Getting to the Point: humanity

Showing posts with label humanity. Show all posts

Thursday, April 28, 2016

Abel, Abraham, and Melchizedek

Our Thursday journey through the Mass has now taken us deep into the Eucharistic Prayer, on the far side of the Consecration. And so we come to this little gem of a prayer:

Be pleased to look upon these offerings with a serene and kindly countenance, and to accept them, as you were pleased to accept the gifts of your servant Abel the just, the sacrifice of Abraham, our father in faith, and the offering of your high priest Melchizedek, a holy sacrifice, a spotless victim.

What’s this about, and what has it to do with us and how we are to live our lives? I will leave aside the repeated prayer that God look with kindness open our offering and accept it—this aspect of things has been well covered in this commentary already. And last week I covered the whole reality of Jesus Christ the holy sacrifice, the spotless victim.

So why do Abel, Abraham, and Melchizedek barge in here? What have they to do with what we are doing on this altar? And why these particular three, when the Old Testament is filled with examples of men offering various sacrifices to God? Why not Noah or Jacob or Elijah or David or Solomon?

To get that question out of the way, Abel was the first one recorded to make a acceptable sacrifice to God (Gen 4:4), Abraham’s sacrifice of his son Isaac (which God did not ultimately ask him to make) shows that God desires not merely this or that offering from us but faith and trust (Gen 22: 1-19), and the offering of Melchizedek, the mystery man, of bread and wine (Gen 14:18) has always been seen (and indeed is developed at length in the letter to the Hebrews) as an type of Christ and his priestly offering.

The three together root the sacrifice of the Mass, what we are doing here and now this day on this altar in this church, with this whole unbroken line of humanity, all flesh coming before God to seek communion with Him. We are so often such petty little creatures, wrapped up in our own problems and concerns, living like ants who cannot see anything beyond the immediate near horizon.

At this moment of the Mass we are called to know ourselves as part of the vast body of humanity, extended through time and space, a single entity made by God and for God, seeking God, at times rebelling and running away from God, yet perpetually returning to the source who made us, who loves us, and who desires us to enter this offering of love and communion.

By calling us out of the here and now and reminding us of our spiritual ancestors the Church calls us to solidarity with all humanity. I would suggest that this especially means being mindful of our solidarity with those members of humanity who may be outside the immediate body of believers, the Catholic Church, or even of the whole Body of Christ that are the Christians spread throughout the world.

All people, whether they know it or not, are called into this communion. Furthermore, all people of good will are striving one way or another for this communion, although they may call it by very different words and understand it quite differently. But anyone who is sincerely striving for the good, the true, and the beautiful is essentially bringing their goods to the altar of God hoping that He will find it acceptable, whether they would put it that way themselves.

We know that it is only in the offering of Christ that this hunger and thirst for the good, the true, the beautiful, for communion in love and the final transcendence of our humanity into divinity is realized. But we also know that our God is a merciful God and that He looks with great pity and tender concern on every human being He has made, and that the whole action of His grace in every human heart is ordered towards making that person’s life-offering one with the Life-Offering of the Son.

And so this little moment of the Eucharistic Prayer which we may wonder at, not think too deeply about, and then move on from, in fact calls us to a profound solidarity with every human being on the face of the earth, a deep prayer that the Lord will find us all acceptable in his sight, and that all flesh will at last come into the Temple of God and make to Him the sacrifice pleasing to Him, which is our faith and union with Jesus Christ.

Wednesday, November 4, 2015

'What Will Bring Us Happiness?', Many Say

The past eight Wednesdays I have gone through my book Idol Thoughts, laying out the traditional doctrine of the eight thoughts that take us away from God, from the happiness He promises us. The eight ‘idols’ that promise us happiness on their terms, but which of course are false in their promises.

Having established in the book that happiness is not found in the satisfaction of the body (gluttony), in the body of another (lust), in material security (avarice), or in revenge (anger), in getting one’s way (despondency), in oblivion (acedia), in human respect (vainglory) or in mastery (pride), an obvious question arises.

Namely, so what is it, then? If all of these thoughts are the idol thoughts, the lying thoughts that tell us false things about happiness, what is the true happiness? As the blog title says, ‘Get To The Point’, Lemieux. What will bring us happiness, many say? (Psalm 4).

OK, it’s the Eucharist, then. Satisfied? Well, you should be.

That is, it is God and the possession of God which is the happiness of the human person. Everything the thoughts seem to promise us, all the drives and desires of our natural humanity that they distort due to our fallen condition, all of this is fulfilled in a perfect and everlasting way by our communion with God.

Ultimately, heaven. But here on earth, Holy Communion. He gives Himself to us as food and drink, and so heals our gluttony. His Body is given to us in an intimacy of communion beside which sexual intercourse pales in comparison, and so heals lust.

His gift of Himself to us assures our life in the most profound security—goodbye, avarice! He is the Divine Justice, and comes to heal all the evil and injustice of the world, and so meets our anger with the power of mercy. He does not give us our own way, or oblivion, but rather shows us that what we really want is really real, and is found in Him and in the path of love and communion in this world—take a bow, despondency and acedia. You both had a good run.

In His gift of Himself to us in this way He ‘validates’ our existence in the most radical sense possible, pays us direct personal and intimate attention and lavishes us with Himself—no need for vainglory. And in all of this we become true sharers of His Divine Life, truly ascend through, with, and in Him to the heights of heaven itself—so, pride – what were you offering us again?

All that the lying thoughts promised us, He gives to us, all in that little Host that is the whole of Himself, the whole of His life. It is not a symbol. It is not some strained metaphor. It is not some vague abstraction. It is Jesus, really and truly Jesus, and because of that, ‘It’ is God Himself, giving Himself to us here and now in the most profound way possible.

In all the discussions of who can receive communion and who cannot, I am sometimes grieved that there is little sense that the gift of the Eucharist is what it actually is, what we all say we believe it to be. And so it is worth making great sacrifices to receive it. Worth making radical changes in one’s life. Worth losing everything, if need be. Worth ‘selling all you possess and following [Him]’, as I read somewhere or other. There seems to be little sense of that in the conversations going on in the Church now—at least I haven’t heard anyone put it so baldly.

People may object at this point (it’s OK – I don’t mind!) that when they receive the Eucharist they don’t ‘feel’ all of the above. Don’t feel entirely happy, shall we say. That they tried all of that Catholic stuff, and IT DIDN”T WORK. So then what?

The question of ‘feelings’ in the spiritual life is a tricky one. We know that we cannot gauge life in general simply by how we feel about it at any given moment (and of course ‘feelings’ are always of the moment). At least, people who are not entirely foolish know this.

But at the same time, a happiness that has no reference to any kind of experience is a bit unreal, to say the least. The Eucharist will make you happy! But I don’t feel any better or different. Well, it’s not that kind of happiness! Uhhh…. OK? Not terribly satisfying.

While there are complexities in all this, some of which go into physical, chemical, and psychological depths I am neither prepared nor qualified to discuss, there is one aspect I am qualified to discuss. Namely, that some of our dissatisfaction with Jesus lies in the fact that we approach the Eucharist still in the grips of the thoughts. In other words, that we come to Jesus in hopes that He will gratify us in our selfish pursuit of self-directed, self-defined, self-ordered happiness. ‘Prosperity Christianity’ – the idea that we should have faith in God and in Christ so that He can make us rich and successful… according to our lights, our desires, our hopes and dreams.

When really, we should have faith in God and in Christ so that He can make our lives successful and yes, rich… but according to His ideas under those headings, which may be a bit different from the world’s.

At any rate, I see from my word count that I have written quite enough for one day, so I had better wrap this up. And that’s it for my little tour of Idol Thoughts. I do encourage you to buy it – American readers may prefer to use this link. Next week in this space we will begin to look at the Year of Mercy – you may be surprised to know that I have some thoughts about that subject. Until then!

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Bread and Wine

My Thursday commentary on the Mass has taken us past the Liturgy of the Word and so now into the Liturgy of the Offertory, the Preparation of the Gifts. At this point, while of course words are still used in the Mass, the use of the symbol begins to emerge here in its prominence.

So I want to spend some time these next few weeks discussing the central symbols of the Mass that dominate the action of the Eucharist. Specifically, there is 'bread and wine', there is the altar, and there is the priest. These are the basic symbolic elements of the celebration of the Mass into which we all enter in worship.

Why is it bread and wine that is used for the matter of the sacrament? Of all the foods that could be chosen, why did Our Lord choose these two? Why does the Church insist on wheat bread and grape wine, even when this may be inconvenient (say, in mission areas where these need to be shipped in at some expense)? Or even when it may make it difficult for an individual Catholic to receive the Eucharist (say, someone with celiac disease or an alcoholic)?

Fundamentally of course it is a matter of obedience. The Lord used bread and wine, told us to do what he was doing the way he was doing it, and so we have no authority to change it. That's really it--the sacraments were not our brilliant idea, not ours in their institution and so not ours to muck around with and change according to whatever brilliant idea is floating around in the Church or in the world (this applies to all the sacraments, marriage and priesthood being the two that people seem to want to muck around with the most these days).

But anyhow, back to bread and wine. Granting that we use them for the simple reason that Jesus done told us to do so, is there anything more to be said? Quite a bit more, actually. Bread is the great scriptural symbol of the basic reality of human life. The word itself in Hebrew is used interchangeably with 'food'. Bread is sustenance, bread is survival. The core reality of ordinary life lived day to day.

Bread also has a shadow side, too. Life is labor, life is hard. 'You will earn your bread by the sweat of your brow.' There is the bread of affliction the people ate in Egypt--bread has this aspect of hard labor, of a world that is marked by economic hardship, injustice, exploitation. Bread is life... but life is hard.

Wine is something quite different, symbolically. We cannot live without bread, symbolically speaking. We can live without wine. Wine is the great symbol in the Bible of life lived beyond the level of mere survival, mere sustenance. Wine is the symbol of human flourishing, joy, celebration. Life as not just a chore to be endured but as something happy, something rich and full.

But wine too has its shadow side. Drunkenness, folly, the wreckage of life that comes when it is consumed rashly or without due measure. Wine 'gladdens the heart', to use the fine biblical phrase, but it can also sadden the heart, drunk in the wrong amount at the wrong time.

All of this meaning is taken into the action of the Mass. Bread and wine are taken to the altar and given to the priest. Everything that human life is - the basic reality, the hard laborious injustice, the glad celebration and joy, and the tragic wreckage of our brokenness - all of this is carried up the aisle of the church to be given to the priest and placed on the altar.

I will say more about those symbols next week, but for now the main point is that Christ's choosing of bread and wine means he has chosen us, that he has chosen to bring all of human life in its beauty and goodness and its tragic suffering into his own offering. There is nothing - not one particle of our human life, that is outside of the Eucharist, that cannot be brought into the mystery of Christ and of God. These simple Eucharistic elements of bread and wine contain within them the whole panoply of the human condition, the human experience. And all of it is to be brought to the altar of God, all of it is to be brought into the mystery of Christ and His love.

As to what happens to those elements, what happens to our human lives, what happens to us when this is done... well, that's for the posts ahead. Stay tuned.

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

A Fair And Reasonable Question

What does the word ‘gender’ mean?

I have been wanting to write a post about this for some time. I realize that the very fact that I have written the above sentence is enough to brand me in some people’s minds as a ‘H8R’, a bigot, who should be jailed if not killed, and at the very least driven from polite society.

I find it interesting that asking a simple question about a definition of a common word yields that reaction. Gender has become the third rail of public discourse today, and to even touch on the subject with anything besides the rote and rather vacuous slogans of the day (‘Love Wins!’) is to take one’s life in one’s hands.

Well, nobody has ever accused me of being timid. So I’m going to jump on the third rail and ride it as far as it will take me here. The architects of critical gender theory, the activists of the LGBTQ movement, do indeed want their concept of gender to be the organizing principle of society, to deconstruct and discard the binary notion of male-female polarity for… well, what, exactly? What does the word ‘gender’ mean, as it is used by these activists? It seems to me that this is a reasonable and fair question, since we are supposed to construct society around their definition.

So let us first establish what gender is not, according to this world view. First, gender is not anatomy. It is not body morphology—men are shaped one way, women are shaped another way. This has nothing to do with the person’s gender—so we are told.

Second, gender is not sexual orientation. There are men who identify as men who are gay, women identifying as women who are lesbian.

Third, gender is not a list of personality traits. This of course was established by second wave feminism. It is sexist, we have been told (and I happen to agree, largely) to say that women are gentle, sweet, empathetic, emotional, while men are logical, aggressive, strong.

Fourth, gender is not defined by the things we are interested in or are good at. Women like flowers, clothes, cooking, babies, while men like cars, sports, guns. I also happen to agree with this, being very much a man while having precisely zero interest in cars and guns and only a slight interest in sports (I’m not much on flowers or clothes, either…)

Fifth, gender is not defined by social roles. Women stay at home and take care of the kids while men go out and earn money for their families.

So… gender is not your body, your personality, your interests, your actions, or who you want to sleep with. Ummm… what is it, then? Please, someone elucidate it for me. I swear I am not being sarcastic or asking the question rhetorically. I want to know what people mean when they say that someone with the body of a man is ‘really’ a woman, even if he (sorry, she) does not choose to have the radical body modifications needed to outwardly resemble a woman in body morphology.

It does seem to me that there is something almost mystical in this deconstructed notion of gender, something so interior and ineffable that it is difficult to put into words beyond the phraseology of ‘I just know it to be so.’ But, my brothers and sisters, massive and complete social reconstruction cannot be done on the basis of such interior and mystical knowledge – it is unreasonable to expect society to reconfigure itself around something ‘you just know.’ I just know that I am a Catholic priest, not as a job or profession but as a mystical configuration of my soul to Christ the head of the Church. But I would never expect a non-Catholic to call me ‘Father’.

For myself, I believe gender is, simply, body morphology, determined by chromosomes. Yes, there are the vanishingly rare instances of babies born inter-sex, and this is a medical and social problem for those very few people—but this is not common enough to justify jettisoning the male-female bi-polarity that has been the basis of every human society since human beings have existed.

And just to completely cook my goose, I wish to say very simply and without any rancor or dislike or indeed anything but great compassion and friendship for all people, that I believe the men who believe they are women and the women who believe they are men are in fact suffering from a mental illness and need psychiatric help, not surgical mutilation and society enabling.

I do find it odd that this is considered by many to be a hateful thing to say. That attitude itself seems to reflect contempt and hatred for people who are mentally ill. As a priest I have many people in my life who suffer from various kinds of mental illness. It is a hard suffering, but it’s not a death sentence and it is not inherently an insult to someone to say “I believe your problem is psychological.”

Anyhow, I don’t intend to write ongoingly about the whole ‘transgender moment’ we are having in our society right now – this is not that kind of blog, obsessing over whatever the controversy of the day is. But I think the question I raise is reasonable and fair. I have given my answer to it, and I would be interested to hear other answers, and other civil responses to it (for anyone who is new to the blog reading this, abusive nasty comments will be deleted without mercy!).

So, what does gender mean?

Saturday, August 15, 2015

'Whoever God Loves Never Ceases To Be'

Happy Feast of the Assumption, everyone. Mary is assumed body and soul into heaven as the first fruits of the Resurrection, and heaven and earth rejoice at the sight. We are celebrating the day in full Madonna House festive style, which I will tell you about tomorrow, God willing.

Meanwhile, I thought for my blog today I would share a bit of my licentiate thesis on the theme of the Assumption. It’s a bit longer than usual, and just a bit ‘high brow’, but it’s a while since I had anything like that on the blog, and highbrow or not, it’s really such a beautiful dogma of our faith, ancient in origin, recent in infallible promulgation, entirely joyful and lovely. So, after the jump, here it is:

Our Not-So-Sacred History

In my weekly commentary on the Mass I have now reached the First Reading, the Old Testament reading. Now remember, the basic point I am making in this commentary is that the Mass is the pattern for how we are to live our life, that everything we need to know about living as a Christian can be found in the very structure of the rite of the Eucharist.

How does this thesis apply to the reading of the Old Testament in our liturgy? The O.T. is a complex series of books, after all—stories, prophecies, law codes, wisdom literature, lamentations and exaltations. Parts of it appal us—mass slaughters and crude primitive justice. Parts of it baffle us—the obscure parts of the Law, prophetic passages filled with references to obscure places and long extinct tribes and nations.

It is way beyond my scope to provide a sweeping explanation for the O.T. and its place in our lives—Scripture scholars spend their lives on such things. I would say, though, that in this context of the Mass and its structuring of our life, we can say that the O.T., in general, is all about the past. It is about life before Christ, B.C. And as such, of course it is equal parts baffling, appalling, radiantly beautiful, but always flawed by human weakness and sin.

The O.T. is, basically, humanity. It is us, and we are equal parts appalling, baffling, beautiful, flawed. But the O.T. is more than that. It is humanity continually met by God—a God who at times is just as mysterious and baffling and whose actions can appal us, but God nonetheless. At every turn of the O.T., we meet man in all his moods and caprices, odd flashes of virtue and tragic lapses into villainy.

And at every turn in the O.T. we see God coming to man, veiled in mystery and hard to make out, for sure, but God nonetheless, coming to redeem, to teach, to heal, to lead, to rebuke, to punish, but always taking us somewhere, always seeming to have a plan to bring us somewhere, somehow.

The whole history of the O.T., of God’s people and their comings and goings to and from Him, only finally makes sense when we see that He was bringing them to a very fine and exact point, a point who is a person, a person who is young woman in a village called Nazareth who would finally and definitively say the great ‘yes’ of humanity to the great ‘Yes’ of divinity—and so Christ is born in human flesh. Everything from Adam and Eve to the last prophetic utterance is brought to its real meaning, its divine purpose and import, in this one young girl and her conversation with the angel Gabriel.

Well, what about you and me and the First Reading and the Mass? Well, each of us has a past, don’t we? Each of us has our own life ‘B.C.’, so to speak. Each of us has our baffling, appalling, beautiful, ugly, good, bad history, self, life. We all have baggage—the entire history of humanity is the baggage carried in the O.T. as a whole; but you and I have our own baggage, our own not-so-sacred history.

And the Church’s insistence from the very beginning to keep this messy business of the O.T., first in the canon of Scripture, but also in the liturgy of the Mass, is deeply meaningful for us. It means that God can redeem everything. It means that nothing, even the ugliest and most horrifying parts of our human life, is beyond the reach of redeeming love.

It means that everything that has ever happened to you, to me, to anyone—all of it, without exception!—whatever else it might mean, whatever else entered into it, has one final divine purpose and import. Everything in our lives is meant to bring us to the point and the place where we can say, as Mary did, “I am the servant of the Lord. Let it be done to me according to your will.” And in that, Christ is born in us. Christ lives in us. Christ suffers and dies in us. And Christ is risen in us, and we are raised up in Him.

The Old Testament in all its raw, earthy humanity, presents to us both a great promise and a great challenge (funny how those two things usually go together). Our real life is really taken up into the Real Life of God. Consoling, but also very challenging indeed. A call to Christian responsibility; a call to deep spiritual maturity; a call to look at everything that has been and that is in our life and to respond in Marian simplicity of heart to it, to open our innermost recesses of our being to the grace of Christ so that all of it, every particle of our being, every last second of our lives, can be met and transformed by redeeming love, so that the Old Testament of our lives can yield to the New Testament of grace and mercy, forever.