Safe Haven

Everything that lives especially has a time; it lives and dies, according to its purpose. There is a sense in which certain kinds of time pass beyond the control of people. The purpose of the Incarnation, (and thus, the Cross and resurrection) is to re-orient human history and cosmic history around the saving acts of God. Man overcomes the futility of his short life by enfolding it into the "forever" that the victorious risen Christ ushers in. There is no warrant for changing the liturgical calendar based on the seasons in certain parts of the world, for example. It would make the liturgy subject to creation, and not the other way around. Jesus sees no contradiction in coming in the flesh to a particular place and time, but by His work, being the summation of everything. That is a worthy thing to ponder.

I took the Pew survey on political identification. I'm right in the middle. I didn't know fear of outsiders and people of color was a conservative value. (Actually, it's not.) So there's that. I mean, I guess I did join the Catholic Church. You can't get any more "ethnic" than that. Forgive me, I may be inclined to think the lot of you are unhinged.

I had the privilege of reading it for the members of our Bible study last night. Verses 27-31 will take your breath away: "All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD; and all the families of the nations shall worship before him. For dominion belongs to the LORD, and he rules over the nations. Yea, to him shall all the proud of the earth bow down; before him shall bow all who go down to the dust, and he who cannot keep himself alive. Posterity shall serve him; men shall tell of the LORD to the coming generation, and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, that he has wrought it." About 1000 years later, St. Paul wrote something . Jesus, I trust in You!

There are people rejoicing that somehow Donald Trump has broken the monotony and stability of our political system. Put down your Rand, and your supply of illegal drugs, and come to your senses. You should never rejoice that an intellectual amoeba is within a breath of the presidency, even if the alternative is Hillary Clinton. She may well be uniquely corrupt, but Democrats haven't changed that much. If indeed the judiciary is so far gone that only Trump can save us from doom, it's been a nice country. Not my problem. Even though the executive has accrued much more than symbolic power, the president is a symbol. And he's not a symbol I want representing me. Politics has always been imperfect, but its drama and its theater demonstrate even now that we aspire to things in politics, and through politics. It's one thing to remember that politics is only earthly; it's quite another to go to the gutter, and congratulate yourself for your alleged detachment.

Ratzinger is concerned here to defend eucharistic piety from charges that it is superstitious. Such a charge proceeds from the premises articulated by things said previously: if the focal point is the community, then anything which distracts from the community and its self-awareness is to be abandoned. On the contrary; the community and its purpose is made by the self-gift of the Lord, one which is extended to the unique eucharistic mode. Ratzinger argues that to distinguish the gift from the Person diminishes the magnitude of Him, and what He offers. Though we also recall that reception of Holy Communion is not obligatory on every occasion, he makes a bold argument to the claim that adoration and Communion are opposed: he says that to eat is to adore; it is to accept the covenant it signifies. He argues that the same liturgical primitivism (and an uncritical one, at that) that views the medieval liturgies with suspicion also cannot abide deepening eucharistic piety and architectur...

Ratzinger begins this chapter reminding the reader that everything Christians did architecturally served a liturgical purpose; that is, all such decisions are driven by the understanding of what God has revealed, and therefore, the proper response of the faithful is thus determined. God's ubiquity surprisingly affects liturgical posture, in that it doesn't eliminate a kind of spatial awareness, but causes it to be even more centered on the central saving event: the resurrection of Christ. He thus strongly advises the priest face ad orientem, that is, turned with his back to the people, facing east. It has been his opponents, who, while claiming he suffers from an irrational nostalgia, disallow any liturgical development, and chase a kind of liturgical primitivism. He gives one example of the negative impact of the partial truth of the Eucharist as meal: the focal point becomes the community, rather than God, whose saving action called the community into existence.

Even in the Old Testament, the synagogue in the time of the Temple was never simply a place of instruction that was intellectual only; everything that took place evoked the Temple and its worship. Facing toward the east meant toward the Temple in Jerusalem. As they came together to worship, to sacrifice, they were always the people redeemed and set apart by God. Because of God's determination to be present with His people, their place of worship could never be merely functional; the liturgy bore witness to God's saving acts. Therefore, the church building of the New Testament doesn't serve the people meeting, as such. Rather, it serves the liturgy, which is the proper response to what God has done and said. Facing east in the New Testament indicates an expectation of the return of the risen Lord. The "seat of Moses" becomes the bishop's throne, and all draw near to the Holy of Holies, the Eucharist upon the altar.

There is an inherent tension between the completed work of Jesus Christ, the action of the liturgy, and the hidden spiritual realities to which the sacramental signs point. Ratzinger reminds us that the liturgy utterly depends upon the death and resurrection of Christ as a past event. But what is still to come in us and in our world depends on him making his priestly work present to us, and us making an offering of ourselves to the Father through Him. The liturgy is not a play-act, but neither is it--as Dr. David Anders might say--a time-travel adventure of a crude sort. Ratzinger asks, "After the tearing of the Temple curtain and the opening up of the heart of God in the pierced heart of the Crucified, do we still need sacred space, sacred time, mediating symbols?" Yes, he says. Answering his own question prior to asking it, Ratzinger says, "The theology of the liturgy is in a special way "symbolic theology," a theology of symbols, which connects us to what ...

The biggest challenge to the Temple worship according to Jesus, says Ratzinger, is that the people had lost the awareness that Israel's worship was always marked by insufficiency and impermanence; that is, they knew they were sojourners, both literally and figuratively. The leaders of that time conceived of their worship cyclically, and that it would remain static. Ratzinger points to Leviticus 26, and to the Passover in Exodus 12, as obvious instances when the sacrificial system pointed to something beyond itself, by contrast. It had always been a true insight of all religions that the only proper gift that man could give to God was his own life. The pagan religions had conceived of this literally as human sacrifice. Instead, Jesus cleansed the Temple to prepare for a new age of universality and fulfillment. He would be the Temple, and the priest, and the sacrifice. This new anticipation is joyful, waiting for the victory of the New Jerusalem.

Ratzinger begins by saying that a false opposition between history and cosmos has often been supposed, and an implicit critique of Christianity is that it is too linear. Acknowledging that the relation between Creator and creation is closer than some people might suppose, he nevertheless points out that God is absolutely distinct from what he has created. Recalling that primitive notions had man at the center of a kind of circle of need between man and the gods, Ratzinger affirms an aspect of such a view: that humanity is meant for union with God. Ratzinger says that a cyclical notion of exitus-reditus ("Everything came from God, and is returning to God") is common in all religions, but Christianity is distinct, in that creation is regarded as an unqualified good. Humanity benefits from the journey back to God in the chance to obtain redemption from sin. Indeed, creation is the theater for the covenant of love between God and man. In fact, creation exists for this purpose. ...

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger asks the question, "What is liturgy?" and having asked it, he considers one possibility: the liturgy as play. There is a great freedom in children's play, he says, and this does capture something about how we properly relate to God. Owing largely to the gravity of the subject matter, he says this is insufficient as an explanation. We should note, however, that when children take on play as a kind of anticipation of future life without its burdens and concerns, it comes the closest to what true liturgy is, and should be. In order to answer the challenge, Ratzinger takes us back to the biblical texts surrounding the Exodus. Freedom of worship is insufficient, because God has commanded that the Israelites go out to serve him in the wilderness. He notes also that the idolatry which broke the covenant was a sort of well-intentioned impatience with the speed at which God was revealing Himself. All true liturgy is a response to what God has revealed...

I had a friend last night ask me last night about going to Confession more often. Just do it. There's no mystery there. There are things in life that just need to get started. Once they do, we can take on whatever task it is that seems too big. Of course, I'm giving myself this advice. It's hard, man. Just the thought of some things seems dispiriting. But things not started become regrets when we are old. May we be granted the grace to be bold today. We trust in Your merciful love, O God. Through Our Lord Jesus Christ Your Son, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.

Fr. Benson wrote a popular novel about the end of time. In the course of it, a character mentions Protestantism, and says, "It is perfectly true that Protestantism is dead. Men do recognize at last that a supernatural Religion involves an absolute authority, and that Private Judgment is nothing else than the beginning of disintegration. And it is also true that since the Catholic Church is the only institution that even claims supernatural authority, with all its merciless logic, she has again the allegiance of practically all Christians who have any supernatural belief left." (Lord of the World, p. 8) Now, one of the features of the aforementioned Noltie Conundrum is that piety eliminates one possibility out of hand: the Holy Spirit cannot speak mutually exclusive truths about the same matter which is not adiaphora. This is so because the Holy Spirit is God, and God cannot lie. So the alternatives remaining are: God protects me infallibly at all times when interpreting t...

Practically, Sola Scriptura goes by another name: ecclesial fallibility. We saw before that a person who has no obligation to believe some ecclesiastical court is correct isn't going to defer in the future, simply because the new authority isn't Catholic. There is no principled position between "me and my Bible" and Catholicism. The purpose of Protestantism is to affirm the individual interpretation of Scripture. The resulting chaos is not an aberration or fluke. The honest Christian begins to question the Protestant methodology precisely when he cannot determine in a principled way the difference between divine revelation, and his own opinion. What we affectionately dub "The Noltie Conundrum" illustrates another aspect of the problem, that is, ascertaining the content of what God has revealed, given mutually exclusive claims about that content, in light of a mutual invocation of the Holy Spirit. It is a Protestant dilemma, on Protestant terms. It will ...

It was actually a political discussion, but as with so much in conservative Protestantism, those lines are dotted, at best. Anyway, Rachel Held Evans came up, and she's the perfect boogeywoman, of course, with her predictable left-of-center political views, and denigration of conservative theological positions. The key point is this: you may not think she's much of a Christian, but she's the perfect Protestant. The alternative to "Scripture Alone" surely is the Church. To turn it around, having rejected the Catholic Church, one cannot be surprised that Rachel calls your bluff in the same way, and on the same terms, as the Reformers did 5 centuries prior. Your makeshift magisteriums--whether alternative structures, or shared interpretations--are even easier to desert than Rome had been. Bad news, kid: the center will not hold. "Conservative" Protestantism is "liberal" Protestantism waiting to happen. It's just a matter of time. Because ult...

I got pretty emotional in thinking through writing this post. I flat-out don't like Donald Trump; I don't live in the thought world where he is a viable option. This man mocks women, the disabled, and ethnic minorities. He doesn't make sense when he talks, and time reveals that he has no idea what he's actually talking about. He revels in his own ignorance. I actually suffered through the primary debates, and I wondered how someone so manifestly unfit could have made it this far. I guess people have learned to reflexively defend anyone on their side, no matter how absurd the notion. That makes me saddest of all. I'm supposed to say that of course Clinton is worse. Perhaps she is, at that. But I find I don't care. What good has it done, supporting these Republicans, anyway? Abortion goes on, along with the destruction of the family, gay "marriage," rampant gun violence, religious bigotry, and a host of other problems. If my social media feed is any gu...

I watched it again last night, and though I had some gnawing sense that the version I had was missing some scenes--Doesn't Cal take the kids to her church?--it still shakes with great moral clarity as a film. Atticus is still the center of the story for me, though of course the innocence of children confronted with ugly human compromise with evil is a major theme. I have half-jokingly said before that I may be the only person whose hero is a fictional character. It remains true, in this case. Though he becomes a victim of the violence against him and his own despair, Tom Robinson is a hero, also. It was absolutely right to feel sorry for Mayella Ewell, even if it became dangerous for Tom to act upon it. Recognizing the danger only accentuates the virtue. Calpurnia showed solidarity as well, teaching the Finch children virtue, and showing them love, even if they will be the beneficiaries of a society that surely hasn't dealt fairly with her. And I never before noticed th...

I read this in St. John's first letter. You might know someone that wants to be holy, but the vast majority of the shame they feel is when they fail themselves . The fact of God's loving primacy tells them that the gift of their faith is real. The whole matter then becomes a conversation about what they are afraid of, and that's what needs to happen. The appeal of Calvinism for some people is a cover for mediocrity and self-hatred. If God loves us, we haven't the right to deny it.

A small town in Ohio had a steel mill that once employed twelve thousand people. Now the company employs 900. Meanwhile, the makers of epi-pens jacked up the price from about 5 bucks to over 600, because they can. Don't talk to me about socialism; if you don't have an ethics that says these things aren't right, your opinions about the excesses of totalitarianism don't matter much to me. People wonder why Bernie Sanders is so popular. We can argue about the prudence or not of particular actions after we recognize and establish the dignity of every human person. I can recall a young Senator who spoke eloquently of two Americas, one for the rich, and one for the poor, lamenting this reality. He also warned of the dangers of state socialism. His ethics may have been faulty in other areas, but he was right on both counts. If there is anything good in a new nationalism, it must begin with the dignity of the person, and the dignity of work. Though peaceful global relatio...

Not all of us get to be heroes of a certain sort. We could probably easily find a story of a soldier who sacrificed his life for his brothers-in-arms. That's real virtue and heroism, but absent any other information, it would be natural virtue. To say that it does not merit salvation before God is not to say it is worthless. That is one error. Another error is to say that a person by his or her natural power can please God. That is called "Pelagianism." The Church has always taught rather that salvation consists in friendship with God, and that friendship happens by grace. We can say that grace is the presence and power of God that elevates man above his natural powers, into friendship and likeness with God. The wise people of old say that friends have to share something to be friends. Grace allows us to traverse an infinite distance to be friends with God. This is no small thing, actually. It could be a mercy of God that we Catholics, even of the faithful sort, are as...