Faith and Death

Last night I was driving home from my weekend deacon gig, when Death Cab for Cutie's I will Follow You into the Dark came on the radio.

Now I generally find songs like this one overly light and precious, but it was a dreary night and it seemed to fit the mood, so I left it on.

It made me think about faith and death. I presume that the song is about dying--the whole going "into the dark" thing. Death is, after all, the final, mysterious limit of our experience and personality in this world. It is an unknown, a permanently veiled moment, a darkness.

But faith, both as a grace and an act, is a lot like that too. Faith is darkness to the intellect. It is the willingness to risk stepping into a cognitive obscurity that does not satisfy our normal standards of knowing anything, of "getting" it. The Light of God is so brilliant that our hearts and minds only perceive It as darkness--what John of the Cross called the rayos de oscuridad.

In this sense I was thinking about how faith is a remote preparation for death. We have already risked a step into the obscurity and darkness of faith. And we have found it trustworthy. So maybe that will help us to go into the final darkness of death with more peace and trust.

Orbit

Do you believe that the earth revolves around the Sun, or the Sun around the earth?

The earth orbits the Sun, of course, everybody knows that.

And yet, every day you see the Sun rise from the east, travel across the sky, and set in the west. Therefore, based on ordinary sense experience, it's obvious that the Sun goes around the earth.

So why do we believe the opposite of our plain experience? Because somebody has told us that it is so. Because we trust that the astronomers and science teachers and textbooks we have read know what they are talking about. We trust them, and that's enough for us to discount our experience and believe the opposite, without even being bothered by the dissonance!

Well, then, why not believe in the apostles who assure us that Jesus is risen? Surely they also know what they are talking about.

Silly

It's too hard for me to reflect on a serious post the day after completing five years of theological education, so here's a silly video about redeeming the web for God. Note the not so subtle message that God uses a Mac and Satan uses a PC.

Deo Gratias

This morning I successfully defended my STL thesis. So two degrees and 10 semesters later, I'm done with school. (for now)

Fidelis of Sigmaringen

Today is also the feast of St. Fidelis, a seventeenth century Capuchin who was famously martyred when he was beaten to death by Calvinists.

One of my favorite memories of my perpetual profession of vows was hearing the cantor sing "Sigmaringen" correctly. Lying face down on the floor for the prostration, I took a little pride at having chosen the right friar to sing the litany of the saints.

The Australian Capuchins have a short biography you can check out here.

Also, despite being dead for almost 400 years, Fidelis maintains a lovely MySpace page, which you can check out here.

Anniversary

Today begins the second year of "a minor friar," and I just wanted to say how grateful I am to all of the perceptive and interesting people I have gotten to know through this ministry.

It has been a great way for me to practice both writing and preaching. Thanks to everyone who has taken a look over the past year.

I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII.

At the church where I work on the weekends we recently recovered a beautiful stone statue of St. Anne and the Blessed Mother.

They are in a typical teaching and learning pose: Anne and Mary, who is perhaps eight or ten years old, are both looking at a scroll that Mary is holding. On the scroll are the Roman numerals I through VII. So the question has arisen among us: what do these numbers represent?

The first proposal was that St. Anne was teaching Mary about the Ten Commandments. But then why do the numbers only go up to seven? Well, maybe the rest are on the other side of the scroll. Seems unlikely to me.

The second suggestion was that Mary was learning about the seven deadly sins. Mary would have had to have learned about sins through "book learning," as the normal manner of learning about sin, through experience, was unavailable to her. Alas, though, there was no list of seven deadly sins when Mary was a little girl, so I think this proposal is out.

In a brilliant execution of the principle of ontological economy, one parishioner suggested that Mary was simply learning how to count to seven. Clever, but not religious enough, methinks.

My suggestion, which seems to me the most likely, is that the statue represents Mary and her mother contemplating the Seven Sorrows that the Blessed Mother will suffer in later life. I think that this is especially likely given that the statue was recovered from an Irish-American church.

Anyone who knows something about iconography want to solve this one for us?