Unconditionally

I finally gave my mom her Mother’s Day present on Friday. Yes let’s do the math: May 13-July 13. That’s a full two months, and I consider myself generally good about deadlines.  So why?  My excuse was that graduation was also May 13, and I’ve...gotten busy this summer?  Yes, that’s it. I was busy with such essential and shopping-impairing activities such as reading books...erm working out...I mean, walking the dog.

...

All right so I don’t really have an excuse.  I wanted to find the perfect gift, but I promise you that doesn’t take two months.  I know it bothered my mom, though she’d never admit it herself before I gave her the present.  Most of all, though, it bothered me.

It’s not really that I felt I “owed” her.  I mean, in a sense, I do completely. One of my friends is planning on paying her parents back, dollar for dollar, their expenditure for college.  I thought that’d be such a great idea!  I could pay them back for everything!  But then I thought about how they would react to me writing them a check for the cost of raising me plus college expenses—all their time, money, grief, and love condensed to a check that, assuming they spent the average cost of raising a child on me, would be about $450,000.  Sure, that’s quite a bit of money, but I’ll be a disgrace to my economics major and say that I don’t think it’s really possible to monetize the love that went into the changing dirty diapers, the 2 am’s comforting me from nightmares, staying up worrying when I stayed out too late, or stressing with me over college admissions.  Even if I take care of them when they get old, I don’t think it’s possible to make up for how much they subordinated their lives to mine for the past almost-22 years.

I also don’t think they’d want me to.  Their care was freely given in love, not conditional on some sort of repayment. 

So, no, it’s not that I merely reneged on a debt. It’s more than that.  I can’t ever “pay back” my mother for her unconditional love.  But I can recognize what she’s done and honor her for it—even if it’s just by making her feel extra special one day out of the year.  Funny how there’s a Commandment that says to do just that.  And it’s really just sad how little that Commandment gets talked about.

There’s a reason the commandment “honor your father and monther” is listed just below the commandments concerning how we are to deal with God (“you shall have no other Gods before me,” “you shall not take the name of the Lord, your God, in vain”, and “keep holy the Sabbath”) —even above the commandment “you shall not kill.”   See, the first three commandments are really hard to do right.  But our relationship to our parents can teach us about our relationship to God.  Just like I can’t pay my parents back for raising me, we can’t put a monetary value on what God has given us (God created all the gold in the world, in the first place). But our relationship with God isn’t transactional. It’s not like I have some spiritual bank account where Jesus grants me certain favors and I, to settle the account, say a certain number of prayers or drive to church and space out while some priest lectures the congregation for a while.  

Like we set aside a special day for mothers once a year, we set aside a special day for Him once a week in which we more remind ourselves what it means to for Him to be God, and to thank Him for His unconditional love and sacrifice for us.  But our everyday praise is also pleasing to the Lord—just like some of the texts I’ve sent to my mom that she still has saved on her phone.

So no wonder it bothered me that I wasn’t on top of Mother’s Day.  Not only does it mean I’m disrespecting my mother, but that I’m not learning what I should about my relationship with God. 

Certainly, not all parents are perfect; they are fallen humans, too, and our relationship with them can only brokenly reflect our relationship with God.  But, in the vast majority of cases, there is certainly something there through which we should be learning how to properly honor.  The Commandment does not state tell us to “honor your parents to the extent that an outside judge and jury would,” just like we are not supposed to honor God based on how much we like the gifts and duties He has given us.  It tells us to honor our parents. 

If we don’t bother to do it with our parents, how on Earth do we expect to bother to do it with our God? 

Vacation and Closing Fortnights

Since I just got back from vacation, I have not been able to write a full post.   Instead, I shall be posting another's thoughts for your edification: an admirable discussion of Christian freedom by Archbishop Charles Chaput, OFM Cap., of Philadelphia at the closing homily for the USCCB (which I attended, being conveniently in Washington, D.C. for the Fourth of July).

For the full text of this homily, please see this link.  The video of the whole Mass can be found here. I hope you enjoy, and have been able to meditate both on Christian and political freedom in the preceding two weeks.

Free from passions. Free from sin.

Last week I mentioned that Christian freedom is freedom from sin.  I must admit, I left that a little vague, and if I’m honest, it’s because I really don’t know what “freedom from sin” means. Fortunately, I might have just figured out where some small part of it lies: freedom from passions.  That may not sound like me—I’m a passionate guy, after all—but listen to this story, and then please feel free to attempt to remove the log in my eye. 

Here it was, 2:30 am, and I’m reading another fantasy novel despite my rapidly approaching alarm. (The book was City of Bones by Cassandra Clare, if anyone’s interested).  It occurred to me I had already fallen for half the guys in the book. In my defense, they were basically half-angels and one is actually gay—a rarity in fantasy novels.  However, this happens so often as to be cliché: I start a book, there’s an interesting guy, I develop a crush on yet another guy who’s out of reach, and I can’t stop reading.  It doesn’t matter or 3 whether it’s 3 am and I have to catch a train back from Chicago early the next morning, or it’s the airplane flight during which I promised myself I would finish this post.  I somehow turn page after page, helpless . 

Sadly, the need to read is not the aesthetical appreciation of a burgeoning literary connoisseur.  It’s not even yearning for the magic in them, or a world where you can fight flesh-and-blood demons.  Since the interesting guy in them tends to be the one who somehow becomes the romantic interest of someone or another, I tell myself that I’m experiencing love vicariously because of my remarkably one-sided love life.  But a need wells up in me while I’m reading the book—an appetite—and when the book is over, instead of feeling satisfied, I’m only left wanting more.

Just before reading that fantasy novel, I had just read a passage by St. John of the Cross: “Appetites...resemble little children, restless and hard to please, always whining to their mother for this thing or that, and never satisfied” (The Ascent of Mount Caramel I.6.6).  When the yearning—the appetite—came upon me while reading this book, I suddenly felt overwhelmed by its yoke, and I was moved to say a simple prayer—“Free me, Lord. Release me from this passion.”

This was an odd prayer for me.  With so much of the rest of the world, I’ll admit that I’ve never really been able to understand the detachment teaching so many religions are so wrapped up in. I throw myself into everything I do whole-heartedly. I've always resonated with this quote from my favorite Harry Potter fanfic (yes, I went there, and sadly this work is no longer available on the internet.):

“Draco didn’t waste moments, Draco threw himself into them.  Draco’s enmity towards him had been wholehearted because Draco knew no other way to be.  Draco was utterly appalling or utterly amusing, but he was utterly something, because there was always passion there.”

I’ve always seen detachment as the opposite of passion.  Cold. Aloof. Almost inhuman.  I never understood what was different between detachment and apathy, and, after all, God loves us personally, doesn’t he?  How can He love personally and detached simultaneously?

But suddenly I understood the need.  Isaiah’s words, “He will turn to the right and be hungry, and eat toward the left and not be filled” (9:20) seemed to be the hidden text behind Cassandra Clare’s characters.

I realized I am a slave to that passion—that appetite for human companionship—and I long to be free of this never-ending need.  I know it won’t end with a boyfriend, husband.  And ignore the whole gay thing—it’d be the same thing if tomorrow I woke up straight and married the perfect girl.  As long as I need human love, as long as I am consumed with an appetite for it, I’ll never be able to love a human. I’ll never actually be complete.  “Man...cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself” (Gaudium et Spes 24).

And appetites and passions are different from being passionate about things.  It is attachment that is the opposite from detachment, and we know that being attached to things of this world will never truly satisfy.  We are in this world, not of it.

Perhaps the passion that ensnares you isn’t reading about interesting guys, or any other human companionship.  It could be money, prestige, “success.”   But I go back to Dean Wells’ point that I mention in my first post, if we can’t love, then we can never truly find ourselves.  We can’t give a sincere gift of ourselves; we hold something back—our appetites demand it.  And as we hold what we desire for ourselves back (often without even realizing it), we poison our love, and we tell ourselves the physical acts that are the inevitable result are somehow a reflection of something holy, when really they are the outward sign of inward disorder.

So, my friends, I may not know what freedom from sin is.  I know it’s not simple, but I know that the road starts with freedom from our appetites. So, my brothers and sisters, in the words of the ancient desert fathers of our faith—“flee.”  Flee from worldly appetites.  Flee to Christ, and Christ will set you free. 

Slaves of Righteousness

I’m impressed with myself—I’ve mostly stayed away from politics throughout this blog! Alas, my friends, I am sorry to report your reprieve is at an end. This week marked the beginning of the Fortnight for Freedom, and the USCCB has asked the faithful to mark a special period of “prayer, study, catechesis and public action.” So, in deference to the Bishops’ request, I duly submit my reflections on Freedom.

Don’t worry. This post is not going to be yet another commentary on the HHS mandate itself.  Plenty of those are floating around nowadays.

Instead, I shall be a good American and talk about Freedom.  Before you get too excited though, I must admit I shall be a bad American and not talk about Freedom © American Founding Fathers, 1776.   Instead, I shall be a good American Catholic and talk about Christian freedom.  One of the beauties of Catholicism is that its perspective is goes back so much further than Locke, Madison, and Montesquieu (yup—a large part of American political thought came from a Frenchman—erm—freedom-man). Scripture is full of freedom-statements such as “The truth shall set you free” and “freed from sin you have become slaves of righteousness.”

Wait a second. Slaves of righteousness?  St. Paul can’t have meant that. We are Free Americans. We sorted out that whole slave thing a century and a half ago.  Men and women have paid in blood for that freedom.  And, honestly, St. Paul, you really need to work on your slogans.  Crying “freedom isn’t free,” and watching crusades to topple genocidal dictators, heartless baby-killers, and liberal governments expecting insurance companies to give Church employees the options of purchasing contraception just seems so much more inspiring than being a “slave to righteousness.”  Whatever that even means.

But there’s the problem.  Wars— traditional or cultural—are fundamentally political, and politics is essentially dehumanizing. It turns real people with complex personal problems into sound-byte-ready issues to rally the base and divide America down the middle.  It’s an extremely powerful pull that has reached even the Church.  Politicians and the media try to make us, as Catholics, decide whether we are liberal or conservative. Democrat or Republican.  Many in the Church fall right in line—e.g. Catholic writer George Weigel, best known for his biography of John Paul II who issued a scathing critique  of the parts of Benedict XVI’s Encyclical “Caritas in Veritate” that might not have fallen in line with the current vogue in Conservative economic values.  But the Church is a collection of people, with human problems. It’s interesting that the Catholics in Iraq weren’t begging for American liberation, but merely for food.

One cannot simply legislate away the thorns God gives us.   Paul is very clear that it is not the law that saves.  He’s referring to Biblical law, and if the written Word of God for His chosen people cannot save us, then anything Congress does can’t possibly, either. “Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any creature will be able to separate us from the love of God.”

So certainly, promoting a just society is central to the Catholic mission, and that probably means Bishops will wade into the political ring.  However, Bishops must remember they wade into the political ring as the Vicars of Christ—teachers—and not as the leaders of just another interest group trying to push yet another agenda on the rest of the nation.  Sadly, to many outside and even within the Church, this is how they come across.

During this fortnight for freedom, I urge you to reject the partisan politics that threaten the Church.  I beg the USCCB and all Catholics to look to our history and remember what freedom means to us as not just Americans, but as Catholic Americans.  Freedom means something so much more beautiful than restricting elected officials.  It means being free from the yoke of sin.  And so I urge you to take this fortnight to not only reflect on Christian freedom, but do something freed from sin—something righteous.  For it is only in losing our lives will we gain it, and only in being slaves to righteousness shall we be truly free.

Veritas in Caritate

Last week, I saw Ironman, and it confirmed to me that when it comes to seeing pain, I’m a wimp.  It’s not that I don’t have an acceptable pain tolerance myself, but throw up an image of someone getting the magnet that was keeping shrapnel from piercing his heart ripped out of his chest, and you can pretty much bet you will find me with my eyes closed and my hands reaching longingly for the mute button.

The Immaculate Heart of Mary

This is not all that abnormal. Many people hate seeing others in pain—some have even not been desensitized to it.  But, fear not, this is not another Catholic jeremiad bemoaning the moral decline of our society.  See, I seem to be an abnormality with my reaction to others’ pain.  But the anomaly goes deeper than that.  I’m not only uncomfortable about people being hurt physically, but also when they’re hurt spiritually.

You might ask what this means.  Well, as a Catholic, I believe in a soul.  I also believe in this pesky little thing called “objective morality,” which basically means that every time you do something wrong, you are tearing your soul kicking and screaming further from God.  And that’s no better for the soul than Tony Stark‘s chest magnet being ripped out is for his heart.

In practice, that means that watching my friends do something morally wrong is the spiritual equivalent of watching them cut themselves.  No wonder I get so uncomfortable at frat parties.

Of course, when someone’s cutting himself, the proper response isn’t to threaten him with the fires of Hell.  It’s not the time to lecture him about the sanctity of the body, and how God is angered by the desecration of His temple. The person who cuts himself is broken, and in need of healing, and so the proper response is love.  And love is not driven by fear, but is patient and kind.  And it’s love that conquers all.  Sure, at some point the “that wasn’t okay” conversation should probably happen, and this can serve an important point for accountability.  However, having that conversation at the wrong point in time not only doesn’t help, but can undo progress that had been made.   

Jesus and the Woman Taken in Adultery
Gustave Doré 

So me striding into Shooters during alumni weekend with a sign announcing, “Hell awaits you! Repent!” is probably not quite the Christian way.  Sure, the Catholic who goes to a frat party and sees some of the partygoers taking a knife to their soul perhaps should feel uncomfortable about it, just as we all feel uncomfortable about self-mutilation.  However, the to inflate ourselves and self-righteously condemn so we can distance ourselves from the messiness that comes with sitting at table with sinners breaks Jesus’ examples just as the sins they themselves commit.

After all, many of those same partygoers simply disagree with Catholic morality. Some have even thought much deeper about it than the Catholics who want to condemn them have.  I personally find getting drunk to be probably morally questionable, and I find a faithful homosexual relation to be probably not.  Many Catholics probably disagree with me on one or both counts.  But I promise you screaming Leviticus 18:22 at me will change my mind no more than me going to LDOC yelling about Ephesians 5:18 would stop the Catholics there.  I’ve thought quite deeply about these issues, and if your first response is to tell me which are my sins rather than finding the Christ within me, perhaps your priorities are misplaced.  

Once we have a mutual understanding in love, which bears all things and endures all things, then we can work to find the truth.

“And we must unite inside her, or we'll crumble from within.”

(Spoiler alert: if you have neither read the Harry Potter series nor seen the movies, please immediately remedy that, and then come back and read this post.)

When I first got the news, I’ll admit I was a bit unsure of how to take it.  I had gone onto Pottermore, taken a JK Rowling-approved house-sorting quiz, and the results came up Slytherin. 

Sure, it seems utterly superfluous, but still—if only there had been a real sorting hat!  I could have pulled a Potter and begged, “Anything but Slytherin, anything but Slytherin!” The hat would have hemmed and hawed and said, “Well, if you’re sure, better be GRIFFYNDOR!”  and all of you would have been so proud to be friends with me.  After all, choosing not to be a Slytherin is a Potter-endorsed way to show how we carefully gather all the information and give others the benefit of the doubt before passing judgment.

Wait—he begged not to be in Slytherin based on a single rumor he heard from a person he just met? 

Oh. 

Well if Potter neglected to charitably portray his rival house throughout his story, allow a new member of the House try to rectify matters.

The Ravenclaw Eagle

The way I understand it, each house is characterized by certain traits.  Ravenclaw is marked by intelligence and ambition.  If we Catholicize Ravenclaw, I think St. Thomas Aquinas would have found his home here. This Dominican Scholastic theologian was dedicated to reasoning his way to uncovering the mysteries of God, and attempted a summation and defense of all the Church’s teaching in his never-completed Summa Theologica.

The Hufflepuff Badger

Hufflepuff is marked by compassion and loyalty, and I think that if she found herself in Potter’s world, Mother Theresa would have joined this one.  The tiny nun dedicated her life to service of the poor and emptied herself past the point it hurt in service to them, even when no longer feeling the comfort of Christ’s immediate presence.

The Gryffindor Lion

 It’s no mistake I said the hat would have sorted me into Gryffindor if I had permitted myself a snap judgment against my house.  When I finished 8^th grade, one of my artistically-inclined best friends drew each of our friend group a fantastical creature (we are admitted fantasy-addicts).  For me, she chose a Griffin: partially characterizing it in her letter of explanation as “brave, stubborn, compassionate, and obsessed with truth to a fault [i.e. idealistic].”  I think St. Joan of Arc was a Gryffindor at heart.  A peasant from Domrémy, she takes directions she hears from Sts. Michael, Margaret, and Catherine all the way to the French prince, convincing him to give her an army and eventually breaking the English siege of Orléans in her conspicuous white armor—persevering in her beliefs even through being burned at the stake for heresy after being captured.  

The Slytherin Snake

Slytherin is complex, and you probably have a knee-jerk reaction to hate and fear it, so bear with me while I give my house a bit of discussion. My admittance letter from Prefect Gemma Farley focused on how fiercely loyal Slytherins are to each other.  And of course they’re ambitious, but that means they’re reaching for some ideal.  It must be admitted Slytherins don’t always choose the best ideals—in the case of Tom Riddle it was power and eternal life.  However, Salazar Slytherin sought the seeds of greatness in his students, and there are many ways to be great—those that are holy, and those that aren’t.

I think most all of us at Duke have ambition.  Otherwise, instead of selfishly taking up all of our time working for good grades and doing all the extracurriculars and SATs, SAT II’s, etc. in high school, we’d have been in soup kitchens actually helping people.  And, sure ambition out of hand can easily lead to Voldemorts, but that’s why which why the Church gives us the litany of humility: perhaps the most important  and difficult prayer for any student at Duke.  But ambition isn’t intrinsically prideful or against God, so long as we keep in mind what Sam Wells had to say in my first blog post. Would it be wrong to have the ambition to become a saint—something we’re all called to do.

I think St. Ignatius would be a Slytherin (and his Feast day is conveniently on my—and Potter’s and Longbottom’s—birthday). His Autobiography tells us how he was from an aristocratic family who read of Jesus and the saints when convalescing from a war injury, which transformed his ambitions from having a glorious military career and successfully wooing a pretty lady to doing great deeds for God.  He transformed this ambition ad majorem Dei gloriam to the Order he founded: the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), who, with their fourth vow of obedience to the Pope (i.e. House loyalty), spread throughout the world.  It eventually became so influential that the threatened monarchs of Europe pressured the Pope to have the Order suppressed, though even this did not last forever.

All four paradigms represented by Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, Gryfindor, and Slytherin have their place in the Church–each has its representative saint, after all.  However, each paradigm has its own pitfalls—after all, even Peter “was given a thorn in [his] flesh.”   Individual service is necessary, but as the Church’s social teachings instruct us—ministering to the poor without also planning for institutional change will leave the poor with plenty of warm fuzzies, but those that will fade with the dawn of a new day and the return of the same problems.  The Summa is perhaps one of the greatest single intellectual masterpieces of all of Christendom...that almost no one bothers to read anymore, and which most Catholics would have trouble applying to their life.  Fighting for the Church has been blessed by Popes for millennia, but without exploring the wider consequences of war and without careful considerations of all sides of the issue, we have the Crusades.  And what can go wrong with ambition dedicated to an ideal within an environment of loyalty and obedience, if it is untempered by love and compassion?  Why, welcome, most esteemed High Inquisitor.

It takes all types to make a Church.  We are all one Body, and each one of us complements the others in serving Christ our head.  In doing this, we must remember last words of the sorting hat we hear in the series, as he finishes describing the differences of the houses:

“And we must unite inside her,
or we'll crumble from within.”

For, “the whole body, being fitted together and held together by what every joint supplies causes the growth of the body for building up of itself in love” (Ephesians 4:16).

A Temple of the Lord

I spent last week eating healthfully and going to the gym.  Your first reaction is probably an approving, “Good for you, Shane!”  And indeed, heaven knows I need to work on my health, since every academic year I seem to do my best to drown my body’s best efforts at longevity in excessive caffeine, sugar, sedentariness, and sleep deprivation.  If our bodies are a temple of the Lord, I have been damned a thousand times over for its wanton desecration. 

But, I’ll be honest: last week’s veggies and gym sessions weren’t peace offerings to assuage my wronged God.  And as few calories as I was eating and as many hours as I was spending in the gym, it’s a bit excessive to try to spin it as “being healthy.”  And it’s not like I particularly need physical strength—few of us do: athletes, military/intelligence personnel, and those in some labor intensive industries such as construction.   So why would I care so much? 

If I’m honest with myself, I can only conclude I had an extremely simple reason—I wanted to be more attractive.  This is absolutely normal, right?  How many guy want to bulk up?  How many girls want to slim down?  And it makes sense, considering that despite disputed efficacy, the body-building supplement industry was worth $2.7 billion in 2008, and the diet industry was worth a whopping $60 billion in 2011.  And our popular media agrees: Stephanie Meyers seems to excuse Edward Cullen for his rather obsessive stalking with frequent reference to his “marble Adonis” body.  But, again, this is absolutely normal, right?   I just watched Thor—what guy doesn’t want a body like Chris Hemsworth?

Probably Christ for one. The Bible talks about many aspects of His life and death—but it seems remarkably thin on Jesus’ workout regimens.  In His years preaching on Earth, God somehow didn’t see fit to mention, “Blessed are the hot.”

So why do we strive so much to have a “hot body”?  I don’t need it for my career; I don’t need it to be healthy.  Well, what is “being hot”?  It seems to be generally a measure of how much you can make another person “want” you merely upon looking at you.  When Jesus warns, “everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart?”  (Matthew 5:27) he is speaking about this exact thing we are attempting to evoke with our workout regimens and protein supplements.

If we actually succeed in this, we are literally leading those around us to sin.  Sure, it fans our ego to have all the girls or boys talking about us, and perhaps we can’t help but wonder if anyone would date is if we’re not attractive enough.  But if we accomplish in making all those who look at us covet us, we have converted our body into a temple to ourselves, not a temple to the Lord.

This is not to say we should never work out or eat healthfully: being healthy, staying fit, making sure we’re able to do what is required of us are all deeply ingrained in the Catholic Tradition.  From the very beginning of religious orders, the Benedictines have divided each day into care for the body, mind, and soul, and the Jesuits have always discussed cura personalis—care for the whole person.  But we must be careful not to go too far, or act in an immodest way (why did you just take your shirt off in front of all those people?  And what exactly is the purpose of that plunging neckline?).

After all, for all the care we can spend sculpting our bodies for possible human lovers, how many of us spend that same amount of time sculpting our soul for God?  The Church teaches that our bodies are sacramental; what we do with them—and why—have eternal reverberations in our soul. 

Honestly, my reckless disregard for my physical health during the school year is against my faith.  I’m not Jesus; when I destroy my temple, it takes more than 3 days for to rebuild it.  But with the modern world telling us we’ll never have a boyfriend or girlfriend unless we have a certain body, it is so easy to fall prey to the other extreme, and allow our bodies to become idols.

Or perhaps it’s not just society.  Perhaps we fear, deep down, we’re the ones who are shallow.  If we have the right body, we’ll probably end up having our pick of physically attractive partners, and we'll never have to stop and reflect that we don't look with heaven’s eyes and see the whole person, but merely life on the surface.

Because above all, if love is skin-deep, then true covenantal marriage is impossible, and if we cannot overcome desire to possess others’ bodies, then even our closest relationship with our spouse will be tainted with sin.