Conforming (phase 2), Three Types of Attitude in Scriptural Case Studies (step14), session 3

He entered Jericho and was passing through. And there was a man named Zacchae'us; he was a chief tax collector, and rich. And he sought to see who Jesus was, but could not, on account of the crowd, because he was small of stature. So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was to pass that way. 

And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, "Zacchae'us, make haste and come down; for I must stay at your house today." 

So he made haste and came down, and received him joyfully. And when they saw it they all murmured, "He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner." 

And Zacchae'us stood and said to the Lord, "Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have defrauded any one of anything, I restore it fourfold."  

And Jesus said to him, "Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of man came to seek and to save the lost." - Lk 19, 1-10

I was wondering what passage they'd use for the third type of attitude. What a perfect choice! I've reflected on Zacchae'us often over the decades, but this gives me a new context for considering his example.

It seems to me that, as is true for so many other aspects of a sincere faith journey, the first requirement we must meet to model this attitude is an understanding of our proper relationship with God in Christ Jesus. So often we approach what God asks of us as if he is something other than a loving Father who always wants what is best for us, and who graciously bestows it on us despite our unworthiness to even be called his sons and daughters. We see God instead as trying to limit our joy by imposing restrictions or obligations on us, and this keeps us from seeking what he truly desires for us in our lives.

I am certain that Zacchae'us was under no delusions regarding his stature within the community (pun intended), and understood what a great privilege it was that Jesus would come to his home. When this is true of us, we tend to receive Jesus joyfully, too! But when we fail to understand what a gift God has given us in adopting us as sons and daughters and delivering us from our sin, everything else we do becomes a struggle in the undercurrent of this denied truth.

We have heard a lot of talk lately about being people of gratitude, and that is very important, but if our first appreciation is not for the most important gift of our unmerited salvation, putting on the proper attitude of humble obedience to God in each thing will be impossible for us.

Reforming (phase 1), Existential Experience of the History of Salvation (step 4), session 6

And when he drew near and saw the city he wept over it. saying, "Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace! But now they are hid from your eyes." - Lk 19, 41-42

I still don't know if I'm doing this step right. But I find that consideration of my personal sin as a component of the sin of the whole world is a useful thing for me, in multiple ways.

• It makes me less surprised at things that have many of those around me shocked. "How could they" - whomever the "they" of the current story is - "do such an awful thing?"  Well, how can I be surprised that the accumulated effect of sin in the world has led us to such extremes? In fact, I've been wondering in recent days: how much of a spiritually binding effect does the widespread tolerance of sinful behavior have on our world?
• It makes me less judgmental of others. Of course, I had an element of this good trend in my life already simply because . . . but to see all of our sin as connected helps me to live that not-supposed-to-be-a-cliché more effectively: hate the sin, but love the sinner. How can I not feel compassion for the sinner if the whole world's sinfulness is interrelated?

Okay, that's a lot of rhetorical questions for a short reflection. But I find that this reading fits right in with my heartache over the brokenness I see in my own family.

Theology on Tap

It was so nice to see Chris last night, to hear about his current work in the pro-life offices of the Archdiocese of New York. He is clearly more in his element, doing meaningful work that nurtures him more than his engineering work in the Air Force did. It was nice, too, to be around an enthusiastic group of younger Catholics who are hungry to grow in their faith. What a great venue to discuss our faith, and Chris did a great job echoing Pope Francis' observation that the only way to counter the culture of death is to joyfully live the life of love to which we are called.  Two things in particular stood out from what he shared; as always, a good talk always gets my own thoughts rolling, and I'm undoubtedly adding in a few of these:

• Cardinal Dolan of New York was apparently meeting with the staff of Chris' office the day that Pope Francis' interview with America magazine was published. Cardinal Dolan related that in response to that interview, a member of the New York press had asked him why it seems like the church focuses so much on issues that the Holy Father has indicated should not be our biggest priority. I thought his response was incisive: "We don't. You do." These sexuo-cultural issues consume our modern society, and are therefore often used to caricaturize how "out of touch" the church (specifically the Catholic Church, but increasingly this charge is leveled against evangelical Christianity as well) has become. Yet Cardinal Dolan's succinct reply can only form the smallest part of our response. We instead have to continually draw the attention back to the Good News we have to share, which we can only do effectively as we live out joyful lives that are transformed from death to life. 
• Chris turned the tables on a Scripture that Catholics who've had to defend our faith know by heart: "You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it."  Now, it drove me crazy that he insisted on repeatedly pronouncing it /HAYDS/ instead of /HAY-deez/, but that did not distract me from the point he made about it. We usually consider that the church is under attack by the world, by society, or by our adversary, the devil.  But the ancient understanding of Hades, rather than the fiery torment that we think of (and - my input - which was surely the sort of image that Jesus meant whenever he referred to "Gehenna") was simply the place of the dead. The image which Jesus is using is that the place of the dead - and by extension, the culture of death - cannot withstand the assault which the church should be making upon it. We are not to be on the defensive about these issues which our society upholds as the ideals of freedom and love to which we should aspire rather than the "restrictions" which the church places upon us. Rather, as we experience our transformed life in Christ in the joy of the Holy Spirit, we must share this life by living closely among those around us and letting them see for themselves what a difference this hope brings about in us. Then the gates of the stronghold of death will not be able to stand against the resurrected life in which we share, and we will deliver the victory of love and life to those imprisoned by the culture of death..

In a nutshell, then, as Pope Francis has emphasized, we must focus first on being transformed in Christ's love, and next on sharing that love with those around us. Then we can allow the Holy Spirit go to work to change the things that are internal strongholds of sin and death in the lives of those whom he has delivered/is delivering into new life in him.

The two brothers

These two brothers from the well-known parable in Sunday's gospel probably call for more frequent attention than we give them. I keep coming back to the thought that the self-righteous find the mercy of God to be an incredible obstacle to fully giving themselves over to their own relationship with him.

At the same time we have Pope Francis indicating that an over-emphasis on morality is probably interfering with our ability to do the work of Christ. It isn't that we should disregard morality, but we must remember that Christ came for sinners. He meets each of us where we are, then calls us each to follow him in holiness, which is far more than mere morality.

"The only thing I care about is winning"

- Tom Brady

You have to take this statement in context, I guess. He was being asked about Aaron Hernandez.  Still, I sincerely hope for his own sake that he's not speaking truth with that statement.

Striking the root of the matter

I just can't pick a phrase or two from today's second reading from the Office of Readings that particularly struck me. Usually I prefer the selections that are chosen from the early church fathers, which often resonate with their timeless truth. Yet today's reading from the documents of the Second Vatican Council kept drawing me into its own veritas as I continued to read. A couple of things in particular struck me, and I hope I'm able to capture them before my own thoughts obscure them.

Without God, the higher kind of life to which we aspire is obscured, taking the form of our mere dreams and wishes. Sometimes there is a sincere element of selflessness in this striving, insofar as we are able to understand and apply it. But what we understand to be the freedom to live this higher calling becomes instead an enslavement to the ideas, the dogma, that becomes an empty shadow of the true freedom we find only in living in God's love.

Without God, we do not understand our weakness and our sinfulness properly.  Rather, we often mistake these characteristics as noble causes which we should embrace, or toward which we should strive.  And the power of our own wants can become all the more consuming if we have no source we trust that might serve to steer us away from them.  The unhappiness we experience in response to our failure to understand that our loving God is providing for our true needs ends up driving us toward more unhappiness, for ourselves and for those whom we are trying to love as well as we can.

These questions with which we grapple should serve to bring us to a relationship with God.  Yet when we begin the struggle with an inner conviction that God cannot be the answer because there is no god, that indeed no rational person should believe in any form of god, they can indeed drive us to despair.  By no means is this inevitable; there are undoubtedly atheists who accept their fatalistic position with an inner peace, but in my experience they are often driven off of their precarious peaceful perch when they encounter various sorts of upheaval in their lives or opposition to their point of view.

Yet faith in God does free us from our own inner struggle between sinfulness and righteousness, nor from our tendency to close off when we are hurt rather than reconcile.  The battle wages within us even when we believe in God, even when we have a relationship with him that transforms us, and the efficacy of that transformation wanes when we fail to give ourselves regularly and with increasing consistency to this most perfect of loves.  I cannot fully imagine the effect that not believing must have on that battle, and pray that I never will experience it.

Only the conclusion of this selection, its last three brief paragraphs, provide the proper context for the resolution of this conflict, and therein can be found the only way to approach it that brings life rather than death, selfless love instead of narcissism, grace and forgiveness in place of vengeance and judgment.

Yet none of these positive approaches is possible of our own effort. Only the Holy Spirit can manifest grace, and at our best we merely participate in and give ourselves over to this work of God.

Javert's dilemma

Have I seriously not blogged about Les Miserables?

I had a couple quibbles with the film, along with one major objection.  First, the quibbles: if I never hear Hugh Jackman sing another note through his nose, that will be okay.  That said: I thought his singing was passable, at least, and his acting was so far superior to his singing that I am glad he got this role.  My second quibble was with Russell Crowe as Javert, who seemed so vocally intimidated (just noticed "timid" in the middle of that word for the first time; duh) that he conveyed neither the certainty of his character through most of the story nor the contrast of his inner conflict at the end.  When he stepped off the bridge, while it was tragic, it felt impersonal, somehow, as I never felt I was connected with the person of Javert.  More on this, as I think I can really relate to this character in ways that transcend Crowe's performance.

But first, my major objection: can we please stop treating "love at first sight" like a noble thing?  Marius was really willing to leave the Resistance at this point in his relationship with Cosette?  Really?  At this point they had nothing more than an attraction for each other.  This had to have more development in the book than it received in the film.  Animal magnetism is not a virtue.

That out of the way, I'd like to return my thoughts to Javert's quandary, which obviously arose out of the conflict he could not resolve involving the inviolability of the law, the definition of evil, and a concept he utterly denied: the unalienable dignity of each human person.  (Okay, I'm sure with some thought I could come up with a summary that more closely reflects these issues as Javert experienced them; but I am writing from my own perspective, after all.)  His entire view of the world was deeply rooted in his convictions about human character and the nature of good and evil.  Obedience to the law was the only evidence of good that mattered, and violating it was incontrovertible proof that you were evil.  Solzhenitsyn's observation that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart would have seemed ridiculous to Javert.  I'm struck by his sense of certainty, his absolute conviction that there is no such thing as a circumstantial criminal, but that rather all criminals are primarily made by a fundamental and unchangeable flaw in their nature. The difference between the class of criminals and that of law-abiding citizens was purely the existence of this weakness, which could never be overcome.  The twisted nature of criminals would eventually work its evil no matter what transpired in their lives.  Therefore, it was essential that society protect itself from the harm of criminals by restricting their opportunity to commit future crimes, for it was inevitable that they would do so if they had a chance.  Furthermore, all violations of the law indicate the same flaw in human nature, an elevation of self over the good of society, such that every offense must be punished and every offender monitored.

So long as he was dealing with others' offenses against the law, his absolutism served him well both in his internal and external duties.  There was a clear line over which he must never cross, as should have been illustrated early  in the movie as he walked the ledge.  He was there not because he was enamored of the idea of stepping off, but because of how it reinforced his certainty of himself.  He knew, to the core of his being, that he was secure there; he would never step across the line.  The ledge was supposed to represent the danger of absolutism from the beginning, though Javert was not to recognize it.  Instead, in the film this seems to come across - either through Crowe's tepid performance or Hooper's direction - as an inner struggle that was waging even early in the movie, when I do not believe this was case for the character of Javert. His crisis would come later, and his certainty would be its crux.  By making Javert appear uncertain of himself early on, Crowe and Hooper undermine his crisis.  They also make his virtue - his commitment to the law is indeed virtuous, in a self-righteous sort of way - seem painted on rather than deep.

As long as Javert could dismiss Valjean's transformation as conditional and his righteous acts as self-serving, and particularly as long as Javert was not swayed to any dereliction of his own duty, he was fine.  To Javert, the law defines virtue, and as long as we uphold it we acts virtuously, as does he.

Yet Javert understands unconsciously that acting outside of one's own self-interest is also incontrovertible evidence of virtue, and it is Valjean's ultimate ability to do so that finally breaks Javert's self-certainty.  He finally cannot bring himself to capture (again) this man who repeatedly acts for the good of others when there is no gain in it whatsoever for himself.  In particular, the one act of mercy displayed to him, in contradiction of Valjean's own personal interest, results in Javert himself violating the law by refusing to apprehend this parole violator. His good deeds as shop owner, caring citizen, mayor, surrogate father, (and so on, in the book, evidently) were easy for the inspector to disregard as somehow self-serving, but in their final confrontation Javert has become convinced enough by Valjean's conversion that he is unable to act according to the law's commands - according to how he has always and unwaveringly defined virtue - and there is no authority to which he may submit his offense.

(I'd really like to read Hugo's book for more on his view on this.  I understand he includes entire essays expositing the moral underpinnings of his story.)

The trap of absolutism is dangerous.  It isn't that there aren't moral absolutes; rather, even scripture warns us not to judge others - or ourselves - according to them.  This is what a good friend realized when she worked so diligently to help me stop being so hard on myself.  When we insist on judging, we block mercy's healing, redemptive power.

Absolutism can take many forms, and being free from one of them doesn't prevent falling victim to another.

Two movies

Life of Pi - What a wonderful treatment of an incredible book.  A visual treat, thrilling and uplifting, tragic and victorious.  The interaction between the author and protagonist was a bit flat against the other parts of the film, yet served an important purpose.  And contrary to what the review I heard on the radio seemed to indicate in some of the details it shared, this movie adhered pretty closely to the book, with its divergences driven by the medium.  By and large, I was pretty pleased with it.

It's really unfair for it to suffer so by comparison with Lincoln.  I understand why Spielberg wasn't willing to make this film without Daniel Day-Lewis, who so convincingly becomes every character he portrays, and brought both the sheer physical stature and the dedication to detail to carry off a role that so intimidated him that he first refused it.  This film, as I presume the book on which it was based, was a fascinating peek into the political machinations of Lincoln's day and of the abolition effort. It made clear how politicians sometimes must use their opposition's perspective to win them over, as it was clear even to those who were adamant about racial equality that they could not hope to gain even the abolition of slavery if they clung to the path of true equality which they knew to ultimately be in the right.

Perhaps most importantly, it illustrates how important it is to not allow fear of the future to undermine our willingness to do the right thing now.  We allow ourselves to be paralyzed by the unknown repercussions of doing the right thing.  This is a lesson I learned by experience: even the most dreaded consequences that come to pass are less fearsome in their reality than they are in our anticipation of them.

Still helpless

I've always felt this way when my girls have been sick, and I feel it even more for Teri's sake now.  We felt as if we'd gotten her turned around with this bout of pancreatitis, with as great as she was feeling on Sunday. Yesterday her pain was back, and shows no sign of abating.  It isn't as severe as before she was admitted, but it's clear that she's not well.  The weird thing is that the indicator in the past, for all of them, has always been that when they could tolerate food it meant that they were over it.  This time, Teri was never NPO, and was comfortable on a full diet before they released her.

Lord, please heal my bride, and my daughters, from this chronic scourge in their lives.

Am also lifting up a parishioner who is finally having surgery on Friday and a dear friend traveling with her children (who is currently driving through northwestern NY during peak time on the Thruway).

What's it all about, Alfie?

What motivates atheists to not be narcissists, or more generally, to be good people?  Given any conflict between what they want to do and what they've been socialized to believe is right, why do they choose the latter?

I choose to do what I believe to be right not primarily because of fear of God's punishment, but out of thankfulness for what God has done for me - the gift of salvation and the blessings that overflow in my life - and a resulting desire to become the person God would have me be.  But in the absence of God and, more specifically, of Christ's example, what would drive my sense of right and wrong?

I can see why "do no harm to others" might be a mantra, and I can see why some of the social changes that secular society espouses arise from this approach.  But what constitutes harm, and why should I make any undue sacrifice - even undertake sometimes-greater "harm" to myself - for the sake of others?  And what constitutes an "other," for instance from the standpoint of beginning- and end-of-life issues?  How do even scientific criteria (consider how we protect an endangered species throughout all stages of development, but not a human being) manage to take a back seat to freedom of individual choice, which seems to really be the motto by which society is guiding itself?  And if this life is all there is, shouldn't I just try to cram every experience and pleasure I can manage into it?

I don't see how we can survive as a society without the central concept of being endowed by (our) Creator with certain unalienable Rights. If our rights are not divinely appointed to us, I do not understand why else we have any grounds to feel we have any rights at all.

This is not a mere academic exercise.  If there is no god, my concept of the person I should be and my motivation to strive for such a standard vanish together.