I certainly am. How about you?

I suppose that really ought to be “whom”, but be that as it may.

There is a significant dynamic in the Christian life. God loves us, and in order to receive that love we must pass it along to others. In fact, loving others increases our capacity for receiving God’s love; so not only must we love our neighbors as ourselves, but in loving our neighbors we are loving ourselves.

So who are our neighbors, and how do we love them?

First, there are those we know personally, and those we don’t. Those we know personally–our family, our friends, our co-workers–can be the easiest and that hardest to love. Easiest because they are right there, in front of us, and hardest because their faults are also right there in front of us. Of those we don’t, there are again two categories: those we see, and those we don’t see.

Those we don’t see are those in other towns, in other states, in other countries. These are generally quite easy to love: write a check, drop it in the mail. Say a blanket prayer for disaster victims in Myanmar. The check must represent hard-earned money, but writing and mailing it is pretty quick, and I don’t even need to leave my house. Saying a quick prayer is even easier.

The hard ones are the ones we see but don’t know: the hordes of people we see at the movie theater or the shopping mall or walking down the street. We don’t know them. We don’t know what they need. Most of them are not obviously hungry, or sick, or in need of alms-giving. There’s probably nothing they want our help with, and they’d be surprised and dismayed if we offered. (Try accosting someone at the mall, and asking them if there’s anything you can do for them. How would you react?)

How can we love them, in more than an abstract and theoretical sense? How can we let them know that it isn’t our own love we are offering, but God’s?

I can think of all sorts of things that won’t work. Is there anything that will?

Jen at Et Tu has just written a timely post on the dangers of looking for validation in the comments on your blog posts. I link to it because it speaks to some things I’ve been thinking about, and indirectly to one of the reasons why I’ve not been posting much recently: intellectual vanity.

As I noted a while back, I’m currently fascinated by the Dominicans, the “Order of Preachers”. One of the Dominican mottos is to contemplate, and then share the fruits of your contemplation. I’ve been doing a lot of contemplating over the last year, and there are many things I’ve thought might be worthy of sharing. I’ve posted a few of them. But every time I do that, I start waiting and hoping that someone will notice how brilliant I am—that I’ll get buckets of links, and tons of positive comments, and that generally I’ll be regarded as the neatest thing since sliced bread. And while not every such link gets noticed, I’ve gotten just enough encouragement to keep looking for it.

And that means that my goal hasn’t been to teach, or to help others, or to give glory to God, but rather to accumulate glory for myself—which, as I realized some months ago, is intellectual vanity. Consequently, I more or less put myself on a blogging diet whilst pondering this. And I’ve come to a number of conclusions. First is that I need to spend more time with real flesh-and-blood people and less time with pixels (i.e., with people at our parish, with friends, and with family). Second is that blogging about the things I’m thinking about is OK, but I need to watch my attitude.

So, if you liked this post, feel free not to tell me. 🙂

I used to tell people, “There’s no such thing as Society. There’s only People.” Most of them, especially the more liberal, would look at me really funny. It’s an overstatement, but I think it’s mostly true. And what I mean by it is, the only real way to change society is to change the hearts and minds of individual people. There are lots of ways to do that, but when you’re thinking in terms of Society most of those ways begin to look like a sledgehammer…or, maybe, a pile-driver. It’s hard to be subtle when you’re dealing with people as a mass of population. If you want to be subtle, you need to work with each individual heart, each individual mind. Of course, it’s almost impossible to do that when you’re dealing with People as a mass of population. Hence the constant temptation to try to engineer Society.

Over at Amy Welborn’s place, she quotes somebody named Angelo Matera, who said (in a much longer excerpt) “This is the spiritual method of the lay movements, not the political method used by Catholic pressure groups.” It occurred to me, on reading this, that this “political method” is based on a subtle fallacy: that the “powers that be” are a ring in the nose of the body politic, and if you manipulate them properly you can steer the body politic in the direction you want it to go. There’s some truth to this, in the political arena; but it doesn’t work very well as a form of social engineering. Just because you’ve got the leaders going the way you want them to, doesn’t mean that the rank-and-file are going to buy into it. And this is even more true in the world of the Catholic Church, where the Magisterium doesn’t answer to the voters in any American sense.

On the other hand, the Christian faith is precisely the thing that can change hearts and minds across society, because it changes them one heart and mind at a time. More to the point, Christ asks each of us to change our own heart, our own mind—to allow Him to change them for us. Christianity is attractive, not coercive. We witness to others through our lives; we call out to others to come drink of the living water and never thirst again. They, then, can choose to change their own hearts and minds, with Christ’s help.

The bottom line is this: if you really want to change the world, don’t bother with the political process. Let Christ lead you into service. Serve those He leads you to. Let Him use you to lead others into service.

Follow Christ and the World (and the Church!) can take care of itself.

I was pondering the Sorrowful Mysteries today, and had some reflections I thought were worth sharing.

Ever since Nicaea, the Church has held that Christ has two natures: He is fully human, and fully divine, at one and the same time. His two natures cannot be separated, but are nevertheless distinct. This is a difficult thing to keep in mind (he said with dry understatement). While knowing and believing that Jesus is God-Incarnate, Man Divine, I tend not to think about Jesus’ human side. But Jesus was a man like us in all things but sin. And that means He had a choice.

Jesus didn’t have to do it. The essence of His sacrifice—the thing that makes it a sacrifice—is that He had a choice. At any time during His passion, with but a word, or perhaps even a thought, He could have summoned the hosts of Heaven. He could not be forced to submit to the lash, the thorns, the mockery, the spitting, the slapping, the road to Calvary, the Cross, the nails, the spear; He chose to submit to these things. All the while He was suffering and bearing the pain and humiliation, He in his humanness must needs also force Himself to continue to do so. With every lash He must, of His own free will, choose to bear the next one. It was His choice.

We know that it wasn’t easy for Him. He spent the night in Gethsemane agonizing over the choice, and asking His Father that this cup might pass from His lips.

One of the early heresies held that Jesus had no Human nature, but was only Divine; the Passion was therefore easy for Him. The Church rejected this. Indeed, it seems to me (I hope I do not fall into heresy with this) that during His Passion, Jesus needed to be most fully Human, that his Divine self could give little or no aid. We know that on the Cross there came a moment when He felt utterly abandoned, and He cried out, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”

What enabled Him to bear so much suffering, and to choose to let it continue for so many hours? If it wasn’t His Divinity, what could it be? So I asked myself. And the answer, of course, was Love. Jesus allowed the suffering to continue out of Love. Love for you and I; but also Love for the very men who were tormenting Him. He was God; He could easily have destroyed them with a word. But He loved them, and forgave them even as they killed Him.

And so, I thought…maybe in His Human suffering He had one Divine aid: He was able to Love us with the Father’s Love.

And then I thought…maybe not. Maybe Jesus had to do it all in His own strength, as you and I cannot do. Maybe for His sacrifice to have meaning, His Humaness was on its own. The words from the Cross seem to indicate this.

In that case, we were saved, in that time of suffering, by Jesus’ purely Human love, by His strength of will in the greatest of the virtues, Charity.

Jesus, being free from concupiscence, that tendency to sin from which all the rest of us suffer, was not thereby free from temptation, this we know. As He was free from sin, we can assume He had no vices. But it does not follow that in human terms his virtues were innate. Perhaps he had to cultivate them as the rest of us do…through constant practice.

Thirty-three years of practice.

Perhaps that’s the reason for the Lost Years, from His visit to the Temple when He was twelve until the beginning of His public ministry eighteen years later. Perhaps that’s how long it took, leading a perfect and holy life, to develop that charity, that heroic virtue, that would enable Him to bear the torments and humiliations of His Passion with patience, forbearance, and love.

Update: I’ve just read that St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica, teaches that Jesus had all of the virtues in heroic measure from the instant of his conception. Me, I’m not going to argue with St. Thomas. Oh, well.