From the gospel reading this morning:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be.
And this morning, about 2000 years ago, He came to live with us for ever and always.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
The process of becoming a lay member of the Order of Preachers—the Dominican Order, or Order of St. Dominic—is not short. First you spend a year as an inquirer, or postulant in the older terminology. During that time you are learning about the Order and the Dominican rule, and discerning whether you are in fact called to be a lay Dominican. In your second year, as a candidate, or novice, you try to live according to the rule, and you continue your discernment process. In the meantime, the chapter leadership are doing the same, discerning whether in their view you are called to join the order.
At the end of these two years, assuming that you still wish to and that the chapter council agrees, you are eligible to make your first profession—that is, to promise for the first time to live according to the Dominican rule. First profession is always for a particular period of time; and your period of temporary profession can last (with renewals) for three to seven years. At the end of that, you either leave the order or promise to live according to the rule for life.
This morning, I and four others in my chapter made our first professions as Lay Dominicans. Three others made their life professions; and one fellow was received and is consequently now a candidate, or novice. It was quite a morning.
May St. Dominic, St. Catherine of Siena, and St. Thomas Aquinas pray for us!
Julie’s been gushing over Alden Bell’s The Reapers are the Angels for quite some time now. She reviewed it, and then she kept mentioning it, and then she and Scott Daniels started up a new podcast just so that they could talk about it. I listened to the first half of the podcast, right up to the spoiler warning, and was curious enough to find a copy and read it so that I could listen to the second half.
One of the cover blurbs describes the book as “southern gothic: like Flannery O’Connor with zombies.” I can’t speak to that, as I’m not even sure what “southern gothic” is, and I’ve read very little Flannery O’Connor.
But what it is, is a zombie novel, set about twenty-five years after the zombie apocalypse. In Bell’s world, people who die and aren’t properly dispatched will come back as “meatskins”, barely sentient creatures with a taste for human flesh. Meatskins can be killed by destroying their brains; otherwise, they seem to last more or less for ever. Starvation doesn’t kill them, though it slows them down until they are almost inert. It’s clear that meatskins are no longer human, but only animals in human form.
Society has collapsed, naturally. There are little pockets of people here and there, scraping out a living from the remnants and huddling together in fortified buildings at night. And there are a few brave souls who travel about.
One of these is main character, a girl named Temple. She’s fifteen or sixteen, and hence has no memory of the days before the meatskins. She simply accepts them as part of the landscape. She feels uncomfortable with other people (for reasons I won’t go into) and likes to see the wonders that there are in the world; so she travels about. Along the way she kills a man who tries to rape her; the man’s brother feels compelled to avenge him, and the resulting pursuit forms most of the matter of the novel.
The most striking aspect of the novel, for me, is Temple’s approach to life in the world of the Zombies. They are dangerous, certainly, and not to be taken for granted; but they are just one of those things you have to deal with, like (in my world) paying the bills and taking out the trash, just part of the cost of living. In fact, she finds them much easier to deal with than the living, because they are so uncomplicated.
I liked the book; it’s surprisingly quite and peaceful considering the amount of death and destruction and violence it contains. I do have one complaint, from a science-fictional point of view. Early in the book, in an area with no living people other than herself, Temple gets some cheese crackers and soft drinks from an abandoned minimart, and finds a car by the side of the road that she’s able to hot-wire. One gathers that the bulk of the population became zombies in a very short time, leaving the world full of stores that are full of goods and the roads full of cars with tanks full of gasoline, and that the few remaining humans are still living on this stuff. OK, but twenty-five years later? I don’t buy it.
Still, The Reapers are the Angels isn’t really science-fiction; rather, it’s a reflection on what it means to be a person, on responsibility, on gratitude, and on justice versus mercy. Temple’s going to stick with me for a while, I think.
Human love is soft, gauzy, shrouded in emotion. It shrinks from what is necessary. God’s love is hard, crystalline, and yet exactly right. It is like a case designed to hold and protect a delicate, oddly shaped piece of machinery. Human love is never quite the right shape—indeed, is sometimes grossly the wrong shape. To protect the device it must be padded, must shroud the hard edges and sharp points with foam and bubble wrap. But God’s love is always the right shape, precisely the right shape. The device fits exactly, every joint and extrusion supported perfectly by God’s hard and unyielding and crystalline love. Human love constrains and pinches, because only by pressure can its softness be made to fit. But God’s love allows us to be exactly what we are supposed to be.
The song “The Little Drummer Boy” has been coming under a certain amount of fire around the Catholic Blogosphere this year, prompted by Shane MacGowan’s recent rendition (about which the less said, the better…and I’m a Pogues fan). A number of bloggers, notably Simcha, have expressed their dislike of it.* Not just of the various odd celebrity versions floating around, but of the song itself. Fair enough; no one has to like it.
But I like it. And I think I know why the various odd celebrities have recorded it over and over again. Like the Little Drummer Boy, they have no gift to bring that’s fit to give the king, and they know it. All they have is their music. All they have are the gifts God has given them. Should they play for Him? You betcha.
And the rest of us, we’re all in the same boat. St. Therese of Lisieux said that we don’t need to do great things for God; we need to do little things with great love. This is good, because next to the infinite majesty of God, little things are all we are truly capable of.
And sometimes, as we do little things for God with great love, perhaps He will do great things through us, things we could not have accomplished ourselves. Perhaps the ox and lamb really will keep time.
Mary nodded. Let’s play our best for Him.
Merry Christmas!
* Not to be banging on Simcha; she makes me laugh out loud on a regular basis.
Written by Matthew Salisbury and drawn by Sean Lam, this is the second volume Atiqtuq’s manga version of the life of St. Paul the Apostle. Paul is in full apostle mode at this point, making tents, preaching the word, and getting beaten up and jailed for it. He’s rescued by a young fellow named Timothy and his friend Phoebe, who eventually follow him to Jerusalem just in time to see him arrested and shipped off to Rome. Consequently, it would appear that the third volume will be the last.
I confess, I didn’t like this as well as either the first volume of Paul: Tarsus to Redemption or the first volume of Atiqtuq’s other manga, Judith. The authors are attempting to tell the entire story through pictures, with a bare minimum of dialog and virtually no exposition. There’s consequently very little sense of the passage of time, though considerable time passes, and some of the sequences made sense only because I’ve read the Acts of the Apostles. The sequence involving Simon Magus was particularly disjointed; I actually wondered whether there were pages missing.
Both of my sons liked it, though. Possibly I’m just not manga-savvy.
Jesus tells us, “Truly I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matt 18:3). We tend to think that this is because there’s just something special, something innocent, about children.
In his book The Beatitudes, Simon Tugwell points out that the ancients were not sentimental about children or childhood; and any parent who is paying attention knows that small children are neither innocent nor virtuous.
Rather, the essential thing about little children is that they have no past. They have no achievements. They have no competence. They can receive nothing on their own merit; all that they receive they must receive as pure gift.
And so with adults as well. We can only receive God’s grace, God’s salvation, as pure gift. But because we can achieve things on our own in the purely human realm, we presume that we can do so in the spiritual realm as well. We cannot. All depends on the Lord.
I’m currently reading The Court of the Air, a fantasy novel by Stephen Hunt, and have run into the following striking passage. Two of the characters have come across the bodies of refugees who died trying to escape from a brutal regime. The younger asks how this can happen. The elder says this:
“Why?” said Harry. “For the big idea, Oliver. Someone comes up with the big idea—could be religion, could be politics, could be the race you belong to, or your class, or philosophy, or economics, or your sex or just how many bleeding guineas you got stashed in the counting house. Doesn’t matter, because the big idea is always the same—wouldn’t it be good if everyone was the same as me—if only everyone else thought and acted and worshipped and looked like me, everything would become a paradise on earth.
“But people are too different, too diverse to fit into one way of acting or thinking or looking. And that’s where the trouble starts. That’s when they show up at the door to make the ones who don’t fit vanish, when, frustrated by the lack of progress and your stupidity and plain wrongness at not appreciating the perfection of the big idea, they start trying to shave off the imperfections. Using knives and racks and axe-men and camps and Gideon’s Collars. When you see a difference in a person and can see only wickedness in it—you and them—the them become fair game, not people anymore but obstacles to the greater good, and it’s always open season on them….
“Because the big idea suffers no rival obsessions to confuse its hosts, no dissent, no deviation or heresy from its perfection. You want to know what these poor sods really died for, Oliver? They died for a closed mind to small to hold more than a single truth.”
My emphasis.
There’s a lot of truth in what Harry says; the 20th Century was replete with examples, not to mention the French Revolution, which is more or less the pattern for the fictional country being discussed. But I’m especially struck by that last sentence. According to Harry, insistence on One Truth always leads to the same thing: repression, violence, and so forth. We must have open minds large enough to hold multiple truths.
The difficulty is that this notion is simply incoherent. Truth is. What is, is true. What is not, is not true. Two compatible truths are, in a sense, one truth; two incompatible truths cannot both be true. They can, however, both be false—and that’s what Harry’s ultimately arguing: we can’t know the truth. It sounds brave and bold enough, to say that our minds must be open wide enough to hold multiple truths, but it’s simply intellectual despair.
And then, is it necessary that an insistence on One Truth will always lead to repression, violence, and so forth? The Catholic Church claims to have the One Truth; but the Church doesn’t say, “if only everyone else thought and acted and worshipped and looked like me, everything would become a paradise on earth.” In fact, the Church says, “If everyone else thought and acted and worshipped and looked like me, the world would be in a real mess—because I’m a sinner.” The Church does say that if everyone lived in perfect accordance with the teaching of the Church…we’d have a paradise on earth? In fact, no. If everyone lived in perfect accordance with the teaching of the Church, then everyone would be saints. No doubt the trials of life would be much easier to cope with under those circumstances, but trials would remain.
And even then, even if we were all saints, we wouldn’t all look and act the same. We would all be drawn into unity with Christ…but Christ is the infinite eternal God incarnate, God of perfection inexhaustible. Each saint reflects God’s perfection in his own peculiar way. There are as many ways to be a saint as there are saints.
So what about “shaving off the imperfections”? The Church does teach that we all need to be working at shaving off our own imperfections, or rather, allowing God’s grace to do that. But that’s something each person must do for himself, with God’s help: you can’t do it for or to someone else. And given what the Church teaches about sin, it’s inevitable that at times men of the Church will commit precisely the sin that Harry describes. We did it during the Inquisition; we did it during the Wars of Religion in the 1600’s in Europe. But if what the Church teaches is true, these happenings should be the exceptions rather than the rule; and examining history we see that they are.
The real Truth doesn’t need “knives and racks and axe-men and camps”.
So Julie tagged me with this “Five Favorite Devotions” meme that’s been going around the Catholic blogosphere. After some thought and pondering, here are mine:
As a Lay Dominican, #1, #2, and #3 pretty much come with the territory—not that I only do them because I’m a Lay Dominican, but that I probably wouldn’t have become a Lay Dominican if they didn’t work for me. #5 is for particularly serious needs, generally for other people, so it’s an on-again, off-again kind of thing. #6 depends on time and opportunity, both of which are scarce.
I’ve just read a remarkably odd novel, Lord of the World by Robert Hugh Benson. Published in 1907 and set in the distant future—our own day, more or less—it’s a classic science fiction tale of the “If this goes on…” variety. It’s also a tale of the coming of the Anti-Christ and the End of Time. Perhaps most remarkably, it’s written by a English Catholic priest from a very Catholic point of view. (I’d love to give a copy to the fans of the Left Behind series, just to watch their heads explode.)
In Benson’s book, Europe is technologically advanced and entirely at peace with itself. All materials wants have been abolished, thanks to the efforts of the communists/socialists, who came to power across Europe in the 1920’s. Religion, though not extinct, is withering away; only Catholicism remains, a tiny remnant. The one threat is the Empire of the East, a sort of amalgam of the Japanese and Chinese empires that encompasses all of Asia and Australia; the signs are that the East may wish to add Europe and Africa to its holdings. Then arises a mysterious figure named Julian Felsenburgh, an American of great charism, oratorical skill, and political acumen. The world watches as Felsenburgh leads a party of diplomats to the East and negotiates world peace. Those who meet him are awestruck: he seems to be the perfect embodiment of Mankind, of the Spirit of the Age.
We follow the action through three figures, all from England: Oliver Brand, a Communist and Member of Parliament, one of the rising men in Government, his wife Mabel, and a Catholic priest, Fr. Percy Franklin. Brand represents the thinking of the Brave New World and its faith in Humanity; Fr. Percy, the old Faith in Christ; and Mabel the tension between the two.
In writing Lord of the World, Benson asks what would happen if the Communists really were able to create a materialist “Kingdom of Heaven” here on Earth. What if it were truly possible for mankind to feed the hungry, clothe the poor and take care of the sick, not out of Christian charity but out of faith in Mankind itself? What if it were possible to abolish all war that all men might live in peace, without reference to Christian revelation? What would happen then? What would be the effect on mankind? What would happen to the Church?
In our day, the question might seem remote. Benson wrote before the horrors of the World Wars, and especially before the Russian Revolution; in his day the Communists had nowhere come to power, and many admired their goals and idealism. The mass killings of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and the like were unforeseen. And yet, the Western Europe of our day does have its reflections in Benson’s book. Soft socialism, not hard Communism, is the order of the day; euthanasia, driven by a misplaced sense of mercy, is becoming ever more common; religion is becoming the province of the few rather than the many.
And yet, even in Benson’s far future the materialist Perfectibility of Man is but a thin veneer. In our day it is not even that.
Benson was extremely popular in his day; the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury and a high-profile convert to Catholicism, he was regarded as one of the leading lights of English Catholic letters. Nowadays, few have heard of him. You can find some of his books at Project Gutenberg.
The View from the Foothills 