Monthly Archives: August 2012

How Do You Start a Conversation about the Interior Life?

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In her book, Forming Intentional Disciples, Sherry Weddell suggests that the first thing a parish needs to do to reach a norm of intentional discipleship is “Break the silence.” That is,

Talk openly about the possibility of a relationship with a personal God who loves you. Talk about your relationship with God.

In a study she quotes, 71% of Catholics who left the Catholic Church for Protestantism answered that they left because “My spiritual needs were not being met.” From her work, she says that it’s often because they’ve begun to experience spiritual growth in Christ…and they can’t find anyone to talk to about it at their parish. Then they meet an Evangelical who does talk about it, and they think, “Gosh, this person knows what I’m going through. Nobody at my parish does….” And they quite understandably leave the Church.

When people are leaving the Church because of their spiritual growth, we have a problem.

What I would have called the “spiritual life” when I was an Anglican, Catholics call the “interior life”. I like that name better, because it’s about how I relate to God in my deepest self…and because my deepest self is spirit-and-body, not just spirit. But because it’s part of my deepest self, it’s hard to talk about it, especially casually, especially in passing.

Seriously: it’s after Mass on Sunday, and I’m saying hello to someone I probably don’t know all that well. It’s quite possible that they have no idea what the interior life is. It’s quite possible that they have a much deeper interior life than I do. (It’s quite possible that both of these things might be true of the same person!) How do I even get started talking about it?

And then, I think there’s a culture of not showing off. It’s proper to have a deep interior life, but it’s not proper to show off how deep your interior life is. Of course, Sherry points out that it’s much more important to listen than to talk. Well and good, but I still don’t see how you get the conversation started. “Hey, how’s your prayer life this week? Gotten any consolation lately?” Once you’ve got an in with someone, that might be possible, but I suspect that the average Catholic would look at you funny.

But it’s important. Because serious spiritual growth depends on the development of one’s interior life, and for people who are just starting having someone to talk to is a real help.

I’ve got a friend—he’s the minister of a Four Square church in New Mexico—who likes to greet people with, “How’s God treating you?” That’s a start, because it’s nicely vague; people can take on a purely external level if they choose.

In any given parish, there are people who are used to having an interior life with God; those who are just starting to have an interior life with God*; and those who don’t know that it’s possible to have an interior life with God. Somehow we need to get these people talking to each other.

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* According to St. José Maria Escriva, “interior life is beginning, and beginning again.” Ain’t it the truth.

Catholic New Media Conference

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So this week I’ll be traveling to the Catholic New Media Conference to meet some of my fellow Catholic bloggers. This is rather out of character for me, as I’m an introvert by nature, and I almost never travel except on business; and yet somehow I find myself going to the Catholic New Media Conference. I wonder what will come of it?

I dunno if I’ll be able to do much blogging this week, consequently; depends on how much time I spend being social, and how tired I am when I stop. If it’s anything like the Tcl conference I go to every year, my spare time will be nil.

On Knowing What Is Right

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It struck me this morning how deep down practical the Golden Rule is as a guide to knowing right from wrong. We know it in its familiar form from the Bible:

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

But it’s a commonplace in many cultures, even if often stated in its negative form:

Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you.

Now, I’ve usually thought about the Golden Rule in terms of my duties toward others. But turn it around; and for this the negative form is more useful. What things shouldn’t others do to me?

I might not have a problem with stealing; but I don’t want others stealing from me.

I might not have a problem with sleeping around; but I don’t want others to sleep with my wife.

I might not have a problem killing people who are inconvenient to me; but I certainly don’t want anyone killing me.

It’s easy to rationalize the things I want to do. (For the record: the three things listed above are not among them.) But I’m always pretty certain about when I’ve been ill-used.

It’s commonplace these days to talk about how social mores very from culture to culture; it’s less common to point out, as C.S. Lewis does in The Abolition of Man, how much they are the same from culture to culture. But in fact, they are—in terms of one’s responsibilities to real people. The culture determines just who is considered to be a real person: a member of my family, a member of my ethnicity, a fellow citizen of my country. This can mask the moral similarity. But when you look at what other people are allowed to do to me, well…things look a lot simpler.

On Sacramental Marriage

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This post continues a series of reflections that I began here.

In the last post in this series, I described four kinds of marriage: natural marriage, civil marriage, sacramental marriage, and “neo-marriage,” and said that I’d have more to say about sacramental marriage in another post. This is that post.

The first thing to point out is that these four kinds of marriage aren’t mutually exclusive. Both civil and sacramental marriage build on natural marriage, to begin with. A civil marriage need not be a sacramental marriage, and a sacramental marriage need not be a civil marriage (though in this country, at least, they mostly are). Being “sacramental” is an additional layer added to natural marriage by Jesus Christ. And that means we need to talk about what a sacrament is.

Here’s the deal. As Christians, God asks a lot of us. Becoming holy is no easy thing, and we can’t do it on our own. So He gives us help, in the form of grace. And because we are not simply spiritual beings, but are naturally body-and-soul together, Jesus gave us the sacraments: physical actions by which He promises to give us spiritual graces, provided that the relevant conditions are made. Thus, baptism, a pouring of water combined with particular words, cleanses us of Original Sin and makes us co-heirs with Christ.

(Note: I am not a theologian; I am a software engineer. If I screw this up, somebody please gently let me know, so I can fix it.)

There are three things that are required for a valid sacrament:

  • The valid form
  • The valid matter
  • The proper intent

The form is the ritual involved. In baptizing someone, you must baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. The matter is the water, and, I imagine, the person being baptized. And the proper intent is the intent to baptize the person. In the Eucharist, the form is the Mass, the matter is the gifts of bread and wine, and the intent is the intent that the Holy Spirit should come upon the gifts and make them the Body and Blood of Christ.

If any of these three requirements are not met, there’s no sacrament. For example, a priest can say the Eucharistic prayers all day long, but if he’s simply intending to memorize them rather than “confect the sacrament”, then there is no sacrament.

So let’s look at marriage. The form is the wedding vows the couple make to each other before witnesses. The intent is the intent to be truly married in Christian matrimony, forsaking all others, until death do them part. The matter, well, the matter is the couple themselves; and there’s a reason we use the phrase “consummating the marriage.”

Catholics, of course, are required to get married in the Church. This involves pre-marital counseling (to make sure the couple have the right intent) and a Catholic wedding service (to make sure the form is correct). The consummation can usually safely be left to the couple themselves. Now, the requirement to be married in the Church is, as I understand it, a matter of canon law rather than Church doctrine; and indeed, the Church assumes that Christians married in other denominations are also sacramentally married….assuming the intent is right.

This, by the way, is what it means for a marriage to be annulled: a Church tribunal looks into it and determines that the conditions for a valid sacramental marriage were not met, e.g., because one of the two were previously married, or because one or both did not truly intend Christian matrimony.

Being a sacrament, marriage confers grace on the couple: grace that will strengthen them and (if used properly) allow them to grow in holiness together. And as I’ve indicated above, the proper action of the sacrament isn’t simply the vow the two make to each other; it’s also the consummation, the act of sex itself, by which the two of them become one flesh.

Now, if you think about, how cool is that? Here’s a sacrament the couple can enjoy over and over again, without help from anyone else, in the privacy of their own home, and be truly blessed by God each time. It’s not only good, it’s good for them!

There’s more to sacramental marriage than that, of course. There’s a whole vast theology, some of which I’m slightly familiar with, and which I really don’t feel qualified to to describe at more than the simplest possible level. For example, marriage is an image of the faithful, self-sacrificing and fruitful love of God for his people; and it is this that is behind the Church’s prohibitions on divorce, contraception, and sex outside of marriage.

I don’t propose to defend the Church’s teachings here; I’m more concerned with their consequences. And the chief point I want to make is that sacramental marriage is pretty darn cool, being the intersection of the love of a man and woman for each other with the love of God for them both, yielding significant spiritual benefits for the couple.

Girl Genius

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I’ve recently discovered the web comic Girl Genius, by Phil and Kaja Foglio. Most of the web comics I read are more like daily comic strips; Girl Genius is more like a comic that’s released a page a time, three pages a week. And it’s both beautifully drawn and hysterical.

It takes place in a steampunk world where a small fraction of the population are “sparks”: people with the gift of mad science. They can build incredible devices, to do amazing, destructive things…and in consequence Europe’s in a bit of shambles. We’re dropped right into the middle of it on Agatha Clay’s last day as a student at Transylvania Polygnostic University. Agatha’s never been all that good at mad science…but all that’s going to change.

If you have any interest in steampunk, or simply in glorious foolishness, you should check it out.

Four Kinds of Marriage

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This post continues a series of reflections that I began here.

Before I get started, I’d like to remind those who came in late that I’m not pushing a political agenda here. I’m trying to work out some thoughts about marriage in general, and on same-sex marriage in particular, in the light of the Church’s teaching. I’m not trying to prove that the Church’s teaching is true, and I’m more concerned with figuring out how to treat others well than I am in trying to coerce others into behaving the way I think they should. Thus, comments on how evil my political agenda is will be deleted. ‘Nuff said.

Several of the commenters on this post raised the issue of marriage as a civil institution vs. marriage as a religious institution, and suggested that while one might have religious reasons for the position that marriage is necessarily heterosexual, there’s no reason why civil marriage need be similarly bound. It was also suggested that the state “provides marriage” to its citizens: that marriage is essentially a civil institution, e.g., an institution governed by the state.

That last proposition, however, is clearly nonsense. People have been marrying and giving in marriage for all of recorded history, whether the people involved lived in something we would recognize as a state or not. Let’s call this natural marriage. It is not essentially religious, and it is not essentially civil. It is, quite simply, human. Getting married and raising a family is what human beings do. Natural marriage does not depend on the state; on the contrary, the state is built upon the foundation of natural marriage.

With the state came civil marriage. Marriage creates families, and families accumulate property and squabble with other families, and the state naturally gets involved in these things. Thus, civil marriage is marriage as recognized by the state. Note that I do not say “regulated” or “controlled”. Marriage is prior to the state, and many traditional restrictions on marriage, such as incest laws, are of ancient origin. It might be truer to say that civil marriage is the way the state handles the pre-existing institution of marriage.

With Christianity came sacramental marriage. Civil marriage was already well established by the time Christianity came along, but sacramental marriage does not build on it; rather, civil and sacramental marriage are like two shoots from the same root of natural marriage. I’ll have more to say about sacramental marriage in a later post; here I’ll simply note that the notion that marriage is between a man and a woman long pre-dates any form of Christian marriage. Even the Greeks, among whom sex with boys and sexual relationships between older men with younger men were not uncommon, kept them quite apart from marriage.

And that brings us to what I’ll call neo-marriage, for lack of a better term. Neo-marriage is solely about the two people involved, and only for as long as they want to remain involved. It is disconnected from sacramental marriage, at least as practised by the Catholic Church, because it is not sacramental, and is not expected to be permanent; it is detached from natural marriage because it is more about the couple than about the resulting family. Its foundation, to the extent that it has one apart from the couple themselves, lies in civil marriage, but its roots are not deep.

Same-sex marriage, as such, is an extension of neo-marriage to gay and lesbian couples. Since it can’t be based on natural marriage, it has to get its legitimacy from civil marriage. Which explains the comments I’ve been getting.

The Pony Principle

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Rick Saenz has a post in which he links to a post on the difference between Ask Culture and Guess Culture. The fellow he quotes says,

This is a classic case of Ask Culture meets Guess Culture.
In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it’s OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.

In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t even have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.

…

I’m a Guess too. Let me tell you, it’s great for, say, reading nuanced and subtle novels; not so great for, say, dating and getting raises.

This is a distinction I’d not run into before, and it explains why I sometimes miss the subtleties in nuanced and subtle novels…because I’m an Asker all the way.

I call it the Pony Principle: If you really want a pony, you should ask your parents for a pony, even if you’re sure they will say no. You almost certainly won’t get a pony…but who knows? Your parents’ notion of what’s reasonable might be different than you think. But if you don’t ask for the pony, you certainly aren’t going to get it. So ask for what you really want…but be prepared to be told no, and don’t make a fuss if you are.

True story. Many years ago, Jane and I were on a road trip with our two very little boys, and we were stopping for the night in Las Vegas (which was still in its “Let’s pretend we’re family-friendly” phase). We arrived rather earlier than we’d planned, and even though it was nowhere near check-in time we asked politely if we could check in anyway. The lady at the desk told us that our room hadn’t been cleaned yet, but we could check back in an hour. We went at got lunch, and came back, and we waited in line and explained, and the second lady we talked to told us that she was sorry, but it still wasn’t ready.

And we said, “Thank you, we’ll check back again later; we know it isn’t really check-in time yet.”

And an hour later, the first lady saw us coming, waved us over to an empty spot, and told us that the hotel was giving us a free upgrade to a much nicer room, so that we could get settled with our little boys. I can only assume that it was because we were pleasant and polite and didn’t make a fuss.

So ask for what you want; be willing to take no for an answer; be nice about it; and if you know you’re asking for something unreasonable, make it clear going in that you’re willing to take no for an answer.

If you’re dealing with a Guesser, though, you’re on your own. I’d be no help at all.

The Iron Wyrm Affair

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The Iron Wyrm Affair, by the improbably named Lilith Saintcrow, is the first in a projected series of novels involving Prime Sorceress Emma Bannon and Mentath Archibald Clare. The setting is a kind of mash-up of steampunk and urban fantasy in an alternative England where Queen Victrix has just married her consort, Prince Alberich.

Bannon is a powerful sorceress in the service of the Queen, and in the service of Britannia, the guiding spirit of the Realm, of whom Victrix is the current vessel. (Note: this is not a metaphor.) She is tough, smart, determined, and because of her unsavory brand of magic, nearly friendless. As the book begins, she is accompanied only by her Shield, Mikal; and not only is it rare for a Prime Sorceress to have but one Shield, Mikal is known to have killed his previous master.

She calls upon Archibald Clare, an Unregistered Mentath; which is to say, a man trained to perform and to desire observation, logic, and deduction to such a degree that boredom can quite literally be a recipe for madness. When we meet him he has been unemployed for some weeks and is clearly paddling in the deep end. (Picture Sherlock Holmes on one of his very bad days.) Their partnership is somewhat unlikely; Mentaths have difficulty with the illogic of sorcery, and Bannon has difficulty with almost everyone.

Together, the two uncover two (or is it three) dastardly and fiendish plots against the realm and the person of Queen Victrix, and (not terribly surprisingly) discover that they make a good team.

I had a lot of fun with this book, and intend to buy the sequel when it’s available on Kindle; however, I was never able to take it completely seriously. It struck me as possibly a little more over the top than the author intended it to be.

And then, the thing that especially struck me is the way that Saintcrow manages to conjure up an air of decadence and sin, especially regarding the relationship between Bannon and her Shield, Mikal—it’s a master/slave relationship, of sorts, and a sexual relationship as well, and I kept expecting the leather and spike heels to come out. But they didn’t. In fact, what little sex there is, is entirely off stage, and (except for the fact that they aren’t married) there’s not actually anything perverse going on. It was really quite odd. I’m used to authors putting forth all manner of sexual goings on as though there was nothing shocking about any of it; and here Saintcrow is creating an atmosphere of great wickedness that completely fails to materialize. Weird. Somewhat refreshing, but weird.

Victory! Victory! Victory!

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So I’ve been working on this novel for the past year or so, with the intent of reading it to my kids. They knew I was working on it, but they didn’t know anything about it. A couple of weeks ago, I judged that it was, if not finished, at least ready to share with them; and just a few minutes ago we finished it.

Now, I’ve read them many, many novels, by many different authors. I didn’t make any kind of fuss about this one; I just told them the title, and read it to them. And when we were done, my eldest asked, “Is there a sequel?”

I said, “No, I haven’t written it yet.”

“You wrote that?”

In fact, it took a while to persuade them that I am, in fact, the author.

Color me very, very pleased.

(For the record, it’s still not quite done; whilst reading it to them I identified a number of over-used phrases, typographical errors, continuity problems, and such like. I’ll keep you posted.)

On Why Marriage is Controversial

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The following chart shows why discussing marriage with others who do not share your presuppositions is fraught with peril.

Marriage.png

I suspect that most people’s notions of marriage form a subset of the items on the chart. Trouble is, for two different people the overlap can exclude what one or the other finds to be most important.

I won’t belabor the point.