Getting to the Point: bible

Showing posts with label bible. Show all posts

Thursday, October 1, 2015

The Great Victory Cry

Thursdays I am writing posts commenting on the Mass, with a particular emphasis on how the liturgy informs how we are to live our lives – the Mass as a template of Christian discipleship. Two weeks ago we had reached the proclamation of the Gospel, but there is more to say about this peak moment of the liturgy that I couldn’t get to in one post.

Today I want to write about the various symbolisms around the rite of the Gospel in the Mass. These are all deeply meaningful and inform the whole Christian attitude towards the words and deeds of Christ found in our four-fold canon.

First, in a properly executed Sunday liturgy, the Gospel book is solemnly processed in, by the deacon if possible; by the priest if not. Or it may well be on the altar at the beginning of the Mass. Either way, the Gospel book (not the lectionary) is enthroned on the altar which is the very throne of God in the liturgy. In this, we see that the Gospels are a true ‘presence’ of Christ—not in the way the Eucharist is, but nonetheless a real one.

At the time of the Gospel, there may well and rightly be a procession of the book from the altar to the ambo, with candles and (on solemn occasions) incense. The Gospel is the light of the world. The Gospel is a holy thing—we only incense that which is holy, which is significant when we realize that we are all incensed at a later point in the Mass.

The deacon proclaiming the Gospel is blessed by the priest, or if it is the priest proclaiming it prays the same prayer for his own sake, asking to be purified in mind and heart so as to proclaim the Word. The Gospel is an awesome thing, not to be lightly taken up and read. We need to be purified before we can even fittingly read it.

And of course the assembly is singing a joyous alleluia as all this is going on. We are about to hear the actual words, hear of the actual deeds of Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour. This is joy for us, or should be. We stand at this point, symbol of both respect and a posture of triumph, victory. The Gospel and what is recounted therein is the great victory cry of God in the world over sin, death, and the devil. And our ritual responses to the proclamation – ‘Glory to you, O Lord… Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ’ – are the right and proper response, always and everywhere, to the Gospel whenever and however we encounter it.

So all of this—so familiar to us who are practicing Catholics—gives us a fairly complete catechesis on how we are to receive and respond to the Gospel in our daily lives. I said last time that the Gospel simply is our guide to daily life, that we live our lives under its authority and as disciples of Jesus Christ, freely choosing to live as Christians in the world, we are to be very literal-minded and (frankly) slavishly obedient to what we read therein. If we don’t want to be Christians, nobody is stopping us from leaving, but as long as we stay in the community of faith, this is the way of life we have chosen to follow.

What all the solemn rituals of the liturgy show us is that the Gospel way of life is joy, is light, is something awesome, something precious, something that really delivers us over to a genuine encounter with the living Christ. When we see how the Church surrounds the liturgical proclamation of the Gospel with all these symbolic gestures, elements, words, it should safeguard us against being flippant, or grudging, or rationalizing, or sad in our relationship to the Word of God.

We should enthrone it, not only on the altar, but in our hearts. We should recognize the light of truth in its words. We should incense it, not with clouds of smoke, but with prayers of adoration and supplication, read it on our knees. We should know that it is joy and victory, that even the hardest passages and the most challenging texts are fundamentally a call to share in Christ’s victory by sharing his passion and merciful love.

And above all, the liturgy teaches us to have a deep reverence for the Gospels, to never speak of them lightly or rudely, to be so aware that this is God speaking to us that we never could, never would be arrogant or dismissive of the least precept of the Gospel, never presume that it is a merely human text that we can analyze and reject (Jesus Seminar, take note).

No, it is God’s words to us, delivered by the Word of God who is with the Father before all the ages in the beginning, made flesh in Jesus Christ, now speaking to us through his Church to which he has entrusted his Gospel to be preached to the ends of the earth. Alleluia, alleluia, glory to you, O Lord.

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Learning How To Read

I'm going through my new book Idol Thoughts weekly on the blog, chapter by chapter. Chapter Three is entitled "How To Read This Book" (I've gotten a lot of ribbing about waiting until the third chapter to give that particular instruction).

Basically it is a chapter about how to do lectio divina, the prayerful meditative reading of Sacred Scripture. That is 'the Book' I want people to read, more than I want you to read me. But I do go into how Idol Thoughts is structured. The following eight chapters each take on of the eight 'thoughts' that lead us away from God and from happiness. Each chapter explores that thought, what it looks like, what it does to us.

And then, along with some basic spiritual practices that combat the thought (e.g. fasting for gluttony, almsgiving for avarice), I present three or four Scriptures that pertain to that thought and write a short meditation on each. I end each chapter by giving a longer list of Scriptures for further prayer and meditation of the reader. The general idea is that this book is a practical 'how-to' manual on the use of lectio divina to combat the thoughts and purify the mind of their influence. I encourage readers, if they are particularly convicted by one or another of the thoughts, to really take those provided Scriptures to heart and use them as a focussed program of prayer and reflection.

This whole business of lectio divina is so vital today, though. So many people don't know God. Even believing Christians seem to struggle with feeling this. While God is infinite mystery beyond mysteries, He has come close to us, though, and His Word is given so that we can at least begin to know HIm in this life.

A big problem today is that we don't know how to read. I'm not talking about actual or functional illiteracy, although that is a thing. I'm talking about our tendency to read in ways that the Internet has taught us--not reading, but skimming. Not really able to take in a text that has some depth of meaning, but flitting about from text to text gathering the superficial meaning we can gather without much effort or concentration.

We have descended from the heights of lectio divina down past even a normal lectio humana to the level of lectio animalia - a reading simply for immediate stimulation and satiation of appetite for intellectual input. No real engagement, no real deep analysis, no real encounter with the other through the miraculous medium of the written word.

Well, this doesn't work one little bit for the Bible. God's Word is not a consumer product that we can use and discard. God's Word is not a listicle, a blog post, a tweet, a status update to scroll past. And when we treat it that way, we do ourselves deep harm, as we have the illusion that we have 'read the Bible' without ever really reading it at all. Many of the Internet Atheists who like to pretend that they know all about the Bible and how dumb it is have approached it only in that way--scouring it only for ammo to use in their futile war against God and religion.

Lectio divina, then, first asks of us one thing, and that is to slow down. We have to read the Bible slowly these days, since we are so used to frenetically reading everything else. We have to take just one or two verses, read them slowly, repeatedly, not trying to 'figure them out' first, but just letting the words breathe, letting them live, letting them speak to us. This may take a long time, since our minds are so revved for this constant superficial level of reading.

Only after quite a time of this ponderous, slow reading should we move into analysis, into thinking about it, into 'meditation proper'. And even then, the meditation should always lead us back to the text, back to the living encounter with the One who is in the text, mysteriously, into prayer. Nothing is sadder than a Christian who gets more enamoured of their 'brilliant' thoughts and daydreams about Scripture than they are of the Sacred Text itself.

Reading, pondering, meditating--all of this is to lead us into a genuine contemplation of the written text we are with, a simple, reverent, awed beholding of the Truth who is Jesus within it. And this contemplation naturally leads to prayer, to conversation, to the simple worship of our hearts and minds in grateful praise. And this prayer and worship must then shape our lives, our choices, our decision, or it remains fruitless.

So that is how to 'read this book' - not Idol Thoughts (although, ahem, I do recommend you read it!) but The Book. And our reading of The Book is the vital need of our time, of any time really. We need to be re-Worded by the Word, so that our words and deeds are a living Gospel for the world.

So I give lots and lots of helpful examples of how to do that throughout my book, and I hope it helps you as it already seems to be helping many people.

Wednesday, August 5, 2015

Here's Something To Think About

It's time for a new series on the blog! As I may have mentioned once, twice, or an odd dozen times, I have recently published a new book: Idol Thoughts: The Captivity of the Mind and Its Liberation in Christ. It is already selling quite well, so I hear, and I have received much positive feedback from its early readers.

So of course being a rapaciously greedy author who wants to rake in all that cold hard royalty cash (and all the professional authors reading this will burst into peals of merry, yet somehow bitter, laughter here. The only reason the cash is hard and cold is because it is actually spare change), I want to promote the book on the blog a bit more.

I do want to get the book out there, of course, and so I want to talk about it a bit, without of course sharing reams and reams of text from it (which would be counter-productive since I, uh, do want people to buy the thing).

So I am going to write a series of twelve blog posts, corresponding to the twelve chapters of the book. This post will match up, roughly, with the first introductory chapter. So what is this wonderful, ground-breaking, enthralling book about? (Humility, of course!)

Idol Thoughts is basically a popular presentation of an very ancient doctrine, coming from the Desert Fathers of the 4th and 5th centuries of the Middle East. These guys were the true pioneers of Christian spiritual doctrine and practice, and laid down for the rest of the Church a basic pattern of prayer, fasting, and self-mastery that has been the ascetic way of the Christian every since.

One of them, Evagrius Ponticus, was a man of learning and so wrote systematically about their eremetical life. He developed a doctrine of the eight logismoi, or thoughts, that took human beings away from God, away from true life, away from happiness and sanity. A great deal of the spiritual practices of the desert were about the mastery of these thoughts and the transformation of the mind and heart into the truth of the Gospel.

Evagrius' disciple John Cassian would take this doctrine of the thoughts to Western Europe where he went to establish monastic life, and his writings were foundational in our Roman Catholic spiritual theology. A couple centuries later, Pope St. Gregory the Great would tweak the list a bit, pare it down from eight to seven, and called them the Capital Sins. And so we have the familiar list.

I am resetting the clock in this book to bring back that original list, and the original name of 'thoughts'. Partly it is because I like the older list better. Also, I like the terminology of 'thoughts' better - these things are only sins when we give our wills over to them, but the thoughts run wild in us even before that, and live in us often unrecognized as fixed patterns of belief that color our whole judgment of reality.

I think in our psychological age the doctrine of the thoughts and their effect on our human thriving is an easy sell for people. We all know about the 'stinkin' thinkin' that if you are a recovering alcoholic, say, 'leads to drinkin'! We all know that people can sabotage themselves in a thousand different ways by patterns of negative and self-defeating thoughts, that before our lives go off the rails behavior-wise, so often the real damage has begun in the mind, in the false beliefs and bad judgments we allow to rule in us.

So this ancient doctrine of the logismoi is about due for a resurgence in our therapeutic culture. Now I maintain in the book that these eight thoughts are fundamentally idols, in that each of them proposes a scheme of happiness that is not God, that is an alternative to God. And they are lies, in that real and abiding human happiness comes only from our living communion with God made possible in Jesus Christ.

And so, as I develop in the book, one of the surest ways to fight the thoughts of man and their illusory idolatrous promises is with the Thoughts of God--the words of Scripture and especially of Jesus Christ in the Gospels. So my book, while being about the thoughts, what they are and what they do to us, is also about lectio divina, the ancient practice of praying with Scripture in a structured meditative way. Specifically, for each thought I provide a welter of appropriate Gospel texts to meditate on and provide some simple meditations on a few of them, just to get you started.

It's all about the purification and transformation of the mind and of the inner person, out of which by God's grace we can choose wisely and well how to live in the world. So we will be looking each Wednesday in the weeks ahead at the eight thoughts and what to do about them: gluttony, lust, avarice, anger, despondency, acedia, vainglory, and pride. And don't forget to buy my book, y'all.

Thursday, July 30, 2015

The People of the Word

I am writing a commentary on the Mass each Thursday on this blog. After six posts on the Entrance Rite, which takes all of five-ten minutes in a normal parish Mass, we have now reached the Liturgy of the Word.

This of course is one of the two principle parts of the Mass, the other obviously being the Liturgy of the Eucharist. Before diving into the specifics of it, then, it is necessary to discuss the general meaning of this liturgy, and of the Word in our lives. It is not only in the Mass that the proclamation of the Word precedes the celebration of the sacrament—this is how every rite of the Church proceeds.

This highlights a central fact of the Christian religion. We are not exactly ‘People of the Book’, as is sometimes said. In our Catholic understanding of things, there is more to it than that. We are, however, intensely and profoundly, People of the Word. People of the Revealed Truth.

This means that we do not get to make up reality. Reality—truth—is received, first. The basic structure of all our liturgy—hear the Word, celebrate the reality—is the structure of all Christian life.

We hear the Word so as to live the Mystery. The structure, meaning, purpose, origin, goal of reality is first shown to us in the revealed Word of God who is Jesus Christ, and then we live this reality out in the life of love and mercy, service and prayer.

This is so utterly of the essence. And yet it is precisely here that many of us go wrong on a regular basis. We know (most of the readers of this blog, anyhow) that this is exactly where secular modernity is flagrantly wrong. Just for example, making up new definitions of man, woman, marriage every day.

Or, as we have all seen these past week, deciding that the unborn human being is nothing but a clump of cells, but then turning around to sell at a tidy profit human livers, hearts, brains from those ‘cells’ for medical research. Then efforts to discuss that grisly fact put us back into ‘it’s just a clump of cells’ territory again. That sort of thing—reality is what I say it is, and can change and change again at a moment’s notice for my convenience. Post-modernity in a nutshell.

But we who profess Christianity need to be very careful about our own minds and hearts in this, too. There is a video making the rounds in MH right now—I can’t seem to track it down on YouTube right now, but will post it on the blog when I do. It is interviews with the families of the recent 20 Coptic men killed in Libya for being Christians. All of the wives, parents, siblings of these young men are unanimous in this video in expressing forgiveness, compassion, and a prayer for conversion of heart for the Islamist murderers of their beloved husbands, sons, brothers. And a resolute willingness to suffer the same fate, if Jesus Christ asked it of them, too.

It is a powerful video, especially since all of these people seem to be fairly poor, ordinary folks. But that’s what people look like when they have received the Word of God into their lives at a deep level. Here in North America we are far too prone to profess Christianity but then live out of the prevailing ideologies or political allegiances or the fads of the day.

We are far too prone to say, in much less extreme circumstances than those Copts, “Well, I’m a Catholic, but… you can’t expect me to love my enemies, can you?" Well, Jesus does expect us to do that very thing. His Word is crystal clear on the point, in fact. “I’m a Catholic, but we have to go along with the world—you don’t expect me to be ridiculed, mocked, maybe even fined or jailed for expressing unpopular truth, do you?” Again, Jesus’ Word is very clear on that point, and a true People of the Word would not even ask that question.

And care for the poor—too many of us subscribe either to the shibboleths of the left where the answer to poverty is one more bloated government program run by anonymous bureaucrats and funded by anonymous tax dollars, or the shibboleths of the right where it’s the poor’s own damn fault for being poor, and I worked hard for my money so I’m keeping it, so there. Personal charity, personal involvement, personal generosity to the point where it hurts, where it entails some sacrifice, a lower standard of living, say? Whoever heard of that? Again, a People of the Word would know Who has not only heard of that, but commanded it of us.

Well, we need to be ‘worded’ and ‘re-worded’ continually, then. This is the true role of praying with Scripture in our lives, a role I have highlighted in my book Idol Thoughts, that we need to continually plant the Word into our minds and hearts like seed in soil, like yeast in bread, live salve into a wound. Work it in, allow the Word to heal us, grow in us, reshape us into the image of Christ.

It is only a people who are daily worded and re-worded by the Word who can then proceed to live the Eucharistic mystery of transforming sacrificial love. But that is where the Word takes us, and next week we will start to look at just how it does that in the action of the liturgy and in the action of our own lives.

Thursday, November 20, 2014

The Bible of Father Brown

N., as I have already said, was a man who read his Bible. That was what was the matter with him. When will people understand that it is useless for a man to read his Bible unless he also reads everybody else’s Bible? A printer reads a Bible for misprints. A Mormon reads his Bible, and finds polygamy; a Christian Scientist reads his, and finds we have no arms and legs.

N. was an old Anglo-Indian Protestant soldier. Now, just think what that might mean; and, for Heaven’s sake, don’t cant about it. It might mean a man physically formidable living under a tropic sun in an Oriental society, and soaking himself without sense or guidance in an Oriental Book.

Of course, he read the Old Testament rather than the New. Of course, he found in the Old Testament anything that he wanted — lust, tyranny, treason. Oh, I dare say he was honest, as you call it. But what is the good of a man being honest in his worship of dishonesty?

GK Chesterton, The Sign of the Broken Sword

Reflection – Leaving aside GKC’s regrettable prejudice (typical, alas, for an Englishman of his day) against the cultures and civilizations of Asia, this little bit of Brown-ian wisdom really pertains to the whole question of how we read the Bible, how we read it wrongly, and how we are to read it rightly.

‘It is useless to read your Bible unless you read everyone else’s Bible’. Chesterton really has a way of putting very complex matters into pithy little epigrams. This is precisely the mind of the Catholic Church regarding Scripture. We read it, not as isolated individuals getting bits and pieces of random sense out of it as we can, but as a community of believers united in a common reading guided by a common faith.

It is fashionable these days, among the New Atheists, to take all the cruel bits and pieces of the Bible—and there are many of them—and parade them around as proof of what a horror religion is, and particularly the Christian religion. The practice of haram warfare, where all living creatures from babies at the breast to animals in field are slaughtered to the last one, the death of the first-born in Egypt, the sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter—if you want horror, the Bible can deliver horror.

And if you are simply reading ‘your Bible’ and no one else’s, you may come to any kind of conclusion about all that. In the story quoted above, the sad character concludes that cruelty and vice are acceptable to God; for the New Atheists, the conclusion is that religion is evil nonsense.

Catholics read their Bible as part of a community of believers who extend 2000 years into the past (Sacred Tradition) and across the entire world in the present (the sensus fidelium), and who gather in their reading around a divinely mandated authority (the magisterium of bishops under the Pope). And the Catholic reading of this whole complex messy book is thus remarkably nuanced, thoughtful, careful, and yields profundity of insight and depth of reflection such as a New Atheist would not dream possible.

While it is far too much to go into the whole thing in a blog post, our basic Catholic sense is that we read all the earlier Scriptures through the later ones, and elevate the four Gospels in particular as the interpretive key to the entire Bible. The Old Testament is fundamentally the story of humanity—messy, mixed-up, ugly-beautiful, good-bad, chaotic, tumultuous, passionate, violent, lusty, hungry, hopeful, despairing humanity—met at each turn by this most mysterious God who only gradually reveals Himself to them in full.

The earlier parts of the Old Testament—haram warfare, etc.—are a very incomplete and poor revelation of this God. The later parts—the late prophets with their extension of God’s promises to all the nations, for example—are a more complete one.

But it is the Gospel revelation of Jesus Christ that gives the right sense and proper meaning to every bit of the Scriptures, and we have 2000 years of comprehensive sweeping commentary and lectio divina on just how this is done, from the most horrific tales of violence to the most obscure precepts of the Mosaic Law. In Christ, and only in Christ, do we read these and understand anything of what they mean here and now.

So that is the Bible of Fr. Brown, and of Chesterton, and of myself, too (not that that matters much). And that is our answer to that aspect of the New Atheist critique of religion.

Thursday, July 31, 2014

Ignorant, Not Stupid

One day some old men came to see Abba Anthony. In the midst of them was Abba Joseph. Wanting to test them, the old man suggested a text from the Scriptures, and, beginning with the youngest, he asked them what it meant. Each gave his opinion as he was able. But to each one the old man said, "You have not understood it." Last of all he said to Abba Joseph, "How would you explain this saying?" And he replied, "I do not know." Then Abba Anthony said, "Indeed, Abba Joseph has found the way, for he has said: 'I do not know."

Desert Father Stories

Reflection – I was joking on Facebook yesterday that I’m enjoying this series on the desert fathers so much (and, according to my traffic stats, my readers are enjoying it, too), that I’m finding it difficult to move on to anything else. I might have to change the name of the blog to Ten Thousand Monks.

These really are, as I keep saying, foundational stories for the spiritual life, and ones which have a startling relevance in our modern technological age. This one, for example. One of the features of our culture now is that it is a knowledge culture, and information age. Everyone has to know about things, and to admit ignorance of a subject or lack of understanding of a matter is a terrible loss of faith.

As an aside, I have never quite understood why it is such a grievous insult to call someone ‘ignorant’ but not so insulting to call them ‘stupid’. To me, ‘ignorant’ is not insulting at all. I am quite ignorant on a whole host of subjects—auto mechanics, real estate, hospital administration, to name just a few that have come up in conversations the last few days. Ignorant simply means ‘unknowing’, and how is that insulting? We can always learn new things, right?

‘Stupid’, on the other hand, is a nearly incurable illness, as far as I’m concerned, the incapacity to use the intellect one has been given to take on new knowledge, to reduce one’s natural ignorance. And there is nothing more stupid, then, than to pretend one knows about something that one does not in fact know, to be unable to say the four magic words that open up for us whole vistas of new knowledge and understanding, “I do not know.”

But this is a digression, sort of. But not really. The key thing in this story is that the monks are commenting on Scripture, and not just on any human matter. It is the Word of God that, above all, it is stupid beyond belief to pretend we understand. This is a perilous matter especially for us priests who are required, by the nature of our orders, to preach on the Gospel. Preaching has to begin from a place of deep humility, a firm conviction that ‘we do not know’ what this passage means, really.

If we begin anywhere else, thinking that because scripture scholar A said this about the passage and B said that and C, D, and E all agree on the other position, that we have ‘understood’ the passage, we have gone badly awry and have understood little to nothing of it. When it comes to God and the things of God, the fundamental and unshakable core of the Christian must be this ‘I do not know’, this deep awareness that there is always more to the matter, always a new level of depth, a new height of meaning, that we are bumbling little children trying to learn our ABCs, while the Word of God is the heights of poetry and wisdom literature and elevated discourse.

This is true, too, even of the dogmas and doctrines of our Catholic faith. Everyone who reads this blog knows where I stand on all those matters; I am a faithful Catholic who adheres to the truth of every word that is written in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. But we must never think that we understand the full meaning of these words. The defined dogmas of our faith are carefully constructed in their verbal formulations, not to explain the mystery of God, but to preserve the mystery of God.

Quite often in our dogmatic and creedal statements, there is a sort of via negativa at work—we are not so much trying to nail down what we do believe as exclude false statements that we don’t. ‘Begotten, not made’, for example—the Son is not a creation of the Father, but is God from God begotten of the Father. This exludes the Arian heresy (which we were discussing at breakfast yesterday, MH being the kind of place where this topic comes up over the oatmeal). But what does it mean that the Son is begotten of the Father? I Do Not Know.

And because of our ignorance, our unknowing, we can spend our whole lives, and into eternity even, contemplating these mysteries, and constantly penetrating deeper into them, in some ways increasing our ignorance, but only because we continually know how much more there is to know that we do not yet know.

So in a sense we only understand a Scripture passage if our first response is to say ‘I do not know what it means.’ If you think you know, you don’t, and that is deep spiritual wisdom, practical and profoundly relevant in our day, from the deserts of 4^th century Egypt.