Miscellaneous Musings, Tuesday

 

First and foremost, please pray that, as the Conclave begins, the Holy Spirit is heard in the deliberations of the Cardinals.  I'm not overly worried or concerned about this election; for some reason I'm confident the selection will be the right one for the Church.

 

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Making the first halting, stumbling, fumbling progress on the mystery novel.  I have to learn to work in a new way, one very different from the way accounting work proceeds.  There is no easily defined, quantifiable end result just waiting for me to get there, no specific spreadsheet to construct with specific information desired, no specific financial report to be produced.  And the timeframe is quite different, we're not talking projects completed in a day or a few days, we're talking maybe months, maybe even a year.  There is a desired end result, the production of a finished novel, but what that novel will look like, or when it's done, I don't know yet.  I expect one or two false starts and also to end up heading down a few blind alleys.

My first steps are on the overall concept of the book and, something I enjoy greatly, starting to develop some idea of the characters, main and otherwise.  I hope they turn out memorably.

I also learned this morning that I'm going to work in some funny bits; it won't be deadly serious (pardon the pun).  The characters told me that. No, really!

 

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One surprise this morning is the weather; it was supposed to be nice this week, a little cool today, but no precip forecast until maybe the weekend or early next week.  It's more than just cool today, it's kind of cold and it has snowed and rained some, enough that the roof of my car parked out front was close to white, as was the back deck.  I like surprises.

 

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As you might expect, I'm spending some regular time each day reading mysteries, to get an idea of what's expected in the genre.  It's fine with me because I enjoy reading them anyway.  But now, I'm reading more analytically than I used to, not just for enjoyment, but to try to see how they’re put together.  I find that interesting and informative.  The book I'm reading now is A is for Alibi by Sue Grafton, her first in a series.  I'm trying not to let all this activity take away from the book I finally settled on for Lenten reading, Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI, a wonderful book.

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Just learned that black smoke was seen outside the Sistine, so I guess we'll have to wait until tomorrow or the next day to see what happens.

A New Way to Post

This is probably not a good thing. I just discovered this iPad app, BlogPress, to use for posting to Blogger. Now I can really run off at the (written) mouth, something I've been doing a lot lately in various ways. Too often my misspent youth on the streets of Detroit shows through. I'll let this post be a reminder of the beauty of silence

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Some Good, Some Bad

"Jesus and Mary — and we aren’t them! This should give us great hope that, despite our moodiness, sins, good days and bad days, God is still calling us to be His saints. It is HE who makes us holy, not us who make ourselves holy." Fr Larry Richards, Surrender

I have to keep reminding myself of this truth, seems I have a lot more bad days than good.  I also have to keep reminding myself what St Ignatius said, to the effect that discouragement isn't from God.  So, suck it up and keep going. (He didn't say that last bit).

The Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but . . .

What is truth? Deutsch: Was ist Wahrheit? Français : "Qu'est-ce que la vérité ?" Le Christ et Pilate. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

R

ecent developments in this year’s presidential campaign with, at best, deceptive ads accusing Mitt Romney of causing death and destruction as a  direct result of his greedy, capitalist, bourgeois activities as the head of Bain Capital, make it clear that truth is no longer regarded as something to be desired.  Most people seem to simply shrug, accepting it as part of the new world we're living in.  This apathy is a mistake which inevitably leads to disastrous consequences, not just for society but also for each of us individually.

 
First, as Peggy Noonan points out in Friday's Wall Street Journal, the continual lies are making us a nation of cynics -- we don't believe anything anyone says.  We're being lied to with increasing wantonness by our leaders, to the point that we can't accept anything they say.  This is amazing to someone who grew up in the 1950's, when national leaders were expected to be truthful, most of the time anyway.  Yes, an occasional porky was expected, but generally our leaders spoke the truth, they could be relied upon and respected as decent men.  Not so now.  It's a distressing situation because not only does it make impossible full, responsible participation in the political process, it’s degrading to all of us as human beings.  We become desensitized, even brutalized, as human persons because all around are brutalized. 

 There's a spiritual cost being exacted that we’re possibly no longer able to even recognize.  Thomas Merton wrote in No Man Is An Island:

 

We make ourselves real by telling the truth. Man can hardly forget that he needs to know the truth, for the instinct to know is too strong in us to be destroyed. But he can forget how badly he also needs to tell the truth. We cannot know truth unless we ourselves are conformed to it. We must be true inside, true to ourselves, before we can know a truth that is outside us. But we make ourselves true inside by manifesting the truth as we see it.

Not knowing the truth, we lose touch with reality and, therefore our ability to conform our lives to it; we live a fantasy.  We need the truth; it’s not just something nice to have for those who can afford it.  Without it, we lose touch with our deepest selves, becoming lost to God in the process. 

I can't think of anything scarier, not even working for a company taken over by Bain Capital.

Sola Scriptura



Scripture (Photo credit: Bob Jenkin)

From Devin Rose’s book, If Protestantism is True

If Protestantism is true, then there is no infallible interpreter of the Scriptures and thus no interpreter can be accepted as authoritative. God did inspire the Scriptures to be without error, but He did not provide an authoritative, infallible interpreter for the inerrant Scriptures, leaving us with only conflicting, error-prone opinions of people. The Scriptures must therefore be deemed to be sufficiently clear for most people on all important matters of the faith. Since, even between the founders of Protestantism, no accord could be reached on what Jesus meant at the Last Supper, then the proper meaning of “body” and “blood” must simply not be significant, and the Reformers were quibbling over trifles.

 This, generally, is the issue that brought me into the Church: amid all the conflicting interpretations of the Bible, how do you know who's right? How, in fact, can there be so much difference among Christians on what the Bible says?  It became an impossible issue to get around, and I tried!

Death To Self

How misunderstood, even by Christians, is the idea of death to self. We are not out to destroy ourselves, rather to glory in God.  It's the only "self-improvement project" worth undertaking.  It's not denial, rather affirmation of who we are.  Merton says, “He Who made our flesh and gave it to our spirit as its servant and companion, will not be pleased by a sacrifice in which the flesh is murdered by the spirit and returned to Him in ruin.”

Detachment

Detachment is knowing things for their true value; the things of this world are good and useful, sometimes even lovely, but can never be of more than limited, finite, value.  Meton says this well:

"Although the grace of the Holy Spirit teaches us to use created things "as if we used them not"—that is to say, with detachment and indifference, it does not make us indifferent to the value of the things in themselves. On the contrary, it is only when we are detached from created things that we can begin to value them as we really should. It is only when we are "indifferent" to them that we can really begin to love them. The indifference of which I speak must, therefore, be an indifference not to things themselves but to their effects in our own lives."  No Man is an Island

Miscellaneous Musings, Thursday, May 10, 2012

Attended daily Mass Monday and found a sign taped to the front door of the Cathedral; there has been vandalism there and they are locking the doors immediately after the daily Masses henceforth.  I know of one incident from last week, apparently one of the many homeless men that hang around the Catholic Charities place across the street urinated in the baptismal font.  There may have been others.

To his credit, Father said he hated to lock the doors like that but he couldn't sit by while "sacred things" were vandalized.  It's a shame that one quiet spot left in downtown Colorado Springs has now been lost due to the probably irresponsible act of one poor confused individual.

 

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Another good column in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, this one from Bret Stephens.  It does a pretty good job of describing the state of higher education, which appears to be getting worse all the time.  It takes the form of a commencement address and starts out as follows:

 

"Allow me to be the first one not to congratulate you. Through exertions that—let's be honest—were probably less than heroic, most of you have spent the last few years getting inflated grades in useless subjects in order to obtain a debased degree. Now you're entering a lousy economy, courtesy of the very president whom you, as freshmen, voted for with such enthusiasm. Please spare us the self-pity about how tough it is to look for a job while living with your parents. They're the ones who spent a fortune on your education only to get you back— return-to-sender, forwarding address unknown. 

No doubt some of you have overcome real hardships or taken real degrees. A couple of years ago I hired a summer intern from West Point. She came to the office directly from weeks of field exercises in which she kept a bulletproof vest on at all times, even while sleeping. She writes brilliantly and is as self-effacing as she is accomplished. Now she's in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban."

He describes an interview with an Ivy League graduate as follows:

 

"A few months ago, I interviewed a young man with an astonishingly high GPA from an Ivy League university and aspirations to write about Middle East politics. We got on the subject of the Suez Crisis of 1956. He was vaguely familiar with it. But he didn't know who was president of the United States in 1956. And he didn't know who succeeded that president."

 This is nearly unbelievable, yet it isn't, and it's sad.  One can't help but wonder what happens when these very highly educated illiterates begin to assume important positions in business and government.  How will the country survive? 

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On a brighter note, a major project at work has been completed and life is returning slowly to normal.  The hours are shorter and there's at least a bit of time to think. 

I just completed an excellent book by Etienne Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages.  His is the first book I've read that offers some reasonable explanation of the relationship between faith and reason.  I hope to provide a full review in a future post.

 

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You may have noticed a bit of redesign of the blog.  I'm hoping to broaden my focus to the Catholic faith in general and the design changes are an attempt to put that broader focus into symbolic form.  Hope you enjoy it.

 

Unrest in Wisconsin

An interesting article today in the Wall Street Journal.  It seems some parishioners in a Wisconsin parish don't like the assignment of some rather strictly orthodox priests to their parishes.  They go so far as to claim that the priests aren't "teaching according to the precepts of the Church."  The articles states that the bishop didn't take kindly to their rather vociferous protests.

"Last month, soon after the parish announced it planned to close its school, Bishop Robert Morlino issued a public letter. He wrote that after investigating allegations from parishioners that the priests aren't teaching according to the precepts of the church, he found that the faith is being taught in the proper manner, but "what remains are personal likes and dislikes, along with inflated rumors and gossip, some which may even rise to the level of calumnious inciting of hatred of your priests, the faith and myself." The bishop had earlier objected to the some church members' efforts to oust the priests, including seminars on protest-letter writing, leafleting of vehicles and gathering signatures on a petition door-to-door."

What set this off is that, apprarently, the priests have imposed a dress code on Mass attendance and won't allow girls as altar servers.  They won't allow scantily clad ladies and men in shorts to particpate in the Mass.  I've often wondered about the way people dress at the parish I normally attend; I wonder if they realize they are, indeed, in the presence of God.  If they did, would that change their choice in attire?   Would they attend a formal or, say, even a business dinner dressed as they are at Mass?  I wonder.

It makes me want to be more mindful of the way I sometimes dress and that I should be more respectful myself.

One other side point.  I think what the Spanish priests are doing in Wisconsin is entirely within their rights as the bishop's representatives.  I also think it's instructive that those members of the parish who are protesting don't seem to be very well acquainted with what the teachings of the Church are.  That's the Church's fault, by the way.

Miscellaneous Musings, Thursday, April 19, 2012, How Did This Happen?

I remember growing up that many, if not most, stores and businesses were closed on Sunday.  I remember that the question was never whether a person you knew went to church or not, the question was, which church did he or she go to?  When I was young, Bishop Fulton J Sheen had the number one rated television show in the land – Protestants and Catholics alike tuned in to watch him, my parents included.  In other words, faith, Christian faith, was an integral part of society and, yes, even culture.  What we have today is a disaster that seems only to get worse with each passing day.  Bishop Chaput asks a very good question when he writes,

The question is: How did we get from the America of Tocqueville, where on Sundays “the commercial and industrial life of the nation seems suspended [in piety, and] all noise ceases,” to the America where—borrowing from the words of Pascal Bruckner— we’re the “galley slaves of pleasure,” an America of obsessive consumption and confused sexuality where “the intention was to produce freedom, but the result was advertising; [where] what was liberated was less our libido than our appetite for unlimited shopping”? Archbishop Charles Chaput, A Heart on Fire: Catholic Withness and the Next America, Kindle edition, Location 232

“The galley slaves of pleasure. . .” is an apt description of what is going on today, and a very sad one.  To make matters worse, we have an administration bent on making in impossible legally to return our society to some sort of freedom and sanity; they consider what was once good and normal in this country to be evil and repressive.  One can only see the work of dark forces in their motives, and one can spend a lot of time in prayer and remembrance that these forces must lose, have already truly lost.

Freedom of Conscience, Saturday, March 3, 2012

 It’s the liberal argument, made especially vehemently in the controversy over the HHS mandate, that religious belief should not be introduced into public life.  I’ve long felt, since I was in college and even somewhat before, that such thinking is nonsense.  Like it or not, religious feeling, for or against, is part of being human and, as humans we’re incapable of cutting ourselves up, as it were.  We can’t separate ourselves into separate compartments that allow us to act one way while playing one role, and another way in another role.  As I heard a Presbyterian minister say one time, “God isn’t just God on Sunday.” 

Something forgotten in such debates today is that one of the central philosophical notions of the Founders is that the rights enjoyed by every citizen belong to that citizen as a gift of God, not as a concession from any government or king.  Nathaniel Peters makes this case in a column on the First Things web site:

 

Furthermore, even before the twentieth century, religious liberty and talk about the rights of conscience had formally entered into the Catholic tradition. This development grew over time, from the scholastics to John Henry Newman and John Courtney Murray, but it flowered in the Second Vatican Council’s declaration “Dignitatis Humanae.” There, in light of Catholic tradition, the Council Fathers made Catholic arguments on Catholic grounds that religious freedom truly is a Catholic and Christian thing. Some have objected to this development—most notably the schismatic Society of St. Pius X—but most have come to see that the freedom to follow the dictates of one’s conscience in matters of religion is not an unfortunate concession to the modern age but a sound development of Christian truth. Today, as George Weigel recently wrote, paraphrasing Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, “the overwhelming majority of Christians believe that it is God’s will that they be tolerant of others who have different notions of God’s will. Religious tolerance, for Christians, is not a mere pragmatic accommodation to the fact of religious difference; it is a virtue, a moral good.”

Furthermore, protecting the freedom of conscience is not simply a concession to the privatizing tendencies of liberalism. Arguing for religious liberty need not entail denuding the public square. Religious liberty strives to protect a minimum standard: The government cannot coerce a person to perform an action that his conscience deems wrong on religious grounds. It shields the private exercise of religion not to keep the exercise of religion private, but rather as a necessary prerequisite for making it public. Moreover, claiming opposition to something on the grounds of private religious conscience need not inhibit separate public arguments against that thing.

Liberals, I might add, have not hesitated to make this argument when it suited their own purposes.  Peters writes:

 

For example, consider a young pacifist Quaker during the Vietnam War. The Quaker’s religious convictions prevent him from fighting in the Vietnam War. They also make him believe that all wars, not just the Vietnam War, are wrong, and that part of his duty as a Christian and a citizen is to make public arguments that this is the case. If the government seeks to ignore his conscientious objection and draft him, the Quaker can claim that the government should not violate his conscience and make him fight in the War. But in making that argument, he does not cede the separate argument that Vietnam is an unjust war—or that all wars are unjust—and he does not lose the ability to make such arguments publicly. Indeed, claiming the right not to fight in the War is his first step toward further public advocacy, on public grounds, that the War is unjust and should not be fought at all.

As Americans, we have a right to voice our deepest held beliefs publically and not to be forced to do something deeply repugnant to us morally.  The issues raised by the HHS mandate are serious philosophical and constitutional issues that affect our liberty as Americans.  I hope it won’t be obscured through the deliberate recasting, and misdirecting this in terms of separation of church and state, by which they mean something never written into the Constitution. It isn't a matter of one group, Catholics, trying to force their beliefs on the rest of the country, it's Catholic's trying to prevent the beliefs of others being forced on themselves.  It's critcal to understand the difference.

Intrinsic Evil

Fr. Richard writes on his blog, Catholic Morality, about the intrinsic evil of the HHS abortion mandate.  He describes the problem perfectly:  

We are going to hear all sorts of attempts to accommodate the President's Mandate "accommodation" within Catholic ranks. The chiefs of Catholic Charities and the Catholic Health Association were obviously given the advance notice they needed to be ready to give the President the shout out on this. There will be many more. They will all make their comments based upon convoluted, moralistic platitudes about the good of providing universal access to health care which, they say, trumps participation in moral evil. These positions will be mortally flawed. Will they be corrected? I would hope so.

 Willing cooperation in grave evil in order to secure a benefit for oneself makes the person who cooperates equally guilty of the grave evil. What is the goal, exactly, of agreeing with the President on this? Is it because those who go along with the President's mandate want people to have access to these so-called preventive services? If so, the cooperation in the program of contraception, sterilization, and chemical abortions is immoral and gravely sinful. Is it because they want to maintain government funding and the ability to "serve" the general public? The cooperation is still gravely sinful.

 In fact, it is quite clear that these agencies and their affiliated institutions cannot cooperate in this plan to provide abortion, sterilization, or contraceptives. Indeed, this plan of the President's is morally evil, in itself. It is what moral theology and Catholic doctrine refer to as "intrinsic evil." Yes, that's right. The plan itself, not just the acts of abortion, contraception and sterilization, is intrinsically evil.

 People are reluctant today to call an evil, evil.  I think it’s important to understand the gravity of this issue and what we are “accommodating” in the “accommodation.”  Please read Father’s post.

Miscellaneous Musings, Thursday, February 9, 2012

Image via Wikipedia

A quote from a column in the latest New Oxford Review by Frederick W. Marks, TheRush to Radical Informality.  Marks points out the connection between some of the worst of today’s cultural deviations, including, even, the break up of the family to this incessant wearing of jeans and t-shirts, no matter how inappropriate.   You might also include the case of the Missouri teenage girl who killed a 9 year old, “just to see what it felt like.”    Marks writes:

“In the final analysis, radical informality, intended or not, is an assault on form, and by “form” I refer not only to the kind of structure that governs a Shakes­pearean sonnet or a Haydn quartet, but to anything that sets limits. The censorship that shaped the classics and fostered the golden age of film (1937-1957), the glorious symmetry that we associate with Mother Nature — all of this is form and, clearly, it is something to be treasured.

Proper dress is not a matter of appearing “better” than another. There is such a thing as false humility. Was it not the insidious Uriah Heap, in Dickens’s David Cop­per­field, who claimed to be “an ’umble man”? But when one has to decide between casual and formal wear, whether it be sneakers vs. dress shoes at work or jeans and a T-shirt vs. a coat and tie at church, the choice is important. We are combatants in a culture war, and externals count in the battle for men’s minds.”

The Tyrant, from Fr. Schall

A really good column from Fr Schall on the Catholic Thing website, The Tyrant, on the tyrant in history: they are safe as long as, in their souls, the people define freedom as the doing of whatever they want.  A very worthwhile read.

Miscellaneous Musings, Saturday, February 4, 2012

Wal-Mart

I went to Wal-Mart the other day, I had to return something and I wanted a refund for it.  I think we bought two of something we only needed one of.  I don’t remember what it was that I returned and I guess it’s not important to the story.  To complicate matters, I had lost the receipt.  She who is the ultimate authority told me I had lost the receipt, since she would never do such a thing.  I won’t quibble.

Anyway, I trundled on down to Wal-Mart, went to Customer Service and luckily, there wasn’t much of a line.  I explained to the clerk about the extra item purchased and about being judged the party responsible for the lost receipt and threw myself on her mercy.  No problem, she gladly agreed a refund was in order and soon, refund in pocket I was out the door.  End of story.

However, I thought back to the years when I grew up in Detroit and what it was like to get a refund back then.  Say you received a sweater at Christmas from Hudson’s and say that sweater didn’t fit.  You were, after all, a growing boy and that was sometimes hard for Aunt Phoebe to keep up with.  Anyway, you could get that refund, but you had to have the receipt, no question about that, and you had to have all original packaging, intact.  Also, you had to bring it back to the store in the Hudson’s bag as I recall.  If you were able to accomplish the above, you would probably get your refund.  If not, forget it, you had to wear the ill-fitting sweater until next Christmas, especially in the presence of Aunt Phoebe.  This whole process was, needless to say, a hassle and fraught with anxiety, for fear of failure, and for fear of having to wear some ill-fitting, God awful sweater all year, or at least whenever Aunt Phoebe was around.

Now, I’m a traditional kind of guy and I believe that there were many things experienced during the “good old days” that could stand to be returned.  Family life being one of those things.  And yet, here I’d just had a clear revelation that some things are better today than they ever were back then.  When I realized this, I also remembered that, especially when I was younger, I would note the behavior of older folks (like I am now) and promise myself, or hope to myself, that I didn’t fall into those kinds of behaviors.  One of them was an obsession with the past and inability to see anything good in the present.    I saw that I was in some little danger, however, of falling into that very trap.  It was a surprise, a bit of a shock.  That’s not a good thing.  So, next time I have to get a refund at Wal-Mart, or whenever I encounter something that is a great improvement over “the good old days,” I’ll remind myself of St. Paul’s instruction to the Phillipians nearly two millennia ago:

“Brothers, I for my part do not consider myself to have taken possession. Just one thing: forgetting what lies behind but straining forward to what lies ahead, I continue my pursuit toward the goal, the prize of God’s upward calling, in Christ Jesus.”  Phillipians 3: 13-14 (NABRE)

Sometimes it’s good to forget the past.

Miscellaneous Musinngs, Thursday, February 2, 2012

What would you carry for a friend?
 

I thought I’d try to freshen the blog this year by writing in response to writing prompts I happened across.  I’ve done this sometimes in the past but usually can’t come up with any good ideas and give up quickly.  This year, in the interest of improving self-discipline and building character, I determined not to give up on any writing prompt once it had been chosen.  A day or two ago, I came across an interesting one:  “What would you carry for a friend?”

My first thought was that, after a back surgery and severe shoulder injury some years ago, I likely wouldn’t be carrying anything for any friends in the foreseeable future.  I was stumped, but determined.  So, I thought about what it meant to carry something for someone.

I thought back to my grade school days and how it was thought a romantic gesture to offer to carry a girl’s books home from school.  Back then we didn’t carry a great many books, so the effort wasn’t great, and it would convey what a chivalrous, strong and decent fellow you were.  The object of your affections might even discover that you were really a likable guy after all.  Of course, often the gesture was met with gales of laughter, which kind of took the romance out of the thing.  And these days, kids are burdened with 50 lb. bags filled with books, computers, wireless routers, who knows what.  Making such an offer is a much greater undertaking, something to be considered carefully.   I notice, also, that kids don’t seem to walk home from school much nowadays.    So even if a young fellow like me might offer to carry such a burden for a poor girl who happened to be left on foot, the probable outcome would be freeing her hands to pull out her cell phone and text her friends about the silly schmuck she found to carry her stuff for her.  That wouldn’t do. 

Then, I thought I could help my neighbor, an octogenarian, shovel his 50 ft. driveway after a cold, wet spring snow.  However, he has the world’s greatest snow blower and can clear that lane in about 5 minutes, blowing all his snow clear across the cul-de-sac into the bowl that is my short driveway, leaving me to spend an hour or two shoving myself out of the octogenarian generated avalanche.  He does it all the time.  He’s on his own. 

I was still stumped.  Finally, I thought perhaps I might find some little old lady at the grocery store that needed help carrying her bags to the car.  But I realized she would probably take me for a mugger or worse, some sort of sexual predator, and drill me with her concealed-carry 9 mm, complete with armor piercing bullets.   After my death, and learning of my pure intentions, she would feel neither Catholic guilt nor repentance, only smug self-satisfaction that there was one less pervert in the world.  Godless [deleted by censor]!! 

I was right to begin with.  Whatever it is my friends have to carry, they can manage it themselves.

Miscellaneous Musings,Thursday,February 2, 2012

Image via Wikipedia

This is from If You Want to Write, by Brenda Ueland.  It's a perfect example of someone who practiced what she preached.  Her book was written in the 1930's, the depths of the Great Depression and I doubt she ever made much money from it's publication.  Yet, she produced something of a classic of it's kind.  The book deserves to be read by all aspiring writer's again and again.

“It is our nasty twentieth-century materialism that makes us feel: what is the use of writing, painting, etc., unless one has an audience or gets cash for it? Socrates and the men of the Renaissance did so much because the rewards were intrinsic, i.e., the enlargement of the soul. Yes we are all thoroughly materialistic about such things. 'What's the use?' we say, of doing anything unless you make money or get applause? for when a man is dead he is dead.' Socrates and the Greeks decided that a man's life should be devoted to 'the tendance of the Soul' (Soul included intelligence, imagination, spirit, understanding, personality) for the soul lived eternally, in all probability. I think it is all right to work for money, to work to have things enjoyed by people, even very limited ones; but the mistake is to feel that the work, the effort, the search is not the important and the exciting thing. One cannot strive to write a cheap, popular story without learning more about cheapness. But enough. I may very well be getting to raving.”— Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write

Duuuuuh!

Image via Wikipedia

I know if haven't posted much lately but hey, I'm an accountant, this is tax season, duh!

Idealogy vs Principle

Cover of C.S. LewisThis is from a piece by David J. Theroux on a site called the Independent Institute, noted by Fr Phillip Neri Power on his Hanc Aquam blog as a "must read.".  I was thinking about this this morning, that the problem in society today is that idealogy has replaced principle, or the First Principles.  Now I know why I thought so.

“We live in an increasingly secularized world of massive and pervasive nation states in which traditional religion, especially Christianity, is ruled unwelcome and even a real danger on the basis of a purported history of intolerance and “religious violence.” This is found in most all “public” domains, including the institutions of education, business, government, welfare, transportation, parks and recreation, science, art, foreign affairs, economics, entertainment, and the media. A secularized public square policed by government is viewed as providing a neutral, rational, free, and safe domain that keeps the “irrational” forces of religion from creating conflict and darkness. And we are told that real progress requires expanding this domain by pushing religion ever backward into remote corners of society where it has little or no influence. In short, modern America has become a secular theocracy with a civic religion of national politics (nationalism) occupying the public realm in which government has replaced God.

For the renowned Christian scholar and writer C.S. Lewis, such a view was fatally flawed morally, intellectually, and spiritually, producing the twentieth-century rise of the total state, total war, and mega-genocides. For Lewis, Christianity provided the one true and coherent worldview that applied to all human aspirations and endeavors: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” (The Weight of Glory)[1]

In his book, The Discarded Image, Lewis revealed that for Medieval Christians, there was no sacred/secular divide and that this unified, theopolitical worldview of hope, joy, liberty, justice, and purpose from the loving grace of God enabled them to discover the objective, natural-law principles of ethics, science, and theology, producing immense human flourishing. [2] Lewis described the natural law as a cohesive and interconnected objective standard of right behavior:

‘This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all values are rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) “ideologies,” all consist of fragments from the Tao itself. Arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess. If my duty to my parents is a superstition, then so is my duty to posterity. If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race. If the pursuit of scientific knowledge is a real value, then so is conjugal fidelity’”. (The Abolition of Man)[3]

Miscellaneous Musings, Tuesday, January 10, 2012.

I haven’t done much in the way of posting since early in Advent’ it seems I’ve had very little to say of any notable worth.  Fr. Don, at our parish, offered a good joke during at the start of the Christmas Eve Mass that I’ve been meaning to share.   

The parish only offered two or three masses on Christmas weekend, two were on Saturday, one in the sanctuary and one in the school gym, both at 4:00 PM.  The sound system in the school gym wasn’t the greatest, but the crowds were huge and there was no place left to sit but there.  At the start of the Mass, Fr Don commented that the sound was somewhat better than expected, and also commented on the changes in the Mass translation, for those who hadn’t been to Mass since Easter.  He said he welcomed the changes for many reasons.  One was he hoped to avoid the situation of a priest friend of his who was offering Mass in a similar setting to our own.  This priest was standing at the microphone, trying to get it to work and said to one of the nearby technicians, “There’s something wrong with the mike.”  To which the congregation immediately responded, “And also with you.”

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I noted that several bloggers I follow posted on plans for their blog for the coming year.  I’ve hesitated to do the same.  It seems everytime I announce some future plan for Colorado Musing, I’ve failed to follow through, so I’ll just say I have two or three new things planned during the year and see if you spot them when, and if, they appear. 

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I read a meditation in an inspirational magazine, written by a modern author and was disappointed.  I wonder sometimes if we have nothing to say, even on things so important to us as the Christmas season or the Epiphany.  Is simply stringing seasonal words together and hope they inspire someone the best that can be done?  It would be better, then, not to write anything at all and turn to the saints who have gone before us who did have something to say.  Why waste the ink on paper?

The Epiphany, which we celebrated this weekend, is an odd thing though.  We celebrate the revelation of the Incarnation to the world.  Yet, it was a quite limited revelation.  It involved, at best, only a few shepherds, perhaps the city of Jerusalem, and three kings from who knows where.  There is little Scriptural evidence that it spread any further until Jesus disappeared, only to show up three days later in the temple, and then it was hidden again until Jesus began his public ministry, perhaps10 years after that.  You would think that if God were to truly reveal himself, it would be an earth shaking event, yet nothing much seems to have happened.   

I’m reminded of one of Gibbs’ Rules, “The best way to keep a secret is to tell no one, the second best way is to share it with one other person, there is no third best way.”  God told a few persons, He chose the third best way, and it was enough.  Like so much that He does, it’s enough, no more was needed.  That is perhaps the best lesson we could have to begin this year with, remember that God will do enough to share His Truth with us.  We may have to look for it, but it’s there.