Brokenness, Evil and Hope

Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. Some . . .  in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness, which they cannot see even in their dreams. But they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street.    G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

    The reality of Evil is one of the great universals, one of the greatest facts of human existence.  The recent mass murder at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida is just the most recent reminder that there are always people who feel the need to visit inexplicable pain and suffering on their fellow men and woman.

The Temptation of Christ, Ary Scheffer

     Naturally, we want to find a solution, a way of stopping these things, and it’s certainly possible to offer better protection, at least, to some innocent people. There will be, as there should be, discussions of what public policy measures should be taken to protect innocent lives, and it is to be hoped that such discussions can help prevent or limit similar attacks in the future (a possibility that is more likely if such discussions are conducted in a reasonable and objective way, and don’t become a vehicle for exploiting the latest tragedy to push a political agenda).

     Even if we do find a way to offer more protection to school children, however, or come up ways to shield other vulnerable people, there will always be another Nikolas Cruz, and another after that, looking to inflict unprovoked, senseless wickedness on humanity at large.  The problem goes back to original sin, as Chesterton points out in the quote at the top of this post. No public policy or law can ever fully protect us from the murderous rages of our fellow men and other manifestations of moral darkness; the Evil will be with us until the last of us returns to our Maker, as it has been with us since our first parents first heeded the sinuous whispers of the serpent in the Garden of Eden.   

     Not that this is news: our fathers in faith knew it 3,000 years ago.  In Psalm 10, for instance, we see:    

            In arrogance the wicked hotly pursue the poor;

let them be caught in the schemes which they have devised.

 For the wicked boasts of the desires of his heart,

and the man greedy for gain curses and renounces the LORD.  (Psalm 10:2-3)

Not only that, it is clear that the wicked often seem to get away with their misbehavior, and sometimes even appear to flourish:

His ways prosper at all times; thy judgments are on high, out of his sight; as for all his foes, he puffs at them.

He thinks in his heart, "I shall not be moved; throughout all generations I shall not meet adversity."  (Psalm 10:5-6)

To us fallen people in a broken world it does often appear that crime pays, and that vice is rewarded. It can leave us wondering what role a supposedly just God plays amid the carnage. This, in fact, is an argument often put forward by unbelievers (generally known as The Problem of Evil): if God is good and loving, why does he allow such horrible things to happen to good people?

     This argument makes a certain amount of sense, but only if we believe that this world is all there is. If the problem is something beyond us (such as original sin and the resulting loss of grace), it is only reasonable that the true solution lies beyond us as well, just as a God capable of creating this universe must necessarily operate outside and beyond it.  Psalm 10 looks to this God, not the strawman policeman god of the atheists’ objection:

Thou dost see [Lord]; yea, thou dost note trouble and vexation, that thou mayest take it into thy hands;

the hapless commits himself to thee; thou hast been the helper of the fatherless.

Break thou the arm of the wicked and evildoer;

seek out his wickedness till thou find none.(Psalm 10: 14-15)

     Of course, saying “it’s all in God’s hands” can sound like an evasion, an airy dismissal of brutally concrete suffering and injustice.  One of the reasons why pictures such as the photos of anguished parents and other loved ones that came out of Florida last week are so effective is that they put actual human faces on the tragedy; there are no corresponding photographs of Godly Wrath in the hereafter.  It is therefore all too easy for doubters to mock our prayers and dismiss altogether the reality of divine retribution.

Joel Auerbach/AP photo

     Sometimes, however, we can catch a glimpse of the bigger picture through the material clutter of this world.  For instance, I was especially struck by one in particular of the news pictures from the Florida high school shooting, a heart-wrenching photo which showed two anguished women embracing at the scene of the crime.  One of the women was distinguished by a large cross of ashes on her forehead.  The killing took place on Ash Wednesday, and the woman in the picture had quite clearly been to church that morning to “get her ashes” and to be reminded that she, along with the rest of creation, would someday return to dust.  The fact of our own finitude in this world and the ultimate destruction all our works is also part of the message of Psalm 10:

            The LORD is king for ever and ever;

the nations shall perish from his land.

O LORD, thou wilt hear the desire of the meek;

thou wilt strengthen their heart, thou wilt incline thy ear

to do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed,

so that man who is of the earth may strike terror no more. (Psalm 10: 16-18)

“The Nations”, that is, all that seems most solid and powerful in this world, “shall perish”, and “man who is of the earth” can strike his terror for a mere instant before he’s gone.  What’s really solid and powerful is The Lord, the Champion of the meek, the fatherless, and the oppressed, and he is “King for ever and ever”.  For that reason the ashes we wear on Ash Wednesday are a sign of Hope.  Along with the powers and princes and bullies of this world, the pain and suffering of this world will also turn to dust and be gone. 

     Even more, these Lenten ashes, palm ashes imposed in the Sign of The Cross, give us a reason for hope greater than the human author of Psalm 10 could know. These ashes remind us that the God who is above and beyond did more than just incline his ear,

but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. (Phil 2:7-8)

     The Cross points to the Infinite God who took on our limited humanity, and took all our pain and suffering on his own shoulders.  Not only does He truly accompany us in our misfortunes, He makes even the most horrendous of the injustices we suffer in this world a pathway of Grace, a path to Him. This is why we call those who suffer and die in his service martyrs, from the Greek word for "witness". They witness with their lives that God truly blesses us in our suffering.

     Again, the point is not that we shouldn’t work against particular manifestations of evil in this world.  It would have been a much better thing if the Florida shooter had been stopped, better still if he had never conceived the desire to destroy innocent life.  It’s just and appropriate for us to work to prevent such things from happening again.  The point is that we can never realistically hope to make this world a place completely free from evil: The Fall has given us a propensity to sin, and the father of sin will be with us until the end. Our true Hope lies in Heaven.

A Tribute Vice Pays to Itself (Vasectomy Showers, etc.)

An Age That Knows No Shame 

  The celebrated 17th century wit François de La Rochefoucauld once opined, “hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue”.  In other words, we lie about what we are doing because we’re wise enough, at least, to be ashamed of it.  What can we say, however, about an age that knows no shame?

   I’m referring here to an article from Britain’s Daily Mail, whose headline blares:

Forget baby showers! Young couples are holding 'vasectomy parties' to celebrate the start of a childless family, and ask guests to name their CAR instead

   While the Daily Mail further tells us that “The cost of having children is deterring a growing number of couples from expanding the family unit”, the comments of the seemingly happily self-sterilized couples in the article suggest other motives:

        Instead of the traditional baby shower, couples also invite friends to 'car showers' where guests help them name their new car.

They also play board games like The Price Is Right, where they talk about what they can buy now that they've saved money by not having kids.

Clearly, it’s not that they don’t have money, they simply would rather spend their cash on toys for themselves than on their own progeny.

   Now, in order to equate one’s child with a car - or not really equate, actually to value one’s own child as less than a car - one must engage in a certain amount of dehumanization.  We can’t simply say that “I prefer playthings to my own sons and daughters”, so we instead we say things like:

        ‘All a baby shower is a party to celebrate that you had sex,' wrote another user [of the blog WereNotHavingABaby.com]. 'That a sperm managed to hit a fertile egg. A vasectomy shower is a party to celebrate soon to be sex.’

   Nobody, including almost certainly the person who first wrote it, really thinks that a baby shower is intended to celebrate “That a sperm managed to hit a fertile egg”.  People have baby showers to celebrate the creation of new life, to welcome a new member of the family, and as a way of sharing  that life with the wider community.  A “vasectomy shower”, likewise, doesn’t celebrate “soon to be sex”, it “celebrates” the decision to render that sex barren and empty, a meaningless self-indulgence. It is an attempt to glorify, or maybe better yet justify, saying “no” to life.

   Not all vasectomy party supporters put the matter quite so crassly, of course; some aim for a more reasonable-sounding tone.  One woman, for instance posted the comment:

I had swallowed the motherhood mandate hook, line, and sinker and I had never given myself the space and time to question whether I really, really want children.

   In some ways this last comment is sadder than the in-your-face defiance the more outrageous sterilization promoters.  She seems to have truly come to believe the current conventional wisdom that what she “really, really wants” should be the paramount thing.  There is no sense  that she owes anything to any children she might otherwise bear, to her family, to her community, or to her God.

Non Serviam!

   We all want what we want, of course: that’s the way of our fallen human nature.  Our wishes and desires are among our strongest motivators. At the same time, healthy societies have always recognized that if they are to flourish, or even just survive, more is required.  Individuals need to see their own fulfillment as tied in with and subordinate to that of their society. There have always been positive incentives (calls to heroism, public acclaim, etc.), and also negative consequences: our modern word “idiot” comes from the Greek ἰδιώτης (“idiotes”), from the adjective meaning “one’s own”.  The idiot was one who rejected the community to make his own way and set his own standards.

Gustav Dore's depiction of Satan cast down from Heaven

   The revelation of Jesus Christ raises the issue to an even higher level.  Christ tells us not merely to find our own fulfillment within the larger community, but that “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13) . . . and he backed it up with his own death “for the many”. For the better part of two millennia the central image of Christianity, God’s self-sacrifice out of love for all, has dominated not only the Church but, to a great degree, Western culture itself.  We can see it in the visual arts, and in music, but also in certain cultural expectations.  When we really, really wanted to follow our own desires in defiance of right order, we knew that we were were also defying the Will of God, and turning our backs on Christ’s willing acceptance of death for our sake.  That didn’t always stop us, of course, but often it did.  Even when it didn’t, the knowledge of the standard Christ set for us on the Cross fed and strengthened the voice of Conscience calling us back.

   That history is important, because it means that our current state of shamelessness is of a different order than that of the age of Caligula and Nero.  The Romans of two thousand years ago were rejecting the the human wisdom of their forbears, which was foolish and destructive: one consequence is that the old patrician nobility of Rome, including families that had been prominent for centuries, virtually died out by the end of the first century A.D.  In our case, we are rejecting not mere human wisdom, but Divine teaching and the example of God Himself in the person of Jesus Christ, his gift of Himself offered up for us on the Cross.  We are following a different example, that of Satan, into whose mouth the poet John Milton puts the words, Non Serviam!, “I will not serve!”.

Giving The Devil His Due

   We don’t see these exact words come from the Devil’s mouth in the Bible, but they had been associated with him long before Milton composed Paradise Lost because they so accurately sum up the nature of Satan’s rebellion.  And they do in fact come from Sacred Scripture, in the book of Jeremiah, where we see the prophet chastising the wayward people of Judah:

Your wickedness will chasten you, and your apostasy will reprove you. Know and see that it is evil and bitter for you to forsake the LORD your God; the fear of me is not in you, says the Lord GOD of hosts.  "For long ago you broke your yoke and burst your bonds; and you said, 'I will not serve.' Yea, upon every high hill and under every green tree you bowed down as a harlot.  Yet I planted you a choice vine, wholly of pure seed. How then have you turned degenerate and become a wild vine?” (Jeremiah 2:19-21)

Michelangelo's "Jeremiah"

   Since Non Serviam (as it appears in the Latin Vulgate translation) so perfectly captures the attitude that led Lucifer to his fall, these words naturally came to be associated with the Devil.  To take it a little further, if it was “evil and bitter” for God’s chosen people to abandon his ways, surely it is the same for us Christians, who also were planted “as a choice vine, wholly of pure seed.”  The chastisement that inevitably flows from our collective refusal to Christ’s call to self-sacrifice is abundantly clear, if we’re willing to see it.  It is evident in the disintegration of the institution of the family and all the needless misery that follows, we can see it in the dying populations of the formerly Christian countries of Europe and, soon, North America, and in many other social ills. Even worse, it is manifested in the decline of Faith, and the likelihood that many souls will be therefore lost forever.

Principalities and Powers

   Jeremiah’s image of harlotry itself fits perfectly with our present situation.  After all, isn’t our era’s great refusal of our Lord’s call to service precisely about indulging sexual desire without responsibility, or consequences, or any limits that we don’t choose for ourselves? Which brings us back to the vasectomy showers, a celebration of sexual pleasure without self-sacrifice, without true union, without real love.  Non Serviam! And just as Satan looks to ensnare all of us along with him in his apostasy, the public glorification of sexual rebellion in vasectomy parties is intended to break down the walls of shame in order to make the repugnant seem acceptable . . . and, ultimately, good.  

Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now Pope Francis (Buenos Aires Herald)

. . . and if you publicly oppose that newly enshrined “good”, or even refrain from

endorsing it with sufficient enthusiasm, there’s hell to pay.  That has been the strategy of the revolutionaries in every battle of the Sexual Revolution.  That is why not so long the cardinal archbishop of Buenos Aires (who has since been promoted to a position of some prominence in Rome) said that the push to “redefine” marriage was "a move by the devil, looking to confuse and deceive all children of God" (article here).  The same judgment applies to other innovations, such as the public celebration of sterilization, that seek to undermine traditional sexual morality. The degradation of our moral norms and the dismantling of social institutions that embody them is, quite simply, diabolical.

Vasectomy parties and and the like may strike us as ridiculous, but they’re not funny.  They might be only a small step on the proverbial Highway to Hell, but who wants to go that way?  More than that, the fact that such a thing can be reported with, apparently, no shame attaching to its promoters is a sign of how far we’ve fallen.  After all, despite the carnality of the battlefield, “We are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). Whose battle standard do we want to follow?

Prophet Samuel,The Candidates, & the Letter to Diognetus

  Today is election day here in the United States, and we face more a dispiriting choice for our highest office than we have seen in this country for a long time, perhaps ever.  It may be that we are testing the validity of Joseph de Maistre’s famous observation, "Every country has the government it deserves” (Toute nation a le gouvernement qu’elle mérite).

Give the people what they want: King Saul and Prophet Samuel

    Before we consider that possibility, I’d like to take a look at 1 Samuel, chapter 8,  the Vulgate Latin version of which we are reading in my advanced Latin classes right now.  It occurs to me that this scripture may have some some applicability to our current situation.  In this Biblical reading Samuel, judge and prophet, has grown old, and has passed his office of Judge on to his sons Joel and Abijah.   Unfortunately, the sons do not “walk in the ways” of their father (1 Sam 8:3). In fact, they are thoroughly corrupt: they are greedy, take bribes, and generally “pervert justice” (1 Sam 8:4).  The elders of Israel get together and go to Samuel. After pointing out the (rather severe) shortcomings of Joel and Abijah, they propose a radical solution: “Appoint a king to rule over us, like all the nations” (1 Sam 8:5).  

    Whatever merit there might be in their complaints, Samuel doesn’t like their proposed solution.  He turns to the Lord in prayer, and receives a surprising reply:

"Hearken to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.  According to all the deeds which they have done to me, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt even to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are also doing to you. Now then, hearken to their voice; only, you shall solemnly warn them, and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them." (1 Samuel 8:7-9)

    Samuel follows the Lord’s instructions, and warns them of the various ways in which the king will abuse and exploit them: how he will take their sons and daughters and put them in various roles of service to himself, and how he will take various of their possessions and bestow them on his servants (1 Samuel 8:11-17).  He concludes with a stern warning: “And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the LORD will not answer you in that day" (1 Samuel 8:18). The people are unimpressed.  On the contrary, they seem determined to illustrate H.L. Menken’s wry definition of democracy: "The theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”  After Samuel’s long list of the wrongs they will suffer,

. . .  the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel; and they said, "No! but we will have a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles." And when Samuel had heard all the words of the people, he repeated them in the ears of the LORD. And the LORD said to Samuel, "Hearken to their voice, and make them a king."   (1 Samuel 8:19-22)

    The people of Israel don’t understand that they can only be free when the accept the Rule of God, because the alternative is the tyranny of mere men.  As Bob Dylan (in a moment of lucidity) once wrote, “You gotta serve somebody.” Men and women who serve God and his commandments are able govern themselves in this world, on a personal level and corporately.  Those who reject the Wisdom of the Lord in the hope of being their own masters find themselves instead the slaves of fellow creatures, of “such a thing as myself” (as Shakespeare’s Cassius says of the tyrant Caesar) . . . or worse. St. Paul advises us that “the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners” (1 Timothy 1:9).  A state peopled by godless citizens will, necessarily, be under the heel of tyranny.

    That’s my fear for the United States.  I’m not saying that either of our present unlovely candidates will, of himself or herself, bring about the end of the republic.  They are rather a symptom of a deeper problem: we wouldn’t be in this position at all, faced with so execrable a choice, if we had really kept God as our true sovereign.  It’s not that we haven’t had our own Samuels: Benjamin Franklin warned that the U.S. Constitution offered “A republic, if you can keep it”, and I’ve often found occasion to cite John Adams’ warning that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

    My purpose here is not to endorse either of the two stunningly flawed human beings the two major parties have offered as presidential candidates.  I do think it is clear that one of the two is decisively less unacceptable to serious Christians, but it still remains a true choice of the lesser of two evils.  The outcome of this or any election, however, is of only passing importance.  More significant to me is the fact that a substantial number of Americans, from across the political spectrum, have deemed character, morality, rule of law, truth, and even basic decency as less important than getting what they want.  It’s bad enough that such a society will inevitably see ever greater human suffering in this world; a much worse consequence is that it will become even harder to hear the words of the Gospel in so degraded an environment, and many souls may be lost. The election of neither the Republican nor the Democratic candidate will change that grim reality.

    At the same time, this is a season of Hope, and of renewed purpose for those of us who aspire to follow Christ.  St. Paul tells us that, in reality, “our citizenship is in Heaven” (Phillipians 3:20). The anonymous author of the 2nd century Letter to Diognetus elaborates,  reminding us that we Christians  “dwell in the world, yet are not of the world”, and further that

as the soul is in the body, so are Christians in the world . . . The soul is imprisoned in the body, yet preserves that very body; and Christians are confined in the world as in a prison, and yet they are the preservers of the world. The immortal soul dwells in a mortal tabernacle; and Christians dwell as sojourners in corruptible [bodies], looking for an incorruptible dwelling in the heavens.

In other words, we have our work cut out for us.  Nonetheless, the outcome of today’s election, however bad, will be of only passing importance in this world; our conduct in this world will be of eternal significance, both for ourselves and any other souls we can bring with us, in the next.

We Are Blind to Ourselves: Liturgical Prayer and the Body of Christ

(This Throwback was first published on 24 June 2015 on the blog Principium et Finis)  

  There is a Protestant radio station just two clicks away from the local Catholic station on my radio dial.  I was listening in the car on my way to work recently, and heard a brief snippet of the non-Catholic station.  I tuned in right in the middle of a sentence in which someone was saying: ". . . the importance of sin.  So, we'll be taking a walk through John's Gospel this morning . . ."  At which point, as I turned to the Catholic station, I thought to myself: "But what will he say about John chapter 6?", where we find "He who eats my body and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him" (John 6:53).  Interestingly, the first thing I heard when I continued to the Catholic station (The Presence, FM 106.7 here in the Portland area) was a priest discussing . . . John chapter 6.  

The Body of Christ

    Now, one might say this was just a coincidence, but if so, it certainly is a very suggestive coincidence.  As it happens, it reminded me of something I'd been mulling over since my recent post on Pascal's Wager.  I had quoted an atheist critic of the Wager, who said "most disbelievers disbelieve simply because they knows of no compelling evidence or reasons to believe."  In that particular post I dismissed this assertion as no more than unsupported opinion, and pointed out that, if true, it actually undermined the argument it was supposed to be supporting.  And I really don't know how one could prove such a thing anyway, or disprove it, given not only the impossibility of knowing what is in another person's heart, but our own inability, at times at least, to recognize our own true motivations.  I do know that a number of non-believers have told me explicitly that they turned away from God not because they were persuaded at first by rational arguments, but because His laws forbid doing things they wanted to do; in other words, they had an incentive to disbelieve.  I suspect that for all of us, whether or not we find something to be "compelling" depends, to some degree, on whether or not it is what we want (or expect) to hear.

    I think something like this may be at least part of the reason that our separated brethren in the Protestant communities similarly seem to miss the more "Catholic" passages in scripture (missing, for example, what seems to us to be the rather obvious import of Christ’s Eucharistic Discourse in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel).  Let me hasten to add that I'm not equating them to atheists; on the contrary, very many Protestants have a deep and sincere faith, and live exemplary Christian lives (case in point: the relatives of the nine people murdered last week at the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, whose willingness to forgive the killer [here] is nothing if not Christ-like).  They have been formed in a tradition, however, that to varying degrees has rejected the incarnational aspects of Christianity as it was understood and practiced for the first millennium and a half after Christ said "You are Peter, and on this Rock I will build my Church." (Matthew 16:18) They simply can not maintain their understanding of what Christianity means and at the same time take at face value what Jesus says here:

I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh." The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" So Jesus said to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. (John 6:51-55)

Pieter Breugel's "The Blind Leading The Blind"

 
  It is part of our nature, of course, to be blind to ourselves, and to interpret things from our personal perspective, which is as true for Catholics as it is for protestants and atheists.  I think that is a very large part of the reason why formal prayers, including private devotions (the rosary, novenas, etc.) and liturgical prayer such as the Liturgy of the Hours play so prominent a part in traditional Christianity. There is certainly a place for spontaneous and personal prayer; sometimes it’s appropriate and necessary to focus on ourselves and needs of which we are consciously aware. There is a danger, however, that we can start to see our spiritual lives as being primarily about us and what we perceive to be our "needs".  That is the reverse of what St. Paul is talking about when he says: “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). Liturgical prayer, on the other hand, is "inside out" prayer, which flows from us toward God. Instead of trying to draw God to us, it pulls us out of ourselves and unites us with Christ’s Mystical Body, the Church.  That is the beautiful and powerful symbolism of the traditional manner of saying Mass with the whole congregation, including the priest, facing the East together. Here we are not looking to ourselves or at each other, but as one body looking outward at the rising sun (literally ad orientem), representing the God who rises again and brings us life [incidentally, since I first published this post last year, ad orientem worship is showing signs of staging a comeback] .  

    Liturgical prayer is just one tangible way in which the Church reminds us that we are part of something bigger, that we are “members” of the Body of Christ (see 1 Corinthians chapter 12). We need to be reminded that, like Jesus’ Disciples, we sometimes need to be told how to pray (see Luke chapter 11 and Matthew chapter 6), and because we are both soul and body we need tangible reminders, and concrete means of praying to the God who is pure spirit.  Like St. Thomas, we need to touch Christ’s wounds (see John chapter 20).  And, of course, unless we eat his body and drink his blood we have no life in us.