Category Archives: Catholicism

Matters relating to Catholicism in particular

The Big Disconnect

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The big conflict in the Church today, some would have it, is between the Conservative Catholics and the Progressive Catholics. These are horrible labels, which convey almost nothing of value; and every person who hears them will add his own spin to them. Few of the labels are flattering, because the folks who see themselves as being on one side too often deprecate those on the other side as being so deficient in some area as to not be real Catholics. (Though Some Pigs, I suppose, are More Deficient than Others.)

But there’s more to it than that. A large bit of it is what I was getting at in my recent posts about Misdiagnosing Your Neighbor. It’s not that I’m a Good Catholic and you’re a Bad Catholic; truth be told, neither of us is as good as we should be. Often it’s that you’re focussed on one thing and I’m focussed on another, and what we have in common is not obvious.

In Salt of the Earth, his first interview with Peter Seewald, then Cardinal Ratzinger nails it. He says,

There is a well-known saying of Karl Rahner: “The Christian of tomorrow will be a mystic, or he will not be at all.” I would not ask for so much, because people are always the same. We always remain just as weak as ever, which means that we will not all become mystics. But Rahner is correct in that Christianity will be doomed to suffocation if we don’t learn something of interiorization, in which faith sinks personally into the depth of one’s own life and in that depth sustains and illuminates. Mere action and mere intellectual construction are not enough. it’s very important that we recall simplicity and interiority and the extra- and supra-rational forms of perceiving reality.

(Emphasis mine.) Where my intellectual understanding of my faith and my physical action for Christ must come together is deep within, in my interior life. If I understand God but do not act on what I understand out of love for Him, I’m nothing. If I have no understanding or love for God, but act for other reasons, I’m equally nothing. Rather, my action must flow from my love of God, as best as I understand Him.

But that inner life is precisely what we can’t see. I can’t even see mine all that well, let alone yours. And yet it is so essential; and it feeds on both contemplation and action.

And that’s why I keep harking back to it. A holy interior life puts your understanding and your actions in right relation with each other. And that’s why we must seek Him first and other goods second.

Georgette Heyer and the Via Negativa

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Recently I was reading Cotillion, by Georgette Heyer, and—

OK. Half of you are saying, “Who’s Georgette Heyer?” and the other half are saying, “Hey, you’re male.” Time for a recap.

Georgette Heyer was an author—or, so I gather, the author—of regency romances in the middle of the 20th century. Regency romances are romance novels set in Regency England, in the time after George III went made but before his death. I do not usually read romance novels, but there’s something about Heyer, as authors as diverse as Lois McMaster Bujold and Julie Davis have noted. She’s funny, she has great characters, she writes well; and when you’re in the mood for something light and frothy, they are great fun. I suspect that she is more akin to P.G. Wodehouse (though less farcical) than to the average romance novelist. And it would be hard to overstate her influence. Some years back there was a flood of novels intended as sequels or companions to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and with the noted exception of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies the ones I glanced at all seemed to owe as much or more to Heyer as they did to Austen. She created her own fictional world, every bit as carefully constructed as a good science fiction or fantasy milieu, and millions have accepted it as the Real Thing. (Give her a try. Try Frederika. Or possibly Talisman Ring. Or maybe The Grand Sophy. I’ll wait.)

So anyway, I was reading Cotillion, in which a thirty-something man of property is travelling from London to the country to make an offer of marriage to a long-time acquaintance. He is not in love with her, or with anyone, but he’s the heir and it has been successfully impressed upon him that he must marry. He well likes his long-time friend, and so off he goes. On the way, he encounters a young woman of good family, great spirit, equal beauty, and little experience who is running away from home because her grandfather, the patriarch, won’t let her marry the man she wants to marry, because she is too young. What’s a gentleman to do? She has a grand strategy, but he can see it won’t answer. He can’t take her back to her family, because she won’t tell him who they are. He can’t leave her on her own; there are unscrupulous people about, don’t you know. Got to take her with him. And from there, of course, the tangles increase.

Now, here’s what led me to reflection. All of his acquaintance are wondering what has happened to him. They hear about the girl, and they all begin to jump to conclusions. Long, drawn out, extremely logical, plausible, believable conclusions, all of which happen to be quite wrong; and they go wrong for two reasons: first, they don’t have all of the information; and some of the information they do have they disbelieve. But as I say, their conclusions are, given the information they have and choose to believe, completely logical.

It occurred to me that we are in much the same position relative to God. It is possible (see Thomas Aquinas) to deduce the existence of God from first principles; and given that He exists, there are certain things that can proven about Him: that He is omnipotent and omniscient, for example. But is less obvious is that these statements are essentially negative. God is infinite, you see, not in the mathematical sense, but in the sense of being unbounded. We can put no bounds on His knowledge or His power. That doesn’t mean that we truly understand what it means to be omnipotent; we don’t. It is simply not conceivable to us.

And yet, on a daily basis we try to make sense of God, and thus to put bounds on Him. And perhaps we even reason logically, and come to valid conclusions, based on what we know for sure. But the one thing we can know for certain sure is that God eludes our intellectual grasp. This why Pope Benedict in his writings frequently refers to God as the “Wholly Other”.

And yet, all is not lost. We are doomed to intellectual failure, but we are not doomed altogether.

We cannot grasp God, not intellectually, and certainly not by reasoning from first principles. But He knows this, and He doesn’t leave us orphaned. Instead, He has revealed Himself to us, first through His history with the Israelites, and then in the person of Jesus Christ. He’s in fact told us quite a lot about Himself, and all we really need. It’s partial information, but it’s enough.

Of course, we still go astray intellectually, just as the various on-lookers in Cotillion do. But the confusion does not go on forever. In time the gentleman comes home, and the on-lookers are able to find out from him what’s really been going on. And so we can go to God; and so in time He’ll bring us to live with Him, we are allowed to hope, and we will see Him clearly, and all our questions will be answered.

Misdiagnosing Your Neighbor

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God leads us to him via our interests, because grace perfects nature. And that means that even if I were able to give every thing under heaven its due importance, my own life would still emphasize certain things over others. Let’s assume* that I have reached that degree of sainthood that I am able to do this. Thus, I know that I love the object of my interest for Christ’s sake:

Step1

Other folks, however, can’t see into my heart. What they see is this:

Step0

Birds of a feather flock together, naturally, and so when it comes to my particular interests in the faith, I’m going to tend to look for and hang out with other people who look like me:

Step0

And because I like them, I may tend to give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they have it all together:

Step1

But of course, I don’t know that for sure. And if they are in a different place than I expect them to be, they can lead me quite far astray. Do they love the poor for the sake of Christ, or do they love Christ for the sake of the poor? But probably they are OK.

But then there are those other people in the church…the ones who don’t seem to share my interests. The ones who are always talking about issues that I just can’t get exercised about. You know, the ones I suspect of being doctrinally incorrect.

Confusion 1

Now, really, what am I supposed to do with people like this? They don’t use the same words as I do, and they don’t do the same things that I do, and they talk about things that don’t interest me all that much. How am I supposed to be sure that they haven’t run off of the rails?

Confusion 2 1

Gosh, I might have to talk to them, get to know them a little, and find out what they really think. Maybe I’d discover that everything’s quite all right.

Confusion 3 1

Or I could just go on assuming the worst…

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* For the sake of argument. You understand.

Christ vs. Other Things

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We all love many different things. When we first become Christians, Christ becomes one of the things we love:

Interests 1

Over time, if we persist in following Christ, our relationship with the things we love begins to change. In particular, we begin to love Christ more than the other things, and to love them for his sake:

Interests 2

And in time (and by God’s grace) we begin to love all things in due proportion to their worth, and all for Christ’s sake; and some things we used to love we abandon altogether:*

Interests 3

But the things that we cease to love, we cease to love because we now see that they don’t deserve our love. All that is good, we will love as it deserves; and thus it is said that if we seek first the kingdom of God, all these things will be added unto us. Woohoo!

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* This is an advanced move, but one to which we should all aspire. Kids, do try this at home!

How to Go Wrong in Three Easy Steps

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By our nature as human, we all have objects that interest us. This is a good thing; we’re supposed to be interested in things:

Step0

But grace perfects nature. Those of us who become Christians learn to see Christ in the things that interest us. We love him through them. For example, we might learn to love the poor because we see Christ in them:

Step1

Now, the saints learn to love Christ for his own sake. But some folks learn to see the things they love in Christ. They begin to value Christ because he adds value to those things. For example, we might learn to value Christ because he tells people to love the poor. This is a mistake:

Step2

But things really start to go to hell when we lose interest in Christ and immerse ourselves in the object only, certain that Christ has our back and will support us in everything we do:

Step3

At this point, we are no longer looking at him at all; and we will ride roughshod over anyone who disagrees, or has some object of interest that we dislike.

So don’t do that.

My Pope

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When Pope Benedict was elected pope in 2005, I was not yet Catholic; but I was already interested in the Catholic Church. I was reading Catholic blogs, and buying Catholic books. I’d heard of Cardinal Ratzinger, God’s Rottweiller, and had known people who could not say his name without emphasizing the word “Rat”. I wanted to know more about the Church; and since the Church had elected God’s Rottweiler, I wanted to know more about him, too. As they say, look before you leap over the Tiber. (Although, please note, it was by no means certain at that time that I’d ever do so.)

So, being me, I bought some books. I got his first two interviews with Peter Seewald, Salt of the Earth and God and the World, both of which I need to re-read. And the man I saw there was about as far from being a Rottweiler as one could imagine. In these books I discovered a teacher, a man who wished always to speak the truth, but who could speak the truth in love and gentleness. I discovered a pastor, one with great compassion for human frailty, but who refused to water down the gospel just to make people feel better about their sins. Sin is a moral illness; what we need is a cure, not an anesthetic. In these books, in which the future pope spoke of the problems of the day, he addressed all of the problems I was familiar with from my time in the Episcopal Church, the forces that were driving that communion to schism and irrelevancy. Not only did we need a cure; the Cardinal was familiar with the cure we needed.

I went on to read books he’d written himself (I’ve got a whole shelf of them now, many of which I’ve read and many I’ve not gotten around to yet). I discovered a clear thinker, and a clear speaker, a man I could learn from. And in a short time, I came to love this man, Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI. I still do.

Am I sorry to see him retire? Yes, and then again, no. He is my pope, the first pope I came to know and trust, and his successor, whoever he will be, will be another man altogether. I love him, and I trust him, and letting go will be tough. He is a tough act to follow.

And yet…when it is time, it is time. I’ve no doubt he made his decision after much prayer, and that it is indeed time. And now, as the papabile-mobile gears up, and saints, sinners, and out-and-out nutcases across the globe are speculating as to who the next pope might be and what kind of pope we should have, I am serene. God’s in charge. He’ll give us the pope we need. I’m content to wait and find out. I’m just glad he gave us Benedict, just at the time I needed him most.

Compulsive Criticism

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Recently I read something on-line that gave me pause. A blogger I’ve been following for many years now had this to say:

We were talking about the habit of being critical—discussing a person we both knew who was caustically critical (and often entertainingly insulting) about everything. She said she didn’t quite approve of that attitude, because it was so safe.

I was surprised by that word, and asked her what she meant, and she said—more or less—that hating or criticizing everything was safe because it meant you don’t have to take a stand. Liking something means you are opening yourself up; if nothing is good enough for you it’s another way of saying you’re superior to everything. Very smug, very snug. Being insulting and critical, admittedly a position of attack when face-to-face, is psychologically actually a position of retreat.

This did not appear on a Catholic blog, nor a political blog; it appeared on a Photography blog, and the thing being criticized was, oddly, the new Chevy Corvette. But the blogger, Michael Johnson, could have gone one step further: he could have pointed out that this attitude is spiritually and morally corrosive. And that’s something we in the Catholic blogosphere need to remember. There’s much in our culture to criticize—but we must never let it become a knee-jerk reaction, lest we fail to see the good in your rush to condemn the bad.

In short, we mustn’t emulate Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff:

Obscure Beauty

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Pondering yesterday’s posts, on The Little Drummer Boy and on software that runs mazes, got me to thinking about obscure beauty.

There’s a beauty to well-written software. I’m not talking about attractive user interfaces or pretty graphics; I’m talking about how the software is put together inside, the way the individual pieces fit together. Well-designed software is pleasant to contemplate, and easy to modify and extend. Everything just works, and it’s easy to find things. Solving a software problem in a beautiful way can be an absolute joy.

Some few of my readers (the programmers, or at least some of them) are nodding their heads. The rest of you are shaking them, or, at best, thinking, “Yes, I can see how that could be true…but I certainly can’t see the beauty myself.” It’s an obscure kind of beauty, one that could only be appreciated by a very few people. And then, of those who might be able to see the beauty, I might be the only one who ever sees it. I may never make this code public, and even if I do, there’s no guarantee that anyone else would look at it.

But here’s the thing. God is the Good, the True, the Beautiful. Everything that is beautiful participates in the beauty of God; and to appreciate something beautiful is to in some small measure give glory to God, knowingly or unknowingly. Recognizing the beauty of creation and glorifying God is one of our functions on this earth.

Now, I spent the weekend making George run through mazes, and delighting in the software I was writing. Is it useful software? I dunno. Was my time spent productively? I dunno. But drummer boys gotta drum, and I gotta code…and I can offer the beauty of that code to God. And it’s likely that I’m the only person in the whole of time and space who will ever offer exactly that small obscure beauty to His Glory. And that’s a great and glorious thing. Makes me feel special.

But if there’s beauty that I’m uniquely suited to spot, there’s beauty that you’re uniquely suited to spot, either because of your interests and talents, or simply because of your place and time. Let’s not miss it.

A Confession

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I have a confession to make.

I like the song “The Little Drummer Boy.”

No, really. It brings tears to my eyes.

Every so often this time of year I read snarky comments about it: “Yeah, I bet Mary was pleased as punch to have some punk kid come start banging a drum right when Baby Jesus had finally fallen asleep.” And yeah, I admit, it’s a bit of a stretch. But then the singer gets to this part:

I played my drum for him, pa-rump-a-pum-pum
I played my best for him, pa-rump-a-pum-pum
Then he smiled at me, pa-rump-a-pum-pum
Me and my drum.

And then I start to weep. I feel stupid, but I do it anyway.

Because that’s what Jesus wants from us: to play our best for him. What I have to offer might seem insufficient, or trivial, or foolish. But that’s what I’ve got, and that’s what he wants from me: that, and no less.

Of course, it has to be done right: the singer has to sing it like he means it…which is why my favorite version of the song is Ringo Starr’s. I don’t know whether there was any religious feeling there when he recorded it; but by golly he plays his drum, and he plays his best, and whether he meant to or not he’s offering his playing as a gift to Our Saviour. God bless him.

Vocations to Third Orders

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So yesterday I talked about what it means to be a Lay Dominican. Among other things, I said that it’s a vocation, something you’re called to. But how do you know whether you’re called to it or not?

I’ve been pondering that today, and I’ve got a few thoughts to share; but I hasten to say first that I can only speak authoritatively about my own experience, which is limited. Your mileage may vary considerably.

First, I think a strong desire is probably a good sign. I wanted to be a Lay Dominican as soon as I learned that there was such a thing; and that’s a desire that hasn’t gone away. And then, when I returned to the Church (which was, oddly, somewhat later), I wanted to make an additional commitment of the sort you make when you join a Third Order. I didn’t simply presume that the Lay Dominicans were for me; instead, I did some research. It turns out that the Dominicans, the Franciscans, the Carmelites, the Benedictines, the Jesuits, the Augustinians (the who?) all have third orders. It seemed reasonable to look into them. I was not at all attracted to the Franciscans, which is perhaps odd, as we’ve got lots of Franciscans in the area. Carmelite contemplation is attractive, at least in theory, and there are also Carmelites in our area. Next to the Dominicans I liked what I learned about the Benedictines most. Their motto, “prayer and work”, makes sense to me. Benedictines are also all about stability, blooming where you’re planted, and that describes me pretty well, too. And St. Andrew’s Abbey is within driving distance, and they have lots of oblates in this area. If there hadn’t been any Lay Dominicans in this area I might have gone that route.

But there were, and of course I looked them up first…and just kind of got stuck. Once I linked up with them, there seemed no reason to look further; I wanted to be a Dominican, and on acquaintance they wanted me to be a Dominican, and here we are. Point is, if you feel called to a deeper relationship with Christ, and the Third Orders have some appeal, it might be worth checking out the different varieties and finding out what your options are in your area. But if you feel called to a particular order, check that out first.

It seems to me that strong desire as a sign of vocation is not uncommon; both St. Therese of Lisieux and St. Edith Stein both had a passionate desire to be Carmelites for a long time before they were able to persuade anyone to agree with them. But that least phrase is key: a strong desire isn’t enough. There are lots of women in the news these days who have a strong, overwhelming desire to be Catholic priests, but the Church has said that it simply isn’t possible. And certainly there have been men who have been ordained priests, who wanted to be priests, who should never have been ordained. Desire isn’t enough; and discernment isn’t one-sided. While you’re discerning whether or not you’re called to a Third Order, the order in question is discerning the same thing. That’s their job.

An essential thing in all of this is obedience. By joining a Third Order, you’re promising to live according to a rule. If you’re not willing to be obedient to the rule, and to those over you in the order as called for by the rule, then you might want to think again.