Lifeless faith

My pastor recently told me that while I have the Catholic faith, all too often I fail to live it; comparing my lifeless faith with my family members that don't have the faith at all. His comment struck a chord (as he meant it to).

It so happens I am reading the section of the Summa Theologica about charity. The link I just gave discusses whether charity can be lost through a single mortal sin. St. Thomas' answer is yes; "Charity denotes union with God", and mortal sin which destroys this union with God removes God's infusion of charity.

But faith remains after mortal sin, and faith without charity is the lifeless faith that I am discussing in this article. Faith that is not animated by charity is hard to live with. I mean this very concretely and literally; the man of faith that lacks charity is the caricature of the humorless, stiffnecked, hypocritical, joyless, angry dry husk of a man that popular culture paints all religious as being. If I lack sufficient love of God, my adherence to the Faith is a matter of will alone, while in my inner heart and deepest soul, I really prefer myself to God (which is the very definition of insufficient love of God). Outwardly, I can appear orthodox and pious, but in reality I am dry, sharp, and empty; in fact the very whited sepulchre our Lord condemned the Pharisees for being (Matthew 23:27 "Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; because you are like to whited sepulchres, which outwardly appear to men beautiful, but within are full of dead men's bones, and of all filthiness.")

For years in my struggle with sin I've focused on lack of will as the problem - if only I had a stronger will I could best my temptations. But my pastor's directness opened up a new line of thought. The more I love God, the smaller my temptations will seem. I should fan the flames of my love for Him... If you read my posts from last December and January you may recall that friendship with God is not something to be taken lightly. Scripture is clear that our hearts should be on fire with love for Him: Deuteronomy 30:6, Matthew 22:37, Joshua 22:5, 1 John 4:19, etc, etc. Now it is clear that no man can love God as He ought to be loved. But I can certainly strive to love Him more!

The need for spiritual reading

I'm reading in This Tremendous Lover about the need for spiritual reading to progress or even continue in the spiritual life. (Before my evangelistic friends get all excited, tops on his reading list is the Gospels, then the remaining Scripture.) Boylan thinks this is more necessary now than in the past, because:

• people don't pay attention to homilies any more
  
• our neighbors and friends aren't necessary Catholic or even Christians in their beliefs
  
• magazines and books are carefully crafted to focus our minds on this passing world, specifically, those aspects of this passing world that are most ephemeral and least worthy of our attention
  
• American culture itself is now a pagan culture; anyone merely imbibing the feeling of the times will not become Christian
  

The kicker is that he wrote all this in 1947! Television hadn't even been invented! Henry Miller's books were still banned in the United States!

Some Catholics nowadays look back at the 1950's as a highwater mark of Catholic culture in the U.S. That Boylan could describe the state of American Catholicism in 1947 with the same language I describe the current state of affairs just goes to show - something. But what? A modernist would say that both Boylan and I are filled with sound and fury, signifying nothing; orthodox believers have been decrying the current state of affairs for all of recorded history. And after all, in 1947 a black person couldn't drink from the same water fountain as me (a white person) in the capitol of the U.S. Isn't it much better nowadays?

Needless to say I don't buy the modernist position. More babies born out of wedlock; more babies killed in the womb; fewer strong families; fewer strong institutions; less willingness to sacrifice oneself for others; the overt sexualization of all relations. None of these are signs of healthy societies.

Well, I didn't plan to get so far away from my original point. The real goal of spiritual reading is to learn about Christ; about His life, the world He created, His desire for us, our desire for Him, His laws, His Passion. The more we know about Christ, the easier it is to grow in friendship with Him. And love for Christ is the basic commandment ("You shall love the Lord with all your heart, all your mind, all your strength; and your neighbor as yourself"). We can't love someone we don't know. We tend to sentimentalize the Gospel, to make Jesus into a nice guy that just wants us to be happy. Well, He does want us to be happy; but the happiness He has in mind for us is a far cry from the pleasant, pagan sensuality that so many of us mean by that word. He offers us joy. Spiritual reading helps us understand the difference between joy and pleasure; between the supernatural hope that Jesus calls us to share, and the faith in this world offered by all the multitudes that would lead us away from Him.

With my brothers

At the end of the Dead's first concert on this year's tour, Phil Lesh said how great he felt to still be playing music "with - my brothers." He'd meant to say something about such fine musicians but switched midstream to "my brothers".

The phrase resonates with me. First, it's what I want in my career. In my last post I talked how I wanted to see my current project through to completion, despite all its problems. Well, part of that is to keep working with my teammates, who are my brothers in some sense. Constantly jumping from company to company and project to project amounts to breaking the web of shared work and common obligation that defines work on a project. And there might be a little more to it. The urge to bail out of a project a year or two after I start is partly a wish to escape my dependence on others - a need to break away from the ties that bind me to my fellow workers.

Obviously projects end and people leave projects all the time and sometimes leaving a project is the only rational thing to do (especially after you become aware it has a Cloud of Doom). But looking back over the years my decisions probably have more to do with preserving my Glorious Independence than anything else.

I want to touch on a larger topic for a minute. The communion of saints also forms a band of brothers; the Church Militant here in the world, the Church Suffering in Purgatory, and the Church Triumphant in Heaven. The Christian leads a life of communion with this entire Church; with the living on earth, and with all those who sleep in Christ. Grave sin ends this brotherhood. Grave sin's essence amounts to preferring a temporal good more than you prefer God - choosing to decide for yourself what is good and bad for yourself. Sometimes the choice to sin amounts to a desire to live in splendid isolation - the ego's desire to be its own end, its own all-in-all, refusing to submit to God who is the only being worthy of our adoration. Grave sin amounts to turning your back on the brotherhood of Christians. Christ Himself is our brother and the Head of the Church.

In my experience, sometimes I'm most tempted to sin when I face challenges in my relationships - with my family, or my friends, or at work. Sin is a way to step away from the world, to turn at right angles to reality and escape into a place where my ego is all there is. Most likely this somehow started as an emotional survival mechanism... I don't really know how it started. But it has to stop! My ego is not all there is; reality is not something to flee from; relationships are valuable because they are challenging.

We are our relationships; my wife is who I am, and God Himself is relationship, Three in One. I want to live, not in splendid isolation, not in glorious independence, but with - my brothers.

Perseverance, patience, and fortitude

My career is organized into projects. I'm a consultant, so I join a project, work for a while, then leave. At some point in every project I become fully aware of all the irrationality, inefficiency, venality, incompetence, goldbricking, and laziness inherent in every large consulting project. I am at this point in my current project! Historically, this is when I get disgusted and leave. Things are different now; maybe maturity comes to us all, even me. Consider:

• Every other project is also riddled with irrationality, inefficiency, venality, incompetence, goldbricking, and laziness
  
• I myself from time to time exhibit these same vices; hopefully not so much venality and incompetence, certainly most of the others
  
• Every project, even this one, also has clear thinking, productivity, prudence, competence, solid engineering, and hard work
  

In short, any place I go is likely to have the same problems (and same benefits) as here. There is no point in leaving!

So if I'm going to stick around, I should strive to make the project successful. Here is where the fortitude comes in. It's easy to keep working hard at what I've always done and wait for the project to fail (I still haven't decided whether the project has a Cloud of Doom). It's harder to think through what has to be done for the project to succeed, and what I can do to make it happen. Thinking more than a week or so in the future is a new thing for me...

Why people choose to be atheist

This month's Homiletics and Pastoral Review has a short article discussing reasons people choose to not believe in God. Clearly none of these reasons is valid but it is good to have an idea of why people make the choices they do.

• Intellectual integrity. "I can only believe in things once I see sufficient evidence; I see no such evidence for God's existence; hence I am forced to not believe in God."
  
• The problem of evil. "How can an all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing God permit the vast, arbitrary pain and suffering that is such an evident part of life?"
  
• The crimes of believers. "Theists have done bad things; therefore believing in God makes people do bad things; I don't want to do bad things; hence I will not believe in God."
  
• Hatred of religion in general and Christianity in particular. "I just don't like religion period."
  
• The Nietzschean reason. "Belief in God is the opiate of the masses; it makes the world comfortable to live in. But the world is really struggle and hardship and suffering."
  
• Man is the measure of all things. "If there is a God, I am insignificant next to Him. But I am clearly the most intelligent and wonderful of all beings. Therefore there is no God."
  
• Peace of mind. "Sin? Repentance? If I don't believe in God I don't have to feel sorry for my own behavior!"
  
• Intellectual laziness. "Believing in God and making sense of my faith is too much hard work; I'd have to form a conception of a non-material being and follow many complicated arguments. I'll watch football instead."
  
• Conspicuous noncomformity. "America is still basically Christian; to stand against conventional wisdom requires me to be atheist." (Personal note: this maybe true in the Midwest and Bible Belt; where I live on the East Coast, the opposite is true; the noncomformists are the orthodox Christians.)
  
• Libertinism. "I want to eat, drink, be merry, and be sexually adventurous. It requires significant mental compartmentalization and rationalization to be promiscuous and orthodox at the same time. So I'll be atheist."
  
• Hatred of God. "A nun was mean to me in 5th grade."
  

The Dead, Greensboro 4/12/2009

So far I listened to most of the first set from this concert. It is not bad! The music is recognizably Grateful Dead music: the fat, fluid bass lines; the tempo shifts from pulsing jam to white-hot intensity to deep weirdness; the rhythmic complexity; the sense that each instrument is doing something interesting on its own, with the combination somehow powerful and resonant instead of discordant and noisy. The total fluidity isn't there yet; the original band played together for 30 years, and this incarnation only for a few months. 4/12/2009 is the first concert in the tour though; as time goes on they should get tighter.

Woman, behold your son

On Good Friday this year, I attended the Tre Ore service at my parish. Tre Ore means "three hours" and is a traditional observance of the three hours Jesus hung on the cross. Scripture recounts seven phrases uttered by Jesus from the cross; during the Tre Ore service, 7 homilies are preached, one for each phrase.

• Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do
  
• This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise
  
• Woman, behold thy son; son, behold thy mother
  
• My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?
  
• I thirst
  
• It is finished
  
• Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit
  

On this Good Friday I found the "Woman, behold thy son" homily especially memorable. The preacher connected this phrase with the visitation, when Mary visited her relative Elizabeth right after the Annunciation. Mary had just been told she would be the mother of the Christ; and the first thing she does is to hurry off to help her elderly relative in her confinement. No standing on her dignity for the mother of the Lord! Anyway, the preacher pointed out how this showed Mary's willingness to bring the Lord to humanity. On the Cross, by this phrase, Jesus gave His mother to humanity. By saying "woman" instead of "Mary" and "son" instead of "John" (by using the general, not the particular), Jesus established Mary as mother of the faithful.

Concert alerts

I've missed one too many concerts by my favorites (Aimee Mann, Old Crow Medicine Show, Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams), just from not knowing they would be in the area... (Now the Dead I wouldn't miss by accident; I just missed them because I wanted to. Now I wish I'd gone; but that's another story). Anyway, back to the main point. I signed up to two concert alert sites: Pollstar and Eventful. Emmylou Harris will be at Wolf Trap in May, appearing with Shawn Colvin, Patty Griffin, and Buddy Miller... Should be a fun time.

Discernment

I've been meditating on the whole prayer, sacraments, reading, God's will prescription for leading a Christian life. Prayer, sacraments, and reading have been my tools for conforming my will to God's... Prayer and conformance to the Father's will were prominent features of our Lord's humanity so I know I'm on the right track. But I'm not sure I've paid sufficient attention directly to strengthening my will to follow God. All too often my will is antithetical to God's and I am all too weak in turning away from myself to face Him. I will pray for the fortitude to keep my face turned toward my Lord and Savior.

So how can we know what God's will is, in any given situation? Our vocation is to love God with all our heart, and our neighbor as ourselves. Practically speaking the Decalogue (aka the Ten Commandments) is our guide for making this happen. If our will is guiding us to turn our back on God or on our neighbor (again, practically speaking, this means breaking a commandment) we know we are headed in the wrong direction.

This guidance may still be insufficient. Who is to say how the commandments should guide me in my particular situation? We live in a world where cohabitation, fornication, adultery, abortion, contraception, divorce, artificial fertility treatments, pornography, are all regarded as positive treasures... or if not actual treasures, then harmless ways to spend our time.

Scripture is an obvious start, and the only starting point. But our Adversary can use Scripture for his own ends; he quoted the Psalms to our Savior in the desert. Many reasonable people today feel that Scripture justifies activities ranging from female preachers to homosexual marriage. Look at the Anglican Church's debates over female ordination - each side had their historians, Scripture scholars, and logical arguments.

For Catholics this issue is resolved by the Church. Only the Catholic church can say definitively that it does not have the authority to ordain women and that homosexual marriage is a contradiction in terms, like "round square" or "cold heat". Only the Catholic church can make it stick. Other churches can only say we don't ordain women - yet; or, at this point in time, we don't marry gays; but who knows what next year will bring for our doctrine? The Church's teaching on faith and morals today is just the same as it was in the very beginning; just as Scripture is still the same.

Lord of the Silent Kingdom

This book by Glen Cook is absorbing my reading time these days. For my money Cook is the best ever swords-and-sorcery author; even better than Robert E. Howard who founded the genre.

The problem with Glen Cook's books is they deprive me of sleep... I have to resolve not to start reading at bedtime!

Prayer, the sacraments, spiritual reading, doing God's will

Yesterday's post laid out the reasoning for letting go of your own will and letting God's will drive your life. Sounds good! How do you do it? Suppose you decide it's time to try out this God's will thing... How do I know what God's will is? It is notoriously easy to deceive yourself into imagining that your own desires are synonymous with His.

Chapter 8 of This Tremendous Lover ("Seeking Christ in Prayer") begins to answer this question. "There are four great ways of getting in touch with Him; prayer, the sacraments, reading, and the doing of God's will. The latter, in fact, would include them all, but we are here thinking for the moment in terms of obedience to the commandments and the duties of one's station in life."

But first, the chapter starts off with good news on the possibility of a spiritual life. "We exclude no baptized person who is willing to avoid mortal sin. It does not matter what is his or her age, condition, or education, or what has been his or her history; it does not matter what sins he or she may have committed in the past, or what opportunities he or she may have neglected, or what graces he or she may have refused; as long as it is a case of a baptized person, who is willing to try and avoid mortal sin, all the doctrine we have outlined can be applied to his or her case." Boylan cites Matthew 1.21: "And thou shalt call his name Jesus. For he shall save his people from their sins."

The obvious way for such a person to get started is the imitation of Christ, and the way to start this is to get to know Him. "The obvious policy from the very start is to get into touch as soon as possible and as closely as possible with our Lord."

And this is where the prayers, sacraments, reading, and doing God's will come in. They are all intertwined. We need our own concept of God to pray to Him; hence the reading. We need grace to absorb the reading and learn about God; hence the sacraments and the prayer. Sincere prayer comes from sincerity in doing God's will; sincerity in doing God's will comes from praying for His grace.

So where do I stand in all this? I'm long in the sacraments: Mass attendance 6 times a week (OK, sometimes only 5); confession once or twice a month. Prayer is a little weak; I pray before Mass but on days I don't attend Mass I generally don't pray either. Not coincidentally these are the days that are exceptionally hard for me. Reading is a little weak; all too often I pick up a novel instead of spiritual reading. And willingness to do God's will? Mostly OK but sin is more a part of my life than I care to admit to myself.

So how to make some forward progress? I will strive to pray every single day and to read every single day, and to practice the presence of God. By this I mean to stop several times a day, quiet my thoughts, and make myself aware of God's presence in my soul.

Dead '09 Complete Recordings

So the Dead (the Grateful Dead, minus Jerry Garcia, plus Warren Haynes and Jeff Chimenti) are touring this year... I missed them at Verizon Center this week. The tour is getting good reviews on dead.net. The band is selling downloads of every single show, within three or four days of each concert... or you can buy the entire tour, 22 shows, probably over 70 hours of music, for $310. I plan to get the first two shows (Greensboro and Washington DC; then I'll think about the full tour. Based on the set lists and the reviews they're doing pretty interesting things... not just rehashes of the glory days.

God's will

This Tremendous Lover was written by M. Eugene Boylan in 1947. The title refers to Jesus Christ Who loves each of us so much that He would have died for any one of us, and Who wants all of us to love Him with all of our strength and passion. Each of us should be Christ's lover.

I just finished Chapter 7, "Seeking Christ Through Humility". Humility opposes pride. Pride was the sin of our first parents; Adam and Eve desired to choose what was good and evil for themselves, without regard to God's will. Pride still underscores every sin; the root of every sin is our turning away from God and to ourselves - choosing ourselves instead of God. Boylan says that pride is what stands in Christ's way; grace cannot permeate the soul that chooses itself over God. The humble soul accepts its need for redemption, for grace, for God.

The second part of the chapter is about conformance to God's will. Pride and humility play out in our daily choices. Pride leads us to choose our own will over God's; humility allows us to submit to God, to let our hearts be molded by Him.

From page 88:

Our position in His plan at any moment depends upon our will at that moment. If we reject His will, then we put ourselves outside His plan for us; if we conform our will to His, then all things work together for our good. For, as we have said, "God's will is of a piece" -- He wills our happiness, and His plan is to lead us to happiness through Christ. His plan, in fact, is to re-establish all things fully in Christ, and every single detail that He wills co-operates to that end. The one exception is the case of the unrepentant sinner, whose sin puts him outside that plan insofar as it provides for his happiness, but who falls immediately into another plan in which God's justice rules.

Take a second to re-read that last sentence about the unrepentant sinner and God's justice.

On page 91 is a very striking passage about how all things are re-established fully in Christ:

Our Lord compared Himself to a vine of which we were the branches; He also spoke of the seed which, being cast into the ground, had to die to itself in order to germinate and grow to fruit-bearing maturity. Let us think of Christ as a seed cast into the barren soil which we can consider to be the whole universe. The seed dies of itself and becomes a plant sending out roots in all directions. Each of these tiny roots embraces the particles of the soil, chooses out what is in harmony with its needs, absorbs and makes it part of itself. And so in the course of time all the good that is in the soil is transformed into the living tissue of the plant.... For indeed the world was barren of supernatural life, until Christ's death sowed the seed of His life in it. And it is by His life that we are made truly alive. He is not only the vine, He is the only vine; and there is no other life that really matters except that which is found in Him.

Awesome listening experience

Three words: Sennheiser HD595 headphones. Just came in today's mail. I cringe to think of all the time I've wasted with lesser phones! Start with an iPod; fill it with great music (losslessly encoded, of course); add awesome headphones; and you have about as good a musical experience as you could wish! At least, without traveling back in time to a 1977 Grateful Dead show.

Sign the Notre Dame Scandal petition

More than 285,000 people have signed the petition protesting Notre Dame's giving an honorary law degree to Barack Obama, and inviting him to speak at this year's commencement address. Please join them!

From the petition:

It has come to our attention that the University of Notre Dame will honor President Barack Obama as its commencement speaker on May 17.

It is an outrage and a scandal that “Our Lady’s University,” one of the premier Catholic universities in the United States, would bestow such an honor on President Obama given his clear support for policies and laws that directly contradict fundamental Catholic teachings on life and marriage.

One a day

OK, so I'm in awe of my friend TJ's one-a-day posting schedule: In Search of a Minimalist Experience. I have to get myself back on the ball here. The trick is to work blog posting into my regular schedule... easier said than done. I hereby resolve to post more often. We'll see!