Lin Wilder's Blog, page 19

The Distinctly Separate Natures of Women and Men

Little sister hugging her newborn brother. Toddler kid meeting new sibling. Cute girl and new born baby boy relax in a home bedroom. Family with children at home. Love, trust and tendernessThe distinctly separate natures of women and men

“Wait—Are you saying that there’s no difference between men and women?

“That the sole difference between the sexes is anatomic and biologic?”

The air was suddenly charged. And the easy energy between us gone.

Startled and confused, I said, “Well, yes, of course…” But my words faded as I tried to process what was happening, And why the warmth between us had chilled. My obliteration of the distinctly separate natures of women and men had been learned years before. The belief had served me well, I thought.

Late that same night, I took my young Dobie out for a walk in the wintry New England air. Reeling from the fact that this man I liked more than a little, had said good-bye.

Addressing both the dog and the brilliant stars, I ranted and fumed. Full of moral outrage fueld by humiliation. The distinctly separate natures of women and men. Had I not swallowed my pride and called the following day, we’d never have seen one another again.

Relecting back on that night, I understand why a devout Catholic like John would react with such vehemence to my casual recitation of a lie. Intuitively, he understood the grave, diabolical, disorder of erasing the male and female identities. Of celebrating anti-creation.

“And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him, He created them as male and female. And God blessed them and said: ‘Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth But mutually they are given the threefold vocation: they are to be the image of God, bring forth posterity, and be masters over the earth.”

Every once in while,

I figure something out. A thing that’s bugged me because I don’t understand. Researching and writing this piece has answered a question I’ve asked myself for decades.

“Why are women so angry at men?”

Often at men who break their backs either figuratively or literally, so the wives can take care of the children and home. Until a trip to Greece, alone, I thought the anger was specific to Americans. But upon visitng the home of a Greek hospital administrator and his family, I learned differently. Although I spoke no Greek and most people did not speak English it became surprisingly easy to communicate through reading expression, body language and intonation while on that ten- day trip.

Once the Greek wife learned through her daughter who spoke English, and sign language that I’d been with someone but was now alone, her rage erupted. Amidst the lovely furnishings of her spacious home, it was evident that she was furious at her husband. Anger’s a universal language. Often, though, we use anger to cover up our fear.

Why?

Two reasons. The first is my opinion, the second, the answer to everything.

Because that initial flush of “I’ve found the answer to everything.” Or “This man will be my everlasting happiness, all I’ll ever need or want,” disappeared years ago. Leaving feelings of regret and sadness.

Ever wondered why you sometimes perceive the behaviours of others totally differently from your husband?

Or the glory of a sunset can make your wife cry?

Or why he loves the facts of a thing but she’s far more interested in its practical use?

But the answer to it all: The distinctly separate natures of women and men and the problem of evil lie in the first three chapters of Genesis.

Words written a century ago shed light:

on the distinctly different natures of women and men.

“Only the person blinded by the passion of controversy (italics mine) could deny that woman in soul and body is formed for a particular purpose. The clear and irrevocable word of Scripture declares what daily experience teaches from the beginning of the world: woman is destined to be wife and mother. Both physically and spiritually she is endowed for this purpose, as is seen clearly from practical experience. However, it follows also from the Thomistic principle of anima forma corporis that such a spiritual characteristic does exist. Of course, woman shares a basic human nature, but basically her faculties are different from men; therefore, a differing type of soul must exist as well.”

Edith Stein: Essays on Women

“Blinded by the passion of controversy.” It’s a perfectly splendid phrase, isn’t it?

And applies to each one of us who lose the sense of his or her identity. Which is precisely what happens when we walk away from God. Even partially. As in, “I agree with these laws but X, Y, and Z are outmoded and cruel. “You need to understand God, we’re different in this twenty-first-century. We’re not wandering aimlessly in a desert.”

In her essay on the Ethos of Women’s Professions, Edith Stein descibes the female flaw emanating from original sin. “Usually, the personal outlook appears to be exaggerated unwholesomely; in the first place, her inclination to center both her activities and those of others about her own person is expressed by vanity, desire for praise and recognition…”

That description sums up the early part of my life, consumed by an obsession to live a different life from the one my unhappy mother and older sisters had chosen. It was only when I became a Catholic Christian that I discovered- or more accurately, was willing to see women who seemed not just content with their vocation as wives and mothers. But were joyous. Secure and confident of their place in their world as wife, mother and helpmate.

It felt to me as if I’d landed on a far different universe from the one I’d been living on during my secular years. These women personified wife as Stein describes her. “…companion. It is her gift and happiness to share the life of another human being and, indeed, to take part in all things which come his way, in the greatest and smallest things, in joy as well as in suffering, in work, and in problems. Man is consumed by “his enterprise,” and he expects others will be interested and helpful; generally, it is difficult for him to become involved in other beings and their concerns….”

Sound like John Gray’s “Men are from Mars and Women from Venus?”

Who was Edith Stein?

The youngest of eleven children of Jewish parents, Edith was born on the Feast of Atonement (Yom Kippur) in 1891. Her birth on the most important day of the Jewish year foreshadowed her brief life as a discalced Carmelite, Teresa Benedicta, and execution at Auschwitz on August 9, 1942.

This saint has attracted and intimidated me ever since I learned of her existence.

The attractions? This statement in her biography: “I consciously decided to give up praying.”

There’s a natural connection, maybe even supernatural, between those of us who deliberately walked away from God. And then returned, not just to religion but to Catholic Christianity.

And her bold, almost aggressive explication of women, the reality of us as persons. In fact, it was Edith Stein’s writings on women that formed much of St. John Paul’s expression of the feminine genius in his 1995 Letter to Women.

The intimidation? A gigantic intellect and authenticity that both draws and scares me to death.

Her understanding of the feminine belies the unsatisfactory “romance” we women seek. And slices through the contemporary, diabolical rhetoric to Truth.

“… The deepest longing of woman’s heart is to give herself lovingly, to belong to another, and to possess this other being completely. But this surrender becomes a perverted self-abandon and a form of slavery when it is given to another person and not to God; it is an unjustified demand which no human being can fulfill. Only God can welcome a person’s total surrender in such a way that one does not lose one’s soul in the process but wins it. And only God can bestow Himself upon a person so that He fulfills this being completely and loses nothing of Himself in so doing…. Whether she is a mother in the home, or occupies a place in the limelight of public life, or lives behind quiet cloister walls, she must be a handmaid of the Lord everywhere”

Edith Stein: Essays on Women

Mary Ellen Stanford provides a brief but comprehensive look at the saint’s Understanding the Feminine here.

Diabolical, really?

As in Satanic?

Absolutely.

Think about what’s happened in the world of women over the last several decades.

First, the “sexual revolution,” followed closely by the war between men and women, thinly disguised as feminism. Next, erasing differences beween the two sexes. And finally, the denial of our creation as man or woman.

These times have been predicted.

In a letter to Cardinal Caffara, Sister, now saint, Lucia wrote, “‘Father, a time will come when the decisive battle between the kingdom of Christ and Satan will be over marriage and the family. And those who will work for the good of the family will experience persecution and tribulation. But do not be afraid, because Our Lady has already crushed his head.'”

The wars rage all about us. They appear different but when we look a little closer, we see the tell-tale sgns of the diabolical-Satan: disorder, hatred, and worse, indifference. We know that people don’t change their minds, but grace, always His grace, rains down on each of the seven and a half billion souls on this earth..

St. Edith Stein knew this well, writing these astonishing words about beloved family and friends who could not understand her conversion to Catholicism.

“Every time I feel my powerlessness and inability to influence people directly, I become more keenly aware of the necessity of my own holocaust.”

 

Edith Stein Biography

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It is Good for Us to Be Here: The Understatement of All Time

Photo Fr. Boniface Hicks, OSBIt is good for us to be here…the understatement of all time.

Peter’s words, “It is good for us to be here…” evokes a smile at the massiveness of the understatement. But after reflecting on what it must have felt like to those three Apostles: Jesus tells them to come up to the mountain with Him, the smile fades into…awe, wonder and ineffable gratitude.

Had He extended such an invitation before?

Come up to the peak of Mount Tabor and pray with me.

Usually we read that Jesus went up to the mountains and prayed. Alone. Perhaps on this day then, they knew this would be special, maybe they were even excited.

But no human mind could have conceived of THAT,

nor can we… now.

Witnessing Christ’s body being glorified into a celestial brightness that could barely be viewed by human eyes.

The sight of Moses and Elijah standing on either side of Jesus-this man they’d been walking with, eating with…

We celebrate the Transfiguration of Christ twice each year: On the second Sunday of Lent and yesterday, August 6th.

Let’s break away from the intense heat of the weather, the politics and the yawning chasm which divides us from this world, and spend a few mintutes reflecting on this oh so familiar man—Saint Simon Peter.

To allow ourselves to think like this passionate guy, this man who frequently just acted—and then thought.

Jesus selects just three to go up to the mountain to pray with Him: Peter, James and John.

Jesus took Peter, James, and his brother John,
and led them up a high mountain apart by themselves.
And he was transfigured before them, 
and his clothes became dazzling white, 
such as no fuller on earth could bleach them. 
Then Elijah appeared to them along with Moses, 
and they were conversing with Jesus.
Then Peter said to Jesus in reply, 
“Rabbi, it is good that we are here!
Let us make three tents: 
one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”
He hardly knew what to say, they were so terrified.
Then a cloud came, casting a shadow over them; 
from the cloud came a voice, 
“This is my beloved Son. Listen to him.”
Suddenly, looking around, they no longer saw anyone
but Jesus alone with them. As they were coming down from the mountain,
he charged them not to relate what they had seen to anyone,
except when the Son of Man had risen from the dead.
So they kept the matter to themselves, 
questioning what rising from the dead meant

Peter claims our attention for it is only he who speaks.

Although I try, I cannot imagine what Peter was thinking when he heard The Voice:

This is my Beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, Listen to Him.

And when he saw with his own eyes, Moses and Elijah standing on either side of Jesus.

Clearly, Peter feels impelled to say something. Even though it probably sounded inane even to his own ears.

“Lord, it is good that we are here…let me build three tents, one for you, one for Elijah and one for Moses.”

Ever considered how and why we know so much about Peter?

His flaws and virtues?

On the one hand Peter has faith like none of the other eleven.

But on the other, he seems to lack even the barest knowledge about himself and his capabilities. And yet it was Peter who had the guts to ask the Lord to command him to come.

And Peter inadvertantly teaches us critical truths:

““It is a ghost,” they said, and they cried out in fear.
At once Jesus spoke to them, “Take courage, it is I; do not be afraid.”
Peter said to him in reply,
“Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.”
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!”
Immediately Jesus stretched out his hand and caught him,
and said to him, “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?

The truths?

There are five of them, I think.

We start to drown when we take our eyes off Jesus.Mere nanoseconds after doing something praiseworthy,we screw up. “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me.You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”If we stay focused on Our Lord, we can do all things through Him.And yet Jesus bothers to change his name from Simon to Peter; a name that means ‘rock.’

The Lord goes further. This patently flawed human receives the keys to the kingdom. He is told that the sins ‘he forgives will be forgiven in heaven.’

Doesn’t it feel like we are looking in a mirror when we ponder the Apostle Peter? Even, maybe especially, when Peter attempts to defend Jesus against His coming passion, crucifixtion and death?

He was just a man, of course he was thinking like one—an almost childlike combination of cowardice and heroism.

This Peter transfigured into the man who wrote this:

“This is my Son, my beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven
while we were with him on the holy mountain.
Moreover, we possess the prophetic message that is altogether reliable. (Italics mine)
You will do well to be attentive to it,
as to a lamp shining in a dark place,
until day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.”

Peter became a man of hope.

But Peter’s isn’t the passive, wimpy, inert hope,

as in “I hope it rains” or “I hope my daughter gets married.”

Nope.

It’s the theological virtue of hope. The ability to see past through the “failure” of the crucifixtion and understand that the cross is the “battering ram” with which we are called to do battle on behalf of His church. Soldiers secure and confident of our “identity as beloved sons and daughters destined for glory.”

What does that mean? Theological virtue?

It emanates from Christ. At baptism, the virtues of hope, faith and charity are infused into our souls providing us with the armor needed to overcome fear.

The Catholic catechism describes the work and function of hope. It states: takes up the hopes that inspire men’s activities and purifies them so as to order them to the Kingdom of heaven; it keeps man from discouragement; it sustains him during times of abandonment; it opens up his heart in expectation of eternal beatitude. Buoyed up by hope, he is preserved from selfishness and led to the happiness that flows from charity. (CCC 1818)

“There perhaps has been no time in modern history as the present where our personal holiness matters. We cannot delay in allowing God to transform us, to experience a sort of personal transfiguration. On our own, we can do nothing to bring down the forces of evil in our midst.

With God working through us all our efforts are supernaturalized, joined to Him.”

It is good for us to be here.

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The Law of the Gift-And They Had As Much As They Wanted

Bishop Barron speaking about Elijah and the widow

The law of the gift

“Your being increases in the measure that you give it away.”

Bishop Barron on Elijah and the widow.

Bishop Barron’s sermon on the prophet Elijah is—as always—packed with wisdom, practical wisdom. He begins his homily by declaring this as one of his very favorite readings in the Old Testament. It’s easy to see why as we review the readings from the Book of Kings.

In those days, Elijah the prophet went to Zarephath.
As he arrived at the entrance of the city,
a widow was gathering sticks there; he called out to her,
“Please bring me a small cupful of water to drink.” 
She left to get it, and he called out after her,
“Please bring along a bit of bread.” 
She answered, “As the LORD, your God, lives,
I have nothing baked; there is only a handful of flour in my jar
and a little oil in my jug. 
Just now I was collecting a couple of sticks,
to go in and prepare something for myself and my son;
when we have eaten it, we shall die.” 
Elijah said to her, “Do not be afraid. 
Go and do as you propose.
But first make me a little cake and bring it to me. 
Then you can prepare something for yourself and your son. 
For the LORD, the God of Israel, says,
‘The jar of flour shall not go empty,
nor the jug of oil run dry,
until the day when the LORD sends rain upon the earth.'” 
She left and did as Elijah had said. 
She was able to eat for a year, and he and her son as well;
the jar of flour did not go empty,
nor the jug of oil run dry,
as the LORD had foretold through Elijah.

And they had as much as they wanted

Bishop Barron reminds us that Elijah had proclaimed a severe drought as punishment for Israel’s refusal to follow the Mosaic Law. For years, the heavens were closed and Elijah had been living near a stream in the wadi. The water, along with meat and bread brought by ravens was sufficient. But the wadi ran dry. And Elijah was told to go to Zarephath where the Lord had told a widow to expect him.

Drawing on the manna raining down on our Jewish ancesters and Christ’s miraculous feeding of the 5000, Bishop Barron integrates the law of the gift with they had as much as they wanted: The old and new Testaments. The widow’s empty jars of oil and flour were miraculously replenished.

We have a choice when hearing and reading these readings. We can dismiss them as fiction and fantasy.

Or we can see ourselves as in a mirror.

Elijah and the widow’s story is about two righteous people. He who knows that God is directing him. And she who takes her last bit of flour and oil to bake the bread she is asked for. Believing that she and her son will starve to death, she gives away all that she has.

“”The human being, who is the only creature on earth that God willed for itself, cannot attain its full identity except through a disinterested gift of self.” John Paul ll shortened this statement from Vatican ll’s Gaudium et Spes into four words: The Law of the Gift.

In his excellent sermon, Bishop Barron addresses listeners who feel depressed and at the end of their rope. “When you find yourself totally depleted-exhausted, hollow….the sources of life are drying up, give the little that you have.”

How do you give when completely depleted?

Impossible while focusing on the countless reasons to feel awful…about our own sufferings. Worrying about the growing evil that cloaks our world.

But wholly possible when we consider Reality: He has placed us here and now for a reason. Not to gripe and complain but to live out our Baptismal grace and be prophets.

The signs of the times

compel us to take stock.

Not of our neighbor.

Not of our politicians.

Nor of our President.

Or our Pope, priests, Bishops or pastors.

But of our own hearts.

Perhaps in a a more profound way than ever before.

What does becoming a prophet mean?

Run out to the street with apocalyptic signs proclaiming the end is near?

Go camp on our atheistic brother-in-law’s couch and start to preach at him?

NO!

Turn our judging eyes and fingers inward, toward ourselves to cleanse our hearts and minds. And adopt better spiritual practices.

Only then can we hear Him.

And do what He tells us.

PrayFastGive alms.What kind of spiritual practices?

“By putting us in touch with our own weakness and need for God, the struggles we confront in prayer and fasting dispose us to forgive, to have compassion, and to seek forgiveness.  Filled with compassion, we learn to pray for our enemies rather than call down hell-fire on them. We find the courage to listen to the heart of our neighbor, especially if they are children or parents. We more readily recognize our own tendency to pre-judge as driven by our own shame, inability to take responsibility for our own actions, and our need to self-justify. As did our Crucified God, we must bear with one another patiently and persevere in love, even when with this means humbling ourselves unto death.  Preserving true peace with one another requires implicating ourselves in one another’s plight, even at our own expense.”

Anthony Liles

A dear friend, an OMI priest, told me in a recent conversation, that in the end, we will be judged on one thing only.

“How well did we love?”

“…Hence peace is likewise the fruit of love, which goes beyond what justice can provide.

That earthly peace which arises from love of neighbor symbolizes and results from the peace of Christ which radiates from God the Father. For by the cross the incarnate Son, the prince of peace reconciled all men with God. By thus restoring all men to the unity of one people and one body, He slew hatred in His own flesh; and, after being lifted on high by His resurrection, He poured forth the spirit of love into the hearts of men.

For this reason, all Christians are urgently summoned to do in love what the truth requires, and to join with all true peacemakers in pleading for peace and bringing it about.”

Gaudium et Spes

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Nothing’s Worse Than Getting Used to the Magnificent

YEAH GOD!!!Nothing’s worse than getting used to the magnificent.

Years ago while living in the first house I’d ever bought by myself, I had a Ziggy calendar. And this was one of the cartoons for the month. Only in that version, Ziggy was shouting,

“YEAH GOD!”

I loved that cartoon.

On many a morning while driving into the glory of a new sunrise to my job at Hermann Hospital in the Texas Medical Center, I’d shout, “Yeah God!!” And pretend not to see the horrified stares of other drivers undoubtedly wondering if there was a crazy person beside them.

I was thrilled to find it again for this article. And found the close to sixty-minute aggravation of finding it, then getting permission to use it and finally converting it from PDF to JPG worthwhile.

Why?

Because all those mornings, I was praising, joyfully proclaiming a God I claimed I didn’t believe in. Right, I was a card-carrying atheist.

Sound wholly, completely nuts?

Think about it for a moment or five. Maybe back to a time when you weren’t so sure of God…or the priest or minister did/said something that you decided to put on God…or any of the numerous justifications supporting the walls of our unbelief.

Or maybe you’re where I was, confident that zealous Christians like me are—off. But when looking at that cartoon, it’s super hard to wipe off the smile. Tamp down the surge of joy. Beauty—magnificence—slices through our defensive rhetoric, reducing our arguments to empty patter.

This cartoon perfectly symbolizes God’s work in each of us. Including those, like me back then, who are not yet believers.

This title isn’t mine but is taken from

the book, Rescued: Unexpected and Extraordinary News of the Gospel. But author Father John Riccardo isn’t talking about God’s creation, when writing “nothing’s worse than getting used to the magnificent.” He’s speaking about God Himself. He who holds everything in being.

If Catholic, He who miraculously condescends to fill us with His Body and Blood at each Mass. Do we truly understand and appreciate what Jesus did?Do we take sin seriously enough?For me, no. At least not consistently.

The priest-author states unequivocally that everything begins with Genesis. The first three chapters.

Fr. Riccardo doesn’t mention Saint Pope John Paul ll’s first book, but I’m guessing that his theories derive from a series of meditations prepared at the request of the then Pope Paul VI for the 1976 Lenten Retreat of the Pope and his staff. The then Cardinal Karol Wojtyla called his book, The Sign of Contradiction.

It’s a remarkable book. Like all of St. John Paul ll’s writings, it warrants a very careful read. And reread. I’ve bought and given away the book at least three times. And am confident that even if I read it ten more times, I’d not begin to plumb the depths of the wisdom contained there.

A few years ago, I wrote this in The Contradictions of Sin and Mercy:

“Having read and pondered these writings, the level of insight and inspiration which is evident, I believe with our newest Saint, that the serpent is no allegory but an entity committed to the destruction of you, me and of our world. Saint John Paul speaks of the serpent as the “Anti-Word” and of “Anti-Love” of waging eternal war against the “Great Heart”, the tender and beautiful phrase he uses to describe God, the first person of the Trinity.

….The world…is a terrain for struggle between man and God, for the created being’s defiance of his Creator. This is the great drama of history, myth and civilization…might not the… temptation of man lie in precisely this, that man should believe himself alone?”

Evil can only exist where there is no God.

I wrote those words last year while listening to Fr. Skip Thompson on the first of his three-day Advent Retreat at St. Patrck’s Church in Arroyo Grande, California with Genesis. They’re worth repeating. “Evil can only exist where there is no God.”

We know from St. Thomas of Aquinas that evil is a privation: the absence of being, of Good—of God. For all that was created was Good. But there are days, with evil’s suffocating presence so horrifically evident, Satan and his forces can seem all powerful. we forget this world is his. Hence, all too often, I blame and judge the man or woman taking no notice of the source as the evil spirit(s) within him or her. Seduction becomes irresistible just as it did to the mother of all the living:

“You shall not die,” says the serpent to Eve, “for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

St. Paul’s 2000 year-old-words to the Ephesians apply today.

“For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and power, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places.”

But there’s our sins too. Again, we can turn to St. Pope John Paul ll to smash our “enlightened” claim that “We can do anything so long as it doesn’t harm another.”

“As a rupture with God, sin is an act of disobedience by a creature who rejects, at least implicitly, the very one from whom he came and who sustains him in life. It is therefore a suicidal act [italics mine]…Sin, in the proper sense, is always a personal act, since it is an act of freedom on the part of an individual person and not properly of a group or community. This individual may be conditioned, incited and influenced by numerous and powerful external factors… Hence there is nothing so personal and untransferable in each individual as merit for virtue or responsibility for sin.”

What did Jesus do?

As we read of the things that were done to Jesus between his arrest at Gethsemani and his sentencing to crucifixion, we get the feeling that in some way he stood outside them. As prisoner on trial for his life he was the central figure; but he seemed not to belong to the circle in which these other men moved around him. The Sanhedrin passed him on to Pilate, Pilate to Herod, Herod back to Pilate. They mocked him and scourged him. He gives an effect of almost total passivity, furiously acted upon, hardly reacting at all. The truth is that he was the central figure, but of a far wider action than his tormentors knew. For he was redeeming the whole human race, his tormentors included. He was active as no man has ever been, wholly given to the greatest thing that has been done upon earth.

To Know Christ

Why?

To become the “ambush predator.”

The being that deceived Eve, the mother of the living is Lucifer-literally the “angel of light.” We have no conception of the malevolence Satan holds for humanity. Nor can we grasp how vast is his intelligence and his knowledge of all things. But Jesus did—does.

Fr. Riccardo explains.

“God became a man to fight, to rescue us, to get his creation—you—back. He landed on earth in order to vanquish the enemy, but here’s the challenge: the enemy won’t fight God. Satan isn’t stupid. Satan knew he couldn’t beat God and wouldn’t try, so God designed a plan: a plan he knew would involve piercing, nails, and a cross. Then he hid himself as a man. And he waited…

Jesus on the cross is not the poor, helpless victim, and he is not the hunted. Jesus on the cross is the aggressor and the hunter.”

And us? What’s our response?

Indeed.

That’s the question, isn’t it?

How can we warrant love like that?

“I thirst,” He said as He hung there.

Thirsting for water?

No!

For you and me and the close to 8 billions souls on this earth.

“Death slew him by means of the body which he had assumed, but that same body proved to be the weapon with which he conquered death. Concealed beneath the cloak of his manhood, his godhead engaged death in combat; but in slaying our Lord, death itself was slain. It was able to kill natural human life, but was itself killed by the life that is above the nature of man. Death could not devour our Lord unless he possessed a body, neither could hell swallow him up unless he bore our flesh; and so he came in search of a chariot in which to ride to the underworld. This chariot was the body which he received from the Virgin; in it he invaded death’s fortress, broke open its strongroom and scattered all its treasure.”

Nothing’s worse than getting used to the magnificent.

gorgeous composite mountain lake in autumn fog. lovely nature scenery with coniferous forest rocky peaks and beautiful sky. surface of water reflects the beauty of exquisite landscape.

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The Movie Freedom: The Heroic Story of Slavery in America and England

The movie Freedom: The movie Freedom: the heroic story of slavery in America and England.

Once again, the article I’d written for today sits in draft form waiting completion. A good thing since I’ve still got a couple of books and articles to finish before finishing the piece.

So why did my watching the movie Freedom eclipse what I was working on?

After watching Cuba Gooding Jr’s excellent perfomance in his 2014 movie Freedom, I felt impelled to tell you about it.

John and I discovered this film only because we subscribe to Pureflix, an alternative to Netflix. I learned about Pureflix from our friend Tom Skelton. The intriguing graphic I’ve posted above seemed to jump out at us from the screen as we perused our options.

Scanning the movie’s reviews—almost unanimously dreadful— evoked a smile which derived not amusement but sad irony.

True for two reasons: My own experience with critics and because the snarkiest critiques were about features I loved about this film.

Here are just a few examples.

The stunning, almost celestial, musical score is called “sanctimonius” by the NY Daily News and “turns the movie into ‘a half-baked musical.”The Hollywood Reporter disliked the interwoven stories of the two protagonists. The story of runaway slave Samuel Woodward and the 100-year earlier tale of John Newton, English captain of the slave ship and composer of the hymn Amazing Grace. Roger Ebert complained that the film “spends too much time trying to edify it’s viewers…Ebert stated that screenplay, which parallels Newton’s and Woodward’s stories, is “kind of a mess.”Almost always, if “the critics” review the movie as splendid, I dislike it,

even to the point of walking out. Think Manchester By The Sea and Gone Girl for dislike intensely and The Shape of Water for walking out.

The effects of pruience-more accurately pornography— watched alone in the darkness can penetrate us in subtle and dangerous ways. It’s absence in Tom Cruise’s unexpected blockbuster, Top Gun Maverick, reveals that hundreds of thousands of us “crave a reset” from watching gratuitous sex displayed as romance. Few expected Cruise to pull off the sequal successfully. But not only is the film reminiscent of a beloved American moral culture, it’s popularity has outstripped any of its predecessors.

My admiration for the six-year-old movie Freedom: the heroic story of slavery in America and England derives from another absence—that of systemic racism.

There’s no ideology here. No mention of the historical revisionism so embedded in academia that refusal to cow to the narrative results in termination even for tenured faculty.

No.

The story takes heroic and historic figures, black and white: William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglas. And integrates them into a fascinating tale of the anonymous and real men and women of the Undergound Railroad who risk their lives to help Woodward and his family get to Canada. Setting the scene for the war to end slavery.

There’s no political narrative here. And I found it’s absence a relief.

The characters are just people, all sinners like you and me. But this story highlights some who decide they must stop injustice. Not only by speaking out but by risking their lives. That the characters can sing doesn’t detract but immerses us into a culture of faith that sustained, that saved. The parallel story of John Newton’s conversion and writing of Amazing Grace was brilliant. In the summer of 2022, watching this well-crafted creative film Freedom, was uplifting, redemptive and gracious.

Slavery has not ended.

I speak not about the slavery in the movie, Freedom, or even about the slavery of human trafficking or addiction

No, I write about America’s National Slavery—our turning away from God and His Law: The definition of sin. And we are the front lines of the battle to end Slavery each day, each moment.

On October 11, 2019, Attorney General Anthony Barr addressed the Notre Dame Law School. I’ve before and do again about it because Barr explains precisely, eloquently, what is happening to our country.

And why.

In the 20th century, our form of free society faced a severe test.

There had always been the question whether a democracy so solicitous of individual freedom could stand up against a regimented totalitarian state.

That question was answered with a resounding “yes” as the United States stood up against and defeated, first fascism, and then communism.

But in the 21st century, we face an entirely different kind of challenge.

The challenge we face is precisely what the Founding Fathers foresaw would be our supreme test as a free society.

They never thought the main danger to the republic came from external foes. The central question was whether, over the long haul, we could handle freedom. The question was whether the citizens in such a free society could maintain the moral discipline and virtue necessary for the survival of free institutions.

By and large, the Founding generation’s view of human nature was drawn from the classical Christian tradition.

These practical statesmen understood that individuals, while having the potential for great good, also had the capacity for great evil.

Men are subject to powerful passions and appetites, and, if unrestrained, are capable of ruthlessly riding roughshod over their neighbors and the community at large.

No society can exist without some means for restraining individual rapacity.

But, if you rely on the coercive power of government to impose restraints, this will inevitably lead to a government that is too controlling, and you will end up with no liberty, just tyranny.

READ MORE

Optician eyeglasses being cleaned by tiny figurine symbolizing clear vision

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Prayer: Discipline, Practice or Conversation?

The word GRACE written in vintage letterpress lead typePrayer: Discipline, Practice or Conversation?

Prayer is all those things: discipline, practice and conversation—and more.

It’s discipline because prayer requires some type of regularity. Eventually habit kicks in and the consequent sense of unease when left undone. For me, even the habit is insufficient but more on that later.Of course, practice applies as verb and noun: the more we practice prayer, the more proficient-prayer begins to feel right. And prayer as noun is a practice in the same sense that medicine and writing are practices—doctors, the good ones, are always learning. As are writers.And yes, prayer is a conversation. But all this is a process. One that progresses in phases. Conversations take time, sometimes a great deal of it. At the beginning of a silent retreat, I attended as a brand new Catholic, the priest ended his Friday night introduction with this statement, “My hope is that by the end of this retreat, Jesus Christ will be your best friend.”

My reaction to his words was pure fear. You might be thinking that fear is fitting, for fear and faith intertwine. And of course, you’re right.

But mine was abject terror… of Him. When I’ve said that to Catholic and/or Christian friends, they’re surprised, even shocked.

“Why on earth could anyone be afraid of Jesus?”

Perhaps if one needs to ask the question, no explanation will make sense. But maybe Judas and Peter can explain. Prayer: discipline, practice or conversation?

Judas’s fear of Him was so great that

he hanged himself.

“Then when Judas, who had betrayed Him, saw that He had been condemned, he felt remorse and returned the thirty pieces of silver to thee chief priests and elders, saying, ‘I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.’ But they said, ‘What is that to us? See to that yourself!’ And he threw the pieces of silver into the sanctuary and departed; and he went away and hanged himself.”

Peter, on the other hand, realized he’d fulfilled His Lord’s prediction: “At that moment, the Lord turned and looked at Peter. Suddenly, the Lord’s words flashed through Peter’s mind: “Before the rooster crows tomorrow morning, you will deny three times that you even know me.” And Peter left the courtyard, weeping bitterly. (Luke 22:61–62, NLT)

Out of pride, both men betrayed Jesus and were filled with shame and remorse. But only Judas submitted to despair.

Why?

I’ll wager many scholars have opined on this question, but I think the answer is as simple and complex as trust—and its lack. Peter had learned to trust Jesus—that he coudn’t rely on himself. While walking on the water at Jesus’s behest and even in his own lifelong craft, fishing , he learned that he was unreliable. Upon seeing the immensity of the catch, Peter recognized Jesus in a way few of us can: “Depart from me, Lord for I am a sinful man.”

Yes, Judas’s fear—and mine—were derived from that precise realization, “Depart from us, Lord, for we are sinners.” But we were too filled with self-disgust to “open the gates of our souls” and feel His Mercy.

The gates of our soul?

Huh?

Yes.

But wait, a little background first.

From the first days as a Catholic, I sought direction, first as a member of Regnum Christi and then after moving west, a Benedictine Oblate. One of the promises we Oblates make is praying the Liturgy of the Hours, also called the Divine Office, three times a day. Although there are times, circumstances preclude my doing so, these prayer times have become sacrsosanct.

Essential.

Composed of the Old and New Testaments, the Office is both guide and direction. Two things my easily distracted brain requires, constantly. Contained in the 150 psalms is every human emotion.

Each day in the Office of Readings there are exerpted sermons from saints and doctors of the church. Yesterday, I couldn’t continue past St. Ambrose’s “Explananation of the Psalms.” It transformed into lectio divina because I couldn’t stop reading these words of the saint., Pondering, thinking about the gates of our soul.

My father and I will come to him and make our home with him. Open wide your door to the one who comes. Open your soul, throw open the depths of your heart to see the riches of simplicity, the treasures of peace, the sweetness of grace. Open your heart and run to meet the Sun of eternal light that illuminates all men. Indeed that true light shines on all; but if anyone closes his shutters against it then he will defraud himself of the eternal light. To close the doors of your mind is to exclude Christ. Of course he is capable of entering even so, but he does not want to force his way in or seize you against your will…Blessed is he, therefore, at whose door Christ comes knocking. Faith is the door of the soul, and if it is strong then it fortifies the whole house

The Exposition of the Psalms by Saint Ambrose

Prayer: discipline, practice and conversation is also listening as St. Benedict instructs in his Rule.

Listen… and incline the ear of thy heart

At times the mystery and paradox overhwelm me. We’re taught that prayer emanates from grace. And that faith is gift. From the beginning of the Rule, St. Benedict teaches that we’re returning what has been given. “For we ought at all times so to serve Him with the good things which He hath given us.”

Then later in the Prologue, we read that “holding that the actual good which is in them cannot be done by themselves, but by the Lord, they praise the Lord working in them.”

And yet none of these goods work in us unless we first ask. Like all those years I spent away from Him and His Church.

Such a simple recipe: we know we’re lost.

“Help me Jesus.”

Why couldn’t Judas ask Him?

What took me so long?

“Of course he is capable of entering even so, but he does not want to force his way in or seize you against your will…Blessed is he, therefore, at whose door Christ comes knocking…”

Listen ear hear survey people person secret

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Religion Begins with Experience

Hand holding red alert sign isolated on whiteReligion begins with experience

Religion does not start out with the notion of God. It starts with a personal experience, the overwhelming experience of ultimate belonging.

Religion of the Heart

On the wall of the bathroom off the foyer in our new—to us— Texas home hangs a frame with two pictures side by side. They reveal two views of a snowy cross-country skiing mountain path in Banff , Canada. The photograph on the right shows a mountain stream, with snow-covered rocks. If I squint and use my imagination, I can see the image of a solitary bird.

Pretty. Even arresting but one might wonder why they’re framed. And on display.

I came late to religion—converted after decades of hostility toward the church and all things religious. The conversion in a Benedictine monastery felt sudden, but in a sense it began on that mountain path. Alone on that trail, abruptly, I was stopped still.

By that stream, the bird, maybe a snow bunting, stared at me in the stillness. Wholly undisturbed by my presence, even perhaps, welcoming it. The only sounds were the cracks of the ice and the whisper of a breeze through the huge evergreens. Had I been agile enough on my skis, I’d have dropped to my knees in awe. Instead, I stood still, drinking in this shockingly tangible sense of order, immensity and majesty.

And yes, the jaw-dropping gratitude that I was part of Something.

A few years before, I’d begun writing poetry in an effort to deal with an increasing unease. A sense that all that I’d been doing, at my work, at school was nothing. Meaningless.

I was in pursuit of what I couldn’t name.

One of the first of the poems, I called “Belonging.”

Belonging

Is there a place called home
Where memories and tradition await
Patiently hidden in places made deep
By relentless pursuit of useless truths.
Do we come trailing clouds of glory
Only to don the actors pose
And spend too many years and tears
Reclaiming wisdom lost so long ago
Saved finally by the knowledge
That human truth is shadow and illusion
Yet uplifted by one hope and prayer
That pure path toward peace and
Understanding lies patiently waiting
For our gaze to turn back to the
Place where we began.

The moment staring back at the bird could have been one second. Or a year.

Because of it, something changed, I couldn’t name it nor could I really describe it to anyone.

In his splendid article, Brother David asks what we do with that experience. We do, he insists, three things. We do something with the emotion, we accept in some form, the sense of belonging and we celebrate it.

I’m not sure I’d describe my reaction in precisely that way but all these years later, the photos are displayed.

The article warrants a careful read.

Brother David’s main point in writing this piece, Religion of the Heart, is to remind us of the power each one of us 7.5 billion souls hold. A power not to tear down, attack, or destroy but to create.

If we choose to.

“I’d like to invite you to give some thought to a particular problem. Why are our responses to the ethical problems of the present time so singularly ineffective and anemic? I’ve asked myself many times, why is this so? I think of one reason, at least, and I’d like to suggest that to you tonight.

Our ethical approaches are uprooted from their religious roots. They are cut off from their religious sources. A great task before us is, therefore, to reroot our ethics in religion…I’m not talking about the religions, but about Religion. This Religion which underlies all the different religions — from which all the different religions spring — is the religion of the heart.”

This piece is jam-packed with wisdom. But I’m struck by the monk’s admonition to us about the second commandment. The Bible doesn’t say, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.

The command instead is “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Because we’re one, despite our heartbreaking, polarizing differences.

That day on the mountain path when everything changed, that was what I knew.

Not sensed.

Not thought.

Knew.

We’re one, all of us.

During these tumult-filled days,

the list of reasons to hate rise exponentially almost daily. And many of us succumb to the hatred, armed to the teeth with moral outrage.

Reflecting back on my incremental, almost inch-by-inch crawl back to God, impels me to see everyone else somewhere on that same rocky, risky path. Everything anyone else does or thinks, I’ve done—or thought of.

But once we know, we must not be silent.

“For a long time religious traditions have known that the highest obedience is the obedience of the prophet. The prophet is one who learns so thoroughly to listen that he or she hears what to say, how to speak out, within the community, but against the trend of the community.

‘It is necessary to speak out from within because if you speak out from the outside, you are not a prophet, you’re just an outside critic. You must be part of that community, but you must also speak out. Either of the two alone would be relatively easy. It would be easy to stay in, if you could shut up. Yet, the two have to come together: to stay in and to speak out. Where these two come together, they form the cross of the prophet. The staying in forms the vertical beam, as it were, and the speaking out forms the horizontal one.

“In our innermost heart we can tap a source of power strong enough to counteract the forces that threaten this good green earth. And we need every bit of energy we can get to put it to work for the goals for which we stand here. What we can achieve is not the question.”

Human hands open palm up worship. Eucharist Therapy Bless God Helping Repent Catholic Easter Lent Mind Pray. Christian Religion concept background. fighting and victory for god

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Father of Prochoice: Dr. Bernard Nathanson

Dr. Bernard NathansonFather of Prochoice: Dr. Bernard Nathanson

Reading three books The Hand of God, Aborting America and Pillar of Fire is a bit much for a 2000 word article.

Even for me.

But when my friend Mary sent me an article called, “How Chuck Colson Thought Abortion Would End,” the weekly article I’d intended for today slid to the back burner.

Dr. Nathanson was the catalyst for my coming out against abortion. Years ago, I was the Hospital Director at UMASS Medical Center and a brand new Christian Catholic. When asked by a third-year-medical student to attend a panel discussion-debate on abortion featuring Dr. Nathanson, also a convert to Christian Catholicism, I squeamishly agreed. Naively hoping that my presence in the audience would be unnoticed.

Father of prochoice: Dr. Bernard Nathanson is an enigma immersed in mystery and surrounded by contradiction. The phrase applies in some way to each of us, of course. But the life of this man, the one no one speaks about from either side of the abortion-healthcare abyss is a study in dissonance. And the profound, inexplicable, jaw-dropping mercy of our God.

For Bernard Nathanson’s story is one of hope…more accurately, Hope, as in the theological virtue.

While a New York City ob/gyn intern in the sixties, Nathanson and his colleagues sang the “drinking song of the gynecologic intern,”

There’s a fortune….in abortion
Just a twist of the wrist and you’re through.
The population….of the nation
Won’t grow if it’s left up to you.
In the daytime…In the nighttime
There is always more work to undo.
Oh there’s a fortune…In abortion
But you’ll wind up in the pen before you’re through.
Now there’s a gold mine…in the sex line
And it’s so easy to do.
Not only rabbits…have those habits
So why worry about typhoid and flu?
You never bother…the future father
and there’s so many of them too.
Oh there’s a fortune…in abortion
But you’ll wind up in the pen before you’re through.

Within a decade, Nathanson became the abortion king.

Partnering with Lawrence Lader, Nathanson overturned the 100-year-old statute prohibiting abortion in the state of New York. And became head of the largest abortion clinic in New York City along with cofounding NARAL. Abortion became Nathanson’s raison d’etre.

In his book, The Hand of God, he writes:

“One of our strategies… was to deny what we knew to be true: that an abortion kills an existing human being. We denied that fact in an effort to mislead the American public and the courts of this land…There were perhaps three hundred or so deaths from criminal abortions annually in the United States in the sixties, but NARAL in its press releases claimed to have data that supported a figure of five thousand. Fortunately, the respected biostatistician Dr. Christopher Tietze was our ally. Though he never actually staked himself to a specific number, he never denied the authenticity of these claims. Lader’s New York state campaign was a paradigm of political gamesmanship and social warfare.”

Incrementally, Nathanson’s passionate interest in abortion begins to fade. A growing inability to ignore the glaring financial incentives from abortion and the introduction of ultrasound technology, the obstetrician’s concerns about the “procedure” grew.

But abortion is a blind procedure.

The abortionist doesn’t see what is happening inside the woman. No one sees what’s happening. Not the woman nor the people in the room. The only one to experience it is the being about to be terminated.

Although each of the dismembered parts of the aborted fetus must be laid out by the abortionist to assure that the uterus has been emptied out completly, it’s an act that can be rationalized as assuring the health of the mother. Bodily blood, fluids, and tissue are routine elements in the lives of physicians and nurses. Quickly, we learn to distance ourselves from the sight, odor and meaning and think in clinical (detached) terms.

But about the time that he was doing fewer and fewer abortions, Bernard Nathanson writes that he became curious.

“What actually happens during the abortion?”

And he asked a colleague to film what was happening during the procedure.

“Look, do me a favor, Jay. Next Saturday, when you are doing all these abortions, put an ultrasound device on the mother and tape it for me.” He did, and when he looked at the tapes with me in an editing studio, he was so affected that he never did another abortion. I, though I had not done an abortion in five years, was shaken to the very roots of my soul by what I saw.”

The Hand of God

The Silent Scream

The recent film Unplanned, demonstrates precisely what happens with each of the sixty-million lives extinguished by the barbarism of abortion. In the true story, the manager of a Texas Planned Parenthood clinic Abby Johnson is asked to assist in an an abortion. And for the first time, Johnson sees what actually happens. She and we hear clearly the racing heartbeat of the child now aware of imminent extinction. The ultrasound silently records the whole odious procedure.

In Dr. Nathanson’s thirty minute film, The Silent Scream, the obstetrician points out the wide open mouth of the “fetus” about to be extinguished in a “silent scream.” Explaining that the rapid increase in heartbeat and thrashing movements of the “fetus” Nathanson reveals the panic of a living being fighting for its life.

Even if you’re “prochoice,” don’t these videos make you stop and wonder?In 2008, Democrat Party leaders stated that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.”.But by 2020, Democrat Party ostensibly Catholic leaders claim that abortion up through birth is “health care.”Our Baptist Vice President declares that there is “nothing in the Bible that contradicts abortion.”How is this even possible?

Karl Stern, Nathanson’s mentor from medical school, supplies the answer to these rhetorical questions in his splendid autobiography, The Pillar of Fire:

“Most people think that the anti-semitism which we encountered under Hitler is the same anti-semitism as on encounters anywhere else…

This is a serious error.

Quantum physics teaches us that energy, in its transformations, does not increase in a continuum but by “jumps.” There is something similar about Evil.”

Later in a chapter called Letter to my Brother, Stern expands on suffering and Evil. “If we are concerned with the suffering of those innocent ones, we have first to look at Him. If we are concerned at the Evil which has brought it about, we have first to look at ourselves. Everything else is deception. If I want to renew the world I have to begin right in the depth of my own soul. This is the only true and permanent revolution I am able to achieve.”

Roe v Wade overturned

When I began working on this piece, early last week, of course, I couldn’t know that the Supreme Court would reverse its fifty-year-old decision on Friday, the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Hence the timing of this article is strangely fitting.

To me and millions like me, the reversal is an answer to prayer, fasting and unmerited grace. And yet, I understand that to many of my friends and many Americans, the Roe reversal is something to be mourned, perhaps even demonstrated against. But after spending this week studying the life of the father of prochoice: Bernard Nathanson, my understanding—no, trust— in the insatiable thirst for Truth in each human heart has deepened.

This obstetrician performed over 75,000 abortions in a conviction that he was saving women from harm. An atheist who dicounted anything but the technical, clinical aspect of the “procedure”, incrementally changed.

And kept changing.

Just as the introduction of suction aspiration made abortion medically possible, efficient and profitable, so the introduction of ultrasound provides a “window into the womb” for those willing to look and see what really happens behind the sterile drapes. Like the father of abortion, Dr. Bernard Nathanson.

A man who during his last few decades of life became dedicated to revealing what happens during abortion. After watching Nathanson’s 1985 film, The Silent Scream, President Ronald Reagan praised the film and said, “If members of Congress could see it, fewer of them would support abortion rights.”

A man who wrote this at the end of his book, The Hand of God:

“I am no longer alone. It has been my fate to wander the globe in search of the One without Whom I am doomed, but now I seize the hem of His robe in desperation, in terror, in celestial access to the purest need I have ever known. My thoughts return to the hero of my medical school years, Karl Stern, who was undergoing a spiritual metamorphosis at the very time he was instructing me in the arts of the mind, its orders, and its sources, and the words he wrote in a letter to his brother: “And there was no doubt about it,” Stern wrote, “toward Him we had been running, or from Him we had been running away, but all the time He had been in the center of things.”

The Hand of God.

.

I’d planned to write today about Top Gun Maverick

But Miles Smith does a great job of it:

“The moral and social framework of the film reflects 1960 more than 2022. Yes, there is a female fighter pilot, but in the film’s universe that seems to be an anomaly. The admirals are all men; the pilots are mostly men. The Top Gun military is, for better or worse, homosocial.

There is something simplistic and almost quaint about the morality of Top Gun: Maverick. The film is an obvious homage to its 1986 predecessor, but it is also an homage to the seemingly unquestioned righteousness of the Pax Americana of the Cold War. In this regard, Top Gun: Maverick is nothing less than the last twentieth-century film.”

Read More.

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June: The Month of Graduation Speeches

Back of graduates during commencement at university. Graduate walking.It’s June: the month of graduation speeches

Over my professional life, I have come to the realization that history is not a fixed thing, a collection of precise dates, facts and events, but a mysterious and malleable thing, constantly changing, not just as new information emerges, but as our own interests, emotions and inclinations change. Each generation rediscovers and reexamines that part of its past that gives its present new meaning and new possibility. The question becomes for us now—for you graduates especially—what will we choose as our inspiration?

Ken Burns Universityof Pennslyvania Commencement

The goal of a graduation address is to impart hard-won wisdom to those men and women ostensibly now prepared to step into their vocations. Ken Burns does a splendid job of it. Since Burns completed his documentary, Franklin, in April of this year, it was fitting that he give the commencement address for this year’s graduates of the University of Pennsylvania.

Using Benjamin Franklin as the cornerstone of his talk, Burns makes excellent and memorable points.

Like this one:

…at this moment, on this memorable day for you, you sit here all potentiality and wonder.  Franklin had only two years of elementary education.  As his biographer H. W. Brands understood, schools teach you what you’re supposed to know, but also what you don’t have to know.  “With Franklin,” Brands said, “he never knew what he didn’t have to know, so he assumed he had to know everything.”  That’s the key to Franklin.   He was always searching:  Nature, art, society, politics, science, faith, himself, looking for ways to improve in all those arenas—especially himself, for he understood deeply and painfully that he was a mass of contradictions and limitations.  Just like the rest of us.”

In an interview about his new documentary, Franklin,

Burns smiles slightly at the interviewer’s remark about Franklin being a complicated human being. And says, “When you say complicated human being?” He pauses long enough to get her attention. And then, “You’re being redundant.”

I’ll wager that Ken Burns regarded his audience of new graduates with the same expression of ironic poignancy with which he looked at that television host when he declares,

“…This wouldn’t be so bad if we were just wasting our own lives, but our future as a democracy depends on you making things better.  ‘A Republic, if you can keep it,’ as Franklin challenged us 235 years ago.  

“Let me apologize.

“We’ve nearly broken this Republic of ours, but somehow you’ve got to fix it. You’re going to have to initiate a new movement, a new Union Army, that must be dedicated above all else—including your career and personal advancement—to the preservation of this country’s civic ideals.  You’ll have to learn, and then re-teach the rest of us that equality—real equality—is the hallmark and birthright of ALL Americans. Thankfully, you will become a vanguard against the separatism that seems to have infected our ranks, a vanguard against those forces that, in the name of our great democracy, have managed to diminish it.  I know you can do it.  But it requires your civil—not cynical—energies…”

If you’d like to read Burns address in its entirety—a three-minute investment of your time, read more.

Reading, then rereading this well-regarded historian’s address to the graduates of an ivy league college in 2022 fills me with hope. Burns’ total absence of cynicism and his determined optimism, better said, faith, in the next generation is instructive, is it not?

And the method with which he transforms the inanities of our current culture into stark reality is not just arresting with its lack of rancor but cleansing.

It’s June: the month of graduation speeches. This one is worth more than a cursory read.

We can’t help but think about our own graduations, can we?

Reading Burns’ remarks of the days of ‘potentiality and wonder’ evokes our own college graduations. Maybe even to recall teachers and classes that still affect us decades afterward. Especially those of us for whom the undergraduate degree was earned by working our way though.

We value things very differently when we must earn them.

My introduction to the Greek and Roman philosophers—especially the Stoics, during my undergraduate years had profound influence on my life and decisions. To my delight, decades later, Aurelius, Seneca, and Stoicism draw a surprising number of followers. Ryan Holiday’s trilogy of stoicism: The Ego is the Enemy, Obstacles are the Way and Courage is Calling, are Amazon best sellers. The fact belies the negative narratives about us so relentlessly hammered in by the media and much of our politics.

The book Meditations by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius was a lifeline for me during the confused, chaotic years of college. Hence reimmersing myself in the minds of these great thinkers was pure pleasure while writing I, Claudia and , -even though hard work. Perhaps because the correlations between Stoicism and Christianity are impossible to miss.

In his translation of Meditations, editor Gregory Hays writes this:

…we must see
things for what they are (here the discipline of perception is
relevant) and accept them, by exercising the discipline of
will, or what Epictetus calls (in a phrase quoted by Marcus)
“the art of acquiescence.” For if we recognize that all events
have been foreseen by the logos and form part of its plan,
and that the plan in question is unfailingly good (as it must
be), then it follows that we must accept whatever fate has in
store for us, however unpleasant it may appear, trusting that,
in Alexander Pope’s phrase, “whatever is, is right.” This
applies to all obstacles and (apparent) misfortunes, and in
particular to death—a process that we cannot prevent, which
therefore does not harm us, and which accordingly we must
accept willingly as natural and proper.
Together, the three disciplines constitute a comprehensive approach to life…

June is the month of His Sacred HeartOn this Solemnity of Corpus Christi, we’re called to renew our fidelity and trust in the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. ““If angels could be jealous of men, they would be so for one reason: Holy Communion.” St. Maximilian KolbeSurrendering our fears, failures and betrayals to Him. Spending time this day on the ways we can receive Him more worthily. Perhaps meditating on the auspicious portents of the Holy Eucharist in the desert:

Then the LORD said to Moses, “Behold, I am about to rain bread from heaven for you, and the people shall go out and gather a day’s portion every day, that I may test them, whether they will walk in my law or not.”

These miracles unite us with our Jewish brothers and sisters.

To facilitate these unifying prayers, EWTN has created a beautiful E-Book: Corpus Christi.

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Time: Ordinary and Otherwise

text THE END written on the sand and the wave that is deleting the word can be used for the end of the presentations or at the end of a movieTime: Ordinary and otherwise

Time. It’s kind of like breath, or air, or water. We consume them as we do all commodities, thinking we have all we need, all the time in the world.

Until suddenly, we don’t.

Maybe because of serious illness when I was four, time has always felt like gift to me. And perhaps those multiple emergency trips to the operating room brought an unusual acquaintance with death. Hence wasting time and boredom are anathema. In fact, not infrequently I write of the inimical effects of boredom and wince when hearing someone say, “Let’s kill time by going…”

Since our move to Texas, these days of inhaling the breathtaking beauty of God’s creation feel irreplaceable. Some of that feeling is undoubtedly the newness of this property: the lawn, huge trees, and evocative green of the Texas Hill Country. The sheer delight of seeing deer with their impossibly tiny fawns in our back yard.

But even back in the years when I considered myself an atheist, a sunrise, sunset, or aria from Puccini could bring me to my knees, sometimes not merely virtually.

Beauty.…the sheer majesty of it.

Not all of us are capable of heeding the sudden breakthroughs of unexpected loveliness in this world.

I have come to believe that it is grace which grants the capacity to do so…On an early morning many years ago, while out running in Houston, I dropped to my knees at the splendor of the sunrise. Alone on the woodsy path, I laughed at the joy I felt, should not be feeling, because my life was in tatters. My husband had just announced that he wanted a divorce, and yet here I was on my knees in praise of a God I claimed I did not believe in.

My good friend Almita loves to quote Alice Walker, “I think it pisses God off when we walk past the color purple without stopping to notice.” When I first heard her say that, I doubled over laughing. Because it’s just…perfect. If, you’d like the origin of Almita’s wonderful phrase, read more.

Our animals know of time and its limits.

A little over a year ago, our older dog Shadow died. That Shadow lived until almost twenty was nothing short of miraculous. He held on, we knew, because he just didn’t want to leave us. But on that last morning, Shadow clearly told us that he had to go. Their experience of time is different—more real ,I think—but the intelligence of our animals can teach us things beyond words and time. I think they remember Eden more clearly than do we.

For all these reasons, the phrase “ordinary time” used in the Christian liturgy has always felt somehow wrong. How can we declare time as merely ordinary? Since I’d never bothered to learn what the word really means, I let myself feel almost sad when we return to ordinary time at the close of the Easter season.

The word ordinary conveys the commonplace, the lack of something special, the routine. And yet, quite often its opposite, is all too often, a crisis. Yet another lie of our black and white world: We’re either bored or terrified, there’s no in-between.

But that’s not the meaning of the church’s ordinary time. It’s root is the Latin word, ordinalis: numbered or ruled…a seasonal rhythm of order. Like the rhythm of the seasons, langorous summer days and the blessing of each new day.

The green-colored vestments used by the priests and on the altar during ordinary time? The green signifies growth, our growth in the daily routines of living our lives, caring for the creatures and the creation we’ve been given. Precisely like the mesmerizing greens of trees and grass. Extending to us the invitation to the grace of the virtue of gratitude.

David Stendahl-Rast

The practice of gratefulness that I’m concerned with is grateful living. That means every moment of your life you practice gratefulness. You practice awareness that everything is gift, everything is gratuitous, and if it’s all given, gratuitously given, then the only appropriate response is gratefulness What we really want is joy. We don’t want things. We don’t want to accumulate things. We forget that, and so gratefulness can help us see that, can help us realize that…

The one most frequently repeated command in the Bible is not “love your neighbor,” but “fear not.” And if there is one thing that we need in our world, if there’s one thing that we should write on our mirror and see every morning when we look into the mirror, it’s “fear not.” If we went into the day with that command deeply tattooed on our heart, “fear not,” we’d be completely different people and create a completely different world—a world of faith.

Religion and ethics

Michael Pakaluk writes of redeeming time: St. Paul’s command to “redeem the time for the days are evil.” Pakaluk’s intriguing article speaks of ways to make good use of down time. Waiting in line in the grocery store, or heavy traffic. Finding and grabbing an opportunity to make a small sacrifice to God.

And summer invites sacred leisure. Another wonderful concept introduced to me by my friend Almita. Leisure is not idleness. But contemplation of reality and essential for our growth in the Spirit. Pope Benedict declares that vacations are essential.

This moment contains all moments

CS Lewis

A most blessed Solemnity of the Holy Trinity to each soul on earth.

The Holy Spirit opens up the Heavens

The Spirit restores our original beauty and fills us with his grace, leaving no room for anything unworthy of our love. The Spirit frees us from sin and death, and changes us from the earthly men we were, men of dust and ashes, into spiritual men, sharers in the divine glory, sons and heirs of God the Father who bear a likeness to the Son and are his co-heirs and brothers, destined to reign with him and to share his glory.

In place of earth the Spirit reopens heaven to us and gladly admits us into paradise, giving us even now greater honour than the angels, and by the holy waters of baptism extinguishing the unquenchable fires of hell.

Speaking quite literally, and also in harmony with the words of water and the Spirit, John the Baptist says of Christ: He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. Since we are only vessels of clay, we must first be cleansed in water and then hardened by spiritual fire – for God is a consuming fire. We need the Holy Spirit to perfect and renew us, for spiritual fire can cleanse us, and spiritual water can recast us as in a furnace and make us into new men.

From the treatise On the Trinity
by Didymus of Alexandria

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