Getting to the Point: freedom

Showing posts with label freedom. Show all posts

Friday, June 3, 2016

Freedom, With Consequences

I want to follow up on yesterday’s post with the next part of the Mass commentary. There is a unity between what I wrote about yesterday—the impossibility of receiving the Eucharist in a state of mortal sin—and what comes next in the Mass.

After the Lord’s Prayer, the praying of which signifies the fundamental union with God made possible by Jesus Christ which will be brought to perfection in the rite of communion, comes the ritual Sign of Peace in which we express to those immediately around us some gesture of peace and good will.

This has rich scriptural significance. We can think of the Gospel passage where the Lord tells us to be reconciled with our neighbor before we can offer our gifts on the altar.

The Eucharist not only brings to perfection our union with God, but also brings to perfection our union with one another in the communion of Christ’s Body, the Church. And as we cannot receive communion if we are in a state of mortal sin (and hence not in union with God to start with), so we cannot receive communion if we are not in union with the Catholic Church, either.

This is a painful subject—disunity always is, isn’t it? But we cannot wish painful subjects away. Now there is a difference between these two types of union. The question of being in a state of sin is something only the person can answer—conscience is inviolable, and only God and the soul can make that discernment.

Union with the Church, on the other hand, is a matter of the outer forum, visible to anyone who knows the facts of a situation. If a person has made choices in their life that remove them from communion with the Catholic Church, not only should they themselves not receive the Eucharist, but the pastors of the Church have a duty to inform them of this fact.

So, someone who is simply not Catholic, but belongs to some other religion, or who has left the Church for some other system of belief and way of life. People who have made moral decisions that publicly declare that they are not bound by or under the authority of the Catholic Church in any regard. Couples co-habitating without any form of marriage, or people doing intrinsically evil things in their work lives (the Mafia, for example, or the owner of a strip club). People who not only struggle with a homosexual orientation but who are publicly living as gay men or women in a same-sex relationship. People who have taken a public stand opposing the Church in its moral or dogmatic teachings—politicians, say, advocating laws that directly oppose the moral teachings of the Church.

And yes, (since this is the controversy of the day) people who have not only been divorced but have entered into a second marriage without having gone through the annulment process for their original one. Any one of these people in any of these categories may or may not be in a state of subjective sin—I would never dream of flatly stating that—but they have indeed objectively removed themselves from the communion the Church.

This is painful, yes. We are all free to choose what we will believe and what we will do in our lives. But our choices bear consequences. If I freely choose to, say, write a blog post where I flatly deny some basic matter of Christian doctrine, I am indeed free to do so. But I am not free to do so and then continue to exercise my ministry as a Roman Catholic priest. Freedom yes, but freedom without consequences? No.

So if someone has chosen to reject Catholicism, they may do so. But they really must not present themselves in the communion line, then. Reception of the Eucharist is not only about our union with God; it is also about our union with Christ’s Body on earth, the Church.

It is not a question of having to be some perfect Catholic who gets every answer right on a catechism test and never asks a question or struggles with a doctrine. Of course not. It is a matter of the public and manifest stands we have taken in our words and in our actions.

For example, you can really struggle with the Church’s flat statement that sex outside of marriage is wrong. You can not be at all sure that’s quite correct, and still choose not to move in with your girlfriend because you nonetheless want to live your life as a Catholic. But if you and your girlfriend do move in together, you have made a choice to publicly reject the Catholic faith. See the difference?

And so in the Mass before we go to receive communion we ritually express all this, first in our praying to God as our Father and then turning to one another to express our unity as a body of believers. And only then, in a spirit of deep humility and knowledge of our unworthiness, do we come forward to receive the Holy Eucharist, the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, at which point the Mass and all it has signified becomes our own mystery, our own life, and we are drawn into it in fullness and in truth.

Let us pray to receive the Eucharist knowing what we are doing and being vigilant to receive it worthily and well, so that it’s fruits may be shown forth in our lives.

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Let's Talk About Conscience

I would like to spend Wednesdays on the blog looking at some of the gnarlier questions of Catholic teaching and theology. I realize from both my priestly ministry of spiritual direction and my presence on Catholic social media that there is quite a bit of misunderstanding of Catholicism, even among Catholics. And of course some of the issues I hope to treat are hotly contested, widely rejected, and bitterly opposed. As those who know me and have read me for years know, that sort of thing only encourages me to keep writing about it. I don’t mind being disagreed with, but fiercely resist efforts to silence me.

Let’s start with something a bit less juicy, but fairly central in many of the hard questions of our day. Let’s talk about conscience. Now, in a single blog post I cannot do justice to the whole theology and philosophy of this matter, but let’s talk about why the Church insists on the primacy of conscience (cf Catechism of the Catholic Church 1782) and what that really means.

Conscience is the practical intellect, that part of our reasoning faculty by which, examining a decision that is to be made, we determine what is the good course of action, also known as the moral good. We determine the right thing to do, and we determine this right thing to do by the exercise of our conscience.

This is not moral relativism. Those Catholics and others who bridle at the mention of the word conscience are hearing it in a morally relativistic way, but that is simply not what the Church means by it. Using one’s intellect to determine what is the right and moral course of action is no different in essence from using one’s intellect to solve a math problem. You indeed have to do the solving (or, if you are using a calculator, you can have someone else do the solving for you), but nobody claims you can decide that 2 and 2 are five or that you can divide by zero and come up with a rational number.

And if you are doing math in the service of some practical project—building a house or paying your taxes—making mistakes in the numbers will have practical effects in the world. The house will fall down and kill you and your family; the taxes won’t get paid properly and there are legal consequences to that.

Conscience is much like that; we use our intellects to determine the right course of action. If we determine wrongly, and do something that is in fact morally wrong, we may be innocent in intent, but the wrong is still done. And actions are morally wrong, not by some arbitrary law given by a heedless Lawgiver, but because they are harmful to us. Some harms are immediate and obvious (reckless driving causes a crash) and some are long-term and gradual (smoking causes lung cancer), but the harm is done nonetheless.

It is absolutely vital that people exercise their consciences freely. Sometimes it comes up in pastoral ministry that a person wishes they didn’t have free will, that God would just tell them directly moment by moment what to do and even completely take over their volition. This is not the deal God has with us, though. The reason we must exercise our conscience is rooted in the very purpose and goal of God’s creative and salvific will for us. He made human beings so that there would be creatures of flesh, material creatures, who could freely choose to know Him and love Him, who could make a free choice to enter communion with Him and so give glory to God.

There is much more that can be said on that front (I hope to write a book about it some day). But that is the fundamental reason why conscience is primary and free will absolutely necessary. God does not violate us, does not force Himself on us, does not make us know Him and love Him (this is also why He hides Himself from us, painful as we find that hiding).

Conscience being free and primary does not do away with the moral law and with moral doctrine or teaching. That is really quite silly if you think of it. If I have a really hard math problem to solve, I am actually grateful to have a calculator, both to save time and to protect me from costly errors. And I trust the makers of the calculator to have created an instrument that provides reliable calculation.

Well, it is no different with conscience and morality. The ‘Maker’ of the moral law has provided us with a sure and trustworthy instrument to provide us with helpful guidance and answers, to save us from needlessly laborious moral reasoning and preserve us from deadly errors. And that instrument is the Catholic Church in its teaching office.

People often bridle at this. “So it comes down to just do whatever the Church tells you, then? Phooey!” Well, calm down there. For one thing, the Church is not telling me right now to write this blog post, nor is it telling you to read it. There are vast swaths of life we all live each day where we are making free choices that the Church offers us at best general principles to decide with (e.g., I should use my writing and intellectual gifts to help people, you should read helpful things).

The Church simply tells us that 2 + 2 = 4 and not 5. Sex is for marriage. Don’t steal - other people’s property is to be respected. Don’t tell lies. Don’t kill people. That kind of thing. Most of us can find quite a bit of freedom in our lives within the walls of the moral law; those walls enclose quite a vast estate of human action and choice.

Well, there is much more to be said about conscience – I wrote a whole series about it a while ago that you can access by clicking on the ‘talking about conscience’ label at the bottom of this post. But that’s more than enough for one day. My conscience is telling me to post this up and move on with the next duties of my state of life, and I guess I’d better obey it!

Thursday, February 4, 2016

The Necessary Price Of Freedom

Our Thursday trip through the Mass has brought us now to this part of the Eucharistic Prayer:

Therefore, Lord, we pray: graciously accept this oblation of our service, that of your whole family; order our days in your peace, and command that we be delivered from eternal damnation and counted among the flock of those you have chosen.

I will pass over the part of the prayer asking that our oblation be accepted—this theme has come up repeatedly in the Mass and I have covered it more than once already in this commentary.

This prayer brings in a dimension of our faith that I don’t think I have written about much at all, but which perhaps I should, at least from time to time. It is not the central focus of our faith, but it is part of our spiritual and moral landscape, and we are foolish to ignore it.

That is the whole matter of ‘eternal damnation’. Hell, to be blunt. That there is such a thing, that we can go there, and that in fact we need God’s mercy and grace if we do not wish to go there for all eternity—this is our Catholic faith, the faith of the Bible, the faith of all the fathers and doctors and saints of the Church.

Hell is not, and cannot be, a comfortable subject to think about. I don’t really think it is meant to be. Uncomfortable to think about, and less comfortable by far to end up there, no? But we have to think about it some time.

It is true that in an earlier era there was far too much preaching about Hell, to the point that it really does look like fear mongering. As one of our wise (and funny) MH elders says of his childhood, “It wasn’t so much a matter of going to heaven, as of backing away from Hell, and at some point the pearly gates would slam shut with us on the right side of them.”

Well, that’s not right. Our eyes, our minds, our hearts are to be fixed on the Lord Jesus and His tender, merciful love. The whole attention of our faith is to be on the Gospel, the Good News of salvation, and the path of life and goodness it opens for us. The positive aspect of our religion—healing, forgiveness, salvation, hope—is far bigger and far more central than the negative—sin, brokenness, damnation.

But… these are real things. And we cannot (and if we understand them rightly, should not) wish them away. The reality of Hell is a necessary corollary to the reality of human freedom. God made us to be free. God made us to be creatures capable of knowing and loving Him, and entering into an eternal communion with Him. But knowledge and love cannot, by their very nature, be forced. Love that is forced is not love at all; it is rape.

But if love and knowledge must be freely given and received by us human beings, this means we can, indeed, refuse them. And this is the sum total of what Hell is, what eternal damnation is—we can refuse the gift of God, refuse to enter the eternal communion of love that is the whole substance of our created being, that for which we are made. Hell is a place of eternal frustration, eternal thwarting of the divine purpose in making us.

Now, where we do have to ponder deeply and think of things that make us rather uncomfortable is that our Catholic understanding is that we can say ‘no’ to God under our own freedom and power, but we cannot say ‘yes’ to Him without His grace to assist us. In other words, we can fall (like any dull heavy body) by the power of gravity and our own innate leadenness, but we cannot fly unless our Father in heaven picks us up and tosses us up, up, and away into the celestial heights.

So we not only need to know that there is indeed a Hell and that we can, indeed, go there if such is our choice in life,[1] but that in fact we need to humbly beseech the grace of God, as we do in this prayer, to be spared such a disastrous consummation of our earthly affairs. The good news of course is that Our Father in Heaven loves us very much, wants with His whole divine wanting to deliver us from this sad fate, and in fact sent His Son to die for us so as to make this grace available to all mortal flesh.

So that’s what I have to say on what I admit is a topic I have neglected and probably won’t frequently return to on this blog. I have now, officially, given you all Hell; let us turn our eyes and minds and hearts to heaven and to the mercy and love that streams forth continually from that happy place.

[1] Now, this is a mere single blog post, so I am not going into all the reality of what that choice is, and exactly how to get to Hell and how to avoid it. I recommend reading The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, if you want a clear and concise elaboration, highly readable and (best yet!) brief, on that point.

Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Take What You Like, and Pay For It

I am spending Wednesdays on the blog talking about my new book Idol Thoughts. Of course my nefarious intention in doing this is to persuade a few of my legions of blog readers (hah!) to part with a few coins to pick up a copy of said book. As it happens, today is also my birthday, so just in case you want to give me a nice thoughtful present for that happy occasion, be it known that there is nothing an author likes better than readers for his writings.

Ahem. Enough with the sales pitch. Today we are looking at what I go into in the second chapter of the book, "Objections, Overruled." The book is about the power of our thoughts to enslave us and the need for liberation from this slavery by our immersion in the mind of Christ, made available to us in part by the Word of God. This chapter deals with a couple of objections to that thesis, in the good old Thomistic style of argument where such things are front-loaded in any debate.

Since I do want you to buy the book, I won't give you the whole content of the chapter. However, one objection I cover is the common one today that concerns the nature of freedom. Freedom means that I do what I want, period. Freedom of the mind means I think what I like. Freedom of the body means nobody tells me what to do, buster. And so forth. So it is wrong and at least borderline offensive to outline eight 'thoughts' that are actually slavery and to argue that true intellectual freedom only comes from submission to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Isn't this just more Christian intolerance and judgmentalism? H8R. Bigot. Fundy. Etc. (So goes the usual level of argumentative discourse in our elevated intellectual times.)

The answer to the objection, in good old Thomistic style, lies in making distinctions between two kinds of freedom, intertwined for sure, but one at the service of and necessarily ordered towards the other. There is first the simple freedom of choice that the objection considers. Namely, I can go left or go right. I can vote for Donald Trump (!!?!) or Marco Rubio (well, neither, since I'm Canadian, but you get the point). I can write this blog post and publish it, or walk away from the computer right now.

Simple factual liberty working itself out in a thousand little decisions we make each day. Is that not freedom? What else is there to add to this? So why is the mind not free in simply thinking what it wants to think about reality? To answer this we need to understand the simple fact that very many people seem incapable of understanding today, and so get into one terrible mess after another.

We are free to choose to think and do what we like. We are not free to escape the consequences of those thoughts and deeds. Nor are we free to negotiate what those consequences are, either. 'Take what you like... and pay for it!' This old proverb has always captured for me exactly what our modern world seems determined to deny.

And so we have the second, more essential freedom, the freedom that the first kind of freedom exists in service of. Namely, the freedom to become a person fully alive, expanded to the utmost potential of human being and doing. Every choice we make, freely, is either making us more free in this second and more vital sense, or making us less free. I can choose to jump off a tall roof, but I'm not free to choose much of anything after I have done that thing.

And this extends to the thoughts. To anticipate a bit where I go in the book, I can choose to live by the thought of anger, to allow my grievances and grudges, hurts and disappointments, to become the most important and most gripping realities of my life. I am free to do that. What I am not free to do, if I do that, is... laugh, love, live, relax, enjoy the beauty of a sunset, walk in freedom of heart and lightness of spirit. I am free all right, to be angry. But my anger enslaves me in regard to just about everything else that is worth anything else at all.

And it is like that right down the line. Freedom only makes us free when it is firmly allied with truth. And truth is the Gospel of Jesus Christ, in this case the truth of "Love your enemies, forgive those who have wronged you, turn the other cheek."

Anyhow, I have lots more to say about all that in the book, so hey! Here's a thought! Buy it. And have a great day of freedom and joy in the Lord's love while you're at it.

Friday, May 15, 2015

Everybody Counts or Nobody Counts

So we had the March for Life in Ottawa yesterday, and a most beautiful day for it, it was—sunny, warm, all that. While crowd size estimates are approximate at best, the organizers think around 24 000 were in attendance. It does seem slightly bigger each year, but it’s hard to tell when you’re on the ground. It is, without question, the biggest demonstration that happens each year in Ottawa.

What’s the point of it? We meet, we listen to some speeches of varying quality, we process around downtown Ottawa holding signs, we return to Parliament Hill where there are more talks and some prayers, and that’s it, pretty much. The counter-protestors yell at us, strip their clothes off and rush the podium (yes, that happened again this year), and increasingly try to disrupt and interrupt the proceedings (kudos to the Ottawa police for their professional calm way of removing the disruptors).

So, what’s the point of it all? We know that the Canadian political system is not going to re-open the abortion debate as a matter of law any time soon. So it’s not for them, exactly. It certainly is an event for the young people who make up a very large percentage of the crowd. Consciousness raising and conscience formation are crucial in the long-term eradication of abortion from our society—since we cannot make abortion illegal, let’s try to make it unthinkable.

In this light, the women and men of Silent No More Awareness Campaign play, perhaps, one of the most important roles in the day, as they give their testimonies on the Hill after the march. The young men and women who remain for that event, where they hear story after story of the devastating harm done by legal abortions, cannot possibly go away thinking that it’s no big deal or an easy answer to a crisis pregnancy. I only wish that some of the counter-protestors would stay and at least listen to these people—real people, who really got into terrible situations and did turn to abortion to solve their problem, only to find it did no such thing.

My own sadness in the whole thing is the extent to which the two sides seem to talk past each other. Those of us in the pro-life movement firmly hold that a new human life begins at conception (that is a strictly scientific statement, by the way), and that every human life should be extended the protection of law (a statement grounded in the entire legal tradition of our society). One human being simply cannot kill another human being, except for very rigorously defined and long established exceptions—self-defence, soldiers at war.

In terms of the strict question of the morality of abortion, that is the beginning and the end of the matter. Once we establish the existence of a living human being (and there is no question of this from any point of view of science), the legal protections given human life apply, or ought to. ‘Everybody counts, or nobody counts’, as fictional detective Harry Bosch says when he tracks down the murderer of yet another obscure demimondaine over the objections of his superiors.

Well, that is the fundamental pro-life position, but of course the pro-choice (to use their own name for themselves) position simply refuses to engage that. They really seem to believe that we don’t really believe that, and that the whole thing is a bluff to hide our real intentions, which is the suppression and control of women.

“Our bodies, our choice,” is the chant they used yesterday, along with “Pro-life is a lie. You don’t care if women die!” But the choice is to kill another human being. I cannot use my body to do that, can I? Meanwhile, it is true that every pregnancy has its risks—there is no question of that. But many women also die because of complications from abortion, not to mention the long-term negative effects of abortion on many fronts, none of which are ever presented to the woman when she is considering the procedure (so much for informed consent!).

And many doctors, faced with a woman who is pregnant and who also has this or that health issue, are quick to pressure the woman to have an abortion. I know many women who have resisted that pressure, carried a healthy baby to term and successfully dealt with their other health issues. Too often doctors prescribe abortion, not because it is medically necessary, but because it simplifies their job.

Yes, there can be wrenching and difficult situations where there are no easy answers, and it is no service to the pro-life cause to ignore those. But in the hardest and worst of those scenarios, the basic truth remains: there are two human beings here, and both have to be considered, both have to be treated as human. Everybody counts, or nobody counts.

It just isn’t true that pro-lifers don’t care about women. We do care, and we know that abortion is no kind of a solution to the real problems and real sufferings that attend crisis pregnancies. What is needed are communities to surround all our suffering people in all situations with love, with concern, with support, with concrete help. For families to do that for their own members, and when that family network fails (which is tragically frequent in our day) for the larger community to pick up the slack. The great driver of abortion is family breakdown and social isolation and abandonment.

To say ‘You mustn’t kill you child!” and then give no help or support is not really pro-life, is it? But to say “I will support you as you kill your child!” is not really supporting the woman, either.

Anyhow, I don’t write about abortion much, not because I don’t care about it, but because I care very much, and it’s hard to write about it, frankly. But these are the thoughts that marched around in my brain as I marched around Ottawa, and listened, and prayed. Everybody counts, or nobody counts. And I believe everybody counts.