Wonder and Awe

For our salvation
he came down from heaven,
and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and became Man.

There are a few I don’t like about the new translation of the Nicene Creed. Is it technically more accurate to say “consubstantial with the Father” rather than “one in being”? Sure! Some people might even be inspired to look up what the heck “consubstantial” means instead of merely mentally translating it into “one in being.” Unfortunately, the birth narrative contained in the new translation simply doesn’t do Christmas justice.

The new translation changes one word—just a single one. Instead of saying Jesus “was born” of the Virgin Mary, we now say Jesus “was incarnate” of the Virgin Mary. To mention that God was incarnated in Jesus is theologically more descriptive, and it paints a really nice contrast between how we picture most of us as being “ensouled” flesh, while Jesus is a soul in-fleshed (carne being the Latin word for “meat” or “flesh”).

But whatever its theological and linguistic merits, there’s one thing substituting “born” with “incarnated” doesn’t do: it doesn’t make us think of babies. See, we normally think of babies as being born, not incarnated. And that’s the point of Christmas! That Jesus was born. That God came down to Earth in the form of a child—a baby.

I know we talk about God coming to Earth as a child so often in the Catholic Church that we can forget its significance, but think about that for a moment. Jesus was a baby. A crying, smelly baby who Mary had to clean up after and patiently coax through the process of crawling, awkward toddling, and finally walking. A baby who was absolutely awestruck when he discovered his hand and his shadow. In coming to Earth as a baby, the Creator of the Universe exchanged omnipotence for dependency, and omniscience for ignorance.

This was not an accident by God, or a necessity. God didn’t need to come as a baby. He could have “incarnated” as a 30-year old, gone seen John the Baptist, run his preaching circuit around Judea for three years, and then done his whole salvific crucifixion-resurrection thing. It would have been more efficient, and probably a lot easier. I mean, if given the choice, I’m not sure I would be a baby again—somehow all the best blackmail pictures of me come from when I was a baby. I’m sure all the Angels and Saints in heaven still joke about what crazy-adorable things Jesus did as a child.

That is what today is about: that God chose to come as a baby. In case we ignored His words, “whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3), we are reminded every year with the sight of God in a manger. And the manger calls us to humble ourselves as did this Child of God—the baby Jesus. We are called to crawl through life with the wonder and awe that accompanies the child as he discovers what seem to us absolutely mundane and ordinary. For, as Joan of Arcadia reminds us, even the most common tree is a miracle through God’s eyes.

My Christmas prayer is that no matter how wearying our life may get, and as comfortable and tempting cynicism may be, that we all remember that God was born into this world as a Child. I pray that we respond to God’s call to see the world through the eyes of His baby—to be as dependent on our Father and as awestruck at His creation as this Holy Child.

Merry Christmas.

Real Life

Yesterday, while I was busy stressing over my property professor's about a take-home exam based on Coleridge's Kubla Khan and a Mongolian revolt from China, a gunman entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT, and shot 26 people. Victimes included the principal, his mother, and 20 children between 5 and 10 years old.

Maybe it was because both my mom and my sister are teachers, and the thought of someone carrying a gun into a school of all places is personal, but it was a jolt that reminded me that no matter how "stressful" life gets in my own little bubble of the world, real life goes on, and the world doesn't stop. I can really have no words at this point aside from those I wrote regarding the Aurora shootings, but I wanted to break my hiatus and come out of my law school finals hibernation to post the following thoughts that Archbishop Chaput, the then-Archbishop of Denver (and current Archbishop of Philadelphia), wrote in 1999 in the wake of the murder of 12 students at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado. Other thoughts specifically on the Newton shootings come from Fr. James Martin, Cardinal, and the Pope.

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Ending the Violence Begins With Our Own Conversion
Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., Archbishop of Denver

He descended into hell.

Over a lifetime of faith, each of us, as believers, recites those words from the Creed thousands of times. We may not understand them, but they're familiar. They're routine. And then something happens to show us what they really mean.

Watching a disaster unfold for your community in the glare of the international mass media is terrible and unreal at the same time. Terrible in its bloody cost; unreal in its brutal disconnection from daily life. The impact of what happened this past week in Littleton, however, didn't fully strike home in my heart until the morning after the murders, when I visited a large prayer gathering of students from Columbine High School, and spent time with the families of two of the students who died.

They taught me something.

The students who gathered to pray and comfort each other showed me again the importance of sharing not just our sorrow, but our hope. God created us to witness His love to each other, and we draw our life from the friendship, the mercy and the kindness we offer to others in pain. The young Columbine students I listened to, spoke individually -- one by one -- of the need to be strong, to keep alive hope in the future, and to turn away from violence. Despite all their confusion and all their hurt, they would not despair. I think I understand why. We're creatures of life. This is the way God made us: to assert life in the face of death.

Even more moving was my time with the families of two students who had been murdered. In the midst of their great suffering — a loss I can't imagine — the parents radiated a dignity which I will always remember, and a confidence that God would somehow care for them and the children they had lost, no matter how fierce their pain. This is where words break down. This is where you see, up close, that faith — real, living faith -- is rooted finally not in how smart, or affluent, or successful, or sensitive persons are, but in how well they love. Scripture says that "love is as strong as death." I know it is stronger. I saw it.

As time passes, we need to make sense of the Columbine killings. The media are already filled with "sound bites" of shock and disbelief; psychologists, sociologists, grief counselors and law enforcement officers -- all with their theories and plans. God bless them for it. We certainly need help. Violence is now pervasive in American society — in our homes, our schools, on our streets, in our cars as we drive home from work, in the news media, in the rhythms and lyrics of our music, in our novels, films and video games. It is so prevalent that we have become largely unconscious of it. But, as we discover in places like the hallways of Columbine High, it is bitterly, urgently real.

The causes of this violence are many and complicated: racism, fear, selfishness. But in another, deeper sense, the cause is very simple: We're losing God, and in losing Him, we're losing ourselves. The complete contempt for human life shown by the young killers at Columbine is not an accident, or an anomaly, or a freak flaw in our social fabric. It's what we create when we live a contradiction. We can't systematically kill the unborn, the infirm and the condemned prisoners among us; we can't glorify brutality in our entertainment; we can't market avarice and greed . . . and then hope that somehow our children will help build a culture of life.

We need to change. But societies only change when families change, and families only change when individuals change. Without a conversion to humility, non-violence and selflessness in our own hearts, all our talk about "ending the violence" may end as pious generalities. It is not enough to speak about reforming our society and community. We need to reform ourselves.

Two questions linger in the aftermath of the Littleton tragedy. How could a good God allow such savagery? And why did this happen to us?

In regard to the first: God gave us the gift of freedom, and if we are free, we are free to do terrible, as well as marvelous, things . . . And we must also live with the results of others' freedom. But God does not abandon us in our freedom, or in our suffering. This is the meaning of the cross, the meaning of Jesus' life and death, the meaning of He descended into hell. God spared His only Son no suffering and no sorrow -- so that He would know and understand and share everything about the human heart. This is how fiercely He loves us.

In regard to the second: Why not us? Why should evil be at home in faraway places like Kosovo and Sudan, and not find its way to Colorado? The human heart is the same everywhere — and so is the One for whom we yearn.

He descended into hell. The Son of God descended into hell . . . and so have we all, over the past few days. But that isn't the end of the story. On the third day, He rose again from the dead. Jesus Christ is Lord, "the resurrection and the life," and we — His brothers and sisters — are children of life. When we claim that inheritance, seed it in our hearts, and conform our lives to it, then and only then will the violence in our culture begin to be healed.

In this Easter season and throughout the coming months, I ask you to join me in praying in a special way for the families who have been affected by the Columbine tragedy. But I also ask you to pray that each of us — including myself — will experience a deep conversion of heart toward love and non-violence in all our relationships with others.

Blog on Hold

Please forgive the law student studying for finals. The downside of law school: 100% of one's grades are from the 4 final exams that occur over the space of 7 days. My final final is December 21st, and, assuming no ancient Mayan predictions come true, regular blogging shall resume subsequently.

Liturgy of Thanks

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. It starts Thursday morning when my dad and I play in the neighborhood football game for the one time all year I care about sports. When we come back, we all help out with the preparations and drag our nice “dining room” table from the crawl space, where it was put for storage when the dining room was turned into the piano room when I got a grand piano in high school. I’m always in charge of place settings, and ever since turning 21, my family gets a kick out of me being the one to uncork the wine. We eat early (~3:30) so that by the time most people are sitting down to eat turkey, we can be eating dessert. Dinner starts with grace, and then each one of us goes around and says something we’re especially thankful for that year. After dinner, we play family games until dessert. After dessert, we watch whatever Thanksgiving specials are on TV—ideally A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, but in a pinch whatever Disney Channel Thanksgiving special is on will do. We go to sleep early, because our traditions aren't over yet.

On Friday, we wake up early and go out to breakfast. We share our Christmas lists while we're eating, but try to be fast, because our goal is to be at the mall by 9 am. At the mall, we pair off—one parent and one child, switch, and then the parents and kids—and take advantage of the Black Friday sales. We have a late lunch and then go see whatever movie in theaters that we haven’t seen yet.

I felt a little guilty this Thanksgiving, and all this week, though. I missed Mass last Sunday. Sure, I had a ton of work and wasn't sleeping (thus missing the blog post, too), but it was the second time this semester I’ve missed Mass for no better reason than “I have a lot of work.” I'll admit, there's not much incentive to go to Mass here. The law school Mass here lasts just over 40 minutes, has no music, and is in a classroom. Add that to the new translation that I’m still stumbling over (aren’t we Harvard students supposed to be quick on the uptake?), and it can be hard to convince myself to go when so much else is going on. Compare it to the Masses I grew used to during undergrad at Duke Chapel, it almost just doesn’t feel even feel like Mass.

When the new priest for the Catholic Center came to campus, his first words to me and the other student music coordinator were, “people come to Mass for two things: good preaching and good music.” I fought that interpretation, because, really, Mass is all about the Eucharist—about God. Music should be at most a nice supplement. But my priest was right; it’d be great if people came to Mass and could walk away saying “I fell asleep during the sermon, and there was no music, but that’s okay, because I got the Eucharist”. Sometimes, that happens, but God didn’t make us that way. Our tradition of liturgy has grown up with music, surrounded in a beautiful Church, for a reason.

This is okay. In a society where in educated circles being “spiritual" is more fashionable than being “religious,” our politics continues to tell us that religion should be relegated to the private sphere, and acts such as the rosary are looked down on as superstition, it only makes sense we would think that only interior disposition matters—that any exterior “act” is at best superfluous. Thus we fall into the Valentinian heresy the Church Father St. Iranaeus wrote so much against which set up a dichotomy between holiness and the physical world. However, in Catholicism, we recognize that the Bible exhorts both “a person is justified by works and not by faith alone” (James 2:24) as well as “you have been saved through faith…not from works” (Eph. 2:8). Ultimately “faith without works is dead,” (James 2:26) and what we do matters. Yes, that means the corporal works of mercy, but it also means going to Mass and engaging our physical senses there as well as our spiritual ones. It means that the Church tapping into that experience so many have called “spiritual” when looking at a beautiful piece of art or hearing a moving piece of music during liturgy is not only okay, but it’s more in tune with the way God created us: both spiritual and physical.

However, we must not forget that while aesthetic appeal adds to a Mass, it is never the focus. That has to be the Word and the Eucharist. The Eucharist is, first of all, an act of Thanksgiving; the word eucharist itself means “thanksgiving” ( CCC 1360). And, like Thanksgiving traditions, sometimes they don’t work out quite as planned. Our Friday afternoon movie, 20/20 hindsight would say that we might have been better off listening to my dad’s suggestion of Lincoln, instead of going with The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2. That doesn’t mean our Friday was ruined. Going to a movie with the family can have more value than just the movie itself. Even if football were cancelled, the turkey burned, and the producer of a Charlie Brown Thanksgiving opted to be out waiting for The Great Pumpkin instead of producing his TV special, we would still have a day of thanks. We still have so much to be thankful for, and there is beauty in that giving of thanks, not matter if the traditional acts for some reason are stripped away. Just the same way, there is beauty in the Word, no matter how poorly a lector proclaims it. There is beauty in the words of the Mass, no matter how much the priest mumbles it. When Christianity was illegal in Rome, the Eucharist was not celebrated with a brilliant pipe organ, but with whatever was available. The artistic beauty is useful, but not essential. There are so many other ways we are engaged .

So families have their traditions around Thanksgiving, and the Church has her traditions around her act of thanks. And just as every member of the family has their favorite traditions, different members of the Church will like different traditions differently. Though, in the long run, it will probably be best, sometimes God asks us to forego our favorite part and remember the point: God. And so this Sunday, I plan on going to classroom Mass again, and to truly be in communion with God—not my favorite song on the organ.

God of This City

I’ll admit I’m a little bit upset about the election. No, unlike many of the Bishops, I’m not in mourning about Obama’s reelection. In case you missed last week’s post, I’m perfectly fine with that outcome.

No. I’m talking about the sentiments I saw on election day and the days following. One facebook post summed up the election as between a “ warmongering, religious homophobe” and an “economically ignorant demagogue. ” Or as I mentioned in last week’s post, Stanley Hauerwas’ called it a “Roman Circus.” I won’t even get into this.

It’s become quite popular nowadays to be a political cynic, whether among the religious who feel their faith not being represented as they understand it, the well-educated who feel the political sound bites and slogans we often hear miss the true complexity of the issues we face, or your average citizen complaining of political hypocrisy.

There’s certainly a lot of hypocrisy in our political system. Take Mike Bowers. Bowers was born in 1942 in Commerce—a small town in rural Georgia, that in 1940 had a population of not quite 3,300. The son of a truck driver, he went on to graduate from West Point in 1963, and served in the air force until 1970, when he attended the University of Georgia Law School. He was elected attorney general of Georgia from 1981-1997, and made a record for himself fighting government corruption.

Sounds like a pretty cool guy, right?

Unfortunately for his legacy in the history books, Bowers is best known as the defendant in two cases: Bowers v. Hardwick, and Shahar v. Bowers. In the first case in 1986, Bowers convinced the Supreme Court to uphold a Georgia anti-sodomy law, and in the second, Bowers convinced the Eleventh Circuit uphold his 1991 rescinding of an employment offer to Robin Shahar, upon his finding that she had recently married another women in a Reformation Jewish marriage ceremony. At first glance, one could argue that Bowers was just doing his job of enforcing statutes the elected legislature had passed. In Shahar, he argued that he was justified firing her because “inaction on my part would constitute tacit approval of this purported marriage and jeopardize the proper functioning of this office,” that she would be unable to enforce the state’s anti-sodomy laws, and he had doubts about the quality of Shahar’s judgment “in general” as seen in her choice to get seek employment in the state attorney's office while getting married to a women, despite the controversy in Georgia following Bowers. However, the lawyers arguing for Shahar knew that Bowers had been having a longtime affair with a member of his staff—as against Georgia’s anti-adultery law (O.C.G.A. §16-6-19). The man who was arguing that a lesbian couldn’t enforce Georgia’s morality statutes on account of her violation of them was himself actively violating them!

So, yes, frustration with our politics is quite valid. At the same time, we, the voters, often make matters worse. We caricaturize the candidates, dehumanize them to be an issue, rather than people in and of themselves. But Romney is not some impersonal robot incapable of feelings and out to oppress 47% of America. Obama is not some demon antichrist with plans to invade the US with UN troops. They have their own thoughts and feelings, hopes and dreams, (and, yes, even tears).  They are public figures, and so subject their political views to public criticism, as Obama has pointed out. However, in holding ourselves proudly aloof and criticizing a system while not working to change it, we make ourselves no better than those we criticize.

Christianity is a religion of hope, not cynicism. We believe in the best, not worst, of what it is to be human. The beauty of democracy is that if you don’t like something, you can work to change it. If no one represents you to your satisfaction, you can run for office yourself. I admit, you’ll probably have an uphill battle—what with our two party system and all. However, there is no beatitude, “blessed are the cynics.” Jesus didn’t forget to finish the “love your neighbor as yourself” with “…except for that political bozo on the TV.”

Ultimately, there is a lesson in the frustration of politics. A friend of mine posted on facebook perhaps my favorite election-day post: "No matter who wins the election today, they won't be perfect. And that's okay; the position of savior has already been taken."

We are not perfect, and our politics is not perfect. Heaven knows, if it were then we’d have some serious question to ask regarding the Catholic teachings of human fallenness and original sin. However, the Catholic response is not cynicism—not holding ourselves aloof in some fortress of self-righteousness.  When St. Paul writes to the Romans, “There is no one righteous, not even one,” he doesn’t counsel cynicism. He counsels hope, and faith in God.

As Chris Tomlin explains his song, “God of This City,” the Christian band Bluetree was in Pattaya, Thailand—a city known for its sex industry and child prostitution. A bar (more descriptively, a brothel) called “The Climax Club” was desperately looking for a band, to play and asked Bluetree, so long as they would bring their sizable crowd of missionaries with them. In the middle of the set, surrounded by the poles for dancers and looking out over the missionaries--heavily involved with their Cokes, Aaron Boyd, the lead singer for Bluetree, was struck with the notion that God was still present. God was the “God of this city, the King of these peoples.” As he described it, in the middle of the set, he started chanting—started singing—those words. This “minor, downbeat loop,” eventually opened up into the lyrics “the greater things have yet to come, and greater things are still to be done yet in this city.” After all, even a city “vitiated by sin” is a city over which God still is God—still the “light in this darkness…the hope to the hopeless…the peace to the restless.”

Remember Bowers, the Attorney General of Georgia who fired a women for a sexual crime while he was committing one of his own?  In May 1997, he resigned his position as attorney general to run for governor. Just a week after a final decision by the Eleventh Circuit in his favor in Shahar, Bowers admitted to his affair. He lost in the 1998 primary. Bowers was overturned in 2003 by Lawrence v. Texas, which stated “Bowers was not correct when it was decided, [and] is not correct today.”

Our political world is far from perfect, but it has a tendency to work itself out in the long run. But those imperfections are important; they remind us we shouldn’t seek our savior in a politician. At the end of the day, we are responsible for our own holiness—there is no miracle politician or law that we must have or cannot do with out. It reminds us that, ultimately, the greatest things are yet to come.

We already have our savior; let’s focus on getting to know Him better, and not on expecting politics to create a new one.

A Catholic Vote for Obama

As the election is imminent, I’ve heard a lot of diverging talk among Catholics about who they support.  After all, the Catholic Bishops' guide on faithful voting seems to come down in support of Obama on some issues and Romney for others.  So what’s a Catholic supposed to do?

Well, first of all, vote.  Duke theologian Stanley Hauerwas has a video going around encouraging Christians not to take the election too seriously.  After all, he says that elections are where “51.1% get to tell 49.9% how to live.”  There’s a mentality that if I can’t find a candidate who agrees with me on 100% of the factors of public policy, I should take my ball (or vote) and go home.  If everyone followed that rule, then the moment I get a politician to meet my own standards, I disenfranchise everyone who doesn’t agree with me. That’s simply uncharitable and selfish.  If you can’t bring yourself to vote for one of the major candidates, then find a third party candidate, or even write in someone who matches. If that doesn’t work, run for office yourself next time.  But don’t take the easy way out and refuse to participate.

That said, I hope to convince you in this blog post that a third party vote is unnecessary, and that the faithful Catholic choice is Obama. In the following, I assume standard Catholic moral teachings. I only consider their application to public policy in the context of abortion, same-sex marriage, the poor, foreign relations, and the Supreme Court. As all of these issues are, of course, debates, I invite respectful and thoughtful comments and discussion in the comments.

Abortion

There are two glaring issues I want to address upfront: abortion and same-sex marriage.  Romney, like the Catholic Bishops, is pro-life, and he appeals to the quiet of conscience” in “people of both political parties”  to bolster support for his position.  As the candidate who claims to stand for religious freedom, we have to trust this “conscience” is not really an appeal to any individual religion.  After all, the Church teaches that legislation based on values—coercing morality—may only occur from natural law; anything else violates religious freedom.  Natural law is that which  "present in the heart of each man and established by reason" (CCC 1956).   This means anything we as Catholics know from the Bible or from divinely-inspired Papal declarations are simply not valid. Thus we can legislate against murder, but not against missing Mass on Holy Days of Obligation.

At first glance, the matter is simple.  If life begins at conception, then there is no wiggle-room.  Just as we as Catholics believe that killing criminals under the death penalty is immoral, to kill the most innocent among us is that much more abhorrent.   Unfortunately, that part about “life beginning at conception” is pretty difficult to establish.  When does life begin? Can we, through pure reason, define life as beginning when sperm cell meets egg cell?  Science can tell us details about various processes that fetus undergoes at various phases of pregnancy, but the scientist does not define words and cannot tell us when we can start applying the term “life.”  Religion itself is confused on the topic.  Even within Christianity, there are diverging opinions. Even Scripture seems not at peace with itself.  At one point, it states “You knit me in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13), and while that would make it seem that at least some time in the womb might be considered sacred, if we apply that same standard to Jeremiah 1:5, which states “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,” then perhaps that we’re alive even before conception.  In Genesis 38 God even imposes the death penalty on Onan for “[wasting] his seed on the ground.”  So does this mean every sperm and egg cell is living, and Congress should pass laws that consider, in the words of Elle Woods, “any masturbatory emissions, where the sperm is clearly not seeking an egg . . . reckless abandonment"? &nbsp

Ultimately, finding a definition of life confuses science and religion alike, yet in Massachusetts, Romney supported a Constitutional amendment defining life as beginning at conception.  Surely there are better ways to amend a Constitution than by making it some sort of dictionary.  We have the Oxford English Dictionary for that (which, incidentally, does not mention the word “conception” in its definitions of life).  Even if God has instructed the Bishops and the Pope as to how the dictionary should be written, the definition is, in this case, clearly not “present in the heart of every man,” and as such, not a valid item to legislate.

Same-sex marriage

If you continued listening to the video I linked above about Romney’s support for a pro-life amendment, Romney also mentioned he fought for an amendment that would have defined marriage as between one man and one women.  The Church explicitly states that homosexual relations are against natural law (CCC 2357), and in an address to the U.S. Bishops in March, Pope Benedict XVI said “Defending the institution of marriage as a social reality is ultimately a question of justice.”

However, I would like to point to Professor Paul Griffiths’ claim in his response to Professor Douglas Farrow’s thirteen theses on marriage in First Things, in which he claims that in our “pagan late-capitalist democracy ordered to idolatry of the market,” an obligation to provide political support to the traditional notion of marriage “is certainly not apparent to all ordinarily rational people.”  As such, it is not natural law, and cannot fall under a proper legislative priority. (For the opposite side, see a considered defense of limiting government recognition to traditional marriage here)

As a final note on legislating morality through natural law, I would like to point out the danger in over-applying natural law. In Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, he includes under natural law the proposition that "each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life” (Humanae Vitae 11).Yet, according to a 2011 study, only 2% of sexually active Catholic women use Natural Family Planning.  I trust those who fight for legislating the other sexual teachings of the Church will put just as much energy and verve into legislation supporting the illegalization of all forms of birth control, no matter their personal view on the issue.  It would be unfaithful to do otherwise, seeing as they stem from the same line of natural law reasoning. 

The poor

The Catholic Church teaches a preferential option for the poor, and in his recent Encyclical Benedict XVI explicitly recognized the importance of care for the poor in an institutional/political context (Caritas in Veritate 7).  I have alluded in previous posts how important this element of caring for “the last, the littlest, the least” must be for the Catholic.  In a brief letter to Paul Ryan, Georgetown theologians reminded us of the U.S. Bishops’ letters protesting the 2011 House budget as one that, “decimates food programs for struggling families, radically weakens protections for the elderly and sick, and gives more tax breaks to the wealthiest few.”  Obama, on the other hand, expanded basic health care to an unprecedented number, in line with the Pope’s explicit callfor universal health care and the U.S. Bishops’ similar call dating back to 1919  Like Thomas Friedman in his recent New York Times Op-Ed, I reject a political ideology that recognizes a right to life up that is inviolable right up to the point one is born.

The question we have to ask, as in the two cases above, is if there is a moral obligation for the Catholic to help the poor, can we use the government to further it. There is a fundamental distinction between the individual moral issues mentioned above, and care for the poor. My friend marrying her same-sex partner of years in no way affects my parents’ marriage.  However, my choice to write this while munching on a cookie at Panera rather than donating that $2 to the homeless person I walked by on the way here does in fact measurably hurt the poor. The government has a responsibility to work for the good of its members.  As we accept human rights, we see that humans have a minimum level that society cannot infringe on without violating their fundamental dignity.  If other institutions in society cannot, on its own, provide that level of dignity, then the government must step in to do so.

A society in which private interests provide all care for the poor is simply not possible. According to this America article, The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate found that if every Catholic increased their charitable giving five-fold, the Church could only pay for half of this single government program, even if it focused all its resources (reserving only its own administrative costs) to it.  If Church, as the largest private charity in the world, could not maintain the burden of a single government program that ensures the right to life, with five times its current resources, I find it doubtful other private institutions would be able to, as well.  It is the job of the government to overcome the collective action failure of the bystander effect or diffusion of responsibility discussed in Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point or here.  It would be difficult to argue that the government may provide for physical defense, stage two in Maslow’shierarchy of needs, yet somehow people are on their own for stage one: basic physiological needs.

Additionally, there is a fundamental fairness concern. Romney, in supporting stripping government loans and grants from higher education, has suggested to students that they should borrow money from parents.  Unfortunately, not all parents have enough money to pay for ever increasing tuition.  Romney paying for the Medical School of his deceased Bain partner’s daughter is an inspiring story of his personal charity.  Sadly, most of those who need the most help paying for college do not have fathers who are partners of Bain Capital and friends with millionaires who can forgive a $400,000 debt as a Christmas present.  Pretending we can care for the poor in this way merely increases the stratification of wealth as the people who know the wealthy get more privileges, and those who don’t are denied them.  If we believe in equality of opportunity, this is not the way to go about it.

International Affairs

Just a brief note on international affairs.  As a member of an international Church that recognizes that people are people, no matter where they’re born, international affairs is always an important aspect for a Catholic’s vote.  I’ll admit, Obama isn’t perfect on international affairs, but at least trials are finally happening at Guantanamo Bay (click here for a Jesuit reporter's impression), he banned waterboarding as torture,  and recognizes the immigration issue as something that must be resolved.  I won’t go much more into depth, because beyond those issues mentioned, I think the third debate showed us on most other substantive international issues, Obama and Romney are pretty close.

Supreme Court

As Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman points out, several members of the Court are getting old.  There is quite a good chance Justice Kennedy or Justice Ginsberg will leave the Court—voluntarily or involuntarily—in the next four years.  We have one of the most conservative Supreme Courts in modern history.   With the current Republican fascination with Constitutional Originalism, a President Romney appointee would be the diametric opposite of Ginsberg, and probably considerably more Originalist than Kennedy, just as President Bush replaced Justice O’Connor with the considerably more conservative Justice Alito.

Why is this a problem?  Consider Burnham v. Superior Court of California (495 U.S. 604 (1990)).  In Burnham, the Court unanimously held that someone could sue you in any jurisdiction they personally deliver the court summons–even if you’ve never been there before. While the judgment was unanimous, there was no opinion a majority of the Justices could agree as to was the reasoning.  Writing for a Conservative plurality, Justice Scalia rested his justification in a pure pedigree argument. He explicitly rejects Justice Brennan and the liberal wing’s argument that the Court should consider “contemporary notions of due process,” and claims this “tag jurisdiction” was justified “because it is one of the continuing traditions of our legal system”(622-23). As anyone who has ever changed his or her mind about anything at all—merely because we’ve thought something in the past is not sufficient to say that it’s right.  Yet Originalism takes this exact view.  In his confirmation hearing, Scalia mentioned how the Originalist view would hold that “if lashing was fine [in 1789], lashing would be fine now.”

Fundamentally, this sense of Originalism is contrary to the Catholic experience of justice.  The history of Church is the development towards a greater understanding of morality. Take slavery, which the fifth century St. Augustine understood as permissible, and of which the thirteenth century St. Thomas Aquinas explicitly wrote, “a slave belongs to his master.”  Yet, Pope Gregory XVI penned an Encyclical in 1839 explicitly condemning the slave trade, and slavery is currently held as “against the dignity of persons and their fundamental rights“ (CCC 2414). The story of the Church is the story of how morality is greater understood over time.   No Catholic can support a candidate who would nominate a Justice who believes American jurisprudence is somehow exempt from a process to which even the Holy Spirit-guided Church is subject.

Reconciling Confession

Note: This post is adapted from a talk I gave several years ago at a retreat. Every time I go to Confession, I sit in the pews, trying to convince myself that I’m miserable because I’m examining the darkest corners of my conscience and should be miserable because of what a horrible sinner I am, and not at all because my mind is wandering while asking myself why I came here.

We confess to our sinfulness every Mass in the penitential rite. We admit, “I am not worthy to receive you” every consecration.  So why do we have to go sit down in a formalized one-on-one with a priest.  What’s so different about the Sacrament?   Couldn’t God just give us the grace at Mass? And He does! He forgives venial sins every time we take the Eucharist.  So why does the Church say we should go to confession every month?  I’d like to think the Church doesn’t assume I commit a mortal sin each and every month.

During Reconciliation, I’m unavoidably alone with God.  It’s me and Him. I can’t keep my sins locked away inside, and saying them aloud makes them somehow more real.  But no longer do I have everyone else around me so I can say, “at least I don’t do that.“ No one else can tell me it’s all okay, because “we’re all human, after all.”  No one’s there to justify and give a dozen reasons why it’s not my fault. It’s me and Him. 

And when I look up and see Him on the cross, my justifications can only fall silent.  What am I going to say—he’s asking too much?

Paul writes in 2 Corinthians, “That I might not become too elated, a thorn in my flesh was given to me, an angel of Satan, to beat me, to keep me from being too elated.  Three times I begged the Lord about this, that it might leave me, but He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’ “

In confession, we confront our sins, our weaknesses.  We have no strength to fight this battle.  We must face the countercultural fact that without God, we are nothing.  It is to God’s glory that He turns even our sin—our intentional rejection of Him—to an expression of humility, of faith, and of love.  And that’s why I go to confession.   It is in confession that His glory is revealed in a personal love too powerful to imagine.  A love that can transcend my brokenness and my weakness.  A love that can conquer, and will make me whole.

No wonder, when I leave, I always know I’ll be back.

The Christian who cried Wolf

I recently saw this video.

A thought immediately came into mind: “The Christian who cried wolf.” 

I spend a lot of my time—especially around law school in Boston—around people who are simply not religious.  As much as we don’t like to face it, Church attendance is shrinking, not growing, and we have to learn to function in a society that is becoming less Christian.

It’s difficult to be taken seriously, in a society of growing skepticism, when one uses arguments for public policy whose past invocations include anti-semitism, slavery, and the crusades.

It’s difficult to taken seriously, in a society of growing skepticism, while constantly decrying the “spirit of this age,” and a generation later frantically back-pedaling attempting to show how the Church’s morality is actually “up-to-date."

It’s difficult to be taken seriously, in any society, while constantly crying wolf.

I hope we can begin to get past the thought that the amazing thing about Christianity is its timelessness—how, no matter the historical context, Christians never have to question as new events unfold and new knowledge is revealed.    

I hope we can show the world that the amazing thing about Christianity is its timelessness—not in the sense of willful blindness, but in the sense that it brings a wisdom collected throughout over 2,000 years of a very human history to provide a new challenge in every age.

Transitional Faith

Visiting Duke this week was glorious.  I was able to see many of my friends and spend three straight days of non-stop catching up with people.  I was back in a community I spent years building, and it was so comfortable.  As much as I am really loving law school, I wouldn’t call it comfortable.

A lot of it’s just that I’m a horrendously bad transitioner.  It took three, if not four, years for me to finally feel established and comfortable at Duke.  Almost as soon as I felt comfortable, suddenly I’m in Boston, with a completely new set of people, communities, classes, and challenges.  Sure, new places are exciting, but I have to admit I really like having friends to come home to, people I can text when the thought crosses my mind, and can get a hug from when stress crops up. 

But even if I loved visiting for a break, deep down, I knew college isn’t where I’m supposed to be anymore.  I’m meant to be in law school.  See, faith doesn’t promise us comfort. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, proof of things unseen” (Hebrews 11:1).  Sure, the “substance of things hoped for” might be nice, but if I’m hoping for a job to pay off my debts, I want an actual job—not its “substance” (whatever that is).

As nice as it would be, faith doesn’t promise us that job—that comfort.  Catholic mystics have taught that when you’re getting comfortable, God does something to unsettle you, to make you think and pray.  Get too comfortable, and our faith becomes tepid—lukewarm.  God has some pretty strong words against a tepid faith (Revelations 3:16).  God’s solution?  Remember St. Paul’s thorn (2 Corinthians 12:8)?  Despite his pleas for relief, God’s response is not comfort and bliss, but an assurance to faith—“My grace is enough.” 

As we enter the Year of Faith the Pope has called in honor of the 50^th anniversary of Vatican II, I hope we are able to separate comfort and faith.  I pray we are able to look at darkness and fear, and know that for God “darkness and light are but one” (Psalms 139:12).  That we never forget, the “visible came into being through the visible” (Hebrews 11:3), and that it is through darkness and discomfort—not comfort—that God’s grace enters our lives and changes our world.

Privilege on the Cross

I am privileged.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked hard to get where I am.  There are countless times I would have loved to cuddle up with a book or television show or go out on a Friday or Saturday that I spent in the Engineering Quad with my work on a Saturday night after the library had closed.  I will spend the next three years of my life reading countless legal texts to try and

But, thinking again, what a privilege that I could, in complete safety, swipe in to a beautiful computer lab, and work as much or as little as I wanted in a quiet place with constant access to caffeine that I could buy on a prepaid food plan.  

No one likes to talk about privilege, and that makes sense, but the mere fact that I was raised in a loving family willing to sacrifice for my sake, that I have had an education and other resources that so many lack. I did nothing to deserve that, and I have only my family’s generosity to thank.  

What privilege.

What grace. 

But that’s okay, because there is nothing wrong with privilege.  Nothing wrong with grace.  My accomplishments are not diminished by my privilege, by me having “built that” through grace I did nothing to deserve.  However, there is something wrong with me denying that privilege is there, or using that privilege improperly.  I cannot say a token prayer of “thanks, God” and using that grace merely to “get ahead” and “be successful” without appropriating for my own what simply isn’t mine.  For every luxury I was given, there are countless others who undeservedly did not receive the same privilege, the same grace, and have nothing.

Using my gifts to get myself ahead is no better than the servant who buried the talents his master gave him instead of using them for his master’s greater glory (Matthew 25).  That is not the way of the Cross. In words reminiscent Uncle Ben, the more grace I was given, the greater responsibility I have.  Indeed, it is written that the disciples decided “according to ability, each should send relief” to other believers in a time of famine (Acts 11:29).

This is the Cross: God empting himself, “taking the form of a slave,” and humbling himself “becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross” (Philippians 2:7-8).  The Cross is the subjugation of power to the powerless.  It is Bryan Stevenson turning down a $160,000 annual salary starting salary at a big law firm to defend the lepers of our society—those we deem so irredeemable we condemn them to death.

This perhaps seems unreasonable for anyone to ask.  Our society allows us to put ourselves first, no matter how many more resources we have. But, “the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor 1:18).  

Christ does not teach us to be ashamed of privilege.  Indeed, Christ had the greatest privilege of all—divine privilege.  Christ’s life shows us the ultimate purpose of this privilege.  His ultimate privilege—divinity—was fulfilled in becoming the most limited slave, subjugating himself to sinners who tortured him to death, in order to grace us all with equally undeserved salvation.

It is only on the Cross that privilege can be transformed from arbitrary reward into a vehicle for God’s love and redemption.  It on the Cross that privilege becomes grace.

The Last, the Littlest, the Least

One of my favorite parts about law school is the quality of speakers that come here every day.  Mere intelligence or understanding of the law is not sufficient to be an effective lawyer; you have to be able to communicate that understanding to others in a convincing manner.  Most of the lawyers who get invited to speak at Harvard Law School are rather good at that.  A few weeks ago, I heard one of the most inspiring talks I’ve ever heard by Bryan Stevenson (To give you an idea, it’s the only time I’ve seen Harvard Law School students give a standing ovation.  For a similar talk, go here). One of the points he mentioned was that as a society, we have to not only focus on the “bright and dazzly things” but also the dark and difficult things it’s just easier not to worry about.

This brings me it to the second principle I identified in my post two weeks ago: fighting injustice.  Central to the Catholic understanding of justice is the relation of privilege and powerlessness.  Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles once quoted a common saying attributed most often to Ghandi: "Any society, any nation, is judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members; the last, the least, the littlest.” The social justice tradition of the Catholic Church has long admitted the necessity of a “preferential option for the poor” (as many of the Catholic and Jesuit scholars at Georgetown Law reminded Paul Ryan in a letter that can only be described as snarky on occasion of his visit to their campus). 

The nature of our Common Law system encourages social realities to become legal ones.  For instance, it’s normally very hard to get an injunction—a Court order to prohibit or force someone to do something under pain of fine or imprisonment.  Courts much prefer to award money damages.  However, there is an exception to this when the Courts look at anything to do with land. Land (technically any real property) has held a special place in jurisprudence.  Whether you want to attribute it to some subjective factor that makes land irreplaceable, the historic tie-up of wealth in land, or the first lawyers in England being landowners, the law has disregarded economists’ insistence that land is able to be objectively valued, and will generally not award money damages in land related cases, but rather make people move on and off or even demolish their homes before considering any other remedy to disagreements. 

It’s factors like this that make what lawyers do in courtrooms and in legislative chambers so important.  Our legal system, without people like Bryan Stephenson who fight for the littlest among us, create institutions that favor people already privileged by the societies we live in.  We live in a world in which 50-60% of persons of color in urban communities are in jail, in prison, on probation, or parole.  In the states of the old South, a defendant is 22 times more likely to receive a guilty verdict if the defendant is black as opposed to white.  And habits such as these find their way into law.  Alabama’s Constitution still technically mandates segregated schools, and prohibits “idiots” and LGBT persons from voting.

As Catholics, we cannot close our eyes to the injustice that surrounds us daily.  Certainly, as a lawyer I hope to fight injustice is another that we can be a society of laws, but the relation between law and society is not one way.  Every Catholic has a duty to open his or her eyes to make sure every act keeps at its center what was the central part of Jesus’ ministry—the last, the littlest, and the least.