanent objects of love in the world, God and the self. All the other loves reduce, in the end, to one of these: to the former at their best, to the latter at their worst, and at the Last Day we will all have to choose between loving God (and our companions and friends of course, but loving God above all) and loving ourselves. “Two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by love of self, even to the contempt of God, the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self.” At best, when we love a friend, or a child, or a lover, or a family member, or a leader, or something inanimate like nature, we really love them because of the spark of the divine which we see within them, and because at some level they are infused by God and his goodness. That is why the writer of the Song of Solomon, in a fascinating line, seems to recognize something superhuman and unearthly beauty within his lover: “Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?” And again, why the same writer, recognizes that within his lover there is a kind of perfection and flawlessness that points beyond the merely earthly: “Thou art all fair, my love, there is no flaw in thee.” In a purely literal sense, none of us is ‘terrible as an army with banners’ and none of us is truly flawless; but in a much deeper and more true sense, within each of us is a spark of something which is, truly, perfect and terrible, superhuman and supernatural, and when we are touched by love, any kind of love- friendship, romance, familial love- we can see the other person not just at the superficial level as a flawed human being, but also as the work of the Most High God, made in his image and likeness, that we truly are and that we were meant to be. <br /><br />Love for a particular person- a friend, a lover, a family member- draws that person out of the general run of humanity, and sees them as special and unique in some way, unique as God Himself is unique; for we don’t love a gender as a whole, but one particular person of our favoured gender. This is why, again, the Song of Solomon tells us, “As a lily among thorns, so is my beloved among women” and conversely, “as an apple tree among the trees of the woods, so is my lover among men”, and this, too, recalls the love of Christ, which was particular as well as universal. He wept not simply collectively over the daughters of Jerusalem, but also for the individual Lazarus, and he went to his death not simply for all of us but also for each of us, and he would have done it if only one person- you, or me, or the centurion, or Herod, or the repentant thief Dysmas- were to have been saved by it.<br /><br /><br />At worst, however, our feelings for another person can be corrupted into a form of self-love, and we can desire their company solely for our own benefit or pleasure. How many people have served the poor not out of any genuine love, but solely for the desire to see themselves as a good person? How many people have had children not because they wanted to bring new life into the world, but solely to carry on the family name? When we do this, we cease to value the other person as a creation of God, good in their own right, and we begin to see them as extensions of ourselves, and means to our own happiness. This is why, within even the best and highest loves, we always see a tension between the human and the divine standards of love, and we always need to keep struggling against selfish impulses and desires, which can pretend to be true love: brass wearing the colors of gold, and the vulture resembling, for a true moment, the form of the eagle.<br /><br />In Christ’s question to Peter we see the tension between divine and human standards of love. “Do you love me?” This is a powerful question, that all of us can identify with, because we hear it so often in our own lives. We think of it especially in the context of romantic love, and indeed it’s a question that people ask and are asked all the time, of their husband, wife, boyfriend, or girlfriend. How happy we are when we can really, and with perfect sincerity and honesty, answer ‘Yes’, and when we can hear the same answer back. This is why the great prayer of the Abbe Perreyve, addressed to the Blessed Virgin Mary, asks of her to ‘have pity on those who love one another and are separated.’ But how often are, we, like Peter, only able to answer this question in a partial and deficient way?<br /><br />This is a question that we often face, just to take one example, in the context of sexual relationships. I happen to think that the sexual revolution was, like many revolutions, a good and necessary thing that went quite a bit too far; I don’t think that homosexuality, or contraception, or premarital sex are necessary wrong, for example. But with increased freedom should come increased responsibility as well. The first question, and the most basic question, should echo Christ’s question to Peter: “Do you love me?”, and in any sexual relationship, the answer to that question should be ‘yes’, in the full and complete sense that Christ meant it, and we shouldn’t, like Peter did, try to qualify or limit that. Sex is intended to be an expression of the deepest and most intimate union- physical, emotional, and spiritual- of which we are capable in this life, and outside that relational context, it’s not serving its full purpose, and is being robbed of its true nature. Unfortunately, many of us when asked that question can’t truly and fully answer ‘yes’. So many people don’t think about the reality that every sexual act involves a small, but real, possibility of creating a new human life, and don’t ask themselves if they would be willing to help take responsibility for that life if the birth control failed. But how can that failure to think about the other person’s needs really be called love? A great many other people answer ‘yes’, but that answer only lasts, in their mind, for a couple days or weeks, and again, how can something that ephemeral really be called love? I can’t help but think that if more people really thought about that question, and how they would answer it- and asked themselves if they really could answer ‘yes’ before taking a relationship to the next level- that we would have fewer unwanted pregnancies, fewer abortions, fewer broken hearts, fewer divorces and broken relationships; and most of all, less casual and uncommitted sex at nightclubs, parties, et cetera. <br /><br />This is a question that we face not merely in personal relationships, though, but in the life of nations as well. Simone Weil said that what we call love for our country can involve two separate and mutually opposed kinds of loves; and that here, our moral failing is usually not that we don’t love our country enough, but that we love it with the wrong kind of love. True love for our country should involve compassion and honesty; we should love it as a parent loves their child, having a realistic understanding of where it goes wrong, of the good things as well as the bad things in its history, and should strive at all times to correct our nation and to make it better. Corrupt love for our country tends to see it as something incapable of evil, something objectively better than other countries, a false idol that we “exalt above all that is called God.” We tend to hear this a lot these days from political leaders who tell us that America is the greatest country in the world, or is in some sense an expression of God’s desires for humanity. Really? Was slavery in the American South an expression of a nation ‘under God’? Was Jim Crow? Was the genocide perpetrated against the Native Americans? Was the colonization of the Philippines? Was the development of monopolistic capitalism, that threw vast numbers of people off their lands and out of their workplaces as huge fortunes were consolidated into the hands of a few? Was the development of an economy based on consumption, greed, the desire to make more money and have more nice things than one’s fellows, was that an expression of God’s will? Was the destruction of the natural environment? What about American support of tyrants throughout Latin America in the name of anticommunism? What about the Vietnam War? What about Hiroshima? <br /><br />Other countries have committed sins of their own, of course. But ours should be our special concern, precisely because they are ours, and should keep us from seeing the United States as an especially good or especially perfect country. Love for one’s country. like love for one’s child, should not lead us to see them as better then they are, or to deny their human flaws, or to try to persuade them that they are perfect just the way they are. My old high school principal, an Episcopal priest, used to say that a very unhelpful, and very common thing to tell a kid in school is that they are ‘perfect just the way they are’. That isn’t true love, that is idolatry. We can all see this kind of distorted, unhealthy love in the way that some parents try to go into their kids’ schools and talk the teachers into giving them a better grade then they deserve. We should see that the same kind of distorted love for our country is equally unhealthy. To really and truly love our country means trying to correct her and make her better than what she is today: as St. Augustine says, “Love, and do as you wish. If you accept, accept through love; if you correct, correct through love….in all things, let the root of love be within, for of that root can spring no evil.” If we could answer the question that our country asks of us, “Do you love me?” with the answer that Christ sought, and not the answer that Peter gave, how much better would we be, and our world as well.<br /><br />For this is what Christ calls us to do: when we are asked this question, as we are all asked implicitly or explicitly, sometime in our lives, to think about our answer. He wants us to answer ‘yes’, and most of us at some level want to answer ‘yes’ too, but often we don’t think about what that ‘yes’ involves. Christ calls us to a kind of love that is deeper, more lasting, and more complete than that which we are capable of on our own. He sanctified all of our human loves, but he also showed us through his life, that they were just aspects of an even greater love, and gave us hints of what that self-emptying, self-denying love might be like: “Charity seeketh not her own.” He warned Peter, as he warned us, of the cost that love sometimes involved, by predicting his crucifixion: “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, When thou wast young, thou girdest thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not. This spake he, signifying by what death he should glorify God.” But he also showed Peter the great and unbounded power of that love, when he forgave Peter the shame of his terrible betrayal. Let’s think about this beautiful, and powerful passage, and about the love that forgives wrongs and reconciles friends, and let’s try to make sure that in our own lives, when we are asked the question that Christ asked Peter, we can answer ‘yes’ with truth, with sincerity, and with understanding and acceptance of what it involves. <br /><br />Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7008813786806083758.post-3844375141707946762010-04-19T09:02:00.001-07:002010-04-19T09:02:59.892-07:00Hymn of the day....To the tune of 'Aurelia'. By Samuel John Stone, 1866.<br /><br />The church’s one Foundation<br />Is Jesus Christ her Lord;<br />She is his new creation<br />By water and the Word:<br />From heav’n he came and sought her<br />To be his holy bride;<br />With his own blood he bought her,<br />And for her life he died.<br /><br />Elect from ev’ry nation,<br />Yet one o’er all the earth,<br />Her charter of salvation<br />One Lord, one faith, one birth;<br />One holy Name she blesses,<br />Partakes one holy food.<br />And to one hope she presses,<br />With ev’ry grace endued.<br /><br />Though with a scornful wonder<br />Men see her sore oppressed,<br />By schisms rent asunder,<br />By heresies distressed,<br />Yet saints their watch are keeping,<br />Their cry goes up, “How long?”<br />And soon the night of weeping<br />Shall be the morn of song.<br /><br />The church shall never perish!<br />Her dear Lord to defend,<br />To guide, sustain and cherish<br />Is with her to the end;<br />Though there be those that hate her,<br />And false sons in her pale,<br />Against or foe or traitor<br />She ever shall prevail.<br /><br />‘Mid toil and tribulation,<br />And tumult of her war,<br />She waits the consummation<br />Of peace for evermore;<br />Till with the vision glorious<br />Her longing eyes are blest,<br />And the great church victorious<br />Shall be the church at rest.<br /><br />Yet she on earth hath union<br />With the God the Three in One,<br />And mystic sweet communion<br />With those whose rest is won:<br />O happy ones and holy!<br />Lord, give us grace that we,<br />Like them, the meek and lowly,<br />On high may dwell with thee.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7008813786806083758.post-23294258220239243642010-04-18T08:02:00.000-07:002010-04-19T09:00:10.170-07:00"My Lord and My God": Reflections on Thomas Sunday<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S8shmON3fJI/AAAAAAAAABE/Fc9pKAzevCg/s1600/st_thomas_icon.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 292px; height: 294px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S8shmON3fJI/AAAAAAAAABE/Fc9pKAzevCg/s320/st_thomas_icon.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5461495913651862674" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S8shS_u6zRI/AAAAAAAAAA8/efz39d8fW3w/s1600/6a00e54ee5cc5b8833011571817e14970b-500wi.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 214px; height: 320px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S8shS_u6zRI/AAAAAAAAAA8/efz39d8fW3w/s320/6a00e54ee5cc5b8833011571817e14970b-500wi.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5461495583346445586" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S8shO5u8tYI/AAAAAAAAAA0/-zdZFM9OrJ0/s1600/Chennai_St_Thomas_Mount_Church.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 300px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S8shO5u8tYI/AAAAAAAAAA0/-zdZFM9OrJ0/s320/Chennai_St_Thomas_Mount_Church.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5461495513016481154" /></a><br />Last Sunday, the first Sunday after Easter, commemorates the appearance of Christ to Thomas the Apostle; for that reason it’s called Thomas Sunday, or alternatively Low Sunday. It’s always been a particularly meaningful day to me, for reasons I’ll go into below. I was actually at church services on Saturday night and Sunday last weekend so got to hear two different takes on the Gospel reading; here is my own take.<br /><br />I’m fascinated by Thomas because, first and foremost, he was the Apostle to my people. He was martyred, around 72 A.D., in Mylapore in Southern India, after a career of evangelization that had led him through the Middle East, through Persia, and through India. Mylapore (by interpretation, ‘City of the Peacock’) is the neighborhood of Madras, India where my maternal grandmother grew up, and where a number of my relatives on my mother’s side still live, and where I have visited several times since I was a child; the family home is just a few miles from the Tomb of St. Thomas. I visited there about two and a half years ago, the last time I visited India. St. Thomas is very important to the Christians of Southern India- though we are now divided between Roman Catholic, Anglican, Protestant, Greek Orthodox, Nestorian*, and Jacobite** confessions, we all tend to respect his memory, and some Indian churches even take his name (‘Mar Thoma’, or ‘Father Thomas’). The Apostles were bidden by Christ to “go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost”; Thomas’ particular calling was to show the love of Christ to my ancestors, to the people of my blood, and so I feel that I have a particular spiritual bond to him. My people were his special concern in life, and I hope, he still watches over us from his throne in the communion of saints today as well. <br /><br />I’m fascinated by him, too, because he is an example of doubt- doubt that was temporary, answered, and sublimated into a stronger faith than ever, but still doubt nonetheless- for an age which is, quintessentially, an age of doubt. We live in an era in which very little is taken on faith, in which some people feel driven to doubt and question everything. Natural science itself demands a certain faith that the universe is orderly, lawful, reasonable, and that honest and objective inquiry can uncover the truth, but in the late twentieth century with the rise of the toxic ideas of postmodernism, people have begun to doubt even that. We can identify ourselves with Thomas, and see ourselves in him, and hope that as with him, our doubts may be dispelled, our questions answered, and we may experience the kind of revelation that he did. Thomas is the perfect and quintessential apostle for an age in which we wonder if we can have faith. <br /><br />Lastly, I’m fascinated because of the traditions that attached to him after his death, but are consistent with the scriptural evidence. If we put together the accounts in John’s Gospel with the traditions and noncanonical writings attributed to Thomas- the ‘Acts of Thomas’, the ‘Gospel of Thomas’, and the like- we get a picture of someone who was very attached and drawn to dualistic ideas: the idea that evil is a great power in this world, that it is something independent, real, and strong against which good needs to struggle, that this world is under the domination of evil, and is something that we should strive to escape, not to enjoy. Taken too far, of course, these ideas can slide into dangerous errors- Manichaeanism, most famously, which held that the world itself was created by the evil counter-god, equally powerful to the true God, and was irredeemable. But there’s little reason to believe Thomas ever himself slid into the error of thinking the world was essentially evil and irredeemable. The picture one gets from reading the ‘Acts of Thomas’ seems to have dualistic ideas pretty much as far as one can, while still remaining faithful to Christ and to the basic essence of the Christian faith. I’ve always found the dualistic heresies very interesting, and felt that for all their many errors, they were on to something in their sense that evil was something independent, eternal, and powerful, to be struggled against and taken seriously, not simply a ‘privation of the good’ to be laughed away. I think Thomas was drawn to some of those ideas too, which makes the story of his ‘conversion’ to belief in the Resurrection- a physical and literal Resurrection- all the more powerful. More on that in a minute.<br /><br />People sometimes talk about Thomas as though he was morally culpable for his inability to have faith- some yahoo preacher was saying this on Family Life Radio last year, which I found too annoying for words. Let’s remember that Thomas was the one who had had the courage and love for Christ to exhort the Apostles to be willing to share in his martyrdom: “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” He was no shrinking violet. Let’s remember too, that “Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus was not with them when Jesus came”, and he had to accept the Resurrection of the God whom he had seen die, on the testimony of others. Would you have accepted it? Their belief can’t be compared to his: they had seen the risen Christ firsthand. Thomas hadn’t. Peter had doubted at first, as had the other apostles, and it had taken a miracle to convince them, just as with Thomas.<br /><br />Thomas was a pessimist; he had said, “Let us also go [and] die with him”, because he was realistic enough about this fallen world, dominated by evil, that he knew that living a good life is seldom easy, and often leads only to suffering and tribulation. Out of that pessimism flowed an unwillingness to believe what seemed like it was too good to be true. How great would your happiness be if you knew that the One to whom you had pledged your life had miraculously conquered death and hell, and allowed you to conquer it too? But conversely, how much greater would your pain and despair be if you learned later that that hope had been misplaced, and that the Enemy had merely been toying you, showing you the vision of liberty, of beautiful green gardens and blue skies, of children playing in the fields and birds in the air, before slamming your cell door and enclosing you in darkness forever? Villiers de Lisle Adam’s short story ‘The Torture of Hope’ explores this well. It is the story of Aser Abarbanel, an old Spanish Jew proud of tracing his lineage back to the Judges of Israel, who languishes in the prisions of the Inquisition, on the night before his execution at the stake. The Inquisition allows him to escape, by leaving doors open and halls unguarded, and set no barrier in his way as he races to freedom: and then, when he is finally leaping out into the sunlight, into freedom, he feels the Inquisitor’s hand on his shoulder, and “Aser Abarbanel with protruding eyes gasped in agony in the ascetic's embrace, vaguely comprehending that all the phases of this fatal evening were only a prearranged torture, that of HOPE….” St. Thomas knew, at some level, how bitter such a torture could be. He didn’t refuse to believe in Christ, he refused, temporarily, to believe in his friends, precisely because he knew, and feared, how great the torture of hope, of false hope, of hope betrayed, could be.<br /><br />Oscar Wilde, once said this: “Once in his life may a man send his soul away, but whoever receives back his soul must keep it with him forever, and this is his punishment and his reward.” That could serve as the story of Thomas’ life, as well. He who had, momentarily, wavered in his faith and been unable to rely on the testimony of his friends, returned with a stronger faith then ever. In the Gospel of St. John, it is Thomas who is the first of the Apostles (leaving aside the Prologue itself) who confesses that Jesus Christ is God: “My Lord and My God!” This acclamation, so powerful in its humility, its faith, and its love, is what Christians used to say (beginning in the thirteenth century) at the point in the Eucharist where the priest elevates and displays the Host; it’s no longer said explicitly, either in Catholic or Anglican churches, but we should still say it to ourselves silently. Those words come from Thomas, and they are a reminder to us, not just of Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist, but of Thomas’ return to a stronger faith then ever. That we honour Thomas in this way is a powerful sign of how doubt can lead us to a stronger faith.<br /><br />How strong was the faith of Thomas? It was strong enough to lead him to sell himself into slavery to finance his trip to Persia and India. It was strong enough to live for twenty years, a stranger in a strange land, driven by his faith and love to heal the sick, to care for the suffering, to carry out miracles, to war against devils and evil powers, and to spread the gospel of Christ. According to fourth-century traditional accounts of the Assumption of Mary, he was brought back to Ephesus by a miracle shortly after Mary’s death, and was the only one privileged to see her assumed into heaven; and the one who had doubted the word of the apostles was now the one on whom the responsibility fell to convince the others. “And the apostles….all asked pardon of the blessed Thomas, on account of the benediction which the blessed Mary had given him, and because he had seen the holy body going up into heaven.” Regardless of what you believe about this story- and I think the Assumption certainly happened, whether or not we have an accurate account- this is a beautiful example of how God allows us to change ourselves, and how his providence puts us, in our lives, into positions where we can for the first time see things from other people’s points of view, just like in trying to convince the skeptical apostles, Thomas could experience what it was like not just not to believe, but also not to be believed. Thomas’ faith led him, finally, sentenced to death for encouraging the wife of the King of Madras to embrace celibacy, to walk up onto the hill outside Mylapore, in the company of four soldiers, to pray, and then to accept his death with these words: “Fulfil the commands of the one who sent you.” His last prayer, we are told, before he was riddled with spears ended with this beautiful line: “I have become a bondman; therefore to-day do I receive freedom.” Death, for Thomas, represented final freedom because there would now be no separation any longer between him and his beloved Lord. <br /><br />It’s the nature of God to bring good out of evil, and to turn the Enemy’s designs to good ends. That is why Goethe’s devil says, “I am a part of that power/ That always willeth evil, and always worketh good.” In the same way, Our Lord took the doubts of Thomas and turned them towards good, making them serve purposes that Thomas could never have foreseen. In the story of Thomas’ conversion we see some of the major challenges that would convulse the Christian faith for the next two thousand years, set forth in advance and refuted in advance as well. Consider again the Lord’s challenge to Thomas: “Reach hither thy finger and behold my hands; reach hither thy hand and thrust it into my side….”. Within eighty years after the Crucifixion, schools of thought would arise that held that Christ had merely appeared to be human, and had been a purely divine being that never actually took on human flesh. These groups, persisting for several centuries, often claimed inspiration from Thomas, and their beliefs that Christ was not truly a human person tended to grow out of an exaggerated dualism (which Thomas appears to have held to a lesser degree). Through asking Thomas to touch his hands and side, Christ refuted the Docetists*** in advance, and used Thomas himself as the vehicle by which those who claimed to be intellectual disciples of Thomas were refuted. And this, incidentally, is one hint that the Gospels were faithful recordings of the truth and not works of propaganda composed to fit an agenda: the teachings in them were often unclear to people at the time, and their full meaning would only become evident centuries later. One gets the sense reading them that the writers did not fully understand what they were writing, but wrote nonetheless as the facts compelled them to do.<br /><br />The Docetists of the succeeding centuries would claim over and over again that Christ was _only_ divine and not human as well, and that he lacked a human body; but though they would appeal to Thomas, the testimony of Christ through Thomas himself refuted them. Thomas, who had leanings towards Docetism, was made the vehicle and agent of the refutation of Docetism, by which the Faith was spared from a particularly dangerous and ever-present intellectual threat. This is another sign that what we have to deal with here is the mysterious and the miraculous, and not merely the mundane: no human wisdom, but only the divine wisdom of Christ the Incarnate Word could have chosen the most Docetic of the apostles to refute Docetism, just as he picked the despised tax collector Matthew to preach Christ to the very people from whom he had collected the hated Roman taxes, and the student of the Law, Paul, to refute the idea that the Law saves us. There can be no better symbol, for our time and for all times, of the way Christ brings good out of evil, and how he turns even our weaknesses and faults to good ends: “For my power is made perfect in weakness.”<br /><br />Doubt is not evil, nor is it a sickness: it is an inextricable part of the human condition. The ability to have faith also presupposes the ability to doubt. Christ himself was racked by doubt in the Garden, when we are told that “in an agony he prayed more fervently, and his sweat became as it were great drops of blood falling upon the ground”, and then again when he hung on the cross and said, “Eli, eli, lama sabachthani?” The doubt that Thomas experienced came about for good reason, and was an expression of a natural, and healthy, pessimism that is a necessary bulwark against following every rumour or fad that comes down the pike. But it’s important to remember, too, especially in our skeptical age, that Thomas did not remain in his state of doubt, and that when his doubts were resolved, his faith was deepened and strengthened to a greater degree than ever, such that for the first time he confessed Christ’s true divinity. As the great book ‘Life of Pi’ said, while doubt is a natural part of the human condition, “choosing doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation”.<br /><br />There’s a lot more to say about Thomas, and I could talk for many more essays about him: delving into the stories about his journey to India, his experiences there, and his struggle against a great devil in the form of a serpent. I’d encourage you all to look at the ‘Acts of Thomas’: though it’s neither history nor canonical scripture, there’s lots of powerful and compelling testimony there, much of which makes reference to historical figures that only someone well acquainted with first century India would know, and I believe there’s much truth there. But that’s another story, for another time. The story for us today is the story of that night a week after Our Lord rose from the dead, when Thomas became the vehicle by which Our Lord proved he had a real body and human nature, when his doubts were conquered and his faith turned into something stronger than ever and unwavering even unto death, and in which his power was made perfect in Thomas’ momentary weakness.<br /><br />Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us. Look kindly on those who struggle to believe, on those who have lost their faith, on those who have never had faith, and on those who are waiting for a sign of your presence. Have mercy on all those who seek the truth with a sincere heart, and lead them, as you led Thomas, to know you, who alone are the Truth. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. <br /><br /><br />*The Nestorians (a small group of Christians in Iraq, Iran and India) hold that Christ comprised two separate persons, the divine Word and the human Jesus<br />**The Jacobites (or Syrian) Church holds (along with the churches of Armenia, Egypt and Ethiopia) that Christ had a single nature that comprised divine and human aspects<br />***Docetism is the belief that Christ was fully God, but lacked a human body and only appeared to be a manUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7008813786806083758.post-80958129689707745002010-04-04T06:15:00.000-07:002010-04-04T10:49:06.309-07:00My favourite Easter hymn....<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S7jRCH1fe0I/AAAAAAAAAAU/p9rIPAiLI5c/s1600/tissot-mary-magdalene-and-the-holy-women-at-the-tomb-2.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 272px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S7jRCH1fe0I/AAAAAAAAAAU/p9rIPAiLI5c/s320/tissot-mary-magdalene-and-the-holy-women-at-the-tomb-2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5456340782952708930" /></a><br />Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!<br /><br />The strife is o'er, the battle done, <br />The victory of life is won, <br />The song of triumph has begun, <br />Alleluia!<br /><br />The powers of Death have done their worst,<br />But Christ their legions hath dispersed,<br />Let shout of holy joy outburst,<br />Alleluia!<br /><br />The three sad days are quickly sped,<br />He rises glorious from the dead,<br />All honour to our risen Head,<br />Alleluia!<br /><br />He closed the yawning gates of Hell, <br />The bars from Heaven's high portals fell,<br />Let hymns of praise his triumphs tell,<br />Alleluia!<br /><br />Lord, by the stripes that wounded thee,<br />From death's dread chains thy people free,<br />That we may live and sing to thee,<br />Alleluia!<br /><br />Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!<br /><br />- Unknown 12th century author, translated by William Pott (1861)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7008813786806083758.post-74841837119821784912010-04-03T13:15:00.001-07:002010-04-11T20:20:18.652-07:00Sealed in blood: a meditation on the Passion of our Lord<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S7k7mjc79KI/AAAAAAAAAAk/X1FxhbqcTPA/s1600/0.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S7k7mjc79KI/AAAAAAAAAAk/X1FxhbqcTPA/s320/0.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5456457957073745058" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S7k7Wwf1l6I/AAAAAAAAAAc/aEPqONDL8Yk/s1600/CrucifixionTheIsenheimerAltarpieces.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 289px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S7k7Wwf1l6I/AAAAAAAAAAc/aEPqONDL8Yk/s320/CrucifixionTheIsenheimerAltarpieces.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5456457685697664930" /></a><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S7jBVKT8xiI/AAAAAAAAAAM/h57fCLbwE1k/s1600/James_Tissot_Mater_Dolorosa_400.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 220px; height: 320px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S7jBVKT8xiI/AAAAAAAAAAM/h57fCLbwE1k/s320/James_Tissot_Mater_Dolorosa_400.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5456323517848798754" /></a><br />Yesterday was Good Friday, the day that Jesus Christ was executed. I'd like to express some thoughts about this occasion, the most solemn day in the Christian year, before the Easter Vigil this evening. The Passion moves me to tears, literally, and it has ever since I read the accounts for the first time, years ago. No less so today. <br /><br />This is the day that God the Incarnate Word, God in human form, hung upon the cross. For our sakes, not merely for all of us, but for each of us. For your sins, and for mine, and for those of Herod and Pilate, and Barabbas, and for those of his own disciples, and for every leper and sick woman who came to him, and for those of Lazarus, and Cyrus, and David, and Manasseh, and Antiochus, and Sennacherib. This is the day that Our Lord endured the agony in the garden, the scourging by Herod's men, the interrogation of Pilate, the mockery of the crowd, the blows of the Roman soldiers, the nails in his hands and feet, the crown of thorns, the spear in his side. This is the day that the Perfect Man, the Second Person of the Trinity, endured the shameful death of a common criminal, and endured the mockery and abuse, physical and mental, of those whom he had come to save. <br /><br />"He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Christ of God, the Chosen One" jeered the crowd. But, of course, that wasn't his purpose. The nature of God is to love, and love demands an object, it takes no fulfilment in itself, for as it is said, "Charity seeketh not her own". Or as William Blake, a great poet given to dualist-Christian strains of spirituality said, "Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care." For all of eternity, even when our world and our universe didn't exist, the Father and the Son had poured out love for one another. Jesus Christ was more than happy, at the slightest hint of a request, to save, succour, and help others. But He who could multiply loaves and fishes to feed five thousand people would not turn stones to bread to feed himself, and He who could save others from death refused to turn aside from his own fate. Even at the last, he could called on his father, and been freed by "more than twelve legions of angels", but He who was the master of fate, at the moment of his death, chose to submit and die. <br /><br />"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Even in the hour of his death, Our Lord remained the good shepherd that did not fail to think of his flock more than of himself. As he walked up the hill to the Place of the Skull, bleeding from the wounds of scourging, his head torn by the crown of thorns, so weak that they needed Simon the Cyrenian to carry his cross for him, he heard the weeping of those in the crowd who felt for him, and his first thought was not of his misery but of theirs. "Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children". Christ forgave those that mocked, beat, and crucified him, to the last man, pleading their ignorance to His Father, the author of justice. He thought not only of the mothers and daughters of Jerusalem but of his own mother, whose perpetual virginity had left her childless and alone, and as he hung on the cross, dehydrated from blood loss, his parched lips wet only with the taste of vinegar, his suffocating lungs straining with each word, he granted the care of the Virgin Mother of God to John the Beloved, his best friend and the one to whom, one day, he would appear in glory and grant a vision of the Last Things. "When Jesus therefore saw his mother, and the disciple standing by, whom he loved, he saith unto his mother, Woman, behold thy son!" <br /><br />And most intimately of all, as he slowly died of suffocation, thirst, and blood loss, his very body disintegrating as it had begun to do the night before, when in his agony the vessels in his body began to rupture and "his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground", with the crowd jeering at him, the soldiers casting lots for his clothing as had been foretold centuries earlier, he heard a voice of praise and humility from the very last place it could have been expected. The dying criminal hanging next to him accepted his guilt and deserved punishment, contrasted his own guilt with Christ's innocence, and said to Christ simply, 'Remember me'. Not asking for salvation, or for release, or for any benefit of his own, but merely asking to be remembered. And he received the promise, the greatest promise ever made to a man, "Verily I say to you, this day shalt thou be with me in paradise." <br /><br />Church tradition tells us this man's name was Dysmas, that he was freed that very day, when Christ descended into hell to preach to the dead, and that he entered as among the first saints into the kingdom of heaven. The orthodox account in the Gospel of Luke suggests that the criminal said this in response to the other criminal's challenge, "If thou art the son of God, save thyself and us'. But the extra-canonical Gospel of Peter, providing an alternative (and quite nearly as old) passion narrative puts it a little differently: here Dysmas takes the initiative, challenging the crowd, 'We have been made suffer thus because of the wrong that we have done; but this one, having become Savior of men, what injustice had he done to you?' This portrays him in a more assertive light, not merely failing to be evil but actually, in the last moments of his life, taking a stand in favour of the good. <br /><br />"Verily I tell you, this day shalt thou be with me in Paradise." None of us is truly lost until the end: the story of St. Dysmas shows us that even in our last moments, on our deathbed (or who knows, maybe even in the next life) we may be confronted with the Presence of God and have the opportunity to turn away from evil. And we can be delivered from evil just as Dysmas was.The accounts given by Luke and by the anonymous author of the Gospel of Peter give us warning, though. The crowd, even seeing this last expression of love and forgiveness, still contained those who continued to be obdurate in their hatred and contempt for the good. There are those who would rather embrace hatred and evil, as self-destructive and unhappy as they are, then admit they were wrong. The orthodox accounts suggest that the soldiers had no need to break the legs of Christ because he was already dead, but the author of 'Peter' says this was done as a deliberate act of malice, to make His death slower and more painful, out of spite for Dysmas' repentance. "And having become irritated at him, they ordered that there be no leg-breaking, so that he might die tormented." There are people and beings who hate good more than they love anything in its own right, and whose driving principles are almost purely negative: to destroy what they dislike rather than to build up what they like. The soldiers are among them; watching this Divine Man die in agony, all they could think about was who would get his clothing, and were more interested in quibbling over a carpenter's meager clothes than having the slightest touch of sympathy or compassion for him. And when challenged and rebuked by a dying criminal who might easily have chosen to think of his own plight rather than think about the injustice done to Jesus, they chose to sneer at him and out of spite, to make the death more painful even then it already was. And in that act they chose their side, as much as the repentant thief Dysmas chose his. All of us, when confronted with the presence of God, have the choice to accept Him or to deny him, and if we choose not to love him then we will hate him. As Fr. Alexandre Kalomiros says, "In the same furnace steel shines like the sun, whereas clay turns dark and is hardened like stone."<br /><br />"He was in the world, and the world was made by him, yet the world knew him not." The soldiers saw Love Incarnate on the cross, and there souls were turned to hate just as the soul of the thief and the Jewish women were turned to love, for as John the Beloved Disciple tells us, "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not." No one can remain untouched by that Presence, and if we do not soften our hearts and turn to him then we become hardened and turn away from him. There is no neutrality when are brought face to face with "Love Divine, all loves excelling": the direct experience of Christ will inspire in each of us either an overwhelming attraction or an overwhelming revulsion, and confirm us either in obedience or rebellion; it will no longer leave us the shelter of ignorance. That is why Christ gave us that terrifying warning, "If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have had sin: but now they have no cloak for their sin." To have a genuine religious experience is a very serious business, because it strips from us the cloak of ignorance, the genuine and innocent lack of knowledge of an honest atheist or a child, that excuses so much. When we see Christ we are, finally, "without excuse", and face at last the terrible responsibility of choosing to join either the repentant thief or the sadistic soldiers. <br /><br />"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." This was the divine mercy and love of Christ, that even in the hour of his death, he refused to be touched by rancor or by bitterness towards his persecutors. He who had told his followers, "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you", was never unfaithful to his own words, not even when he was dying a more painful and more agonizing death than he could have imagined, betrayed by Judas and denied by Peter, mocked by the crowd that had hailed him five days earlier. This was truly the last temptation of the Enemy, of whom it had been said that at the end of the forty days in the desert, he 'departed until an opportune time'. That opportune time, for the last and greatest temptation, the temptation to spill the cup his Father had given him instead of drinking, to refuse to say 'Thy will, not mine, be done', had begun last night on the Thursday when He prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane. He had then been pitched on the knife edge between faith and despair, as much as when he was standing of the knife edge of Solomon's Portico and the Enemy said, "If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down...." And that excruciating moment of temptation stretched on, and on, until three o'clock on the next day when Jesus Christ breathed his last. He must have thought about how he could get out of this mess- by denying his Divinity, by denying his Kingship, by pleading with Pilate, by demonstrating miracles to Herod, by calling upon the holy angels. But to the last, he stayed faithful, and death with the last temptation as he had dealt with all the others, and saying in so many words, "Retro me, Satanas." <br /><br />"He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Christ of God, the Chosen One." No: the true Christ of God, infused to the last cell of his body with the love and charity that comes down from heaven, thought in his dying three hours of the Blessed Virgin Mary, of the Beloved Disciple, of the faithful women of Jerusalem weeping over his death, of the condemned and repentant criminal next to him, of the crowd who in their ignorance and weakness consented to his death. Perhaps he thought of others too, but he didn't think of himself. He pleaded from the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" But like Job, who had said, "Though he slay me, yet shall I trust in him", he remained humble and obedient and did not see, even in his most forsaken hour, a licence to betray his calling. <br /><br />"Eli, eli, lama sabachthani?" The extra-canonical Gospel of Peter dates from probably the late first century; it was treated as credible by some of the Church Fathers and probably represents an independent testimony of the Passion, differing in many details (but not in theological import) from the canonical gospels. It puts this famous saying differently, "My power, my power, why hast thou forsaken me?" We can compare these two accounts and see something quite interesting (it's quite possible Jesus said the same thing in two slightly different ways). In the extra-biblical account, Jesus is confessing that the 'power' which animated him was the same as the power of God, and that he had, within himself, a divine nature as well as a human one. <br /><br />"And it was then about the sixth hour, and darkness fell over the earth until the ninth hour; and the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst." As the moment of death, the moment at which the power of evil became triumphant, for a day, over the Author of Good, the moment at which God Incarnate died the death of a criminal, and at which rebellious humans succeeded in killing the one who had come "that they might have life and have it abundantly", the world itself seemed to quake at the horrendous injustice done to him through whom this world itself was made. We are told of the great eclipse and earthquake by Matthew, and Luke, and the author of 'Peter'; Matthew backs up the sense of how much this represented the overturning of the natural order by telling us that a number of dead people broke from their graves and came back to life, in a kind of creepy foreshadowing of the Resurrection which would come in a day and a half. When this earth's Author and Maker was put to death, the earth itself seemed to shudder in horror. <br /><br />"The veil of the temple was rent in the midst." The great earthquake that tore in half the curtain of the Temple, which revealed the secret inner sanctum which was meant to be forever concealed, must have been seen as a terrible portent; "Now when the centurion, and they that were with him, watching Jesus, saw the earthquake, and those things that were done, they feared greatly, saying, Truly this was the Son of God". It would be like an earthquake ripping appart St. Peter's Basilica or the temple at Tirupathi, though more so, for the Jews much more than Hindus or Christians had a sense of God's total otherness. They believed the inner sanctum, behind the veil, was consecrated to the Most High God, and only the High Priest himself, on one day of the year, could enter into the Presence without being struck dead. The tearing apart of the veil would have been seen as ipso facto evidence, terrifying and numinous, that a great sacrilege had happened. Whether or not this earthquake was a miracle, there is evidence from non-Christian Greek sources, cited by Eusebius of Caesarea, that a great earthquake did rock the eastern Mediterranean in the year 32-33 AD, and there may have been Roman records, noted by one 'Thallus' of a great eclipse over Judaea as well. We normally draw a sharp distinction between the spiritual and natural universes, but perhaps here is one of those few instances where the separation breaks down, as it does during any miracle, and where nature itself seemed to be overturned by the enormity of what had just happened. As the earthquake was a natural disaster, the tearing of the temple veil was a supernatural one, that foreshadowed in an eerie way the destruction of the Temple itself forty years over, and that must have struck the people of Jerusalem as a terrible omen.<br /><br />"It is finished," said the Lord, in Latin "Consummatum est." The English translation does not do justice (and who knows, Christ may have used Latin). Christ was saying, "It is accomplished", or perhaps, "It is consummated." Romantic love is (very often) consummated by the act of coitus, and if the woman is a virgin, then this may involve blood. Christ's consummation of his love for fallen humanity, too, was sealed in blood, the blood that poured from his torn forehead and his pierced hands and feet. The blood of the virgin's bed when she surrenders to her lover recapitulates the blood through which the love of Christ and his Bride was consummated. It is, of course, a commonplace observation, made by innumerable theologians, poets and mystics down the ages (and interestingly enough, the Hindus have an equivalent theological concept) that erotic love, and the act of coitus, are at their best a carnal figure of a spiritual reality, symbolizing and incarnating (in the literal sense of the word) not merely the spiritual communion between lovers, but the everlasting covenant and communion between Christ and fallen Man, which was initiated by the Incarnation, as a romantic relationship is initiated by a first date, and consummated by his death on the cross. It is no accident that in early modern English of Donne and Shakespeare, 'to die' was used as a euphemism for the sexual climax. For something in human nature and in our souls recognizes that there is a hidden, obscure but inescapable connection between pleasure and suffering, between love and death, between sex and the mystery of the Cross. The physical act of love is the closest thing we can experience in this world to perfect union with another, and that perfect union was what God the Son accomplished through his Incarnation, sealed with his blood as the writers of old used to seal letters with wax. Every stroke of the scourge, every blow from the soldiers' fists, every cut from the crown of thorns, every issue of blood from the wounds in his hands, his feet, his side, every drop of blood that mixed with his sweat in the Garden as the red wine mixes with water at the Eucharist, was a further expression of his boundless and perfect love for us, just as every kiss and caress of the lovers is an expression of their love for each other. For as it said, "by his stripes we are healed."<br /><br />"Consummatum est." It is perhaps for that reason that the wounds of Christ, and the streaks of his precious blood, are eternal. When Christ comes again in glory, at the end of the world to defeat the armies of evil, St. John tells us in his Apocalypse that even then, innumerable ages after the Crucifixion, he will bear the wounds of his sacrifice: "He was clad in a vesture dipped in blood, and his name is called the Word of God," and again, "in the midst of the elders stood a lamb as it had been slain." For this act of supreme love was so great and so momentous that it can never be forgotten or diminished, not even visually: Our Lord wears the marks of his suffering forever. For the past can be transcended, and out of evil God brings good, but evil can never be made not to have happened, and the past can never be replayed. Yann Martel, in his bestseller "Life of Pi", puts it well: once a dead God always a dead God, even though resurrected. If God's death was to have any meaning, instead of being a sham and a farce, as Martel puts it, the death must be real, and that means that for the rest of eternity, the Trinity must be in some way wounded by it. I have no idea what Martel's personal faith is, but here he brilliantly puts the essence of the fundamental debate between orthodox Christianity and the Docetic schools of thought, and shows the fundamental flaw of Docetism. Christ accepted that permanent, everlasting injury to himself out of love for us, and for the rest of eternity he wears the marks of his Passion, just as so many military officers wear their decorations for the rest of their lives.<br /><br />"Many bulls have compassed me: strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round", this is what the Lord must have felt in his last minutes, as he remembered the prophecy, "the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet". But he knew that it was worth it, just as a man and a woman, after months of getting to know each other, after building up love through friendship, mutual devotion, and sacrifice, know that it is worth it when they make love for the first time, because in this act of supreme love, Christ knew he was accomplishing something great for his people. He had told his disciples, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man should give up his life for his friends," and being perfect in all ways, he followed this logic to its perfect conclusion. <br /><br />"Consummatum est." And truly, how much was really consummated in that moment? In the moment of his death were consummated the three hours of his dying, the three years of his ministry, the thirty-three years of his life, the countless generations that God had been speaking to the people of Israel, the countless millenia of human history, the many millions of years of animal evolution, the very history of our universe itself. It was all leading up to Christ, its center and its focus, and all those endless ages finally found their purpose when he spoke his last words from the cross: "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit."<br /><br />Amen.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7008813786806083758.post-19301324406169294872010-03-30T19:49:00.000-07:002010-04-03T11:07:22.839-07:00An Unholy Brotherhood: reflections on Phoebe Prince and the Passion of our LordI was unpleasantly surprised this morning, when in my spare time I checked one of the political blogs that I often read, and read about a horrible story that happened earlier this year in South Hadley, Massachusetts. It centered around a young girl of 15, named Phoebe Mary Nora Prince, who had started as a freshman last fall at South Hadley high school. <br /><br />The Boston Globe article commemorating her death, on January 14th, started this way: "Like a lot of kids her age, Phoebe Prince was a swan: beautiful but sometimes awkward." She had just emigrated with her family, from Ireland to western Massachusetts. She had been at that age when most of us feel terribly insecure, nearly all the time, and when what is paramount, on which our happiness and self-confidence depend, is being welcomed and liked by others. She had found a few friends in Hadley, and had briefly dated a senior on the football team- and shortly before her death, had been asked out by another boy. Things could have been happy for her, and in a better world she would have been welcomed, loved, and made to feel at home. Unfortunately, a clique of boys and girls at the school felt that she was getting above herself, and set about to make her life miserable. They tormented her by calling her an 'Irish slut', abusing her verbally and physically, and in general made her life miserably. According to some claims she was sexually assaulted as well, and two older boys have been charged with statutory rape. <br /><br />If she had lived three more years she could have escaped all this, but three years, when you are fifteen, can feel like a lifetime. And that lifetime was too much for this young, vulnerable Irish girl to endure.<br /><br />On January 14th, as she was walking home, a group of teenagers threw a soda can at her, and called her names. This was the straw that broke the camel's back, and that afternoon, in a closet in her home, tormented, alone, and despairing, Phoebe Prince hanged herself. Her body was discovered by her twelve year old sister later that day.<br /><br /><br />This is one of the many times that I consider myself glad that I found Christ in my early 20s, because it allows me to hope that for innocent victims like Miss Prince, who were so cruelly treated by those around them, that the future life may bring a recompense for all the sufferings that they endured in this one. I'm glad that I can pray, with other Christians, this prayer, and mean it with every fiber of my being:<br /><br />Into thy hands, O merciful Saviour, we commend thy servant Phoebe. Acknowledge, we humbly beseech thee, a lamb of thine own flock, a sheep of thine own fold, a sinner of thine own redeeming. Receive her into the arms of thy mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light. Amen. <br /><br />But beyond praying for Phoebe, and for her sister and parents, now returned to Ireland from the country that brought death to their daughter, this sad, and horrible story made me think deeply about human evil. This is a good time to have such thoughts. For the story of the Passion, which we commemorated on Palm Sunday and will remember again this Friday, is perhaps the most stark and vivid example of human evil that Scripture gives us. On this day Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, the Divine Man, the only truly innocent human being in all of history (with the possible exception of his mother) was put to death by crucifixion, and through his torture, agony, and death, became a perfect sacrifice for the sins of the world. In his death all of us are implicated, for my sins, and yours, as much as those of David and Solomon, as much as those of Haman and Sennacherib, put him there. <br /><br />I had the opportunity to attend Palm Sunday services at St. Paul's on K Street this weekend, a beautiful Anglo-Catholic church in D.C., presided over by a young priest named Fr. Nathan Humphrey. In the reading of the long Passion narrative (it was from St. Luke) I was struck by a few things. One of them was the reconciliation of Herod and Pilate. <br /><br />"And Herod with his men of war set him at nought, and mocked him, and arrayed him in a gorgeous robe, and sent him again to Pilate. And the same day Pilate and Herod were made friends together: for before they were at enmity between themselves." <br /><br />Herod and Pilate...what an unlikely pair of comrades. The hereditary monarch and the agent of a supposedly republican empire, the domestic ruler and the foreign procurator, the embodiment of decadent corruption and the embodiment of harsh and efficient militarism. Luke tells us that they hated each other and it's not hard to see why; they probably despised each other in the same sense that the French and Arab Algerians, or the Russians and Poles, or the British and Irish despised each other. A foreign army ruling over a cowed people in a backwater province tends not to have good relationships with its subjects. Yet they both found something common to bond over, in their shared response to Christ. They loved quite different things. Herod had given himself over to adultery and incest, to the sins of the flesh; Pilate had given over his soul to political and economic oppression, to the sins of the world. Yet the sins of the flesh and of the world both eventually trace their origin to the same place. Pilate and Herod were divided over what they loved, but they were united in their shared sense that Christ might be interesting, fascinating, worthy of interrogation- but at the last, he had to be killed.<br /><br />Both of them are, in a sense, tragic figures, because they had the opportunity to redeem themselves, and came so close. Neither of them particularly hated Christ to begin with; Luke tells us that Herod tried to talk to him, and demanded to see miracles done in his presence, and St. John tells us how Pilate interviewed him and asked, with all the stylish weariness of a postmodern intellectual, 'What is truth?' Pilate had the chance to free Christ, as Herod had had the chance to free St. John the Baptist, but at the last they both embraced cowardice and their own darker impulses, and sent him to his death. And in the aftermath of that fateful decision, they became 'friends'. <br /><br />We are told that this had happened earlier, as the Pharisees and the Herodians joined together to make common cause to put Jesus to death. "The Pharisees went out, and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him." Could there be a stranger friendship than that? The fiercely nationalistic Pharisees and the decadent, collaborationist Herodians? These two, again, loved very different things but were united by what, and by whom, they hated. In their shared contempt and fear of Christ, they were drawn together in a kind of diabolic simulacrum of friendship, united not by love but by hatred. <br /><br />Because the nature of fallen man is that one of the quickest routes to friendship and popularity, and one of the quickest ways for people to bond, is through their mutual pleasure in hurting, putting down or excluding another person. This is the lesson that the tragedy of Phoebe Prince tells us. Why did so many young people in that school join together in tormenting her? Some of them probably took pleasure in it, but many more probably were more interested in seeming cool or popular, and knew that they could gain valuable popularity points by making a witty joke or a cutting remark at her expense. Others no doubt knew that by being loyal and sycophantic towards the cool kids, they could move closer to being accepted at least as part of the fringes of one of those high-status circles. All of them, whether through the hatred of the Herodians or the cowardice of Caiaphas, purchased their own popularity at the cost of someone else's suffering. <br /><br />C.S. Lewis, in his essays and his great book "That Hideous Strength", talks a lot about the phenomenon of the Inner Circle. The desire to be well-liked, and to be part of the inner ring, to be welcomed, to belong, is at the heart of a great deal of childhood nastiness. It reached some quite ferocious heights in the boarding schools of his time, and in our own time it has reached even more terrible heights, as we saw this winter when Miss Prince was driven to kill herself by the cruel and callous taunting of her high school classmates. Lewis, in his aforementioned book, draws a connection between this phenomenon in the school environment, and its (generally) more influential and dangerous counterpart in the adult world. In business, in politics, in statesmanship, in the life of the mind, in the arts, we all know of people who are more than willing to bury their love for kindness, mercy, and truth in order to get ahead and to be welcomes as part of an in-group. For it's hard to build a genuine, cohesive in-group based in true love and dedication to pursuing something good; it's much easier to build one based on mocking and excluding those on the outside. <br /><br />The world experienced this in a big way in the mid-20th century. It was often commented on at the time, and has often been remarked on since, how little the various Fascist powers had in common with each other. After all, what could possibly tie together men as different as Stepan Bandera, Mussolini, Franco, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Ezra Pound, Marshal Petain, Codreanu, assorted Christian clerics who gave their support to fascism, and Regent Horthy? Many people couldn't believe a Fascist alliance could last, as each country was fiercely nationalistic; wouldn't they all end up at each other's throats sooner or later? How could fanatical nationalists from traditional enemies like Hungary and Romania, or from Germany and France, or from Christian and Muslim clerical establishments, find themselves on the same team? <br /><br />The answer is, of course, that they all stuck together for quite some time, because they all hated something more than they hated each other. While they all had quite different aspirations and goals, they shared one thing in common, their hatred of the Jews. Hatred of Socialism, and of the idea of a world of equality and justice, was part of it too, but above all, it was the hatred of the Jews that appealed to millions of people across Europe, inside and outside the German-speaking regions, and that for a few dark years seemed as though it would be the key to allowing the Nazi armies to become the world's dominant power, and to establish an empire of tyranny and mass murder that would last for many centuries. The Nazis knew what many of us then and now have forgotten, that hatred can be a stronger unifying and driving principle, and the basis of (at least in this world) tighter bonds between people and nations, than love, and that evil can constitute a kind of deeper and more lasting fraternity then good. Because, as we are told by the Beloved Disciple, the Enemy truly is 'prince of this world'. <br /><br />This is just an example of a more general problem of our fallen world: that we so often seek friendship and community at the expense of others. As Orlando Patterson has argued, the idea of freedom grew out of the experience of slavery, and the great and classic prototypes of liberal democracy- the United States and ancient Greece- were built on the labor of slaves, worked to death for the pleasure of others. The American melting pot, that brought white people together from Slovakia and Greece, Germany and Italy, Ireland and England, and forged them into a unified people with a shared culture, did so by reminding them of one simple fact: that they weren't black and they weren't slaves. In their shared contempt for black people, and in part for the despised and dispossessed Native Americans, they all had something in common, and out of that bond came a kind of unholy brotherhood. <br /><br />Christ came, among other things, to bring us out of ourselves and into friendship with one another, and just as his presence at the wedding in Cana sanctified marriage, his presence at the Last Supper, among his friends the Apostles, sanctified friendship. The medieval Grail romances call the Apostles the greatest society of friends that the world has ever known, and Christ presented his relationship with the apostles as the archetypical friendship: "Henceforth I call you not servants, for the servant knows not what his master doeth, but I call you friends....". Christ brought some very, very different groups of people into friendship with each other: uneducated fishermen and highly educated scholars, Roman centurions and pacifistic hermits, impoverished lepers and rich men like Joseph of Arimathea, pessimists like Thomas and optimists like John, Gentiles and Jews, and soon after his death Persians and Ethiopians, Germans and Arabs. In their shared love for Christ, and in the love that Christ taught them to show to one another, they saw each others as fellow travelers along the way, and that shared purpose made them into friends and brothers. <br /><br />The enemies of Christ, too, had their own kind of brotherhood and their own commonalities. Herod and Pilate, the authorities of church and state, had little in common but were united by their enmity and contempt for the good. As in the twentieth century the great powers of Europe were happy to set aside their differences and form a mutual alliance based on contempt for socialism and the Jews, the powers of the first century set aside their differences when they saw, in Christ, something that they feared and disliked because of the threat that it posed to their way of life. Such 'brotherhoods' or 'friendships' may be ephemeral- they almost certainly are, because the city of man is ultimately divided against itself, because greed and hatred are ultimately divisive and not unitive, and because love cannot exist, in the last analysis, in a place from which the source of all goodness has removed Himself. The Persians, who more than any other nation believed that evil was a self-existent power, coeternal and coequal to good, nevertheless had the wisdom to see that in the long run, the defeat of evil is, and must be, assured. The mutual 'friendships' of men like Herod and Pilate, based on shared guilt and hatred, are ultimately unstable, and in the life to come, where all things good and evil achieve their true nature and measure, they will no longer be able to exist. In the here and now, however, such corrupt imitations of true love and true friendship can be powerful, long lasting, and can seem to triumph, for years and even centuries, powers of evil triumphed on Good Friday.<br /><br />Most of us have experienced this phenomenon in a small way. One of my personal vices is gossip, and I've certainly, to my discredit, often told stories that I shouldn't have. Usually because they were good stories- but I suspect there was often a hidden motivation too, which was to make myself, as the storyteller, seem more interesting, as someone who had something to say, to enliven the conversation. Most of the gossip was harmless, and I've never betrayed things that were spoken in confidence, but there's a reason St. Paul tells us that gossip is a sin, and the reason is that almost inevitably we slide into revealing details- maybe inadvertently- that come at someone's expense. When we do this, to make ourselves seem more interesting or cool, we are, in a small way, trying to pursue friendship in an unhealthy and deformed way. Because true friendship, like that of Christ and John the Beloved, is based not on tearing other people down but on building them up, not on sarcastic or witty jokes at other's expense, but on the much harder and more difficult path of sharing mutual concern, mutual interests, and mutual dedication to a good cause. When we do this, in a small way, we become like Pilate, and recapitulate the sin for which Dante put him at the vestibule of hell, subtitled 'the Great Refuser'.<br /><br />This is the lesson of the Passion, it's the lesson of tragedies like that of Phoebe Prince, and it's the lesson of the great evils of human history: that at a very deep level, we like to have someone to kick around, and that we can sometimes feel most united and like we are sharing something at the deepest level, when what we share comes at the expense of someone else's suffering. This is the evidence that at the core, something within us is corrupt. Good Friday is a great time to remember it, and to remember the depth and darkness of evil in this world. We can take comfort, though, in remembering that after Good Friday comes Easter Sunday, and that in the last analysis we can rest assured in the promise that- not today, or at anytime in this life, but in the great cosmic drama- good is ultimately stronger than evil, and life stronger than death.<br /><br />Incarnate Word of God, you who spilt your blood on the cross for our salvation, have mercy on us. Have mercy especially on those of us like Phoebe Prince who suffer from oppression and abuse, as you suffered; unite their suffering to yours, and as they share in your pain and death let them share in your resurrection and in your eternal kingdom, where there is no more death, no more sorrow, no more mourning, and no more tears. Amen. <br /><br />Amen.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7008813786806083758.post-64061640187426391902010-03-14T05:49:00.000-07:002010-04-05T20:23:24.017-07:00"Take thy stand upon the summit of the temple...."<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S7qpKJfooLI/AAAAAAAAAAs/2yFRaPduP0Y/s1600/satantriedtotemptjesus_tissot1.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 219px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_EqmnMMgCZR4/S7qpKJfooLI/AAAAAAAAAAs/2yFRaPduP0Y/s320/satantriedtotemptjesus_tissot1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5456859890325168306" /></a><br />The second temptation of Our Lord (actually the third, in Luke) is a very interesting one. The three temptations can, in general, be taken to correspond to physical, intellectual, and spiritual temptations. Or they can be associated with the three sources of temptation in Christian liturgy, called picturesquely the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. This second temptation, the offer to demonstrate His Divinity through a spectacular miracle, corresponds to mental temptation, and to the temptations of the World. <br /><br />"And [the Devil] brought him to Jerusalem, and set him on a pinnacle of the temple, and said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down from hence: For it is written, He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee: And in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. And Jesus answering said unto him, It is said, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." Luke 4:9-12. <br /><br />Tradition suggests that the 'pinnacle of the temple' (literally, 'little wing') did not correspond to the actual highest point in the temple, but rather to the roof of Solomon's portico, a point on the southeast wall of the Temple overlooking the Kidron Valley and the Judaean Desert (some translations use 'parapet' instead of 'pinnacle'). Eusebius of Caesarea, in his 'Church History', tells us that this was the very parapet on which James the Just, the cousin* of Jesus Christ and the first Bishop of Jerusalem, would be made to stand on the day of his execution. The early authorities, quoted by Eusebius, tell us that the Jerusalem authorities said to St. James, "Take thy stand, then, upon the summit of the temple, that from that elevated spot thou mayest be clearly seen, and thy words may be plainly audible to all the people," thus seeking his support in putting down the nascent Christian movement through publicly denying Christ. James, however, when faced with temptation on the self-same parapet on which his cousin had stood some forty years earlier, chose this moment to confess his faith, and to declare that 'Christ Himself sitteth in heaven, at the right hand of the Great Power, and shall come on the clouds of heaven." And having confessed his faith at the last, he was thrown down from the temple wall, and his broken body was stoned at the foot of the temple. <br /><br />The story of Christ's temptation was certainly circulating in 69 AD when St. James was killed, as the Gospel of Luke had probably been written many years earlier, and so it's near certain that St. James knew of this story, and that it was running through his mind as he was faced with such a similar temptation to that which his cousin, Our Lord, had faced forty years earlier. As Christ had been tempted to test his faith in the Father, St. James was tempted to deny his faith in God the Son, and with the example of Our Lord in his mind, he chose to honour his faith rather than betray it. History moves in cycles, and repeats itself in strange and mysterious ways; Marx said, 'first as tragedy, the second time as farce', but there was nothing farcical about the martyrdom of James. <br /><br />This second temptation has a curiously modern ring, not least because it is an intellectual temptation, appealing to an intellectual age which more and more seems to have lost its faith. Asking for evidence of the existence of God is a perfectly legitimate endeavour, but too often we ask without any hope of hearing a positive answer, and already half-convinced in his heart that He isn't there. The Enemy was asking Jesus to do something similar- to ask for proof of God's presence and favour not at some vague time in the future, but here and now. He was asking Jesus to challenge God to reveal himself, to _demand_ proof instead of humbly awaiting for it. And if we approach God in that spirit, we haven't yet taken the steps outside ourselves, and the steps into a state of humility and recognition of our own smallness, that allow us to perceive Him. God doesn't reveal himself to us in our states of demanding pride, but in our moments of humble dependence. Jesus already had proofs of God's favour, for example during His baptism in the Jordan; what the Enemy was tempting him to do was to forget what he knew, to abandon his experiences of the divine presence and favour that he had had in the past, and to wilfully choose to give in to his doubts. <br /><br />God the Father had given plenty of evidences of His favour to Jesus Christ over the last thirty years of his life; what He hadn't given was any evidence that he would preserve His Son from death. It was hinted at in the Persians' gift of the myrrh, but Jesus had had no previous reason to believe, prior to the Passion, that God would preserve him and allow him to triumph over death. This was necessary; for if Christ was to remain perfect Man as well as perfect God up until 'all was finished', it was necessary for him to remain perfect in all human virtues including the virtue of faith, and for that reason it was necessary that he not know, for sure, whether death would be the end for him (for none of us really know this, until we finally experience death itself). If Christ had given into the Enemy's temptation and thrown himself off the parapet, one of two things would have happened. Either he would have known, for sure, that God would protect him, and he couldn't have experienced the Cross in doubt and agony, and thus could not have participated fully in the human experience. Or at that moment the hypostatic union would have ended, and the entire purpose of the Incarnation would have been obviated. And either way, the Enemy would have won. <br /><br />This second temptation tells us that the Enemy, too, can quote scripture to his purpose. Here he does so by taking a verse from the Psalms of David out of context, ignoring the fact that it refers to accidents, not to deliberately suicidal falls, and ignoring the broader message that 'you shall not test the Lord thy God'. Scripture taken out of context can be a dangerous thing, indeed, and it takes discernment to recognize it and refute it; the same wisdom and discernment that Jesus showed when he answered the Enemy's temptation with a quotation from Deuteronomy. <br /><br />If we wait, and hope, for a sign from God, I think that we will eventually receive one, just as the Magi received the sign they had so long sought on the day of the Epiphany. But we will never receive the signs we seek unless we lay our hearts truly open to them; and the first step in making our hearts open to God is by ceasing to demand, ceasing to try to receive proof on our schedule, but awaiting those glimpses of the Divine that He chooses, in his own time and in his own way, to give us. The first step in achieving wisdom is, as Mary Doria Russell says in her great science-fiction books, is to recognize that 'I don't understand' is not the same thing as 'This doesn't make sense', and to recognize our own ignorance and smallness in the face of the mysteries of the universe. To seek God in a spirit of challenge, self-confidence, and intellectual pride, as if we are _entitled_ to a miracle, as if we can _demand_ a sign whenever we want one, is to not even begin to take the first step outside ourselves that would be essential to really knowing God. Like friendship, and like love, and like wisdom, you will never receive wonder and awe if you seek it for its own sake. That's the path of those who try to artificially construct mystical experiences through using hallucinogenic drugs; all they can ever get is a pale shadow of the real mystical communion with the Divine. The greatest mystical experience of which we have record, the great apocalyptic vision of John of Patmos, came to him one day after he had finished saying Mass to his congregation. For 'the wind blows where it will', and we cannot demand or expect a revelation of God in any particular moment; all we can do is be hopeful, and faithful, and wait for Him one day to reveal himself, whether it be through a still small voice or through the skies opening and the throne of God being revealed. It is in waiting, and hoping, that we experience God, and the attempt to short cut this process, to artificially seek miracles on demand, is precisely the temptation that the Enemy offered to our Lord in the wilderness, and that in His wisdom and faith he rejected, and through that rejection overcame a second time the sinful nature that afflicts all of us, and took us a step closer to our salvation.<br /><br />Glory to you, Lord Christ, who in the desert experienced the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and overcame them all. Praise to you, Lord Christ, who as a good shepherd wills not that a single one of your flock be lost, and shed your precious blood not merely for all of us but for each of us. All honour to you, Lord Christ, who thought never for a moment of your own good, but devoted the three years of your ministry to healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and heralding the coming of the Kingdom of God. Have mercy on us sinners, in all time of our tribulation and in all time of our prosperity, in the hour of our death and in the day of our judgment. Lamb of God, have mercy on us, and deliver us from all evil, now and in the life to come. Amen.<br /><br />*You will hear some people call James the biological brother of Jesus, and thus deny the perpetual virginity of Mary the Mother of God. They are wrong. St. James and Jude are best understood as cousins of Jesus; Our Lady remained ever virgin, after as well as before the birth of Our Lord.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7008813786806083758.post-17253360831395139762010-03-13T08:52:00.000-08:002010-03-13T09:37:20.516-08:00"Not by bread alone....""And the devil said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, command this stone that it be made bread. And Jesus answered him, saying, It is written, That man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God." Luke 4:3-4.<br /><br />This first temptation recalls a number of other episodes throughout the scriptures. Most clearly, it's a recapitulation of the commandment given to the first couple in the garden, to fast from a particular fruit. (This is myth, not history, of course, and Adam and Eve didn't literally exist; it is, though, a myth charged with meaning. It would have immense and invaluable meaning even as a totally fictional story, if its purpose was to foreshadow Christ. Adam was the myth, the shadow; Christ was the truth, the substance). It also recalls the manna in the wilderness, and it foreshadows the feeding of the five thousand, and the miracle of the Eucharist in which Christ transforms the sacramental bread and wine into His Body and Precious Blood. <br /><br />Why would Christ refuse this temptation? And what sets it apart from the miracle that he did carry out, the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes to feed five thousand people? Several things. First of all, the Enemy, in his diabolic and malevolent wisdom, knew that he could not tempt Christ with evil things, or with the base things of this world; he had to tempt Him with good things. This is the form that temptation so often takes, the choosing of a lesser good in preference to a higher good. As St. Augustine puts it, sins are misdirected virtues. <br /><br />Bread is a good thing; what the Enemy offered Christ was sin because it consisted in choosing the good of bread at the wrong time, under the wrong circumstances, in such a way that it would have ruined the very purpose for which Christ had come to earth. And as sin taints and sullies even its own satisfaction, the very taste of the bread would have become sour in His mouth, and burning in His stomach, as he realised that in accepting that first temptation in the desert, He had vitiated the reason for which he had been born on earth, and deepened the rift between God and Man. For the enemy loves to tempt us to sin and then turn the pleasure of the sin to cardboard on our tongue, to win our souls and give us nothing in return. The Lord, of course, works quite differently, for he is the source from which all good things come. No truly good thing, in the fulness of time, will be denied to those who wait. The day would come when Christ was given the power to turn stones into bread, but in the desert, as he trembled in front of the Enemy, and as all creation was quiet as it awaited for his answer, the answer on which our salvation depended, his time had not yet come, and he knew it. <br /><br />Not merely an issue of timing was involved. Christ had the power to multiply bread for the feeding of others, and to turn water to wine to enliven a wedding festivity. But He would not use his powers for mere selfish gain, not even when he hungered in the desert and longed for bread, or when He hung on the cross, crying out, "I thirst" (John 19:28), and had to be given a few drops of sour wine on a sponge. He who endured in his own body, the piercing of hands and feet, nevertheless had such compassion on the wounds of others that in the very night before he was crucified he healed the ear of the soldier wounded by St. Peter. He who descended to hell in the day of his death, nevertheless as he hung dying, remembered the repentant thief next to him and promised him, 'This day shalt thou be with me in paradise' (Luke 23:43). No doubt he was often sick, and hungry, but the Gospels give us no accounts of any occasions on which he healed himself, or fed himself (and surely such an occasion would have been startling enough, and worthy of inclusion in a historical and apologetic account). He was always dependent on the charity of others, and on the good fortune that God the Father sent his way. He no doubt led a very hard life, one whose hardships were not limited to the Passion, for it was foretold that he would be "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief" (Isaiah 53:3). The Enemy, for his part, is relentlessly focused on himself, and strives to devour and consume all things, to gather them and direct them towards his own pride and self-gratification. In contrast the nature of God is to love, to be other-centered, and to spread His affection and compassion to others; for the very nature of God is a community of Persons united to each other in the bonds of perfect love, within the Holy, Consubstantial, and Indissoluble Trinity; thus Augustine says of the Trinity, "But love is of some one that loves, and with love something is loved. Behold, then, there are three things: he that loves, and that which is loved, and love", and these three things correspond to the Persons of the Trinity. God is always, relentlessly, focused on the good of the other, on sharing his goodness and his perfection with those he has created. This was why he created our world, this was why he chose the angels for honour and glory, this was why he watched over our evolution as a species and, in time, blessed us with immortal souls, and this was why when He took human form, and was born as a man, he had no thought for himself, but only for others. For he told his followers, "Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?" (Matthew 6:25) and we cannot suppose that he, perfect God and perfect Man, commanded something other of His disciples then the code he lived by himself. <br /><br />A third thing, too, differentiates the miracle of the loaves and the fishes from the temptation that Christ was offered in the desert by the Enemy, and which He rejected. At Bethsaida, Our Lord did not turn stones into bread: rather he multiplied bread, turning five loaves into many "And Jesus took the loaves; and when he had given thanks, he distributed to the disciples, and the disciples to them that were set down; and likewise of the fishes as much as they would" (John 6:11). This is the nature of the work that God does in this world. He makes use of His own creation, and of the work that His creatures have done. His miracle was dependent on the labour that farmers, bakers, and fishermen had done in preparing the loaves and fishes; he took advantage of their labour and made use of it, multiplying it and transforming it to achieve something they could never have achieved on their own. But his work was dependent on theirs, and had they refused to catch the fish or to grow the wheat He would not have done it for them. For God lives by the rules he himself has set down, and one of those rules is that He will not supplant our free will, and that though he will work hand in hand with us, our cooperation and assent is as necessary to His work of healing and salvation as the grace that he sends down from heaven. This is why people who expect God to solve the problems in this world with a snap of His fingers are so tragically wrong. He can do anything with us and for us, but He demands our labour and cooperation as well. As the Muslim proverb goes, if we take two steps towards God, He runs a mile towards us, but we need to take those steps to begin with. <br /><br />Discernment, and the ability to tell whether we are being called to do something good or something evil, is a vital ability, and something fraught with risk. But whenever we are faced with such a challenge, we can do no better than to search our own consciences, and look to the example of Jesus. He who was willing to do the work that his Father gave him in transforming little bread into much bread to feed others, was unwilling to accept the Enemy's temptation to transform stones into bread to feed his own needs. And in that difference we can see some of the clues that can help us distinguish good and evil in our own lives, and in the world. Let us all try to remember the nature of temptation, this Lent, and strive to overcome it. <br /><br />Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7008813786806083758.post-75806519238982906812010-03-13T07:22:00.001-08:002010-03-13T08:54:13.168-08:00A second year's reflection on the Temptations of our LordThe season of Lent- called by our Orthodox brothers and sisters, 'Great Lent'- has many purposes, but one of the most important of them is to commemorate the Temptation of Christ, the forty days that Christ spent in the desert, being tempted by the devil. <br /><br />As I said last year, Luke is the most historically minded of the Gospel writers, and as Christians we are bound to accept this account as historical. Our Lord was not merely subjected to a symbolical temptation: he was really tempted, in a real desert, by a real dark spiritual power, he who was called 'the prince of this world' by St. John the Evangelist. Many Christians nowadays seek (for reasons that are beyond me) to deny the reality of the devil, but as Archbishop Charles Chaput said last year, "If we do not believe in the devil, sooner or later we will not believe in God." This is because when we deny the reality of spiritual evil, of any basic constituent of reality that is opposed to and antithetical to God, we are quickly led to blame the evil that we see around us, not on the devil but on God, and we quickly start to perceive that such a God cannot be worthy of worship. Denying the reality of supernatural evil makes not easier, but more difficult to account for real, perceptible evil, and it strengthens the force of the Problem of Evil, the rock on which the ship of faith of so many people has foundered. As Bulgakov put it in his classic work "The Master and Margarita", the existence of evil, and specifically of supernatural evil, constitutes the 'seventh proof' of the existence of God, and to deny the existence of supernatural evil is a step towards denying the existence of supernatural good. <br /><br />The episode of the temptation of Christ is one of those stories that is impossible to categorize. Before I was a Christian, when I encountered the Gospels for the first time this was one of the stories which most captivated me and which I found most haunting- and most challenging. This story reads something like a myth, and indeed there are myths somewhat similar to it in the stories of Zoroaster and the Buddha. But it appears in the middle of a narrative that's unquestionably meant as literal history. Luke begins the third chapter of his Gospel in this way: "Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judaea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of Ituraea and of the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene, Annas and Caiaphas being the high priests....." which tells us that he is not intendeing that we take this as a murky myth out of the depths of the unknown past. St. Luke is paying scrupulous attention to historical and chronological detail, and leaves us in no doubt that he intends to say that these events really happened, just as the events described in yesterday's 'New York Times' really happened. <br /><br />The Gospels are too mythical to be taken as mere history, and too historical to be taken as mere myth. They are both, simultaneously, the Myth made Fact, as Our Lord was the Word made Flesh. The supernatural and moral elements to the story of Our Lord's temptation are not something superimposed on the story, they are intrinsic to it, and in the temptation of Christ we see, in perfect clarity, the everlasting and eternal struggle between good and evil, between the supernatural forces of light and of darkness. But at the same time, the historical details of this account are not extrinsic or incidental to its meaning either. This isn't just the story of one example of the cosmic struggle of good and evil, such that if the temptation had gone differently there would have been others. This was the moment on which our salvation depended, the moment when Christ was faced with the same choice that had faced the first conscious and spiritually aware human beings, when they had to choose between submission or rebellion, and when he rejected the same temptation that they had accepted. As God the Word, begotten of the Father before all the ages, became incarnate at a specific moment in history, of a particular woman in a particular home, so the struggle for our salvation, between God and his Enemy, took form and shape in a particular episode of forty days' duration in the Palestinian desert. It was not for nothing that Milton focused his 'Paradise Regained' not on the Passion or the Resurrection but on the Temptation. Because this was the moment when for the first time in human history, the human and the divine wills became perfectly aligned, and when for the first time in history, human nature, in the form of the perfect Man, was restored to what it had been intended to be. "Therefore he renews these things in himself, uniting man to the Spirit," said Irenaeus of Lyons and by his obedience reversed the damage that had been done by human disobedience. And at no time was this clearer than during the temptation in the desert.<br /><br />Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7008813786806083758.post-68228026434283381392010-02-25T17:18:00.000-08:002010-02-25T17:43:47.739-08:00For our soldiers in Afghanistan.....St. Michael the Archangel, commander of the heavenly host, patron of soldiers, remember us in our daily struggles against the powers of darkness; and remember especially our soldiers in Afghanistan, and specially the brother of my best friend, R.<br /><br />You who stood faithful in the midst of rebellion; you who fought with the red dragon and threw him from heaven; you who argued with the prince of this world over the body of Moses and rebuked him in the name of the Lord; you who warred against the rebel angels of Babylon and delivered the people of Israel; you who appeared to Our Lady in the hour of her dying and announced the privilege of her Assumption into Heaven; you who appeared to Constantine and showed him the vision of the cross above his armies; you who inspired Joan of Arc in the hour of her triumph and consoled her in the hour of her martyrdom; in all this you have stayed ever faithful to our God and an example of just and righteous struggle. Watch over the men and women who are engaged in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Intercede for them so that they may be given the virtue of courage, the virtue of hope, the virtue of self-control, the virtue of fortitude, and above all the virtue of justice. Bless their struggle and ensure that it is ordered not towards national glory but to the ends of justice, love, and charity. Preserve them from despair, preserve them from fear, preserve them from danger, from disease, from murder, from torture, from capture. Lead them to remember the task in which they are engaged, to succour the weak and to deliver a captive nation from tyranny and misrule. Watch over, especially, the brother of my best friend, R., and preserve him in good health and safety, and let him not fall victim to the tragedies of war. Above all, preserve our soldiers in the path of righteousness and let them never fall victim to the temptation by which the evil one corrupted Caiaphas the high priest, the temptation to do evil that good may come of it, and to break the laws of war by resorting to torture, to the killing of civilians, or to the maltreatment of those for whom they are fighting. Intercede for us, and for them, before the throne of the One True God, who was and is and is to come. I ask this in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.<br /><br />Amen.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7008813786806083758.post-3952056990681727362010-01-23T11:40:00.001-08:002010-01-23T11:40:44.338-08:00Reflection on the Lectionary: St VincentThen one of the elders addressed me, saying, "Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?" I said to him, "Sir, you are the one that knows." Then he said to me, "These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.<br /><br /> For this reason they are before the throne of God,<br /> and worship him day and night within his temple, <br /> and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. <br /> They will hunger no more, and thirst no more;<br /> the sun will not strike them, <br /> nor any scorching heat; <br /> for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd,<br /> and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, <br /> and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes."Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7008813786806083758.post-11224422497527695022010-01-23T11:38:00.000-08:002010-01-23T11:39:37.891-08:00Reflection on the Lectionary: St. AgnesSong of Solomon 2:10-13<br /><br />My beloved speaks and says to me:<br /><br />"Arise, my love, my fair one,<br /> and come away; <br />for now the winter is past,<br /> the rain is over and gone. <br />The flowers appear on the earth;<br /> the time of singing has come, <br />and the voice of the turtledove<br /> is heard in our land. <br />The fig tree puts forth its figs,<br /> and the vines are in blossom; <br /> they give forth fragrance. <br />Arise, my love, my fair one,<br /> and come away." <br /><br />The Psalm<br />Psalm 45:11-16 Page 648, BCP<br />Eructavit cor meum<br /><br />11<br /> "Hear, O daughter; consider and listen closely; *<br /> forget your people and your father's house.<br /><br />12<br /> The king will have pleasure in your beauty; *<br /> he is your master; therefore do him honor.<br /><br />13<br /> The people of Tyre are here with a gift; *<br /> the rich among the people seek your favor."<br /><br />14<br /> All glorious is the princess as she enters; *<br /> her gown is cloth-of-gold.<br /><br />15<br /> In embroidered apparel she is brought to the king; *<br /> after her the bridesmaids follow in procession.<br /><br />16<br /> With joy and gladness they are brought, *<br /> and enter into the palace of the king.<br /><br />or<br />Psalm 116:1-8 Page 759, BCP<br />Dilexi, quoniam<br /><br />1<br /> I love the LORD, because he has heard the voice of my supplication, *<br /> because he has inclined his ear to me whenever I called upon him.<br /><br />2<br /> The cords of death entangled me;<br /> the grip of the grave took hold of me; *<br /> I came to grief and sorrow.<br /><br />3<br /> Then I called upon the Name of the LORD: *<br /> "O LORD, I pray you, save my life."<br /><br />4<br /> Gracious is the LORD and righteous; *<br /> our God is full of compassion.<br /><br />5<br /> The LORD watches over the innocent; *<br /> I was brought very low, and he helped me.<br /><br />6<br /> Turn again to your rest, O my soul, *<br /> for the LORD has treated you well.<br /><br />7<br /> For you have rescued my life from death, *<br /> my eyes from tears, and my feet from stumbling.<br /><br />8<br /> I will walk in the presence of the LORD *<br /> in the land of the living.<br /><br />Matthew 18:1-6<br /><br />At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, "Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?" He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.<br /><br />"If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea."Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0