Classroom talking points

1. Faith is not blind.
2. God is not random.
3. Scripture has to be read with intelligence.
4. The world's religions seek truth and hold to it as they see it; Catholics understand that the heart of wisdom is within Jesus' teachings, preserved and protected by their Tradition.

Now this is another piece of the puzzle

Remnants of a pre-Islamic monastery have been discovered in U.A.E.  It appears that for at least a time it existed contemporaneously with the nascent Islamic communities in the region.  This is very valuable for those who are concerned with periods of religious co-existence, when they occur.

As a Teacher, I like this...

...and as a parent, even better.
Dennis Prager on Self Esteem and Character.

OK, so, is Oddness a theme?

Or is there some other name for the quality of a person, place, thing or piece of art (including literature) that has that very special stamp of the divine recognizable universally to believers.  I say "person" because there are people who have this imprint--the saints, for example.  Many of the saints were encountered as "different" during their earthly lives--sometimes bearing a stamp of "be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect," and at other times bearing a mark or seal of genuine strangeness or eccentricity.  One would need to pursue testimonies along this line.

The Parting of the Sea

I ran across a link to this story about the possible scientific plausibility of the incident of the parting of the sea in the Exodus narrative and passed it on to some colleagues.  One wrote back asking how I felt about the "literal level" of the Scriptures.

Here's what I answered:

I think the wonder of these writings is that they contain lots of truth that does not depend on the literal meaning—so, “holistic truth.” That part is basically what Tradition teaches, going back to the Fathers. However, the older I get and the more I read, I am more convinced that there is in many stories that don’t pass the historical-critical standard, something like a vestigial and sometimes collective memory at work. There is a “fact-level” that may be open to us if we truly are open to the Scriptures, but it’s buried very, very deeply in the most ancient connections we have to our human past. The stories are “true” in that they are rooted in the theological truth of our nature as God’s children, but they are also likely to be true in having connections to unique experiences at some really old level.

I think, for example, not only of the Moses cycle of stories, but also of the flood narrative—some ancestral part of the faith community underwent a rescue, not just metaphorically, which is nice, but from a vast inundation, and they just knew it was Yahweh who did it. I think parts of the Abraham cycle have this character, also. I see it in the sacrifice of Isaac story. There’s an oddness here that it would be difficult to “make up.” So, while I don’t NEED to tie scriptural stories to science, I think it’s nice when these pregnant connections cause us to wonder.

A question.

I had occasion to revisit the story of Abraham's near-sacrifice of his son Isaac the other day, and I didn't mind because the story is so haunting and so provocative.

Why did Abraham agree to this act?

Why was he so uncommunicative about it to his son and servant?

Did Isaac resist the final binding on the place of sacrifice?

Did Abraham ever have a doubt?

Why does God stay his hand only at the last second?

Did God have a doubt?

What is the lesson?  Does the lesson belong to the realm of faith as the absoluteness of abandonment to the will of the Other?  Or does the lesson belong to the realm of morals and the awakening of conscience to the true voice of God, who ultimately forbids barbarism and demands a prudent, orderly, civil and humane faith?

Democracy and learning

Submitted without further comment, from the Preface to "The Great Conversation"--

We believe that the reduction of the citizen to an object of
propaganda, private and public, is one of the greatest dangers
to democracy. A prevalent notion is that the great mass of
the people cannot understand and cannot form an indepen-
dent judgment upon any matter; they cannot be educated, in
the sense of developing their intellectual powers, but they
can be bamboozled. The reiteration of slogans, the distortion
of the news, the great storm of propaganda that beats upon
the citizen twenty-four hours a day all his life long mean
either that democracy must fall a prey to the loudest and
most persistent propagandists or that the people must save
themselves by strengthening their minds so that they can ap-
praise the issues for themselves.

From a very clear-eyed observer...

...named Jacques Maritain (d. 1973), come these two comments: 

"I don't see America as a mainland, but as a sea, a big ocean. Sometimes a storm arises, a formidable current develops, and it seems it will engulf everything. Wait a moment, another current will appear and bring the first one to naught."

"The great and admirable strength of America consists in this, that America is truly the American people."

Maritain, a Frenchman, wrote a short testimonial to this country as he found it in the 1940's, called Reflections on America.  To some in the current moment, these words are a warning; to others, they are strength and consolation.  Be patient.  "Stay thirsty, my friends."

Extraordinary

Apparently, Open Source Audio has recently archived and published a January 1, 1939, wire recording of Peter Maurin reading one of his Easy Essays. An amazing, thrilling and inspirational bit of Catholic history.

On the Doctrine of the Soul

A friend related a story about when she and her sister were much younger. As their mother was taking a rare nap, her sister, a toddler at the time, went up to mom, carefully pulled up the lid of one of mom's eyes, and asked, "Mommy, are you in there?"

Who could explain it better?

Why to read, and how to do it.

Richard Weaver is one of those Dangerous Writers. It's important to be careful and discerning as we make our way through his work. Plato, Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann, Leo Strauss are among those authors who are perceptive and profound in their observations of human thought and culture. Here is a lengthy passage from the concluding chapter of Visions of Order, where he discusses human learning. (His idiom is mid-20th century, so please overlook the non-PC terminology, like "man".)

Now while man has many times claimed goodness arising from a divine connection and while he is given to erecting codes of ethics, he has committed the most abominable crimes and has visited every kind of suffering upon his fellows for an infinite variety of alleged reasons. He is passionate and unstable, sot that very little is required to set him on the warpath, even against his kith and kin. Most fearful of all to contemplate is his great power of self-deception. He often does things for reasons that are obscure to him, and undoubtedly many a person has led an entire life in ignorance of the mainspring of his own actions.

These things being so, nothing could be more proper to man than the study of himself, and it is important that this should be the deepest, freest and most imaginative that the most gifted individuals are capable of making. It should be a continuing, earnest examination of human life, with all its moods, impulses, choices of means, failures and successes, miseries and happinesses shown in concrete representation. The indispensable requirement, both for the creation and enjoyment of literature thus conceived, is a receptivity to the real image of man. The practical problem is how to restore that receptivity in the face of a barbarism nourished by the scientistic fallacies discussed earlier.

A simple illustration may make this clearer. Every teacher of experience knows that there is a type of student who resents the very idea of studying literature. This student hangs back or is even defiant because he senses that the study of literature demands a certain kind of intellectual and emotional response. We might say that it demands a sign of consent, almost like some religious sacraments. It requires of every man that he suppress at least part of his native barbarism and enter into rapport with the realm of value. The easier and more natural thing for him to do is to regard the work of literature with mingled contempt and truculence. For literature, at the same time it pleases those who accept it, imposes obligations; one does not enter into it and leave scot-free. In that important respect literature is further comparable with religion; it is not supposed to make us merely comfortable. This the wary barbarian (even in the form of the reluctant student) senses, and he may decide to persist in an obdurate barbarism. It is part of the barbarian's self-protection to reject cultivation. He may repel all influences that would mollify the attitude that keeps him narrow and destructive. Putting this in a figurative way, one might assert that men are not ready for literature until they have been "Christianized." By this I refer to the establishment of that "prejudice" Blackmur speaks of in Language as Gesture. They must give initial assent to certain propositions about man and the world. In no age are all men equally ready to give this assent, and in our age there are new active forces to persuade them against giving it. The barbarian's picture of the world is founded upon the simple adulation of force, direct ways of satisfying appetite, and generally the absence of any idea about human destiny. (Of course not all peoples who have been called barbarians fit this description.) When the barbarian is asked to respect things which rebuke, refine, and control these ideas, he is being asked to change his way of life. Hence the problem of conversion arises, which in the modern setting will have to be away from the idealization of physical comfort, from the view of life as the mere play of physical matter, and from the shortcutting of those processes around which cultured man weaves patterns of significance. It must be to a conversion to an awareness of the ethical and religious drama of every moment.

The saddest thing ...

...about the funeral service I attended yesterday was the small coffin. As a teacher, I've been to a number of funerals of teens and young adults. There is a certain logic to most of these--it's either a catastrophic illness or some risky or extreme behavior. You wouldn't call them senseless in spite of the pain.

In this case, it was the death of a four year-old, from some unexplained cause. The parents have been in the midst of a very unpleasant divorce. The parents had separated and the children were with mom. Ostensibly, the child went to bed one evening, and never awakened. I don't know the story, but there was certainly some tension at the funeral. Mom was not present, and the story was that there is a cloud of suspicion over the child's death, which authorities are pursuing. No one knows anything for sure.

The celebrant spoke in his brief homily about a phrase from the liturgy--"the sure and certain hope of the resurrection." This addresses the situation most fittingly. In the first place, our faith is that the kingdom of heaven welcomes its newest soul with open arms and in God's love and comfort. Our prayers have value in carrying the young spirit to the bosom of the Maker. Secondly, we are reminded that our world is not paradise. We, God's people, do horrible things. These things are not just the outpourings of aberrant, sick individuals but belong to us as the human family. All are called to repentance and sorrow, even though specific moral guilt may not fall on all. By the same token, all are called to hope--repentance is pointless without a hope of forgiveness and renewal of life, "a sure and certain hope of the resurrection." This is what enables us to abide the sadness.

Current Reading

An amazing novel of "dystopian philosophical fiction:" Anathem, by Neal Stephenson. I'm about halfway through. If you make an effort to "translate" the other-world vocabulary, you can follow (or teach) much of the history of philosophy, especially philosophy of religion. It's about faith and reason, sacred and secular, clerical and lay, all turned inside-out, on a post-apocalyptic, suspiciously earth-like planet called "Arbre". In this journey epic, an intrepid fellowship navigates its way through a world that is not only physically hostile, but intellectually cannibalistic.

The Philosopher

A competent philosopher is one who reads slowly and writes very carefully.

"When you're down. and feeling sad ..."

Pope Benedict's Epiphany homily discusses the importance of pursuing the vision of the Kingdom, no matter the discouragements. A teacher takes comfort in this paragraph:

“There is no shadow, however dark, that can dim the light of Christ. For this reason believers in Christ never lose hope vis-à-vis the great social and economic crisis troubling humanity today, the destructive hatred and violence that continue to shed blood in many regions of the world and man’s selfishness and pretensions to be his own god, which leads sometimes to dangerous distortions of God’s design about life and the human dignity in matter of the family and the harmony of creation. As I wrote in the already mentioned Spe salvi Encyclical, our efforts to free human life and the world from poisons and pollution that could destroy the present and the future retains its value and meaning, ‘even if we outwardly achieve nothing or seem powerless in the face of overwhelming hostile forces,’ because ‘it is the great hope based upon God's promises that gives us courage and directs our action in good times and bad’(n. 35).”...

Sartre: something that doesn't get much publicity

From Busted Halo:

While serving in the French army in 1940, Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher and playwright, was captured by Germans and placed in a prisoner of war camp. Before Christmas, a fellow-prisoner named Paul Feller who was a Jesuit, persuaded Sartre to write a Christmas play for the Christians imprisoned with them. By 1940, Sartre—who had been baptized a Catholic—was a declared atheist, but he agreed to the request out of a sense of solidarity with the other prisoners. The following is a brief excerpt from the resulting play, called “Bar-Jona,” in which Sartre offers a moving reflection on the Virgin Mother and her newborn son, Jesus.

"The Virgin is pale, and she looks at the baby. What I would paint on her face is an anxious wonderment, such as has never before been seen on a human face. For Christ is her baby, flesh of her flesh, and the fruit of her womb. She has carried him for nine months, and she will give him her breast, and her milk will become the blood of God. There are moments when the temptation is so strong that she forgets that he is God. She folds him in her arms and says: My little one.

"But at other moments she feels a stranger, and she thinks: God is there — and she finds herself caught by a religious awe before this speechless God, this terrifying infant. All mothers at times are brought up sharp in this way before this fragment of themselves, their baby. They feel themselves in exile at two paces from this new life that they have created from their life, and which is now peopled by another’s thoughts. But no other baby has been so cruelly and suddenly snatched from his mother, for he is God, and he surpasses in every way anything that she can imagine. It is a hard trial for a mother to be ashamed of herself and her human condition before her son.

"But I think that there are other rapid, fleeting moments when she realizes at once that Christ is her son, her very own baby, and that he is God. She looks at him and thinks: This God is my baby. This divine flesh is my flesh. He is made from me. He has my eyes, and the curve of his mouth is the curve of mine. He is like me. He is God and he is like me.

"No other woman has been lucky enough to have a God for herself alone, a tiny little God whom she can take in her arms and cover with kisses, a warm-bodied God who smiles and breathes, a God that she can touch, who is alive. And it is in these moments that I would paint Mary, if I was a painter, and I would try to capture the air of radiant tenderness and timidity with which she lifts her finger to touch the sweet skin of her baby-God, whose warm weight she feels on her knees, and who smiles."

Worth saving.

From Rodney Crowell:

The sun comes up tomorrow,
but there are no guarantees;
it can rock you like a baby,
it can bring you to your knees.

Happy New Year! Some Advent thoughts....

from Engaging Faith blog:

"Let the world indulge in its madness, for it cannot endure and passes like a shadow. It is growing old, and I think is in its last decrepit stage. But we, buried deep in the wounds of Christ, why should we be dismayed." (St. Peter Canisius)

"Hope always draws the soul from the beauty that is seen to what is beyond, always kindles the desire for the hidden through what is perceived" (St. Gregory of Nyssa)

"God is so good and merciful, that to obtain Heaven it is sufficient to ask it of him from our hearts." (St. Benedict Joesph Labre)

"The time will come when there shall be one flock and one shepherd, one faith and one clear knowledge of God." (St. Birgitta of Sweden)

"If Christ is with us, who is against us? You can fight with confidence when you are sure of victory. With Christ and for Christ victory is certain." (St. Bernard)

Moving on...

Some messages of encouragement and clarity on this day:

First, today's meditation passage on DGO is from St. Therese of Lisieux. Consider carefully what the Little Flower says about the search for the great soul, and the conditions for that search:

Dear Sister, how can you ask me if it is possible for you to love God as I love Him? ... My desires of martyrdom are nothing; they are not what give me the unlimited confidence that I feel in my heart. They are, to tell the truth, the spiritual riches that render one unjust, when one rests in them with complacence and when one believes they are something great... Ah! I really feel that... what pleases Him is that He sees me loving my littleness and my poverty, the blind hope that I have in His mercy .... That is my only treasure...

Oh, dear Sister, I beg you... understand that to love Jesus... the weaker one is, without desires or virtues, the more suited one is for the workings of this consuming and transforming Love. The desire alone to be a victim suffices, but we must consent to remain always poor and without strength, and this is the difficulty, for: "The truly poor in spirit, where do we find him? You must look for him from afar," said the psalmist. He does not say that you must look for him among great souls, but "from afar," that is to say in lowliness, in nothingness.

Ah! let us remain then very far from all that sparkles, let us love our littleness, let us love to feel nothing, then we shall be poor in spirit, and Jesus will come to look for us, and however far we may be, He will transform us in flames of love. Oh! How I would like to be able to make you understand what I feel! It is confidence, and nothing but confidence that must lead us to Love. Does not fear lead to Justice? (To the severe justice that people show to sinners but not the justice Jesus will have for those who love him.) Since we see the way, let us run together. Yes, I feel it, Jesus wills to give us the same graces; he wills to give us his Heaven gratuitously.

On a more overt political note, Plato writes in the Republic:

The city where those who are to rule are least anxious to be rulers is of necessity the best managed.

Finally, Victor Davis Hanson, in A War Like No Other, on the character of the most tragic of all conflicts, the Peloponnesian war:

Just think of it: a land versus a maritime power, the starkness of the Dorians contrasted with Ionian liberality. Oligarchy was pitted against democracy, practiced dearth set against ostentatious wealth. A rural hamlet dethroned a majestic imperial city; and a garrison state professed the cause of Greek autonomy abroad even as a humane imperialism killed the innocent.

No one foresaw such carnage in 431. Who believed that in just two years, the majestic Pericles would end up covered with pustules, grasping an amulet as he coughed out his life in the fevers of the plague? [Hanson then discusses the fates of other important figures....] Everything considered wisdom at the beginning of the war would be proven folly at its end.

Circumstances change. Leadership is the critical issue in the search for the better republic, and until great souls emerge the vision of the best polity will continue to take second place to economic revanchism and the moral cynicism that prefers selfish, short-sighted, agenda-driven convenience over the inalienable dignity of life itself.

Deepak Chopra

Dr. Chopra suggests three Christs: historical, theological, cosmological. There isn't a lot of detail in the article, but certainly the idea is not new. From Origen and other early scholars to Teilhard de Chardin, the sense of a cosmic, spiritual, reality of Christ as the Savior/Reconciler of all things has been present. It's not only Pauline, but fully a part of mainstream Christianity. Now the question is whether the presence of the cosmic Christ is recovered within the Christian and Catholic core beliefs or becomes the center of another modern attempt to claim a valid gnosticism.