Songs and Wisdom from Africa, Cappadocia

In honor of Black History Month, I wanted to share two treasures. First, a lecture by a great scholar of African American religious history, Albert Rabateau, on “Seeing Christ in the Poor” in which he weaves into one the suffering wisdom of black slaves in antebellum America and the pastoral wisdom of some 4th century Cappadocian Church Fathers. Below the article and its link, I also share with you this hidden treasure I found today — three African American spirituals sung by a group of college students at Albany State University.

This morning I want to draw upon two deep reservoirs of Tradition — by which I mean the living presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church — that are important in my life academically and personally.  The first rises from the Christianity of African-American slaves in antebellum America; the second from the 4th century pastoral work of several Christian bishops in Cappadocia in the eastern part of the Late Roman Empire.  For these reservoirs converge (flow together) as resources for renewal in the ongoing struggle against poverty and oppression.  Read more…

Now, enjoy the sounds:

Terrible Beauty

A number of years ago, I was visiting a Greek Orthodox Church where I was asked to share my thoughts on the beauty of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Twist my arm! It’s like forcing me to drink coffee at Cafe Du Monde in New Orleans or coercing me to admire my wife’s smiling face. Beauty naturally births praise. And my point to them was precisely that: the Eastern Churches possess a holy knack for rendering God’s beauty accessible to the five senses in a way that, in my experience and personal judgment, surpasses that of the West. It’s why the legend of the conversion of Prince Vladimir of Kiev to the Byzantine version of Christianity contains this compelling description of the reaction of the pagan prince’s emissaries to what they saw at Hagia Sophia Cathedral in Constantinople:

We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth, for surely there is no such splendor or beauty anywhere upon earth. We cannot describe it to you: only this we know, that God dwells there among men, and that their service surpasses the worship of all other places. For we cannot forget that beauty.

It’s also no mistake that it was an Orthodox writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, that gave voice to this same aesthetic truth in his novel, The Idiot. The main character of the story, Prince Myshkin, responds to being presented with the portrait of a woman of ill repute, Nastassya Filippovna, by expressing his deep appreciation of her beauty. When asked to justify his troubling response to this “morally grotesque” woman, he says: ”In that face—there is much suffering…beauty like that is strength…such beauty will save the world.”

The main core of my lecture was this: it’s not the gloriously painted icons but the suffering and dying of Christ that is the unrivaled epicenter of all beauty in Christianity. And here I say the suffering and dying Christ, for even in the glorious splendor of the Resurrection it is Christ’s scar-marred Body that rises in immortal loveliness  On the Cross of Jesus is the epitome of divine and human love bound in perfect synthesis, and it’s that love alone, lived out in a Church of sinners and saints, that makes or breaks the power of Christian witness. If we set aside the Slain Lamb that desires to bleed through the icons of flesh and blood – us! – and choose instead to transform the Church into self-congratulation society, or a museum of sacred artifacts that recall an age of beauty now lost and forgotten, the Church will grow old and weary and die a just death.

This beauty of God is a hard beauty, a burnished beauty, a sweat-drenched beauty, a fire-refined beauty that is no cheap trinket.

True Goodness is Beautiful

In particular, I said to these Orthodox, if we fail to endure as Christians the hardness of the commandments in an increasingly anarchic moral culture, or fail to suffer the costly demands of living and speaking the truth in our personal and public lives, or refuse to love unto excess after the pattern of the Cross, there will be no beauty to attract; no loveliness to reveal the Face of Christ. We will cease to be evangelizers and become mere chaplains of a quaint, if sometimes pretty, though largely irrelevant idea.

But we Christians, Oriental and Occidental, want people to fall in love with God’s love that has fallen down to us in Christ. That’s what counts, and that’s to be the white-hot core of all our skillful evangelizing strategies…

Nothing is more practical than finding God,
That is, than falling in a love in a quite absolute, final way.
What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination will affect everything.
It will decide what will get you out of bed in the mornings,
What you will do with your evenings,
How you spend your weekends,
What you read,
Who you know,
What breaks your heart,
And what amazes you with joy and gratitude.
Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.”
― Pedro Arrupe, S.J.

Wondering Faith

One of my favorite quotes in all literature:

In wonder all philosophy began: in wonder it ends….But the first wonder is the offspring of ignorance; the last is the parent of adoration.  – Plato

Wonder, that posture of trusting, yearning openness to the endless surprise of existence, the ceaseless fascination of beauty, the sleepless seduction of goodness and the unending allure of truth, is the presupposition behind all learning; including that transcendent mode of learning that is born of faith in Jesus.

I recall an incident years ago when I gave a talk on the necessity of cultivating wonder in the life of faith, and argued that wonder, being a “declension” of the gift of holy fear, has to be begged for and received as a grace from God that heals our narrowness and opens us to see all things as flowing fresh from God’s “Eternal Innocence.” I built the talk around Abraham Joshua Heschel’s famous quote, “Never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame. I asked for wonder, and he gave it to me.”

An elderly man came up to me afterward with tear-reddened eyes and said: “You know, it was years and years ago when life beat out of me the wonder you talked about tonight; and with wonder went my faith in God and in the goodness of life. The gift I received tonight was a new hope that I could find wonder again, and so find faith again by asking for it.”

In a world plunged deep in dark and divisive cynicism, it is our wonder-filled saints that keep alive in the world the hope that God’s Eternal Innocence is not, in this falling world, forever slain by men. Rather it is still dared by those few who choose daily to embrace the gift of faith in the Innocent Heart of Jesus, wounded by malice yet burning with ardent love, that births in them afresh adoring, yearning, trusting wonder. It’s the prime contagion of the Communion of Saints in whose number I hope to be.

“…and a little child shall lead them” – Isaiah 11:6

Best or Worst of Times?

Someone the other day was talking with me about how bad it is getting for the Church in the U.S. as the cultural tide is turning against more and more of the Church’s teachings. They said to me, “Do you agree?”

Spontaneously, that quintessentially Catholic response to most questions came to mind: sic et non, yes and no. But, as most often happens when someone asks me a question I did not expect, I thought of four great quotes after our brief subsequent exchange. SO I will share with you a bit of what I would have said to him had I had these quotes at my immediate command:

“Christianity is greatest when it is hated by the world.” — St. Ignatius of Antioch, d. 108 A.D. from his Letter to the Romans 3.3

Why? It gives us an opportunity to give voice to the Gospel while we have the attention of those who care enough to reject our message:

Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope, but do it with gentleness and reverence, keeping your conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who defame your good conduct in Christ may themselves be put to shame. — 1 Peter 3:15

It gives us the privileged opportunity to demonstrate the character of divine love. Indeed, Jesus’ most persuasive proclamation came as He spoke what St. Paul entitled, “The word of the cross” (1 Cor 1:18):

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that? Do not the pagans do the same? So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect. — Matthew 5:43-48

And finally, as people who believe in Divine Providence, and especially in God’s proclivity to draw the greatest goods out of the greatest evils, it’s always important to find the hopeful opportunity — the hidden grace — that is always present in the midst of threat:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way. – Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

A gentleman I met in Tallahassee, Florida, had a great way of phrasing what I’m getting at: Times of adversity always show of what mettle you’re made, and without adversity you’re always an unknown quantity.

Shame and Honor

[Note: as I have no time to write new posts these days, I am posting older posts that I never made public because I was not convinced they were done. But, well enough...]

I was talking with a colleague the other day about the breakdown of marriage and family life in the West. In particular, we discussed the specific role of shame and honor in our culture.

Here’s a half-digested spin-off from that lengthy conversation…

True Shame, Right Honor

All cultures, including our own, employ the power of shame and honor to perpetuate and preserve certain social mores. Shame and honor serve as internalized regulators of behavior that relate individuals to social norms, and are absolutely essential companions to a just social order that rewards and punishes those who comply with or rebel against a society’s accepted norms. Shame is an internalized suffering of social censure that greets deviant behavior, while honor serves as an internalized affirmation that accompanies social approbation for one’s socially acceptable conduct.

We agreed that, in this sense, shame is not in itself an undesirable thing. But we added an important qualifier: shame and honor must be founded on the presupposition that the social norms they relate us to are grounded in truth, goodness and beauty, and lead to the cultivation of a community of virtue. Shame and honor are not in and of themselves good or bad, but take on a good-bad character inasmuch as they are related rightly/wrongly to the truth of the human person.

Of course, a thousand nuances flow from this that clarify what is meant by “good” and “bad” shame, but the general point stands that all societies require internalized dispositions of shame and honor if they are to cohere in an orderly way.

My colleague, playing off this point, made an interesting observation: much can be said about what a culture values as true and good and beautiful by the way it parses out shame and honor; or by who it shames or honors. Especially, he opined, it’s instructive to look carefully at the way it informs sexuality, marriage and family life.

Cohabit

We talked more about the almost universal practice of couple-cohabitation before marriage, and its bedfellow, non-marital sex and mused about the extraordinary shift in the culture of shame in this regard: while at one time premarital cohabiting and non-marital sex were considered socially shameful, now those who even infer that such behavior is shameful themselves feel the powerful censure of shame.

This inversion of honor and shame makes the “cost” of thinking, speaking and acting Catholicly much higher, which in turn requires from Catholics a strong sense of Catholic identity, a strong network of like-minded faithful to lend support and a sustained commitment to live as a disciple of Christ who is willing to carry the cross of shame when it’s called for. This “cost” of enduring shame in the act of speaking the truth in love, my colleague said, is what Jesus must have meant in the 8th Beatitude: 

Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you falsely because of me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven.  Thus they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Side Point

An aside, based on my experience. Over the years, especially when I was working on a college campus, I have noted how deeply this cultural shift has penetrated young Catholics. I have had the blessing of watching college-age men and women come alive in their faith, and become wildly desirous to be orthodox and live out their faith. At the same time, very many times, these same young people were actively having sex outside of marriage with (in some cases) another ‘devout’ Catholic. What intrigued me most, though, was not that they had fallen into this pattern of behavior but rather that they often found themselves deeply puzzled by the fact that they didn’t “feel” any shame about their behavior, and wondered how something could really be so wrong when it felt so right. At times they would conclude that ∴ God must not be displeased, as they equated their own internal emotional feelings of shame/pleasure with divine displeasure/pleasure.

I recall one time when I confronted a young man on this issue because of his prominent role in a church ministry. He was a daily Mass goer, frequenting nocturnal adoration and passionately involved in Church activities. I will never forget our conversation, and at the end of it he said in a very matter-of-fact manner regarding his sexual activity with his Catholic girlfriend: “It may seem unorthodox, but we don’t feel bad, we don’t think God minds and we have no intention of stopping. We even pray afterwards…”

Indeed, how deeply we breathe in our cultural air without even knowing how profoundly it informs our Catholic identity! How important our Church’s teaching stands as a prophetic voice apart from culture to help us sift out the wheat from the chaff. Making the hard counter-cultural choice of internalizing this voice of Christ speaking in his Church beats at the very heart of conversion. It is this graced conversion alone that will render us able to face and embrace a Christ-culture wherein we even come to feel the honor of goodness and the shame of sin.

Insight?

Yes, I know, I only here state the obvious.

I guess the personally useful insight I received from our conversation was this: the Church’s call to each Christian is to first be converted in the midst of our culture, allowing culture to be converted in, and then through us. And, in light of our conversation above, we are called to evangelize and cultivate a culture of shame-honor based on the true-good-beautiful as revealed in Christ. It calls for a creative, impassioned and informed response.

 

Young Drift

Here’s a fascinating NPR story on why the young leave their faith traditions. Though not a ‘study,’ it’s good material to mull for those whose work in the church reaching out to young people. I recommend listening to the ~7 minute audio.

One-fifth of Americans are religiously unaffiliated — higher than at any time in recent U.S. history — and those younger than 30 especially seem to be drifting from organized religion. A third of young Americans say they don’t belong to any religion.

NPR’s David Greene wanted to understand why, so he gathered a roundtable of young people at a synagogue in Washington, D.C. The 6th & I Historic Synagogue seemed like the right venue: It’s both a holy and secular place that has everything from religious services to rock concerts. Greene speaks with six people — three young women and three young men — all struggling with the role of faith and religion in their lives. Read more…

Affair of the Mind

I was just talking to a woman the other day here in Louisiana whose husband had indulged in pornography for several years of their marriage.

It’s crushing to listen to the pain she suffered.

What stood out most to me in her recounting of its effects in their marriage was the sense that her own feminine dignity was traumatically demeaned and betrayed. She said the progressive erosion of that trust on which marital love is founded made her feel worthless, and her vivid awareness of what vile things must have coursed through his mind each time he looked at her made her “physically nauseous.”

Revolting

In the Christian view, men stand or fall on their vocation to honor the dignity of women, and to honor them precisely as they exist in the mind and heart of God.

This point was graphically made to me once by a priest in the Confessional a few years ago — “Look, your wife is God’s daughter before she’s your bride, and He expects you to treat her like His daughter. He loved her before you did, far more than you do now and will judge you one day on how well you stewarded this pearl of great price.”

Daughters of the King, the Most High and glorious God.

The Christian gentleman stands among the most radical, counter-cultural avatars of our church’s impending New Evangelization, and the act of total renunciation of pornography can be, for those bound by its loathsome chains, a Christ-Gent’s extreme sign that God’s chivalrous revolution is at powerfully at work.

Fire and Muck

I was reading an article recently that had a great quote in it describing the Eucharist as a “sacrificial ritual enacting a solemn marriage between the fallen muck of earth and fire falling from heaven.”

Reconciling Love

But I thought to myself, why limit this lovely expression to the Mass? Why not the other Sacraments? And especially, why not the Sacrament of Reconciliation?

I mention that because right after I read that quote I went to Confession at a local parish and my experience was quite exceptional. I was challenged, consoled and filled with a deep sense of gratitude for God’s lavish and indulgent mercy and the priest’s humble service.

As I was praying my “penance” I was reminded of two Reconciliation memories.

Healing a Broken Marriage

I recalled speaking with a wonderful elderly priest who shared with me an experience he had in his later years while hearing confessions one Saturday. He said that while he was sitting in the confessional after a particularly powerful confession, and was praying in fervent gratitude, he had an earth-shaking encounter with Christ acting in him as the Bridegroom of the soul whose confession he had just heard. “Jesus made it clear to me that my humble ministry permitted him to reconcile with his estranged Bride, the Church, in the person of each penitent who entered my confessional. He made it clear that all of salvation history conspired to make present this sacrament so that God could be re-united in love with his covenanted yet fallen Bride. And my simple ministry of sitting in that room was part of his grand plan.”

That a seasoned priest could find in his later years, after thousands of confessions, such a fresh love for this ancient Sacrament left a deep and abiding impression on me. I imagined that his youthful exuberance was a faint glimmer of God’s super-abundant eternal joy over our smallest acts of repentant love.

God of Muck

Then I recalled a gentleman I have written of in this Blog before (the one about vulgarity) who returned to the Church after many years away. He had a gut-wrenching and heart-ripping experience in the confessional with an old monk that left him utterly changed (and to this day, years later, even more so). He described his confession this way: “It was like I was sinking in sewage and Jesus grabbed my hand and pulled me out. I’d never felt so clean in my life. After it was over, the monk said to me: now, the Lord has taken you to himself again, clothed you in white garments and re-lit the flame of faith that was blown out in your soul after your baptism. Now, keep it that way! It was like Jesus himself was talking to me!”

God conspired for a whole history in time to give us this reconciling Sacrament, like a bridegroom consumed by love for a bride who has spurned him; a Bridegroom who spares nothing to win her love back.

We Catholics really tend to domesticate our faith, but truth is our Sacraments transact absolutely, totally, completely crazy stuff — stuff that could only have been dreamed up by (a la Catherine of Siena) Dio, pazzo d’Amore, God, the mad Lover.

Look for Him at your next Confession.

Faith Fiction

I wrote a few months ago about the Catholic vision of the lay vocation in all its secular splendor, and averred that the new evangelization, if it is to truly penetrate and haunt our ever-more secularized world with the Word-made-culture, absolutely requires that our up and coming young saints feel at home in the world even as they courageously avow to remain not of the world.

As I read the Times article below, I thought, “We Catholics need to give the world new faith-filled fiction writers who can create stories that dramatize “belief the way it feels in your experience, at once a fact on the ground and a sponsor of the uncanny, an account of our predicament that still and all has the old power to persuade.”

If you’re out there, work tirelessly to master your craft as we’re awaiting your refreshing Renaissance to imbue imaginations with the persuasive and uncanny truth of God’s creative Word.

A seminary student has an affair with an insurance adjuster he met in an office building near Riverside Church; then they go their separate ways — and that’s the whole story.

A collective of Dumpster-diving dropouts follows an “Anarchristian” creed on the edge of a student ghetto, and in the novel about them the faith is as sloppy as the sex.

In The New Yorker, a novelist describes his best seller as a work about free will written from a Catholic perspective — but the novelist is Anthony Burgess, dead almost 20 years, and his essay (about “A Clockwork Orange”) is a lecture exhumed from 1973.

This, in short, is how Christian belief figures into literary fiction in our place and time: as something between a dead language and a hangover. Forgive me if I exaggerate. But if any patch of our culture can be said to be post-Christian, it is literature. Half a century after Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Reynolds Price and John Updike presented themselves as novelists with what O’Connor called “Christian convictions,” their would-be successors are thin on the ground. Read more

By George, Not Same-Sex Marriage

Cardinal George has taken it upon himself, even in his illness, to be the “public intellectual” in the public square on behalf of the Catholic tradition in response to the rapid sprint our legal culture is making toward enshrining same-sex marriage as a permanent fixture within American civil law. He laid out his case in two exceptional books — The Difference God Makes and God in Action — but here offers a nice summary of points relevant to the present crisis. Here he engages in subtle, careful reasoning, which is something Americans (in my experience) don’t find as persuasive as brief, hard-hitting, personal story-laden, gut-stirring arguments clustered around highly-charged words that begin with the prefix “anti” or end with the suffix “phobia.” But I think George does a nice job trying to wed the two approaches. See what you think:

At the beginning of the New Year, 2013, a law is being proposed in the General Assembly to change the legal definition of marriage in Illinois to accommodate those of the same sex who wish to “marry” one another.  In this discussion, the Church will be portrayed as “anti-gay,” which is a difficult position to be in, particularly when families and the Church herself love those of their members who are same-sex oriented.  What’s at stake in this legislative proposal and in the Church’s teaching on marriage? Read more…