bearing blog

"On death as a blessing" --- and as a model.

"Dad?  Mom?  Does God love the people in Hell?"  

That's Milo, always with the theology questions at bedtime.  It would be easy to say "You're supposed to be in bed; go back upstairs."  

"Hmm.  We don't know for sure if there are any people in Hell.  But if there are people in Hell, then God must love them, since He loves every person."

"Then why are they still there?"  

There's nothing child-ish about children's theological thinking -- haven't the greatest minds among us been grappling with this stuff for two thousand years and more?   What good is this omnipotent omnibenevolence stuff anyway, if it can't or won't stop suffering, temporal or eternal?

"That's an answer nobody's sure about,"  I said.  "We know God's mercy lasts forever, but we also know that people might choose not to want His mercy.  Some people say that this must mean, either that any people in Hell must stay there because they really want to stay there, or else, because God knows that it is really the place where those people will be the most happy -- that because of their choices they would not really be happier anywhere else."

That was a couple of nights ago.  I thought of that conversation again this morning when I picked up the Office of Readings while I waited for the bread machine to make bagel dough for me.  The second reading was from "A treatise on death as a blessing by Saint Ambrose, bishop."  He writes about dying to self (this translation is from my dead-tree breviary, not the link):

Death must be active within us if life also is to be active within us... [The Apostle] therefore teaches us to seek out this kind of death even in this life, so that the death of Christ may shine forth in our lives---that blessed death by which our outward self is destroyed and our inmost self renewed, and our earthly dwelling crumbles away and a home in heaven opens before us.  

The person who cuts himself off from this fallen nature of ours and frees himself from his chains is imitating death...

The Lord allowed death to enter this world so that sin might come to an end.

I thought about that conversation with Milo, how some theologians suppose that Hell exists to provide a place of the most mercy possible for those who in the end don't want Heaven -- a concept that, though it's borne of logical argument from the premises that Hell and a merciful God both exist, probably seems odd to a child (why would you not want Heaven?  and also, can it really be so that Hell can be something merciful?)  Such an idea can only make sense given the terrible flaws in human nature, flaws that we can choose to cling to.

Physical suffering and death in this life often gets the same question, of course, and the good bishop Ambrose's comment got me thinking about the mechanism by which physical death could be a similar mercy in this life.   I've thought of it one way for a long time:  It's a sorrow because it's necessary even for the best of people only because of sin; it's a mercy because it does bring sin and sorrow to an end, at least in the here and now.  

But it had escaped me till now that, since our nature is so flawed as it is, we must learn to cast off those flaws and cut away that diseased part of the self.  To understand how to do this, maybe we needed something in nature to imitate, to understand -- something to which the analogy could be made.  So many of the truths of our faith have been taught to us through concrete imagery -- sowing and reaping, eating and washing, begetting and birthing.  The reality precedes the concrete:  "fatherhood" is what it is so that we could understand something about "God the Father," i.e., natural "fatherhood" was modeled somehow after what we call the Fatherhood in the Blessed Trinity.  

So perhaps natural death was created as a model for us to follow, itself after the process of cutting away the sinful part of ourselves, what we are told we must do with the help of Christ.  Perhaps death is what it is because of mercy, because it shows us something like what we have to go through during our physical lives, in order to come out the other side more alive than before.

Intimacy and Lordship.

Darwin expresses frustration with the "Jesus is my Pal" attitude:

One of the elements of modern (often Evangelical, but sometimes Catholic) spirituality that I find most foreign is when people talk about Christ as being "my best friend." It seems an even more familiar form of the relationship suggested by hopeful missionaries, "Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?"

It's possible to err in either direction on these things, and I make no representation that I am a perfect Christian, but I don't think of myself having a "personal relationship" with Christ, certainly in a "best friends" kind of way.

The ways in which I would normally envision Christ are not guy-next-door, my-buddy-the-savior kind of images. Christ the King, enthroned in eternal splendor into union with whom all Christians wish to enter for life everlasting. Christ Crucified, pouring out his blood for the sins of the whole world. Christ Risen, triumphing over the reign of death which had doomed humanity since the Fall. Christ in the Eucharist, kneeling before the glittering monstrance in which the Body of Christ forms the center of a sunburst of golden rays, with the crucifix above and the tabernacle behind. 

I have a reaction to that sort of thing that's pretty similar to Darwin's, but I don't think he's got the right idea of what that "best friend/personal relationship" thing is really trying to express.

I think the "personal relationship with Jesus Christ" -- a phrasing that is really foreign to Catholics -- is  best understood as an attempt to express two things:

1.  The perfect knowledge Jesus Christ has of each individual.    A one-way sort of knowledge.  That He knows me better than anyone else knows me, including myself.   

2.  The intention Jesus Christ has to save each individual -- that Jesus Christ didn't just die to save everybody, He died to save me.   

Not being of the Protestant persuasion, I naturally prefer to emphasize -- when I think of salvation --  a more corporate, Church-centered, we're-all-in-the-barque-of-Peter-together view.   But the individualistic view is also a true way of looking at salvation. And I am pretty sure the "personal relationship with Jesus" thing is an expression of it.

The problem with the "best friend" imagery associated with belief in such a personal relationship isn't its intimacy, it's that it implies an equality that isn't there.  I am not Christ's equal; but "friendship" implies symmetry.  And yet it's hard to find a modern archetype of a relationship to point to which expresses the vast asymmetry and the tight intimacy at the same time.   We are divorced from an idea of the relationship between a man and his Lord and Master as an intimate one. If we can envision a relationship like this that is as intimate or more intimate than the best of friends, we will be getting back on track.

The corpus and the cross.

Rich Leonardi has a cryptic post up about a hypothetical bumper sticker he'd like to see in the Cincinnati Archdiocese:  "We Preach Christ Crucified."  I read through the comments while waiting for him to update and explain himself, and came upon this comment:

Evangelical friends of mine maintain that their cross, devoid of a corpus, emphasize[s] the Resurrection.

I have heard this before, of course -- Catholic crucifixes with corpus displayed emphasize the Passion and death of Jesus, bare Protestant crosses emphasize the Resurrection.  I never thought too deeply about it much. As the commenter goes on to say, there would be no Resurrection without the Crucifixion, so there's a certain primacy there, but Resurrection is the final victory after all.  What's wrong with emphasizing one or the other depending on one's personal devotion?  We Catholics are masters of emphasizing some bits here and some bits there -- if I wear a medallion of Mary I am "emphasizing" her, and we say truly that to do so is not to deny her greater Son -- so if someone wears a bare cross instead of a crucifix so as to "emphasize" the Resurrection, well, so what?

Though it struck me as I thought about it ... does the bare cross really emphasize the Resurrection?  

An empty tomb is an image that emphasizes the Resurrection.  The Risen Lord with the marks in his hands and side, that is an image that recalls and emphasizes the Resurrection.   And we do emphasize those things -- I have several images of the Risen Lord around here of one kind or another.  The Divine Mercy image is one such, for example.

But what does a bare cross call to mind?  It might symbolize the Resurrection, if indeed Jesus had "come down from the cross" and saved himself, as the jeering crowd dared him.   Instead, he was dead when they took Him down.  The cross itself didn't last much longer than that.  

The bare cross, objectively, may call to mind the road to Calvary, with the soldiers standing aside hammer in hand.  It may call to mind the dead man being borne to the tomb.  But on the third day, attention would be forever elsewhere.  

Define your terms.

Jen has a good post up about a recent visit to Adoration in which she felt little but nevertheless took away great insight.  That's the main thrust of her post and is a good reason to go read it.  I was struck by a particular point she made, a side point:

I've been brought to a place where I no longer even think of it in terms of whether or not God exists -- "exists" being a weak word with an obvious antonym, implying that nonexistence is possible. To say that something "exists" usually has the unspoken implication of a transitory state, since every material thing in the universe will eventually cease to exist. Duck-billed platypuses exist; spiral galaxies exist; I exist. The English language doesn't have a proper word to describe the state of being of God, who always was and always will be, who is more real than reality, other than to simply say that God is.

English - perhaps all languages, I don't know - is a bit impoverished when it comes to the words "exist" and "existence."  We apply them to the unique kind of existence possessed by God, who alone exists in and of Himself; and we also apply them to what material objects are doing for as long as they last.  Really the two kinds of existence are so very different that they ought not to have the same term apply to them.

Lacking a concise way to distinguish between them can lead people into logical fallacies.  For example, "the universe" is sometimes defined as "the set of all that exists."  Not a good definition, if you also hold that God "exists" *and* that God is not a member of the set defined as the universe, but is rather its creator and logically not part of a set.  This will get you into trouble with atheist pedants who can then counter that the contradiction is yours, since if God is not a member of the set of "all that exists," then God must not exist.  Always remember to define your terms!  If the universe is defined as "all that exists," then God has to be said to do something other than exist.  Transcend existence, maybe, or pre-exist.

Dialogue.

Tito Edwards at The American Catholic has a post on ecumenism that is followed by an interesting combox discussion.

Writing about institutional-level dialogue and ecumenism, Tito states:

Ecumenism, whatever that means anymore, is a dead cat.  It’s going nowhere because it has no idea what it is.  Hence the forty years of fruitless labor has produced nothing to celebrate.

The only real progress I foresee is with the Orthodox.  Only they understand us and we they.  We have much in common and are capable as divinely inspired institutions to be of one.  Not our Protestant brothers who continue to devolve to the point of being unrecognizable among the worldly.

He also quotes Piuses (Pii?) XI and XII to the effect that the point of interreligious dialogue is to promote the "return" of non-Catholics to the Catholic Church.    And concludes that ecumenical efforts have produced nothing over the last forty years.

I see his point.  Too many people (pro-dialogue and anti-dialogue) confuse "ecumenical dialogue" with "ideological compromise."  Compromise on essential truths is simply not permitted, and not possible if the Church is to remain the Church.  

The two things that can be done are to pare away inessentials and to accurately understand each other's reasoning.

To pare away inessentials is not, of course, to remove elements of worship, belief, and practice that are helpful and fruitful for many, but to identify those features of faith that, being a help to some and a hindrance to others, may be chosen or rejected freely and so do not represent obstacles to union.

To accurately understand each other's reasoning is not, of course, to adopt the reasoning of the other body, but to understand the exact definition of terminology, to know the rational basis upon which their reasoning rests, to understand the responses to common objections -- in short, to comprehend the others' beliefs on their own terms, with respect for their intellectual freedom.  It does not mean accepting faulty reasoning as faulty; it does mean scrupulously understanding each step in the chain of reasoning.

The problems Tito has outlined with ecumenism are largely restricted to institutional ecumenism:  committees of leaders of the Church, theologians and prelates and such, getting together with leaders from other traditions and hashing out documents and things like that.  

"Dialogue" -- otherwise known as "conversation" -- between two individuals is another situation entirely.  And there are other possibilities besides "I'm trying to convert him" and "I'll compromise so we can come closer to agreeing."  In the conversation between two people, members of different faiths, who are both loyal to their own faith, fruitful dialogue is possible even if neither party changes their beliefs one whit.

Fruitful dialogue is when the two parties carefully explain themselves to each other, defining terms, clarifying distinctions, and so on, so that they can each come to an accurate understanding of what the other believes and the rational basis upon which those beliefs rest.

Fruitful dialogue pares away areas where misunderstanding of terms, superficial differences in behavior or in practice, etc. makes the two believe they have differences where they really are not.

Fruitful dialogue identifies real differences. It pinpoints the areas where the two really do have to say, “Ah, I see. That’s something you assert which I deny.” Or: “Hey, my belief on that issue, though I phrase it in different words, is not really so very different from yours.”

Because to clearly identify the exact points of difference is to understand how far apart you are. And when two bodies have clearly delineated the exact points of difference — which they do through fruitful dialogue — it is a help to individuals who may be wondering if they belong not there, but here. It is a challenge to individuals within those two bodies to decide which of the two is more true.

That is why dialogue can be fruitful, even if it does not seek to “convert,” but only to teach and to learn. To teach the truth as we know it, to learn exactly where the other does not align with that truth. 

One of the greatest mistakes anyone can make in a disagreement -- religious, political, or otherwise -- is to assume you know why the other thinks and acts as they do, and to dismiss their own explanations of themselves.  It's plainly unkind.  It's remarkably self-centered ("I am the only person in the world whose beliefs are based on rational thought.")  Finally, it's stupid, shooting yourself in the foot like that, because an accurate and unprejudiced understanding of the other is crucial to crafting arguments that may convince them.  And it's disappointingly common.

Crisis.

We were awakened last night, again, by screaming in the street.  It's not that unusual and we've called 911 a dozen times or more since we moved into our South Minneapolis neighborhood seven years ago.  A woman was moaning and crying hysterically, unintelligibly.  I heard Mark get up and I mumbled something to him and rolled over, assuming he was going to get his phone.  A couple minutes later I woke up more fully and put on my glasses and went to the window to assess the screamer -- domestic violence?  Ordinary drunken argument?  Prostitute solicitation gone from bad to worse?   

A weeping, incoherent woman, hunched over, was running frantically back and forth in the street and another woman was standing by.  I thought it might be one of our new neighbors.  Flashing lights came from one direction, and suddenly the white van from next door came screeching up and parked on the wrong side of the street, too far from the curb, and a third woman got out in a hurry and ran over just as the cop arrived.  Meanwhile the fire engine from a block and a half away was pulling up.

I made out a snatch of a wail: I SLAPPED HER BACK, I SLAPPED HER BACK, and I thought -- a fight?  But then I saw that the weeping woman had transferred something to the arms of the police officer, not a something but a someone, a tiny someone, a girl about three years old, limp and lifeless, and the police officer turned and carried her (head hanging -- ankles hanging --) and was met by a ponytailed woman from the fire engine, and they put the baby down on the hood of our car parked in front of our house.  Hands moved swiftly, a flashlight raised, poised, moved, poised, held up high, and under it hands moving, tearing paper, too nimble for me to see.  

I slapped her back transformed instantly in meaning -- "The baby choked," I breathed out loud, to Mark who had come up and put his arm around my shoulders cold and bare in the breeze from the open window.  The word seizure? with a question mark came up on that breeze, and I felt my own breath coming in quick pants and Mark squeezed my shoulder.  My hands came up and covered my mouth and I watched in horror -- across the little girl's motionless body, the weeping woman stood in the street silently, her hands covering her own mouth.  

I could not even pray or think of any words to pray.  A completely incoherent and wordless thought entered my mind that only happy endings are allowed to happen on the hood of that car, because that's our car.

Suddenly the little band of people huddled around the hood of our car exploded outward, and the ponytailed woman in the FIRE tee shirt was carrying the girl up the street where an ambulance had arrived silently.  If I had to guess from the equipment the woman carried, I would say she had just managed to intubate the little girl; if I had to guess from the pace the woman walked, the urgency was over, but whether it was for better or for worse I could not say.  The ambulance stayed there, flooding the street with pulses of red light, but quietly, even as the police went back to their cruiser and two of the three women walked slowly back to the house next door, the house we used to live in.  I thought I heard one policeman laughing softly as he spoke to his partner before the door slammed.  I hoped beyond hope that this meant the prognosis was good.  

The ambulance drove away and left me feeling like the world was a fragile and terrifying place.  I went down for a drink of water and paced the floor in the dark, thinking how often when things are going very well for us in our little home -- and they have been going very well for us -- it is hard to see how deeply vulnerable we all are while we walk this earth, the valley of the shadow.  It was a long time before I could sleep, to the steady rhythm of my daughter's breathing.

UPDATE.  Mark managed to communicate with the neighbors well enough to find out that the child is apparently okay.

Veiled.

"The Mom" at Shoved To Them finds a box of her grandmother's lace mantillas and decides to try them out.

I decided to wear one on Easter in honor of my grandmother, and offered one to my eldest. My sweet #1 readily accepted. She is no stranger to veiling, having a close friend who attends the Latin Mass regularly. She veils on those occasions when she sleeps over at their house, and to her it is simply a facet of Catholicism.

Easter morning I stood in my pew with this triangle of lace draped over my head and worried that I looked ridiculous. Then it slipped off of my head. I replaced it and bowed my head in an effort to keep it in place, not looking at the pews across the way, but at the empty space in front of my shoes. It was a posture of complete humility and was foreign and uncomfortable. The lacy sides draped enough in my peripheral vision that I couldn't see any further down the pew than my own husband and children. It became, for me, my family alone with God. All that I was responsible for was all that I could see.

Read the whole thing.

Short lived.

Something about this memoir of a severely malformed baby's short life, written by his 16-year-old sister, brought something home to me.  One of those things I knew in my mind but that nevertheless struck me with new, raw power as I read her words.

How crazy that a substance as unimaginably beautiful as the soul must be contained in something so material and tangible as the body.

Why does the world require that he bring a healthy body with him? 

Little Miracle is a gift, but he does not belong here. I do not belong here. None of us belong here. If the Divine desires only to grace us with Little Miracle’s presence for a few fleeting moments, so be it. 

It is pretty crazy that a soul must be contained in a body, that the body must be healthy for the soul to stay with us.  

A life so brief, and yet.  Haven't we all had brief encounters with people who touched us deeply and permanently even in the few seconds or minutes that our encounter with them lasted?

I remember that in the seconds of shock after I learned my mother had died moments before I arrived in her hospital room, a big warm woman, a hospital nurse, African-American, with glasses and bright-flowered scrubs -- she enfolded me in her arms and said to me:  It's a beautiful day out there, honey.  "A beautiful day to just fly away," that's what I told her.  She wasn't alone.

I never saw that nurse before and never saw her again.  I spent twenty seconds in the presence of that soul, twenty seconds in her embrace.   My life is fuller and happier for those twenty seconds.  

It's hard to know sometimes that, in this life, some people suffer so that others may thrive and grow.  Suffer involuntarily even.  Yet it's true.  It's one of the inescapable ways that suffering has meaning.  

If a short encounter can have meaning that lasts a lifetime -- well, then, a short lifetime can have meaning that lasts -- how long?  Forever, no?

(h/t Amy Welborn)

To use the church nursery, or not? What it means to be fed.

Melanie has a rambly, thoughtful post with a lot of things to chew on, about "getting fed" spiritually as a mother. 

 I was rather surprised when two mothers of my acquaintance were in favor putting their children in the nursery when they are between the ages of 18 months and three and a half because, they argued, that's when they are at their worst behavior and because when you have three or more children it becomes impossible to control them all and even if you do control them you spend the entire mass distracted. Six days a week I give give give, said one mother, on Sundays I need to be fed.

... What I want to focus on is the question raised by our friend: What does it mean to be "fed" at Mass?

...The way I have come to see it is that this is a sacrifice that I will make for only a brief period of my life and I'm making it for the very best cause: so that my children can be in the presence of God and come to know Him and love Him and serve Him. I have confidence that in this area of life as with my personal prayer time, the act of showing up faithfully to Mass and the attempt to give as much of my attention as I have to Him is what he will reward. He is my Father and He will feed me what I need to be fed.

There is a lot more there - read the whole thing.

Feeling fear.

I've never had trouble with the concept that Jesus felt physical pain, that He physically suffered.  Seems obvious to me:  If you have a body, it hurts sometimes.  And that doesn't feel good, even if you know the pain is necessary and a sign of something good.  Anybody who's given birth knows this.  Pain is more bearable if you understand where it's coming from, but it is still pain and it would be nicer if there were less of it.  Right?

But the fear?  How does that work?  How on earth can the omnipotent and omniscient and eternal "fear" his own willed temporal suffering?  Fear comes from a lot of places -- not knowing, for example.  (But God knows all.)  And being out of control.  (But God is in control, even in the person of Jesus who submitted to others.)  And the threat of annihilation.  (But God is eternal.)  Isn't fear something that is fixed by knowing, by control, by the promise of continued existence?  Well?

I wasn't thinking about that when I began the sorrowful mysteries of the rosary yesterday, when I arrived at the story of Gethsemane.  I was thinking about Amy Welborn's meditation on the resurrection of the body and her quote of a post by Fr. Longenecker , about the resurrected body being "the soul in every cell," that she said helped her feel relieved:  "I could not begin to parse it philosophically or theologically, and nor did I have any desire to. Something within got it, and I was able to trust." 

 Of course, I took that to prayer thinking I would try to parse it philosophically or theologically.  A lot of what Amy writes about difficult-to-grasp assertions of our faith resonates me. I have a very cerebral, historical approach to the Catholic faith, and aspects that can really only be approached so far with the intellect, further progress having to be made obliquely or with intuition, leave me with a permanent sense of unease.  So that's what I was trying to understand.

What came to me was something that happened to me years ago.  Have you ever had a genuine panic attack?  I have.  I had a string of maybe five panic attacks over a period of about six months when I was in college.  I never knew why they appeared, and I never knew why they went away again -- I've never had any since.    I remember it vividly though, one of the most surreal things ever to happen to me.

It was surreal because at every moment I knew exactly what was happening to me.  I recognized the sensation as a panic attack.  I knew I was, in fact, safe.  I knew there was no thing that could have triggered a legitimate fear response.  And yet my body was behaving as if I was in terrible danger.  My heart was pounding, my skin was sweating, the prickly hairs were standing up on my neck and arms, my blood was dumping adrenaline into my muscles, my breath came swift and panting, the lights brightened as my pupils dilated.  

I suffered.  Not because I knew fear but because I felt it in my body.  My physical response created an unbearable restlessness -- my very cells shrieked, Run! Fight!  And in a way that made it even worse, because I knew there was, in fact, no point in running and nothing to fight.  And yet my body urged me to do something -- I kept having this urge to leave the house I was in, to run away into the night.  But since I knew I was safe, I had to bring all the strength of my will to bear against the irrational urges of my body to flee.   I told myself "This is a panic attack, it will pass," but the one thing I did not know was how long it would last.   In the end I sought help, called a friend (to my embarrassment, waking up his parents in the middle of the night) and begged him to keep me company on the phone until the terrible sensations passed.  I didn't feel wholly better until after I had fallen asleep (completely physically exhausted) and awoken hours later.

So I remembered that, and then it made a little bit more sense to me how Jesus could know all and yet suffer from His fear, as we believe He did in Gethsemane.  I'm not saying that I know how it works, I just say that I see now a way that it could work.  Because He could certainly have willed His body to yield the fear response, just as He could (and we know, did) will His body to experience pain, to send distress signals to His brain.   If a panic attack can feel physically even worse to one who knows there's nothing to fear, because of the constant effort for the wiser mind to suppress and overrule the wild urges from the body, the urges of muscle and bone --- then I don't doubt that the fear response generates real suffering even to the omniscient.

* * *

That permanent sense of unease, about things that can be grasped only so closely by the intellect -- it is not a bad thing.  For me, "to trust God" means above all else to accept "I can not understand this except when You decide to gift me with insight."  The habit grows easier with time, but the unease remains, part of that restlessness that belongs to this life.  St. Augustine wrote:  Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.  It doesn't make sense -- that's a kind of restlessness, an urge to do something, to find out something, to write and write to try to figure it out, to read and read, to argue and understand.  And restlessness isn't always made easier by knowing that there's really nothing more that can be gained by action.