This was posted as a guest post elsewhere, but I figured I would post it here for those of you who might not scour the internets for possible chances to read my writing
In case you happen to have missed it, the Supreme Court did something rather remarkable last Wednesday. Ten years to the day after Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the Court striking down anti-sodomy laws as unconstitutional, he took up his pen again in United States v. Windsor and struck down section three of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The section stated that in all federal laws, “the word ‘marriage’ means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word ‘spouse’ refers only to a person.” More details are here, but the gist is that Justice Kennedy and the liberal wing of the Court found that “no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity,” thus violating the 5th Amendment. This ruling is clearly a victory for LGBTQ rights, but the Court also challenges Christians to completely rethink how they relate with non-Christians.
One of the purposes of the that the Court found illegitimate is the House Report’s explanation that the bill expresses “both moral disapproval of homosexuality, and a moral conviction that heterosexuality better comports with traditional (especially Judeo-Christian) morality.” The Court uses this language to buttress its claim that DOMA’s “principal purpose” and “essence” is to “impose inequality.” The Court seems to suggest that congressional legislation based on nothing more than moral sentiment is not only unconstitutional, but downright bigoted. The dissents picked up on this. Justice Scalia, protested that the decision “formally declar[es] anyone opposed to same-sex marriage an enemy of human decency.” The Chief Justice scolds the majority for “tar[ring] the political branches with the brush of bigotry.” After the ruling, conservative Professor Eric Posner asked, “Isn’t it possible to oppose same-sex marriage without hating gay people?”
The Court’s answer is apparently no, if your objections are based solely on moral disapproval. This ruling is significant for many Christians in the sense that most Christians’ objections to same-sex marriage are religious or moral in nature. I was in North Carolina during the 2012 marriage amendment debate, and the rhetoric boiled down to “I know what marriage is because the Bible tells me so.”
But Windsor may be part of a trend not confined to civil marriage. In Lawrence v. Texas, the Court found that “the fact that the governing majority in a State has traditionally viewed a particular practice as immoral is not a sufficient reason for upholding a law prohibiting the practice.” If the church’s theological and moral arguments are insufficient to support laws, its political influence is reduced to that of an average citizen—based only on the strength of its non-religious reasoning.
GK Chesterton once wrote that one reason he was Catholic was that, “It is the only large attempt to change the world from the inside; working through wills and not laws.” If the church must rely upon a donation of Constantine’s sword to survive, then “those who live by the sword will perish by the sword.” Fortunately, we don’t need to rely upon the force of the U.S. Code to make sure God’s will is followed. Paul wrote that, “the demands of the law are written in their hearts,” even for the nonreligious.
However, instead of using the truth to set each other free, we rely on Ceasar. Seeing us using the power of the state as a crutch, God has used the Court in Windsor to call American Christians to a new evangelization. As he is so apt to do, he “chose the weak of the world to shame the strong.” He used an old woman named Edie to admonish us for our dependence on Ceasar to argue for us with sword rather than spirit. He used an old woman named Edie to ask us if we really believed that the divine law would crumble without the constant support of human law. He used an old woman named Edie to tell us to rise, pick up our mats, and walk.
I firmly believe that God’s Word can set the world on fire. The question that faces the church is do we accept the challenge and set hearts ablaze as Jesus did, or must we rely on Ceasar to give to God what is His?
Monday, July 8, 2013
Monday, February 18, 2013
Lent Day 5: Signs of Forgiveness in Luke 5
In the famous story of the healing of the paralytic in Luke 5:17-26, a group of men cut a hole through the roof to lower a paralytic in to see Jesus. “Seeing their faith,” Jesus says “saying the paralytic’s sins are forgiven, Jesus is accused of blaspheming—for only God can forgive sins. In response, he asks, “Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say ‘Rise and walk’?” He then proves his point that “the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” by telling the paralytic to pick up his stretcher and go home—which the former-paralytic promptly does.
This story in Luke 5 illuminates two related aspects of the Church: its ability to effectively intercede for us for God’s forgiveness, and the efficacy of those intercessions even despite its imperfections.
This message of intercession is revealed after carefully probing of Jesus’ words in verse 20. He says, “When he saw their faith” Jesus says “your sins are forgiven.” (5:20) Because in English, “your” is can be either singular and plural, the text is unclear to whom Jesus refers to—the paralytic, his friends, or all of them. Fortunately, Spanish is more precise in this matter, and the text reads ,“Al ver su fe, Jesús le dijo: 'Hombre, tus pecados te son perdonados.'” (Luca 5:20) First, Jesus refers specifically to “Hombre” (man) singular, not “hombres” (men) plural. Second, Jesus says “Tus pecados—” and “tus” is used to address a single person, not a group.
So why does this rather mundane linguistic analysis matter? It matters because it means that after seeing “their faith—” the faith of the men who brought the paralytic, Jesus forgives the sin of someone totally different. Not only is this intercessory prayer at its finest, but it opens the door both for the forgiveness through intercessory prayer—even for those who do not have the wherewithal to ask for forgiveness for themselves. Perhaps the application to those who willingly reject God’s proffered grace is arguable, but this result is really extremely important if we care about those who may not have the mental capacity to ask God for forgiveness, such as young children or the mentally disabled.
The second interesting point is that in response to faith, Jesus’ first act wasn’t to simply fix the worldly problems of the paralytic, but to forgive the paralytic’s sins. In fact, it seems Jesus only reluctantly healed the paralytic with the goal of proving that he could forgive sins. At the time, the Jews believe that physical disability and illness was God’s punishment for one’s own sin or the sins of one’s parents. To the Jews, then, causing the paralytic to walk was not merely sending an unrelated message that would basically amount to, “See, see? I am powerful. Now do you believe what I say?” But, rather, in keying into the directly related message forgiveness of sins, it was an unmistakable and irrefutable sign of Jesus’ authority over sin to the Jews of the time.
In his actions, Jesus demonstrates that what is important—grace and salvation—are often not accompanied by visible signs. Indeed, the fact that he only did so in the face of doubt perhaps indicates they shouldn’t be. Yet, don’t we constantly demand signs of our Church? We might not demanded the same miracles the Jews did 2000 years ago, but when we see a priest, Bishop, Cardinal, or Pope, not visibly demonstrating our vision of godliness, we presume God is not present, and the legitimacy of the Church is destroyed. Just as the Jews did 2000 years ago, we demand our own “modern” sign of God’s presence, and when it isn’t forthcoming, we echo the scribes and the Pharisees and say, “Who is this who speaks blasphemies?” (5:21).
Of course, God understands that we are just as human as those who doubted him 2000 years ago, so God sends us the sign of a (soon to be) saint like Mother Theresa every once in a while to remind us that His Church is indeed graced with His presence. But, just as Jesus’ original forgiveness of the paralytic was not dependent on the accompanying physical sign, neither is the grace God dispenses through the Church, nor our faith dependent on our believing in the holiness of any individual member of the clergy. This is why we pray every Sunday before the Eucharist, “Look not on our sins, but on the faith of your Church.” Just as the faith of the paralytics friends cleansed the sins of the paralytic, the faith of our Church cleanses ours—no matter if the signs we are hoping to see aren’t there every time.
This story in Luke 5 illuminates two related aspects of the Church: its ability to effectively intercede for us for God’s forgiveness, and the efficacy of those intercessions even despite its imperfections.
This message of intercession is revealed after carefully probing of Jesus’ words in verse 20. He says, “When he saw their faith” Jesus says “your sins are forgiven.” (5:20) Because in English, “your” is can be either singular and plural, the text is unclear to whom Jesus refers to—the paralytic, his friends, or all of them. Fortunately, Spanish is more precise in this matter, and the text reads ,“Al ver su fe, Jesús le dijo: 'Hombre, tus pecados te son perdonados.'” (Luca 5:20) First, Jesus refers specifically to “Hombre” (man) singular, not “hombres” (men) plural. Second, Jesus says “Tus pecados—” and “tus” is used to address a single person, not a group.
So why does this rather mundane linguistic analysis matter? It matters because it means that after seeing “their faith—” the faith of the men who brought the paralytic, Jesus forgives the sin of someone totally different. Not only is this intercessory prayer at its finest, but it opens the door both for the forgiveness through intercessory prayer—even for those who do not have the wherewithal to ask for forgiveness for themselves. Perhaps the application to those who willingly reject God’s proffered grace is arguable, but this result is really extremely important if we care about those who may not have the mental capacity to ask God for forgiveness, such as young children or the mentally disabled.
The second interesting point is that in response to faith, Jesus’ first act wasn’t to simply fix the worldly problems of the paralytic, but to forgive the paralytic’s sins. In fact, it seems Jesus only reluctantly healed the paralytic with the goal of proving that he could forgive sins. At the time, the Jews believe that physical disability and illness was God’s punishment for one’s own sin or the sins of one’s parents. To the Jews, then, causing the paralytic to walk was not merely sending an unrelated message that would basically amount to, “See, see? I am powerful. Now do you believe what I say?” But, rather, in keying into the directly related message forgiveness of sins, it was an unmistakable and irrefutable sign of Jesus’ authority over sin to the Jews of the time.
In his actions, Jesus demonstrates that what is important—grace and salvation—are often not accompanied by visible signs. Indeed, the fact that he only did so in the face of doubt perhaps indicates they shouldn’t be. Yet, don’t we constantly demand signs of our Church? We might not demanded the same miracles the Jews did 2000 years ago, but when we see a priest, Bishop, Cardinal, or Pope, not visibly demonstrating our vision of godliness, we presume God is not present, and the legitimacy of the Church is destroyed. Just as the Jews did 2000 years ago, we demand our own “modern” sign of God’s presence, and when it isn’t forthcoming, we echo the scribes and the Pharisees and say, “Who is this who speaks blasphemies?” (5:21).
Of course, God understands that we are just as human as those who doubted him 2000 years ago, so God sends us the sign of a (soon to be) saint like Mother Theresa every once in a while to remind us that His Church is indeed graced with His presence. But, just as Jesus’ original forgiveness of the paralytic was not dependent on the accompanying physical sign, neither is the grace God dispenses through the Church, nor our faith dependent on our believing in the holiness of any individual member of the clergy. This is why we pray every Sunday before the Eucharist, “Look not on our sins, but on the faith of your Church.” Just as the faith of the paralytics friends cleansed the sins of the paralytic, the faith of our Church cleanses ours—no matter if the signs we are hoping to see aren’t there every time.
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Lent Day 4: Outsiders in Luke 4
Luke 4 contains a curious passage:
In any case, this isn’t what makes the passage so interesting I feel the need to blockquote it at length. No, it’s interesting because it’s our first example of Christ—of God—interpreting Scripture we see in Luke. It’s the first time he interprets the meaning. The reason I find it fascinating. The story about Elijah and the widow in Zarephath is found in 1 Kings 17. The story of the Naaman the leper and Elisha is found in 2 Kings 5.
1 Kings 17 is our first introduction to Elijah in Scripture. Unlike the lyric introduction of God’s call of Jeremiah Jeremiah 1), we are introduced to Elijah with a terse and ominous prophecy he gives to the Israeli King Ahab: “As the Lord, the God of Israel, lives, whom I serve, during these years there shall be no dew or rain except at my word.” (1 Kings 17:1). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Lord’s next command to Elijah is leave Ahab rather abruptly, and he eventually finds himself led to Zarephath—a Phoenician city in modern day Lebanon—with God promising a “designated” widow to provide for him. (17:9). Apparently this was unbeknownst to said widow, because Elijah finds a widow outside the city walls, and asks her for water and some bread. She replies she has only a handful of flour and a little oil and she and her son are but waiting for death. (17:11-13). Elijah responds that she should go cook something and “the jar of flour shall not go empty, nor the jug of oil run dry” until the end of the drought. (17:14). And lo and behold, the widow does what Elijah said, and all involved were able to eat for a year. (17:15). Because one miracle is never enough, he later heals her son when her son is afflicted with sickness—and then she recognizes Elijah as “a man of God” from whose mouth “the word of the Lord comes truly.” (17:17-24).
It is interesting this is the story Jesus chooses to prove his point. Perhaps there are no better stories—I don’t know, I’m not an Old Testament scholar. However, on first glance it hardly appears Elijah was “sent to” the widow to preach or for her benefit, as Jesus’ description in Luke 4 would make it appear. No, God tells Elijah the widow is supposed to “provide for” him, yet, in the end, Elijah (and the Lord, of course) is the one who ends up allowing the widow to provide for both of them. Perhaps this is not a mistake. Jesus is at home, where he grew up. One’s home is meant to nourish you, to provide for you. “There’s no place like home.” Yet, already being the sign of contradiction Simeon prophesized in Luke 2, Jesus, instead, is met with incredulity. They call his father by name—seemingly incredulous that this carpenter’s son could have the audacity to call himself a prophet. Yet, he responds by reminding them of this story, where the one who was meant to be nourished instead does the nourishing. Perhaps this is not only furtherance of the rebuke Jesus makes on the face of his words—that they doubt in the face of truth—but a failing at their duty to provide for one of their own. But perhaps not. See, the widow was not failing in a duty to provide, in the sense that she literally had no food with which to feed Elijah. Instead, God had chosen her to provide for his prophet, despite her very lack of ability to do so. And then He provided her the resources to do it, assuming she followed the words of his prophet. Perhaps Jesus is saying the Nazarenes are similarly inadequate to provide for a prophet of the Lord, without the aid of the prophet himself. And he is rebuking them for not accepting his truth, bemoaning that a prophet must go far from his homeland to find someone who will listen to truth without second guessing its bearer.
Moving on to Jesus’ second example, in 2 Kings 5, Naaman is a great general of Aram—a neighboring kingdom of Isreal—and he is a leper. An Israeli girl the Arameans had captured in a raid told Naaman that he should go see “the prophet in Samaria,” who could heal his leprosy. (2 Kings 5:1-3). Elisha indicates Naaman should wash in the Jordan to be healed. (5:8). Naaman initially doubts the instructions, complaining “are not the rivers of Damascus, the Abana, and the Pharpar, better than the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them and be cleansed?” but his servants call him out, saying “if the prophet had told you to do something extraordinary, would you not do it? All the more now, since he said to you, ‘Wash and be clean,’ should you do as he said.” (5:12-13). Naaman follows Elisha’s instruction, and so is healed. (5:14).
Naaman’s story is different than the widow of Zarephath’s in the sense that Naaaman sought out Elisha. However, perhaps the significance Jesus is pointing to in his reference of this story is twofold. Not only are the prophet’s instructions followed with respect (after a little urging) by the outsider, but the instructions themselves were not so alien as Naaman expected. Naaman’s first reaction is, “I thought that he would surely come out and stand there to invoke the Lord his God, and would move his hand over the spot, and thus cure the leprosy.” (2 Kings 5:11). Indeed, the waters of Damascus that Naaman references are known for being clean, while the Jordan—not so much. However, in following the seemingly mundane act, Naaman is cleansed. So, too, the Israelis look for the clear. Indeed, he even criticizes them for expecting the miraculous, rebuking them for impliedly saying “Do here in your native place the things that we heard were done in Capernaum” (Luke 4:23). Instead
Interestingly, in both stories, the initially doubts. So Jesus cannot be trying to imply prophets are immediately with respect outside of their homeland. No—both the widow and Naaman initially doubted—though ultimately they were open to God’s grace. However, in the widow of Zarephath, he reminds them that it is God who provides the strength to serve him through listening to his Word. In there reference to Naaman, he reminds them of God’s presence in the seemingly mundane. We should remember Elijah’s experience, also in 1 Kings,
“No prophet is accepted in his own native place. Indeed, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah when the sky was covered for three and a half years and a severe famine spread over the entire land. It was to none of these that Elijah was sent, but only to a widow in Zarephath in the land of Sidon. Again there were many lepers in Israel during the time of Elisha the prophet; yet not one of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.” 4:24-27.This is said in response to the doubt his fellow Nazarenes have when he claims for himself the mantle of prophet in their presence (4:17-21). In Luke, this episode comes at the beginning Christ’s ministry, just after he returned from his 40 day retreat in the dessert (4:1-13), and this is literally first experience preaching—so I suppose one takeaway is that even Christ “failed” at first.
In any case, this isn’t what makes the passage so interesting I feel the need to blockquote it at length. No, it’s interesting because it’s our first example of Christ—of God—interpreting Scripture we see in Luke. It’s the first time he interprets the meaning. The reason I find it fascinating. The story about Elijah and the widow in Zarephath is found in 1 Kings 17. The story of the Naaman the leper and Elisha is found in 2 Kings 5.
1 Kings 17 is our first introduction to Elijah in Scripture. Unlike the lyric introduction of God’s call of Jeremiah Jeremiah 1), we are introduced to Elijah with a terse and ominous prophecy he gives to the Israeli King Ahab: “As the Lord, the God of Israel, lives, whom I serve, during these years there shall be no dew or rain except at my word.” (1 Kings 17:1). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Lord’s next command to Elijah is leave Ahab rather abruptly, and he eventually finds himself led to Zarephath—a Phoenician city in modern day Lebanon—with God promising a “designated” widow to provide for him. (17:9). Apparently this was unbeknownst to said widow, because Elijah finds a widow outside the city walls, and asks her for water and some bread. She replies she has only a handful of flour and a little oil and she and her son are but waiting for death. (17:11-13). Elijah responds that she should go cook something and “the jar of flour shall not go empty, nor the jug of oil run dry” until the end of the drought. (17:14). And lo and behold, the widow does what Elijah said, and all involved were able to eat for a year. (17:15). Because one miracle is never enough, he later heals her son when her son is afflicted with sickness—and then she recognizes Elijah as “a man of God” from whose mouth “the word of the Lord comes truly.” (17:17-24).
It is interesting this is the story Jesus chooses to prove his point. Perhaps there are no better stories—I don’t know, I’m not an Old Testament scholar. However, on first glance it hardly appears Elijah was “sent to” the widow to preach or for her benefit, as Jesus’ description in Luke 4 would make it appear. No, God tells Elijah the widow is supposed to “provide for” him, yet, in the end, Elijah (and the Lord, of course) is the one who ends up allowing the widow to provide for both of them. Perhaps this is not a mistake. Jesus is at home, where he grew up. One’s home is meant to nourish you, to provide for you. “There’s no place like home.” Yet, already being the sign of contradiction Simeon prophesized in Luke 2, Jesus, instead, is met with incredulity. They call his father by name—seemingly incredulous that this carpenter’s son could have the audacity to call himself a prophet. Yet, he responds by reminding them of this story, where the one who was meant to be nourished instead does the nourishing. Perhaps this is not only furtherance of the rebuke Jesus makes on the face of his words—that they doubt in the face of truth—but a failing at their duty to provide for one of their own. But perhaps not. See, the widow was not failing in a duty to provide, in the sense that she literally had no food with which to feed Elijah. Instead, God had chosen her to provide for his prophet, despite her very lack of ability to do so. And then He provided her the resources to do it, assuming she followed the words of his prophet. Perhaps Jesus is saying the Nazarenes are similarly inadequate to provide for a prophet of the Lord, without the aid of the prophet himself. And he is rebuking them for not accepting his truth, bemoaning that a prophet must go far from his homeland to find someone who will listen to truth without second guessing its bearer.
Moving on to Jesus’ second example, in 2 Kings 5, Naaman is a great general of Aram—a neighboring kingdom of Isreal—and he is a leper. An Israeli girl the Arameans had captured in a raid told Naaman that he should go see “the prophet in Samaria,” who could heal his leprosy. (2 Kings 5:1-3). Elisha indicates Naaman should wash in the Jordan to be healed. (5:8). Naaman initially doubts the instructions, complaining “are not the rivers of Damascus, the Abana, and the Pharpar, better than the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them and be cleansed?” but his servants call him out, saying “if the prophet had told you to do something extraordinary, would you not do it? All the more now, since he said to you, ‘Wash and be clean,’ should you do as he said.” (5:12-13). Naaman follows Elisha’s instruction, and so is healed. (5:14).
Naaman’s story is different than the widow of Zarephath’s in the sense that Naaaman sought out Elisha. However, perhaps the significance Jesus is pointing to in his reference of this story is twofold. Not only are the prophet’s instructions followed with respect (after a little urging) by the outsider, but the instructions themselves were not so alien as Naaman expected. Naaman’s first reaction is, “I thought that he would surely come out and stand there to invoke the Lord his God, and would move his hand over the spot, and thus cure the leprosy.” (2 Kings 5:11). Indeed, the waters of Damascus that Naaman references are known for being clean, while the Jordan—not so much. However, in following the seemingly mundane act, Naaman is cleansed. So, too, the Israelis look for the clear. Indeed, he even criticizes them for expecting the miraculous, rebuking them for impliedly saying “Do here in your native place the things that we heard were done in Capernaum” (Luke 4:23). Instead
Interestingly, in both stories, the initially doubts. So Jesus cannot be trying to imply prophets are immediately with respect outside of their homeland. No—both the widow and Naaman initially doubted—though ultimately they were open to God’s grace. However, in the widow of Zarephath, he reminds them that it is God who provides the strength to serve him through listening to his Word. In there reference to Naaman, he reminds them of God’s presence in the seemingly mundane. We should remember Elijah’s experience, also in 1 Kings,
“Then the Lord said, ‘Go outside and stand on the mountain before the LORD; the Lord will be passing by.’ A strong and heavy wind was rending the mountains and crushing rocks before the Lord- but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake - but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake there was fire - but the LORD was not in the fire. After the fire there was a tiny whispering sound. When he heard this, Elijah hid his face in his cloak and went and stood at the entrance of the cave.” (1 Kings 19).As we go through Lent preparing for Christ coming through death on the cross, and perhaps as we prepare for a new Pope, we should remember that we do not need an impressive outsider or the miraculous to see God. Rather, the seemingly mundane, limited, and oh-so-normal, through the grace of God, can bring God’s healing to our lives.
Friday, February 15, 2013
Lent Day 3: Children of God in Luke 3
Luke 3 gives perhaps the best Lent story in the Bible: John the Baptist preaching in the desert, eating locusts and calling for us to make straight our paths, and the baptism of Jesus. Perhaps because it is so perfect, I am going to be difficult and completely bypass it to focus on something I’ve never heard anyone ever talk about. At the very end of Luke 3, Luke includes the genealogy of Jesus, going all the way back. And by all the way back, I mean all the way. Like Matthew, he links Jesus to Abraham through David. But then he continues the genealogy to back to Noah, and even Adam. But he does stop there. He ends by stating “Adam, the son of God.”
So, certainly, Jesus is the Son of God, in a theological title we reserve for the Messiah. But he is also the son God by virtue of being related to Adam: the first human, who was, as Luke points out, the son of God.
The implications are rather breathtaking. If Adam is the son of God, and Jesus is thus the great-great-great-great[…]great-grandson of God through Adam—so is everyone else.
Pope Benedict XVI, the first modern Pope to humbly profess his weakness to give up the Petrine ministry when he felt called to, is a son of God.
The great Martin Luther King, Jr, the renowned activist who unabashedly centered his message for equality around God, is a son of God.
But it goes further than that. Despite her disinvitation to the Eucharistic table Kathleen Sebelius is a daughter of God.
And even still, Pontius Pilate is the son of God. He condemned his own brother to death.
And, less popularly, Osama Bin Laden is a son of God. He financed a regime that massacred his own family, and found his own death at hands of them, as well.
And so we can learn from this. Every one of us is a member of the human race. Every one of us a descendant of Adam. And every one of us is a son or daughter of God. So Luke calls us to remember that, and in the words I borrow from C.S. Lewis, it is children of God “whom we joke with, marry, snub, and exploit.”
So, certainly, Jesus is the Son of God, in a theological title we reserve for the Messiah. But he is also the son God by virtue of being related to Adam: the first human, who was, as Luke points out, the son of God.
The implications are rather breathtaking. If Adam is the son of God, and Jesus is thus the great-great-great-great[…]great-grandson of God through Adam—so is everyone else.
Pope Benedict XVI, the first modern Pope to humbly profess his weakness to give up the Petrine ministry when he felt called to, is a son of God.
The great Martin Luther King, Jr, the renowned activist who unabashedly centered his message for equality around God, is a son of God.
But it goes further than that. Despite her disinvitation to the Eucharistic table Kathleen Sebelius is a daughter of God.
And even still, Pontius Pilate is the son of God. He condemned his own brother to death.
And, less popularly, Osama Bin Laden is a son of God. He financed a regime that massacred his own family, and found his own death at hands of them, as well.
And so we can learn from this. Every one of us is a member of the human race. Every one of us a descendant of Adam. And every one of us is a son or daughter of God. So Luke calls us to remember that, and in the words I borrow from C.S. Lewis, it is children of God “whom we joke with, marry, snub, and exploit.”
Thursday, February 14, 2013
Lent Day 2: Pax Christi in Luke 2
Luke 2 tells the story of Christmas: the birth and childhood of Jesus, and a theme that runs through Luke’s story is peace. The two prayers contained in this chapter both focus around this. When the angels visit the shepherds, they break out in prayer, “Glory to God in the highest, and on Earth peace to those on whom his favor rests” (2:14). Upon seeing the Christ presented in the temple, Simeon exclaims, “Now, Master, you may let your servant go in peace, according to your word.”
Clearly, peace is in some way connected to Christ. It’s a theme that goes beyond Luke 2 Ephesians 2:14 calls Christ “our peace,” and Colossians 3:15 discusses “the Peace of Christ.” So what do we mean by this pax Christi? Do we mean lack of war? On one level, certainly. But the Roman empire was in the middle of the Pax Augusta—a period of relatively few armed conflicts enforced by the armies of the Emperor Augustus. If pax Christi means only world peace, we have a problem. After all, not only did peace exist before Christ (and to any Roman, peace within the Empire counted as world peace), but it was brought about by someone entirely different: Caesar Augustus. And anyone who has studied the Church can hardly claim that Christ brought about peace.
Yet, even living in the lack of armed conflict during the Pax Romana, Simeon says he may “go in peace” only upon seeing the Christ. And so we Christians believe Christ is the peacebringer. How? Well, Simeon also says Christ is a “sign that will be contradicted . . . so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” (2:34-35). It is this very “sign of contradiction” that allows us to look for peace in the life of someone whose life ended in anything but a peaceful manner. Us followers of Christ believe peace means more than not hitting someone. Consider the phrase “at peace with yourself.” It doesn’t merely mean you are not physically hurting yourself—though that is a prerequisite—it means more. It means a harmony—a tranquility—without fear and without tension. St. John of the Cross prays “O blessed Jesus, give me the stillness of soul in You. Let your mighty calmness reign in me. Rule me, O King of Gentleness, King of Peace.”
Even in the world in which armed conflict and death occurs in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Chad, Mali, Somalia, Uganda, Colombia, Burma, Mexico—the list goes on and on—Christ is still present in each of our hearts. Even with all the hatred we witness daily in our very own country—even in the very name of Christ—we can still find peace our relationship with Christ. That is the sign of contradiction. And at Lent, as we prepare for that ultimate sign of contradiction—salvation through the Cross—we are called to remember that as we enter the Mass, and lay down before the altar, or even open up the altar of our heart in our daily prayer, we open ourselves up to the Pax Christi that Simeon found in Christ.
Clearly, peace is in some way connected to Christ. It’s a theme that goes beyond Luke 2 Ephesians 2:14 calls Christ “our peace,” and Colossians 3:15 discusses “the Peace of Christ.” So what do we mean by this pax Christi? Do we mean lack of war? On one level, certainly. But the Roman empire was in the middle of the Pax Augusta—a period of relatively few armed conflicts enforced by the armies of the Emperor Augustus. If pax Christi means only world peace, we have a problem. After all, not only did peace exist before Christ (and to any Roman, peace within the Empire counted as world peace), but it was brought about by someone entirely different: Caesar Augustus. And anyone who has studied the Church can hardly claim that Christ brought about peace.
Yet, even living in the lack of armed conflict during the Pax Romana, Simeon says he may “go in peace” only upon seeing the Christ. And so we Christians believe Christ is the peacebringer. How? Well, Simeon also says Christ is a “sign that will be contradicted . . . so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” (2:34-35). It is this very “sign of contradiction” that allows us to look for peace in the life of someone whose life ended in anything but a peaceful manner. Us followers of Christ believe peace means more than not hitting someone. Consider the phrase “at peace with yourself.” It doesn’t merely mean you are not physically hurting yourself—though that is a prerequisite—it means more. It means a harmony—a tranquility—without fear and without tension. St. John of the Cross prays “O blessed Jesus, give me the stillness of soul in You. Let your mighty calmness reign in me. Rule me, O King of Gentleness, King of Peace.”
Even in the world in which armed conflict and death occurs in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Chad, Mali, Somalia, Uganda, Colombia, Burma, Mexico—the list goes on and on—Christ is still present in each of our hearts. Even with all the hatred we witness daily in our very own country—even in the very name of Christ—we can still find peace our relationship with Christ. That is the sign of contradiction. And at Lent, as we prepare for that ultimate sign of contradiction—salvation through the Cross—we are called to remember that as we enter the Mass, and lay down before the altar, or even open up the altar of our heart in our daily prayer, we open ourselves up to the Pax Christi that Simeon found in Christ.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Lent Day 1: Unfair Annunciations in Luke 1
As a Lenten discipline, I am reading one chapter of the Bible a day, and then writing a brief daily reflection which I will be posting here. Conveniently, the Gospel of Luke and Corinthians 1 add up to precisely 40 chapters, so I shall plan on reflecting first on the Gospel of Luke and then on 1 Corinthians. (It actually works out the same if after Luke, I go to the Gospel of Mark or to Romans. There is much to be said with any of these three paths, and while I currently plan on sticking to 1 Corinthians, I’ll simply go as the Spirit wills me after completing Luke.) I make the caveat these are just the product of single day reflections, and I am still in school, so please forgive content that might not be as well thought out or even possibly erroneous.
Luke 1 tells the story of the Annunciation. Everyone knows the story, in which the Archangel Gabriel gives us the opening lines to the Hail Mary with his greeting in 1:28. A much less talked about part of the story is Gabriel’s appearance to Zachariah in the Temple sanctuary to announce the conception of John the Baptist in his elderly wife—who so happens to be Mary’s sister. In response to Gabriel’s statement that to Zechariah “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, you prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall name him john. And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth. . . .” (1:13-14).
Imagine yourself in Zechariah’s shoes, being told that your elderly wife . Not only is it physically impossible—it’s dangerous. Pregnancy was dangerous enough at the time without being old while doing it. Much like we would if told we had just won the lottery simply by wishing for it (after all, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is), Zechariah’s first reaction was doubt. “How shall I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years.” (1:18). However much we might have done the same thing, Gabriel wasn’t impressed. In return for looking a gift horse in the mouth, he is struck mute until the birth of his son, because he “did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled at their proper time.” (1:19). Even his wife wasn’t impressed. When Mary visits her, Elizabeth greets her with the words, “Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled”—in case her husbands sixth month of muteness had made him forget his initial doubt. (1:45)
First off, this seems unfair. Sure, Mary famously says, “I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.” (1:38). However, her first reaction was remarkably similar to Zechariah’s: “How can this be, since I have no relations with a man?”(1:34). She expresses the same doubt, and instead of being punished with muteness, Gabriel replies not only that “the power of the Most High will overshadow you,” but gives further proof—her sister Elizabeth has conceived a son. If it’s possible for her, certainly it’s possible for Mary! Only then, after this assurance, does Mary acquiesce to be the Lord’s handmaid.
So how can we reconcile this discrepancy, where doubt in one case is punished, and in the next is understood? Same input: different outputs. On one level, we have to face the reality is that God is not fair, in our human understanding of it. God is just, and does not show “partiality” (Acts 10:34-35), but He’s not fair, in the sense of modern day American sensibilities. He does not always match up the same output for a given input.
He’s not fair, but he does consider context. Consider the result of punishing Zechariah with muteness. “When he came out, he was unable to speak to them, and they realized that he had seen a vision in the sanctuary.” (1:22). Alternatively, what would have happened if Mary were struck mute? Not only is it unlikely Jesus would have been born (unlike Zechariah, whose previous prayer was being granted, it does not appear that Mary had never prayed to be mother of the Messiah), but imagine a pregnant fiancée trying to convince her future husband that the reason she was pregnant was not that she cheated on him, but that she will be “overcome with the power of the Most High.” Now imagine her trying to communicate to him why she was pregnant, mute. If your fiancée came home mute and pregnant, your first reaction wouldn’t be that you were witnessing a miracle—it’d probably be that your fiancée had been raped. By the time she could correct him effectively, it would have been 9 months. What if he told other people of that suspicion? What if he couldn’t shake off something so traumatic that he had believed for 9 months. What if he was convinced he knew who had “done it,” and tried to pin rape on an innocent? This is not cloud of doubt God would want surrounding the birth of His son.
So God is not fair, but He does have a plan. It would not have been in that plan to have His son’s birth surrounded with sorrow rather than joy. Zechariah, on the other hand. So when we see something that doesn’t seem fair, think to yourself, what is the context? What is God’s plan? It just might be the case that God cares about more than just matching up output to input.
Luke 1 tells the story of the Annunciation. Everyone knows the story, in which the Archangel Gabriel gives us the opening lines to the Hail Mary with his greeting in 1:28. A much less talked about part of the story is Gabriel’s appearance to Zachariah in the Temple sanctuary to announce the conception of John the Baptist in his elderly wife—who so happens to be Mary’s sister. In response to Gabriel’s statement that to Zechariah “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, you prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall name him john. And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth. . . .” (1:13-14).
Imagine yourself in Zechariah’s shoes, being told that your elderly wife . Not only is it physically impossible—it’s dangerous. Pregnancy was dangerous enough at the time without being old while doing it. Much like we would if told we had just won the lottery simply by wishing for it (after all, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is), Zechariah’s first reaction was doubt. “How shall I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years.” (1:18). However much we might have done the same thing, Gabriel wasn’t impressed. In return for looking a gift horse in the mouth, he is struck mute until the birth of his son, because he “did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled at their proper time.” (1:19). Even his wife wasn’t impressed. When Mary visits her, Elizabeth greets her with the words, “Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled”—in case her husbands sixth month of muteness had made him forget his initial doubt. (1:45)
First off, this seems unfair. Sure, Mary famously says, “I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.” (1:38). However, her first reaction was remarkably similar to Zechariah’s: “How can this be, since I have no relations with a man?”(1:34). She expresses the same doubt, and instead of being punished with muteness, Gabriel replies not only that “the power of the Most High will overshadow you,” but gives further proof—her sister Elizabeth has conceived a son. If it’s possible for her, certainly it’s possible for Mary! Only then, after this assurance, does Mary acquiesce to be the Lord’s handmaid.
So how can we reconcile this discrepancy, where doubt in one case is punished, and in the next is understood? Same input: different outputs. On one level, we have to face the reality is that God is not fair, in our human understanding of it. God is just, and does not show “partiality” (Acts 10:34-35), but He’s not fair, in the sense of modern day American sensibilities. He does not always match up the same output for a given input.
He’s not fair, but he does consider context. Consider the result of punishing Zechariah with muteness. “When he came out, he was unable to speak to them, and they realized that he had seen a vision in the sanctuary.” (1:22). Alternatively, what would have happened if Mary were struck mute? Not only is it unlikely Jesus would have been born (unlike Zechariah, whose previous prayer was being granted, it does not appear that Mary had never prayed to be mother of the Messiah), but imagine a pregnant fiancée trying to convince her future husband that the reason she was pregnant was not that she cheated on him, but that she will be “overcome with the power of the Most High.” Now imagine her trying to communicate to him why she was pregnant, mute. If your fiancée came home mute and pregnant, your first reaction wouldn’t be that you were witnessing a miracle—it’d probably be that your fiancée had been raped. By the time she could correct him effectively, it would have been 9 months. What if he told other people of that suspicion? What if he couldn’t shake off something so traumatic that he had believed for 9 months. What if he was convinced he knew who had “done it,” and tried to pin rape on an innocent? This is not cloud of doubt God would want surrounding the birth of His son.
So God is not fair, but He does have a plan. It would not have been in that plan to have His son’s birth surrounded with sorrow rather than joy. Zechariah, on the other hand. So when we see something that doesn’t seem fair, think to yourself, what is the context? What is God’s plan? It just might be the case that God cares about more than just matching up output to input.
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
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.
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.
Saturday, December 15, 2012
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sunday, December 9, 2012
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.
Sunday, November 25, 2012
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.
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.
Sunday, November 11, 2012
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.
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.
Sunday, November 4, 2012
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.
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"?  
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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"?  
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.
Sunday, October 28, 2012
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.
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.
Sunday, October 21, 2012
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.
Sunday, October 14, 2012
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 50th 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.
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