Politics & Economics

McCain/Palin ’08? I Can Live With That

Posted on by John W Gillis / 2 Comments

Sarah Palin? Even if I had known who she was, I don’t think I would have seen that coming. I had been hearing the whispers of Tom Ridge and Joe Lieberman as possibilities, and saw how McCain’s logic might have steered him toward them. He’s never really been conservative, and has always been ready to play the maverick, and I could see how he might consider the constituency-broadening appeal of a pro-choice running mate. I hate to say it, but I don’t think the prospect of a pro-choice VP would have concerned McCain. And it would have built bridges into new voting constituencies that would have made him very hard to beat this year.

Of course, the social conservatives would have been furious, but what could they do? They still would have voted for McCain (this year) – the alternative would be an Obama presidency (enough said). I could really see McCain doing this – it seemed like a move that would be right down his alley. It would have worked in 2008, but very possibly could have fractured the Republican base for years to come. It would have marked a potential parting of ways of the pro-life movement and the Republican party – a marriage that is more circumstantial that intrinsic to Republicanism, anyway.

I think there are a lot of Republicans who would like to be rid of true conservatism – much of what they consider the kooky religious right of the party – in order to pursue unmitigated Republicanism – which is really good old fashioned liberalism, as confusing as that may be to moderns who don’t have a grasp of European history over the last, say, 350 years. Some might argue that Libertarianism already offers that option – which is a pretty good argument, but I think most modern Republicans are looking for a greater level of social conservatism than Libertarianism embraces, even those who could do without the religious framework.

Anyway, so I got to wondering whether the Republican party or the pro-life movement (and traditionalism in general) would fare worse in such a split, if it were to turn radical. I wondered if the social conservative movement was coherent enough, apart from the Republican party, to pull together a political force that could compete for serious political office in this country. I’m not sure it is, but I do think such a scenario would have provided an opportunity to put a political platform together that was not so beholden to economic liberalism as the Republican party is. The idea that the corporate consequence of unmitigated personal greed and self-interest will somehow produce the common good is a rather idolatrous proposal, after all. I also wondered if it might provide an opportunity for the “religious right” to divest itself of the statism particular to political conservatism, which tends toward slavish subservience in the face of any form of state-sponsored violence, and seems incapable of honest, objective evaluations of judgment criteria such as just war theory.

So I saw a potential opportunity for social conservatism in the U.S. to cleanse itself of some dubious bedmates. More specifically, I saw a potential opportunity for the development of a political force that was rooted in Christian values that cut across the lines of modern liberalism and conservatism.

Since I know more than a few of them – including some very dear to me – I often wonder what it would take to get Christians out of the Democratic party, with its unabashed commitment to the destruction of innocent human life, its open hostility to marriage and the family, and its infatuation with using state power to achieve its ends – in a nutshell: with its relentless misanthropy. Honestly, I don’t know what it would take, because they usually think they are taking the moral high ground themselves, standing up for the little guy (as long as the guys aren’t too little I suppose, but we won’t go there, since many of these folks try very hard not to think about that much). Still, to offer them a political alternative that was not wedded to economic Darwinism might be enough to open the eyes of many of them to the innate misanthropy of the Democratic platform.

But all this may have been wishful thinking. It’s entirely possible that a Republican party divorced from its Christian conscience would only join forces with the Democrats in fostering a more and more radically progressive and intolerant form of political liberalism, hostile to any kind of religious values in the public square, and effectively outlawing Christianity as anything more than a privately held neurosis. Given the political vibrancy of the “values” constituency in the U.S., this might seem far-fetched, but one doesn’t need to look far to see its manifestations in countries not too different from the U.S. Making the outrageous claim that marriage is a covenantal bond between a man and a woman just might get you hauled before a Human Rights Commission on hate crime charges in Canada, and convincing a pregnant woman not to subject her baby to a brutal death in an abortion clinic will now apparently get you two years in prison in Great Britain. It’s a brave new world out there…

All of this is moot now, however – at least for the time being. McCain managed to make the kind of reach-across gesture I imagined him doing, but he did it without courting the pro-abortion vote. In fact, in picking a mother of a Down’s Syndrome baby, he picked the anti-Obama, a woman who could be the poster model for true human decency, respect, and dignity. You don’t build a bright new future by killing it one baby at a time, Mr. Obama. I don’t know much about Governor Palin yet, but I really like what I’ve seen so far, and I think this may have been a master stroke of political genius by McCain – a man I didn’t really expect that from. Before she’s done, Sarah Palin may be the first woman president of the United States. I can sure think of worse fates.


, , , , , , ,
Scripture

Upon This Rock: Royal Authority & Stewardship

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

A few observations on the Gospel reading for this week…

21st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

19 I will thrust you from your office and pull you down from your station. 20 On that day I will summon my servant Eliakim, son of Hilkiah; 21 I will clothe him with your robe, and gird him with your sash, and give over to him your authority. He shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and to the house of Judah. 22 I will place the key of the House of David on his shoulder; when he opens, no one shall shut, when he shuts, no one shall open. 23 I will fix him like a peg in a sure spot, to be a place of honor for his family; [NAB]

33 Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How inscrutable are his judgments and how unsearchable his ways! 34 “For who has known the mind of the Lord or who has been his counselor?” 35 “Or who has given him anything that he may be repaid?” 36 For from him and through him and for him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen. [NAB]

13 When Jesus went into the region of Caesarea Philippi he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” 14 They replied, “Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” 15 He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” 16 Simon Peter said in reply, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” 17 Jesus said to him in reply, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah. For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father. 18 And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it. 19 I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” 20 Then he strictly ordered his disciples to tell no one that he was the Messiah. [NAB]

Knowing & Knowing Of: It’s interesting to note the way Jesus frames the two questions he presents to the disciples: “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” vs. “Who do you say that I am?” The people, who are remote, know “the Son of Man,” but He is to them a remote figure whom they know inadequately, in a kind of third-person relationship: not as a “thou” but as a “him”. Really, they know of Jesus; they don’t know him. On the other hand, the knowledge of the disciples is personal, and therefore able to be brought to completion. Not long before this, Matthew tells us, Jesus had explained to His disciples: “To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been granted.” (Matthew 13:11, NASB). Peter’s confession is the logical conclusion to this string of ideas showing the disciples as the privileged stewards of God’s revelation.

On Peter: Much is made in certain circles of the difference in the Greek between the masculine form of the name now given to Peter (Petros), and the feminine form (petra) of the “rock” upon which Jesus will build His ecclesia. The difference, it is said, is as one between a stone and a large rock mass. The usual rejoinder from the ultramontane crowd is that in the Aramaic which Jesus would actually have been speaking that day to this Galilean fisherman, there is no such distinction, and the word used in both instances would have been kepha. This may be so, but I like to think the inspired character of the text given to us in Greek offers us insight that goes beyond any extrapolation back into the Aramaic.

The obvious Old Testament parallel and type for this passage is the passage from Isaiah 22 that we see in the first reading. The oracle, pronounced against Shebna, the king’s steward (“master of the palace”), makes reference to his being thrust from his office, and replaced by Eliakim, who, unlike Shebna, would act as God’s servant in his fulfillment of the office. This stewardship was not a singular role that was intrinsic to Shebna personally, but an office that he filled – and that others would continue to fill so long as there was a Davidic king to be served as steward. I think this may be a useful interpretive key to the linguistic differentiation of the two “rock” words in the Greek.

Perhaps Jesus is saying here that He will build His Church not simply “on you, Peter” but “on Peter writ large.” In other words, not only on Peter personally (although He certainly did that), but on the office of royal authority – of king’s steward – that Peter would inaugurate anew and serve as the paradigm for. The following verse about the giving of the keys of the Kingdom seems to make this clear, referring quite evidently back to Eliakim’s taking on of the stewardship of the Davidic kingdom.

The calling attention to the stone/rock-mass (petros/petra) distinction often seems proposed as a rather coy means of minimizing the significance of Peter’s foundational role, and more importantly, by extension, in claiming that Peter himself is not the foundational “rock mass” after all, despite the obvious parallelism at play in Jesus’ pronouncement, of writing off the claims of Peter’s successors to a role of chief stewardship. However, I think the Petrine claims to such an office become even more convincing when this passage is seen in its broader Biblical context, and the linguistic differentiation of scale in the Greek text actually points forward beyond the personal (which would have made the statement mythological, since the historical Peter would live only another thirty-odd years or so), to the historical unfolding of that Church which would not appear in an instant, but rather will , we are told, be built. As the rest of the passage makes clear, Jesus was conferring real authority – His authority – upon Peter, and Peter could not possibly have personally exercised that authority continuously until the Church prevailed against the “gates of the netherworld” in the resurrection.

The Rock: Even more interesting to me is Jesus’ choice of the name “Rock” for Simon. He could have called Simon anything, but He chose a term that had been widely used in Scripture to refer to God Himself. This says simply amazing things about Peter, or more properly, about the nature of the authority Jesus was conferring on him. It is clear that Jesus intended that those who heard the voice of Peter should consider that they heard the voice of God. If this is not clear enough in the gospel text, it is recapitulated, by inference, in Rev 3:7:

“And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia write: He who is holy, who is true, who has the key of David, who opens and no one will shut, and who shuts and no one opens, says this:” [NAB]

Here the Risen Lord, seated in authority, uses language that hearkens back again both to Peter’s commission as foundation of the Church, and all the way back to Eliakim, a faithful servant become steward, whose name means “God raises up.” Then, we see at Pentecost, Peter, the faithful servant become steward of Christ, proclaiming to the world “God raised Him up”: “But God raised Him up again, putting an end to the agony of death, since it was impossible for Him to be held in its power” [Acts 2:24, NAB]. Peter then testifies with the Pentecostal Spirit of Truth to the Lordship of Jesus “Therefore let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made Him both Lord and Christ—this Jesus whom you crucified” [Acts 2:36, NAB] which proclamation is the faithful fulfillment of his commission.

Peter Receives the Keys to the Kingdom (Perugino, 1481)

The Keys to the Kingdom: The liturgy’s association of the Isaiah 22 passage and Mt 16:19 makes clear both how Christ intended the kingdom He was inaugurating to be the fulfillment of the Davidic kingdom, and the kind of authority He was handing to Peter as steward. The authority is historical. That is to say, while it is certainly a “spiritual” authority, it is temporal, even if it has eschatological implications. The authority of the Kingdom is not something waiting to be revealed in a mythic or even eschatological future. The Kingdom is now, and the king’s steward exercises the King’s authority.

While it’s certainly true that the breaking in of the Kingdom is far from complete, this passage, and its articulation of the historical reality of the Kingdom in the Church, thoroughly repudiates the popular American Evangelical theology known as Dispensationalism – a recent variation on millenarianism which denies the present reality of the Kingdom, and expects instead a future 1000-year temporal reign of Jesus from modern-day Jerusalem, inaugurated in apocalyptic mayhem. It is quite ridiculous to picture Peter exercising Christ’s royal authority on earth in such a scenario, with Christ Himself somehow also both reigning directly on earth as He does in heaven, and yet still “building” His Church on petra! If Dispensationalism is true, then Jesus must not have meant anything He said to Peter that day.

, , , , , , , , , ,
Scripture

Motherhood and Salvation

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

I think the Gospel reading for this week – Mt 15:21-28, The Healing of the Canaanite Woman’s Daughter – is pregnant with eschatological meaning.

20th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
Isa 56:1, 6-7
Ro 11:13-15, 29-32
Mt 15:21-28
“O woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.”
And her daughter was healed from that hour. (Mt 15:28)

The woman, who calls Jesus “Lord” and “Son of David,” asks for mercy on herself, but in doing so is actually referring to her daughter’s ailment. She is, in other words, identifying completely with her daughter’s suffering – she’s making it her own.

Jesus, however, does not respond to her with a logos (word). The disciples, we are told, ask (or implore) Jesus to “send her away,” though the plea doesn’t look much like a question. Did they “ask” Him on her behalf? Or did they just want to be rid of her so she’d stop yelling behind them? Verse 24 would seem to suggest they asked Him to help her. However, Jesus was not sent to the Gentiles . . . the apostles were – but that’s a story to be picked up later.

The woman, at any rate, would not be deterred, and she came and did Jesus homage – again asking “help me,” and so demonstrating again her commitment to her daughter’s healing as her own personal burden. There’s no real surprise to that, of course, but Jesus honors it. Great was her faith, so the Lord tells us, and it was indeed her will that was accomplished – Christ made her will His own. Such is the remarkable power of the prayer of those of “great faith.” Because of this woman’s faith, her daughter was healed of demon possession “from that hour.”

And if the demons had no more power over her, then her mother’s faith surely brought her across the threshold of salvation. Great is the power of intercession: If one will take on the suffering of others, the power of salvation can be manifest.

Why didn’t the disciples implore Jesus to save the child because of her suffering from the “cruel” demon possession, instead of because of the nagging persistence of the mother? Perhaps that’s too harsh a reading; perhaps, in a sense, we have here a model of intercession, where the mother pleads for her daughter, and the disciples plead on the mother’s behalf.

I think those that would withhold baptism from infants and children fail to grasp the truth being displayed in this passage about the woman’s faith. It does violence to God’s intention and will for us in Christ to make baptism, or even salvation for that matter, a consequence of personal belief. This woman’s faith saved her child because of the unrelenting love and devotion that she had for the girl. It was a grace, pure and simple. But grace, as always, is offered in love.

Grace is, in other words, dependent on love – it is not random. It was, as Jesus said, the woman’s will that was done in the healing of the daughter. This grace has its origin in the mother’s love, or more precisely, in God’s love brought to light within the mother, expressed through her will to love her daughter.

This should not surprise anyone, because the Christ became like us that we might become like Him. And what is it to be like him? What else but to make the grace of salvation present in the world through love and faith.

Isn’t this just what Christ commanded when he told us to love one another as he has loved us? What was his love for us except taking upon himself our burdens as his burden, and through a faithful, persevering, sacrificial love for us, bringing us to God’s salvation? This is shown in yet another way in Paul’s remarkable assertion that “woman will be saved through bearing children.” (1Tim 2:15, RSV)

Those who are scandalized by Mary’s titles of Co-Redemptrix and Co-Mediatrix must fail to see this. Mary may bear those titles in a special and even unique way, as the one chosen from among all the offspring of Eve to bring Salvation Himself into the world through the love and suffering of childbirth and motherhood (for even if her childbirth were free of suffering, as tradition asserts, her motherhood surely was not). But she does not bear them uniquely per se, for we are all called to share in the salvific love of Christ for the world. Salvation is the work of Christ in the world, working through those who, in His Spirit, would be His Body. The titles really identify Mary with the Church, and orient the Church properly toward the world.

It seems some would like to keep well defined and intact a clear line between the thrice holy God and fallen humanity, but that is precisely the line that He became incarnate to erase, glory be to God.

, , , , , , ,
Life in Christ

A Saint for Our Age

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

Today was the feast day of Saint Maximilian Mary Kolbe, and I spent a lot of time thinking about him. When Maximilian was canonized by Pope John Paul II, the pope proclaimed him The Patron Saint of Our Difficult Century. He was a great evangelizer and defender of the faith, as well as a protector of Jews and a fierce critic of Nazism – a witness which eventually landed him in Auschwitz as a prisoner.

It was there that his legend was cemented. In retribution for an attempted prisoner escape, the deputy commander of the death camp ordered ten men from Maximilian’s barracks to be sent away to be starved to death. One of the men cried out in grief over his family, and Maximilian stepped forward to take his place. The man survived to personally see Maximilian canonized 41 years later.

The 20th century was nothing if not the stage for the full flowering of Enlightenment deism into outright atheism, and its attendant religiously-flavored inanities. Maximilian’s sensibilities were very much shaped by his experience of the hostility of Europe’s public order toward the Church. As waves of nationalism, socialism, and finally National Socialism, reverberated through the remnants of Christendom, sweeping away traditional meanings of community, the vacuity of the “Enlightenment” project was once for all exposed in the unimaginable darkness of abject brutalities, culminating in the misanthropic hell holes of places like Auschwitz.

Maximilian, in the very midst of the madness, responded in the only way the Church can. He followed his Lord in offering his life, not only for his neighbor, but for his neighbor’s family.

It’s no accident of history that the descent of civilization into various barbarisms in the 20th century has left the 21st century with a legacy of broken families, the destigmatization and social embrace of fornication, a view of sex even within marriage that is radically divorced from its organic meaning in fatherhood and motherhood, the utter collapse of nature’s most fundamental bond of love in the unspeakable crime of abortion, and now, even the attempt to erase the memory of marriage from the consciousness of humanity by perverting its meaning, so that future generations will not even possess a word by which to distinguish marriage from other, non-covenantal, and even explicitly self-centered, domestic arrangements. There will be no thread binding the family together that is left unrepudiated, except the duty of children towards parents – and the wheels of “progress” are already moving to dismantle what remains of that, as society prepares to implement the mirror-image function of abortion in Kevorkianism.

It turns out, it seems, that the family and civilization do not so much support each other, as reflect each other in different historical permutations of the same reality. The family is to civilization as the fetus is to the adult. You cannot destroy one without destroying the other. This is the true crisis of our age, as John Paul II (and his successor) understood as well as anyone. And that Maximilian of Auschwitz is also the patron saint of families is no coincidence.

We need more men like Saint Maximilian with the courage, and the prudence, to offer their lives for the sake the family. The truth is that the world is not so much saved one soul at a time, as one family at a time.

“Believe in the Lord Jesus and you and your household will be saved.”
Acts 16:31 (NAB)

, , , , , , ,
Scripture

Walking on Water

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

I love the readings for this week. The Gospel reading is one of those stories that even unbelievers are familiar with – Jesus walking on the water. It has become a cultural reference, and the phrase “he walks on water” has come to have an immediately identifiable meaning. The Gospel story, for its part, is taken as evidence of (or at least a claim for) the Divinity of Christ.

But, interestingly, in this Matthean version, unlike the parallel in Mark, Peter also walks on water, if only briefly. This suggests some magnificent things about the Church, much like some of the other miracle stories: about how the Church is invited to participate in the transformative power that God reveals in Christ. But the wind caused Peter to become frightened.

19th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
1Kgs 19.9a,11-13; Rom 9.1-5; Mt 14.22-33

He said, “Come.” Peter got out of the boat and began to walk on the water toward Jesus. But when he saw how (strong) the wind was he became frightened; and, beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!”
Matthew 14:29-30 (NAB)

The wind (Gk anemos) is never something good to encounter in the New Testament (the “roaring like a wind” at Pentecost is a different word in the Greek). Whether frightening the disciples at different times on the lake (c.f Mt 8.23-27), driving Paul and his captors toward shipwreck (c.f. Acts 27.14ff), representing the dangers of clever heresy in every wind of doctrine (Eph 4.14, c.f. the reference to John the Baptist not being a reed shaken by the wind in Lk 7.24), or acting as the force that works to topple the houses built on the two foundations of rock and sand (Mt 7.24-27), the wind seems to encompass all those forces in life that press against us in so many directions, and would divert us from our goals – even our walk toward the Lord.

The thing that most fascinates me these days about this story is that Matthew, but not Mark, includes the subtext of Peter also walking on the water. This episode directly follows the miracle of the disciples feeding a “great throng” (Mt 14.14), including 5,000 men, with 5 loaves and 2 fish (Mt 14.15-21, Mk 6.35-44).

As I said, Mark doesn’t mention Peter’s escapade on the sea, and his ending of the pericope seems, at least on the surface, very different from Matthew’s. In Matthew: Those who were in the boat did him homage, saying, “Truly, you are the Son of God.” whereas in Mark: They were (completely) astounded. They had not understood the incident of the loaves. On the contrary, their hearts were hardened. (Mk 6.51b-52)

This appears contradictory, as if one writer is saying that the disciples really “got it,” while the other writer is saying that they really didn’t. But I think what Mark is saying in his ending is basically the same thing Matthew says in his Peter subtext.

The disciples were not prepared to accept that the power of God is intended to be manifest in the disciples themselves, as lowly and plain and ordinary as they were (and are). We see a similar truth expressed in the Elijah reading: God doesn’t come to the world in the earthquake (or in the wind), He comes in the humble, the lowly, the ordinary, the still small voice. Even in the bread and wine.

In the miracle of the loaves and fishes, Jesus blessed the food and gave it to the disciples, but it was up to them to step out and hand it out to thousands of people – and this happened upon their return from their mission of preaching and healing (Mk 6.7-13). Even so, they would shortly thereafter be perplexed as to how they could get enough food to feed a smaller crowd, when they had even more loaves and fish! (Mt 15.32-39) Likewise, Peter stepped out of the boat and walked toward Jesus, doing something no other sinner had ever done or has done since. But the wind confounded him.

Peter and the disciples had no idea at this point how much Jesus had in store for them – for they themselves to be a blessing for the people. First, they had to learn to ignore the wind, and allow God to be manifest to them, and through them – in the humble and the ordinary.

We live this story still today, and He is with us in the humble and ordinary. It’s not that we couldn’t manifest the very power of God on earth if we were up for it, but we too often become frightened in the wind – even when He bids us “come.”

If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.

, , , , ,
Religion & Society

An All-Too Common Word

Posted on by John W Gillis / 1 Comment

Yale Divinity School last week hosted “Loving God and Neighbor in Word and Deed: Implications for Christians and Muslims,” a conference on global inter-faith dialog, which was a follow-up to a written dialog commonly referred to as “A Common Word,” started back in late 2006 by several dozen Muslim leaders responding in an open letter to Pope Benedict XVI regarding Benedict’s famous University of Regensburg address, in which he infamously used some quotes from an obscure Byzantine text of Emperor Manuel II Paleologus to help make what was an extraordinarily well articulated appeal to the importance of nurturing a renewed understanding, in Western intellectual circles, of the profound and necessary interrelatedness of faith and reason.

Quite a bit could be said about this ongoing effort at promoting world peace through the attempt to moderate religious fanaticism, but if the opening keynote address of the conference, given by Senator John Kerry, is any indication of the direction this dialog is taking, I do not hold out much hope for the outcome. Perhaps it is not fair to tar the working group with Kerry’s views, but they did invite him to give the address, which at least raises some questions about their understanding of the character of the problem they assemble to confront. He’s not even credible within his own religion; I don’t see how he could be taken seriously as a spokesman for inter-religious dialog

Mr. Kerry, of course, is the junior U.S. Senator from my home state of Massachusetts, as well as a former Democratic Party nominee for U.S. President (2004). He is also a Roman Catholic, by upbringing and by personal affiliation, but is one of several prominent American politicians who have become lightning rods for criticism in conservative Catholic circles for their continued superficial embrace of Catholicism – and assertions that they remain in communion with the Church – despite their very public and materially efficacious dissent on fundamental matters of faith and morals, among which abortion perhaps looms largest, but hardly alone.

◊

Senator Kerry’s address contained numerous occasions of what I consider to be, at best, muddled thinking, but there is one particular statement that I think reflects not only the lunacy of commonly held Western views of religion’s role in global issues, but also just how badly the intellectual world needs to listen closely to the pope’s message of the imperative of reintegrating faith and reason – the alleged jumping off point of this entire enterprise:

Somehow, we have to find a way to agree that faith may be worth dying for, but it cannot be worth killing for. John Kerry, 7/28/2008

At first blush, this statement perhaps looks very noble – enlightened, even. It appeals, if you will, to both sides of the aisle: by paying homage to the seriousness of held religious belief, while aiming to express the very common sentiment that religion should foster peace – and peaceableness. Implicit, however – and not too subtly – is the idea that this will require some kind of change: that religion currently – and historically – foments violence and animosity.

Now, the question of whether religion has done more over the course of human history to cause warfare and violence, or more to tame the same, I will leave unexplored here – though personally, I think an honest and reasonable assessment of the question would infuriate religion’s cultured despisers. Rather, I’d like to look at the admittedly very popular proposal that religion (“faith,” as Mr. Kerry actually puts it) cannot be worth killing for.

◊

This claim may sound innocuous enough, but only of we don’t stop to ask the question: is anything worth killing for, and if so, what?

The question might make many people uneasy, but only because our modern culture has weaned us on euphemism. Simply put, it’s a question of whether or not there is anything in the world worth going to war for.

I’m quite certain that John Kerry is not a pacifist. It is well-known that he honorably served two tours in Vietnam, and he campaigned only four years ago to be commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful military. I think it’s safe to say that John Kerry – like almost everyone in the world, thinks at least some things are worth killing for. If I asked Mr. Kerry if “freedom and democracy” (which is shorthand for “American political ideology”) is worth fighting for, I’m pretty sure he’d come back with a pretty quick affirmative.

So what does it mean to insist that faith, or religion, is not to be counted among those things worth fighting or killing for?

◊

The reasons people go to war are complex. Not only are there almost always in each case a complex of reasons, but it is a different question to ask why states go to war versus why people participate in war. It is a different question again to ask why people engage in other acts of collective violence that do not fall (at least not at first) into the category of war proper, such as rebellions. Likewise, states and tribes do not war in the same way, and it seems dangerous to try to reduce the whole matter to an historically pertinent formula.

Still, not being above trying to make myself look foolish, it seems to me that the motive for warring can be broken out into three general categories, which are by no means mutually exclusive when it comes to providing motivation, and which each contain a wide breadth of expression.

  1. Gain. Let’s be honest: this is the primary motivator for most warring, whether it takes the guise of greed for booty, slaves, or natural resources; the lust for power; the pursuit of glory; or perhaps even the modern euphemism “national interest.” Other examples abound. Despisers of Christianity would want to see pursuit of indulgences included here – fair enough.

  2. Ideals & Conviction. While some wars may be fought purely for selfishly immoral ends, some are fought for convictions. I have no illusions either that these ends are mutually exclusive (I’d say they’re usually pretty much mixed together), or that some convictions, however well-intended, might be thoroughly immoral. But that fact remains that there is a world of difference between fighting for ideals and fighting for gold. I think these convictions can be broken out into two sub-groups: religiously formed conviction, and political ideology.

  3. Duty. I again see two basic sub-categories here: self-defense, and love of neighbor – where love of neighbor involves things such as the willingness to sacrifice in defense of your family, community, or nation, as well as the willingness to come to the aide of other vulnerable peoples who have been or are being wronged by a greater power. The promise of indulgences aside, it is here that I would place the greater part of the motivations for the Crusades. That observation raises the point that perhaps these duty-oriented motivations should really be subsumed under the above subheading of religious convictions – which I think is absolutely true – but I’ll leave that for now.

So, where does that leave John Kerry, and the myriad others who think like him?

◊

If there exists a human being naive enough to think that man’s propensity for warring can somehow be mitigated by barring religious conviction from the calculus of political decision making, he can look to the grotesque and murderous history of the last century to see just what a religion-free political ideology will buy you. Somewhat ironically, I write this on the day I read of the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, so he won’t be available for comment, but his body of literary work should suffice.

Indeed, Solzhenitsyn would seem to have had little patience for attempts to marginalize religious conditioning of political thought, a modern trend which he saw as a bane of both modern East and West: “the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness.” At Harvard, in 1978, he had this to say on the subject of the “cleansing” of religion from political life:

It has made man the measure of all things on earth—imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.

No, Mr. Senator, war would not go away if we banished faith from the table of those things we find worth fighting for. Instead, the ideals and duty motives that are part of the calculus would be reduced to those that are informed by ideology. Ideology, by definition, rules not by appealing to truth – to something “out there” by which all can be judged – but through power accomplished by compelling conformity to a desired, manufactured, status quo. Religion, in however perfect or imperfect a form, at least has the advantage of seeking its goal in some kind of transcendent meaning, rather then the purely political and self-interested machinations of ideology.

The highest ideals that people possess are their religious ideals- whether they are explicitly religious, or even atheistic. Claiming that society must advance by making peoples’ highest ideals about the only things not worth fighting for is sheer lunacy. There is no way that such an approach to statecraft could make the world anything but more barbarous.

It is precisely this kind of divorce of religion from public rational processes that Pope Benedict inveighed against the German scholars for in Regensburg, which prompted this whole discussion to begin with. Benedict, of course, was not promoting religious warfare – he was in fact condemning it as an irrational means of advancing religion. But as long as states resort to warfare, it is imperative that religion provide civilizing boundaries. Furthermore, it is religion, with its transcendent moral requirements, which must provide the framework for reason to work out the differences among peoples, so that warfare can be avoided.

◊

Not all religion is created equal, but the real value of inter-religious dialog needs to be the pursuit of truth for the sake of reforming religion, not the marginalization of religion from the public sphere.

If faith and reason are cooperative forms of God’s revelation of Himself to man – as Benedict, speaking for the Church militant, expectant, and triumphant, insists – the end result of genuine dialog will not be a means for all of us to get along cheerily with our differences, but the correction of bad religion, and, ultimately, unity of faith. If God is truly One, then there can be no other end but unity.

We may be a long ways off, and we may need to ensure that the road leading us there is peaceful enough to be fruitful, but we should not confuse the means with the end – or allow muddled thinking to subvert our highest ideals by renouncing them for ideology.

◊
, , , , , , ,
Scripture

God’s Treasure

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

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)

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Bible Study Tools

WORDsearch 8.0.2.32 Released… Oops

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

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…

Media & Culture

There’s Bozos and There’s Bozos

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

George Carlin

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.

Frank Avruch as Boston\'s version of 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.

, , , , , , , , , ,