Lin Wilder's Blog, page 7

Instead of a Sunday, A Day Off

Crucifixion At Sunrise – Empty Tomb With Shroud – Resurrection Of Jesus ChristInstead of a Sunday, A Day Off

“Instead of a Sunday,” Baron K. told us, “the Russians have a day off. This happens at certain intervals which vary in different parts of the country. First they had a five-day week, with the sixth day off, then they had a nine-day work period, with the tenth day off; then again it was an eight-day week. What a difference between a day off and a Sunday! The people work in shifts. While one group enjoys its day off, the others continue to work in the factories or on the farms or in the stores, which are always open. As a result the over-all impression throughout the country was that of incessant work, work, work. The atmosphere was one of constant rush and drive; finally, we confessed to each other that what we were missing most was not a well-cooked meal, or a hot bath, but a quiet, peaceful Sunday with church bells ringing and people resting after prayer…

As I have spent most of my life in rural areas, it is Sunday in the country that I shall describe.

First of all, it begins on Saturday afternoon. In some parts of the country the church bell rings at three o’clock, in others at five o’clock, and the people call it “ringing in the Feierabend.” Just as some of the big feasts begin the night before–on Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, Easter Eve–so every Sunday throughout the year also starts on its eve. That gives Saturday night its hallowed character. When the church bell rings, the people cease working in the fields…On Sunday everyone puts on his finery. The Sunday dress is exactly what its name implies–clothing reserved to be worn only on Sunday…

But when my husband and I were walking home that night from Baron K.’s house, we realized that our complacency–so prevalent among people in pre-war days–had received a rude shock. It dawned on us that we had taken something for granted that was, in reality, a privilege: namely, that we lived in a country where Sunday was not so much observed as it was celebrated as the day of the Lord. This was a new way of looking at things, and the light was still rather dim, but I can see now in retrospect that a new chapter in our life as a Christian family began that very night.

The Land Without a Sunday

If we call ourselves Christians,

these words of Maria Von Trapp’s essay, pierce,. maybe even draw some blood. As indeed they should. In our 21st century, Von Trapp’s description of Sunday reads like fantastically religious whimsy. And yet, her essay provokes us even more deeply because she explains they did these things out of tradition. When asked why Saturday nights and Sundays were this way, she realizes, “Everyone did it and so we did too.”

“It was a necessary cleansing.”

Father Paul McCollum’s reply to my description of becoming Catholic during the awful persecution of the Boston Catholic church in the late nineties surprised, even shocked me. And I must have showed it.

“Lin, when I was growing up, Saturday nights were for confession. Every Saturday night. And then Mass on Sunday mornings.”

My then spiritual director paused, collecting his thoughts. “It’s what everyone did….”With an ironic smile, he said,”I was a kid and on the way into the priest, would make up stuff just to have something to say. Now, when Catholics go to confession, they come because of sorrow, contrition for their sins, not conditioned habit.”

It’s tempting to think that those who’ve gone before us had it easier: easier in terms of working to live virtuously, that is. But we need only to continue reading Maria Von Trapp’s essay or look back in history to see that achieving a virtuous life is hard work. At times, it’s a moment by moment grind that requires all we have, gritting our teeth the whole while. Satan didn’t take over this world last year. We handed it to him in the beginning..

This past Wednesday was the Feast of Saint Ingnatius of Loyola, a saint I ‘met’ in Rome. Before our trip to Italy, I knew his name and little else. But when John and I walked into the Chiesa di Sant Ignazio, I virtually dropped to my knees. St Peter���s was stunning to be sure; the Sistine Chapel, indescribable. But it was at the Church of St. Ignatius of Loyola–the Chiesa del Jesu— where I wanted to worship, over and over again. And it was there that I had my first conversation with the Spanish soldier of fortune who became a saint because he’d nothing else to do. It was there that I prayed at the simple black coffin holding his remains, asking–more accurately, begging for direction for my life.

And got it.

We do ourselves a great disservice when we ignore these friends in heaven: men and women who walked this earth, did battle with the same temptations as we.

“Born to be saints,” you say about him or her?

Yes, of course.

But so are you.

And me.

Saint Ignatius, Pivotal Player

Bishop Robert Barron’s series of pivotal players in the Catholic Church is a gem. Each hour-long video is visually beautiful and replete with the depth and comprehensive research we associate with Bishop Barron’s work.

For Saint Ignatius’ feast day, he offers his presentation on Saint Ignatius of Loyola for free: https://www.wordonfire.org/loyola/#watch. The presentation begins, Admayorim Dei Gloria, to the greater glory of God.. This is the motto associated with Saint Ignatius of Loyola and the Society of Jesus order he founded. And another maxim of the saint, Semper major “always more.” Saint Ignatius pushed, ever certain that his fidelity and devotion to God could ever be increased…there is always more we can do to unite ourselves, to give Glory. Not until though, he dealt with his desires for fame and his love of the world and its vanities.

What would our lives be like if, daily, upon opening our eyes, we dicided that starting now, with evry word and action, we would give greater glory to God? Certain that our focus must be on our own actions, the weeds in our own hearts, categorically refusing to participate in the moral outrage swirling around us. Summing up the Ignatian spirtual exercises in one sentence: always do more to promote the salvation of souls.

“Then,” Bishop Barron declares, “everything is ordered and our lives will reflect Ignatian indifference to all but God.”

By finding others who apparently are more evil than we, we falsely believe that we are somehow better “than the rest of men” (Luke 18:11). It used to be that the most popular biographies were stories about the lives of good men and women worthy of our imitation, rather than the recounting of scandals for the sake of making us believe we are more virtuous than we really are.

The Wisdom of Fulton J. Sheen (Archbishop)

The photo below is the magnificent Chiesa del Jesu in Rome.

On the bottom far left can be seen the coffin holding the remains of Saint Ignatius of Loyola.

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Saint James and Medjugorje

Saint James Church, Medjugorje, Bosnia

Saint James and Medjugorje

Saint James isn’t a saint I’ve thought much about–until Thursday’s daily 6am Mass, that is. July 25 is Saint James the Greater’s Feast Day. During that liturgy, I got a nudge–more a push– to dump the reflection I’d written for today and write this new one.

Okay…

James was the first martyr. Sometime after Jesus’ crucifixion, he crossed the Mediterranean to evangelize in Spain and Portugal, then called Hispania. Just eleven years after Christ’s crucifixion he returned to Jerusalem during Herod Agrippa’s persecution of Christians. He was beheaded in 44 AD. Saint James’s is the only recorded martyrdom (Acts 12.).

Members of the inner circle with Peter, James and John witnessed Jesus’ transfiguration and Jesus’ resurrection of religious official Jarius’ daughter. The brothers earned animosity from the other ten apostles when they asked to be seated at his right and left.

The mother of the sons of Zebedee approached Jesus with her sons
and did him homage, wishing to ask him for something.
He said to her,
“What do you wish?”
She answered him,
“Command that these two sons of mine sit,
one at your right and the other at your left, in your Kingdom.”
Jesus said in reply,
“You do not know what you are asking.
Can you drink the chalice that I am going to drink?”
They said to him, “We can.”
He replied,
“My chalice you will indeed drink,
but to sit at my right and at my left, this is not mine to give
but is for those for whom it has been prepared by my Father.”
When the ten heard this,
they became indignant at the two brothers…Gospel of Matthew.

Jesus nicknamed James and John “Sons of Thunder.”

Why?

These were the two men who heard a man calling out demons in the name of Christ. And rebuked him for doing so because he wasn’t one of them. Later in that ninth chapter of Luke, Jesus was heading for Jerusalem. On the way, they stopped at a Samaritan village that refused to receive Jesus. The brothers are enraged.

“Lord, do you want us to call down fire from heaven to consume them?”

Although that’s an admittedly startling Gospel passage, it’s consoling. By then, they’d been following Jesus for three years; three years in the presence of the Creator of the Universe. And still, they could lose it. A fact I find perversely reassuring.

To understand that intensely passionate fervor, we need to consider their first meeting with Jesus. James and John were partnered with Peter. They’d been out all night and caught nothing. In fact, when Jesus tells Peter to ‘put out your boat into deep water and lower your nets for a catch,’ Peter replies that they’ have worked hard all night and caught nothing.’

But he does it anyway.

Peter’s catch requires all hands to deal with the miraculous multitude of fish when Peter had obeyed Jesus’ instuction to “put out into the deep.”

Fish in a fishing nets

What is Jesus really saying to James and John’s request for the honor of sitting at his right and left?

Can you drink the cup which I must drink and be baptized with the baptism which I must undergo? He is saying: “You talk of sharing honours and rewards with me, but I must talk of struggle and toil. Now is not the time for rewards or the time for my glory to be revealed. Earthly life is the time for bloodshed, war and danger…
Then the other ten became angry at the two brothers. See how imperfect they all are: the two who tried to get ahead of the other ten, and the ten who were jealous of the two! But, as I said before, show them to me at a later date in their lives, and you will see that all these impulses and feelings have disappeared. Read how John, the very man who here asks for the first place, will always yield to Peter when it comes to preaching and performing miracles in the Acts of the Apostles. James, for his part, was not to live very much longer; for from the beginning he was inspired by great fervour and, setting aside all purely human goals, rose to such splendid heights that he straightway suffered martyrdom..”

Saint John Crysostom homily on Matthew

Saint James church in Medjugorje

The church’s history is providential. Its Patron Saint, James the Greater, may well have instructed the now unknown pastor to erect a church that would hold 5000 people . It was 1969 and Medjugorje a tiny place in a county that no one had ever heard of. At most, the church had a handful of parishioners. The townspeople, understandably, thought their Pastor crazy.

Twenty-one years ago, in 2003, Saint James church was so crowded that it was standing room only, I knelt on the floor for Sunday Mass, the pews were full. The fifteen of us who stayed in Mirjana Soldo’s home were placed beside and in front of Mirjana during her apparition, in the midst of what I considered a huge crowd. Now, gazing at the hundreds of thousands pictured below, the Patron Saint of Pilgrims and the Holy Spirit’s effects are awe-inspiring.

Saint James the Greater, Patron Saint of Pilgrims, indeed.

Do miracles really happen in this sacred place?

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Return to Right Reason

Sense Vs Nonsense Ball Pyramid Illogical Vs Logical IdeaReturn to right reason

“How are you?”

I stared at him, choked by the avalanche of tears threatening to erupt.

Steve, my former doctoral advisor and head of dissertation committee, nodded and said, “Come see me.”

I’d just completed a talk on medical ethics bolstered by my dissertation research.. My professional life was at an all-time high. The reorganization at the hospital where I worked had resulted in a hefty increase in money and authority. I’d become known as an expert, not just in medical ethics, but a variety of other topics applicable to academic health care through my lengthening list of publications. Requests for consulations at other AMC’s were numerous, requiring extensive travel. In my field, I’d achieved the ‘fame‘ I told my mother I wanted when I walked away from God.

And I’d never been unhappier. I felt emptied out, hollow and painfully aware of the absurdity of being considered ‘expert’ in anything. Each time I tried to explain this sense of despair to close friends, I failed. From the outside, my life was perfect. So their reactions varied from, “Well, you really like school, so go get another degree…maybe law or an MBA” to “You should go see someone, you’re depressed.”

I did go to see Steve. He listened silently to my torrential outpour of profound confusion and sadness. Unlike all my friends and boyfriend, he didn’t think I should seek another advanced degree or pyschiatric counseling. Rather he seemed to comprehend what I was only just beginning to. I was dealing with the death of a certainty I’d had since I’d decided I was an atheist: if I studied hard enough, collected enough advanced degress and read the works of experts, I’d find wisdom. I could relax in the security of the knowledge I’d worked so hard to achieve.

So many years later, I realize the immensity of the gift.

We can’t know what we want

while filled up with knowledge. Cardinal John Henry Newman deliciously phrased the human intellect as aggressive, capricious and untustworthy. Although I didn’t know those words, I knew their truth, in myself and each of us, no matter how lettered. Not, mind you that I regret those ten years of doctoral study. No, because as Steve had predicted, my deep dive into medical decision making research would result in the acquisiton of friends for life. Like Israeli decision-making theorist Daniel Kahnemann.

Kahnemann’s precise prose serves as balm for those of us trying to make sense of what we see and hear from irrational superiors, colleagues, friends and ourselves.

…the concept of rationality is a technical, mathematical concept. It’s a logic. And it is actually completely not possible for a finite human mind to be rational or to obey the axioms of rationality. You’d have to know too much. The difficulty of being consistent in all your beliefs is impossible. And if you are not consistent in all your beliefs, you can be trapped in an inconsistency, and then you’re not rational. So the concept of rationality, the technical concept of rationality, is psychologically nonsense…

Our beliefs do not come from where we think they came. And let me elaborate on that sentence. When I ask you about something that you believe in — whether you believe or don’t believe in climate change, or whether you believe in some political position or other — as soon as I raise the question why, you have answers. Reasons come to your mind. But the way that I would see this is that the reasons may have very little to do with the real causes of your beliefs.

So the real cause of your belief in a political position, whether conservative or radical left, the real causes are rooted in your personal history. They’re rooted in who are the people that you trusted and what they seemed to believe in, and it has very little to do with the reasons that come to your mind, why your position is correct and the position of the other side is nonsensical. And we take the reasons that people give for their actions and beliefs, and our own reasons for our actions and beliefs, much too seriously.

Do We See What is There Or What We Expect to See?

Humiliation as gift

That was the immensity of the gift: humility. By that I mean the emptiness, the total loss of confidence in my own or others’ ability to define what I want, what and who to believe in. Very early in my career, I could see that academic medicine was broken—anyone with eyes in their head can see that. But I thought I could repair what was broken–at least in the institutions I worked in.

“The rise of reason did not take power into account.”

It’s the first sentence of Paul Starr’s The Social Transformation of American Medicine, and although written forty years ago, details how and why our medical and judicial systems became derailed from their original goals. Starr’s crisp declaration doesn’t just explain the messes in medicine and the judicial systems, does it?

Everywhere we look, we can see the effects of untrammeled [Godless} human reason, will and power, the list is endlessly tiresome. And growing, exponentially.

So how do we return to right reason?

Unlike everything else, the answer’s simple, anyone can grasp it.

He wrote it in our hearts.

And he waits for our overflowing minds, hearts and appetites to create enough space to hear the whispered words,

“Follow me and I will give you rest.“

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We Have No king: Amazed at Their Lack of Faith

We have no king

Often, the readings from the Old Testament seem directed at us. Like last week’s daily Mass readings from The Book of Amos that overflow with Israel’s –read our own–infidelities against God. And this week’s from Hosea. Listen to the reading from the Christian liturgy for Wednesday:.

Israel is a luxuriant vine
whose fruit matches its growth.
The more abundant his fruit,
the more altars he built;
The more productive his land,
the more sacred pillars he set up.
Their heart is false,
now they pay for their guilt;
God shall break down their altars
and destroy their sacred pillars.
If they would say,
���We have no king������
Since they do not fear the LORD,
what can the king do for them?….

That stanza, “Since they do not fear the Lord, what can the king do for them?!” recalls a long-ago Nevada neighbor. Claire [name changed] suffered deeply from her son’s suicide. The bizarre sudden death of her husband lollowed not long after her son shot himself. While renewing his pilot license on an instructional flight his plane collided with another on a perfectly sunny day in the small town of Yerington Nevada. Both pilots and Claire’s husband were killed.

Despite, my zealous Catholicism and her angry atheism, we became friends. Close enough for Claire to speak her rage and confusion at a God who would permit such evil on her family.

“Why wouldn’t your loving God save my husband?” The words were projectiles, filled with fury.

Claire’s husband’s atheism had been so aggressively radical that his clothing advertised it. And argued with believers about their faith. He was after all a scientist, she would proudly declare.

���We have no king������
Since they do not fear the LORD,
what can the king do for them?..

Amazed at their lack of faith

After miraculously healing the woman’s twelve-year flow of blood and resurrecting the twelve-year-old daughter of religious official, Jarius, Jesus returns home. He isn’t there for a visit but rather to teach. Initially, his listeners are awed by the authority with which he preaches.

But…they know him.

These people watched Jesus grow up. And are likely aware of the strange circumstances of his birth. And so they choose to deny the Wisdom their own ears convey to them. And open themselves to jealousy and envy. They “took offense!”

They said, ���Where did this man get all this?
What kind of wisdom has been given him?
What mighty deeds are wrought by his hands!
Is he not the carpenter, the son of Mary,
and the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon?
And are not his sisters here with us?���
And they took offense at him.
Jesus said to them,
���A prophet is not without honor except in his native place
and among his own kin and in his own house.���
So he was not able to perform any mighty deed there,
apart from curing a few sick people by laying his hands on them.
He was amazed at their lack of faith.

My friend Claire in the story above was angry at the God she claimed not to believe in for not protecting her husband. The very same husband who spent his time and energy denying God and ridiculing people of faith. So many of us are like that, aren’t we? We claim to be logical thinkers while behaving wholly irrationally.

Sometimes though, the apparent irrational might be

prudent. This past Thursday, we commemorated the Memorial of Saint Benedict. Benedict, the man who rejected the lawless, pagan and immoral practices of sixth century Rome by escaping to a cave. Most likely, his friends, and perhaps his family too, believed him crazed. But his biographer, Saint Gregory the Great, explains the young Benedict knew the critical import of silence and solitude.

Benedict’s ���world was overturned by a tremendous crisis of values and institutions caused by the collapse of the Roman Empire, the invasion of new peoples and the decay of morals.��� And yet this man would be a “luminous star” pointing the way out of the “dark night of history.” 

The period in Subiaco, a time of solitude with God, was a time of maturation for Benedict. It was here that he bore and overcame the three fundamental temptations of every human being: the temptation of self-affirmation and the desire to put oneself at the centre, the temptation of sensuality and, lastly, the temptation of anger and revenge. In fact, Benedict was convinced that only after overcoming these temptations would he be able to say a useful word to others about their own situations of neediness. Thus, having tranquilized his soul, he could be in full control of the drive of his ego and thus create peace around him. Only then did he decide to found his first monasteries in the Valley of the Anio, near Subiaco.

On Saint Benedict.

In a real sense, it was Benedict who founded the civilization that came to be known as Europe. It was thus that Pope Paul Vl declared Saint Benedict the Patron of Europe.

The “simple” Rule of Benedict

is a seventy-three chapter manual. It’s read daily by countless monks and oblates throughout the world. For me and I would guess, all, it functions precisely as a school.

the temptation of self-affirmation and the desire to put oneself at the centre, the temptation of sensuality and, lastly, the temptation of anger and revenge. In fact, Benedict was convinced that only after overcoming these temptations would he be able to say a useful word to others about their own situations of neediness. Thus, having tranquilized his soul, he could be in full control of the drive of his ego and thus create peace around him.

On Saint Benedict

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American Exceptionalism: Constitution and Bill of Rights

Hillsdale College- Last Days of a Revolutionary: eight-minute video that warrants your time.

American exceptionalism: Constitution and Bill of Rights

A few weeks ago, a newsletter called “Texas Minute” showed up in my inbox. After providing snippets of state news, author Michael Quinn Sullivan wrote about historian Mellen Chamberlain’s 1887 interview with the last surviving member of the battle of Concord. Historian Mellen Chamberlain asked ninety-one-year-old Levi Preston why he decided to fight in the Revolutionary War.

The answers weren���t what the historian expected, for Preston did not speak of the oppressive British rule, the stamp tax, the tea tax, or the writings of philosopher John Locke.

���Well, then,��� asked Chamberlain, ���why did you fight?

Preston���s answer still takes my breath away: ���Young man, what we meant in going for those redcoats was this: We always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should.��� It was this concept of self-government, so natural to Levi Preston and his contemporaries, that changed the world.

Texas Scorecard

Sullivan’s phrase, “American exceptionalism,” grabbed me. True because the phrase is wholly discordant from what is taught in American public schools, universities and our own government. In 2019, a ‘revisonist history’ of the United States, the 1619 Project was greeted with rave reviews by the New York Times and the intellectual elite. It’s premise? Systemic racism is our foundation.

The Portland Association of Teachers provided a handout in its resource guide, Teach Palestine! Resources for Educators in Portland Public Schools created by Oregon Teachers for Palestine. The pamphlet targets the ���over 4500 professional educators��� who are members of this affiliate of the National Education Association���the largest teachers��� union in the United States. Another TWM-Teaching While Muslim- project compares Palestinians and American Indians as victims of white colonialism.

You can’t love what you don’t know. When young Americans say they aren’t proud of their country, it proves our education system has failed them.

My Generation is Being Taught to Hate America

There were a different kind of fireworks,

on Joly 4, 1776. Instead of the fun, brilliant fireworks of last week, these were the kind that killed and maimed. The explosions came from shotguns and cannons, the red that of British soldiers’ uniforms along with blood running in the streets. The Loyalists, later Tories, outnumbered the radical Patriots: the chaos, heartbreak and sacrifice of those times are unimaginable to us 248 years later.

Ryan Halliday reminds us there was no nation called America on this day. Not even a thirteen-state confederation bound more by hope than policy.

… A revolution against an empire. Families ripped apart because a war forced them to choose sides. Hopeful successes on the battlefield repeatedly followed by dispiriting defeats. The uncertainty of victory, shrouded in the certainty of death and misery and suffering for what could be years���if they were lucky. It had only been a year since George Washington assumed command of the Continental Army, and the hardest years were still ahead for the loose coalition of patriots fighting for self-determination.

Daily Stoic

It was impossible. A few farmers declaring their independence from the greatest empire on earth. George Washington becoming the general of an army that didn’t yet exist. And yet, it happened.

The history of the origins of the United States of America is the stuff of fantasy, heroic valor rarely seen. John Adams’ writings on policy, government and nationhood are some of the most brilliant analyses ever penned. One could spend lifetimes and never plumb the writings from the astounding, miraculous, story of American independence.

Think the average American

believes American exceptionalism is a fact? Or can define freedom?

If he or she stops to ponder the miracles of the nation’s history, yes.

If.

One of the most vital services that Catholic Christians provide to our nation is our witness to truth and the reasonableness of reason. This is especially true of our witness to the natural moral law (knowable by all who use right reason) and to the norms of social justice.

Independence Day and Catholic Citizens

Monsignor Stuart Swetland carries very worn copies of the Constitution and Bill of Rights in the left hand pocket in his clerical suit jacket. He began doing this while living and working on Capitol Hill in Washinton DC. The Monsignor writes that many had lost their copies and that he won numerous arguments by grabbing his own copy as reference. He continues the practice today because these documents “give witness to truth.” Monsignor Swetland is the president of Donnelly College where, he tells students, our first value is truth. And that truth is knowable. [emphasis mine]

 “I explain how a college is a community of learners, earnestly and courageously seeking the truth in all things.

While this may seem obvious to most, it is, in fact, highly controversial today. The false ideology of postmodern relativism and epistemological skepticism has permeated and dominated many (most?) institutions of higher learning, newsrooms, editorial boards and governmental entities today. Many boldly, if illogically, proclaim, ���There is no truth,��� yet go on claiming to be professors with nothing to profess, pundits with pointless points of view, and leaders without vision. And as Proverbs teaches us, ���Where there is no vision the people perish.���

American exceptionaism: Constitution and Bill of Rights.

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Maintaining the Integrity of Words: Religious Freedom Week

Trust Reliability Sincerity Commitment Integrity Consistency WordsMaintaining the integrity of words

isn’t my phrase. But that of Bishop Erik Varden and expresses a belief that is dear to my heart.

Why do I think it so dear that it warrants 800 words?

There are a number of reasons: even as a kid, I loved words. The process of learning to use words that perfectly encapsulated worlds of meaning, like craven, flummoxed or truncated, was massively fun. After all, when we speak or write, we’re looking to peak others’ interest in something of universal value, aren’t we? But there’s a rub, a significant one: we can’t be certain that our intended meaning is what is heard or understood.

In the undergraguate linguistics course I thought would bore me to tears, I learned. Sister Marie Bernard was fascinated by the power of the vernacular upon those who lived and spoke it. And her admonitions to her students were simple and practical: while the meaning of a word may be clear and precise to you as a writer or a speaker, understand always, there are those in the listening or reading audience to whom the meaning of that word may be something else entirely. Her thoughts and viewpoints far beyond her time, Sr. Marie Bernard was fascinated by the power of the vernacular upon those who lived and spoke it.

Perversly, the almost universal embrace of deconstuctionism--Modernism–among intellectuals and college and university academics has dispensed with the problem of meaning: there isn’t any. For the deconstuctionist, meaning is wholly subjective and resides in one’s personal feelings. There are no absolute truths. Of course this is a euphemism for atheism but when dressed up with five syllable words, it becomes compelling, sophisticated, and mysterious. And we know that euphemisms work exceedngly well to quiet consciences. Hence the primary reason to write about maintaining the integrity of words.

For last Saturday’s memorial of Saints John Fisher and Thomas More, Bishop Erik Varden exhorts us to ponder why we are here by recalling the origin of our reason, intellect and speech.

Adam���s task of naming the animals in Eden was not restricted to a Linn��ian classification of species. As king and priest he named his fellow creatures for what they were, blessing them.The words we employ to engage with the real are not erratic constructs. God, making us in his image, made us capable of speech so that our many words might echo his one Word in antiphonal response.

The Greek Fathers loved to say that man is ��������������, that is, capable of ����������. To be human is essentially to be of the Word. That is how the Word could be incarnate. Now, it does not take more than a bout of ���flu to remind us that we���re dust, subject to decay. Yet our spirit is fit to conceive of and utter words with a bearing on eternity. Hence the need to recall that what we say, and don���t say, matters ��� at times more than all else.

Sts. John Fisher & Thomas More

I first met Saint Thomas More

when assigned Robert Bolt’s play, A Man For All Seasons in the English class mentioned earlier. From Bolt’s first words, I was hooked. Bolt was an atheist, like me. “More was a man,” Bolt writes in his Preface to A Man For All Seasons, “who did not race to martyrdom.” Unlike most of the saints revered by the Church and rejected by Bolt. Quite the contrary. More was a man of law and a loyal subject of the King of England, considering King Henry Vlll to be a friend. Married with four children, Thomas More was a lover of life, good food and fine wines. He was a humanist; a concept which in the sixteenth century, conveyed complete submission to God and his law. 

He was a man who did not want to die. I well recall my hunger-yearning, more accurately, for something or Someone so precious that I would give my life rather than betray it-Him. I’ve come to believe that my conversion to Catholicism was influenced by my first friend in Heaven, the Patron Saint of Politicians, Thomas More.

Like More, Bishop John Fisher was a friend to Henry. He and More helped the young King Henry formulate his answer to Martin Luther’s The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, The Defense of the Seven Sacraments. Bishop Fisher used his literary skill and theological training to produce prolific writings revealing the errors in Luther’s theories., becoming known in all of Europe.

But Henry’s divorce changed everything. Initially, Fisher consoled the king. But when he realized where Henry was headed, Fisher aggressively supported Henry’s wife, Catherine of Aragon both privately and publically, the only one of England’s seventy bishops to do so.

���Kings usually think that they are permitted to do whatever pleases them, because of the magnitude of their power. Therefore it is good for these kings in my opinion, to submit themselves to the decrees of the church���lest perhaps they kick over the traces and do what they like, so long as they can weave together some appearance and pretence of right.���

The History of England-Bishop John Fisher

Sixteenth century England

was replete not just the usual political machinations but horrendous torture and death for the enemies of King Henry Vlll. Bishop John Fisher and Thomas More’s refusal to sign the Act of Supremacy declaring Henry, not the Bishop of Rome, head of the church, plunged them into the enemy camp. The king who had been declared “Defender of the Catholic Faith” by Pope Leo X through his writings against the teachings of Martin Luther, had broken with Rome and created a new religion.

It’s tempting to judge the sixty-nine bishops who signed the oath and the many thousands of former Catholics who joined the king in persecting and killing the Catholics who refused to recant their faith. Until we think about Jesus. And relect on his visit to his home in Nazareth where he could perform no miracles. “He was amazed at their lack of faith.”

This layman and Catholic priest were two very different men yet they had this in common: “their speech was Yes or No. And no threat of terror could substitute one for the other. They resolved to die because they held Truth dearer than life itself.

We, too, are called to bear witness to the truth in a world seduced by phantasms, sometimes by outright lies. Who knows what account we may be called upon to give in our times, our so strange times? May our martyrs help us to revere the truth. May we be consecrated in the truth, graced to suffer and, yes, even to give our lives for love of it. Amen.

Coram Fratibus-Sts John Fisher and Thomas More

Photo from National Catholic Register, July 6, 2016

Maintaining the integrity of words: religious freedom week ended yesterday

Five letters, a small, simple word– faith– but one that holds the fate of the world and that of each soul.

In his last letter from the Tower, More wrote to his daughter, Meg. ”

���.���I will not mistrust him, Meg, though I shall feel myself weakening and on the verge of being overcome with fear. I shall remember how Saint Peter at a blast of wind began to sink���Margaret, I know this well: without my fault he will not let me lost���do not let your mind be troubled by anything that shall happen to me in this world. Nothing can come but what God wills. And I am very sure that whatever that be, however bad it may seem, it shall indeed be the best.���

A Man For All Seasons

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See? I told you!

Joe Mazzula on Boston Celtics Championship RunSee? I told you!

Celtics coach Joe Mazzula interrupted his conversation with interviewers about the Celtics win of the NBA basketball playoffs to grin at the off-camera shout, “We DID it!” and reply, “See, I told you!”

“Joe, what did you tell Jayson?” Only then do we understand that the shouter was Jayson Tatum, the twenty-six-year old who has been aiming and missing the championship for four years.

“I told him, you’ve got to have faith.”

His comment may sound trite. But that’s because you didn’t listen to few minutes preceding the interrupted interview. Mazzula’s reply to the “How did you do it?” was surprising to me and I suspect the interviewers.

“The difference between winning and losing is in the details…Most teams are closer to winning than they know…”

Then one of the interviewers cut though the hype questions and asked, “Can you explain your system of analytics, Joe?”

And elicited Mazzula’s explaination of the complex factors requiring constant analysis: the percentage of possessions, rebounds, thorough, meticulous analysis of both the Celtics’ errors and those of the opposing team. The constant need for strategy, change and thinking outside of the box. When we think about all of that, his comment, “See? I told you-you, you’ve got to have faith,” no longer sounds contrived. In fact, It makes us curious about the mind and heart of this man.

Attempting for a more egoistic answer, another of the interviewers asked, “So Joe, what did you personally do to bring this team to the chanpionship?”

“Stay out of their way…These are experts…”

It was my husband John who taught me that sports-football, basketball- could be a metaphor for life, faith, and happiness.

John knew I didn’t like football and seemed to have no problem with it. But this January evening, he insisted I stop working and come upstairs to watch Tom Brady’s first Playoff game. As I climbed the stairs, the camera happened to capture an expression on the twenty-three-year-old quarterback’s face . Mesmerized, I stopped and stared at determination, intensity, grit, calculation and will.These are just a few of the things I saw reflected in that young man’s eyes. And I was hooked. Understanding less than nothing about the game, I sat down, mesmerized. Because I realized that what I had just seen had nothing to do with football…and everything to do about life: yours and mine. About risk and choices, challenges and failures. About tenacity and resolve, passion and focus.

Football as metaphor for life, faith, and happiness

Tom Brady throwing the ball at training camp in Foxborough MA.What did Mazzula mean

when he told Tatum to have faith? Rather than the weak adjective too often used in speech, devout Catholic Mazzula refers to Saint Paul’s ” realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen.” The coach told Tatum that God “put us here for a reason.” All too often, believers and non alike think faith means we can sit and do nothing because God will take care of everything. Yes, that’s true, but our goal won’t be achieved without working our veritable —-‘s off! Saint Ignatius of Loyola is reputed to have advised,

“Work as if everything depends on you while believing that everything depends on God.”

Mazzula said this about Tatum: “He’s been gifted with this emotional stability and this mental toughness from whenever I first met him,” Celtics’ head coach Joe Mazzulla said. “All he has ever wanted to do is get better, whether that was figuring out how to be better for his teammates or figure out how to be better for his coaches. …”So he does it in every area, not just like basketball.”

See? I told you!

All of which leads me to Pope Benedict’s splendid encyclical, Spe Salvi.

Why?

Because these two men, who have untold influence on kids, on all of us who love watching excellence, openly speak about the faith-based hope that early Christians displayed…on ESPN and Fox and CNN! How can such a display not lead us to thinking and writing about Christian hope? [Spe Salvi]

Faith and Hope

“SPE SALVI facti sumus”—in hope we were saved, says Saint Paul to the Romans, and likewise to us (Rom 8:24). According to the Christian faith, “redemption”—salvation—is not simply a given. Redemption is offered to us in the sense that we have been given hope, trustworthy hope, by virtue of which we can face our present: the present, even if it is arduous, can be lived and accepted if it leads towards a goal, if we can be sure of this goal, and if this goal is great enough to justify the effort of the journey. Now the question immediately arises: what sort of hope could ever justify the statement that, on the basis of that hope and simply because it exists, we are redeemed? And what sort of certainty is involved here?

Spe Salvi

A dive into Pope Benedict’s writings takes work. Not because his writing style is incoherent, irrelevant or uninteresting but just the opposite. Each of Benedict’s words and paragraphs methodically dissects, integrates to then reveal the obvious as well as the cryptic. For example, In reflecting on Christian faith and hope, Pope Benedict liberally quotes relevant texts. But he insists on reflecting on the practical significance of Christian hope-are we changed?

Is Christian faith leading to hope real to each person, to you and me?

Or are these just nice thoughts, like an interesting story.

If real, exactly how are we changed?

Former African slave, Josephine Bakhita was seven or eight years of age when grabbed by slave traders. Josephine was flogged daily until she bled. She bore 147 scars until the end of her life. Resold, the Sudanese woman was introduced to a new Master. A Master who had accepted flogging and awaited her at the right hand of the Father. Through the knowledge of this hope she was “redeemed”, no longer a slave, but a free child of God.

At our Baptism there was a dialogue.

“What do you ask of the Church?”

“Faith.”

“And what does Faith give you?”

“Eternal life.”

Methodically he pushes into the thoughts of unbelievers.

Perhaps many people reject the faith today simply because they do not find the prospect of eternal life attractive. What they desire is not eternal life at all, but this present life, for which faith in eternal life seems something of an impediment. To continue living for ever —endlessly—appears more like a curse than a gift. Death, admittedly, one would wish to postpone for as long as possible. But to live always, without end—this, all things considered, can only be monotonous and ultimately unbearable. This is precisely the point made, for example, by Saint Ambrose, one of the Church Fathers, in the funeral discourse for his deceased brother Satyrus: “Death was not part of nature; it became part of nature. God did not decree death from the beginning; he prescribed it as a remedy. Human life, because of sin … began to experience the burden of wretchedness in unremitting labour and unbearable sorrow. There had to be a limit to its evils; death had to restore what life had forfeited. Without the assistance of grace, immortality is more of a burden than a blessing”[6]. A little earlier, Ambrose had said: “Death is, then, no cause for mourning, for it is the cause of mankind’s salvat

Spe Salvi

See? I told you!

Acquins: faith is a habitus, that is, a stable disposition of the spirit, through which eternal life takes root in us and reason is led to consent to what it does not see. The concept of “substance” is therefore modified in the sense that through faith, in a tentative way, or as we might say “in embryo”—and thus according to the “substance”—there are already present in us the things that are hoped for: the whole, true life. And precisely because the thing itself is already present, this presence of what is to come also creates certainty: this “thing” which must come is not yet visible in the external world (it does not “appear”), but because of the fact that, as an initial and dynamic reality, we carry it within us, a certain perception of it has even now come into existence.

Spe Salvi

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The Shame and Blame Game: The Anatomy of Sin

ShameThe shame and blame game: the anatomy of sin

Some books are worth reading over and over again. Karol Wojtyla’s–Pope John Paul ll’s– A Sign of Contradiction is one of those unique texts. Recently, I read A Sign of Contradiction for the third or maybe the fifth time.

The book compiles Wojtyla’s meditations for the March 1976 Lenten Retreat for Pope Pius VI, the papal household, and the cardinals and bishops of the Roman Curia. In the first several chapters, Archbishop Karol Wojtyla speaks and writes of Genesis as if it is exigent reality: unfolding now. 

Yes, now, literally, on many levels. The first: paradise.

I’ll wager I’m not unique when I declare that I’ve heard the echoes of Eden. It’s a place of perfection where peace reigns. It isn’t actually sounds but rather their absence. As if you are one with the universe, suddenly all things feel connected to everything else. A complete whole with you exactly where you should be…you belong.

Throughout the description in Genesis, the heart can be heard beating. We have before us not a great builder of the world, a demiurge. We stand in the presence of the great heart! No cosmogony, no philosophical cosmology of the past, no cosmological theory of the present-day can express a truth like this truth. We can find it only in the inspired pages of Genesis, in the revelation of the love that pervades the whole earth to its core, in the revelation of the Fatherhood which gives creation its full meaning, together with the covenant which gives rise to the creation of man in the image of God…

Thus, from the dawn of history man is faced with a tree: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the tree which is a symbol of his human nature in that it is a sign of the limits implicit in his creaturely state and of the frontier which development of the human person may not cross…

I think it is true that today one cannot understand either Sartre or Marx without having first read and pondered deeply the first three chapters of Genesis. These are the key to understanding the world today, both its roots and its dramatic affirmations and denials.

A Sign of Contradiction

“Why did you do such a thing?“

God’s question to Adam and Eve repeats through the ages in each human heart.

The anatomy of sin

Years ago, I read the first three chapters of Genesis. And then read them again. And also a third time. I did this because I clearly remember when I’d thought it all nonsense. But reading with the eyes of faith I was so flabbergasted at the words, their magnificence and majesty that I wondered how I could possibly have believed a human mind had conjured them.

Just so, when a character from my latest novel was trying to make sense out of what is wholly irrational and perverse, she was counseled to do the same.

“How did a civilized, technologically advanced culture like ours degenerate to this … abyss of evil?” Although tears streamed down my face, I felt oddly calmer and cleaner.

Father Cavendish’s reply both attracted and shocked me. “The entire story of humanity is contained in Genesis,” he said. “Everything is explained there. Read the first three chapters, then read them again and again.” As he spoke, his expression softened, and his piercing gray eyes seemed to drill into my heart. “A former pope, Saint John Paul the Second, speaks of the ‘Great Heart’ that we hear beating behind these words in Genesis. I think you’re ready to hear His heartbeats, Kate.”

Plausible Liars

The enemy has one tactic: the shame and blame game: the anatomy of sin. Bishop Robert Barron’s reflection, What is Sin? refers to last Sunday’s Gospel reading. [Read Here} The third chapter of Genesis details the recently expelled from Heaven, Lucifer’s conversation with Eve. “The perspective here is stunning!”, declares Bishop Barron. “It is staggering how deeply the author perceives, under God’s inspiration, the nature of sin…”

“Where are you?”

He who “was arrayed in the apparel of sovereignty, and there was the crown of glory set upon his head, there was he made king, and priest, and prophet, there did God make him to sit upon his honourable throne, and there did God give him dominion over all creatures and things. And all the wild beasts, and all the cattle, and the feathered fowl were gathered together, and they passed before Adam…,”

The Book of the Cave of Treasures

replied, “I heard you in the garden and I was afraid.”

“Why did you do such a thing?”

What is sin?But it doesn’t end there

“Adam, where are you?” hardly sounds like the thunderous voice of the Creator of the Universe. Monsignor Charles Pope observes that it sounds like a plaintive cry: “Adam and Eve, you’ve hidden your heart from me, why are you hiding?”

“Where is yor heart?”

It’s a question for each if us, believers or non.

Who is the object of our adoration?

What shame bursts out of our consciousness at the thought of confession?

And compels us to find someone to blame?

The Lord does not forsake Adam, Eve or us. He sets forth a crucial plan wherein one of Eve’s own progeny will rise to conquer Satan’s pride by his humble acceptance of the cross.
Whatever your sins, never forget that God has a plan to save you. Let God find you as he calls out, “Where are you?” Let him help you to understand your heart. Finally, let him apply the crucial remedy, the cross. All he needs is your ongoing Yes!

Adam, Eve and God’s Crucial Plan

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Stir Into Flame

Cooking flaming wok with vegetables in the commercial kitchen. High quality photography.Stir into flame

Saint Paul’s Letter to Timothy from last week’s Christian liturgy feels directed to each of the 8.1 billion living souls in this June of 2024. Although there’s controversy about authorship and dates of these letters, orthodox concensus declares it as Paul’s last letter. He writes to his successor in Ephesus, from prison.

It certainly reads as last words, doesn’t it?

Paul, an Apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God
for the promise of life in Christ Jesus,
to Timothy, my dear child:
grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father
and Christ Jesus our Lord.

I am grateful to God,
whom I worship with a clear conscience as my ancestors did,
as I remember you constantly in my prayers, night and day.

For this reason, I remind you to stir into flame
the gift of God that you have through the imposition of my hands.
For God did not give us a spirit of cowardice
but rather of power and love and self-control.
So do not be ashamed of your testimony to our Lord,
nor of me, a prisoner for his sake;
but bear your share of hardship for the Gospel
with the strength that comes from God.

He saved us and called us to a holy life,
not according to our works
but according to his own design
and the grace bestowed on us in Christ Jesus before time began,
but now made manifest
through the appearance of our savior Christ Jesus,
who destroyed death and brought life and immortality
to light through the Gospel…

…be persistent whether it is convenient or inconvenient;
convince, reprimand, encourage through all patience and teaching.
For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine
but, following their own desires and insatiable curiosity,
will accumulate teachers and will stop listening to the truth
and will be diverted to myths…

Entire Letter

It’s a razor’s edge, this journey

of faith. While on the one hand, we know we’re capable of nothing but sin, we baptized are priests, prophets and kings. That reality is one of the many magnificent inspirations of Vatican ll.

���,,,for those who believe in Christ, who are reborn ��� through the word of the living God, not from the flesh, but from water and the Holy Spirit, are finally established as ���a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a purchased people ��� who in times past were not a people, but are now the people of God������ (1 Pt 2:9-10) (LG, 9). Christ himself is the ���head��� of this ���messianic��� people, in whom the Holy Spirit dwells, as in a temple, who are to abide by the new commandment to love as Christ loves. 

Summary of Lumen Gentium

Long ago, my second or maybe third spiritual director explained the paradoxical reality of all Christians as, “redeemed sinners.” It was his experience, Father Roland remarked, “that converts like you place far too much emphasis on the denominator ‘sinners’ while cradle Catholics often see only the redeemed” part of the ratio. Over two decades later, I again come face-to-face with my tendency toward scrupulosity.

My confessor this past Monday morning’s emphatic “No!” to my concern about whether a frequent habit was sinful was followed by a broad grin and “You are not Teresa of Avila!” There’s no way this priest could know of my long-standing friendship with Saint Teresa of Avila. But Jesus does–it’s the Lord who has graced me with her friendship. A tangible reminder of just Who we are speaking to in confession for the priest acts in persona Christi:

“The Christ whom he gives and makes present, and who by means of his ministry effects the remission of sins is with the priest, who appears as a brother of man, a merciful bridge-builder, faithful and compassionate pastor dedicated to search for the lost sheep, the doctor who heals and comforts, the one teacher who teaches the truth and teaches the ways of God, who judges the living and the dead and judges according to the truth and not according to appearances…Spirit the Sanctifier in the heart; to communicate a pardon which God alone can give; to “celebrate” his reconciliation with the Father, represented in the parable of the prodigal son; to reinsert that redeemed sinner redeemed into the ecclesial communion with his brothers and sisters; to admonish the penitent to change , in a fatherly, encouraging and friendly way, “Go and sin no more.”The Priest and Confession-Pope John Paul llCalled to be saints

The title of Somerset Maughm’s novel, Razor’s Edge aptly descibes the struggle facing us each moment of our life. Basking in our state of grace after confession can be enjoyed only momentarily. Within seconds, new temptations crop up and may require virtue not yet assimilated. My friend- and I hope yours!- Saint Teresa of Avila explains:

“Do not suppose that after advancing the soul to such a state God abandons it so easily that it is light work for the devil to regain it. When His Majesty sees it leaving Him, He feels the loss so keenly that He gives it in many a way a thousand secret warnings which reveal to it the hidden danger. In conclusion, let us strive to make constant progress: we ought to feel great alarm if we do not find ourselves advancing, for without doubt the evil one must be planning to injure us in some way; it is impossible for a soul that has come to this state not to go still farther, for love is never idle. Therefore it is a very bad sign when one comes to a standstill in virtue.” ���St. Teresa of Avila, p.99Interior Castle

Saint Teresa paraphrases Jesus’ warning in the Gospel of Matthew: An unclean spirit driven out of a man will return if he finds the soul empty of God and when he returns will bring back seven others, making the last condition of the person worse than the first.

Each of us is called to be a saint, whether in or outside of a monastery. And so Saint Paul’s words, “Stir into flame!” is our mantra. As I read this passage again and again, I see the recipe for our moment-by-moment struggle. The flame we’re stirring up isn’t the natural flame of a cook but of the holy spirit: not a spirit of cowardice but of power and love and self control.

It is not what you are nor what you have been that God sees with all-merciful eyes, but what you desire to be.

The Cloud of the Unknowing

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Restoring Our Glory: Love of Chastity

Royal Gold CrownRestoring our glory

“Come ye, let Us make man in Our image, and according to Our likeness.” Now by this word “Us” He maketh known concerning the Glorious Persons [of the Trinity]. And when the angels heard this utterance, they fell into a state of fear and trembling, and they said to one another, “A mighty miracle will be made manifest to us this day [that is to say], the likeness of God, our Maker”… And they saw the right hand of God opened out flat, and stretched out over the whole world; and all creatures were collected in the palm of His right hand…

And  when he rose at full length and stood upright in the centre of the earth, he planted his two feet on that spot whereon was set up the Cross of our Redeemer; for Adam was created in Jerusalem. There he was arrayed in the apparel of sovereignty, and there was the crown of glory set upon his head, there was he made king, and priest, and prophet, there did God make him to sit upon his honourable throne, and there did God give him dominion over all creatures and things. And all the wild beasts, and all the cattle, and the feathered fowl were gathered together, and they passed before Adam…”

The Book of the Cave of Treasures

I have to redo man in everything. Sin has removed the crown from him,
and has crowned him with opprobrium and with confusion; so he cannot stand before my Majesty.
Sin has dishonored him, making him lose any right to honors and to glory. This is why I want to be
crowned with thorns – to place the crown on man’s forehead, and to return to him all rights to every
honor and glory. Before my Father, my thorns will be reparations and voices of defense for many sins
of thought, especially pride; and for each created mind they will be voices of light and supplication,
that they may not offend Me.

The Twenty-Four Hours of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ

The above two quotations express first, the incomprehensible majesty of man’s original divinity and the colossal cost of our redemption. Restoring our glory: love of chastity.

The vocabulary of faith

It was at St. Benedict’s Abbey that I joined the Catholic Church. I read five textbooks that summer, each of which required intense concentration. And yet it was fun.

Fun. Really? Reading a textbook from the 1940s based on St. Thomas Aquinas’ writings is fun?

My ‘Yes!’ is unqualified– unconditional. Can you imagine finding something you have been looking for most of your life? Something you could not express but once you found, knew? And even better, a teacher to guide you, answer your questions, one on the same path as you? I found the answers to questions I ‘d been asking for my entire life in those volumes. Restoring our glory: love of chastity.

The process of religious conversion in and of itself causes the convert to stop. That cessation of motion in the direction of life has tremendous consequence. Everything that was believed before feels upside down, the openness to learning is unprecedented, perhaps never to be felt like that again.

I learned the phrase, “dumbing down” from the editor of the textbook I published with Blackwell Scientific Publishing Company. Richard understood my goal to produce a textbook which would provide a breadth of physiology and pathophysiology not available in competing texts. But, he warned me, the culture was dumbing down. It was the mid-eighties, and the majority of readers wanted simpler, easier sources.

The vocabulary of faith is like that. In the interest of making the Catholic faith accessible to laypeople- children and converts, it is has been distilled to something unrecognizable. And boring.

‘Everyone has warned me not to tell you what I am going to tell you in this last book. They all say “the ordinary reader does not want Theology; give him plain practical religion.” I have rejected their advice. I do not think the ordinary reader is such a fool. Theology means “the science of God,” and I think any man who wants to think about God at all would like to have the clearest and most accurate ideas about Him which are available. You are not children: why should you be treated like children?

Mere Christianity

We yearn to be fed

by the thoughts of men and women who have walked the same path. There is an almost infinite repositry of writers wating for the chance to help us see more clearly. Their writings are timeless and exist in all traditions. Erik Varden’s Chastity- Reconciliation of the Senses makes use of Jewish, Hindu, Christian as well as secular voices in this forthright, incisive and remarkably gentle book.

Perhaps because he’s Norwegian, humanity’s infinite love for sin doesn’t deter the delicate sympathy and humor with which he writes. Like this remark about modern attitudes about celibacy. “Virginity, to be fruitful, must be chosen as a vibrant, for life. We are culturally conditioned to think of virginity as pickled maidenhood.”

And the poignancy of this one: “We easily forget that God has hope for us. He knows we need to grow and grow up.”

I think the most stunning thing about this book is its implicit hope and clarity: our sins don’t shock Jesus. In his chapter Tensions, Varden remarks that the practice of virtue is neither natural nor ‘normal.’ We must recall that all we can do on our own is sin. Rather, It’s extraordinary, therefore requiring the supernatural: grace. Our perception of celibacy as sublimation is flawed and dangerously so. It isn’t sublimation at all, declares Bishop Varden, but one of orientation. We’re reminded by Saint Benedict to “love chastity.” Continence becomes something to offer our beloved as gift.

Varden ends Tensions with this exquisite quote from Etty Hillesum:

.I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart and try to cherish the questions themselves, like closed rooms and like books writtien in a very strange tongue. Do not search for the answers which cannot be given you now because you could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing, one distant day, live right into the answer.

Etty Hillesum: An Interrupted Life

After reading a few of the quotes like the one beginning this article,

I bought and devoured The Book of the Cave of Treasures. Bishop Varden’s decision to ground his book in the splendor of these ancient Syriac writings is inspired. One cannot read this compressed biblical history without virtually prostrating oneself in awe at the magnificence of Creation and first human being, Adam. These ancient writings make our hearts soar and fuel our fervor to be perfect as Our Father in heaven. We learn too of God’s compassion: Adam was not left bereft.

And besides [these things] God spake unto me, saying, “Be not sorrowful, O Adam, for thou didst wish to become a god and didst transgress my command. Behold, I will stablish thee, not at this present, but after a few days.” And again He spake unto me, saying, “I am God Who made thee to go forth from the Garden of Joy into the earth, which shall shoot forth thorns and brambles, and thou shalt dwell therein. Bend thy back, and make thy knees  to totter in old age, and I will make thy flesh food for the worms.
And after five days and half a day{5} I will have compassion upon thee, and shew thee mercy in the abundance of my compassion and my mercy. And I will come down into thy house, and I will dwell in thy flesh, and for thy sake I will be pleased to be born like an [ordinary] child. And for thy sake I will be pleased to walk in the market place. And for thy sake I will be pleased to fast forty days. And for thy sake I will be pleased to accept baptism. And for thy sake I will be pleased to endure suffering. And for thy sake I will be pleased to hang on the wood of the Cross. All these things [will I do] for thy sake, O Adam.”

To Him be praise, and majesty, and dominion, and glory, and worship, and hymns, with His Father and the Holy Spirit from this time forward and for ever and ever. Amen.

The Book of the Cave of Treasures

The litany of chastity

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