Upside down world

To those who are accustomed to living in a world turned upside down, setting it right cannot help but appear to be turning it upside down. - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon

Oh, this is so true, and not merely in the ways which we consider obvious, the disordered priorities and skewed values that our society embraces. Even when we have begun to accept the impossible reversal of judgment which God has accepted on our behalf, when we have begun to agree that the ways which we have been taught are valuable are in fact empty vapors, we continue to make evaluations in the same ways we have learned.

I am appalled by how hard and judgmental we are with one another and with ourselves. We see the harshness of the cross and somehow we interpret that as God's way rather than as ours, and we are unrelenting in continuing to think of ourselves as better than those around us, or as worse. Perhaps it is because we are afraid of what it will cost us to accept and love our brothers and our sisters and our selves in the midst of their brokenness as God has done for us. We see the scandal and complete heartbreak of the cross and it confuses our upside down minds for us to know that this is the glory of healing, transforming, boundless love.

So in the midst of trying to take ten minutes to reflect on this, I find myself locked in frustrated conflict with a five-year-old, and modeling this love for her is a challenge that I find beyond me.

Incredible collusion

The Father and the Son have colluded in a thing most astonishing, a thing on the far side of our ability to be astonished. Justice cries out to be satisfied; something must be done. From the blood of Abel, to the prison camps of Siberia, to the nine-year-old who this afternoon died of leukemia, justice cries out.  These things must not be permitted to have the last word . . . All the Adams and all the Eves join with the brightest and the best of philosophers to declare that this is just the way the world is. And who is responsible for that? And with that question was born what philosphers call the question of "theodicy" -- how to justify to humankind the ways of God. And thus was God put on trial. If God is good and God is almighty, how did evil come about? If there is evil, how can an almighty God be good or a good God be almighty? - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon

Beyond our ability to be astonished? Absolutely. Beyond our willingness to believe. The thing is, this final question is rooted in our inability to truly believe in eternity. We ask our questions as if sense must be made on the basis of this world and this life alone. These things - God is good, God is almighty, God made all things, evil exists - are incompatible if this world is all the reality there is, if this life is the only life. They are barely reconcilable if there is indeed another life that is better than this one, even perfect. Couldn't an all good almighty God have made this life perfect?

And thus we conclude that there cannot be a God. We kill him just as dead as we killed his Son. And rather than condemn humanity for our temerity, God loves us still. In love he created us, in love he reconciles us, in love he draws us into this life that he desires for us, in which we would never remain without tasting the true results of our will and our resulting death. He gives us the gift of having our own way so that we will eventually trust that his way is unspeakably better than our own. Is this why some of the angels fell?

What an incredible collusion. Indeed, we cannot credit it. Surely a God who could become man could have created us so that we did not need for that inscrutable event - the entire life of Jesus - to ever happen. Surely God could have created our world so that it was never corrupted. That would seems easier and more convincing than the plan he actually conceived and executed, we think, as if there were anything easy about the bringing home of a single human heart upon the shepherd's shoulder.

Indeed, rather than be carried home we have convicted God, and put him to death, and Jesus has carried out our penalty. And perhaps all of the "fulfillment of the law" was intended from the outset solely to give us a hope of recognizing him.

Knowing that I did the deed

I may think it modesty when I draw back from declaring myself the chief of sinners, but it is more likely a failure of imagination. For what sinner should I speak of if not for myself? Of all the billions of people who have lived and of all the thousands whom I have known, whom should I say is the chief of sinners? Surely I am authorized, surely I am competent to speak only of myself? When in the presence of God the subject of sin is raised, how can I help but say that chiefly it is I? Not to confess that I am chiefly the one is not to confess at all . . . and by our making of excuses is our complicity compounded . . . - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon

For over two decades, I have had not the slightest qualm about declaring myself the chief of sinners. For the longest time I soaked in that judgment, luxuriated in the balm that this knowledge was against the wrong that I had done, the hurt I had inflicted upon one who should have been able to utterly trust me. Thankfully have I finally accepted the grace that many loved ones strove to impart to me, that I might grasp it as my own despite my unworthiness - for after all, if any of us were worthy it would not be grace.

About the chief of sinners I do not know, but what I know about sinners I know chiefly about me. We did not mean to do the deed, of course. The things that we have done wrong seemed, or mostly seemed, small at the time. - ibid.

And if it did not seem small, at least by the end, I nonetheless had my own excuses for it, in a sense. Though I did not blame my actions upon the dysfunctions in which I was raised nor the abuse I received, still I excused my actions as being beyond my ability to control. (Omitting entire course of therapy learning how lack of control is actually the application of unhealthy control.) So yes, what I did seemed small at first, then grew into something undeniably big but nevertheless excused. I am so grateful to be free of that dynamic.

Now I find that the sin that remains seems small in comparison to that of my past. It is a different facet of the distorting lens of comparison. If I compare myself today to where I have been, then my sin seems small. This is, as Fr. Neuhaus emphasizes elsewhere, a matter of minimizing the great transformation in holiness with which God wishes to bless us. So the things that I do are not small. The sins of act and of thought - the entertainment of negative thoughts, that is, not the passing ones - make me less than the person God is calling me to. The purpose of this truth is not that we might flagellate ourselves over our shortcomings and become scrupulous in our dealings with ourselves and those around us. It is to call us to open ourselves to the grace of God at work in practical ways to transform us into what we cannot hope to be on our own: the very image and likeness of Christ shining the light of his love and mercy on everyone around us.

All the trespasses of all the people of all time have gravitated here, to the killing grounds of Calvary . . . . It was not only for our sins, but surely for our sins, too. What a complex web of complicity is woven by our lives. Send not to know by whom the nails were driven; they were driven by you, by me. 
Is there a perverse presumption in confessing that we did the deed? There could be, I suppose. But there is also prudence. - ibid.

Good Friday makes us uncomfortable when we consider our role in it. But considered rightly, this discomfort is good for us. If it calls me to turn away from those things that make me less of a vessel, less of a mirror, less of a servant of God's love than the One I follow would have me be, then it is a good thing. When I realize that this calling is not a burden upon me but an unfathomable gift to me, it is a very good thing.

More on humility

The story is told of the rabbi and cantor who, on Yom Kippur day, the Day of Atonement, lament their sins at great length, each concluding that he is a nobody. Then the sexton, inspired by their example, laments his sins and declares that he, too, is a nobody. "Nuh," says the rabbi to the cantor, who is he to be a nobody?" - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon

How this story sums up our struggle with true humility. My mom was a huge Mac Davis fan, and I'll always remember his tongue-in-cheek song,

O Lord, It's hard to be humble, when you're perfect in every way
I can't wait to look in the mirror, 'cause I get better looking each day
To know me is to love me. I must be a hell of a man
O Lord, it's hard to be humble, but I'm doing the best that I can.

There's a pretty clear difference in my mind between thinking that I must be more humble and realizing that I think entirely too highly of myself. There is also a difference between humility and self-deprecation or worse, self-loathing.

I think that perhaps Fr. Spitzer's emphasis on striving to identify with our contributive identity rather than the comparative one serves us well on this topic, too. If I find my own value only through perpetual comparison with others, I am unlikely to able to find healthy humility. On the other hand, if the primary sense in which I come to realize that I am somebody is an awareness that I am somebody the eternal Son was willing to come carry home, then I have both the humility of knowing I need him and the worth that comes from knowing that I am his.

There remains an interesting trap, though, in allowing the Spirit to apply this humility to all areas of our lives. We can be completely in balance in some areas and have others that remain problematic for us.

So while he had the wrong reasons in mind, Mac at least had the title right.

Irreverence leads to . . . ?

So I guess that this book by Fr. Neuhaus gets into my brain even when I don't have a chance to open the pages, because I'm pretty sure that where I ended up in my thoughts were close to an idea he expresses in the pages I'm reading. But getting there was a quick and interesting thought trip.

Yesterday on the way home from Cincinnati we passed the Solid Rock Church adjacent to I-75. This church is semi-famous for a pair of massive statues that it has erected facing the highway. The first, the King of Kings statue, was locally referred to as Touchdown Jesus (not to be confused by the mosaic at The University of Notre Dame in South Bend), and was destroyed by a fire resulting from a lightning strike drawn to its iron framework. I knew it probably wasn't an original thought when I told my wife that the new statue that has replaced it has taken the church from Touchdown Jesus to Five-Dollar Foot-long Jesus. Turns out I'm not the first to see it that way.

I immediately realized I was being a bit irreverent, and decided not to post this smart-alecked observation on Facebook. I know quite a few people who'd be amused by it, but that isn't the point. I also know quite a few friends who are already biased against organized religion, and for all that my fellow Christians rightly point out that Christianity is about a relationship with a person rather than a set of religious observances, this distinction rings hollow to the people I have in mind. Many of these folks balk at the idea that we need to be saved in the first place, let alone that Jesus saves us, and this expression of humor would be more likely to reinforce their preconception rather than overcome it.

But this got me considering why we rebel against the gift that God offers us. Why do so many of us conclude that we don't need a Savior? It's a complex question with many answers, but I found myself thinking primarily about one of them, and that's where my re-reading of Death on Friday Afternoon comes in. This is also likely to invoke some of my favorite thoughts by Fr. Spitzer.

It's pretty simple, really. We estimate our sin wrongly. We insist on evaluating ourselves by comparison. "I'm a pretty good person," most of us think. And we're right. Most of us are not murderers, thieves, abusers or felons, so there is a high degree of truth in our evaluation. Those of us who are murderers, thieves, abusers or felons either continue to reach the same conclusion by shifting our comparison pool, or reach the opposite one. Some folks who should be able to think that they're pretty good people also find themselves locked into the same thought process that grips many of those who fall into this other category: "I'm not a good person. If you knew the truth about me, you'd want nothing to do with me."

And the thing is, there is enough truth underlying this thought that, once again, we're right. If we're living by comparison, our lives encompass enough areas that we will always find people against whom we compare favorably and unfavorably. This is why comparison doesn't really work as a standard for judging ourselves.

There is a standard for us to live up to, if we are going to try to live well enough to gain admission to heaven for ourselves. Jesus gave it to us, right there in the Sermon on the Mount, where everyone likes to point for "the New Testament version of the Ten Commandments." How we love the Beatitudes, but because there is so much in them we often fail to read the rest of this sermon along with them. Next Jesus spoke of things like being salt and light, of his fulfilling of the law rather than abolishing it. Ahh, now we're getting close. Do we judge ourselves in comparison to others? We're not murderers? We're not adulterers? Most of us have been scorners and lust-ers, though. He goes on to talk about how to respond to evil done upon us, a lesson which he would demonstrate to its ultimate extreme. Finally he puts a bow on the entire chapter: Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

We had a great homily a few weeks ago reminding us that this perfection is not about performance, but about how we love. Even so, we fail to live up to it, and I am convinced that Jesus' purpose in delivering this sermon was not to provide another standard which we have no hope of ever achieving. Nor was his dying intended to show us that it could be done, so get to it! After all, it was impossible to keep all of the laws already established, and even getting rid of the Pharisaic interpretations wouldn't make that exactly manageable. So why could Jesus have given us such a truly impossible standard?

Could it have been for no other reason than so that we would understand that every human being is equally dependent on God's grace and mercy, so that we might appreciate the gift we have been given so much that we wish to offer it to everyone else?

And perhaps the biggest obstacle, then, standing between us and Christ, is our unwillingness to stop looking down on others so that we might feel better about ourselves.

Okay, this is probably incoherent and wandering, and I lack the time or ability to make it any better, so I just offer it to you Jesus, as I do myself, to use as you will.

Time out

Our dear friends Herb and Maureen shared a presentation tonight entitled Time Out. It started off talking about time outs that we're all pretty familiar with, involving unruly children or sports teams. It ended up on the importance of having time out as a couple, whether we think we want one or not, to focus on our relationship.

And it took a moment along the way to give due credit to the inventor of the time out: God, who certainly wasn't worn out from all those labors at the end of creation.  Neither did God need the chosen people to give Him a day off so he could rest up from taking care of them.  Rather, God knows that we need regular rejuvenation if we are to be consistently about the life to which he calls us.

Good stuff. Remarkably honest and unexpectedly poignant sharing from the other couples about how they receive the times out that our Marriage Encounter affords us to work on our relationship with our spouse in a community of couples committed to supporting one another in our sacramental lives. I wish I could share details of the different ways we all receive these opportunities to grow, but we are all glad to have each other in our journey of marital love.

Dealing with the overwhelming

God became man.  We say it trembling.  We say it puzzling.  But more often we say it rotely, counting on routine to buffer what we cannot bear.  - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon

There are many worthwhile passages throughout this book about which I have previously reflected and posted, yet my checking always results in the discover that, yes, I've written about this passage, but not about this thought that occurs to me as I read it now.

In this case, Fr. Neuhaus has captured succinctly the idea that I find myself drawn to and expanding on. Our limited minds must reduce the overwhelming to things we can manage.

This is why children of alcoholism or abuse get "stuck," developing and reinforcing and ultimately internalizing the coping mechanisms which suit us for surviving our immediate threats but which serve us ill for dealing with life as adults. All I could concern myself at those times when my dad was raving drunk was being invisible, not becoming the thing he was mad at. I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have struck me in his drunken frustration, but it was obviously a thing to be feared. And it worked consistently, just like my dog barking at the mail carrier every day works: just as the postal worker leaves every single day, my invisibility every drunken evening kept the unknown big meltdown from happening, and he was always okay (for at least a while) the next day, and we could both mostly pretend that nothing untoward had happened, and I grew to believe that not making waves was how to survive life.

(I can't remember if I've written, either here or in the book, about the night he lost his balance and broke the three-legged table in our living room. I don't recall if this is a real memory or not, but I seem to remember trying to fit the broken leg back in place so it could be glued, and it not staying in place because we didn't have a clamp handy that was shaped properly to hold it. I think I thought that, if I could just help him fix that table leg, whatever his motivation - the avoidance of mom's ire, for instance; I suppose he was every bit as fear-driven as I was - maybe he would finally be proud of me. I think that it was without any rancor toward me - rather with a sense of his own guilt - that he told me pretty quickly not to worry about it.)

The recurring experience of his inebriation, and that other one from that summer morning, left me with a well-developed "pretend-normal" dynamic when it came time to deal with the repeated sexual abuse I later experienced. (My abuser's skill at redefining what he did to me as something very different played a big role in that, too.) Yes, the brain absolutely does what it has to in order to deal with things that are too big for it to handle.

And God is definitely too big for our finite faculties to handle. Even the (comparatively) smallest parts of our theology can be too big to get our minds around fully or for very long. The Incarnation is a centerpiece of Christian theology, and it is incredibly simple and unfathomably HUGE. We cannot grasp all its implications, so as soon as we get a piece of it we cling to that part as if it's the whole thing, and repeat it by rote - literally, in the creed, "and became man" - without allowing ourselves to grapple with the full truth of what it means. Even the most fervent and studied of us fail to make more than a surface connection between Bethlehem and Calvary, no matter how much we tell ourselves that we get it. Like the Pharisee and the tax collector, when we think we've "gotten" God, we have probably actually moved further from fully entering into the mystery.

Unlike the dysfunction in which I was raised, The beyond-me-ness of God isn't really a thing to be afraid of. (We seem to be back to the idea of the fear of the Lord again, which is a good thing and far different from the things we fear in the normal sense.) Yet we are trained - ingrained, reinforced, internalized - with the idea that things that are so much bigger than us are indeed to be feared in the ordinary sense of the word. Rote minimization of God into a routine we can manage is the natural way of dealing with it, just as it was how I dealt with alcoholism and abuse. But just as I've had to unlearn my thoroughly-integrated ways of looking and experiencing - a process which is doubtless still ongoing - so must we all learn to stop applying our inadequate ways of understanding if we are to fully embrace God with abandon!