Mark P. Shea's Blog, page 1391

People who can read...

(this excludes virtually all MSM reporters on religion) will not detect a lot of railing or cracking down in this, just Benedict's typically lucid, gentle and beautiful clarity:

11...On the one hand, we do not want to die; above all, those who love us do not want us to die. Yet on the other hand, neither do we want to continue living indefinitely, nor was the earth created with that in view. So what do we really want? Our paradoxical attitude gives rise to a deeper question: what in fact is "life"? And what does "eternity" really mean? There are moments when it suddenly seems clear to us: yes, this is what true "life" is—this is what it should be like. Besides, what we call "life" in our everyday language is not real "life" at all. Saint Augustine, in the extended letter on prayer which he addressed to Proba, a wealthy Roman widow and mother of three consuls, once wrote this: ultimately we want only one thing—"the blessed life", the life which is simply life, simply "happiness". In the final analysis, there is nothing else that we ask for in prayer. Our journey has no other goal—it is about this alone. But then Augustine also says: looking more closely, we have no idea what we ultimately desire, what we would really like. We do not know this reality at all; even in those moments when we think we can reach out and touch it, it eludes us. "We do not know what we should pray for as we ought," he says, quoting Saint Paul (Rom 8:26). All we know is that it is not this. Yet in not knowing, we know that this reality must exist. "There is therefore in us a certain learned ignorance (docta ignorantia), so to speak", he writes. We do not know what we would really like; we do not know this "true life"; and yet we know that there must be something we do not know towards which we feel driven[8].


12. I think that in this very precise and permanently valid way, Augustine is describing man's essential situation, the situation that gives rise to all his contradictions and hopes. In some way we want life itself, true life, untouched even by death; yet at the same time we do not know the thing towards which we feel driven. We cannot stop reaching out for it, and yet we know that all we can experience or accomplish is not what we yearn for. This unknown "thing" is the true "hope" which drives us, and at the same time the fact that it is unknown is the cause of all forms of despair and also of all efforts, whether positive or destructive, directed towards worldly authenticity and human authenticity. The term "eternal life" is intended to give a name to this known "unknown". Inevitably it is an inadequate term that creates confusion. "Eternal", in fact, suggests to us the idea of something interminable, and this frightens us; "life" makes us think of the life that we know and love and do not want to lose, even though very often it brings more toil than satisfaction, so that while on the one hand we desire it, on the other hand we do not want it. To imagine ourselves outside the temporality that imprisons us and in some way to sense that eternity is not an unending succession of days in the calendar, but something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality—this we can only attempt. It would be like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time—the before and after—no longer exists. We can only attempt to grasp the idea that such a moment is life in the full sense, a plunging ever anew into the vastness of being, in which we are simply overwhelmed with joy. This is how Jesus expresses it in Saint John's Gospel: "I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you" (16:22). We must think along these lines if we want to understand the object of Christian hope, to understand what it is that our faith, our being with Christ, leads us to expect[9].

Gosh, I love that man!

Urgent Prayer Request

One last thing before I go. Barbara Nicolosi Harrington writes:

My family has just received some very difficult news and I wanted to ask all of you to join with us in prayer.

My younger sister, Valerie, the opera sister, was just diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer. The doctors have said it is a very aggressive cancer and they are readying her for surgery on Monday.

Valerie is 36 and was married in 2009, just two days before Norris and I. She and her husband Gary live in Colorado Springs where Gary has a job as the Director of Religious Education for a small Catholic parish. They don't have a lot of money, but they had more than enough joy this past September as Valerie delivered their first little girl, Anamarie.

The baby is only four months old and we are all so worried that her mother will be very sick in the next few months. There are also other ramifications for future pregnancies depending on the severity and type of treatment Valerie has to undergo.

Will you please join us in praying very hard for Valerie, for Gary and for baby Anamarie? Please pray that we can find wonderful doctors and a supportive community to help them all through this.

My only consolation today is in being part of this wonderful Church and knowing that I can lean on all of you for the mysterious and triumphant power of your prayers. Someone told me today that every bad thing she has ever gone through has ended up being a blessing. This is the Christian difference, that we suffer but with serenity and hope. Please pray for these things for my family right now.

If you would like to send Valerie a message of support letting you know you are praying for her, her email is valnic33-at-sbcglobal.net.

Thank you so much. God bless -

Father hear our pray for Valerie's complete healing and for her family and all who love her. Grant skill to her caregivers, total healing to her and grace, peace, consolation and strength all who love her through Christ our Lord. Be especially with Anamarie. Mother Mary, St. Luke and St. Peregrine, pray for her! We ask all this through Christ our Lord. Amen!

Beautiful!

I gotta book, but I couldn't go without offering my huzzahs to the Muslims of Egypt who have gone to Coptic Mass in order to offer their bodies as human shields against the crazies of the Umma. Well done, Egyptian Muslims! You give me hope!

Okay. Now I'm outta here!

I'm off to Minnesota!

Beautiful, zero Fahrenheit Minnesota! Where I will get to speak to some wonderful folk (see here for info), plus get to sponge off the kindness and hospitality of Dale Ahlquist and make his life a living hell for four wonderful days!

This is gonna be fun! But (alas for us, my reading chums) it means no blogging today as I finish up stuff here and then toddle off to the plane. I will try to parachute in as I can (on the blog, not from the plane) and will be back for sure on the 12th, once all the excitement in Minneapolis dies down.

Till then, remember the bean/nose drill instructions:

1. Grip one bean firmly between thumb and forefinger.
2. Carefully do not put it up your nose.
3. Repeat as necessary till process is complete.

That is all!

What will they think of next?

It's the Rosary Robot!

Film Nerd Bait

Rank the Coen Bros. films!

Leah from Unequally Yoked writes

I'm seeking some advice from Catholics, and I was hoping you could crowdsource this to your blog. I'm an atheist dating a Catholic, and, a week ago, I asked if anyone had suggestions for ways to explore Christianity that I ought to adopt as New Year's resolutions.

Well, I'm a college student, so my New Year doesn't start until classes do, so I'd still welcome suggestions. If you want a quick sense of where I am now and some of my unanswered questions, I wrote a very brief sum up of the year here. I'd welcome questions or advice.

Thanks!

P.S. I already have several of Mark's books, so no need to make the obvious suggestion. :) I also already attend Mass every week-- I made a deal with my boyfriend that I would go to church if he went to ballroom dance lessons.

Leah, if you haven't met her yet, is a sane atheist whom I have come to like a lot: humble before reality, mature, charitable, and not filled with the sort of strident ideological certitude and nasty belligerence that characterizes Ditchkins and their acolytes. The internet does not tend to Darwinianly select for such voices, so I am grateful for her blog.

As far as my suggestions go, I think Jesus is probably the best counsellor in this matter:

"My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me; 17 if any man's will is to do his will, he shall know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own authority." (John 7:16-17).

In short, the best way to proceed is to do what Jesus says. If you don't know where to begin with that project, start where you are. Ask him (even if it feels like asking the air) what needs to change in your thoughts or actions in order to become a bit more like what Christ commands us to do and be. Something will fairly quickly turn up. Start there. It may feel like playing pretend. What's the harm in that? If it *is* pretend then there's nobody there and you've spent a few weeks exercising you imagination. If it isn't pretend, then he is there and is on record as saying that even an act of faith the size of a mustard seed is good enough for him for starters.

That doesn't mean the work of the intellect must cease, of course. If the various conversations about the mere existence of God are helpful then pursue them. St. Thomas did. But do be aware that Jesus, at any rate, had little interest in chatting about God the Ground of Being or First Cause or Designer. Such a take on God, while useful to philosophers attempting to engage a radically impoverished spiritual culture on the barest minimum of terms, is like talking about the alphabet.

Jesus was not about demonstrating that ABC existed. He thought in sonnets and sought to make poets. The trouble about focusing all one's energy on questions like "Does God exist?" is the same trouble as focusing all one's energy on whether A B and C exist. One can get caught up in the "problem" of why there are so many typefaces, and why more ancient tongues do not all agree on whether "j" or "i" should perform this or that function and why some languages have no A B or C at all that the much larger fact of language is lost altogether. Not all such cleverness is wisdom and children are spared a lot of wasted time by just internalized this basic stuff and moving on to the more interesting issues in language thereby.

Jesus spends absolutely no time on the question of God's existence for the same reason that Shakespeare spends no time proving that English exists. It's an obvious fact in which he and his audience live and move. The quarrels of the New Testament are quarrels among grad students who learnt their ABCs long ago and are now discussing (and discovering both the sins and virtues) of more advanced discourse--in fact, extremely sophisticated discourse--about God.

Of course, it is the special anxiety of the modern and post-modern world to wonder if these ancient Jews were simply operating from the start on the basis of a massive category mistake: they assumed a theistic world, were wrong, and *everything* they thought was based on this massive error. They may have gotten factoids like the hypoteneuse or Euclidean geometry right. But the cosmos they lived in was fundamentally an erroneous one and the whole project of simply assuming theism was a massive mistake.

Sure. That's possible. But it's also just as possible that the categorical denial of theism by the atheist is the huge blunder and that Jesus and his hearers (both friend and enemy) are in the right mental universe. If so (and it seems an even bet at least) then it seems to me that the experimental route Jesus advises ("do my will and you'll know whether I speak from my Father") seems the sound route to take. What could it hurt?

Fr. Damien Continues to Inspire

There are no Christopher Hitchens Leper Colonies or Richard Dawkins Charities. In a Darwinian world, concern for the weak and sick doesn't tend to reach the top of the To Do list. No, that doesn't mean "All atheists are immoral". But it does mean that ideas have consequences and if you groom a whole population to think "If they be like to die they had better do it and help decrease the surplus population" what you will get is a population that, on the whole, thinks that way and does not regard helping the weak or the sick as particularly worthy of attention. Hitchens himself is quite clear about how the gleaming efficient atheist state of the future should treat undesirables. Even P.Z. Myers is appalled by Hitchens' zeal for "putting a bullet through every God-haunted brain".

Religious cultures that say "Give alms, even when it seems like a waste of time" or "Inasmuch as you did it to the least of these..." or "The Lord is the Defender of the Alien, Orphan, and Widow" are a challenge to much of the Darwinian narrative as it is voice by Planned Parenthood ("Inconvenient, expensive or physically disabled? Kill it!"). Atheism tends to create cultures that view charity as a waste of time or, at best, a calculated investment. God help those who do not promise a good return on the investment. Rationalism dictates their extermination.

Fr. Damien, who cannot be explained by the little systems of order created by Ditchkins, shows us another way.

Hat tip.

Exorcism is not Entertainment

I wish I could say that this will be some sort of evangelism opportunity, but the simple fact is the Church has never conducted exorcism for the titillation of a bunch of ghoulish rubberneckers. To be sure, some of Jesus' exorcisms were done in public, but note that Jesus' first command to the demon is typically "Be quiet!"

There is death in the camera. Its very presence screws up the dynamic of what is supposed to be taking place. People in the grip of possession or obsession are, among other things, often not terribly psychologically healthy (duh). Shoving a camera in their face and saying, "Millions are watching" (and such approval from the "human subject" must be obtained) is a sure fire way of radically skewing the interpersonal dynamic between the person and the one who is, in Christian understanding, there to liberate him, not to exploit him as a circus freak for the delectation of people who regard him as just one more piece of weird Jerry Springer trash to laugh at.

I hope that the bishop where this is being done will scotch this stupid idea.

GOP Congresscritters to Reduce Their Own Budgets by $35 Million

Yay! It's a good start and compares quite favorably with the Son of Man's vacation bling and La Pelosi equally royal self-accomodations on the public teat.

Of course, the real question is whether this move is merely token or symbolic of real reform. If token, then the GOP will not actually do anything to reduce the $14 trillion deficit and will go on living in the delusional world of increasing spending and reducing taxes.

Since there is, so far as I know, no serious proposal to, for instance, stop being the military for rich countries that can take care of themselves and every indication that our wars of Empire are supposed to go in expanding in perpetuity with little objection from the people who launched them and then bent them into meandering exercises in nation-building (a bi-partisan effort), I will have to be convinced that this little tiny shaving off the budget is much more than a sop to distract the public from the GOP's engorged snout at the public trough, battling with Dems to see who can spend the most. So far, the Dems are the spending champs, but *nobody* is in the lead for serious spending reform. Our Ruling Classes are all about building a national security state in which the rich and powerful "protect" us by bleeding us dry and making us cattle. A pagan society always enslaves since a pagan society is not bound by such outmoded Christian dogmas as "human equality".