bearing blog

The lack of checklists.

Recently a friend of mine asked me if I could recommend any books for someone who was struggling with scrupulosity -- in particular, the Do I Have A Sufficiently Serious Reason To Delay Pregnancy sort of scrupulosity, mixed with depression and struggles with anger and being overwhelmed. I wanted to help, so i put some thought into it.

Longtime readers will know of my irritation with the tendency of some corners of the Catholic internet, lacking any actual lists of rules from the Magisterium, to write their own rules for what constitutes a Serious Reason and then disseminate them.

My position is that those entrusted with the teaching authority of the Church, as well as the inspired writers of Scripture, knew what they were doing when they didn't, for example, add "subclinical depression isn't a good enough reason to watch your fertility signs" or "if only one spouse is sure that it's a good time to try for another baby, the other one should get in line." The fact that the Church has declined to give further guidance beyond generosity and the good of the family, is itself a kind of guidance: a signal that discernment about family size and childbirth timing belongs not to theologians and pastors, nor to doctors and therapists, nor to social media friends and Twitter, but to a well-formed married couple themselves -- and no one else.

I couldn't think of any books that I could recommend through experience, although I found some promising titles via Google. I know of a number of web-published articles and blog posts that make the case for backing off from pressuring others with the so-called Grave Reasons and minding yer own business, but as it was of course web-published articles and blog posts that helped convince my friend's friend that her own struggles were not bad enough -- that she was not good enough, and if she could only be better she could handle everything, and maybe the first step towards being better was to take on more and more and more -- well, I wasn't sure that piling more websites, no more authoritative than the others, would help.

So I suggested working on recognizing scrupulosity in general, and left it at that.

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Later on this week it occurred to me that there is another sort of commandment -- one that is much, much more fundamental to the Christian life than anything having to do with married life, since it applies quite strictly to everyone of any age and state of life -- that, despite its importance, is similarly light on the details.

We all know we've got to do it. In a very real sense our salvation is said to depend on it. But no one -- not Christ's words in scripture, not the Catechism, no papal teaching document, no synod -- has ever told us exactly how to do it, or how to know when we've done it, or given us a checklist of features of successfully practicing it. And yet this virtue, this activity, is not something that is purely spiritual or invisible; like generosity in the service of life, it plays out in the arena of real contact between real human beings, and if we invite it in, if we practice it, somehow (but no one will tell us how, exactly) it will change the course of our days.

I am speaking of forgiveness. We know it's always necessary: Jesus said himself that we can't be forgiven unless we forgive. We know it must be offered again and again, without practical end; that, at least, is what the exegetes tell us that "seventy times seven" times means to say to us.

But beyond the teaching that we have to do it, and that we are never allowed to give up doing it -- we are not told what we have to do to be forgiving.

How can we ever forgive enough? There is no "enough," because our model of forgiveness -- just like our model of life-giving generosity -- is God Himself.

There is only what we are called to do. And because it is a matter of a call, no one can figure that out for us. We have to discern on our own.

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Let's talk extremes: Almost nobody (unless they are trapped, themselves, somehow) believes that the injunction to forgive means that a physically abused person must go on putting himself or herself in danger of more abuse. We don't say that there is a limit on forgiveness; rather, we advise that forgiveness doesn't require the risk of being harmed by a dangerous person.

And yet... all forgiveness means some level of risk and vulnerability (otherwise we wouldn't have to remind people to do it). And so there is always the open question of how much vulnerability we can create before we have forgiven.

The question is open. There is no checklist.

"If your neighbor commits such-and-such a crime against you, and then he apologizes and makes restitution, forgiving him means declining to press charges. But if your neighbor commits such-and-such a different, particular, crime, and then apologizes and makes restitution, forgive him some other way while you still press charges." Nope. We don't get advice like that.

"If you lend money up to $X and the borrower never pays you back, forgiveness means that you stop demanding the money and you should be willing to lend to that person again. If the unpaid amount is between $X and $Y, forgiveness means that you stop demanding the money, and don't think of it again, but probably you should not lend to that person again. If the amount is between $Y and $Z, it is permissible to take the borrower to court for the money, while forgiving the borrower in your heart..." Nope. We don't get advice like that.

"If a family member hurts you in such-and-such a way, forgiveness means that you tell the person of your hurt and then never speak of it again, and not gossip to other members of the family, and keep going to visit the relative who hurt you, and send Christmas cards, and the like. If a family member hurts you in a different way, forgiveness means that you keep silent about the hurt, keep visiting with that person, and learn to change the subject when necessary to avoid the topics that lead to people saying hurtful things. But if a family member hurts you in such-and-such a different way, it's okay to separate yourself completely from that person and quietly work on your own anger issues without subjecting yourself to further mental abuse, and that is what forgiveness means in that case." Nope. No specific advice.

Look in the encyclicals all you want. Read the Bible as much as you want. There is no algorithm.

But isn't this dangerous? Aren't some people going to feel trapped by the injunction to forgive, trapped in cycles of self-hatred, trapped in abusive relationships, trapped by toxic family members demanding what they have no right to demand?

Yes. It is dangerous. And people are trapped in this way.

And yet it would be dangerous in a different way if we were given such an algorithm, because we would none of us have any room for discernment -- for working out the best way to forgive in a specific situation, with specific human beings.

We have a Church, not a clinic; we have a Teacher, not a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual; we deal with disordered human persons (including ourselves), not with disorders. We have to judge the situations that we are in by looking at the needs of the people who are affected by the situations. We as individuals are the only ones who can see the details of our surroundings. A predictive, exhaustive flowchart (if P then Q) would, I presume, hobble us; leaving no room for a flowering of authentic human forgiveness, it would tempt us to go just so far and yet no farther.

It might serve as an excuse to limit forgiveness, by telling us when we had forgiven "enough."

Forgiveness comes in different shapes, and we have to see the shape it will fit into, in our hearts and in our relationships, and work over and over again to more fully fit it into its place. But it isn't ever done and isn't ever enough. The nature of forgiveness, like generosity, is a nature of readiness-to-serve; never saying "I am done," but instead always ready to be called to do something more.

What that something may be, we apparently have to figure out on our own, for it to be forgiveness and not some other thing -- maybe, a good thing, but something else.

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Tuesday: Scala Sancta.

After our beach day at Santa Marinella, it seemed as if we all got a second wind.

We came back to a lovely dinner of Italian convenience food from the grocery store across the street:

Refrigerated ravioli stuffed with proscuitto. Boxed store-brand pasta sauce (the ragù is shown, but the best was arrabiata). Bagged grated cheese. Jars of little sweet red peppers stuffed with a tuna-caper mixture. A jar of borlotti beans for the baby. A bagged salad with all sorts of beautiful mixed greens.

With three days left in our trip, I bought a three-day bus pass for everyone over the age of 10. And...

The next day we hopped the bus and headed for the Scala Sancta. It is over near St John Lateran and is the original "stairs that you go up one at a time on your knees" indulgence. It is a marble stairway, encased in wood for its protection (although there are a few portholes cut in the wood so you can see and touch the marble). Reputedly they are the 28 steps that once led up to Pontius Pilate's praetorium in Jerusalem, so: they are, if it is true, a physical part of the Way of the Cross. Since the Middle Ages at least it has been said that St. Helena brought them to Rome from Jerusalem in the 300s. And the legend has a nice long history of annoying people like Martin Luther (possibly) and Charles Dickens (verifiably).

The map was a little confusing and the building was so nondescript (at least compared to the nearby basilica) that I wasn't sure I had the right place until I got in front of the door and saw the stairs with about a dozen people kneeling on them. (See the Wikipedia article, from which I took the historical information, for a picture not unlike what I saw. I did not feel comfortable photographing people there, although it is allowed from the bottom of the stairs.)

I explained to the children that no particular prayer is prescribed for the stairs, so they could pray something as simple and short as the name of Jesus, or something longer if they wanted. As for me, I had downloaded a set of devotional prayers on my iPhone, the kind that gives you something slightly different to meditate upon for each step. Mark went up the stairs with the 4yo in his arms and I went up with the baby in a front carrier. At first it was not hard, but around the tenth step the wood started to press uncomfortably on my knees and the baby began to stir.

About step 19, the baby started crying loudly, so for the sake of the other pilgrims, I quit with the iPhone prayers and went with something MUCH shorter as I crawled up the remaining nine steps. (You aren't allowed to step on the stairs, so there wasn't really a faster means of escape for me, other than tumbling down them, I suppose). At the very top, hands reached down to help me up, and pulled me, sweaty and flustered, to my feet. I stroked the baby's head and apologized in Italian, and the other strangers who had also just finished their ascents shook their heads, and smiled, and cooed at the baby, and told me it was not a problem, that it was a great blessing.

I believe I was reasonably well disposed, but this was not a time when I was granted any special consolations. I made it up the stairs; it was physically uncomfortable; I was rather focused on my crying baby.

Are they really the steps Jesus walked on? They might be. They might not be. Regardless, they represent the whole via dolorosa; my downloaded prayers don't say, for example on the sixth step, "O my Jesus! By this 6th step," etc., they say things like

O my Jesus! By the patience thou didst exhibit amid the outrages and mockeries of which Thou wert the object throughout the night preceding Thy death, have mercy on me!

They take you through the whole Passion. The physical object of the Holy Stairs -- there likely were once some holy stairs, whether these are they or not -- is not the object of our worship. Replica "holy stairs" have been built for other pilgrims in other places, and none of those pilgrims believes that the stairs they climb are really the stairs Jesus climbed; in at least one sense, it is the thought that counts. Or rather, the intention, allied with the action.

The stairs inspire the faithful to suffer, voluntarily, for a time.

Speaking from experience as someone who hardly ever voluntarily suffers, despite holding a fervent belief that voluntary acceptance of suffering has meaning and bears fruit -- this is a valuable thing. I climbed them because they were there. If they weren't, doubtless there is no other voluntary suffering I would have substituted that day.

 

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The Salesian preventive system, or, how to not punish kids.

My personal parenting/discipline ideal has always been to avoid punishing kids.

I get the impression from other people that the idea alarms them, because it sounds a lot like "avoiding discipline;" perhaps it calls to mind the stories of parents who insist their offspring can do no wrong.  You know, the kind who sue the school when their child is suspended for cheating on a test or something like that.

That's not my point.  By punishment, I mean those arbitrary unpleasantnesses inflicted in return for misbehavior:  the spanking, the grounding, the confiscation. Mrk and I aren't what you'd call permissive parents.  We try to be authoritative, if not authoritarian.  We use the term "obedience" with the kids and are clear about what it means and why it's important.   But (this is our ideal, mind you, not always the way we manage to make it work) we try not to get to the point where we need a "punishment" in the first place.  

We try to let them experience the consequences of their actions, insofar as it isn't dangerous.  

• Didn't pack an extra dress like you were supposed to?  Well, I guess you'll be wet and uncomfortable now that you've run through your friend's sprinkler in your clothes.  
• Refused to eat your lunch at lunchtime?  Ooooops, snack time isn't till 3:30, I guess you can have some of these plain almonds I keep in the car for emergencies.
• Shrieked at each other in the car while we were running errands?  After all that, I (honestly) don't feel anymore like taking you out for lunch, so instead we're going home and having tuna sandwiches.

On the occasion when something truly egregious happens -- such as when one of my kids came to me and admitted that a long string of perfect scores on math assignments had been faked -- consequences are meted out rather than merely allowed to happen; but we really try to have it make sense.  In the case of the spurious perfect scores, since I had no way to know whether the child understood the material, the child was assigned double math lessons for as many days as the lessons had been faked, each day doing the regularly scheduled lesson and at the same time re-doing one of the lessons from before.  That plus a long conversation about honesty.  And dangerous misuse of a tool around here is very likely to result in revocation of privileges to use said tool until competency and proper respect for risk is demonstrated; that's just common sense, not a punishment.  

It was difficult for us to figure out when our first was very young, but we hit our stride eventually, and he grew out of the normal frustrations of toddlerhood into an earnest child and now a delightful teenager, and that has given us a lot of confidence as we continue to bring him up, him and the four that have followed.  It's true that I yell more than I wish I did, and lose my temper.  It's an ideal I fail to measure up to.  But I still strive for that "no-punishment" ideal.

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I notice, however, that this isn't language I tend to hear from my fellow Catholic parents much.  Indeed, at more than one parish I've seethed while listening to a priest (including in the homily at my daughter's baptism) cheerfully recommend vigorously and frequently spanking small children.  

I think this is an American Catholic phenomenon, borne of being caught between a decadent permissive culture and an army of evangelical Protestants -- in many ways, serious American Catholics are constantly playing "keeping up with the Bob Joneses," and so, for better or for worse, we have been inculturated with what I personally see as a break-the-child's-sinful-will, thou-shalt-honor-us-because-of-the-ten-commandments sort of  attitude toward child discipline.  

The exceptions are the super-crunchy attachment parenting Catholics.  Am I one of those?  Sort of; as a young parent, AP wasn't good enough for me and if you were foolish enough to ask me about it I would talk your ear off about how I was into "CC" parenting, which stands for "continuum concept," which, well, some other time....    

I did have plenty of role models for the way that I felt was right for me to parent my kids, but I lacked Catholic ones.   And that's why I was so excited when I first learned about the educational philosophy of St. John Bosco.  AKA "Don" Bosco (1815-1888) because that's what you call a diocesan priest in Italy.   Here's Wikipedia on him, for some background:

At that time the city of Turin had a population of 117,000 inhabitants. It reflected the effects of industrialization and urbanization: numerous poor families lived in the slums of the city, having come from the countryside in search of a better life. In visiting the prisons Don Bosco was disturbed to see so many boys from 12 to 18 years of age. He was determined to find a means to prevent them ending up here. Because of population growth and migration to the city, Bosco found the traditional methods of parish ministry inefficient. He decided it was necessary to try another form of apostolate, and he began to meet the boys where they worked and gathered in shops, offices, market places. They were pavers, stone-cutters, masons, plasterers who came from far away places, he recalled in his brief Memoirs.

The Oratorio was not simply a charitable institution, and its activities were not limited to Sundays. For Don Bosco it became his permanent occupation. He looked for jobs for the unemployed. Some of the boys did not have sleeping quarters and slept under bridges or in bleak public dormitories. Twice he tried to provide lodgings in his house. The first time they stole the blankets; the second they emptied the hay-loft. He did not give up. In May 1847, he gave shelter to a young boy from Valesia, in one of the three rooms he was renting in the slums of Valdocco, where he was living with his mother. He and "Mamma Margherita" began taking in orphans. The boys sheltered by Don Bosco numbered 36 in 1852, 115 in 1854, 470 in 1860 and 600 in 1861, 800 being the maximum some time later....

In 1859, Bosco selected the experienced priest Vittorio Alasonatti, 15 seminarians and one high school boy and formed them into the "Society of St. Francis de Sales." This was the nucleus of the Salesians, the religious order that would carry on his work....In 1871, he founded a group of religious sisters to do for girls what the Salesians were doing for boys. They were called the "Daughters of Mary Help of Christians." In 1874, he founded yet another group, the "Salesian Cooperators." These were mostly lay people who would work for young people like the Daughters and the Salesians, but would not join a religious order.

Bosco's capability to attract numerous boys and adult helpers was connected to his "Preventive System of Education."

Don Bosco explained his "preventive system" in an essay, "The Preventive System in the Education of the Young," which can be found here.  It begins by contrasting his "preventive" system with the "repressive" system.  The "repressive" system, he says, has its place "in the army and in general among adults and the judicious, who ought of themselves to know and remember what the law and its regulations demand."  

The repressive system consists in making the law known to the subjects and afterwards watching to discover the transgressors of these laws, and inflicting, when necessary, the punishment deserved.

According to this system, the words and looks of the superior must always be severe and even threatening, and he must avoid all familiarity with his dependents.   

In order to give weight to his authority the Rector must rarely be found among his subjects and as a rule only when it is a question of punishing or threatening.  

But Don Bosco's system is different:

[The preventive system] consists in making the laws and regulations of an institute known, and then watching carefully so that the pupils may at all times be under the vigilant eye of the rector or the assistants, who like loving fathers can converse with them, take the lead in every movement and in a kindly way give advice and correction;  in other words, this system places the pupils in the impossibility of committing faults.

This system is based entirely on reason and religion, and above all on kindness; therefore it excludes all violent punishment, and tries to do without even the slightest chastisement. 

"Excludes all violent punishment, and tries to do without even the slightest chastisement" being what I was going for all along, I was so glad to find this.  

The basic idea is that children are closely supervised at all times by leaders who care for them, model good behavior, encourage reception of the sacraments, participate in their games, and converse with them frequently about behavior norms in a way that "appeals to [their] reason" and "generally enlists [their] accord."  Close supervision and "forewarning" means that there is little chance for a child to commit a fault. Don Bosco believes that young people misbehave, initially at least, because of inattention, not malice:

The primary reason for this system is the thoughtlessness of the young, who in one moment forget the rules of discipline and the penalties for their infringement.  Consequently, a child often becomes culpable and deserving of punishment, which he had not even thought about, and which he had quite forgotten when heedlessly committing the fault which he would certainly have avoided, had a friendly voice warned him.

To apply this system Don Bosco lists several principles of education and discipline.

1.  Close supervision by the people entrusted with the children.  "[The Rector] must always be with his pupils whenever they are not engaged in some occupation, unless they are already being properly supervised by others."

2. Moral teachers who actively lead the pupils to and in each new place or activity. "Teachers, craftmasters, and assistants must be of acknowledged morality... As far as possible the assistants ought to precede the boys to the place where they assemble; they should remain with them until others come to take their place, and never leave the pupils unoccupied."

3.  Allow rowdiness and physical activity.  "Let the boys have full liberty to jump, run, and make as much noise as they please.  Gymnastics, music, theatricals, and outings are most efficacious means of obtaining discipline and of benefiting spiritual and bodily health.  Let care be taken however that the games... are not reprehensible.  'Do anything you like,' the great friend of youth, St. Philip [Neri] used to say, 'as long as you do not sin.'"

4.  Encourage and promote, don't force, the sacraments.  "Frequent confession and communion and daily mass are the pillars which must support the edifice of education, from which we propose to banish the use of threats and the cane.  Never force the boys to frequent the sacraments, but encourage them to do so, and give them every opportunity.... [L]et the beauty, grandeur, and holiness of the Catholic religion be dwelt on..."

"Avoid as a plague the opinion that the first communion should be deferred to a late age... When a child can distinguish between Bread and bread, and shows sufficient knowledge, give no further thought to his age... St. Philip Neri counseled weekly and even more frequent communion."

5.  Exclude bad materials and trouble-making people.  "[P]revent bad books, bad companions, or persons who indulge in improper conversations from entering the college.  A good door keeper is a treasure for a house of education."

6.  Brief daily reflections -- a sort of community examen.  "Every evening after night prayers before the boys go to rest, the Rector or someone in his stead shall address them briefly, giving them advice or counsel concerning what is to be done or... avoided.  Let him try to draw some moral reflection from events that have happened during the day... but his words should never take more than two or three minutes."

7.  Love before fear.   "An educator should seek to win the love of his pupils if he wishes to inspire fear in them.  When he succeeds in doing this, the withholding of some token of kindness is a punishment which stimulates emulation, gives courage, and never degrades.... With the young, punishment is whatever is meant as a punishment.... in the case of some boys a reproachful look is more effective than a slap in the face would be."

8. Do not  shame children.  "Except in very rare cases, corrections and punishments should never be given publicly, but always privately and in the absence of companions."

9.  Employ patient reason and religion. "[T]he greatest prudence and patience should be used to bring the pupil to see his fauly, with the aid of reason and religion."

10.  No corporal punishment.  "To strike a boy in any way, to make him kneel in a painful position, to pull his ears, and other similar punishments, must be absolutely avoided, because the law forbids them, and because they greatly irritate the boys and degrade the educator."

 11.  Clear communication of expectations.  "The Rector shall make sure that the disciplinary measures, including rules and punishments, are known to the pupils, so that  no one can make the excuse that he did not know what was commanded or forbidden."

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I think these principles of Salesian education and discipline are sound ones that speak for themselves, principles that seek to form and transform human nature rather than to fight against it, and principles that respect and elevate the dignity of both child and educator.    When I discovered Don Bosco I felt I'd finally found someone who was truly on my side.    

If only I'd known about him when I was having to make post-baptism chitchat with Father Spare-the-Rod!

Francis de Sales: The patron saint of to-do lists?

I know I said in my last, introductory post to Salesian spirituality that I was going to look first at Don Bosco's "Preventive Method," what with the school year starting up now and all.

But I changed my mind, because I happened to be looking at a short work of St. Francis de Sales, the Spiritual Directory. It's sort of a rule of life for the religious he supervised -- only instead of specifying so mant hours of work, so many of sleep, so many of prayer, etc., he specifies little acts of devotion and intention to be performed throughout the day, connected to rising, worship, work, meals, bedtime -- the whole cycle of an ordinary day. They are, so to speak, spiritual exercises, not for a novena or a retreat but for every day.

"It is true that the Directory proposes many exercises," Francis writes,

Yet it is good and fitting to keep one's interior orderly and busy in the beginning. When, however, after a period of time, persons have put into practice somewhat this multiplicity of interior actions, have become formed and habituated to them and spiritually agile in their use, then the practices should coalesce into a single exercise of greater simplicity, either into a love of complacency, or a love of benevolence, or a love of confidence, or of union and reunion of the heart to the will of God. This multiplicity thus becomes unity.

I like this idea of patiently developing little habits that "coalesce" over time into character.

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The ordinary thing for me to do would be to start where Francis starts, at the beginning of the day, with "Article #1: Rising."

But I was struck instead by Article #2, "Meditation." Or rather, preparation for meditation.

Francis devotes only a short paragraph to instruction on meditation, "the serious practice of [which] is one of the most important of the religious life." Mainly he suggests going to other sources, including his own other works. But he devotes several paragraphs of this article to the preparation.

To form themselves for meditation they will prefer to all other means the exercise of the preparation of the day....By this means they will endeavor to be disposed to carry out their activities competently and commendably.

Invocation. They will invoke the help of God, saying,

"Lord, if you do not care for my soul, it is useless that another should do so." (Ps 127:1)

They will ask him to make them worthy to spend the day with him without offending him. For this purpose, the words of the psalm may be helpful,

"Teach me to do your will, for you are my God. Your good spirit will guide me by the hand on level ground, and your divine majesty by its inexpressible love and boundless charity will give me true life."

Foresight. This is simply a preview or conjecture of all that could happen during the course of the day. Thus, with the grace of Our Lord, they will wisely and prudently anticipate occasions which could take them by surprise.

Plan of Action. They will carefully plan and seek out the best means to avoid any faults. They will also arrange, in an orderly fashion, what, in their opinion, is proper for them to do.

Resolution. They will make a firm resolution to obey the will of God, especially during the present day. To this end, they will use the words of the royal prophet David, "My soul, will you not cheerfully obey the holy will of God, seeing that your salvation comes from his?"

Surely this God of infinite majesty and admittedly worthy of every honor and service can only be neglected by us through lack of courage. Let us, therefore, be consoled and strengthened by this beautiful verse of the psalmist:

"Let evil man do their worst against me. The Lord, the king, can overcome them all. Let the world complain about me to its heart's content. This means little to me because he who holds sway over all the angelic spirits is my protector." (Ps. 99:1)

Recommendation. They will entrust themselves and all their concerns into the hands of God's eternal goodness and ask him to consider them as always so commended. Leaving to him the complete care of what they are and what he wants them to be, they will say with all their heart:

"I have asked you one thing, O Jesus, my Lord, and I shall ask you again and again, namely that I may faithfully carry out your loving will all the day of my poor and pitiable life." (Ps 27:4; 40:9)

"I commend to you, O gracious Lord, my soul, my life, my heart, my memory, my understanding and my will. Grant that in and with all these, I may serve you, love you, please and honor you forever." (Ps. 31:6, Lk 23:46)

Okay. Do you see what he did there?

St. Francis has just unified the concepts of "the morning offering" and "the to-do list."

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Before meditation, in fact as part of the preparation for meditation, St. Francis prescribes thinking about all the things that you expect to encounter during the day, anticipate difficulties, carefully plan (with an eye towards avoiding faults -- I tend to skip that step when making to-do lists), then "arrange in an orderly fashion what ... is proper... to do."

Did you catch those last two words?

You finish up your orderly-arranged to-do list with two more steps I commonly skip: resolving to obey the will of God, and entrusting yourself, with all your "concerns" (including, we are to assume, all the items on your aforementioned to-do list), into God's hands.

It turns out that you don't have to try hard to push back the items that are rushing at you and demanding your attention while you are trying to make your morning offering.

It turns out that you don't have to guiltily say to yourself, "I'll do my morning offering as soon as I write my to-do list."

It turns out that you've been a bit silly, trying to add "Say Morning Offering" to the top of the to-do list.

St. Francis suggests that the to-do list can itself be the morning offering. He sanctifies it: embedding it in an exercise of invoking God's help, planning tasks with an eye to avoiding faults, resolving to do God's will, and ultimately entrusting the outcome to God's providence.

And this is a perfect example of why St. Francis draws me. I am used to being made to feel, oh, I don't know, insufficiently go-with-the-flowish, insufficiently trusting of God; that my desire for order and efficiency is somehow a marker of a lack of love. That I should want to run to God in prayer more than I should want to make an Action Plan, and that my itchiness until All The Things are safely written down, that itchiness which so interferes with making prayer my first act of the day, is a sign of weakness and a thorn in the flesh.

What's this? Rather than putting holiness on my to-do list, I can make my to-do list holy. This is a spiritual exercise I can roll up my sleeves and tackle, true multitasking: setting out my daily plans, right there, on the altar of offering.

 

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Augustine and evolution.

Today I cracked open St. Augustine's On The Literal Meaning of Genesis in order to find bits for my ninth-grader's evolutionary biology course.  

I plan to begin the course with some cultural and social context for evolutionary theory, and I was irritated to discover that the summary in the college textbooks went straight from Plato's and Aristotle's ideas to "Later, Christians interpreted the biblical account of Genesis literally and concluded that each species had been created individually by God in the same form it has today."  I've been familiar with the idea that Augustine's philosophies allowed for evolutionary development for a long time (since reading the sci-fi classic A Canticle for Leibowitz, I think!) , so I set about going to the source.

The first 22 paragraphs or so should cure anyone of the notion that asking probing questions about the logical contradictions in Genesis is a modern phenomenon.  Augustine lists many such questions.  For example:

So why was the sun made with authority over the day to give light upon the earth if that light which had also been called 'day' had been sufficient for the making of the day? Or was that earlier light illuminating higher regions far from the earth so that it could not be perceived on earth, and thus it was necessary for the sun to be made? ... It can scarcely be supposed, after all, that it was put out so that nocturnal darkness might follow, and then lit again so that morning might be made, before the sun took on this task.

Augustine says that the six-day structure and series of creative events that are described in Genesis has a literary and pedigogical, not a historical, purpose:

It is not because formless matter is prior in time to things formed from it, since they are both created simultaneously together... but because that which something is made out of is still prior at its source, even if not in time, to what is made from it, that scripture could divide in the time it takes to state them what God did not divide in the time it took to make them.

 ...Since both [matter and form] had to be mentioned by scripture and both could not be mentioned simultaneously, can anyone doubt that what something was made out of had to be mentioned before what was made out of it?

... If two things cannot be named simultaneously, how much less can their stories be told simultaneously! So then, there can be no doubt at all that this formless basic material, almost the same as nothingness though it be, was still made by none but God, and was simultaneously created with the things that were formed from it.

The particular choice of which things are created on which days is not to establish order in a sense of a timeline, but order in a sense of classification.  For example, why plants are included on the third day:

Here we should note the skillful touch of the one who put the text into shape; because grasses and trees are sorts of creatures quite distinct from the specific form of the lands and the waters... they are spoken of separately as coming from the earth... it is also separately indicated that God saw that it was good.

But all the same, because being fixed there by their roots they are continuous with the soil of the earth and entwined in it, he wished these things as well to belong to the same day.

He also goes on to explain, for example, that the creation of sun, moon, and stars is described as following the creation of land and plants because "fixed" things come before "moving" things in the logical structure.

I got the impression as I read that just as Augustine would disapprove of insisting on a six-day creation, he would disapprove of insisting that the scripture "got the science right" with respect to, e.g., light coming first, water-animals preceding land-animals, and so forth. Trying to put together some sort of "Genesis Code' that matches what we observe about the early days of Earth and the life on it, point by point, with the events of the six days of creation, would be missing the point entirely.

Nevertheless, Augustine spends a great deal of time talking about natural philosophy as it existed in his time and as it was handed down from earlier times. He is interested in setting up a correspondence in the sense of dialogue between the two bodies of knowledge. 

For example, here's a place where he essentially says to an interlocutor, "Your scriptural interpretation is invalid, and you wouldn't make that mistake if you knew more science":

Some people...have expressed the opinion that the reason fishes are not called [in Genesis] 'live souls' but 'reptiles of live souls' is that they lack any kind of memory or form of life even remotely approaching rationality. But this opinion comes simply from insufficient experience, because there are authors who have described many wonderful things that they have been able to observe in fish-ponds... It is still absolutely certain that fishes have memory. This is something I have myself experienced, and anyone who wants to can experience it too.

There is, you see, a large fountain in the district of Bulla that is chock-full of fish.  People are habitually looking down into it and throwing in things which the fish will rush at together to grab first, or fight among themselves to tear them to bits.  Being now used to this kind of feeding, whenever people stroll round the rim of the fountain, the fish too will swim back and forth with them in a shoal, waiting for those whose presence they are aware of to throw something in.  

From what I can tell, it sounds like some naturalists of Augustine's day said that Genesis was obviously boneheaded because it said "Let the waters produce" (besides crawling things) "flying things," when everyone knew that birds are clearly of the airy element, or perhaps of the earthy element.  He spends some time, therefore, pointing out logical inconsistencies in his day's settled science:

If the reason they give [for fish being watery and birds being earthy] ... is that fishes do not have feet, then it means seals do not belong to the water, nor serpents or snails to the land or earth... As for dragons, which lack feet, they are said to take their rest in caves and to soar up into the air. While these are not too easy to come across, this kind of animated creature is for all that definitely mentioned not only in [scripture] but also in that of the [pagan Greek and Latin legends].

(I liked the bit about dragons not being too easy to come across. It's like he's saying he's never personally observed the effect but it has been attested to in the literature.)

 He finds particular significance in the repeated phrase "according to kind":

The reader may also wonder...whether the phrase 'according to kind' comes up again and again just by chance... or whether there is some meaning in it, as though they were already in existence beforehand, though the account of their creation is only now being given... In fact this expression begins to be used about the grasses and the trees, and so on until we get to these terrestrial animals... Is it because these things sprang into being in such a way that others would be born of them and in succeeding to them would preserve the shape and form of their origin?... 

This then is the significance of 'according to kind,' where we are to understand both the efficacious force in the seed and the likeness of succeeding generations to their predecessors, because none of them was created just to exist once and for all by itself, whether to continue for ever, or to pass away without none to succeed it.

This doesn't actually talk about evolution, of course, but of the generations of animals producing offspring of the same kind.  Still, it sets the stage for Augustine to talk about the arising of animals which were not present in the beginning and which can be observed in his time by the best natural scientists available...

...and no, we're not talking of evolution, but spontaneous generation!  Augustine subscribes to the then-current scientific belief that maggots and such are spontaneously generated in rotting meat, and for completeness explains how they could then have been created in the original establishment of things.

As for [those tiny creatures] that are generated from the bodies of animals, especially dead ones, it wold be quite ridiculous to say that they were created at the same time as the animals themselves were, unless possibly there was some natural tendency in all animated bodies... as it were, the first beginnings of the future animalcules, which were going to arise... all things being put in motion without any change in him by the creator.

Note that bit about God having created the "natural tendency in all animated bodies... the first beginnings of the future animals which were going to arise."

As I read through this, I can hear in my head the voice of innumerable adolescents and overgrown adolescents, and possibly some esteemed biologist-authors as well, challenging, "Oh yeah?  Well if your religion can co-exist with science then how come it says the earth was created before the stars then?" and thinking they were the first ever to come up with such a wise and brilliant argument.  It's partly to head this sort of thing off at its source that I want my kids to read classical Christian authors, even in bits and pieces.

A great deal of thought (as well as contemplation of observations from the natural world) went into ancient metaphysics, and that it's simply not true that Christians before Darwin uniformly believed in a young earth and a literal six-day creation.  

In Book V,  Augustine argues that the act of creation of everything material (including time) had to have been a single instantaneous act rather than a series of acts:

Creatures [including inanimate objects] once made began to run with their movements along the tracks of time, which means it is pointless to look for times before any creature, as though times could be found before times....

So it is time that begins from the creation rather than the creation from time, while both are from God...

Nor should the statement that time begins from the creation be taken to imply that time is not a creature...

Accordingly when we reflect upon the first establishment of creatures in the works of God from which he rested on the seventh day, we should not think either of those days as being like these ones governed by the sun, nor of that working as resembling the way God now works in time;

but we should reflect rather upon the work from which times began, the work of making all things at once, simultaneously, and also endowing them with an order that is not set by intervals of time but by the linking of causes, so that the things that were made simultaneously might also be brought to perfection by the sixfold representation of the day."

BAM.

And people think this is a *modern* idea, because Stephen Hawking, or something.

Once we get to the particular creation of man, things continue to get interesting:

After saying 'to our image,' he immediately added, 'and let him have authority over the fishes [etc.],' giving us to understand that it was in the very factor in which he surpasses non-rational animate beings that man was made to God's image. That, of course, is reason itself, or mind or intelligence... it was not in the features of the body but in a certain form of the illuminated mind." 

From this I get: "Man" cannot said to have been "created" until we are talking about rational man. Man with a certain form of the illuminated mind.  And it isn't clear that we would be able to discern which fossils would have come from organisms who possessed that "certain form."

It seems to me that we don't have to understand precisely what the distinction is between the mind of a human and the brain-processes of other animals.  Without that, we can still accept that scripture is telling us that there is some distinction, possibly unmeasurable, some illumination that belongs properly to humans but not to nonhuman animals, and that illumination is what is meant by "in the image of God."

I think we run off the rails by trying to force that distinctive characteristic of human-ness to be described by only what we can measure with our current technology. Augustine's writing records a time when people were wasting a lot of brain power either trying to get the scriptures to match up with earth/air/water/fire concepts of matter, or trying to use those concepts to refute scripture.

Augustine says that the "seventh day" is the division between "how God worked then" and "how God is still working."  "How God is working now" includes, then, all the eons of work between the act of creation and the present day.  God doesn't "create through evolution."  He created; now, creation evolves, as long as he works in it.

"Let us believe, or if we are able to, let us even understand that God is working until now in such a way that if his working were to be withheld from the things he has set up, they would simply collapse...

"If we suppose that he now sets any creature in place in such a way that he did not insert the kind of thing it is into that first construction of his, we are openly contradicting what scripture says, that he finished and completed all his works on the sixth day. Yes, within the categories of the various kinds of thing which he set up at first, he manifestly makes many new things which he did not make then. But he cannot rightly be thought to set up any new kind, since he did then complete them all.

And so by his hidden power he sets the whole of his creation in motion, and while it is whirled around with that movement, while angels carry out his orders, while the constellations circle round their courses, while the winds change, while the abyss of waters is stirred by tides and agitated by cyclones and waterspouts even through the air, while green things pullulate and evolve their own seeds, while animals are produced and lead their various lives, each kind according to its bent, while the wicked are permitted to vex the just, he unwinds the ages which he had as it were folded into the universe when it was first set up. These, however would not go on being unwound along their tracks, if the one who set them going stopped moving them on by his provident regulation."

I posted much of this on Facebook, and along the way snagged a couple of recommendations for future reading:

• Amy Welborn suggested In the Beginning:  A Catholic Understanding of Creation and the Fall by Pope Benedict I né Joseph Ratzinger.
• Melanie suggested The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy Sayers.

I don't know if I'll get to them in time to put them in my course, but they do sound like good suggestions.  The Ratzinger book probably would have saved me a lot of time had I known about it before I started...

"By means of images."

From today's Office of Readings, the second reading, from the Jerusalem Catecheses:

When we were baptized into Christ and clothed ourselves in him, we were transformed into the likeness of the Son of God. Having destined us to be his adopted sons, God gave us a likeness to Christ in his glory, and living as we do in communion with Christ, God’s anointed, we ourselves are rightly called “the anointed ones.” When he said: Do not touch my anointed ones, God was speaking of us.

We became “the anointed ones” when we received the sign of the Holy Spirit. Indeed, everything took place in us by means of images, because we ourselves are images of Christ. Christ bathed in the river Jordan, imparting to its waters the fragrance of his divinity, and when he came up from them the Holy Spirit descended upon him, like resting upon like. So we also, after coming up from the sacred waters of baptism, were anointed with chrism, which signifies the Holy Spirit, by whom Christ was anointed and of whom blessed Isaiah prophesied in the name of the Lord: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me. He has sent me to preach good news to the poor.

The bit that I have underlined is what struck me this morning.

Sometimes I wonder where Western Civilization got the idea of reading so much into everything (and, I suppose, writing so much into everything). It reminds me of English class, sometimes, sifting through a novel or a poem, looking for this or that object that serves as a symbol or a totem. I remember in an essay in a college literature class, writing something about one character playing keepaway with another's keys; a violation, I wrote, because the keys were "symbols of autonomy." I remember students teasing one of my high school teachers as she tried to squeeze a little extra meaning out of the discarded fruit rinds being carted away on the mornings after Gatsby's parties. The habit of looking for hidden meanings in the words and objects that we find in our books is one I enjoy, a bit of a game I play with an author (but be careful; some authors bite). Certain books yield up new shoots every year if we read them regularly, so we've learned.

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In any case, we have these tools of literary analysis, and we are willing to use them even on fruit rinds, so by gosh we are going to use them on the Bible too, no? So, you see, when the Israelites passed dry shod through the sea, it was a kind of foreshadowing. All that bit with the scapegoat, too. And the Ark is a type of Mary, and that bit about the snake-crushing means that Mary is to be another Eve, and...

Water. Oil. Fire. Snakes!

Is it possible that we read the Old Testament a bit too much as we would read a modern novel? Do we come to it with a habit from English class? Is that really the right tool, or is it only the tool we have and therefore we wish to use it? Or is it that the notion of symbol and hidden meaning is common to both? Or is this literary habit something we inherit from an older tradition? Why should it be so?

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Lines like the one I highlighted above, which date probably to the fourth century, reassure me a bit that we are still on track. Because I'm really confident in the idea that human beings are made "in the image of God," and that we are meant to become images of God-in-flesh-made-manifest, of Christ. God made us to look a certain way -- like an animal -- but carry something unseen and intangible, yet real -- intelligence, and will. We have meaning. Each of us looks like a thing but what each of us is, is a person.

We do not look like gods, we are not gods, but we represent the God. We can do something that is like what a Creator does, in a smaller way; we also craft artifacts that bear meaning. For instance, we can assemble a pile of vegetable matter, clay, and blackened bits into something that tells a whole story to anyone who has time to curl up with it on a lazy afternoon. And we can tell the story too, and put into it shadowy people who represent real people, and pasteboard props (like keys, or fruit rinds) that represent real virtues or vices, and in the moving-about of these characters and props, transmit secret messages. Indeed we could have saved time by merely writing out the message; but where would have been the fun in that?

And of course, when one remembers (in the middle of a blog post, say) that Jesus spoke in parables, one has another reason to have confidence in symbolic readings.

If we are made an image, then we should be able to speak the language of image.

How fun to think, reading over this, that we have such pasteboard props in our real, physical lives. We have water that looks like water, but when we put on a certain washing-up play with this water as a necessary prop, it enacts a real (though unseen) rebirth:

 

This baptism is no removal of physical stain, but the pledge to God of an irreproachable conscience through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. (1 Peter -- today's first reading in the Office)

The same with our oil, and our wine, and our bread.

It's because we are images that we make these transitions best by means of images, say the Jerusalem Catecheses. If nothing else, the materials of the sacraments provide us with a means of feeling confident that we have done, at least in this area, what God requires of us. They are a balm against the constant fear that we are not good enough to attain God's mercy: of course we are not good enough, cannot make ourselves good enough, but we can do the things He has asked us to do as signs of our interior commitment -- as a pledge -- and we can trust in the promises He has made regarding them, not because we are good but because He is trustworthy, and he asks us to do no more than what we can do... which is to put on these little plays with intention to do His will.

I like to think that the sets and the props and the scripts were carefully designed so that the hidden messages are passed onstage exactly the way they need to be passed in the unseen reality. Baptism requires water, and (crucial if you ask me) it requires one other person who need not himself be a baptized person; it is not possible, even in the direst of emergencies, for a person to baptize himself, but any other willing person can do it; the one to be baptized can even instruct his baptizer. Somehow this sacrament -- which is the only method on earth by which we are permitted to feel sure we can enter heaven -- requires two to be gathered together, and a few drops at least of a substance we cannot live without. Somehow, maybe, that kind of life is really -- not just in the play -- propagated only from human contact.

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Shadows. A very quick post.

Today's reading in the Office of Readings: the beginning of the tenth chapter of Hebrews, starting with

Since the law has only a shadow of the good things to come, and not the very image of them, it can never make perfect those who come to worship by the same sacrifices that they offer continually each year. Otherwise, would not the sacrifices have ceased to be offered, since the worshipers, once cleansed, would no longer have had any consciousness of sins?

But in those sacrifices there is only a yearly remembrance of sins, for it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats take away sins. For this reason, when he came into the world, he said: “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me; holocausts and sin offerings you took no delight in. Then I said, ‘As is written of me in the scroll, Behold, I come to do your will, O God.’”

I never noticed that bit about the shadow and the "very (I.e., true) image." Quite like Plato and the cave. I googled around a bit this morning to see if scholars thought that Plato had actually influenced the epistle (though obviously many people, including presumably translators, have been influenced by both), and I came upon a Google Books reference on the subject.

I can't copy the whole piece, or even read it all online, but at least part of the discussion touched on the nuances in the Greek of the relationship between the "shadow" and the "true form." Does it suggest that the "shadow" is an inferior, flat sort of copy of an original "true image" that precedes it, or does it suggest that the "shadow" is a preliminary sketch or draft version of a perfected form that is yet to come?

I just thought I would like to draw attention to this specific kind of distinction between two ways of viewing the same sort of concept, that the material world is an inferior or "flat" version of a higher reality. I have always thought of Plato's cave as a proto-Christian concept; but I really like the notion that one kind of inferior-image-of-a-greater-reality is a shadow or copy cast by an original, and another kind is a prefiguration or draft that is to be fulfilled by its perfected form.

We can, of course, go all meta on the subject by suggesting that Plato's concept was itself a shadow of the Christian version. And that the directionality of that relationship gives us a hint, embedded in the universe of human culture, to the direction we should assign to the relationship of image-and-reality.

Now I feel like rereading Anathem and Flatland and The Last Battle and drawing directed graphs.

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Satisfying bleakness.

I left Mark and his dad with my daughter in her hospital room yesterday afternoon so I could go to Mass at a parish on this side of town. The rest of the family will go this morning, the usual place, the usual time. Now that the 9- and 13-yo boys are both serving Mass, we have a little less flexibility than we used to.

I'm not naming names, but when I opened that door I walked into the bleakest-looking sanctuary I have ever seen.

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It isn't ugly, per se; there was a symmetry and a proportion to it that satisfied the mathematical eye. And it isn't haphazard or cluttered; clearly someone had inflicted this design with a sense of purpose. So I wouldn't call it painful to look at.

But it isn't a place of spareness and simplicity, either, which has its place, if only among monks. It is more like a basketball court repurposed as a tasteful dungeon.

The sanctuary there has no foyer; one walks through the double doors and finds oneself immediately at the entrance of the center aisle, face to face with a smiling usher handing out photocopied 11x14 sheets with a couple of hymns and the Nicene creed printed on them. The pews are arranged in forward-facing ranks. The space is a large box, with recessed can lights in the ceiling far above, pointed straight down. There are square windows crisscrossed with bars that break them into triangles, of frosted glass that filters the light to thin gray, around the very top of the walls. The total effect is very dim despite the large number of can lights. The quantity of light is enough to see by, but its quality is that of a late afternoon, with thunderclouds gathering but never releasing their rain.

The walls themselves are beige brick all the way up to the ceiling. A couple of wide rectangular pillars, the same beige brick, rise on either side of the altar area. Low on the broad face of one is bolted a dull metal Madonna-and-child, symmetrical, hooded, expressionlessly gazing straight forward from mask-like, slot-eyed faces. This piece is surrounded by tea lights each also bolted to the wall.

There is a crucifix, too small for the vast space, hanging on a surface that serves as a signifier of a reredos. This reredos rises in a peak -- so it also serves as a signifier of a sanctuary-shaped space -- and is made of vertical bands of dark wood. The bands are so high-contrast that if you gaze at them or at the crucifix for more than a few seconds and then look away, their ghosts stay imprinted on your retinas, casting stripes everywhere that then disappear.

The tabernacle is a cube with a square pattern of black squares, tucked behind the Madonna's pillar. The altar cloth is plain. Behind the altar are hung three plain narrow banners, off-center, for Ordinary Time. There is a single pot of orange mums next to the priest's chair.

I took a seat in a pew near the front. I was ten minutes early, and there were maybe five other people in the pews. I put down a kneeler and tried to kneel on it, but the kneeler was set so close to the pew in front that my pregnant belly could not fit, so I had to sit back down.

An older man carrying an iPad and wearing a tie was dashing about asking questions; his voice echoed in the space, muffling his words, but it was clear enough that he was tasked with filling vacant slots, perhaps trying find a parishioner who would agree to serve as lector. He leaned over and asked a question of the woman behind me; she said she didn't have her reading glasses. Meanwhile, parishioners were starting to come in through the double doors from the parking lot. They spoke to each other and the reverberating rumbles of their voices in the bare brick box grew louder and louder, their words still indistinct.

"Father." The one clear word came from behind me and startled me so that I half turned. The speaker was a youngish man seated in a pew back and to my left, leaning forward over a metal rubber-tipped cane. I supposed he had been greeting the priest, whom I could not see but who might have been the man dressed in a black short-sleeved shirt and black pants disappearing just now behind the reredos. When I turned the young man with the cane stared back at me and I turned back, a little embarrassed.

Even though the space objectively offended my sight and hearing, something about the sanctuary atmosphere felt weirdly appropriate. I have had a bleak sort of week, starting out by missing Mass in favor of signing in to the emergency room downstairs. I have been plunged into knowing what it is to be sinful and sorrowful; I think a piece of the Memorare has fallen into place for me this week. I have been tired and afraid and lonely, and anguished, and watched my daughter be tired and afraid and lonely and hurting. I have not done any of the things I meant to do this week, and I find I don't care.

So I sat there and thought: Maybe this is perfect, the cherry on top. I get to go to Mass here in this place. God is here too, and I know that, and maybe this is just the reminder I need, that God is in the bleak places.

I sat back, thinking to myself in an Eeyore sort of way, that it was a rather satisfying end to the week.

Then the dashing-about man walked up from the side and put the book of the gospels on a stand at the edge. Next the priest, vested, came out in front and announced that the pianist had not shown up and so the Mass would be "somewhat abbreviated." "Please rise," he said cheerfully. And he climbed right up the steps and launched into "The Lord be with you."

And Mass started, processionless, music-free, chant-free. Readers, there was no Gloria, not even a spoken one. There was no Alleluia, not even a spoken one. I found myself somewhere sparer even than Lent.

Well. I wasn't even sure if this was allowed, but I guess (in an Eeyore sort of way, or perhaps by now we were crossing into Marvin the Paranoid Android territory) it was even more satisfying than I had originally thought.

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The readings being the story of Aaron and Hur holding up Moses's arms until Joshua defeats the Amalekites, and the parable of the widow pestering the corrupt judge until in exasperation he rules in her favor, the homily turned out to be an exhortation on spiritual persistence.

Okay then.

Afterwards, after kneeling for a brief prayer of thanksgiving (well, sort of, with my butt on the pew to make room for my belly), I determined to leave quickly and quietly, getting back to my daughter. I remembered what St. Francis de Sales wrote in the Introduction to the Devout Life:

When you have finished your meditation, take care to keep your heart undisturbed lest you spill the balm it has received: in other words, keep silence as long as possible and transfer your attention to other things quietly, trying to retain the fruits of your prayer as long as you can.

A man who carries a vessel full of some precious liquid walks very carefully, looking neither right nor left but straight ahead to avoid stumbling over a stone or making a false step, making sure that the vessel is well balanced.

This is how you must act after prayer, trying not to be too quickly distracted; for example, should you meet someone you must speak to, accept this as unavoidable, but keep a guard on your heart, so that you spill as little of the balm of prayer as possible.

As I passed by, the young man with the cane looked straight at me and said: "God bless you."

I looked back at him and replied automatically, "You too." I didn't stop but went on out to the car, pondering, hefting my balm.

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Big-person questions.

Yesterday morning my daughter, who was sitting in a wheelchair next to her IV pole, looked across the rumpled hospital bed at me and asked, with a nearly expressionless face, "Is this the kind of sickness that can make me... that can make people... die?"

I said: "When people have an appendix that gets as sick as yours did, if they don't get the surgery you had, then yes, they do sometimes die. You were very, very sick before your surgery. But we took you to the hospital, and the radiologist figured out what was wrong, and right away you went into surgery, so you are going to get better. Almost everyone gets better after they have the surgery you had. And this is a very good hospital."

She thought about that for a while.

I said: "Were you worried about that?"

"Yes."

"I'm glad you asked me about it so I could answer you."

She looked back at me with almost no expression on her face. There had been no hint of weeping or of anger or of anything else.

Then she said: "Why does God make some people get sick?"

My first thought was: Am I living in some kind of schlocky TV show where children get sick and ask "Why does God make people get sick?"

And then I thought, I just got handed a major Catholic-parent pop quiz. Better get this one right.

So I said something I keep in my pocket to buy myself time:

"That is a question that many very smart people have been talking about and discussing for a very long time. It is one of the most important questions that people have ever come up with. So I am glad you are thinking about it, because everyone has to ask it eventually."

And then I said:

"Some people think that it isn't God who makes people get sick. They have the idea that it was when original sin came into the world, that sickness and suffering came into the world with it."

She looked at me expressionlessly.

I continued: "And other people say that God lets some people get sick so that all of us can learn how to be compassionate and kind to each other. By helping the people who are suffering."

She nodded -- not in a "yes, I agree with you" way, nor in a "That makes sense, Mom" kind of way, but in a "That's enough out of you" way. She looked down into her lap.

I waited a moment and then I added, "That really is an important question. People have been talking and wondering about the answer to that since before Jesus was born, even. It's in the book of Job."

She asked to be put back in her bed. I helped get her in -- she is able to scoot herself around a little bit, and I am able to lift her a little bit, so together we can do it -- and soon she dropped off to sleep.

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I sat back down in the vinyl recliner in the dimmed room -- the sunlight filtered through the curtains we had drawn across the east-and fired up iBreviary for the first time since we got here. Yesterday was the feast of St. Ignatius of Antioch, one of my favorites. I clicked the "Lauds" button and decided on the common of martyrs.

The reading was second Corinthians 1:3-5:

Praised be the God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all consolation! He comforts us in all our afflictions and thus enables us to comfort those who are in trouble, with the same consolation we have received from him. As we have shared much in the suffering of Christ, so through Christ do we share abundantly in his consolation.

What do you think? Did I pass the quiz? I think maybe I got a fifty percent.

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This morning things are looking up. Catheter is out, although she has a job to do before she can be sure that she won't have to have it in again; also, she has been promised a chance to try mashed potatoes at lunchtime. Mark went to work for a couple of hours. I am about to comb her hair while she sits in a wheelchair and watches The Price is Right.

The surgical team is optimistic that she will not develop a secondary infection, since there has been no fever. We are basically waiting for the digestive system to start working again, including fluids in and out, before she can come off the IV and be discharged.

Thanks for all your prayers. If you feel moved to add more, let's all ask that she not need another catheter because that part wasn't any fun at all....

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Enacting mercy, whether or not it exists.

The works of mercy are all the works of almsgiving or "charity." According to the Catholic Encyclopedia:

The traditional enumeration of the corporal works of mercy is as follows:

• To feed the hungry;
• To give drink to the thirsty;
• To clothe the naked;
• To harbour the harbourless;
• To visit the sick;
• To ransom the captive;
• To bury the dead.

The spiritual works of mercy are:

• To instruct the ignorant;
• To counsel the doubtful;
• To admonish sinners;
• To bear wrongs patiently;
• To forgive offences willingly;
• To comfort the afflicted;
• To pray for the living and the dead.

 

From Disputations:

Rocco Palmo quotes Pope Francis:

"We cannot follow Jesus on the way of charity if we don't love those around us first of all. It's necessary to do the works of mercy with mercy! The works of charity with charity!"

Which is probably why I don't often find instructing the ignorant and admonishing the sinner brings me much peace.

Um.  Yeah.

So here's the question of the day.   If you can't summon up mercy and charity in your heart as the reason to perform any of these works...

...if you have some other reason...

...is it better to try to fake it and perform them anyway, or is it better to refrain?