Embracing Wastefulness

He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.

– Martin Luther, 1518 Heidelberg Disputation

Blessed Miguel Pro moments before his martyrdom

As the years go on, I see more and more clearly as a theologian the awful, terrible beauty of the “wondrous” Cross of Christ. In that beauty is the defining form of all of God’s Providence, and, most astoundingly, the deepest mystery of the inner nature of God’s Trinitarian life.  All of Scripture, all of history, and every detail of each human life finds its resolve and meaning only in the Crucified God whose torn Flesh and out-poured Blood forever remain openly manifest in the glorious Body of the Risen Christ. Indeed, at each Eucharist we taste and see this overwhelming truth and, in holy fear, ingest this divine form of life as both pledge and power that it will be so in our human life.

…of the Cross

This realization has been deepened especially these days as I immerse myself yet again — thanks to the generous interest of some seminarians here in New Orleans — in the works of St. John of the Cross. St. John is so clear to his monastic audience in The Ascent of Mt. Carmel that the only gate of entry into the depths of this wondrous mystery of Christ, the only way we can dare drink of the sweet beauty of the mystical meanings hidden in the biblical Song of Songs, is for every sojourner up the slopes of Mt. Carmel to pass through the splintered thickets of Golgotha’s dense forest. As he says it,

Would that men might come at last to see that it is quite impossible to reach the thicket of the riches and wisdom of God except by first entering the thicket of much suffering, in such a way that the soul finds there its consolation and desire. The soul that longs for divine wisdom chooses first, and in truth, to enter the thicket of the cross.

So even as I am captivated by the beauty of God’s revelation as eternally self-wasting mercy on the Cross, I tremble knowing that theologians — I — may not remain mere distant spectators of the very Mystery they consent to explore and to teach.

But we know that in faith that it is precisely this Crucified Christ, the Captain and Author of our Faith, that is with us always as we follow Him along the way. We need only see His serene face to know that, as Thomas Merton worded it,

…you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

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.

1973-2013

Human life is sacred because from its beginning it involves “the creative action of God” and it remains forever in a special relationship with the Creator, who is its sole end. God alone is the Lord of life from its beginning until its end: no one can, in any circumstance, claim for himself the right to destroy directly an innocent human being.

This exquisite line from Donum Vitae, the Vatican’s 1987 instruction on the ethical framework for beginning-of-life technologies, makes an exceptionally important theological and anthropological point that should condition the way all Catholics think about the abortion debate: human beings’ entire identity is irrevocably relational. In particular, from the first instant of conception we enter into a singularly unique relationship with God that will never cease to exist, even if we — God forbid — pass after death into hell’s eternal alienation from God. For even in hell our “eternal loss” is forever defined by our immortal rejection of that forever relationship God created us to embrace.

At the moment of conception, according to the Catholic theological tradition, God creates ex nihilo, “out of nothing,” an absolutely unique, new and unrepeatable soul that informs and “ensouls” the newly conceived body. What a marvelous statement of the eternal and majestic God’s minute attention to this microscopic moment of human genesis within a mother’s womb, and what a sense of awe it awakens as we realize that from that very instant of conception God brings to bear his “love from before all ages” on the fragile cathedral of this newly existing human person stamped with his divine image.

This makes both the mother, bearing this child beneath her heart, and the father, in his covenanted love for the mother-with-child, privileged stewards of God’s supreme gift and of creation’s final purpose: the coming-into-being of a new child of the Most High God who will never cease to exist for the ages upon ages.

It is also true that the relationship between child and mother-father in life’s earliest stages stands as a singular sign of our relationship to God as our Creator: one of absolute dependence that rests on both love and trust, i.e. love that desires and rejoices in our existence, and trust that the one we are utterly dependent upon desires only and always our true good.

This wonderful insight reminds me of a proverb my former spiritual director used to use to make his point: “Every person you encounter is being looked at ceaselessly with love by God. Remember that whenever you look at anyone and are tempted to think otherwise.”

Applied to 1/22: Every child cradled in the womb is being looked at ceaselessly with love by God. Remember that even when the other is unseen and you are tempted to think otherwise.

Patriarchy, mystics and feminists

This is an exceptional reflection by Nicholas Frankovich on fatherhood, and it made me think of a comment a feminist theologian once made to me about her unusual-among-her-peers opinion that we should still refer in Christianity to God as Father: “My thought is that if we remove, or even radically de-prioritize, from our theological lexicon Jesus’ portrait of fatherhood in God we will lose a valuable means to critique the injustices of patriarchy.”

And that reminds me of an elderly woman who participated in a Catechism class I offered, who was something of a mystic in my eyes. As we covered the article of the Creed on God’s paternity, one participant expressed her strong distaste for a “male” God, arguing that the attributes of males she has known make her unable to invoke God as Father. “It’s oppressive,” she concluded. The elderly woman perked up and said, “Young lady, you’ve clearly never met Him. He’s not like that at all. If you love the way Jesus is a man, imagine that Jesus says his Father’s even greater. Just ask Jesus to tell you what fatherhood is.”

I followed it up by adding that God was not male or female, that these were only analogies and God transcended those analogies infinitely, that men and women both image God variously but that fatherhood was more fittingly applied to God for metaphysical reasons and because Jesus, who is God, alone has the authority to reveal the name of the One who sent him.

The elderly woman quietly added to my carefully nuanced disquisition, “Don’t take the fire out of that name, son.”

As my kids would say, “Poned.”

All men are called to conserve the fire. What we need are men who are willing to render visible the Father by allowing His perfect Image, Jesus, to re-form their lives through the Spirit-who-cries-Abba. I often pray that when my children die and go to see God’s Face, they will say: “You remind me of my Dad.”

Take five minutes to read it:

My friend’s six-year-old son wanted to be God the Father in the Christmas pageant. He reasoned that he was too old to play the second person of the Trinity, whose part in any case had been assigned to a doll. It was explained to him that the Father wasn’t in the cast of characters, despite his obvious theological significance. Jesus’s father with a lowercase f was the lead male role, but a boy doesn’t naturally look up to the Joseph of Christmas pageants. That thinly bearded fellow in the brown robe is such a downcast figure—a “just man,” St. Matthew tells us, and noble in all his ways, including his assent to the abruptly announced expectation that he will act as the legal father of a child his wife conceived not by him. Who wouldn’t be chagrined at this turn of events?

A six-year-old child doesn’t ask that question, but the tone of the nativity scene asks it for him. Joseph appears past his prime. His hairline recedes. His drawn face tells of long years of hardship. An art critic irreverently describes him as God’s “cuckold.” In scripture and hymns, when Jesus is called the son of David, Joseph’s distant ancestor, we see banners and hear trumpets. When Jesus is called the son of Joseph himself, we nod and understand it to mean that our Lord was born in a log cabin: “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?” No match for his beautiful young wife, who has eyes only for her newborn God-sent son, Joseph in Christmas iconography exemplifies dutifulness, patience, humility—the whole range of beta-male virtues, as we tend to regard them. The kingdom and the power and the glory belong to the child’s unseen father in heaven. Jesus hardly ever stops talking about him. When Mary tells her son that she and his father were worried about him, the twelve-year-old boy in the Temple corrects her: “Don’t you know I must be about my father’s business?” Joseph says nothing.

From the moment he discovered that Mary was pregnant, he knew he wasn’t the child’s biological father, and now these many years later Jesus reminds him. Are Joseph’s feelings bruised? Perhaps the patron saint of “interior souls” appreciates the bracing effect of an honest blow to his ego, as a runner prizes the healthy muscle burn from a hard workout. Even as an adult Jesus will teach that “he who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me,” suggesting that clarity about the hierarchy of values—loyalty to God ranks above loyalty to kin—was not just an expression of youthful zeal but a consistent theme with him up to the end. The principle was already established by Abraham when he obeyed God’s commandment to sacrifice Isaac: You are not the father of your son. God is. Your son belongs to him. God is his father if by “father” you mean the deeper source of the awe that a small boy feels in the presence of the man he calls “Dad.”

“Call no one on earth your father,” Jesus teaches, “for you have one father, who is in heaven.” But the meaning of “father” would evaporate if there were no men to whom we could apply the term even in scare quotes. Traditional churches in particular act on that understanding. The Eastern Orthodox have patriarchs. Catholics have the Holy Father in Rome. They address their priests as “Father.”

Priest, pope, patriarch: Christians hold up their father figures as rough sketches of God—but not even sketches, really, so much as symbols, which point to something without necessarily resembling it. If you point your finger at a landmark off in the distance, a dog will look at your finger, not the landmark. People are susceptible to the same misunderstanding. Human fatherhood is too emotionally charged a concept for skeptics to take their eyes off it long enough to contemplate what the Church, following Christ, intends it to signify. Freud taught that God is an imaginary object of our “longing for a father,” whereas for Christians a father is only what our hearts settle on for a time before completing their climb to God in heaven, in whom they find their rest.

Believers can agree with Freud about one element in his definition of God: Their attitude toward God the Father is characterized by longing. Others might call it instinct. I think of it as appetite. It’s irrepressible and a sign of vigor, like thirst.

But how do you slake it when the water supply is poisoned? I mean not just the sex abuse scandals that have damaged the reputation of the Catholic priesthood in our time. I mean the larger cultural trend that has been described variously as “the decline of males” (Lionel Tiger) and “the end of men” (Hanna Rosin). Across the West, the meaningfulness of fatherhood has faded to the point that Christianity struggles to make its theology understood or, where it is understood, admired. Some 30 to 40 percent of American children now grow up in homes where their biological fathers are entirely or largely absent, while religious observance wanes, particularly among the young. When your father has abandoned you and you’re told that God is your father, you’re liable to hate God, if you assume that he even exists.

A boy can be deprived of his father but not of his need for validation from older males he finds adequate. If they redirect his worship from themselves to its proper object, he’ll turn to God. Imagine the first time that the infant Jesus in his human innocence reached out to Joseph, who, though imperfect, had the distinction of being the only man the boy had yet encountered. From what the gospels and tradition tell us about Joseph’s character, we might infer that he pointed the child to his true Father in heaven. It would have been the most fatherly act a man ever performed, the very picture of fatherhood.

Nicholas Frankovich is an editor at National Review. See here for article.

Why?

My sons and I (my daughters I will discuss another time) often have bedtime chats about the Big Questions of life, which is a delight and a challenge. It’s a delight because they are fascinated by the meaning of life and want to talk about it with their father even as teens, and it’s a challenge because their questions are often very difficult and lead me not to offer them a done-deal answer but to think with them about what the possibilities might be. Sometimes their questions leave me thinking for days or weeks.

One such question they posed to me flowed out of a conversation about that mind-numbing dogma of faith: Divine eternity. How is it possible that God had no beginning and, as one son says it, “Where did God get all His information?”

They ask this with sufficient frequency to keep this truth of faith in the forefront of my thinking and in my prayer, and the latter has provided me with great fodder for my colloquies with God. And I have found, is a powerful stimulus for theological wonder. In fact, often pray, after their inquests, over Aquinas’ philosophical definition of God: actus purus essendi, the pure act of being who is ipse sit suum esse subsistens, the beginning-less cause of his own existence.

Cur Deus, homo?

But it was this past November that one of my sons asked a question that I had (as far as I can recall) never thought of in the form he posed it: “Dad, okay, I get that God has no beginning, is the reason for his own existence, but this is what I still don’t get: Why does God exist? I mean, what’s his purpose for existing? And why is he love and not, like, meanness or something else? Oh, and if he’s really free, did he choose to come self-exist and be a Trinity?”

I think I passed out.

I shared with him the theological tradition of apophasis, or “unsaying,” in which we confess that all we say about the infinite God, drawn as it is from the realm of finite being, is a faint and distant echo of God that must at once be un-said right after it is said. As Aquinas says it, ”cannot know what God is, but rather what He is not, as we have no means for considering how God is, but rather how He is not.” God is not simply one being among other beings, a kind-of top of the food-chain, peak of a hierarchy, like moving from am amoeba to a man. Rather, there is an infinite chasm between God and his creation, and even though God became Flesh in Christ, and so came near, the truth of his absolute otherness, transcendence and difference from us remains. Hence, the author of the book of Revelation falls down as though dead when the risen Christ first appears to him as “the One who is,” i.e. the same One who spoke to Moses in the Bush and Named himself, I AM.

“So it’s a mystery?.” he said, “Isn’t that philosophy’s way of saying, “I don’t know?’” “Not really,” I replied, “It’s philosophy’s way of recognizing its limits, and that knowledge of God as-he-is-in-himself is a gift of grace, just like your knowledge of me — of who I am — can only be accessed if I freely choose to reveal myself and let you in to my mind and heart and soul.”

He glazed over. I continued,

“Okay, so this why is the end of the chain of all whys we ask and it admits of only one good answer: praise. And when we praise, we simply say to God: I honor you for being so awesome. For being God.”

“There’s a medieval philosopher who said, ‘Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment. Then you will know the true God.’ Praise is like the prayer of bewilderment that is willing to joyfully affirm what its does not comprehend.” I’d never thought of that before then.

“Okay, Dad, no more. That’s too deep.”

Ever since then, I have felt compelled to praise God for being God. For being love and mercy and justice and Trinity and Creator and Redeemer.

For Being.

The child is the father of the man. Thank you, son, for re-birthing in me wonder. As you taught me to praise, now may I teach you to praise.

i58

No Pain, No Gain

I was speaking with someone recently about the influence of our ‘therapeutic culture’ on Christianity in the U.S., and especially on the ‘healing’ movements that seek quick and easy and pain free paths to the healing of wounds that have been self- or other-inflicted. We continued talking about how the Catholic and Orthodox traditions privilege ‘redemptive healing’ which places high value on the role played by the struggle and trials, suffering and laboring under grace as one freely consents to God’s healing power in bearing ‘along the way’ the crosses these wounds contain. How important it is, we thought, to see the hard struggle as part of the healing, and not as a mere delay in obtaining desired relief. My friend said, ‘We aren’t looking for relief, we’re looking for redemption.’

No Charity, No Gain

But then, so as to avoid painting a merely white-knuckled, Stoic view of healing, we turned our eyes toward the healing role of Christ-commanded charity, i.e. love of God and neighbor. We pondered the central role of the Cross in healing, and mused that it was Christ’s ‘upward and outward’ charity alone that transformed the dark brutality of His wounds into redemptive portals of healing rays. We then concluded that healing of wounds must be intimately bound up with a life lived for God-in-others, as it’s theologically true that the deepest and deadliest wound we bear — Original Sin — is only truly healed when the inwardly turned Ego ceases to be our center of gravity and God-neighbor dawns as our new heliocentric Sun.

Then came an ‘aha’ moment. We both immediately thought of Isaiah 58:6-8, and decided to call our freshly uncovered ‘theology of healing,’ i58.

Is this not, rather, the fast that I choose: releasing those bound unjustly, untying the thongs of the yoke; Setting free the oppressed, breaking off every yoke? Is it not sharing your bread with the hungry, bringing the afflicted and the homeless into your house; Clothing the naked when you see them, and not turning your back on your own flesh? Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your wound shall quickly be healed…

This flash of insight made us think yet again (here I paraphrase our rambles), ‘Wow! This means that any healing movement in Christianity must find its ‘soul of theology’ in Catholic social teaching, which manifests what a healed humanity looks like. If we are seeking peace, we must live in what St. Augustine calls tranquillitas ordinis, the ‘tranquility of order,’ which is a life founded on the practice of justice and charity.

This truth highlighted for us that my healing always must always include in its definition your healing. How theo-logical, since all grace is always given by Our Father.’

Now, this ain’t a new insight. But it’s exciting when you find that buried treasure you didn’t realize was right beneath your feet.

Prescribing a Healing Remedy

It all reminded me afterward of a psychotherapist I knew in Pennsylvania who always wrote two prescriptions for all his patients on the first visit:

1. Make 30 minutes every day for absolutely un-distracted silence. 2. Do something for someone else every day.

He said, ‘These two did more good for them than any pill I could ever prescribe. The first exposed their wounds, the second healed them.

What’s a Saint?

When I gave a talk not long ago at a parish, I asked the participants to write out for me the definition of a saint before I gave them my own.

Whence the Saint?

I read through them all, and immediately noticed a pattern. While they all offered beautiful and accurate descriptions of virtuous behavior, not a single one mentioned that holiness has anything to do with God.

Now, I am not arguing that they would not articulate sanctity’s God-centeredness if I had posed the question differently, but it speaks to what I believe is a pervasive view of Christian life among Catholics: that being a good person is holiness, that holiness is what we do, and that heaven is what we get for what we do.

The rest of the night I affirmed their lovely and noble insights, but attempted to re-plant those insights into the Heart of Christ where all of the best of human striving is ‘caught up into divine love and is governed and enriched by Christ’s redeeming power and the saving activity of the Church’ (Gaudium et Spes, 48). I talked of sin and grace, sacraments and prayer, and argued that personally plunging into Christ’s dying and rising is God’s way to God. I used stories of saints, especially St. Augustine, who found their vices healed and their virtues kindled by loving Jesus.

But I must admit, their faces seemed puzzled at my high emphasis on the ‘need’ for Catholics to personally plunge in to this whole divine rescue thing. Or maybe it was just my William Shatner style of over-presenting that made them grimace.

Thinking and Loving

But for whatever reason, it was my recounting of the story of an RCIA Candidate in knew in Florida in the late 1990s that elicited from them an ‘aha’ moment. This RCIA seeker had struggled with a number of core Church teachings, and I would spend lots of time with her outside the RCIA evenings dishing out the best rational apologetics I knew. I was convinced I could argue her into the profession of faith.

But I was humbled to the dust the evening she pulled me aside after class to share with me a profound experience of Jesus she had had in prayer that week.  She said, ‘…and as soon as I found myself in love with Christ, it all suddenly seemed reasonable and possible.’

I thought to myself, ‘Oh. Right. Good point.’

Duh, it’s about Christ.

At once I recalled a comment the late Fr. Raymond Brown had made in a lecture I heard him give in Vermont in 1990: ‘Christianity, unlike any other religion, stands or falls on one central conviction: to become the person you are meant to become, you must love the Founder who first loved you…only when Christianity has prioritized this conviction has it flourished.’

It’s the eve of All Saints, fall in love with Christ afresh and let him catch you up in the amazing grace of divine love.

I will end here yet again with Matt Maher’s fabulous musical setting of Augustine’s prayer:

Lay geniuses

This post began with a hope to simply offer a few brief thoughts on an interview I heard, but as you see my meandering mind got the best of me. Like most of my posts it’s just raw thoughts, so pardon the length and ragged edges.

I was listening to a radio show featuring a convert to Catholicism whose radical conversion to Christ had led him from a life of moral corruption and spiritual aimlessness to a profound and lively faith in Christ. This sudden roundabout led him to quit his highly successful job in the business world and start a Catholic company that distributes religious goods.

It was inspiring. But there was a moment in the interview when I found myself really perturbed. After the man indicated to the interviewer that he felt Jesus was asking him to abandon his secular career and sell religious goods, the interviewer said, ‘That’s really great. How inspiring for our listeners to hear that you abandoned your secular career, like St. Matthew, to serve God in his Church. We need more of you.’

As opposed to the uninspiring choice of remaining in the secular career to serve God in his Church?

{NB though the word ‘secular’ has come to mean hostile approaches to religion, here I use the word to mean the ‘extra-ecclesial’ world– those dimensions of life not explicitly related to church institutional structures, liturgical worship, or other things related to the virtue of religion. In slang language, secular is that which is commonly identified as not churchy or religious. I understand religious and secular to be distinct but related, as opposed to seeing secular as absorbed into the religious, the religious absorbed into the secular, or, what is clearly the most popular contemporary view, that religious and secular are unrelated or even opposed.}

The Lay Call

Now, it may be that this businessman felt he was unable to maintain his integrity in the matrix of morally compromised business relationships he had established, and that Jesus was indeed calling him away into a religious-goods business. That’s not my judgment to make.

Though I don’t know what the interviewer really meant by his comment, here’s the underlying message that I find detestable: that, when it comes to serving God, secular careers constitute a sort of ‘settling for less.’ Such an approach implies that when the ‘worldly’ who come to Christ are faced with the option of godly religious or godless secular careers, and that those who leave their secular careers to work for the Church, engage in ministry, or to do overtly religious things, are valorized as truer beacons of light whose radical witness to real discipleship supersedes that of their still-secular counterparts.

I have struggled with this perception for years. Many good and faith filled people have said to me over the years, ‘I wish I could work for God like you.’ Sometimes I reply, ‘Not the last time I saw the signature on my paycheck.’  Other times I say, ‘You already do! See Genesis 1:28-30.’

But usually I try to appreciate their sentiment, and say, ‘It’s a privilege to work for the Church.’

Ordinary and Extra-

As a man long employed by the Church, I obviously am a firm believer in the intra-ecclesial career path as a genuine calling from God. In fact, for those laity who believe themselves called to serve in voluntary or employed ministries, the Bishops have spelled out a program and vision for their rightful place in the Church Institutional. But the fact remains, mine is not the ordinary or even preferred career path for the vast majority of lay men and women. It’s extra-ordinary, non-normative. The orthodox Catholic vision is that the essential character of the lay vocation is secular, meaning that the vocation of the laity is to primarily live and work in the temporal world, to be fully engaged citizens of the City of Man, engaging in the ordinary circumstances of secular affairs.

It’s a risky venture, no doubt, to bear the mind of Christ in the City of Man; in a post-Christian culture that increasingly perceives the patterns of Christ’s mind as signs of mental illness. But Christians have always been risk-takers, willing to chance being labeled a fool just as their Master was. The laity are on the Church’s front lines, engaging in God’s riskiest business as God’s foolish geniuses.

Facing the many, many hardships that accompany this call to be Christ in the heart of the world is is the warp and woof of lay sanctity. Personally, I have always been far more inspired by Christian men and women who live their faith outside the walls of the Church, fighting the good fight on the front lines, bringing the light of Christ to life’s darkest corners. For these lay saints, work, civic involvement, marriage and family life have served as their personal Colosseum.

But we must never forget that it was the Colosseum that offered Roman Christians in antiquity the very best pulpit and PR for Christ.

Staying Power

So, what we really need hold up in the Church are the lay witnesses who encounter Christ in a life-altering way and heroically choose to remain in their secular careers, embrace more fully their spousal and domestic duties, uphold more vigorously their civic responsibilities, feeling wholly at home in non-church environments among friends, co-workers and strangers of all persuasions and ways of life. In a word, the Church needs secular saints who see that the leaven of the Gospel needs to leave the secure space of the leaven-jar in order to be mixed deep into the center of the batch of unleavened dough.

We especially need young people who fall in love with Jesus and at once find their passion for future secular careers enkindled, making them into a new ‘creative minority’ in our society, capable of serving as fonts of a new culture: creating new economists, new artists, new politicians, new journalists, new educators, new students, new spouses and parents, new car mechanics, new salespeople, new social justice advocates, new janitors, new lawyers, new doctors, new technologists who each excel in their respective field and are thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the Gospel in the midst of the world.

And the church must help these ‘lay genius’ become adept at doing the world in Christ, learning all languages, living in all states of life, and mastering all cultures in order to offer humanity the chance to think with them, over a beer or a cup of coffee, about ‘whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, or anything worthy of praise’ (cf. Phil 4:8). In other words, these geniuses will be capable of giving others who do not yet know Christ’s mind a chance to think with Him in us.

But the ‘lay genius’ will never be unleashed into the public square as long as we continue to think that ‘the converted’ are only ‘working for God’ if they work for the Church, do ministry, or believe that holiness = doing explicitly religious things. For the secular saint, church activities, ecclesial ministries or religious practices are servants — even if necessary servants — to their opus Dei, their ‘work of God’ which is, to say it again, to do the world in Christ by remaining at home in the world.

Settling?

Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes says,

They are mistaken who, knowing that we have here no abiding city but seek one which is to come, think that they may therefore shirk their earthly responsibilities. For they are forgetting that by the faith itself they are more obliged than ever to measure up to these duties, each according to his proper vocation. Nor, on the contrary, are they any less wide of the mark who think that religion consists in acts of worship alone and in the discharge of certain moral obligations, and who imagine they can plunge themselves into earthly affairs in such a way as to imply that these are altogether divorced from the religious life. This split between the faith which many profess and their daily lives deserves to be counted among the more serious errors of our age.

The laity must find this schism first healed in them before they can help heal it.

A young man I knew at Florida State University once mentioned to me that, after his conversion to Christ, he felt ‘guilty’ every time he did anything ‘secular.’ He said, ‘I feel like I have to be doing church things, or talking about God, to feel like I am close to God. And I feel like every time I do something outside of that religious world, listen to non-religious music, hang with non-religious friends, I’m somehow settling. Even if I’m not doing anything really wrong, I always feel compromised. I guess I feel that the two – religious and secular – are like oil and water. There’s God-stuff and there’s world-stuff, and never the two shall meet.’

But here’s the deal. The really radical lay saint finds him/herself in love with all that God made genuinely human, and sees that reading the newspaper, going to a movie, playing cards, tinkering with your car, going hunting, playing pool, learning to dance (my wife hopes for this one), enjoying sports, or sipping a glass of Chianti with a friend, listening to some good jazz music in the French Quarter, all the while talking about the world is, when done with the mind of Christ, truly engaging in a holy acts fitting to the genius of the lay vocation. It’s the way to sanctify the secular qua secular.

Lay saints end the schism that sin drives between God and the Garden he made for us to cultivate and enjoy as a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and remind the world that the world itself, purified and transfigured through our lives, will remain constitutive of our happiness in the next world. Of these lay saints, Vatican II says,  ’[God] summons others to dedicate themselves to the earthly service of men and to make ready the material of the celestial realm by this ministry of theirs’ (GS 38).

Go!

The words framing the Mass, Venite, ‘Come!’ and Ite, ‘Go!’ impart to the secular labors of the lay faithful outside the Mass a fundamental demand: As priests of the public square, go into the world to make of the world bread and wine susceptible to Christ.

Then at Mass, the priest of the sanctuary will bring your offering to the One who appeared to Mary Magdalene as a Risen Gardener, and he will bear up to the Father the fruits of the soil you have labored so hard to till.

That is the true harvest of Vatican II.

Marriage revisited

I had someone contact me after reading my recent post on ‘saint-making marriage,’ and ask me this question: ‘So, after your friend shared with you his understanding of marriage as saint-making, what again was the exact insight you came to understand?’

Great question. Here is a knee-jerk stab at it that has all the romance of a theology book.

Two Insights

I shared with this inquirer in reply that there were two things in particular I have come to appreciate from his comment as our marital years have evolved: (1) marriage lived as a sacrament is about walking the ‘narrow way’ to holiness and (2) the ‘personal fulfillment’ to be had in marriage is not primarily me-centered but thee-centered.

The sacramental theology of the Catholic tradition says that the grace of the sacrament of marriage is effected not by the ordained minister witnessing the exchange of promises, but by the couple in their free consent to enter into a lifelong, till-death covenant. Their consent allows them to participate in God’s unbreakable covenant of love for humanity that was ratified and consummated in Christ. This means that the spouses are themselves sources of sacramental grace, and as with all sacraments what is received and given in the sacrament of marriage is Christ’s self-giving dying and rising.

This means that by freely accepting the sacrament of marriage in the exchange of promises, the couple accepts into their relationship, like holy Communion received in the hand, the substantial fire of Christ’s self-sacrificing love. By accepting this holy sacrament at the moment they say ‘I do,’ husband and wife pledge to live out that sacramental dying-rising love together every moment of every day, till death rends their one-flesh union.

And as we know what nuptial love looks like in Christ, we know it ain’t pretty. But it is beautiful.

My Good is Your Good

This marital covenant fidelity, cemented by the couple’s free pledge of undying and self-giving love, is a very costly love that is the soul of marital holiness. Nuptial holiness involves daily acts of hidden heroism as each spouse chooses again and again to love the other, with relentless resolve, and each chooses to place the other first.

As a married man, my definition of personal fulfillment always includes my wife and the children that God has created from the clay of our one-flesh union. Spouses, in effect, say to one another every day: ‘my happiness includes your happiness; my fulfillment includes your fulfillment.’ Not in a dysfunctional co-dependent way, where my happiness is wrongly dependent on your happiness, but rather in a healthy interpersonal way, where I include you as my quest for happiness by choosing at all times what is in our best interest.

Original Sinners

What makes this shared quest for marital fulfillment really challenging is that both spouses are broken sinners, imperfect lovers, and so their mutual love has to also be a redemptive love willing to bear the other’s burdens. Spouses help lead each other, from the midst of their grace-soaked marital union, from brokenness into wholeness. And just as Christ loved his sinful Bride even unto death at her own hands, so the couple must suffer together a certain arduous toil in loving their flawed beloved, and flawed children, from sin into grace. Seen thus, spouses faults aren’t the unfortunate obstacles to each other’s happiness, but opportunities for heroic love.

This vision of marriage as a vocation of redemptive love is what makes it a form of lived martyrdom, of dying to self for the sake of the beloved. And to succeed fully as a recipe for marital success, both spouses have to own this vision.

This ‘redemptive’ character of spousal love is what medieval theologians believed to be one of the primary ends of marriage – remedium concupiscentiae, ‘the remedy of concupiscence.’ Concupiscence, which is the way theology describes the moral dysfunction of sinful humanity (sexual and otherwise), finds in marriage a powerful salve, a healing grace that allows God to untie the knot of our twisted desires and teach us to love aright. And how perfect that he accomplishes this healing in the heart of the very relationship from which all sin first sprang. O happy fault, as Adam and Eve gave me the chance to love my bride with a costly love!

Marriage is Beyond Me

In marriage, you also enter into something much greater than yourself, and the whole of marriage is greater than the sum of the two parts. In marriage, you consent to cooperate with Christ in healing the broken human race, beginning with yourselves, and in opening humanity to a most intimate share in the divine life/love poured out out for us in Christ. In this sense, one might say the future of humanity, its very salvation, depends on fidelity to the gift of marriage entrusted to humanity by God from the very beginning, and on the gift of sacramental marriage entrusted to the Church by Christ.

In addition, our children are constant visible reminders of our self-transcending commitment. They are living, breathing, walking signs of our choice to remain for the long haul and be for them God’s earthly home.

Tough love

In a culture that tends to define happiness in terms of the autonomous and self-sufficient individual, whose ‘pursuit of happiness’ is perceived to be in competition with other individuals’ self-interests, this approach to marital bliss is hard to digest without creating ethical heartburn.  The fact is, having a ‘good marriage’ is really hard work. But it’s love alone that makes all hard work seem easy.

Christ-less = Crisis

But we are Christians, and so it’s not all about hard work and effective strategies. First an foremost it’s about hard prayer and effective cooperation with God’s manifold grace. Marriage is what God has joined, not about what we have joined. Which means that living a sacramental marriage of necessity requires explicit and sustained intimacy with Christ, the giver and content of the sacrament. It’s Christ whom I am loving in my wife, and it’s Christ who empowers me to love her worthily and forgives me for not.

In fact, to attempt to live a sacramental marriage without Christ is like a priest trying to confect the Eucharist without Christ — it’s an empty gesture devoid of power.

A Revolution

A last point. When I worked at the Missionaries of Charity Gift of Peace hospice in 1991-92, I was lovingly confronted one day by the superior of the house, Sr. Manorama, after she listened to me bitterly complain about the hardships of serving a difficult patient I was caring for. His name was Robert.

After hearing me out for nearly an hour, she simply said, “Tom, it’s not about you. It’s about Robert. And inasmuch as it’s about Robert, it’s about Jesus. And that’s why we’re here. It’s just not about you.”

It’s never about me, but always about thee and we and the thrice-holy Three, that life-creating, lovely and undivided Trinity.

And that insight is for me the utterly and absolutely revolutionary key to marital and parenting success.

Orthodoxy with Hart

Festschrift

As I have mentioned in the past, I am a huge fan of Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart. He is a dense and artful writer with a sharp wit and an encyclopedic database of knowledge. He is also an equal opportunity offender, and has the most creative insights into seemingly stale or intractable debates.

For example, I found his post-tsunami book on the problem of evil wildly compelling, his post-Port-au-Prince earthquake commentary on the Haiti crisis incisive, and his book on theological beauty mind-blowing in its fresh appropriation of well-worn theologies. He even wrote an essay on ‘my man,’ St. John of the Cross, that knocked my socks off in opening to me St. John’s remarkably Eastern Christian view of salvation (see Summer of 2003).

Then there’s his very witty 5-part youtube exchange with a British secularist Terry Sanderson about ethics, history and Christian theology.

The list goes on.

From East to West

As I grew up in a broken Orthodox-Catholic home, I have always longed for the day East and West breathe together as one again.

Quotable Hart

I came across this Hart quote yesterday as I was reading his persuasive essay on ‘the myth of schism,’ that preserves a delicate balance between realism and hope.  Note especially the appreciation of the unique ‘gift’ each Tradition is said to bring:

…In any event, my last remark is only this: reunion of the Orthodox and Roman Churches has become an imperative, and time is growing short. I say this because I often suffer from bleak premonitions of the ultimate cultural triumph in the West of a consumerism so devoid of transcendent values as to be, inevitably, nothing but a pervasive and pitiless nihilism. And it is, I think, a particularly soothing and saccharine nihilism, possessing a singular power for absorbing the native energies of the civilization it is displacing without prompting any extravagant alarm at its vacuous barbarisms. And I suspect that the only tools at Christianity’s disposal, as it confronts the rapid and seemingly inexorable advance of this nihilism, will be evangelical zeal and internal unity. I like to think…that the tribulations that Eastern Christianity has suffered under Islamic and communist rule have insulated it from some of the more corrosive pathologies of modernity for a purpose, and endowed it with a special mission to bring its liturgical, intellectual, and spiritual strengths to the aid of the Western Christian world in its struggle with the nihilism that the post-Christian West has long incubated and that now surrounds us all, while yet drawing on the strengths and charisms of the Western church to preserve Orthodoxy from the political and cultural frailty that still afflicts Eastern Christianity. Whatever the case, though, we are more in need of one another now than ever. To turn away from ecumenism now may be to turn towards the darkness that is deepening all about us. We are called to be children of light, and I do not think that we will walk very far in the light hereafter except together.