Considering Evil

The existence of evil is not so much an obstacle to faith in God as a proof of God’s existence, a challenge to turn towards that in which love triumphs over hatred, union over division, and eternal life over death.

Nicholas Berdyaev, Dream and Reality

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I am particularly alarmed at the verbiage in public discourse that conveys evil when faith is needed.  Mind you, the political rhetoric on the Left, in particular, has been most troubling … and it has ratcheted up over time and found allies in what must be a free and fair press and media.

What once was helpful dialogue has turned in time to ideology, division and too often to hatred.

In this is destruction and the foretelling of violence, if it is not halted – unless cooler heads prevail, and voices come to echo faith and wisdom, unity, good will, fellowship, compassion and community.

Let’s pause to consider evil – as our words seem to tell us now that we do not know the measure of evil, its destructive force – its capacity to destroy all in its way, tear down, maim and murder.

Think of this: “Judge, not, that ye be not judged.”  These the words of Christ.

Christ does not say we ought to be silent when evil appears – but rather that we first must judge ourselves before we judge others.

Sadly, I see not much proof of pause in the words of those so quick to accuse others of evil intent and evil acts.  So think again of Christ: “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote in thy brother’s eye.”  (Matthew 7:5)

Today we are too quick to judge, to claim a moral ground that those who judge and condemn show no evidence of actually occupying.  Nae, what we see is ideological “got-ya” moments – the opportunity to make of morality itself a weapon of evil, a way to advance one’s quest for power, one’s idiocratic ideas and demonstratively discredited ideology.

Yes, evil is being “addressed” by evil.  There can be no greater harm done, no better way to perpetuate division and nudge us closer to more violence and bloodshed, than to hijack morality to advance one’s private desires for gain, superiority, power.  Such conduct is evil itself.

A response to evil must have pure objectives – to correct, to teach, to heal, to build relationship, advance fraternity, community, repair misunderstandings, restore justice, advance love, create a stronger bond with others, with what is right and good and lasting – to grow closer to God and others – while excising us from hatred and the craven desire for power and retribution for one’s real or imagined slights and injuries.

I close with this: those who see themselves as perpetual “victims” are consigning themselves to a life of unhappiness and anger when in their mere but sacred being they are, in reality, sons and daughters of a loving God.

Evil begets evil – until we seek the Good that is above and in us.

Shalom.

 

 

 

Think of the Sunrise

Dedicated to Friends – and to Butchie, Roger, Giel and Diane

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If you want to be reminded of the love of God, just watch the sunrise.

Jeannette Walls, in Half Broke Horses

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I am rarely ever unhappy.  In this is grace and with grace vision.  I see … and I believe.

Never had much trouble believing.  It just seemed right … obvious.  Think of the sunrise.  When your father deserts the family there is still sunrise, and Mama and her strength of soul that is belief.

My sunrises now are of slopping emerald green pastures, purple mountains and, cows and calves gracefully, slowly eating their way down the incline as the pink on the sky fortells of the inevitable Father Sun.

We get all tangled up in ourselves and in a small screen that is our life span when there is an endless unfolding movie and we see it in the sunrise.

Context.  We lose it more often than we retain it.  Yet, wait – think of lunch with an old friend and his old friends – they are the sunrise and Mama’s strength and belief.

Rest your eyes and heart and soul on sunrise, cows and calves, and pastures and mountains, the sky, Father Sun, friends, Mama, belief, and God.  Happiness follows.

Shalom.

 

Battle of Words

… false seeing … a love affair with words and ideas … But you cannot really love words; you can only think them.  You cannot really love reality with a judgmental mind, because you’ll always try to control it, fix it, or understand it before you give yourself to it.  And it usually is never fixed enough to deserve your protected self.  So you stay on Delay, Stall or Pause forever.

Richard Rohr, in The Naked Now

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When you pause to think about it – each day we are surrounded by other people’s words – a virtual down-pour of words, ideas, concepts, complaints.  The mere saying of them is accepted in the culture and common discourse as if these words convey something useful, truthful.

Need an example?  We speak of “multiple genders,” children in the third grade “deciding” that they are not male, but female – not female but male.  A man says his male sexual partner is his “wife.”

Yes, words are appropriated and their meaning distorted.  What was once “A” is now “Z.”

When life as it is is abandoned, false words and proclamation emerge and Truth vanishes.  We see here a love affair with words – a love affair with self, with fantasy, distortion – words used to personal and political advantage and the “hell with reality.”  In this, a journey away from truth in favor of fiction … and the added feature of fragmenting, dividing and destroying culture and shared community. 

Think too of ideology.  Despite historic evidence to the contrary ideologues tout the utility and “benefit” of socialism and the road to Communism – advocate for it without regard to its destuctiveness.  Here we have selfishness – the desire to tear down what others have built – anything to deny reality and life.

Things successful and unbroken are smashed with these words so those who cannot wade into life as it presents, or into history and common sense – arrogantly attempt to bend us to their disorientation and even their unhappiness and hatred.

You see this battle and its divide in our political parties – one houses those who hi-jack, usurp words and ideas for their own use and the other party that fights to salvage words, protect ideas and concepts that afford common understanding, support the essential and successful structures (marriage, for example) and institutions that have given us peace,  prospertity and freedom.

The battle over words as we have seen it thus far does one remarkably destructive thing – it has the capacity to alter the experience of human experience … the likes of  which substitute illness for health.

Where are you in this battle of words and established truth?

Shalom.

The Thin Guy with the Sandals

Interviewer: Q. “You knew Jesus?”

2000 Year Old Man: A. “Lovely Boy. Thin. Wore sandals.”

Carl Reiner (Interviewer) and Mel Brooks (Two Thousand Year Old Man), in a comedy rountine entitled The Two Thousand Year Old Man..”

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We often miss the humor all around us.  We miss the “important” people who, trying to be serious, are often incoherent, senseless, contradictory – hence, funny – amusing – (bordering on idiotic) whose ideas sound (well) slapstick.  We seem to let a whole lot of idiocy pass as acceptable public conversation.

Case in point: young, noisey First Term Congresswoman Cortez recently made a spectacle of herself by shamelessly proclaiming to the world at-large that she was utterly puzzled by finding that a switch on the kitchen wall of her new residence activated something she realized was a garbage disposal.

She confessed that she was mystified by this device … and she was serious!  So a woman who proposes to utterly alter the American economy with her “Green New Deal” has not had sufficient exposure to the world such that she might have heard that people have a garbage disposal installed in their kitchen.  Yes, she said it frightened her!!!

I find this comical … and a tad unsettling coming from a person full of zeal (and armed with limited knowledge) who intends to reorder American life and its economy?

Chances are if your would-be leaders do not know what a garbage disposal is, they are probably not capable of handling the government’s business.

Apparently it is time to be skeptical about people with “big ideas” and limited life experience.  Have we not had enough of these people running free of late?

And isn’t it a good idea to invoke this question as it applies to those who wish to lead: Do you know the thin guy with the sandals?

Shalom.

Marriage and the Mass

Today’s Blog is Dedicated to Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Quinn and their families in Honor of their Marriage at the Basilica at the University of Notre Dame on this day May 11 in the Lord’s Year 2019.  May a life of happiness and faith be their’s day by day, year after year.

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The essential nature of marriage consists in a certain indivisible union of minds by which each one of the consorts is bound to keep inviolably his faith with one another.

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologicae III, q. 29, art. 2, 1272

To me nothing is so consoling, so piercing, so thrillling, so overcoming as the Mass said in amongst us.  I could attend Masses forever and not be tired.

John Henry Newman, Discourses to Mixed Congregations, 1849

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I witnessed today several Masses in celebration of Marriage which were held previously at the Basilica at the University of Notre Dame.  In each I was moved to tears at the exquisite reality of those Masses and Mass itself, of marriage, of Sacred Matrimony, of Notre Dame, of the witness to Love and fidelity and to Christ that shown so bright in the Bride and Groom, their attendents as well as their parents, family and witnesses.

In seeing this, I know that Marriage and Mass tell us far more about life and eternal existence than most other things except perhaps the birth of a new born baby.

You see Marriage and the Mass are temporal and eternal, as is love.  Yes, God never dies and Christ never ceases.  No time.  No error.  No hostility.  No injustice.  No division.  No sin can deny or extinguish Love, or the God of Love, nor Christ, nor faith, nor Eternity, nor God’s reign and fidelity to us.  No man-made thing or argument, preference, problem, or purpose or proposition may tumble God from God’s reign, nor the good that God so generiously plants in each of us.  The Mass and Marriage show this – over and over and over again in each and all Ages.

My wish today for Stephen and Katie and each and all of us is this: May we live day after day in the proclamation of God’s primacy over all Creation and each man, woman and child and all institutions of this Earth so we might know forever a life of Love in each passing moment, no matter the challenges this wonderful life on Earth may bring.

Shalom.

Mystic or Nothing at All

“The devout Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic’ … or he will cease to be anything at all.”

Karl Rahner

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Have you ever asked yourself how Jesus might have experienced life, and faith, and His relationship with The Father?

Our life is more a question of fully experiencing the human and hence divine experience of being a human being than anything else.

Yes, our completion and fullness relies on the full experience of human experience for in that our gift is made for completion – for a joining of mortal and immortal reality.

We are made to know fully – from Aplha to Omega.  In this we enter the Mystery.  There is: Truth, identity and relationship with God and all others, all things.  Therein is contentment, peace, traquility and the absence of fear and doubt, and uncertainty, anger and hostility.  Therein is love – the all surpassing love that is of God, that is God.

But alas, we do not see and opt to divide one from another.  The lesser among us divide so as to control, claim authority, impose narrow views that they alone conjure up or acquire from some favortite figure whose wandering defied God.  Marx comes to mind.

In lesser “gods” is foolishness, conflict, ignorance and illness.

The land is littered with those who foolishly chose ideology over God and doing so they close the mind and heart, and alter all opportunity for wisdom, faith, tranquility, peace, truth, compassion, humility, understanding, the experience of human experience – and the transcendence that is available to all.

Yes, we are an odd lot – given fullness, we seek division and hostility.

It is far better to know how to know than be told what to know.  It is far better to know how to see than be told what to see.  This is the difference between the curse of ideologues and Christ, between the rote “believer,” and one who believes because he sees and knows from the experience God in the experience of human experience.

When we settle into division – the proclaimation of “me,” “me vs. them,”  “us vs. the others” we are the antithesis of fullness in being, we are less than we are made to be, blinded not sighted.  You see we are of the Whole, nothing less.

Shalom.

 

 

Man Without God & Banana Republics

After trips and computer problems, we are back to a more regaular schedule.  Writing in the morning.  Here we go.

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Man without God is no longer man.

Nicholas Berdyaev, in The End of Our Time

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I write about faith and culture – secular culture in particular, that is: culture hostile to God, culture that “glorifies” not God but man himself and herself.

Our nation was founded on liberty that relies on belief in God and the honor that accrues to those who realize that they have a sacred relationship with their Creator.  As Berdyaev says so simply and accurately: “Man without God is not man.”

The relationship between God, and belief, liberty and the human person is vital to our success, freedom and security.  Yet, alas we see the Democrat Party of the Left acting in opposition to our wellbeing because they do not appreciate and protect our legacy of God-belief-liberty-freedom-success-security.

What we see today in the lawlessness of Congressman Nadler’s attempt to discredit a good man and excellent lawyer in Attorney General William Barr as is expected.  “Expected” you say?  Yes, we have seen this Democrat disregard for law as the product of godlessness and its predictable by-products: chaos and destruction.

For those who question this characterization of the Democrats – I sight an article by Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post from August 16, 2013 (when it used to be a relatively serious and somewhat reliable newspaper).  The article was entitled “The Lawless Presidency” aimed at Barack Obama and his lawless actions – actions that discredit the U.S. Constitution and show us man shrunken to miniture when he acts without God.

Doctor Krauthammer reports the following – Mr. Obama’s Justice Department unilaterally deviated from federal drug laws so as not to punish otherwise punishable crimes.  Likewise, the Obama administration waived portions of the dubious Obamacare law without any provison of the law allowing this.  He personally directed a “70-plus-percent subsidy for insurance premiums paid by congressman and their personal staffs – under a law that denies subsidies for anyone that well off.”  Likewise he lawlessly suspended a cornerstone of Obamacare “the employer mandate.”

Krauthhammer further reveals that Mr. Obama granted exemptions from the law to preferred businesses, unions, and “other well-lobbied, very special interests.”  Krauthammer also reports Mr. Obama unilaterally eased immigration law and exceeded his authority and gutted the legislative process in doing so.

The point to be made is this: Mr. Obama (a man of no particular achievement or work record) acted unilaterally – acted far outside his lawful authority – and no one protested and no one stopped him.  Congressman Nadler is proceeding in the same manner.

So we come to this: man unrestained and without God is far less than man and the problems he creates are utterly destructive.  A moderately faithful man would know this – alas this is the Democrat Party of the Left today.  No God, no man.

Today Democrats are a lawless and destructive cohort.  Our silence and acquiesence will be our demise.

As Doctor Krauthammer notes acts such as we saw with Mr. Obama (and like we see with the Democrats today) are “banana republic stuff.”

Shalom.

Relationship with God

God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

Gen 1:26

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Why did God make us in His image?  So we would have the ability to maintain a close personal relationship with Him.

This, Dear Friends, is fundamental to our understanding of ourself and our worth.

Knowing that we are made for relationship with God – we cannot be lonely, or feel insignifcant.  But alas, if we forfeit our belief in God and God’s desire for relationship with us – loneliness sets in and multiplies … particularly when we set about to define ourself as being important and set out to establish that which we already can know – that is: that we are important and never without God – hence never alone, never forsaken, nor abandoned.

Think just about this one verse from Scripture.  Then watch the daily news and see how many people act out of loneliness – how many seek intimacy in ways that insure their loneliness.  Imagine the pain the follows when one relaizes he or she sought intimacy in the most unwise ways while having possessed this right from their creation and birth!!!

Shalom.

Stories, Structures and Sacred Knowledge

Greek religion was a set of stories belonging to the entire community, rather than a set of well-bounded statements about ultimate moral and philosophical values … Within the common Greek culture, then, was an urge to understand and create a systematic structure of sacred knowledge which ordered everyday life.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, in Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

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If you want to understand why we are in the mess we are in, why the state of affairs in our nation are troublesome (indeed self-destructive) you need only know that those who would command our attention have no idea of our inheritance – the place Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews played in the development of Christianity and, in turn, Western Civilization.

You see we license all manner of poorly educated public personalities to speak to us without them knowing much at all about who we actually are.

Yes, we listen to people with no claim on our attention but that we listen because they are presented to us on television, in the media, among the intellectual or celebrity or political class, and the “special pleaders” who push one or another foolish idea or idiotic claims.

In short, we have an extreme deficit when it comes to the wise and broadly read, experienced and insightful whose knowledge runs to our origins and the process of human development dating back two thousand years before Christ.

Think I am wrong?  Ask youself who among our public figures might be able to explain the connection between Greece, Rome, the Hebrews and the development of Christianity and the laws, institutions of governance in the West or identify the distinctions and similarities between Greeks, Romans, Hebrews and Christians when it comes to the Divine and our relationship with God or gods.

When is such a fundamental conversation ever been expected of those who seek to lead or “share” with us their opinions and desires for radical change?

Get serious.  Those on the public stage subtract from the sum of human knowledge when they speak.  This, of course, is taking its toll on us and our long term existence.

Shalom.

Seeing as the Mystic Sees

… it is difficult for churches, government, and leaders to move beyond ego, the desire for control, and public posturing.  Everything divides into oppositions … vested interests pulling against one another.  Truth is no longer possible at this level of conversation.

… you can lead people only as far as you yourself have gone …

Richard Rohr, in The Naked Now

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Richard Rohr writes of two monks of the 11th and 12th century – Hugh of St. Victor monastery in Paris, France, and Richard of the same monastery.  He tells us that these monks wrote that humans have been given three different ways of seeing.  One way arises from the eyes that produce thoughts.  The second way of seeing leads to reason, and to reflection and meditation.  The third way of seeing leads to true understanding and contemplation.

It is the third way of seeing that is the rarest and most evolved.  Whereas the first way of seeing is common, it produces little depth of experience, is more concrete and binds one to the immediate without nuance.  The second way of seeing allows one to relish his or her power to conceive of the material disposition of the world.  Ah, but the third way of seeing allows one to do more – it allows one to “taste” existence, to be in awe before the underlying mystery, coherence, and spaciousness that connects one with everything!

The third way of seeing is seeing as a mystic sees – seeing as God has designed us to see.  This seeing exceeds the senses, does not rest on knowledge and intellect alone – but rather sees in a manner that expands his or her consciousness – and in this is transformed, made whole, lives in and above at the same time, is mortal and immortal, contented, whole and wise in ways that neither the senses nor intellect can offer.

In commenting on this Rohr says “I cannot emphasize strongly enough that the separation and loss of these three necessary eyes is at the basis of much of the short-sight-edness and religious crises in the Western world.”  Hence the above quote that leads into today’s blog.

The view that Rohr shares, Dear Friends, highlights how and why “identity politics” is so destructive, so wrong-headed, so primitive, tribal, hostile, aggressive, hateful and unappetizing.  Those with greater depth of human experience cannot abide that which pits one against another in a death struggle.  We are, after all, not made to be enemies to one another but rather brothers and sisters to one another.

This historic moment requires us to see as the mystic sees.

Shalom.