Getting to the Point

Deliver me from my enemies, O my God;

protect me from those who rise up against me.

Deliver me from those who work evil;

from the bloodthirsty save me.

Even now they lie in wait for my life;

the mighty stir up strife against me.

For no transgression or sin of mine, O Lord,

for no fault of mine, they run and make ready.

Rouse yourself, come to my help and see!

You, Lord God of hosts, are God of Israel.

Awake to punish all the nations;

spare none of those who treacherously plot evil.

Each evening they come back, howling like dogs

and prowling about the city.

There they are, bellowing with their mouths,

with sharp words on their lips—for “Who,” they think, “will hear us?”

But you laugh at them, O Lord; you hold all the nations in derision.

O my strength, I will watch for you; for you, O God, are my fortress.

My God in his steadfast love will meet me;

my God will let me look in triumph on my enemies…

Then it will be known to the ends of the earth that God rules over Jacob…

But I will sing of your might;

I will sing aloud of your steadfast love in the morning.

For you have been a fortress for me and a refuge in the day of my distress.

O my strength, I will sing praises to you, for you, O God, are my fortress

the God who shows me steadfast love.

Psalm 59

Reflection – Well, another week, another terrorist attack dominating the news. As we have been moving through this difficult section of the book of Psalms—the ‘gloomy 50s’, I’ve been calling it—the world has itself moved through some gloomy times, the ‘bloodthirsty’ have indeed had their moment lately, ‘prowling about the city’.

I found it bizarre that the visceral response of at least some in the face of this recent attack was to lash out with anger and contempt at those who were praying for the dead and their families. Even as the bodies were still warm and surgeons were attending to the wounded, even as the survivors and their families were publicly asking for prayers, some in the media found it appropriate to sneer that ‘God can’t fix this’ (an actual full page headline from one New York tabloid) and to tell people of faith to shut up because ‘we are the problem’ (an actual quote from a respected senior journalist).

Well, we won’t shut up, because God indeed can fix this. Yes, we cannot only pray or, worse yet, mouth empty platitudes about prayer while not even doing that. But we have to be very clear. There is a spirit of violence and death at loose in the world right now. Now the media does hype things up, and statistically we are still more at risk of dying in a car accident than a terrorist attack… but nonetheless this is real, this is happening, and it will continue to happen, a great evil of our time.

And the greater evil yet is the fear and anger these things stir up in people. Only a miniscule percentage of the population will ever be killed or injured, or even have a close family member killed or injured, by a terrorist. But there are shock waves—spiritual and emotional—that rocket forth from these things, and let loose upon the land all sorts of things we have to guard against. Anger, hatred, fear, anxiety, vengefulness. And in that, vulnerability to politicians playing on those emotions who may possibly not have our best interests at heart (not to mention any names, but it rhymes with Funnelled Rump).

And this is what God ‘can fix’, not to mention His consoling love for the grieving and His mercy in welcoming the fallen into His kingdom (I don’t expect journalists to understand much about those matters). We have to know that our security is not in electing some idiot with bad hair who promises us he’ll take care of the whole thing with his ‘best people’. Our security is in the Lord and the Lord alone. Yes, there are things we have to do about ISIS, and they are not nice things, not pleasant things. Nobody should welcome those things.

But we do not have to give in to fear, anger, panic, unreasoned hatred, vengeful bitterness. Why? Because our safety, our security, the sure hope of our life and the assurance of the victory of good over evil, light over darkness, truth over falsehood, is in the Lord and not in flesh and blood. In the final ascendancy of heaven over hell, love over hate.

Oh, God ‘fixes’ us, all right. He affixes us on the path of freedom and truth, the path of Gospel love and merciful care for our brothers and sisters, out of which we can make the right choices about our difficult world situation. To pray, and in that praying, renew our commitment to Christ and to His Gospel, is not an empty exercise, but is the heart of the matter, that which alone provides a path of light and peace in our troubled war-torn world. So let’s keep praying, and thinking, and loving, and serving, according to what Our Lord has given us and what His Spirit prompts us to do.

In the past decades, we have seen plenty of evidence on the streets and squares of our cities of how pacifism can be perverted into a destructive anarchism or, indeed, into terrorism. The political moralism of the 1970s, the roots of which are far from dead, was a moralism that succeeded in fascinating even young people who were full of ideals.

But it was a moralism that took the wrong direction, since it lacked the serenity born of rationality; in the last analysis, it attached a higher value to the political utopia than to the dignity of the individual, and it showed itself capable of despising man in the name of great objectives.

Joseph Ratzinger, Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

Reflection – I can’t exactly write my usual Saturday post on ‘this week in Madonna House’ for the simple reason that I was away all week and have no idea what happened around here. So I thought I would do a little throwback to the original blog format, dedicated to exploring the writings of Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI. I still firmly believe him to be one of the greatest if not the greatest theologians of the 20^th century, and his writings deserve a wide audience.

Ratzinger lived through the waves of extremist politics and violence that gripped Europe in the late 60s and 70s—the generation of the soixante-huitards were his university students, and he had ample opportunity to study the phenomenon at close quarters.

This  is a great question of our time, the perversion of idealism into terrorism, and it is one we all have to grapple with. There have been numerous examples in the media in recent months of ‘good, normal boys’ who have been radicalized and become servants of the violent apocalyptic agenda of ISIS. There is a real need to account for how this group, which to most people seems frankly insane, can attract at least some young men, not even Muslim to begin with, to itself.

There are those who would say, “Who cares? If they’re with the terrorists, let’s kill them!” Others would say, “You see! It proves that religion is inherently dangerous! End religion and the problem goes away.” Others are… well, just perplexed by it all.

I would argue, as Ratzinger does here, that the problem is not religion or high ideals, but religion and ideals not moderated by reason and solid first principles. And this is precisely what we have failed to give our children, dating back to at least my own childhood, but certainly more so in the subsequent decades.

The human person is inherently idealistic, and I would argue that there is no demographic more in need of, and hungry for, real idealism than the young human male. Young men need a vision of life to which they can commit their youthful energy and drive, lest it be directed to destructive and wasteful channels.

We have not given young men this vision of life; we have given them video games and internet filth. And we are then baffled when at least some of the young men who are not satisfied with this diet of distraction and debauchery are easy prey for the violent ideologues of the Middle East.

The solution is not to stamp out the idealism of the human person, but to provide an idealism that both extends to the heights of heaven (and so meets the need for transcendence that is embedded in our souls) and yet is intensely humanistic, intensely committed to the irreducible value of the human person. We need to present a vision of life that is inherently heroic, but that calls forth a heroism that is essentially non-violent, directed at all times towards the care of the individual.

My own firm conviction is that Catholic Christianity does provide ample heroic scope for life, setting forth the essential call to love as Christ loves us, to be servants of the kingdom of love in this world and to lay down one’s life for the sake of that kingdom. At the same time, Catholicism has a rich intellectual tradition that undergirds and supports its heroic visionary core, and a mystical heart—the sacramental life of the Church—that is accessible to all and makes this heroic scope of life possible for everyone, not just for the privileged elite few.

We cannot fight bad religion with no religion, bad ideals with no ideals, radicalism with nihilism. The remedy for the new wave of political and religious terrorism in our times is not to stuff everyone with lots of goodies and diversions, but to present an alternative that is compelling and beautiful.

Come to think of it, that is exactly what happened ‘this week at Madonna House’, and every week at MH for that matter. That’s exactly what our whole mandate and mission is here—to shine forth the radiant vision of life and love that the Gospel of Jesus Christ has given us, and that the Person of Jesus Christ has sustained in us by his grace. That’s what we do here; that’s why MH exists. 

So… come one, come all, especially come all you young people seeking to find and deepen and live a vision of life that is worthy of your greatness. There is such a vision, and it flows from the heart of Jesus Christ eternally to the world and to every human being alive in it.

Transferring to humanity the prerogatives which Christians acknowledge to be God’s, positivism, by that very fact, reverses in the social field the attitude of Christianity, whose heir it means to be.

Without rights vis a vis God, since he receives his whole being from God, the individual thought he had rights vis a vis society: however organically incorporated in it., however subject to its authority in all things temporal, however sincerely devoted to its welfare, he was aware of transcending it by his first beginnings and his latter end.

He knew that, by what lay deepest in himself, he formed part of a greater and vaster society and that, in the last analysis, everything rested with an authority that was not human…

But, if temporal society is an adequate manifestation of the only true deity, from whom the individual receives all that he is, how can he have any right as against society? That notion of right is essentially ‘theological-metaphysical’… the positive faith, everywhere substituting the relative for the absolute, substitutes ‘laws for causes and duties for rights.’

Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism

Reflection – Well, it’s been a while since we had a ‘difficult’ text on this blog, and it’s good for us (that is to say, me) to flex some intellectual muscle once in a while. All my fancy book-larnin’ has not been for nothing, after all.

De Lubac’s book is, I believe, still one of the most important books of the 20^th century. It has held up extraordinarily well in its analysis of the tragic dynamic of atheism, its false promise of liberation and human fulfillment, and its subsequent collapse into tyranny and human destruction. It’s a slender little book, and for the most part quite readable; I recommend it highly.

This quote is taking that discussion to the field of human rights and society. If you find it a bit convoluted, let me un-convulate it for you. Essentially, de Lubac is saying that human rights either come from God by virtue of His creation of man and the inherent structure, nature, and dignity of the human person, or human rights come from society and the social contract—a shared consensus of values among those living in the community.

But since ‘society’ is an abstraction and human rights are concrete, what this latter concept of right really means is that our rights are granted us by the state. And this is no true right, but a concession, a privilege, which can then be revoked by government fiat.

In other words, either our rights are from God and dwell within us ineradicably, or we exercise whatever freedom we have at the good pleasure of our social masters. It is either God or the president/prime minister/congress/parliament/courts.

There is a great irony here. De Lubac is quite right that, if our whole being is from God, then we have no rights vis a vis God—this would imply some higher power to which we could appeal against the One who is All in All. So humans would seem to be in a state of radical subjectivity and bondage towards God, which is the position of Sartre and Nietzsche.

But God is changeless, eternal, not subject to flux. Once we grasp that God’s creative will towards us is for our freedom and dignity, our capacity to genuinely act and move freely, then the whole notion of human rights becomes very secure.

If we reject God and His dominion, we are indeed left with the highest power being the government. The changeable, fluid, political, malleable, intensely corruptible, say-whatever-will-get-us-elected next time government—and this is the guardian of human rights, freedom, and dignity?

What Caesar can give, Caesar can take away. If the state is the source, or even (since in our post-modernity frivolity and folly we are allergic to metaphysical statements and avoid them whenever possible) simply the final arbiter of human rights, our freedoms are very perilous indeed. We have to think about these things: atheism tends towards tyranny and arbitrary exercises of state power; religion tends towards rule of law, at least (the historical record at least bears this out), which itself is an absolutely necessary pre-condition for democracy.

Trusting another means taking one’s stand on someone else’s intelligence and embracing as true what one has not decided for one’s self… it implies a recognition by the mind of its own limits, an acceptance of dependence, a surrender of my absolute sovereignty…

The rejection of the truth comes down to the choice of self affirmation and rejection of affirmation of God… acknowledging what is, submitting to the real, means acknowledging something that I have not decided for myself and therefore already saying yes to God…

What we get now is instead of acknowledgment of a sovereign Law by which all will be judged, individuals and society, is the arbitrary decision of one particular will, which decrees good and evil, and against which there is no longer any appeal… here at the end of the line the perverse roots of the rejection of truth are stripped bare. The will to power appears in all its inexorableness.

Jean Danielou, The Scandal of Truth

Reflection – The theme of our summer program this week has been ‘Show Me God: Finding God in Truth, Beauty, and Goodness’. We have had a variety of presentations along these lines, many of them leaning rather heavily in the direction of the latter two of the transcendentals, beauty and goodness. We have had some good teachings on the nature of truth, as well, but I have noticed over the years, not particularly in Madonna House but in the world at large, a tendency to shy away from the word truth or the notion of truth.

Relativism of one sort or another seems to be the operative system for many today. It doesn’t make huge amounts of sense, of course. How can it be absolutely asserted as true that there is no such thing as truth? How can we say it is certainly true that we cannot know for certain what is true? The whole thing collapses under its weight before it gets off the ground.

No, it fails as an intellectual system, miserably and utterly. But it succeeds, or seems to succeed, as a sociological system, as a way of ensuring social harmony and peace. You have your truth and I have my truth and it’s OK because there is no actual truth or nobody knows what it is and so everybody dance! Clap along if you know that happiness is the truth! Whatever that means. Who cares – it has a good beat!

All of this put me in mind of this very fine book by Danielou published in the 1960s. It has lost none of its relevance today. Truth does scandalize us; that is, it is an obstacle we trip over (the original meaning of the word scandal), something awkward, in the way, something we would like to do away with so we can do as we please, go as we please.

The rage on the political left in the aftermath of the Hobby Lobby case in the US is instructive in this regard. For one thing, it puts a lie to the claim that relativism is the path to social peace and harmony, and lays bare the inherently totalitarian and dictatorial nature of relativism.

One group holds that it is true that there is an absolute right to free contraception (a strange claim, in my mind, one I have never seen really argued for, but assumed as a dogma, I guess). Some in society believe that contraception, or at least some forms of contraception, are morally evil, and while having no interest in coercing other people from committing those evil acts, do not want to actually be cooperating in them by paying the bill for them. 

Now in a genuinely tolerant society, it would be a no-brainer to work out some accommodation whereby if the government really believed that the first group was justified in its claim, it could meet their ‘right’ without violating the beliefs and conscience of the second group. And, to their credit, Congress in the 1992 RFRA, and the Supreme Court in its interpretation of that law and its present application to the current matter of Hobby Lobby, etc., came to that very conclusion.

And… all hell broke loose among the first group. Strange, that. Apparently it is not acceptable to work out some compromise that respects everyone’s beliefs and lets everyone alone. The second group—people who sincerely believe they would be doing a grave evil if they paid for these products—must be forced to capitulate, must have their consciences crushed, obliterated, wiped out.

And so the will to power shows itself. When there is no greater truth—even the simple truth that people should be allowed to follow their consciences so long as doing so does not harm the social fabric—then what is left is not freedom but rather a naked power struggle in which whoever has the upper hand can ruthlessly suppress those who are in a weaker position.

Well, all I can say to those who are fine with that is, watch out. Those who live by the sword will die by the sword, and today’s winners may not be tomorrow’s. If might is right is the only relevant principle, then nobody’s rights are secure, not in the least.