Monthly Archives: May 2013

Lawn Chair Catechism, Session 1

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LawnChairCatechismSquare This summer, CatholicMom.com is hosting an on-line book discussion group for Sherry Weddell’s Forming Intentional Disciples. Each session will focus on one chapter of the book, and yours truly is participating. Hit the link above to see all of the participants, and to find the discussion questions.

How would you describe your lived relationship with God to this point in your life?I’m a Lay Dominican, and so making God part of my daily life is simply something I do. That includes regular times of prayer, as well as cultivating an awareness of the presence of God as I go about my day.

What does the word “discipleship” mean to you? To be a disciple is to accept a teacher’s discipline, or way of life. We are to be disciples of Christ, and to follow his ways.

Do you perceive a need in the Church today to help lay Catholics become more fervent followers of Jesus Christ? Absolutely. We Catholics are generally happy to pitch in to help others, and so follow the second of the two great commandments; but the first great commandment is to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and we mostly haven’t been taught what that means.

How would you describe your parish’s current efforts at discipleship? A hotbed of discipleship? A weekly gathering of spiritual sleep-walkers? Or perhaps something in between? It’s hard for me to say, precisely, because of my involvement with my Lay Dominican chapter, which is at another parish altogether. But there are some things I have seen happening over the last several years:

  • For the last year or so, we’ve had an adult faith formation program up and running. Due to our family’s schedule I’ve not generally been able to participate, but I hear good things about.
  • Our pastor has been preaching heavily on the subject of discipleship over the last sixth months; this past Sunday he actually used the phrase “intentional disciple” in his homily.
  • We have quite an active Lifeteen program at our parish, which I’ve been somewhat tangentially involved with. It’s been running for seven years now, and I gather we have a number of young men discerning a call to the priesthood, and at least one young woman discerning a call to religious life.
  • The bishop over our region in the archdiocese has been a strong supporter of the work of the Catherine of Siena Institute for quite a while now (if I remember correctly, he’s mentioned by name in the book).

So things are looking good for the future.

Action is the Measure of Love

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A few days ago, I wrote, “If you don’t feel pain when they hurt, you don’t love them.” Upon reflection, I have to correct that.

Depth of feeling is not the measure of love. Action is the measure of love. It is not essential that I feel anything at all when someone I love is hurt; what is essential is that I am moved to action.

When my daughter falls down and skins her knee, yes, I feel bad; but I also comfort her. When I hear of massive earthquakes in Haiti or tornadoes in Oklahoma, I might or might not feel bad; some people have a lot of empathy, and some don’t. But even if I do not feel bad, I can still love those harmed by the catastrophe. I can still choose to take action: to pray, to send aid. These actions, done for the good of the victims, constitute love. Conversely, I can feel bad, very, very bad, and tell everyone how bad I feel about the victims of the catastrophe…and not love them at all in any objective way.

Action is the measure of love.

Feelings are called emotions precisely because they move us. Feelings of hunger move us to eat. Feelings of pity move us to aid or comfort. Feelings of anger or lust all too often move us to sin. The emotions themselves are not good or bad; only the actions that result from them (or the inaction despite them) can be good or bad. (We here in America spend a lot of time consuming media that moves us inwardly but without moving us to real action. We complain or we chuckle or we sigh, but do nothing. The emotions are short-circuited, as it were. This might be a problem.)

Action is the measure of love.

But if that is so, how can we truly love God? True love drives us to action. But He is perfect, omnipotent, infinite; he needs no help or comfort from us. How can we love him?

Jesus has given us the answer. He asks us, how can we love the God we have not seen, if we do not love the neighbor we have seen?

Action is the measure of love. That action might only be a prayer, an invocation of God’s help. (Only a prayer! Hah!) It might be more than that, depending on our means and on the proximity of the neighbors in question. But action is the measure of love.

Making Love

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Strange Gods: Unmasking the Idols in Everyday Life In Strange Gods, her new book on the idols present in every day life, Elizabeth Scalia has this to say about the words “peace” and “love” and growing up in the ’60’s:

During that time, the word love—a deep word communicating all kinds of messages about permanence, commitment, self-abnegation, and sacrifice—began to be used to describe situations and encounters that were shallow, short-lived, casual, and self-serving. Simultaneously, the word peace, an equally deep word that, especially when partnered with love, gets to the heart of contentment, serenity, gratitude, and joy, was hauled into the shallows, where it came to mean mostly an “absence of war” and nonjudgemental permissiveness….

…in truth, peace and love, either conceptually or spoken, if applied at critical moments, can do the work of God and the angels. Overused, misapplied, or simply bandied about, they become as meaningless as scrap paper; and when we render words meaningless—especially powerful words like peace and love—our understanding of them becomes warped. Then, as when a teenager flings his stuff thoughtlessly and lazily about the house—disorder follows.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Love isn’t something easy, something you just fall into. And words are not just noises meant to invoke a warm cluster of feelings. They have meanings. Love is something you have to make—something you have to build, every day. If you are not willing to sacrifice your time and effort for someone, you don’t love them. If you don’t feel pain when they hurt, you don’t love them. If you simply feel a strong desire to have sex with them, you don’t love them. When you have casual sex with someone, you are not making love. (But I digress; this is a post about words, not about marriage.)

Words have meaning. Humpty Dumpty was a liar.

The Latest Stuff

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Just an update on what’s been going on.

First of all, April was lousy. No major tragedies, mind you; just of a lot of little grinding unpleasantnesses, including the joy and pleasure of getting a tooth crowned for the first time.

Some people find that they feel pretty good the day after getting a tooth crowned. Other people might find that the pain lasts for couple of months. I am not the former, alas, but also not the latter (and there was great rejoicing). And you know how toothaches seem to move around in your jaw, so that it’s not always clear which tooth is actually the culprit? I was more or less convinced for a week or so that I’d be getting a second crown immediately after the first one. This now seems not to be the case (and there was great rejoicing).

All of my hopes for Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis’ book Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word. I’ve been getting up early every day to spend time in study ever since Easter Tuesday (including Saturdays and Sundays!), and I’m regularly astonished by the blindingly obvious things he pulls out of each line of the text—blindingly obvious after you’ve seen them—that I had never noticed before. I’m keeping notes of my reflections; some of them may appear here in the future. (As some kind of indication of the depth of Erasmo’s writing…50 days after Easter, I’m not quite to the end of the third chapter of Matthew’s gospel.)

Finally, I’m still working George’s Saga, my RPG, in which George, a naive but promising young man of low birth and high destiny, encounters such characters as the grim Sir Fred, Hogworth the peasant, Cyneros the dark wizard, Magister Mayhem, and Princess Floribunda. The game is becoming increasingly goofy. When George applies to Magister Mayhem for quest, he is told:

Magister Mayhem looks at you sourly. “Another adventurer,” he says.
“Just what I needed. Well, at least the Sewers have been restocked.”

He harrumphs a bit more, and then says, “OK, let’s take it from the top.

“The town of Floobham is in desperate straits. I’ve not had breakfast,
and everyone knows that I get nasty when I’m hungry. So you just go
down to the sewers, and see if you can find me a Tasty Egg Maguffin
in one of the chests. Bring it back to me, and I’ll see what else I
can think of.”

He doesn’t look enthused at the prospect. As you turn to go, he adds,
“I’m sure a naive but promising young man like you will have no trouble
finding the entrance to the sewers. You can, heh, keep anything else
you find down there.”

Later, George travels the short distance to Floob Castle, where Princess Floribunda is in dire straits. George goes speedily, eager for a quest that doesn’t involve sewers.

It seems that one of her father’s guests has unleashed cosmic evil within the castle. The princess could resolve the problem easily, she says, had she her magic ring…but she dropped it, and it fell down a grating, and, well, it’s in the palace sewers:

Sewers. More dirty, stinking, filthy, rat-infested sewers. Just what you
needed. You take a deep breath, out here where the air is clear.

“Very good, your Highness. So how do I get into the sewers?”

“Well, that’s the problem,” she says, still staring at the grating.
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to go through the palace.”

She turns to look at you.

“Good luck,” she says. “You’ll need it.”

Truth, Beauty, et Al

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Today Julie reviewed a book called The Church Building as a Sacred Place; y’all can go read her review, because I’m not going to talk about it as such.

But she talks about the importance of beautiful churches, which triggered some reflections.

According to St. Thomas Aquinas, all of the transcendentals (the True, the Good, the Beautiful) are all essentially the same thing, which is to say God, the ground of all Being. (Bear with me here.) Me, I’m a programmer; I juggle thoughts for a living. I came back to the Catholic Church because I determined that it was True, and since then I’ve very much approached God along that axis.

In the introduction to Ratzinger’s Faith, Tracy Rowland notes that Pope Benedict thought that the neo-Scholastics who dominated pre-Vatical II Catholic theology were too focused on the intellect; and while not thinking them wrong, always chose to emphasize God as Love, as the perfectly loving and the ultimately lovable.

So here’s the thought I had. We cannot, in our human fraily, truly understand God. And though we can know that the True, the Good, and the Beautiful are all one thing, are all God underneath, nevertheless they are different to us. And so it seems to me that as Christians, to approach God, to know him as best we can and love him as best we can, we have to approach him along all three axes.

(Obvious, perhaps, but I still need to hear it.)

A Primer on Philosophy and Education

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NewImage A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of reading a pre-release review copy of Sam Rocha’s new book, A Primer on Philosophy and Education. The book is not (nor does it pretend to be) a general introduction to Western philosophy; rather, it’s an introduction to philosophical thinking, especially as it applies to education—and here Rocha has a bit of fun.

Rocha is a philosopher of education, and from that and the title of the book one might think that this is a book about schools, teachers, and chalkboards. On the contrary: Rocha refers to all of that as “schooling”; by education he means “learning”, or more precisely, the ability to learn for one’s self, and to go on doing so all one’s life. But that precise meaning only emerges in the course of book. (Whoops! Spoilers. Sorry, Sam.)

The day I read this I was at home sick with a cold, and so it’s a fairly strong statement to say that I enjoyed it and that it held my attention. That said, I find I can’t judge the book fairly, as I’m really not a member of Rocha’s intended audience: his students, and others at a similar level. I don’t claim to be a philosopher of any stripe, but I’ve been delving into it long enough that at least I’m no longer a beginner (perhaps I’m a philosophomore). Whether I’d have found this book helpful when I was beginning that journey, I don’t know. But it all made sense to me, and as I say I enjoyed it.