Happy Thanksgiving

Saying 'thank you' was perhaps never easy, which is probably why the Psalmist has to order it done: "Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good!" It is, nevertheless, absolutely essential to living the truth as a human being.  We are all dependent creatures, very much at the mercy of accidents and evils, and there are many times in our lives that we cannot survive, much less flourish, without the help of others.  Thanksgiving is a way of acknowledging dependence, not merely a social convention designed to stave off hurt feelings of those we take advantage of.  For thanksgiving to be real, we must practice it regularly, and it must lead to a change of heart, to humility and ultimately, if we are Christians at least, to faith.

I am frequently asked about how to pray.  Again, this is not a new puzzle for those seeking God.  The disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray as John taught his disciples.  Many of the Fathers wrote long treatises on prayer.  The one most influential to me is John Cassian's Conferences 9 & 10.  Conference 10 is the more famous, dealing as it does with apparent states of mystical prayer.  But Conference 9 offers four practical suggestions for praying based on St. Paul's First Letter to Timothy 2: 1.  (This sort of exegesis often appears capricious to us moderns, but I have found this one most helpful through experience)  We pray by acknolwedging our sins, second, by determining to amend our lives and make offerings to God in the future (what Cassian and Paul, following Old Testament usage, call 'vows').  Third, we ask God for what we need and intercede for others (the most common form of prayer, and what most people think of and do when they pray), and last but not least, we should thank God.  I find this last recommendation most helpful.  A few moments a day to recall the many blessings that God continually gives us, and to remember what he has promised us for eternity tends to dispel whatever gloomy prospects my cotidian existence portends.

A few weeks ago, I received an email with a somewhat anguished question regarding how frequently and for how long we can licitly ask God for something, before we become like whiney children.  As far as I can tell, we should constantly ask God for what we feel we need or even desire, with the important proviso that we accept his answer and give thanks for the fact that He always listens and answers, and always in a way that is to our benefit, whether we can understand that benefit immediately or not.  Indeed, start with thanksgiving, and you might decide that what you thought you needed isn't so important once you see what you have from God!

For His love endures forever!

I'm not getting anything out of this...

In my high school junior-year Confirmation class, a friend of mine raised his hand and asked poor Fr Tony (who was mismatched with high school juniors, to say the least), "I'm not getting anything out of this; is that alright?"

After a dreadful moment's pause, Fr. Tony mustered up his best authoritative tone of voice and said, "Yes."

Today, I am a priest myself who routinely corresponds with young persons dealing with many questions. So I feel for what Fr. Tony was going through. Worse for him, he was from the old school where it was taken for granted that sixteen-year-old Catholics would actually have been raised practicing their faith, known what it involved and even been fervent in their desire to further the cause of the Church militant. I at least have the advantage of assuming that many people will ask just this sort of question.

The fact that the question that my friend Scott asked focused on the subjective experience of one person says everything and goes a long way toward explaining why 'religion' seems so deathly dull to young people. 'Why do adults just go through the motions?' No one looks like they are 'getting a lot out of Mass'. We put the Mass into the vernacular, and people still don't look like their getting much out of it at times. We organize youth retreats and sing around campfires (at least I did when I was a youth--does this still happen?). When, as young adults, people have to go back to St. Mary's of Centerville, they pine for those campfires with young, exciting people, and quietly let their faith fall into desuetude.

To ask in return, 'Well, what are you putting into it?' does not address the underlying problem, that we for some reason feel entitled to 'get something out of' the Mass (besides receiving Jesus Christ in the Eucharist!). What, just what if, the point of religion is not about me?

This is, in a sense, a follow-up to yesterday's post about liberation theology. There is a healthy sense in which liberation theologians are attempting to address the problem of subjectivism in the Church. By pointing out the necessity of working for justice and the 'preferential option for the poor', liberation theology moves us away from the question of what we get out of worship and points us toward mission. As I pointed out yesterday, this attempt can easily backfire when homilies or talks or books rant at length about the evil people who disempower the poor, since it tends to exonerate the ones giving and receiving the rant! We still 'get something out of it'.

Now I do not mean to imply that we should strive to have religion be something dry that does not engage us. Quite the contrary. I wish everyone were passionate for God and God's justice! But this passion for the Other, for the salvation of the world, is a far cry from passion for one's daily 'pick-me-up'.

Von Balthasar Controversy

At the Easter Vigil, I preached a homily that made reference to the current controversy over Hans Urs von Balthasar's radical ideas on Jesus' 'kenotic' death. It turned out to be one of the most remarked-upon homilies I have ever delivered, with everyone who commented coming out in favor of VB. Unfortunately, a techno-glitch has kept the homily from being podcasted, though I have posted the text here.

The response of our monastery friends contrasted somewhat with the correspondence that has come in to First Things, at least the correspondence they printed, which reveals far more skeptics of VB. Perhaps this has to do with a more conservative readership that includes Evangelical Christians.

The basic problem is that VB saw Christ experiencing to a divine degree what sinners experience when they die: a total separation from God that in Jesus' case was infinitely more painful than what we experience because Christ's divinity is infinitely more intimate with God the Father than our souls are. Jesus Christ entered into an abyss of despair deeper than any human being had experienced, and was raised up by His Father in such a way as to make the reconciliation of even the worst sinner possible (but not necessary: VB is an Origenist, but departs from his problematic mentor here, where the Fifth Ecumenical Council also departed from Origen). When we affirm that Jesus descended into hell, VB means the full existential hell of the damned.

Alyssa Lyra Pitstick objects that Church tradition, perhaps best visualized in the apocryphal accounts such as the Gospel of Nicodemus, show Christ entering hell, not in existential despair, but in a show of power and triumph. She wonders if VB is emptying the Cross of its meaning by locating the height of Jesus' suffering after the Cross in hell.

Because I was preaching a homily and not making a theological argument, I summarized both sides briefly and was more peremptory sounding toward Alyssa Lyra Pitstick's arguments than I am in fact. Her objections seem proper to me in their gist, though I question the actual weight of evidence she adduces. But I have not read her book, and so I hesitate to dismiss her ideas based on the FT articles, though I strongly question her apparent partitioning of hell and insistence on a kind of 'timeline' of Jesus' entry there.

I wanted here to add a couple of my own (monastic!) thoughts to the debate. If anyone thinks they are of interest, maybe I'll send them to Fr. Oakes up at Mundelein or the Fr. Neuhaus at FT. So here goes.

I do believe that VB's teaching is novel. The question is whether it is a development of Tradition or a departure. I also believe that some development on this question is necessary, inasmuch as persons in the modern West face an existential dilemma that has not existed before. Radical atheism is an option that most human persons in history have not had, but one that is not only common today, but is so widespread as to infect Christian belief itself. Many Christians separate their spirituality into a private sphere in such a way as to live as 'practical atheists'. In fact, the tired cliche of young persons desiring to be 'spiritual' and not 'religious' is a symptom of this. We want a private spirituality that has no particular impact on practice. "Practice-wise", that is, practically, our faith then is meaningless; we are atheists in all but name, for we do not believe in God who is objectively knowable through observation of creation, historical events, etc, and who calls us to conversion of life. We instead believe in a false god of isolated interiority.

St. Therese of Lisieux (a monastic!) is an important missing link in this argument for me. She took it upon herself to pray for radical atheists, and God promptly allowed her to fall into a devastating Dark Night of the Soul. VB (and I) believed that this was expiatory suffering (contrary to popular iconography, Therese was a tough young Norman!). If Christ would allow Therese to sink into these depths, surely something like this is to be seen in the Crucifixion and Christ's descent.

On the other hand, the monk in me is uncomfortable with something that Pitstick includes in her version of the Harrowing of Hell that VB oddly seems to leave out (I write that based on having read Mysterium Paschale and bits and pieces of his Theo-Drama on this theme). As an Origenist, one would have imagined VB to be more alive to the reality of the demonic. The presence of personal evil in Pitstick's presentation, while unfortunately somewhat naive in appearance, is in accord with Scripture more than is the idea of existential suffering, real as that might be. That is to say, in a strange way, VB psychologizes where he should be theologizing.

It is interesting to note that VB tends to rely heavily on the gospel of John, somewhat to the diminishment of the Synoptics. There are no clear exorcisms in John, whereas they are (pardon the pun) legion in Matthew, Mark and Luke.

The importance of this for me, again as a monk, is that psychology only tells part of the story. For example, depression is a psychological illness that comes uncomfortably close for us moderns to Evagrius' depiction of the attack of the demons of sadness and acedia. We are not likely to suggest to someone who is depressed that he or she is capitulating to a sinful temptation. We are more likely to medicate, to offer diversions, and so on, that is to treat it as requiring medical and not moral intervention. My experience, and the witness of the keenest of the Monastic Fathers on this point (for me, Evagrius and John Climacus of the Holy Ladder), suggests that trying to fight against sadness and acedia by hunting around for psychological or medical causes only strengthens the demonic attack. What is needed is a frontal assault on the demon himself, with the aid of the Name of Jesus Christ. Sadness is based on a lie, that God doesn't care. Our minds are slower than demonic suggestion, as Climacus says over and over again, and so trying to think our way out of sadness falls right into the demonic trap.

Let me bring this back to VB again. It is worth noting that VB is oddly antipathetic toward Evagrius, the man who most innovatively developed Origen's demonology with the help of the Egyptian monks and nuns. Looking at Jesus Christ on the Cross, could we not see him assaulted by demons in such force that his human psychological state is one in which hope is reduced to a bare minimum or even nothingness by a cacophony of despairing thoughts of demonic origin, without thereby holding that somehow the Holy Trinity itself is stretched to the point of allowing sin into the Divine Life (where it is consumed, acc. to VB)? I obviously have not worked this out in any great detail, and I am not a professional 'theologian' (though I do pray--let the reader of Evagrius understand). However the absence of any spiritual combat outside of the existential struggle within Himself does strike me as problematic in Balthasar, even if his basic insight, that a renewed sense of the depths of Christ's sufferings is needed to cope with modern barbarity, is of acute importance.

Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Individualism

One of my regular gigs as a singer was to assist with stirring and solemn music at what seemed like a thousand graduations at the University of Chicago. That meant mostly sitting around listening to names being called and speeches being given. I still remember Hanna Holborn Gray, then the president, congratulating each new bachelor, master or doctor upon their entrance into the 'ancient and venerable company of scholars', then rising to belt out the 'Alma Mater' anthem.

The image of a company of scholars always stuck in my mind, something like the picture that Dante paints in Canto IV of Inferno where he strikes up a conversation with Virgil, Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan. This is Dante's poetic way of saying that his own knowledge and art, his way of interpreting his own life and world, is borrowed from the giants who went before him. This is a lofty case of a general rule in life: no one comes to knowledge as an individual. We all begin and live our spiritual lives largely in communion with the thoughts and experiences of others, as the great Pope John Paul II demonstrated in Fides et Ratio.

However, we quite often live with the illusion that we are not dependent on the ideas that have gone before us. The marketplace promotes the ungrateful stance, for instance, that we are free agents in the world. How often do we give thought to the fact that someone else grows our food, butchers our meat, binds our books, and even mixes our paint and manufactures drywall (etc etc) for us? Analogously, the very fact that we use words to express ourselves demonstrates that we inherit a whole set of concepts about the world.

Recognition of this humble fact is not always considered an American virtue. Quintessential American philosophers such as Thoreau and Emerson eschewed dependence on anyone. Walt Whitman celebrated himself. For my part, I found Walden to be a book of total fantasy. Thoreau, the great individual, never bothers to notice that someone else forged his axe, ground his wheat and, for that matter engendered him, gave him birth and changed his diapers so that he could grow up and go off by himself.

This state of affairs makes religious formation, monastic formation especially, a difficulty. The monastic tradition is populated with all kinds of strange and difficult characters who are nonetheless considered venerable and worthy of attention. Why? Because the substance of human experience does not change so radically from age to age and person to person as to cut us off from the possibility of learning from one another. Even the simple Coptic Desert Mothers and Fathers have something to teach us world-weary postmodernists. To learn from them involves the necessary step of putting aside one's own ideas and listening (Ausculta o fili, praecepta magistri!) to the advice of someone who's been there already.

The very sad part of our current preference for individualism is that when crises arise, be they in religious life, marriage, or work, we are left with the poverty of our own inner resources. The 'ancient and venerable company' of humanity is there, waiting to help those who would leave aside their own smallness and step out into the world of trust, relationship and love. Will we take the plunge?