Happy Halloween

What's Halloween without a surfy cover of the eponymous song by everyone's favorite Rock and Roll guilty pleasure, the Misfits?

Pro-Life: An Examination of Conscience

When I was leaving the parish to return to studies, I received a lot of kind and encouraging words from parishioners. A few in particular have stuck in my mind. One of them went like this: "You're a very good priest, Father, but there's one thing wrong with you. You're not pro-life enough."

I was reminded of this over the past few days by an ad on the subway. It had a picture of a mother and child and proclaimed, "I chose life." The caption said something like, 'unexpected pregnancy, unexpected joy.' I'm not sure I remember it rightly, but it was something like that.

The first time I saw this ad, I thought to myself how good it was to see a pro-life message on one of the subway lines that is always full of students and young people. As I have been shocked and scandalized to notice, even at the 'catholic' school I attend, the false idea of a 'right' to abortion seems to be common. On one campus poster I saw, the so-called 'pro-choice' position was listed among activities of 'social justice.' I thought of taking a picture of the notice and publishing it, but then I decided it was none of my business. (Or was that a rationalization by a Catholic who isn't pro-life enough? After all, it is revealing--and even unmasking!--that abortion is sometimes absent from our catholic discourse on 'social justice.')

But back to the subway. A couple of days later I saw the same, "I chose life" ad. This time someone had taken a marker to it and written "Pro-Choice!" over it. (Perhaps accidentally, but not incidentally, one of the words cut through the baby's face.) At first it made me sad. The so-called 'pro-choice' position is so incomprehensible to me and speaks to me of the terrible confusion of our society. But as I reflected, I thought that perhaps the defacer of the ad wasn't mocking the pro-life position, but making an accusation against the ad. In the end the ad was pro-choice. It held up someone who made the right choice, who had chosen the good over the murderous and dehumanizing violence of our culture, but it still celebrated that there was a choice to be made.

At that moment I realized that I had been tricked. My original appreciation of the ad was partly misplaced. Yes, the ad celebrated the goodness and blessing of life, but embedded in it was the acceptance that life could be a matter of our choice. I didn't even think about that until I saw the ad written upon in the way I described.

Perhaps my friend was right, and that I'm not pro-life enough.

Midway in the Embrace

For class this week I'm reading William of St. Thierry's The Golden Epistle, which I really recommend for anyone who would like to take the spiritual life seriously. Check it out in this edition.

The soul in its happiness finds itself standing midway in the Embrace and the Kiss of Father and Son. In a manner which exceeds description and thought, the man of God is found worthy to become not God but what God is, that is to say man becomes through grace what God is by nature. (96. Trans. Theodore Berkeley, OCSO)

To me this gets at one of the most critical retrievals we need to make in our contemporary sense of Christianity. The Trinity is not just our doctrine of God; it is our doctrine of the spiritual life. In the most basic terms, our teaching is that God is not some kind of static 'supreme being,' but is constituted in an infinitely dynamic and creative set of relations. What we call our 'spiritual life' is our finding of ourselves drawn into and included in these relations, so that when we take about the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son, we aren't talking about some kind of abstract, divine logic, but about the place where we find our own spirits in prayer.

Jesus Christ is conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, as we say in the creed. He is the stretching forth of the divine relations of the Trinity to include within themselves our humanity. Christianity, then, is the life of being adopted into the eternal Embrace of Father and Son, the enjoyment by grace and adoption of the relationship to God which the human Jesus enjoys by hypostatic union. As William puts it, "man becomes by grace what God is by nature."

Church Music Rant

The other day I got into a conversation with someone on one of the standard conflicts of the parish ministry: music for funerals and weddings.

The conflict goes like this: the engaged who are preparing for their wedding or the bereaved preparing for the funeral Mass of their family member decide that they want a certain song in the liturgy. The pastor, priest, or music director objects, saying that such-and-such a song is not appropriate for divine worship because it is secular, sappy, vulgar, etc. Then the counter objection is made: on the contrary, this song 'mentions God' or is 'very spiritual.'

The first objection is easily dismissed. Just because a song 'mentions God' doesn't make it appropriate for the liturgy. Black Sabbath's "After Forever" (written by bassist Geezer Butler, a Catholic) mentions both God and Christ, and contains senses of eschatological urgency and counter-cultural belief in God that one rarely hears with such sharpness even in church, but this doesn't mean I want Ozzy to sing it at my funeral. For the blog, however, it's a fine inclusion. My funeral music is planned anyway, in a way.



The second objection, that an inappropriate song is 'very spiritual,' is a little harder. Here we are up against a flattening abuse of the term 'spiritual' which goes largely unchecked by preachers and pastors of souls. To the world, something is spiritual when it refers to the non-material life of the person, or the relation of the person to God or the divine in a very general way. For us Christians, however, the term is more specific. The 'spiritual life' and 'spirituality' refer specifically to the activity of the Spirit, the formal principle of the Church Who prays in her and as her both corporately and in her individual members.

But here's my challenge to pastors of souls and music directors on this issue. Who gets to decide which songs are suitable for the liturgy? Is it OCP or GIA? Who gave them this tremendous authority over the theological and catechetical formation of the praying assembly? If they, who are neither God nor the magisterium, can decide that a song is appropriate for liturgy, why not the couple preparing their wedding or the folks trying to mourn the loss of a loved one?

You see, I am begging the question. There is any easy way out of this problem, which is to begin to give up on the option of replacing the actual proper chants of the Mass with songs in the first place. Unfortunately, the option of replacing them has become so normalized that many priests no longer even recall that it is, in fact, a substitution.

Therefore, if pastors are unwilling to even investigate or begin to let go of this option become norm, and are also unwilling to try to preach a corrective against the flattening of the generic uses of 'spiritual' and 'spirituality,' then it's not fair to deny ordinary folks the option of substituting the music they think they want.

Spiritual Direction from a Pretty Princess

Sometimes I invest conversations with more meaning than is probably there. I don't apologize for this wholesale; often in the Scriptures people say more than they know, so why shouldn't it be so for me sometimes?

Consider a conversation from after Mass today. After I had given the standard buen Domingo to her mother, a little girl addressed me directly, in English:

"Do you know what next Sunday is?"

"The thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time?" I responded.

"No," she said, correcting me. "Next Sunday is happy Halloween!" As she said the 'happy' she spun around with a gleeful flourish.

"Oh," I said. "And what are you going to be for Halloween."

"I'm going to be a pretty princess!" she announced. "What are you going to be?"

"I don't know yet," I confessed.

"You better figure it out!" I was instructed. "It's next Sunday!"

Indeed. Who knows how much time any of us has left on this earth? I've probably used up more than half of my time already, and without having made hardly a beginning of a spiritual life. Receiving the grace of surrendering to the person God wants us to be in this life is a task of some urgency, and it gets more urgent with every moment that goes by.

St. Peter of Alcántara

Today is the feast of St. Peter of Alcántara, a great reforming friar of the sixteenth century. In your 1962 Missale Romanum you will find his feast day on October 19. He seems to have gone out of the general Roman calendar at the time of the reform, but remains in proper Franciscan calendars. I presume that his feast day was moved to today--at least in the United States, I don't know about other places--because of the concurrence with the North American martyrs.

In the Office of Readings for today, we have some of a curious and challenging letter from Peter to St. Teresa of Avila. He warns the "Mother Prioress" about seeking advice on matters of the spiritual life and the evangelical counsels from those who have no competence in living them:

I was not a little surprised, Mother Prioress, that you submitted a matter of such importance to learned men who no competence in the matter. Now when there is a question about lawsuits or cases of conscience it will indeed be praiseworthy to get advice from lawyers and theologians and follow their opinion. But when there is a question about the life of perfection reason particularly suggests that those persons to be consulted who profess the life of perfection; that lawyers and theologians cannot have better advice or opinion on this matter, a study and scrutiny of their works shows very clearly.

We should note that this means that who are religious must accept and embrace the particular expertise and competence we are supposed to have. By our religious profession we have made our Christianity public, and are obligated to pursue holiness in a particular and public way. People who seek from us knowledge and counsel on their own prayer lives and interior struggles for holiness ought to be confident that we have something to offer. Of course this also goes, in similar senses, for priests and indeed anyone who has accepted public ministry in the Church and thereby made their baptism a public property. In this regard it is also important to always be continuing our own reading and reflection in the spiritual tradition. In my own time as a parish confessor, I would occasionally have a penitent whom I suspected of being advanced far beyond me in the spiritual life. To such persons I could only speak to with great tentativeness from things I've read in books.

What is Theology?

The other day the director of the STD program asked me to think about preparing a talk on my sense of "the ecclesial vocation of the theologian." I'll have to give it next semester in one the little lunch meetings of the doctoral students. Of course the project is a bit remote right now, but the questions have been in the back of my mind and I have found myself thinking of various texts that could form starting points, illustrations, and apologies.

So, as I have started to reflect a little on what I think theology is and what its purposes might be in my own life and in any service I might be able to give to the brothers or the Church, I was struck by the first reading for Mass today:

I kneel before the Father,
from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named,
that he may grant you in accord with the riches of his glory
to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner self,
and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith;
that you, rooted and grounded in love,
may have strength to comprehend with all the holy ones
what is the breadth and length and height and depth,
and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge,
so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
(Ephesians 3: 14-19)

Theology starts with prayer born of a desire for God, a kneeling before the Father that seeks the "riches of his glory." Of course, our entering into the Mystery of God through prayer is a kind of optical illusion of the interior vision; it is not we who enter into God but God who enters into us. We experience the logic of the incarnation in reverse, or, better, in fulfillment. That the Word becomes flesh means that our humanity, the enfleshment of our spirits, now seeks to enter into the Word and to find its delight and fulfillment in deiformity.

By our surrender to this life of prayerful desire, our spirit is strengthened, and Christ comes to dwell in our hearts through faith, grounding us in love.

What is this love? It is first of all the love of God. But to love God is to love the love that God is, and his love is for every creature. Thus to love God is to begin to taste and touch the love that embraces every creature. It is to stand in wonder at a Love whose horizon is broader and whose height and depth extend beyond what we can scarcely imagine. Indeed, to even speak of horizons and extension is too coarse.

And yet, we touch this Love. We have glimpses of it in each other, in the beauty and order of creation, in the Providence of God in the paths of our lives, and in the universal human suspicion (contuition?) that at the Center of it all is a Goodness we are always touching but not quite apprehending.

In Christ is revealed God's own desire to join himself to our human upward desire to know this love. God's self-emptying into our humanity allows us to fulfill the great Easter slogan: sursum sunt quaerite! "Seek thing things that are above." Theology is to reason and to attempt to articulate what this means and how this human process may be exercised. It is our attempt, in our context and time, to know what all the "holy ones" knew. These are the saints and doctors who have gone before us and who help us to see, by the reflections and articulations that they made for their time, what it could mean for us to do the same for the people of ours.

Ultimately, like all missionary efforts, the purpose of theology is to make itself useless. It is a means by which the theologian helps us "to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge," that "we may be filled with the fullness of God." This fullness is what God has accomplished for us in the incarnation.Theology is a means to understanding how we may surrender to it more and more completely.