Gaudete et exsultate: The Real History of the World

Pope Francis exhorts us, with the help of Edith Stein:

Let us be spurred on by the signs of holiness that the Lord shows us through the humblest members of that people which “shares also in Christ’s prophetic office, spreading abroad a living witness to him, especially by means of a life of faith and charity”. We should consider the fact that, as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross suggests, real history is made by so many of them. As she writes: “The greatest figures of prophecy and sanctity step forth out of the darkest night. But for the most part, the formative stream of the mystical life remains invisible. Certainly the most decisive turning points in world history are substantially co-determined by souls whom no history book ever mentions. And we will only find out about those souls to whom we owe the decisive turning points in our personal lives on the day when all that is hidden is revealed” (8)

This reminded me of something from Thomas Merton:

I wonder if there are twenty men alive in the world now who see things as they really are. That would mean that there were twenty men who were free, who were not dominated or even influenced by any attachment to any created thing or to their own selves or to any gift of God, even to the highest, the most supernaturally pure of His graces. I don't believe that there are twenty such men alive in the world. But there must be one or two. They are the ones who are holding everything together and keeping the universe from falling apart. (from "Detachment" in New Seeds of Contemplation)

One of the gifts of priesthood for me has been the opportunity to meet, usually in confession, some of these hidden saints. It is they, not the robbers writ large that one sees each day in the news, who are the protagonists of the true history of the world, which is the creation's pilgrimage toward full transfiguration in the Risen Christ.

Laudato Si': Progress

There is also the fact that people no longer seem to believe in a happy future; they no longer have blind trust in a better tomorrow based on the present state of the world and our technical abilities. There is a growing awareness that scientific and technological progress cannot be equated with the progress of humanity and history, a growing sense that the way to a better future lies elsewhere. (113)

As the variously attributed quote goes, 'God is dead, Marx is dead, and I don't feel so well myself.'

The Holy Father says a lot regarding the aimlessness of our modern culture. In days past it threw off the eschatology of Christianity and replaced it with other, more worldly eschatologies: communism, eugenics, technocracy, better living through chemistry.

The twentieth century is the age of the crumbling of these human ideas of progress, each of which come to nothing after they had given birth to their rotten fruit for the world. (Although we have to say that abortion, as a child of the eugenics movement, is still with us.)

Thus the current 'post-modern' moment represents an opportunity that the Holy Father recommends to us, a moment to make friends again with ourselves and with our own dignity, to learn to love chastely our sister mother earth, to believe in something better that is beyond the hubris of our own ideas of progress, but is hidden in the little mustard seeds of chaste love that are the Kingdom of God planted among us.

A better future does lie 'beyond ourselves' as the Pope says, but it is a 'beyond ourselves' who has identified himself with our joy and struggles in Jesus Christ. His divine humanity is the Kingdom of God, and it is ours to find our own humanity in it.

Reading 'The Infancy Narratives'

I've been reading Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives on the Sundays of Advent and finished it this morning. The first thing I would say about it is that the reader does well to take seriously what the author says about the nature of the book, that it "is not a third volume, but a kind of small 'antechamber' to the two earlier volumes." It's a sweet little book of just a few chapters, but shot through with the sort of reflection that reveals a real devotion to the events recorded by Matthew and Luke. Particularly touching in this sense is the thoughtful section on the Virgin Birth:

It seems natural to me that only after Mary's death could the mystery be made public and pass into the shared patrimony of early Christianity. At that point it could find its way into the evolving complex of Christological doctrine and be linked to the confession of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God--yet not in the manner of a story crafted from an idea, an idea reformulated as a fact, but vice versa: the event itself, a fact that was now in the public domain, became the object of reflection--understanding was sought. The overall picture of Jesus Christ shed light upon the event, and conversely, through that event, the divine logic was more deeply grasped. The mystery of his origin illuminated what came later, and conversely the developed form of Christological faith helped to make sense of that origin. Thus did Christology develop.

Another section that makes a similar point in a more general way:

The two chapters of Matthew's Gospel devoted to the infancy narratives are not a meditation presented under the guise of stories, but the converse: Matthew is recounting real history, theologically thought and interpreted, and thus he helps us to understand the mystery of Jesus more deeply.

How refreshing that is for us who absorbed so many brittle doctrines about history and fact and meaning and God--e.g. 'yes, it's just a myth' or 'yes, it's just a symbol,' 'but that means it's more true!' or 'yes, the Bible is all true, and some of it really happened'--all of these doctrines that when they are heard by unbelievers convince them more deeply that we religious people are self-deluded and full of nonsense. More and more I tend to consign such teaching to the large category of things that seemed liberating to our parents in the faith but have not delivered on such hope.

It is said by some that the Church needs to be updated according to the times, in order to be more relevant, more comprehensible, and set free from her doctrines that are offensive to the cherished ideas of contemporary society. But what they forget is that the world doesn't hate the Church because of her teachings; the world hates the Church because it hated Jesus Christ first. And those are his words, not mine.

And why should Benedict's assertions seem strange? Do we not in just the same way work out our spiritual understanding of ourselves? It is a historical fact that in the early afternoon on August 29, 1992, I walked up and out of the basement of Freeman dormitory and down the street to Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Quaker Hill, Connecticut, where a deacon of the Roman Catholic Church poured some water on me and invoked the Blessed Trinity. It really took place. You can go to the church and find a historical record of it in their office. But to know and understand what happened that day requires some theological reflection. That's how our spiritual lives work, history coming to be understood in light of God's eternity. Why should the Sacred Scriptures be any different?

I also enjoyed a little jab at academic theology delivered by the old professor. He is discussing the beginning of Matthew 2, in which Herod, following up on the inquiry of Magi, asks the chief priests and the scribes where the Messiah is to be born. Despite giving a learned and complete answer, Benedict notes that this knowledge does not prompt them to actually do anything:

The answer given by the chief priests and scribes to the wise men's question has a thoroughly practical geographical content, which helps the Magi on their way. Yet it is not only a geographical, but also a theological interpretation of the place and the event. That Herod would draw the obvious conclusion is understandable. Yet it is remarkable that his Scripture experts do not feel prompted to take any practical steps as a result. Does this, perhaps, furnish us with the image of a theology that exhausts itself in academic disputes?

The Funny Feast of Christ the King

I woke up this morning thinking about today, the last Sunday of Ordinary Time, the solemnity of Christ the King. In a way that it hadn't before, it struck me as an odd day. I'll try to explain how.

The most powerful doctrines are the ones we hold as assumptions, moods, 'interpretive keys,' 'lenses,' and the like. The less they are explicitly taught and simply absorbed from one's surroundings, the more powerful and normative they become. One such doctrine I learned early on in my Catholic journey and theological education was a certain way of understanding the relationship between history and eschatology.

It was said that in the past there was too strong a focus on an other-worldly salvation, on an eschatology which was reduced to the four 'last things' (death, judgement, Heaven, hell). This absolved Christians of taking seriously enough the need to serve the salvation and well-being of people in the here and now. But since we modern Christians knew well that we would be judged according to our never-questioned reading of the Judgment scene in Matthew 25, our work was less in preaching, catechizing, 'making disciples of all nations,' but in serving the needs of the 'least of our brothers and sisters.' Our ancestors in the great modern flowering of apostolic religious life did this by finding new forms and building new institutions to serve the needs of people. For us it wasn't to do such things ourselves, but to try to make civil authorities do them instead. This was called the shift from 'charity' to 'justice.' It was one of the great dogmas of my Catholic upbringing.

Now maybe I make a caricature of these things and thus a straw man, but the theological insight behind them is solid; eschatology isn't about a far-away world that renders the current reality less important, but about a Kingdom that is transcendent, always and everywhere present, available, and inviting history into its beatitude.

To reiterate the the basic doctrine: we used to talk about other-worldly salvation, but now we are about peace and justice in the here and now. But here's the funny thing about Christ the King; as an observance, it has journeyed along the opposite trajectory.

The reformed liturgy presents the feast of Christ the King as a celebration of the rule of the cosmic Christ, the alpha and the omega. The day crowns the apocalyptic theme of the last days of Ordinary Time and makes us ready for the similarly apocalyptic first Sunday of Advent. The readings for the Mass and the Divine Office seem to emphasize Christ the King as a day to reflect on the end point of time, history, and God's purpose, without a lot of interference of the messiness of the 'here and now.'

It's funny because the feast of Christ the King used to be a lot more pointed toward the current moment, with much heavier political overtones. Here are a couple of quotes from the encyclical Quas primas of Pius XI, which established the observance:

In the first Encyclical Letter which We addressed at the beginning of Our Pontificate to the Bishops of the universal Church, [Ubi arcano Dei consilio] We referred to the chief causes of the difficulties under which mankind was laboring. And We remember saying that these manifold evils in the world were due to the fact that the majority of men had thrust Jesus Christ and his holy law out of their lives; that these had no place either in private affairs or in politics: and we said further, that as long as individuals and states refused to submit to the rule of our Savior, there would be no really hopeful prospect of a lasting peace among nations. (1) 

Nor is there any difference in this matter [i.e. the "empire of our Redeemer"] between the individual and the family or the State; for all men, whether collectively or individually, are under the dominion of Christ. In him is the salvation of the individual, in him is the salvation of society... If, therefore, the rulers of nations wish to preserve their authority, to promote and increase the prosperity of their countries, they will not neglect the public duty of reverence and obedience to the rule of Christ. (18) 

When once men recognize, both in private and in public life, that Christ is King, society will at last receive the great blessings of real liberty, well-ordered discipline, peace and harmony. (19)

That's 1925. Kind of shocking, isn't it? Somewhere along the forty years between Quas primas and Vatican II, the Church decided to make friends with the project of European modernity, and with it the idea of secular, pluralistic, modern democracy. And so, as we turned from other-worldly salvation to justice and peace, the funny feast of Christ the King had to take the opposite path and be changed from a politically-charged observance to a work of awe and wonder at the world to come. The politics of Christ the King went out of style, but since you can't just get rid of a feast day instituted by a Pope, the best thing you can do is to make it mystical.

But now, another fifty years on since Vatican II, perhaps the concerns of those who made such a fuss about 'modernism' are looking a little less stuffy and reactionary, as the happy friendship between the Church and modern liberal democracy starts to show some signs of stress.

Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat

Party Like It's 5199

I'm a little bummed that the Christmas proclamation, i.e. the "Proclamation of the birth of Christ," which can be sung leading up to the Mass in nocte, doesn't seem to be included in the new Roman Missal in English. I guess it's just another symptom of the marginalization of the Martyrology in the reformed Roman rite.

CORRECTION: Thanks to my erudite friend cua guy, I have been corrected. A new version of the proclamation does appear in the new English Roman Missal, towards the end of the appendix, "Various chants for the Order of Mass."

Personally, I don't like this new version, and nor did I like the version that appeared in the 2004 Sacramentary Supplement. The latter is still available on the USCCB website, oddly enough.  I prefer the big numbers that date the creation, and a history that begins before Abraham. "When ages beyond number had run their course from the creation of the world" Boring. It's Christmas. Be a creationist for one night and party like it's 5199!

Our Lady of Guadalupe

On my walk to the Poor Clares for Mass this morning, I was reflecting on Our Lady of Guadalupe, and what I might say by way of a homily for her feast day today.

I think she is a great encouragement for the Church and the world. That our Blessed Mother should have appeared from among the indigenous people of the Americas precisely as the eschatological Mary, the apocalyptic woman clothed with the sun from Revelation 12, is hope in the midst of the mess and ambivalence of human history.

Whatever the sins of history and the abiding injuries and injustices of Christianity coming to the 'New World,' our Lady of Guadalupe assures us that Babylon the great is already fallen, and that the king of the nations she bears has been preserved from the destructive dragon. The one she bears to the world is the Eternal Word who empties his divinity into the suffering humanity of this world, offering salvation to all of us who have insisted on such misery for ourselves and each other with our violence and sin.

Eschaton Made Flesh

I love the feast of the Immaculate Conception because I think it's one of the most explicitly and plainly eschatological liturgical observances of the whole year, and because we are so badly in need of recovering our eschatological sense. I think this is especially true for us Franciscans. As the young Benedict XVI wrote of the Franciscan Rule in his Habilitationsschrift, The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure:

The unsophisticated and unrealistic way in which Francis tried to make the Sermon on the Mount the rule of his 'new People' is not understood properly if we designate it as 'idealism'...it is understandable only as...eschatological confidence..

A couple of common-sense objections to the Immaculate Conception help us to understand the eschatological nature of this dogma. First, it is asked how Mary could have benefited from the salvation Christ won by his Passion and Resurrection before these things happened. Second, if Mary was free of both the guilt and the effects of original sin from the first moment of her conception, what need did she have of the redemption Christ was to win for us?

These objections reveal an overly temporal and mechanical imagination surrounding the Resurrection of Christ and the salvation that it is for us. The Resurrection matters precisely because it is an eschatological event; it is the end and destiny of the creation made historical by revelation.

This is why Paul, in Romans 4, is able to suggest that Abraham's faith that God could bring forth descendants from the bodies of himself and Sarah, which were 'as good as dead,' is a sort of occult faith in the Resurrection. Abraham believed that God could bring a fresh and new life from a creation that had become old and dead in the corruption inherited from our first parents, and that God would do just that through his body and that of his wife.

Isaac, is then, the first visible light of the dawn of Resurrection faith. As the power of this eschaton-made-history rolls through time, it prepares Mary to be the new and final Ark in which the full inauguration of the End will come into the world.

Confessing our Deicide

These past couple of days I've enjoyed a visit from my sister. It was very good to see her and catch up. We spent yesterday morning at the Museum of Fine Arts. Because of my general Philistinism, I had not been there before despite having lived in Boston for a total of six years.

It's a lovely place, and we saw many interesting things. I have to say, though, that the visit troubled me a little. Journeying through the history of European art, it became clear to me that God, or at least a certain explicit way of expressing divine things, goes away. At the beginning one sees so many beautiful depictions of the Lord and the saints. Over the course of time, the dominance of the mysteries of revelation and the saints evaporates.

It brought Nietzsche to mind:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? (The Gay Science, Section 125, tr. Walter Kaufmann)

I don't want to beat any culture war drum and bewail that our civilization went wrong by doing away with God. It may be true but that's a judgement that certain cautions with me prevent me from making. But I will say two things about what seems to follow. First, our civilization, as I think Nietzsche warns, has not understood the implications of having killed God. And now, as 'God' becomes a concept without any intelligible content at all for whole sections of society--sometimes even for religious people, though many times it's not their fault--we don't even know why it becomes impossible to make value judgments or avoid slipping into the relativism in which there is only the rule of power.

Second, and this is the thing that's really been on my mind, I wonder if we who are believers have really done any better with taking the death of God seriously. Have we found ways to preach and catechize that both confess and confront that all of us who are heirs to western civilization are implicated in deicide? God is dead. And remains Dead. And we have killed him. Does our religion admit this? Or worse, does it just live in denial in such a way that we become functional agnostics or even atheists?

To be fair to the Church, I think that Gaudium et spes, for example, was something like an attempt at answer to this sort of question. But the more I read it, the more I become convinced that it was the Church's shot at embracing the humanistic optimism that western civilization tried to substitute for God, and that just as the rest of the world was giving up on it after witnessing its rotten fruits during the bloody twentieth century.

For us who have killed God and put him out of the human civilization he himself created, I'm wondering if something more radical is called for. But I admit I'm not sure what it is.

Update: I'm not sure what it is primarily because the execution of the God who failed to live up to our best religious expectations is at the heart of Christianity, and I haven't put this truth together with the historical data yet.

Theology of History

Providence has given me a number of reasons of late to examine more closely my fundamental theological ideas. Among not the least of these reasons is my obedience to obtain a doctorate in sacred theology and my desire to be a responsible catholic blogger.

In this project I have begun to try to articulate a certain theological sense of modern history that I seem to hold, and which seems to frame a lot of my thinking. This being the case, I need to get these ideas out in the open so I can examine them better and submit myself to critique.

In that spirit, here are the outlines of the theology of history that I seem to have fallen into over the years. I don't present this as a set of theological claims, but as an attempt at self-examination.

1. Modern man, as Nietzsche famously diagnosed, killed God and thereby emancipated himself from religion (and yes, often even we religious people want to enjoy this emancipation for ourselves, wanting to have it both ways) and from both the desire for and responsibility to any supernatural destiny.

2. Because people want purpose, direction, and meaning more than anything else, purely rational substitutes for God as the purpose and goal of human history began to emerge thanks to Hegel, Marx, etc. Historical dialectics replaced the eschatological Kingdom of God. On the other hand, thanks to Freud, the ascent of the mind to God was replaced with an inward, therapeutic journey of personal archaeology.

3. As the twentieth century passed, these replacements for the dead God came to destroy themselves. National Socialism scarred the whole world. Communism caused tremendous suffering and then imploded. The inward, therapeutic journey which was supposed to be so liberating came to yield a rotten fruit of narcissism and entitlement.

4. With both God and Marx dead--that is to say without either a natural or supernatural meaning or destiny--modern man had become, by the middle of the twentieth century, adrift. He began to call his state of being adrift his 'post-modernity.' In this condition he has nothing left to do but argue about the right way to conduct the modern liberal state (and sorry, the 'modern liberal state' embraces both 'liberals' and 'conservatives' in the political sense of the terms.) But even in this project he has no criteria for doing so, being without any durable values, shared ultimate concern, or absolute truth. So the criteria for conducting the modern liberal state come to be based on personal feelings and personal convenience on the animal level--both having been given some sense of 'absolute' value by the therapeutic journey. Thus, we end up in a situation where various tragedies and absurdities, e.g. state-sanctioned abortion and homosexual "marriage" respectively, become to people obvious, 'no-brainers.'

5. Into this state of affairs, the Catholic Church, in the wake of Vatican II, tried to finally embrace the ideas of modernity, like someone who comes to a party just as it is ending. So we get a certain 'Spirit of Vatican II' that wants to talk about historical progress in the sense of the European Enlightenment, just as the rest of the thoughtful world--having witnessed the first half of the twentieth century--is just about ready to reject it. Thus, we end up with a kind of misplaced focus in our ministry and preaching, in which the 'progress of peoples' is seen in an overly this-worldly way. Works of material charity and social justice are very worthwhile, and even necessary, but even more than these, what modern "society" (if it can be called that) really needs is eschatology, a sense of where it is going, an idea of the Destiny from which derives the meaning of the present and the person within it.


So there it is. As I try to dig out my theological assumptions, I realize that this sense of history is a big part of it. In some ways, it's mixed up with my unconsciously abstracting a theology from my own experience of conversion.

Getting There

The other day I finished the Holy Father's doctoral habilitation The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure (in translation), and I have to say that I really enjoyed it. It's a 'page turner.' If you've ever wondered how someone like Bonaventure could preserve the eschatological edge of Franciscanism by correcting the excesses of Joachim of Fiore and his early receptors, and by making a subtle Christological shift of Christ from eschatological end to center of creation, then this is the book for you.

Having an argument about Christ as end and/or center might not seem to matter, but I think it does. As Christians, we need to recover our eschatology. We have lost, to some degree, our sense that the world as a whole and we as individuals are on a linear pilgrimage of which this life is only a part. The loss of this sense has hampered us in our senses of both life and death.

In the area where I work, aimlessness is one of the larger pastoral and human problems I see. It seems like a lot of young men die here; guys in their 30s or 40s who never really got going in life and who often fall into alcohol and drug abuse. I feel for them because I can see that it's hard here. There isn't much to do. Unless you're a schoolteacher, cop, join the fire department or work for the casino, or unless you have the wherewithal to get a job in the City and commute, there isn't much left. I sometimes wonder if preaching with an eschatological edge would help. I don't mean that I would get up and preach the fear of hell, but explain the good news that our human lives have some urgency to them; that we are live lives that become less revisable each day and through which we decide who we want to be in eternity. Not that this is a matter of fear. It is the stuff of opportunity, and when we put ourselves to it we find peace and joy because we are aligning ourselves with the fundamental movements of the entire creation. Purposefulness of life is harmony with the pilgrim creation.

Our lack of eschatological consciousness also reveals itself in how we handle death. It's why funerals have become 'celebrations of life' rather than offerings of prayer and sacrifice for someone at a turning point in their ongoing journey. It's why Mass intentions have become opportunities to memorialize the dead rather than to pray for them. Many priests wouldn't dream of using anything but white as the liturgical color for funerals. I have nothing against white, which is the right and dignity of all the baptized, but doesn't making the option for white in funerals into an unassailable norm betray a little bit of presumption?

Rambling on Sacraments and Voices

This morning I was thinking about a homily I heard once. The priest was preaching on the need for people to return to confession. One of his points went something like this: 'When you pray, no voice comes back. If you do hear a voice speak back, that's called mental illness. But on the other hand, when you receive sacramental absolution, you actually hear the voice of Jesus Christ speaking to you.'

On the one hand I liked it. I appreciated that the priest was preaching on our need for a return to the sacrament of Penance. It wasn't until I became a parish priest and got to know older Catholics that I realized the extent of the decline in this practice. Priests don't preach it a lot either, which perhaps is partly because some of them don't go themselves and many find hearing confessions tedious or boring. I do too sometimes, but then I think that it's probably nothing compared to the tedium and boredom I must have caused confessors over the years (and still do, no doubt!). Most of the time priests have treated me gently, so should I not do the same?

I also appreciated the good sacramental theology of this priest. It is our catholic belief that the divine presence of the incarnate Word of God in the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth has been passed into the eschatological presence of Jesus Christ in the Sacraments. The name of this passing over is Resurrection. When we are baptized, we are in the same position as Jesus being baptized by John; the Spirit descends upon us and the Father proclaims his pleasure. When we receive Holy Communion, we are in the same condition as our Blessed Mother who consented to the Word of God being conceived in her body. When we receive sacramental absolution we are just like those whom Jesus heals, forgives, and sends in the gospels. The only difference is one of something like dimension; it is between the historical and the eschatological. Our faith tells us, however, that in the end these will be rolled into one in the New Jerusalem that is, in herself, the marriage between heaven and earth.


On the other hand, I had some trouble with what the priest said. Even though we live in a sacramental community in which the primary presence and communication of God comes to us as an assembly that extends through space and time, we cannot push this too far. God does communicate with individual souls through their prayer. Yes, if we hear a voice in the same way we hear another physical person speak to us, we should probably see the doctor. But there are suggestions that come to us in prayer, or after we have prayed for guidance. There are phenomena that occur that we might call 'interior locutions.' Of course such experiences always have to be tested and should be reviewed with a spiritual mother or father. It is very easy to be tricked in this regard.

In the end, it's true that Jesus is not my 'personal Lord and savior.' He is the savior of the world, and I wish to tag along. But we do have an individual relationship, and there's no denying it.

My New Older Brother

Yesterday afternoon I had the honor and joy of attending my new nephew's circumcision ceremony at the home of my brother and sister-in-law. It was an interesting and happy event, on both the natural and spiritual levels.

"You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin, and that shall be the sign of the covenant between Me and you. And throughout all generations, every male among you shall be circumcised at the age of eight days." (Genesis 17: 11-12, JPS)

And so it was for my little nephew: Yesterday he was eight days old, and my brother delegated a professional mohel to bring his son into the covenant.

On the natural level, I was happy for the new parents in their gratitude and wonder at their healthy little baby boy. I was happy for him too, having arrived in the world with two bright and gentle parents. It was good to see my family as we received the blessings of new identities and reconfigured relationships; to see my brother as a father and my parents in the beginning of their grandparenthood.

The afternoon was also quite fascinating on the supernatural level. Here's what really blew my mind: I've been on this earth for almost thirty-eight years, but as I looked at this tiny, eight-day-old baby sitting on the throne that had been prepared for Elijah, I saw someone older than me. Here was my senior, not my young nephew but my elder in the faith of Abraham, the Israel of history. For me, as a member of the "Israel of God," (Galatians 6:16) of the New Jerusalem that is the eschatological marriage of heaven and earth (Revelation 21:2), of the Body of Christ which is the Risen Son of Man containing in Himself the destiny that is the End Times already here, this baby will always be my older brother.

In these last days, by the astounding mercy of God I have been grafted into the faith of Abraham. I enjoy by privilege the faith that is my nephew's by right. May I always revere and respect my new little elder.



Here he is with his father, mother, and maternal grandmother, sporting his little skullcap and sucking on some gauze soaked in Manischewitz.

In the Faith of Abraham

An email conversation with my mother regarding the upcoming birth of my Jewish nephew has got me thinking about the relationship of Christianity to non-Christians in the faith of Abraham. I know that there is magisterial teaching on these questions, but I'm just musing this morning.

Perhaps many Jews would object to this, but it seems to me that a Christian is a peculiar sort of Jew. After all, we do what Jews do: we follow the Law and worship at the Temple. For us this is not the historical law or the physical Temple. We keep the Law as it has been received in its prophetic interpretation down to and including the historical Jesus. We worship within the eschatological Temple that is the sacrificed and risen Body of Christ. Therefore, when I meet a Jew, I don't see someone from a different religion but someone of the same religion in a different concept of time. We are both Jews, one a member of the Israel of history, the other a member of the Israel of transcendent time, the end times, the ultimate horizon, the eschaton.

I believe that this is sound and demonstrable Biblical teaching deriving especially from the later prophets, St. John, St. Paul, and Revelation, and if it wasn't two days before Christmas for which three different Sunday-length homilies have to be given in three days, I might have time to point some of this out.


Islam is a lot harder for me, and I admit that I have an unresolved internal tension when I think about it. It seems to me that you have to face the question: Did the angel Gabriel reveal the Qur'an to Muhammad (peace be upon him) or not? If one consents to this proposition, then the only reasonable thing is to surrender to God and become a Muslim right now. If one denies that the Qur'an came from Gabriel, doesn't this invalidate Islam altogether and throw out the faith of nearly a quarter of the people on earth? Is there a way out of this seemingly binary problem?

Of course, if what I say about Christianity being an eschatological religion is accepted in a certain way, then the faith/fulness of Jesus Christ is still a more recent revelation of God than the Qur'an. After all, the Resurrection is the definitive and constitutive sign of the end times, and it has reached back into history and grabbed us.

Friday

Tonight I'm trying to read a book and I can't pay attention because I'm having a far-out reflection on the inner meaning of Friday.

Friday is, of course, the final day of the Creation, when God makes the land animals and the human beings. In his parting word, God explains to the human beings that they have all the botanical fruits for their food* while the other animals will have the green plants. Friday is the conclusion of the work of Creation.

And so it is with the Lord's Passion on Friday, because the suffering and death of the Lord are the last thing, the end of the story of this world, the end of human history. The Resurrection that inaugurates the New Creation on the First Day--the Deity having rested on the Sabbath according to the very structure of the Creation in which he became incarnate--is properly part of the Last Things and the End Time, Eternity now having invaded history in the Risen Lord.


*I would be very interested to read a theological study of the human diet according to Divine Revelation. On the face of it, it appears that it was only after the covenant with Noah that people started to eat meat (Genesis 9:3), while at the beginning they ate fruit (1:29.) So how was it that Abel offered meat to God, and why did God like it better than the crops offered by Cain?

Back in the Day

Today on the feast of the founders of the Servite order, I keep thinking how it must have been a blast to live in Europe back in the decades surrounding the turn of the thirteenth century. Victorines in Paris, Waldensians in Lyons, Humiliati in Milan, Servites in Florence, Franciscans and Dominicans all over, having professors with names like "Petrus Comestor" and waiting for Joachim of Fiore's third age of the world to appear... all together it must have been quite something.

Believe in Now

Ok, I can't help but throw a rant about the Superbowl slogan, "believe in now." It is the nature of now that you don't have to believe in it; now is the given, the self-evident. A cat or an infant knows the now and they organize their lives in response to it, but they don't have to believe in it. It's a given.

The trick is to believe in the future, and the really special work is to believe in the future in such a way that it permeates and draws the now into it. That's what it means to believe in the seedling Kingdom of God, or in that classic sign and event of the end-times, the Resurrection.

Holocaust Memorial Day

I just wanted to post this as a counterpoint to recent concerns regarding the Holy Father and the SSPX.

Transfiguration

I really love the feast of the Transfiguration, and I've often reflected on it in these posts. To me it's just one of those very mystical feast days. In the same spirit I really love the Epiphany and the Presentation/feast of Candlemas.

To me the Transfiguration reveals that the Resurrection is not a historical event but a transcendent force. If it were merely a historical event, how could this Resurrection appearance--and surely it is one--occur before the Lord's Passion?

God makes use of the humanity of Christ to break into time and space. Raising this humanity to new life by the Spirit, this inbreaking arrives as the Resurrection of the Lord. It is the transcendent joined to the time and space of creation, or, more scriptually speaking, the marriage of heaven and earth.

The Resurrection and the Bomb

Continuing in response to Ben in Denver's comments on my Transfiguration homily from the second Sunday in Lent, I have been thinking about the relationship between the Transfiguration/Resurrection and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which occurred on the feast of the Transfiguration in 1945.

As I've tried to think about it, I think there is an analogy between the Resurrection and the bomb. What is the Resurrection? It is God revealed in history. It is the glorious, immense, and benevolent power we clumsily call "God" revealed to us in Jesus Christ's victory over suffering and death. Most simply, the Resurrection is the fierce but gentle, intense but quiet power at the core of the everything having been made available to us.

It is in this sense that the atomic bomb--and this is how I make sense of Ben's calling it antichrist--is a kind of negative mirror image of the Resurrection, in that it is an unleashing of a hidden power at the core of creation, not for life, but for destruction and death.

But the power that runs amok in an atomic bombing is only that. It is scarcely imaginable, but it is only a power bounded by creation. The Resurrection, on the other hand, unleashes the hidden power at the core of everything that is, including God, and this is the hidden Desire for goodness, gentleness, and life that is the foundation of all that is. And that's why the Resurrection is more powerful than death, and certainly more powerful than the bomb.

Transfiguration

Friend Ben in Denver raised some questions for reflection about the Lord's Transfiguration, coming out of the second Sunday of Lent. In my homily I made the point that the Transfiguration is a preview of the Resurrection, so Ben perceptively asks how it is also a preview of the coming of the Lord at the end of time. He also asks--and this is very interesting in other ways--how the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the feast of Transfiguration in 1945 are perhaps related to the revelation this feast commemorates. I've been thinking about these two things for a few days.

I would say that the Transfiguration is just as much a preview of the Resurrected Lord (as Jesus' first disciples would experience him) as it is of the Lord who will come again at the end of time. I say this because, in my best understanding, the Resurrection of the Lord we celebrate at Easter and the arrival of the Lord at the end of time are really the same thing. In the development of the understanding of the people of God--especially between the Testaments--the Resurrection was always an event that marked the end of time. Thus, when Jesus is Risen and the experience of him as risen encourages the disciples to gather together again and bravely proclaim his gospel, this is a sign that the end of time has, in a sense, already arrived. Recall the Lord's basic proclamation, "the Kingdom of God is at hand!"

The Resurrection is the "end"--in both the sense of terminus and the sense of purpose--of time, breaking backward into history, just as Jesus himself is the eternal Word of God breaking into history, time and space. The good news of the Resurrection is that this glorious and hopeful conclusion and goal of history is now present in Jesus Christ, and, as he promised, is drawing all things--and time itself--to himself.

I'll save the atomic bomb for the next post.