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Why does this not make me feel any better about the prospect of an Obama presidency?

A few years ago, I started teaching a unit called "Biblical Themes" in the parish Confirmation Prep program. I was given six 90-minute sessions to work with, and no curricula whatsoever. Since I was recruited for the task a mere week before classes were to begin, I didn’t have a lot of time to plan out the program, but I relished the idea of having such free reign to come up with six Biblical lessons for the high school kids.

I quickly sketched out a plan of study that I can only describe now as grossly optimistic. It involved touching each week on the Biblical meaning of one of six important concepts: revelation, covenant, sin, faith, righteousness, and salvation. 

About halfway through the third class, I finally made it out of the first lesson. Needless to say, I did some serious adjustment to the plan, and completely re-worked it the next time I taught it, focusing the whole unit on the reality of the Bible as God’s Word.

So I found myself, the second time through, trying to show about 20 high school kids how they can encounter Christ in Scripture, and taking the opportunity to perhaps reiterate the importance of some moral and religious duties. Yet I wondered if I was using the time well. These kids already knew the moral law, after all, and they already knew that God can be found in the Bible.

But, as was apparent during our lessons, they weren’t in the habit of going to the Scriptures to find God. So, I thought: Instead of spending my time telling them what they already know – at least at a basic level – perhaps I should be trying to understand why they’re not pursuing their ready opportunities to encounter God. It dawned on me pretty quickly that their knowledge of God was probably such that it was leading them to conclude that, if they did open the Bible to find God, He’d likely tell them, so to speak, to clean their rooms. What they really needed was to hear the Gospel.

17th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

1Ki 3:5,7-12; Rom 8:28; Mt 13:44-52

⁴⁴ "The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, which a person finds and hides again, and out of joy goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. ⁴⁵ Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant searching for fine pearls. ⁴⁶ When he finds a pearl of great price, he goes and sells all that he has and buys it.
Matthew 13:44-46 (NAB)

At just that time, I was involved in putting together a reflection on two of the mini-parables in this Sunday’s Gospel reading: the Hidden Treasure, and the Pearl of Great Price. In both parables, a man gives up all that he has to possess the treasure he found.

As I found myself thinking about the best way to use Scripture to convey to my high school charges God’s love and yearning for them, I considered extrapolating on John 3:16, but decided it might come off as too cliche. It was early winter, when John the Baptist appears in the liturgical readings, and I got to thinking about how John’s insight "He must increase; I must decrease" (John 3:30) was recapitulated by Paul, in a post-Ascension context, when, in Galatians, he says:

"I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.
Galatians 2:20 (NASB)

It struck me that the Son of God could not have given up more than Himself; that like the man in the parable who gave up his all to possess the hidden treasure, Christ has given up His all to possess the Church. This is the same essential message as John 3:16; it is the heart of the Gospel.

We’re accustomed to hearing this parable in quite different terms – that the treasure is the Kingdom of God that the wise disciple is willing to give up everything to possess (c.f. Mark 10:17-31), but I think Matthew primarily has something else in mind.

The parable of the Hidden Treasure (like that of the Pearl of Great Price) is set in the midst of a series of parables in chapter 13 of Matthew, which all suggest God as the subject and principal actor (the person), and the disciples/church as the acted upon objects (seed, wheat, yeast, fish).

It seems clear to me that the Lord is trying to tell us in these parables, not so much about what our priorities should be – as important as that is to understand – but just how much He thinks of us, and what we’re worth to Him.

My friend, in God’s eye, you are that pearl of great price whom He has given up all He has to possess. Next time you see a high school kid, see if you can find a way to convey that message – it’s the gospel truth.

For you are a people holy to the LORD your God; the LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession.
Deuteronomy 7:6 (NRSV)

Ever since high school, I’ve been keeping a journal of at least occasional thoughts, as well as some other minor writing. Sometime during the summer of what I think was 1984, I threw away all my collected writing to date – with the exception of a small set of poetry that was the lyrical content of some music I was composing at the time.

I’ve often since regretted that action, thinking that, in my rashness, I’ve deprived myself of a good source of knowledge and insight into myself as a person. I’m not sure I still regret it, though, as I don’t know how keen I would be to encounter the young man behind those ten years worth of missing documents. I’m not entirely certain of the reason for this, but I have some ideas.

I still possess what is now over twenty years of the document record of my life, often recorded at low moments of melancholy bellyaching, yet also including a fair amount of constructive thought, in one form or another. Occasionally, I go back through it to recollect the way I have traveled. The bellyaching tends to be pretty repetitive – I’ve been struggling against more or less the same demons for most of my life, even if my footing in that struggle has changed radically over time – but I’ve always found it at least entertaining, and at times even inspiring, to re-enter the thinking of my younger self.

Lately, though, I’ve been finding myself less comfortable with what (or who) I encounter when I dig into my past. I’m not referring to the record of my struggles – I understand what that’s all about, regardless of how frustrating it might be to see the evidence of sin’s tenacious perseverance, and my own characteristic feebleness – but rather to the record of my ideas about things that were important to me. Where once I would have found my younger self’s thinking to be at least a good jumping off point for considering some matter, I now find myself, more and more, rolling my eyes at the narrowness and shallowness of what I once thought.

p>It’s not necessarily a bad thing to be able to say that I’ve moved on, but I’m beginning to not recognize myself in my own history, if I can say that without undue melodrama. It’s not that I’ve ever been completely satisfied with the way I’d put things ten or fifteen years prior, and I’ve certainly always felt there was room for improvement and development, but I’m beginning to consider my youthful thinking less in terms of development (of at least certain strands of thought), and more in terms of correction – even repudiation. It seems I was, in some matters, right out to lunch.

The net result of this has been a loss of confidence in myself, and in my ability to perceive reality with sufficient and appropriate clarity. It’s great to learn from one’s mistakes, to grow, to overcome deficiencies. But what should this suggest my current life might look like to me in another fifteen or twenty or thirty years? Would I discover (or at least surmise, for how could I say with certainty even then?) that my ideas, today, had been not only immature and unrefined (which would be par for the course), but even at cross-purposes with reality (that is: lies)?

Multiply this problem by, not a few decades, but the infinite shadow of eternity, and it becomes easy to fall prey to the conceits of the relativists, and their confounded coupling of skepticism and progressivism. At the least, it does seem to raise a valid question about the limits of human knowledge, and of what it means to be coming to know the truth. If we are growing in wisdom, we should always have the luxury of looking back with a certain bemusement, but it seems illogical to me that the path to truth should ever look, in retrospect, to have been just plain wrong – leading me to wonder exactly what path I’m actually on.

As I write this, it occurs to me that I must sound like I am complaining of a lack of personal infallibility. So many people have such trouble with the concept even of the infallibility of the Bride of Christ, and here I am grousing about how inconsistent it seems with life in the Spirit of Truth for an individual to fall into error. It sounds silly when I put it like this. But, still, wrong-headedness must be seen, it seems to me, to be rooted in resistance to the Spirit.

In reality, some of the Protestant theories of revelation tread down this same path – I’m thinking of the doctrines of soul competence and the perspicuity of Scripture. They’re not identical to what I’m talking about, but they likewise assume that error can be known (or avoided), not through the faculty of reason, but through grace, somehow. And that this is available to individuals through the Spirit. When you examine them, these are really much more radical doctrines than the Catholic dogma of infallibility, which grace is attributed only to the Church as a whole – including, in some circumstances, the Pope speaking for the entire Church.

So I really can’t go there, as tempting as it is. In the end, I suppose I simply cannot know just how misguided I may be at any particular time. That’s the inherent danger of opinion, isn’t it?

What’s frustrating is the stubborn obscurity of the distinction between opinion and understanding – not that I’ve ever witnessed understanding attempting to masquerade as opinion, but opinion certainly strives mightily to be passed off as understanding. It’s very easy to walk away with an ignorant opinion from an encounter with a genuine source of knowledge. Isn’t that, in a nutshell, the basis of faithlessness?

As for whether my younger self had any real clue whatsoever, or what my older self would make of my current self, I suppose I just need to be at peace with myself, and cultivate hope. And it wouldn’t huty to consider the significance of the fact that the areas of my youthful thought I now see the need to renounce are exactly those areas where I had trouble, as a youth, with Catholic Church teaching.

It looks like WORDsearch blew it again in today’s release of build 8.0.2.32, at least in terms of fixing the problem of the control that is supposed to allow users to define their home directory for documents.

For many months after the release of WS8, this button did absolutely nothing (except on non-LUA-compliant configurations – a diversion there is no need to pursue here). A recent build proposing to fix it actually wired a function into it that changed the wrong setting instead, and then another build release passed without addressing what would seem to silly old me to be a major embarrassment.

Yesterday’s build release notes claimed to finally fix the problem, and the dialog box allows you to browse to a new document home location, and makes it look like you’ve changed it. It even creates a registry entry for the “new” location (though it doesn’t write the key until the app exits, which seems bizarre).

But the application continues to look in the default location for documents (C:\Users\username\Documents\WORDsearch). Upon restart, it even resets the value shown in the Options dialog box to the default.

Furthermore, the app appears to be persistently setting a read-only flag on that WORDsearch directory.

For the life of me, I just cannot understand either how this can be so difficult, or how management could let these builds out the door with such a blatant lack of testing and due diligence…

I have to begin this entry by confessing that, when I heard last week of George Carlin’s earthly demise, I reacted to the news with a feeling of subdued satisfaction and relief, one that was very similar to the feeling of watching the trash collectors drive away from the house after a weekend of cleaning. There was a mild sense of losing something familiar, but more a sense of being done with that which finally had to go.

Now, I realize that was not at all a charitable reaction, nor do I offer any justification for it. I didn’t know George Carlin, and I mostly paid very little attention to him while he was living. But there was a time when I thought he was funny, and there was also a time – an earlier time – when I thought he was more than that.

At one time, Carlin represented to me a kind of secret knowledge -  even a kind of blessed existence – that operated on the other side of a divide that I was being restrained from crossing by the sorry circumstances of my life (that is to say, by my youth). He was a kind of symbol of what was possible, if only I could be freed from the shackles that kept me bound to the boredom of my genteel, supervised, life. For genteel, he surely was not.

I remember in particular being fascinated by the existence of his famous routine on the seven words you could never say on television. I’m not sure I ever heard the routine – perhaps I did, but I can’t remember. What I remember is wanting to hear it.

When it was released in 1972, I was in 6th or 7th grade, and undoubtedly using all of Carlin’s favorite words in common speech with my peers (my own life actually being genteel in theory only), so there was no unknown pleasure waiting to be experienced in the knowledge of the routine’s content, I only wanted to experience the hearing of it. Knowing which words they were was not enough, I wanted to hear them said. Not by my friends, either – that might have had a certain charm, but it was not the real deal.

What I wanted to experience, I know now, was sheer mockery of civility. I wanted to experience the contempt for goodness that this piece trafficked in and pivoted on – in much the same spirit, I realize now, that other boys liked to watch frogs cruelly and contemptuously destroyed by firecrackers. I wanted to cheer on the defilement of purity.

I could be profane all by myself – I didn’t need Carlin. What made the vicarious insolence of indulging in a sophomoric rant like his seem more like "the real deal" than even my own private insolence was precisely the participation factor. In it, I could be a part of something much larger than myself, something of a social movement. It’s actually a perversion of liturgy – a way for me to belong; to be an insider in something that provided a kind of meaning to life.

And this is very ironic, because the mockery and insolence came off as a kind of liberation – a liberation from socially imposed expectations, which would purchase the freedom of independence. But I see now that it can only free one from the expectations of civility. Once across the chasm and into the promised land of irreverence, social expectations don’t disappear, they simply change, and mockery becomes the only acceptable currency, the only real proof of virility. It turns out to be not freedom from expectations at all, but merely an exchange of one master for another: exchanging the good, the true, and the beautiful for the cruel, the cynical, and the profane.

When something sacred is violated, we experience a kind of revulsion that is all too easily distorted into a titillating thrill. The perverse pleasure we take out of the debasement of the good is a masquerade that hides our inability to accept the cross of suffering with God for the sake of overcoming sin. First we feel sick to the stomach, and we get fearful and angry, but if we do not have the character to persevere and overcome, we will end up laughing. Such is the state of so much of what passes for contemporary comedy.

I’d intended to let Carlin’s passing pass without remark – in part because I felt no urge to expose the callousness of my own sense of good riddance – until I was confronted with my very contrasting response to the news of the death yesterday of Larry Harmon, a man I’d never even heard of, but who was largely responsible for the phenomenon called Bozo the Clown.

I don’t recall much in particular about Bozo. I can picture the face, though it’s almost conflated a bit with Ronald McDonald in my memory. What’s important for my purposes is that the comedic entertainment that Bozo represented was of such a different character than Carlin’s. When I read of Harmon’s demise, I thought "there goes someone whose life work brought delight and wonder into the lives of so many children." What a contrast to Carlin, whose life work peddled contempt and cynicism to the hearts of so many of those anxious to avoid being contaminated by the sweetness of childhood. Carlin is truly the one of these two contemporaries who deserves the title Bozo.

The NY Times obituary for Carlin says that he himself defended his particularly obnoxious recent "material" by claiming that "his comedy had always been driven by an intolerance for the shortcomings of humanity and society." Of that, I have no doubt. But if society is going to avoid disintegrating into a fratricidal jungle, we need turn back from this "new way" of unmitigated contempt advanced by bozos like Carlin. Communities, like families, survive, in no small part, on the willingness of their members to overlook each other’s shortcomings. What we should be intolerant of is not human foibles, but the willful and deliberate corruption of the human spirit.

The challenge, for me, is that my community is not only full of people like Larry Harmon, who find a way to put their talents to work in ways that contribute in somehow to the common good, but also of bozos who try their best to tear down the good: to degrade, to demean, to belittle, to mock, to despoil. It’s a challenge to me because such people are a temptation to me to stoop to their level. I realize that Carlin can win the battle for my spirit by either getting me to laugh at his depravity, or by getting me to treat him as he treated others. I fear that the incivility and vulgarity that has come to so permeate my society over my lifetime has become barely recognizable in its ubiquity.

And I fear I remain a long way from being freed from the servility of the caustic inhumanity that makes up the faux-liberated modernism promoted by Carlin, if news of his death can only provide me a sense of satisfaction and an opportunity to call him a bozo. Lord, have mercy on all of us.

WORDsearch released a new WS8 build yesterday, bringing the current public distribution to 8.0.2.29. Remarkably, it did not address what I consider the biggest chink the the armor of the previous public build (8.0.2.14, released on May 15th).

This "chink" is a mis-coded button on the Settings dialog that offers to let the user to set the home directory for user files used within the program, but instead, by calling the function intended for a different button, changes the root directory for the library of CROSS books used by the program. (In other words, someone apparently copied & pasted the first button object and changed the label, but never changed the onclick() method to make it do what the second button is supposed to do.)

So, you think you are telling the program to look in a certain directory for your user-created documents, but instead, you are actually telling it to look for its main library in that folder, which is not likely to work very well. I can only imagine how many non-computer-savvy people ended up with installations that just didn’t work at all after trying to change their home directory to something more useful than the installation default. Hopefully, not too many people have tried it yet.

But it blows my mind that WORDsearch would: a.) release the code initially without testing it (it was new functionality in the .14 release); b.) let such a ridiculously flawed build remain the public build for six weeks; and c.) fail to fix it in the next public update release. The problem was identified almost immediately on the Tech Support forum, so it’s not like nobody knew about it.

Some of the long-standing window/desktop management problems have been at least partially addressed with this release, and an annoying little issue where citations of Psalms texts would be referenced incorrectly (e.g. Psalms 24:1, instead of Psalm 24:1) has been corrected, but this release seems to focus mostly on trying to improve the Bibliographer and citations mechanisms.

I just can’t shake the feeling that I’m still beta testing this application, almost eight months after release.