Black Smoke Rant

Maybe it's a random thing to rant about, but I was disappointed with the first black smoke of the Conclave last night. Not that I expected it to be anything but black, but it just seemed to be a little over the top in its volume and blackness, billowing away long after everyone had gotten the point.

History of the Concept of the Soul

I had totally forgotten about this song. When I happened on it again this afternoon, it made my day. You don't have to agree with everything, but the very idea of putting footnotes into a song, how can you not love that? Listen for the "Ibid" at the very end.

Mr. T. Experience, The History of the Concept of the Soul

Homer didn't have a comprehensive word for mind.
the psyche and the conscious self had not yet been combined.
He understood events as repetition from the past,
and individual consciousness was not a part of that.
But early Greek thought played a role in the complicated history
of the concept of the soul. (1)

By the time of Plato these ideas had taken shape.
The Phaedo and Timaeus are works which demonstrate
the consious separation of the knower from the known
and the dual nature of the body and the soul.
Modern thought was possible:
the complicated history of the concept of the soul.
Whoa!

Pythagoras and Orphic doctrines all came into play,
because Plato was a mystic in his own Platonic way.
The pre-Socratic Naturalists saw things in terms of "stuff".
But Plato's metaphysics showed that this was not enough.
This is the incredible complicated history of the concept of the soul.
Rock and roll! (2)

(1) For an interesting discussion, see E.R Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, (Berkeley, 1953), pp. 45-150.

(2) ibid.

Justice, Pencils, and Academic Influence

Just over twenty years ago, when I was a senior in high school, I somehow managed to get invited into this program in which I could take a college course or two. I remember the whole experience very clearly. I got out of school a couple of periods early all week so that on just two days I could walk down to the university and attend Classical Civilization 252b: Plato's Republic. (Why is it that I can remember that course number from twenty years ago, but I can't remember the numbers of the courses I'm in now when I get to the library reserve desk?)

As time has gone by, I have come to realize the intense and abiding influence this course had on me. That I should have been exposed to the middle Plato at age seventeen or eighteen set me up to be a philosophy student in undergraduate, and I thus acquired, quite providentially, the classic preparation for the theology I was called to study later on. For the first time in my life I was taught something like a coherent way to think about a spiritual reality, and so I can't deny that this course formed a significant part of my proximate preparation to assent to Catholic Christianity two years later. (Perhaps Clement of Alexandria and Justin Martyr would be proud.)

I reflect on all of this sometimes when I notice one of the practical ways in which I was influenced by the course. During one of our first classes, the professor threw this funny little rant about highlighters. They were undignified, he said, and it made him sad to see venerable texts from the great achievements of human civilization all marked up with bright yellow or hot pink. The lowly and understated pencil was the instrument appropriate to the humble student, he explained. Underlining with a check mark or occasional asterisk in the margin was all we should need.

I absorbed the plea completely, both in its tone and its practice. As I start my tenth year of formal schooling since Classical Civilization 252b, I have never marked up a text with anything but a pencil, and with only underlining, check marks, and the occasional asterisk.

The Metaphysics on Preaching

In preaching at a baptism, wake, funeral, or wedding, or to a particular group like religious or children, you can speak to a specific spiritual condition or state in life. Not so on Sundays; at the Sunday Eucharist we are all together, all degrees of devotion and all states of life are present. Sunday preaching is more of a challenge for precisely this reason; one must preach to all at once, but without being vague.

I was reflecting on this yesterday after re-reading this passage from the Philosopher himself:

Our attitude towards what we listen to is determined by our habits. We expect things to be said in the way in which we are accustomed to talk ourselves...Some people will not listen to anyone who does not talk in the manner of the mathematician, others will not listen to anyone who does not use illustrations, others again expect a poet to be adduced as an authority. Some people want rigorous treatment in everything, whereas others are annoyed by it, either because they cannot follow it or because of its pettiness; for rigorousness does carry with it something that makes some people feel that in arguments, just as in business transactions, it is rather illiberal. (Aristotle, Metaphysics, II:3, trans. J.L. Creed)

For me this captures the exciting challenge of Sunday preaching. To riff on the Philosopher, our attitude towards the homilies we hear is determined by our habits. Folks expect the truths of faith to be expressed in the language they themselves use, and rightly so, though preaching ought also to form and educate the faithful in sacral language and the precision of theological terms. Some people will not listen to anyone who does not preach in the manner of theological disputation, others will not listen to anyone who doesn't begin every homily with a funny story, while others are only satisfied if you can tie what you are trying to say into an example from some movie or Broadway show. Some people want rigorous treatment in everything, complete with citations from the Catechism, while others are annoyed by it, either because they cannot follow it or because of its pettiness; for rigorousness does carry with it something that some people find illiberal. (!)

This also means that if you preach to a few hundred people each weekend, there are bound to be folks who decide you are the best preacher ever. So they will be your encouragement. You just have to embrace the ascesis of not preaching to them alone.

St. Justin's Altar

This morning one of the brothers sent me this photo of St. Justin's Altar at our church on the Via Veneto in Rome:


"The bones of St. Justin, philosopher and martyr"

On my first visit to the church, which--in good Franciscan style--is dedicated to the Immaculate Conception, I was pleasantly surprised to find Justin's relics; I had no idea that they were there. The poor church is so famous for our lovely bone chapels that other things get missed. Not that I don't like the bone chapels; they're a little macabre, for sure, but their particular art might be a good word against a world that has ceased to believe in the final destiny of the body. And that goes for you too, Catholics who cremate their relatives and then refuse to give them a proper burial.

St. Justin and I have a long history. When I was preparing for baptism I had to choose my Christian name. I looked through a list of patron saints. I was a philosophy student at the time, so I remarked on Justin as the patron of philosophers. I went to the library and read the First Apology and the Dialogue with Trypho. I found them fascinating. I still use Justin's description of the Eucharist whenever I train or give a talk to ministers of Holy Communion.

In an uncharacteristic display of practical wisdom, I decided to leave Justin and be baptized with the same name I had before. Nevertheless, I have come to believe that my choice of Charles Lwanga as a baptismal name was pure Providence. It only started to become clear to me later. Justin came up again as a candidate at my Confirmation, but lost out to St. Joseph. Because of his presence in these discernments, and because he was someone I read very early on, I have always considered St. Justin to be something like a tertiary patron saint.

Whenever I try to pray for our brothers in studies, I ask Justin's prayers as well.

My Trip to the Pet Cemetery

Today I did a committal service of (human) remains at the local pet cemetery. Hartsdale Canine Cemetery is one of the oldest of such places, and it's not far from us. Apparently--who knew?--if you have previously interred your pet there, you can have yourself buried there as well, provided you get cremated (at another facility, that is, they don't do people.) One of the gravediggers told me that they have over seven hundred people buried there in just this fashion.

'You can't make this stuff up,' as the saying goes. You sure do 'see it all' in the ministry. As one of my classmates once accused me, riffing on Jerry Seinfeld's critique of his dentist's conversion to Judaism, "I think you joined religious life just for the bizarre stories!"

I was there a few minutes early and so had time to browse around the departed Fluffys and Muffins of this world. Here are a few that caught my eye.


One of many called "my little pumpkin."



I don't know if "Pet" was her name, or if she just lived namelessly for fifteen years. Cats don't know their names anyway.


And maybe you thought he was buried in Egypt! No way!


I also saw a cute mausoleum with various little urns displayed behind a grate, along with a lovely statue of St. Francis. The light wasn't right, though, and I couldn't get a picture.

Discuss what all this means.

Judas Maccabeus vs. Gaudium et Spes

At the beginning of this thirty-first week of Ordinary Time we arrive at one of the oddest and most challenging counterpoints in the whole of the liturgy: the two day juxtaposition, in the Office of Readings, of 1 Maccabees and the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World of Vatican II. I didn't catch much of it this year, yesterday having been All Souls and opting for John XXIII's beautiful homily for the canonization of Martin de Porres today, but I did the readings anyway because they strike me so strongly each year at this time.

In the reading from Maccabees today, the great Mattathias is so filled with zeal to follow the Law that he not only kills the messenger bearing the king's demand of cultural assimilation, but even another Jew who was going to comply. He and his fellow zealots, after having left the city in order to protect the purity of their religious observance, go about destroying pagan altars and forcibly circumcising any uncircumcised boys they find.

After having meditated on all of this, one then turns to Gaudium et spes and is exhorted to "cooperate, willingly and wholeheartedly, in building an international order based on genuine respect for legitimate freedom and on a brotherhood of universal friendship." We are to "cooperate actively and constructively with other Christians" and to share resources "without being uniform and inflexible."

It's the classic question of how people of faith who value religion are supposed to relate to the unbelieving, persecuting, or lax world around them. Do we separate ourselves so as to protect the purity of our life, or do we assimilate to the world a little so as to include more souls in what really matters? What is our duty to the lapsed or unobservant among us? Do we come at them honey or vinegar, with cooperation or separation, with 'relevant,' 'updated' activities or a bomb?

Is it good to have a Catholic politician, even if they don't seem to believe and work for everything the Church teaches? Or is it an unacceptable scandal?

Christians have always enjoyed the right of 'plundering the Egyptians;' we may take the tools of the unbelieving world and use them for the benefit of the Gospel. (What else does it mean to be a Catholic blogger?) But in our relationship to the world, how willing are we to risk allowing its errors to infect the purity of our faith? It's a hard question, to know where to draw the line. If we run up into the mountains and refuse any relationship to the earthly city, we will fail to be the missionaries that we are called to be. But if we live in too close a spirit of cooperation with the unbelieving world, we will soon find--as we have!--that the faith becomes distorted by those of us who start to accept and support the world's crimes and absurdities, like abortion and various other things.

There have always been Christians firmly planted all over the map on this question, and it remains a challenge for each individual and community.

Plundering the Egyptians

Yesterday I had a delightful meeting with a parishioner who was seeking ways to respond to Jehovah's Witnesses. He seems to have befriended one who has been "working on" him for some years.

Apparently one of the main attacks this Witness makes on ordinary Christianity is the observance of the "man made" holidays of Christmas and Easter. First of all, the days have to be considered separately.

Easter, though it perhaps corresponds to certain pagan festivals surrounding the vernal equinox, is intimately connected with the Passover, which is certainly part of divine revelation. God did not invite the children of Israel to observe the Passover; he commanded them to do so. If you want to believe the Gospels, the Last Supper was or was not the Passover meal, but in any case, the Passion, death, and Resurrection of the Lord is correlated with the Passover in a pretty direct way. So the assertion that the celebration of Easter is a "man made" or pagan observance has no merit.

Christmas is another story. Serious guesses at the birth date of Jesus of Nazareth place it perhaps in the spring of the year we would now call 3 or 4 BC. But it's anybody's guess, really. The commemoration of the Lord's birth, which we celebrate on December 25th, does in fact correspond to various pagan festivals associated with the winter solstice. Putting Christmas in their place assisted the conversion of culture to Christianity and fit astronomy to theology as we celebrate the re-birth of the light of the world. (At least in the Northern hemisphere.)

But do the pagan roots of observing Christmas when we do make it wrong and something to be rejected? And if not, why? Christians have always had the right and privilege to borrow what is helpful from the pagan world, e.g. culture, philosophy, etc., and adapt it to Christian purposes. But where do we get this right and privilege? It is founded on the Christian sense of creation and Incarnation.

The world comes to be through the Word of God. We see this in the prologue of the St. John as well as the first creation account from Genesis: "God said...and so it happened." We believe that this Word became flesh in Jesus Christ. Thus, Jesus is the revelation of the pattern on which all of the divine creative activity is based. Therefore, all created things--as well as art and culture, the grandchildren of God, as it were--somehow point back to the Word of God in their internal logic. We see this very clearly in ourselves in our heart's perpetual longing for love and beauty and intimate union; this is the creative force of God alive within us. From this we see that everything human, evangelized and adapted, can be put into the service of Christ.

Now I woudn't push this line of argument as far as Karl Rahner's famous "anonymous Christianity," which I find a little patronizing, but it does stand up to Sacred Scripture and it is certainly strong enough to justify plundering the winter solstice festivals from the pagans and transforming them into the commemoration of the Nativity of the Lord.

Things I've Learned as a Confessor

As time goes on, I hear more and more confessions. I wasn't a priest for four hours before my first penitent appeared, and it has been pretty constant ever since. It's a beautiful ministry and I enjoy it, but it has real challenges. Raised in the therapeutic model, I think we are taught to engage in thoughtful and sustained analysis and archaeology when it comes to reflecting on the movements of the inner person. In confession, by contrast, the confessor must do several things very quickly. He has to diagnose the guilt of the person, often choosing (or letting the penitent choose) among several self-accusations. He must then quickly and succinctly suggest how Sacred Scripture and the tradition of ascetical theology speaks of hope, encouragement, and possibilities for amendment.

One thing you notice right away as a confessor is that there are many devout and thoughtful Christians who struggle terribly and with great guilt over habitual sins that have become very ingrained in their daily lives. Many times these might be sins of speech, like speaking without thinking, cursing or "taking the Lord's name in vain," or they might be sins against chastity or "purity." Sometimes such sins are intrinsically serious, but not all serious matter is serious sin.

The question that arises for me is the problem of locating guilt. I'm beginning to think that when otherwise serious Christians have their prayer and devotion hampered by bad or sinful habits, it may be a mistake to concentrate prayer and ascetical effort on the sinful behavior itself. As Sun-Tzu put it, the best thing is not to attack the enemy, but to attack the enemy's strategy.

This is to say that for Christians who struggle with patterns of habitual sin, the project before them is perhaps not to "cut it out" or "just try harder," but to examine the remainder of their lives surrounding the sin to discover the occasions of the sin and what the sin (falsely) claims to do for them (that is, it's (mal) function). Thus the project goes from negative to positive, from stopping a behavior to re-organizing daily life in order to both reduce occasions of sin and to fulfill spiritual desires well before they turn to the maladaptive behaviors that produce misery and the feeling of alienation from God.

(In the name of honesty, I have to admit that before I was in religious life I spent five years working in a group home in which a large part of my job was to do Applied Behavior Analysis. So I guess some of it stuck. Hey, I'm allowed to plunder the Egyptians.)