Getting to the Point: truth

Showing posts with label truth. 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, January 13, 2016

Works of Mercy: Instructing the Ignorant

Our Wednesday series on the Works of Mercy has completed the corporal works, those dedicated to the good of the body, and now we turn to the spiritual works, those pertaining to the good of the soul.

The first spiritual work of mercy is to instruct the ignorant. Here we come to a difficulty of terminology. It seems that in our contemporary culture (at least I have run across this many times), the word ‘ignorant’ is used as a term of abuse, intended only to insult. Oddly enough, it seems to have acquired a harsher sting that the word ‘stupid’, which makes no sense.

I guess I am just too aware of ancient languages and word etymologies to really understand this. ‘Ignorant’ simply means ‘not knowing’ something. ‘Stupid’ means ‘incapable of knowing things because of some intellectual disability. Which is a worse insult, really?

I am ignorant of all sorts of things—auto mechanics, rugby, the chief exports of Indonesia, and how to stop LinkedIn from sending me spam e-mail. I am always grateful, and in fact experience it as a work of mercy, when someone who knows about something that I do not know much about takes the time and trouble to educate me. It’s so easy to just throw up one’s hands and say ‘Well, this person is stupid and I can’t be bothered – imagine not knowing about that at their age!’

And so… instructing the ignorant. A great work of mercy, and one which all of us can engage in, though some of us are called to engage in it a lot more frequently. Today in Madonna House we begin the guest classes on the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It is a straightforward ‘just the facts, ma’am’ kind of course: this is what the Catholic Church teaches, and it’s all in this here book laid out with paragraph numbers and everything, see!

The reason we do this is because about fifty years ago the Catholic Church in North America decided as a general policy to stop instructing the ignorant. People of my generation and younger grew up learning precisely nothing about what the Catholic Church teaches, what our faith actually is. And then we are puzzled and shocked when they all leave the Church as teenagers—were they ever given a reason to stay?

Well, I had nothing to do with that decision, and have no idea why on earth it was decided that we should no longer tell anyone anything of the doctrines of the faith. I have in fact dedicated quite a bit of my adult life to doing what I could to reverse that disastrous course of action. And I call on all Catholics of good will—pastors, teachers, parents, everyone—to do what they can, because we are in a ridiculous situation now, where we have had fifty years of exemplary magisterial teaching, pope after pope laying out the riches and splendors of the Catholic faith for all to see… and very few know anything about it, because those charged with telling them have refused their charge.

Well, enough on that subject, which obviously I feel very strongly about and can rant away on if I please. But instructing the ignorant is more than just religious education, central as that is. What about auto mechanics? What about teaching a handicraft you yourself have learned? What about simply sharing with someone else a fantastic movie, a great piece of music, an appreciation for art that you have? And… does anyone know how to block LinkedIn from sending me e-mails? Because man is that ever annoying!

Knowledge is wealth, and wealth of any kind in this world is given for one reason only—to be shared with those who lack it. That there is a basic principle of reality, by the way. Wealth only is given so as to be shared—it has no other purpose.

Catherine Doherty loved to tell the story of going to school for the first time when she was a wee girl in Russia. She came home and told her father excitedly “We learned the alphabet today!” He looked at her gravely, and said “That’s wonderful, Katia. But remember, knowledge received must be passed on. The kitchen maids don’t know how to read. Why don’t you go now and teach them the alphabet?”

And so this little six year old child began what would be a life long work, as she climbed up on a tall stool in the kitchen and taught the kitchen maids the Russian alphabet. And for the rest of her life she tirelessly passed on, with ingenuity and creativity, whatever knowledge she had been given along the way.

Go and do likewise.

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Why People Are Nervous

Today it seems as though language had been robbed of its forgetfulness: every word is present somewhere in the general noise of words around us. In the general noise of words everything emerges for a moment, only to disappear again. Everything is there at the same time and yet not there at all.

There is no longer any present immediacy of the word and therefore no forgetting. Forgetting is no longer done by man directly but proceeds outside his control in the general noise of words jostling one with another.

But that is not a forgetting at all, but merely a disappearing. And so there is no forgiving either in the world today; since now one can never get rid of a word or a thing, it is always bound to turn up again somewhere. And it is also a fact that one never really has a word or a thing today—and that is why people are so nervous.

Max Picard, The World of Silence

Reflection - I have been working my way through this wonderful book, and periodically have shared some of its nuggets on this blog. This one in particular seems almost eerily prophetic—Max Picard invents the Internet! There are so many choice phrases here that almost exactly describe the world of information today: ‘Everything is there at the same time and yet not there at all… the general noise of words jostling one with another... now one can never get rid of a word or a thing, it is always bound to turn up again somewhere… that is why people are so nervous.’

Well, yes. And almost cliché to say these things nowadays, but this book was written in 1948. To be both constantly engulfed in words and yet at the same time never have them, to be both incapable of forgetting (and hence forgiving) since the Internet is forever, and yet at the same time incapable of remembering, since the rush of words continually races past us (not forgotten, but disappearing)—this is Internet culture, 2015.

And it is unacceptable. Inhuman, and hence incapable of aiding us to be made divine by God’s grace. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us—language is meant to serve its divine purpose always in the end of communion of persons, always towards becoming ‘flesh’ and making our flesh, our concrete experience of life, a communion of love.

Language as a ceaseless flow of binary information across a flat screen is the anti-Incarnation. Language as a roar of verbiage, a clamor and clash of agendas, a fighting for a slight fleeting flicker of attention from the mob, ultimately language as click-bait in the service of generating advertising revenue—this is a perversion of what it is to be. Language is degraded from a quest for truth and understanding ordered towards communion and love to being, essentially, a sales pitch.

In this time of the Synod on the Family, I am concerned to see that roar of language, that clamor and clash and base sophistry of marketing and sales being used to ‘talk about’ (well, sort of) that which is truly a sacred matter, a holy thing. Both the realities of sex, marriage, and family life, but also the reality of the human person made in God’s image, broken by sin but redeemed in Christ—this is the true subject matter of the Synod.

There is a real profanation of the holy, a desecration of God’s image, when the inchoate howl of Internet chatter and punditry engulfs these conversations. I am not talking about the Synod itself—the Pope has decided we need a synod to talk about these things, and I am praying for that synod and doing my best to follow its actual deliberations.

It is the constant blah-blah-blah, the hand wringing, the claxon sounding, the sounding of the alarum against ‘those horrible modernists’ or ‘those horrible traditionalists’, against Kasper or Erdo, Marx or Sarah, the calls to action, the ‘deep concerns and confusion’ of this writer or that writer, the apocalyptic fears on that website or the triumphalist yells on another—all of this is more than divisive and distasteful.

It is sacrilegious. Yes, strong language and so forth. I don’t care. Language is debased and in that debasing of language, actual human beings are damaged, the path of salvation in Christ is obscured, the way of truth and love in the world is made hard to find and ultimately souls beloved of God are made to stumble and fall from that way. And that is scandal, in the exact sense of the word.

So there is a Synod going on. Let us pray for it. Let us address ourselves to our own call to live faithfully the mysteries of family, love, and human sexuality according to our own vocations. And let us otherwise be still and silent. I will not be blogging about the Synod, for the reasons given in this blog post, nor will I be taking any interest in the commentary on same in the media, social or otherwise. And I encourage you to do the same.

Monday, September 21, 2015

Lest The Truth Be Too Hard

Without truth language would be a general fog of words above the silence; without truth it would collapse into an indistinct murmuring. It is truth that makes language clear and firm. The line separating the true from the false is the support that holds language back from falling. Truth is the scaffolding that gives language an independent foothold over against silence.

Language becomes a world of its own, as we have said already; and language now has not only a world behind it—the world of silence, but a world near at hand—the world of truth.

The word of truth must keep in rapport with silence, however, for without it truth would be too harsh and too hard. It would then seem as though there were only one single truth, since the austerity of the individual truth would suggest a denial of the inter-relatedness of all truth. The essential point about truth is that it all hangs together in an all-embracing context.

Max Picard, The World of Silence

Reflection – I began discussing this quote from Picard yesterday, but found there was more to say about it than could fit into a single blog post. Yesterday I focused on the first two paragraphs, highlighting the necessary relationship of ‘language’ and ‘truth’, and how the loss of that connection, rather than liberating us to be tolerant and inclusive, actually reduces all communication to the base level of naked power struggle and manipulation.

The other side of this, though, is this final paragraph, where Picard emphasizes once again the role of silence in our lives, this time as a necessary counterbalance to the passion for truth and its expression.

For me, this means we need to listen deeply to one another. In the clamorous world of competing ideologies, political and social agendae, and world building projects of all kinds, we need all the more to seek out and embrace ‘the world of silence’, the world where I am not simply trumpeting my views to the world via social media or whatever other platform or pulpit I have, but where I in turn actively listen to that which is not me, that which is other from me.

Not simply so I can spot the weaknesses and fallacies of this other and tear it down with relish, but so that I hear the truth that, indeed, the other has to offer, even if I do disagree with them on the vital point.

This is not mushy moral relativism. I will never seriously consider that I may be wrong on the subject of, say, abortion, or contraception for that matter, or the nature of marriage, or the absolute obligation to care for the poor, or any one of a dozen other matters. For that matter, I am quite certain of the truth of who Jesus is, what the path of eternal life is, the nature of the Church and its necessity for salvation, and so forth. But because I have such opinions and hold them most strongly, believing them to be not simply ‘my own ideas’ but the Truth about Reality—all the more do I need to really listen to those who reject those truths and have other ideas about things.

Truth needs to be balanced by silence, humility, listening, or it devolves quickly into a harsh and hard doctrinarianism. Listening applies not only to listening to another person, although it is that for sure, but listening to the silence of the world, to one’s own heart, to the voice of God, ultimately, shrouded in mystery as that is.

Without this commitment to listening, the words we speak and the truths we advance are doomed to be unpersuasive and fall on deaf ears. Furthermore, even if we are in fact ‘right’ about various matters, the refusal/inability to listen, to have silence as the necessary counterbalance to our speech, dooms us to fall into the trap of arrogance, anger, pride, and a half-dozen other related vices. Being right can become more important that loving our neighbour, and that is a grim mistake indeed.

Language, truth, and silence together yield a very deep humility, a commitment to truth that does not make us into Pharisees or inquisitors or bullies, a commitment to silence and contemplation that is not a retreat into self-absorption and complacency, a commitment to speech and communication that is not merely a parade ground for the ego. And this is more and more the urgent call of our times, when all of the above is all too common. The world is full of people blaring their views at top volume and shredding everyone who disagrees with them with savage ferocity. Picard’s little book on silence and speech offers deep wisdom to offset this most modern mess, and we do well to heed him in this matter..