bearing blog

The seventh corporal work of mercy.

Philando Castile (whom I mentioned in a post the other day) was laid to rest here in the Twin Cities on Thursday. Mr. Castile's funeral was hosted by the Cathedral of St. Paul at the request of Valerie Castile, his mother. There are some moving photos taken outside the building here at this article from the St. Paul newspaper website. There you can also view photos of the program detailing the chosen readings and speakers.

At the end of the article are comments, which I in no way recommend you to read. Some of them gave me the impression that the Archdiocese has received some comments from persons identifying as Catholic who object to the Cathedral's welcoming the Castile family to bury their son at a public ecumenical service. Castile was not a Catholic, and a Baptist minister was invited to deliver a sermon, while the rector of the Cathedral delivered introductory prayers.

My impression was strengthened by the Cathedral's release of the following statement:

 

The Archdiocese was honored that Philando Castile’s mother, desiring that her son’s funeral be an opportunity for “people to come together in a new way,” thought our cathedral could be a fitting setting for an ecumenical service at which our community could unite with her family to pray for peace and reconciliation.

During his general audience on September 9, 2015, Pope Francis said “the assembly of Jesus takes the form of a family and of a hospitable family, not an exclusive, closed sect.”

At this difficult moment we feel privileged to have the opportunity to offer hospitality to the Castile family and to our hurting community.

We are praying that our cathedral might serve as a place where all might encounter a God who offers consolation and hope.

 

I endorse this wholeheartedly.

Some of the objections to Mr. Castile's burial from the Cathedral are of a character that I will not dignify with a rebuttal.

On the other hand, the question "Why can Mr. Castile, a non-Catholic, have a 'Catholic funeral?'" is a reasonable one, even if expressed--rather insensitively--during the funeral in question, to judge from the time-stamps on the various comments. So is the corollary continuation "....when my brother/dad/son/grandpa was not allowed to have one?"

Let me just offer some context for that one.

The term "Catholic funeral" is imprecise. There is such a thing as a Requiem Mass, which is the quintessential "Catholic funeral." It can only take place inside a Catholic church or Catholic chapel.

There is also among the ecclesiastical funeral rites a "Funeral Liturgy Outside Mass," which is also a type of Catholic funeral. If you have been to a "Catholic funeral" in a funeral home chapel, in a private home, or in a cemetery chapel, that is what you most likely experienced. Sometimes (for example, in families that include Catholic and non-Catholic members) this is deemed the most fitting pastoral choice regardless of the location of the funeral.

It is also permitted (in fact it is encouraged!) to hold ecumenical prayer gatherings inside Catholic churches, presided over by Catholic and non-Catholic clergy, for many different reasons. These can include funerals and memorial services. Mr. Castile's funeral would seem to fall into this category.

Finally, at any memorial service at all, at a gravesite, in another church, at a wake, in someone's home: if a Catholic priest happens to be in attendance, he might accept an invitation to offer prayers or a blessing.

The first two categories, because they belong to the ecclesiastical funeral rites, are properly called "Catholic funerals." The latter two are not.

 

The diocese and the pastor have leeway in deciding who may or may not be buried according to the ecclesiastical rites, anyway. In some dioceses, under some circumstances, a baptized non-Catholic may be buried with full funeral rites. In other dioceses and in other circumstances, it may not be allowed. It can seem as if the standards are looser for non-Catholics than for Catholics, because in some dioceses a so-called "non-practicing" Catholic might not be permitted a "Catholic funeral" while a person who never was a Catholic might be permitted one, or at least might be buried in a Catholic cemetery.

It is undoubtedly upsetting for a bereaved family, at a vulnerable time, to be told that their loved one cannot receive a requiem Mass, or that a requiem Mass cannot be held at the location and/or time that they are planning to have the funeral, or that the deceased is ineligible for the ecclesiastical rites at all. Some of the commentary and pushback probably comes from this place.

To that I can only say: This post is the short answer giving reasons why Philando Castile could be permitted a memorial service in the Cathedral. There really is no short answer as to why some particular person might not be permitted the type of funeral desired by his or her family. You would have to talk to the pastor, and listen to the explanation, and then possibly do a lot of reading, in order to understand that. No short answer. I am sorry I cannot help relieve that pain.

 

The purpose of Catholic ecumenism is to foster true Christian unity. When Valerie Castile called the Cathedral and asked that it host her son's funeral "for people to come together in a new way," this was precisely what she was asking -- and she asked it not just of the Cathedral parish, but of the whole local church, the diocese. In a sense she asked it of our universal Church.

Who are we to turn her son away?

If I had been the one to take that call, I would have wept in humility before Mrs. Castile. It was she who honored our church, not the other way around, by reaching out to us.

Furthermore, everyone knows that Mr. Castile's funeral was not just a funeral. It was also a gathering to call for peace, justice (in the Christian sense), and love in the wider community.

For what the Catholic Church has said about ecumenism, I encourage you to refer to the Pontifical Council's Directory for Application of Principle and Norms on Ecumenism (link). Here is an excerpt:

108. Where appropriate, Catholics should be encouraged, in accordance with the Church's norms, to join in prayer with Christians of other Churches and ecclesial Communities. Such prayers in common are certainly a very effective means of petitioning for the grace of unity, and they are a genuine expression of the ties which still bind Catholics to these other Christians. Shared prayer is in itself a way to spiritual reconciliation.

109. Prayer in common is recommended for Catholics and other Christians so that together they may put before God the needs and problems they share—e.g., peace, social concerns, mutual charity among people, the dignity of the family, the effects of poverty, hunger and violence, etc. The same may be said of occasions when, according to circumstances, a nation, region or community wishes to make a common act of thanksgiving or petition to God, as on a national holiday, at a time of public disaster or mourning, on a day set aside for remembrance of those who have died for their country, etc. This kind of prayer is also recommended when Christians hold meetings for study or common action.

110. Shared prayer should, however, be particularly concerned with the res- toration of Christian unity. It can centre, e.g. on the mystery of the Church and its unity, on baptism as a sacramental bond of unity, or on the renewal of personal and community life as a necessary means to achieving unity. Prayer of this type is particularly recommended during the "Week of Prayer for Christian Unity" or in the period between Ascension and Pentecost.

111. Representatives of the Churches, ecclesial Communities or other groups concerned should cooperate and prepare together such prayer. They should decide among themselves the way in which each is to take part, choose the themes and select the Scripture readings, hymns and prayers.

I see no evidence at all that Mr. Castile's memorial service was not a suitable instance of the sort of ecumenism discussed in this document.

(Incidentally, paragraphs 120 and 121 of this same document explicitly grant to the local ordinary -- normally the bishop -- the discretion of offering full funeral rights as well as prayers and blessings of other types to non-Catholics.)

For a deeper examination of the role of ecumenism, one could consult two documents of the Second Vatican Council in particular, Lumen Gentium and Unitatis Redintegratio.

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I am grateful to Mrs. Castile for reaching out to our diocese, and I am glad that our Cathedral rector responded with welcome. I'm sorry that anyone calling themselves Catholic publicly objected to the rector's decision, which was entirely in accord with Catholic teachings. May Mr. Castile rest in peace, and may eternal light shine upon him.

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Laudato Si': Finally finished it.

Sometimes, when we're on a long drive, I read to Mark while he drives.  We pick some nonfiction book that we think will spark an interesting discussion -- usually something we think we'll like, sometimes a work that we'll have more fun attacking and poking holes in.    On our recent trip to Ohio, our book for the way down was a 2013 book called The Righteous Mind:  Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt.  That was a really thought-provoking one, which emerged with only a few holes in it, and I hope to blog a review pretty soon.  On the way back up, we read Laudato Si' from start to finish.

As I read it, I "took notes" by posting little paraphrases on Facebook.  I mostly didn't quote, but tried to distill it down to my own takeaways from the document.  It wasn't by any means a comprehensive summary.

Mark and I are using the long drive to finally read Laudato Si', the ecological encyclical. Chapter 1 tl;dr: Humans can't just do anything they feel like doing. The consequences hit the poor hardest. There are many possible solutions, but only some respect human beings and put the poor first.

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Laudato Si' ch2.I tl;dr: So if this encyclical is for everybody, why am I writing about Christian doctrine? 1. Cultural diversity means our thoughts count! 2. Don't you think if I can call on faith to motivate millions of Christians to steward the earth, I should? (not mentioned: because I am the pope and it's totally in my wheelhouse)

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More Laudato Si' ch2 tl;dr: Actually, we *don't* steward the earth just for the benefit and use of all the peoples of the earth and future generations. The earth and its creatures are a good worth stewarding for its own sake as well as humans'. "Till it," AND "keep it."

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LS ch2: Neither absolute property rights, nor renunciation of them. "If we make something our own, it is only to administer it for the good of all."

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LS ch3: The bad kind of technocratic paradigm is: all problems worth solving are solved by completely controlling material objects, and by the way, everything is a material object.

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LS ch3: The throwaway culture that wastes resources and pollutes the planet is the exact same throwaway culture that disposes of inconvenient human beings and buys and sells the bodies of the poor.

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LS ch3. Better laws aren't going to save you in a culture immersed in utilitarianism, because the powerful will always see the utility of subverting the law.

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LS ch3. Genetic modification techniques are to be judged case by case, depending on their impact on human relationships, labor, and well being.

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LS ch4. One problem with trying to solve problems via high-level regulations binding equally everywhere is that their inflexibility limits the flourishing of local institutions and cultures. Consumerism also levels differences instead of allowing them to flourish.

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LS ch4. Overcrowded cities might make people live in uprootedness and chaos, but if people weave strong networks of human bonds this can be transformed into belonging and closeness instead.

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LS ch5: proposals. Developing countries get to prioritize development and quality of life; let the rich countries bear the heavier burden of environmental restrictions.

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LS ch5: Somehow, we need both to respect national sovereignty and local conditions, while instituting a real global transnational political structure to make rules about global problems -- with the teeth to enforce them, somehow. Meanwhile, lots can be accomplished by local projects.

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LS ch5: The burden of proof should be on the proposers of a new project, that it will not cause serious irreversible damage to the human ecology of an area -- not on the local inhabitants to show incontrovertible evidence that it will.

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Cell phone coverage prevented me from liveblogging the sixth chapter of Laudato Si' as I read it, which is too bad, because that is where the advice is. Here goes: "Purchasing is always a moral, not simply an economic, act."

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LS ch6, my paraphrase: Environmental education needs to mean drawing out an *ethics* of ecology, instilling not just info, but habits of solidarity, responsibility, and compassion.

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LS ch6, my paraphrase. For those who can afford to consume a lot, it is meaningful to instead make small daily acts of conservation (turn down the thermostat, reduce food waste, turn off lights). It's a sort of "little way" of simplicity and self-control wth respect to resources that are not unlimited, and may pay off in ways we can't see immediately.

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LS ch6: "Christian spirituality proposes a growth marked by moderation and the capacity to be happy with little... That simplicity which allows us to stop and appreciate the small things, to be grateful for the opportunities which life affords us, to be spiritually detached from what we possess, and not to succumb to sadness for what we lack."

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LS ch6. One way to restore the right attitude, on several levels, towards resources is the traditional thanksgiving/blessing before and after meals.

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LS ch6, my paraphrase. Encouraging beauty locally, by joining together in groups to preserve a building, a landscape, etc., also is meaningful.

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LS ch6. My paraphrase. To do away with intentional rest is to do away with the most important thing about work: its meaning. In resting we enjoy the fruits of our labor, experience gratitude, and see that it (what we have made) is good.

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LS ch6. Interestingly enough, the encyclical ends with two prayers, one of which is a Christian prayer (i.e., a Trinitarian one) and one of which is suggested for non-Christian believers in God to use, a "prayer for the earth." They are long, so I recommend checking them out yourself.

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Then after I finished paraphrasing, I went back and recorded a few thoughts on the encyclical as a whole, and on our family.

 

LS thoughts (1): Utilitarianism is the wrong way to calculate which policy and personal decisions to make. You could read the whole encyclical as "the state of the planet is evidence that utilitarianism is wrong."

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LS thoughts (2). If I have a lot of resources, and can spend more of my resources (money, time) to reduce damage or impact, I should. E.g. If it costs me more to repair an item than to buy new, but I can afford it, maybe I pay for the repair instead of discarding the item and buying new.

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LS thoughts (3). We do the traditional blessing before meals, but maybe we ought to incorporate the blessing after meals, like before we excuse the children from the table so we can finish the wine and talk together.

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LS thoughts (4). Private property's purpose is the common good. I think this is a "parable of the talents" situation. You can have stuff to use it, to restore it, to share it, to protect it for later, to turn it into more stuff that can be spread around -- lots of possibilities. But if you can't use that item in some way that furthers the common good, why acquire it?

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LS thoughts (5). Be glad for what you have, that's an easy way to start.

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Yeah, I know, the last one is a quote from a Veggie Tales song.  It's from"Madame Blueberry," which I maintain is the most relevant Veggie Tales episode ever.  But I digress.

I have to say, and a couple of my FB friends also had this to say, that the repeated calls for transnational governing bodies to take up the problems of global environmental health and to enforce agreements make me a bit... uneasy.  Reckless, was the word that one of my FB friends used for it, and I think I actually agree with that designation.  We all know how willing powerful people are to take things out of context to justify doing things the way they want to do them.  

When we hear "transnational governing bodies" we think of the UN, and of the UN often the best thing that can be said of it is that its intentions were good, once.  It hasn't just been a corrupt body; it's been a body bent on calling evil good and good evil, off and on throughout its history.  

If you take the document as a whole, it is pretty clear that Pope Francis is not calling for organizations that operate the way the UN does, with the kinds of goals and governing principles that the UN has.  He is calling for massive conversion of heart at all levels of society including the transnational.  But:  the sound bites will never reflect that.  One can argue that the media will never stop taking Popes (and anyone else who is invested by enough people with moral authority) out of context, and that there are no words which cannot be twisted to suit someone else's purposes.  And Francis does seem to be more "reckless" than his last few predecessors, in a lot of ways.  He's not as precise.  He seems to be more easily taken out of context.  

This is a high-risk situation for a Pope to be in, to be sure, that's what "reckless" means, but high risk might also bring high reward, and I'm hopeful.  St. Francis was himself reckless in many ways and is still taken out of context all the time, and yet, those who look beyond the popular image and deeper at the ascetic, at the historical St. Francis, the holiness of the man himself (not either the pious legend or the impious legend) will find something that calls to conversion of heart and of life.

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Besides the bits that I summarized above, I took away from the encyclical some concrete advice at the level of family life.  We are squarely in the class of people who have plenty of resources to live a life that is in accord with human dignity, and then some, and so it's that advice for people who live in rich countries that speaks more to us.

We can afford not to externalize the costs of our lifestyle.  It is a false economy, for example, to buy cheap junk which breaks, can't be repaired, is landfilled and then must be replaced with more cheap junk.  Even if a thing costs more to be repaired than to be replaced, perhaps it is more fitting to pay a worker to fix it than to landfill it and cheaply replace it.  We should continue to use a thing until it becomes unusable, and then try to recycle it, rather than get a new version just because a new one is available.  This is frustrating with electronics, which are subject to a system in which they are designed to become functionally obsolete and to force us to replace them before they are "broken;" but we can use them longer than we might, if we are willing to put up with minor irritations for a while, and over a lifetime we might consume significantly fewer electronic devices than if we had listened to the culture of new-and-shiny.

We are tempted to use climate control unnecessarily.  Mind you, climate control isn't evil; we are having a heat advisory right now, and I have the air conditioning on.  Climate control saves lives, in fact, especially in the case of the elderly and sick, and people who suffer from windborne allergies and can't function well with open windows.  But I have found myself over the past few winters slipping into a "doggone it, I can afford to turn the heat up" mentality, and stabbing the button to take it from 68 F to 73 F.  It's true, I could put on a sweater and a pair of fingerless gloves.  It's a small sacrifice, which means that the turning-up of the heat is a very petty luxury.

We can choose to maintain beautiful things no matter where we are, either as individuals or as communities.  One of the things that I really liked about this "ecological encyclical" -- it really isn't an "environmental" one so much as an "ecological" one -- is that it included manmade beauty as well as natural beauty as worthy of preservation.  Pope Francis mentioned buildings and fountains and city squares, along with landscapes and rivers, as worthy for human beings to rally around, form an identity of place around, and preserve.  I have a bias toward cities and the beautiful and useful things that people design and build, the way that we transform the earth into something new and the ways that we concentrate in urban areas and build social networks that have a sense of unity and identity despite a diverse population, and I was delighted to find that this human ecology has received plenty of attention.  So yes, we can join together in civic groups to preserve wetlands and forests, but it's also good to join Friends of the Library, a local historical association, or any number of other civic groups that strengthen human bonds and keep the city from becoming impersonal and ugly. 

We could all do with a little more gratitude for the good things we enjoy.  The Holy Father reminded us that the blessing before and after meals is a fitting way to pause and exercise that gratitude; we do, as a family, regularly give thanks before meals, but we haven't really done the after-meals thing.  We tried for a little while some years ago, but trailed off as we couldn't really find a good time that was the "end" of the meal, as kids asked to be excused one by one.  Mark and I talked about that and we decided we would try to bring that back.  I left it up to him to figure out exactly how it's going to work.  Maybe instead of excusing the kids one at a time as they finish, we'll excuse them all at once, say the after-meal blessing, and then they'll run away and we can finish the wine together.

We could be careful only to acquire the things that we can "administer for the good of all" -- where that might mean for the genuine benefit of our family (the education of the children, the care for each member's bodily needs) or might mean to care for it so it can be enjoyed by others.  (I'm struck by how this resonates to the same frequency as the Marie Kondo book that I read a couple of months ago.  It feels pretty wasteful to get rid of so much unused, non-joy-sparking stuff, but once you've done it, an a-ha! goes off in your head and there's a reluctance to allow any more non-joy-sparking stuff back in.)

We can do all those small things that, we are told, add up to making a difference:  reduce food waste, reuse and recycle containers, cut down on unnecessary car trips, live more simply.  Sure, it's annoying, and it seems to be a drop in the bucket, but in a spirit of sacrifice it may do some good; like fasting, it has worth beyond the value of the food not consumed, if the sacrifice is made as an offering.  Purely technological solutions that do not ask any sacrifice from us don't have the same dimension of value; self-gift is always effective somehow, even if only interiorly, but technical solutions might have unforeseen consequences and risk becoming just a signifier, a status symbol.  Also, small acts of self-sacrifice are available to everyone.  

In our family, one of those drop-in-the-bucket things might be to change our patterns of meal planning so that we don't waste so much food (I throw out SO MUCH RICE it's ridiculous) and consume a more sustainable mix of protein sources.  

• Meatless Fridays are just a starting point (and of course, there are lots of reasons to choose that as a starting point, here in the US where meatless Fridays are optional -- the primary reason one being to take up the penance that belongs to the rest of the Church as a matter of course).  
• We can recognize that in some countries the people must rely on ocean fish as a primary protein source, and it's a limited resource, and we can abstain from it to leave enough for them -- in economic terms, to keep its price low.   (Similar logic might need to be applied to some imported plant foods, such as quinoa, but the economics are complicated.)  
• We can think of poultry meat as more "expensive" than eggs and dairy protein, pork as more "expensive" than beef, and beef as the most "expensive" of all -- not just based on the dollar value at the supermarket, but based on the amount of agricultural land required to support it.  Maybe a three-pound chub of ground beef on sale is not actually as great a deal as it looks.  I'm not saying never eat beef -- if you're in need of dietary iron, for example, it's very hard to beat it -- but it seems a reasonable sacrifice to regularly abstain from it, save it for legitimate feasts.  Some of the costs of that sale beef have been externalized, and if we pay more for less (as we would if we restricted ourselves to, say, grass-fed small-farmed animals) maybe we can take up more of the responsibility for the real costs as well as supporting family farms.

I think that we have a lot to think about here, as a family, and even more to do.  Fundamentally, though, Laudato Si' recommends a change in attitude.  I think that it's very compatible with the spiritualities I have become most interested in over the past few years:  for example, Elisabeth Leseur's ideas that our tiniest actions and words may affect others in ways that we could never fathom, spreading outward like ripples through time and from person to person, which means that we never have the luxury of apathy.   If Elisabeth Leseur's special gift was to integrate her married life with her spirituality, then I think what Pope Francis is calling here is to integrate our economic lives with our spirituality.  Too often we separate them, but in fact we must integrate all of ourselves into Christ, and that means every decision we make is a moral decision.  Yes, even a choice of taste, like whether your ice cream is chocolate or vanilla or strawberry -- or maybe that's a bit extreme; how about, whether your tacos are  carne asada or pollo or frijoles. 

Sister things.

I started to read Laudato Si' last night, in bed with an iPhone, and didn't get very far into it before I was too sleepy to go on and had to put it down.  The dim rectangular afterimage of a glowing screen danced before my eyes for a few moments as I rolled over, snuggled in next to a baby, and let my mind wander.

Occasionally it's at this time that my brain makes odd connections.

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I've written a little bit recently about Japanese author Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.  Mostly I wrote about the practical advice on getting rid of stuff.  I haven't written so much here about what a deeply foreign book it seems to be.   I don't think the content must have been updated very much for an American audience.   Kondo is Japanese, and wrote for Japan.  

She takes for granted, for example, that the reader's home is laid out like a Japanese home.  Here she is on closets:

If you have built-in closets in your home, most of the things in your house can be stored inside them.  

Japanese closets are ideal storage spaces.  They are deep and wide, are divided into top and bottom by a broad and extremely sturdy shelf, and have a cupboard built into the wall above.

And on the "fatal mistake" of storing things near where they are to be used:

For people like me who are naturally lazy, I strongly recommend focusing storage in one spot... If it only takes ten to twenty seconds to walk from one end of your home to the other, do you really need to worry about the flow plan?

Yeah, she's not thinking about American ramblers, or four-level urban homes with detached garages.

And then there are little tidbits like this:

I once worked as a Shinto shrine maiden for five years.

A very noticeable feature of the whole book, one that is central to her concept, is a relationship with inanimate objects that can seem a little bit bizarre.  It fits right into my personal preconception of Japanese household culture, which I admit is heavily and almost exclusively influenced by Studio Ghibli movies such as My Neighbor Totoro, populated with strangely alive, anthropomorphic objects, down to spidery, googly-eyed balls of soot.

Anyway, to sum up, Ms. Kondo describes the process of selecting, storing, and using possessions as almost a dialogue between herself and the objects.  Here are a few selections from different parts of the book.

When you come across something that's hard to discard, consider carefully why you have that specific item in the first place.  When did you get it and what meaning did it have for you then?  Reassess the role it plays in your life... [If] that particular article of clothing has already completed its role in your life,... you are free to say, "Thank you for giving me joy when I bought you," or "Thank you for teaching me what doesn't suit me," and let it go.

...

Can you truthfully say that you treasure something buried so deeply in a closet or drawer that you have forgotten its existence?  If things had feelings, they would certainly not be happy....Let them go, with gratitude.  Not only you, but your things as well, will feel clear and refreshed when you are done...

...

When you are choosing what to keep, ask your heart; when you are choosing where to store something, ask your house.

...

This is the routine I follow... First, I unlock the door and announce to my house, "I'm home!" Picking up the pair of shoes I wore yesterday and left out in the entranceway, I say, "Thank you very much for your hard work," and put them away... I put my jacket and dress on a hanger, say, "Good job!" and hang them... I greet the waist-high potted plant by the window and stroke its leaves.  My next task is to empty the contents of my handbag ... Before closing the drawer, I say, "Thanks for all you did for me today." 

 So, this stuff is kind of weird.  A few amateur reviewers I've run into have described it as "delusional."  I think it's more that this comes from a culture, and a way of relating to inanimate objects, that most of us are not familiar with.  

It's not like Westerners don't anthropomorphize objects; it's just that we mostly do it when we're annoyed with them, as in "OUCH! Damn this car door!" when we slam our fingers in it, or "This stupid shopping cart doesn't want to roll straight!"  or sometimes when we need to pretend we are explaining them, like "This material won't dissolve in water because it's hydrophobic."

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So I had kind of brushed off the Kondo-isms as "probably just a Japanese thing."  And then I encountered something small and almost entirely unrelated that made me reconsider it in a slightly different light.

I only got a little way into Laudato Si' where there is a short discourse on St. Francis of Assisi.  In par. 11, Pope Francis briefly described the saint's attitude toward non-human things:

He communed with all creation, even preaching to the flowers, inviting them “to praise the Lord, just as if they were endowed with reason”.  His response to the world around him was so much more than intellectual appreciation or economic calculus, for to him each and every creature was a sister united to him by bonds of affection....

His disciple Saint Bonaventure tells us that, “from a reflection on the primary source of all things, filled with even more abundant piety, he would call creatures, no matter how small, by the name of ‘brother’ or ‘sister’”. Such a conviction cannot be written off as naive romanticism, for it affects the choices which determine our behaviour. If we approach nature and the environment without this openness to awe and wonder, if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs.

By contrast, if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then sobriety and care will well up spontaneously. The poverty and austerity of Saint Francis were no mere veneer of asceticism, but something much more radical: a refusal to turn reality into an object simply to be used and controlled.

Mind you, Francis (the pope) is mostly writing fairly narrowly here, about Francis (the saint)'s attitude towards "nature" -- by which we often mean plants and animals and the sea and the air and the earth, not always the collection of all objects around us.  That Saint famously called natural objects "brother" and "sister" because they, like us, are created by the Father.  His words remind us that in many respects, though we are persons and not objects we are more like to the rest of creation than we are to the Godhead.  They are words of humility.  But that's not all they are words of.

Some of what St. Francis was getting at, when he preached to birds and addressed "brother sun, sister moon,"  is gratitude.  Because that is what a Catholic vision of "respect for the natural world" must, in the end, be reduced to.  Respect is actually something owed to persons, and all "respect" for objects, natural or man-made, is really a respect for persons; the object is merely a means of transmission.  Example:  we show respect for, say, an American flag, not for its own sake, but because it's a way to visibly respect people who also share that flag, sometimes (as at a military funeral) very specific people.  

And we "respect" the natural world, not for its own sake, but (practically speaking) to steward it and share it for the sake of other people's livelihood, and (more fundamentally speaking) out of gratitude to God for making a gift of it to all of us.  Wastefulness and an attitude of total control risk us taking for granted this world of objects for which we should give thanks every day.

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So, I told you that I sometimes make really odd connections when I'm drifting off to sleep.  I realize this is kind of a corny one.  I am not putting The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up on the same level as a papal encyclical.

But the slight cross-cultural glimpse into Kondo's world of paying little homages to her possessions connected in my mind with St. Francis calling creatures "brother" and "sister."   I think that there is something to be said for "speaking a language of fraternity and beauty" -- not just about blades of grass, vast canyons, colorful birds, cherries in bloom -- but even about the mean little things that we surround ourselves with, the things that we make, buy, and use.  

Kondo recommends addressing our excess things personally as a literal act that frees us from needing to cling to them.   She has you looking your possessions in the face, so to speak, and intentionally choosing which to let go.  It is not hard to imagine that, having practiced this small asceticism, one might find it easier to choose not to acquire so much in the first place.  To avoid waste not by keeping many things that "someday" you might use, but by never buying up so many things in the first place.  Treating useful or beautiful possessions "the way they want to be treated" -- that being a sort of shorthand for "the way that will keep them functioning for a long time."  Passing on things that still have some use in them, without dumping unwanted items on people.  While acknowledging that this is a bit of a corny connection to make, I wonder if it might not be a good practice to behold and handle each of our possessions with some spark of gratitude for each one to the God from whom all blessings flow.

John Paul II's life's work, one could argue, was spent teaching us not to treat persons as if they were objects.  

I could quip here that in this introductory part of Laudato Si', Francis is teaching us not to treat objects as if they were objects, either.   At least:  not objects "simply to be used and controlled."  

May we use objects?  Yes!  That is one of the things that separates them from persons.  We are not allowed to use persons.  We are allowed to use objects.

May we control objects?  To the extent that we can do so, yes.  Again, this is one of the things that separates them from persons.  We are not allowed to control persons all the way to their innermost being, who retain  their free will and capacity to use reason absolutely, and no one has the right to interfere with those.  We are allowed to control an object.

So the problem is in "simply" using and controlling them, I think.  There is at least one other thing we must do with all objects:  receive them with gratitude.  Not really for the sake of themselves, but for the sake of the one who gives them to us as gifts.

Daily habits of truth and love.

When I was writing about forming new habits for healthy, non-gluttonous eating, I remember suggesting that it was important to  choose habits that you could practice every single day.  

Make a list of behaviors that you can experiment with, starting with one. I really think you can do any sort of thing, but I suggest that you start with something that is clear and objective and that can be practiced proactively and at least daily. The more often you find opportunities to practice each habit, the faster it can become second nature.

We've just been given an example of good "daily" habits in Pope Francis's homilies.  Let me give you some background, and then take you to the ones I mean.

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I admit that I went a bit off the rails with the concept of the "spiritual poverty" that Francis I  means to attack.  In the passage that I quoted when he  was talking about the great "other kind of poverty" of our times, he was specifically referring to moral relativism:  

There is another form of poverty! It is the spiritual poverty of our time, which afflicts the so-called richer countries particularly seriously. It is what my much-loved predecessor, Benedict XVI, called the “tyranny of relativism”, which makes everyone his own criterion and endangers the coexistence of peoples.

And that brings me to a second reason for my name.

 Francis of Assisi tells us we should work to build peace.

But there is no true peace without truth! There cannot be true peace if everyone is his own criterion, if everyone can always claim exclusively his own rights, without at the same time caring for the good of others, of everyone, on the basis of the nature that unites every human being on this earth.

I think it's particularly interesting that F1 asserts that relativism "endangers the coexistence of peoples."  An awful lot of people assert that a relativistic attitude -- one that denies dogma qua dogma  -- is essential for the coexistence of peoples.  This must be rejected, however, because moral relativism admits the legitimacy of an every-man-for-himself, every-people-for-itself philosophy; tolerating a desire for genocide hardly promotes "coexistence."  

Anyway.  According to F1, the great spiritual poverty of our time is relativism which endangers the coexistence of peoples, and its opposite is a recognition of the common nature of all human beings which leads us to "[care]  for the good of others, of everyone."

It's interesting how the one is a sort of flip-side, masquerading as the other.  For the good intention of "coexistence" people reject the idea of absolute good or absolute truth, thinking that it is a belief in absolutes that destabilizes coexistence.  And yet what is really required for coexistence is an absolute belief that other, "different" human beings are equally deserving of recognition of their humanity and a response of love and mercy.  That human beings may never be used as a means to an end.

This comes largely from the legacy of John Paul II.  The moral instruction of his massive work on the Theology of the Body can all be summed up in "Human beings may never be used as a means to an end."  

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The sign of contradiction that today's poverty of spirit requires is a radical rejection of all that objectifies and seeks to use human persons as means to an end. 

• It requires detachment from easy ways of thinking and easy ways of feeling comfortable and satisfied -- not physical comfort and satiation, but emotional comfort, self-satisfaction.  
• It requires a non-judgmentalism of persons based in recognition of our common humanity, which necessarily implies admitting our common heritage of original sin and need for free gifts of grace.

Let's take a look at some of the themes that we've gone over here, of mercy, judging only by loving, and detachment.

- The means by which God judges us is identical to loving us.   Which seems to teach us that the only right way to judge is to love.  

- "If you're going to judge me correctly, you have to understand that I was conceived a sinner -- in other words, that the propensity to do wrong came to me through no fault of my own."  I

- ...None of us can pat ourselves on the back for achieving whatever spiritual riches we have; ergo, even the most objectively horrible people must be reached out to with love and compassion and a recognition of "there but for the grace of God go I."   

- “The Lord will say this clearly: his anointing is meant for the poor, prisoners and the sick, for those who are sorrowing and alone. The ointment is not intended just to make us fragrant, much less to be kept in a jar, for then it would become rancid … and the heart bitter. ” 

-"Living Holy Week following Jesus means learning how to go beyond ourselves... to reach out to others, to go to the outskirts of existence, to be the first to move towards our brothers and sisters, especially those who are most distant, those who are forgotten, those who are most in need of understanding, consolation and help."   That is, not just the physically repulsive but also the morally repulsive, are human too, and deserve to be treated as such.

-One thing we know we do have to be somewhat detached from are spiritual consolations of all kinds.

 

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So here are two "how do we live this every day?" suggestions from recent homilies.

On the theme of detachment:  Complaining too often can distance us from Jesus, says Pope Francis

The disciples had had such high hopes that Jesus would be the one who would redeem Israel, but they thought their hopes were destroyed, he said on Wednesday.

“And they stewed, so to speak, their lives in the juice of their complaints and kept going on and on and on with the complaining,” the Pope said. “I think that many times when difficult things happen, including when we are visited by the cross, we run the risk of closing ourselves off in complaints.”

When all people can think of is how wrong things are going, Pope Francis said, the Lord is close, “but we don’t recognise him. He walks with us, but we don’t recognise him.”

...

“Complaining seems safer. It’s something certain. This is my truth: failure,” he said before adding that the Gospel story shows how very patient Jesus is with the disciples, first listening to them and then explaining things step by step, until they see him.

Complaining and griping, about others and about things in one’s own life, is harmful “because it dashes hope. Don’t get into this game of a life of complaints.”

 

On the theme of radical rejection of objectification:  Quit gossiping and recover the value of meekness. 

Christians need to recover the value of meekness, particularly when they are tempted to speak ill of one another, Pope Francis said during his early morning Mass on Tuesday.

Complaining behind each others’ backs is a temptation that comes “from the Evil One who does not want the Spirit to dwell among us and give peace, meekness to the Christian community,” the Pope said.

...The new life offered through the grace of baptism is something that Christians must work on developing; even though it “principally depends on the Spirit,” he added, it also takes effort on the part of each individual to cooperate with that grace.

...

He said the virtue of meekness, which is a key to harmony, has been “a bit forgotten.”

Meekness, he said, has “many enemies” and the first is gossip. “When one prefers gossiping, gossiping about another, it’s like clobbering another. This is normal, it happens to everyone, including me, it is a temptation of the Evil One.”

The struggle against such harmful chatter, he said, is something that continually sows tensions in parishes, families, neighborhoods and among friends. “But this is not the new life” promised by baptism, because when the Holy Spirit descends, “it gives birth to a new life within us, it makes us meek, charitable,” the Pope explained.

It looks like Francis is going to lead us on a sort of "little way" of detachment and of non-objectification.  Really?  This is what the Pope is going to tell the whole world to detach from?  Griping?  Really?  This is the way the Pope is going to suggest that we begin loving our neighbor as ourselves?  By abstaining from... gossip?

But it's utterly true.  

Griping is a sign of undue attachment to an alternative "reality," something wished-for and unattainable.  If we let go of what we wish would happen, and focus on what is happening, we can move forward.  We should be working toward things that are and that can be, not on things that cannot be.

Gossiping is, really, using another person as a means to an end.  In this case you are "using" another person as a character in a story you tell for entertainment.  

These are maybe ways of starting small, of beginning at the beginning.  The very fundamentals of detachment, of respecting persons as persons.  

And what's great about these is that any of us can begin practicing habits of not-griping, of not-gossiping, today and every day.  These are ways to begin immediately growing in the habit of truth and love.  

And yet, griping and gossiping are such universal behaviours that these habits -- these new "Franciscan habits" -- appear truly radical.  A radical rejection of attachment to what can't be had.  A radical rejection of exploitation of persons.  So radical we won't even talk about people behind our backs.

Judging by loving.

Pope Francis's address at the Way of the Cross on Friday contained an element that was, I think, joyful enough to save for an Easter post.

The Cross is the word through which God has responded to evil in the world. Sometimes it may seem as though God does not react to evil, as if he is silent. And yet, God has spoken, he has replied, and his answer is the Cross of Christ: a word which is love, mercy, forgiveness.

It is also reveals a judgment, namely that God, in judging us, loves us.

Let us remember this: God judges us by loving us.

If I embrace his love then I am saved,

if I refuse it, then I am condemned, not by him, but my own self,

because God never condemns,

he only loves and saves.

The last sentence points  to a certain dichotomy of choice.  In the constant presence of the love of God I have the choice to embrace His love, and be saved; or to refuse it, and be condemned.  

This field of love is, so to speak, a self-correcting test.

In the context of the Via Crucis,  what immediately comes to mind is the personification of this dichotomy in the two thieves crucified alongside Jesus, described in Lk 23:39-43.

Now one of the criminals hanging there reviled Jesus, saying, "Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us." 

The other, however, rebuking him, said in reply, "Have you no fear of God, for you are subject to the same condemnation?  And indeed, we have been condemned justly, for the sentence we received corresponds to our crimes, but this man has done nothing criminal." Then he said, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." 

He replied to him, "Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise."

The two thieves crucified with Jesus are literally  in the presence of the mercy of God.  One responds by "reviling" Jesus:  If you were really the Son of God, you would get down from here.   (This line parrots what the rulers say, and what the soldiers say, and it's not far from the words Luke puts in Satan's mouth in Chapter 4:  "If you be the Son of God, throw yourself down from here.")  

The other responds, first by defending Jesus, then by making what amounts to a confession ("we have been condemned justly... but this man has done nothing criminal" can certainly be read that way -- perhaps the man does not even realize quite how true it is), finally, by embracing that love:  "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom."

And he is answered -- canonized from the cross.  

The story of the two thieves is too iconic to mean nothing more than "a story of two thieves."  It shows us two ways to respond to the "problem" of suffering in the presence of a just and merciful God -- the whole problem of pain.  One response is rejection:  God cannot be God, because if He were God, He would not allow this to go on.  The other response is acknowledgement of the debt we owe, embrace of suffering, and entering into a conversation with the acknowledged King.

I suppose either response is equally logical; but one is a response of rejection, and the other is a response of embrace.

Judging by loving is not a dereliction of duty on the part of the judge.  It does not mean "no judging," or "love instead of judgment."  It is a method of judging.

Something to think about. 

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Side note:  I find it interesting that the feast day of St. Dismas, the "Good Thief," is March 25 -- the same date as, and so usually eclipsed by, the Annunciation.  (Another feast of making an important choice to embrace God.)  But the Annunciation got booted till later because it was superseded by Holy Week, and so St. Dismas came out from behind the angel's wings this year.  More on this from Fr. Z.

"Collectors of antiquities or novelties."

Here's a report on Pope Francis's chrism mass, with video.

(I seriously can't get enough of this guy.  My apologies; recipeblogging, parentblogging, and kid pictures will return shortly.)

I haven't watched the full video yet or made a transcript, but even in the two excerpts on the listed site I found something I wanted to share.  Recall that this is the Chrism Mass, where the oils for anointing are blessed and distributed to parishes.

First quote:

“The Lord will say this clearly: his anointing is meant for the poor, prisoners and the sick, for those who are sorrowing and alone. The ointment is not intended just to make us fragrant, much less to be kept in a jar, for then it would become rancid … and the heart bitter. ” 

I'm pretty sure when he says "not intended just to make US fragrant," he means the people entrusted with the oil for its use.

He is talking to priests, but I think the lesson is more general than that.  The oils stand for all the gifts of the Church and of faith.

Second quote (I took this from the full text to give context):

A priest who seldom goes out of himself, who anoints little – I won’t say “not at all” because, thank God, our people take our oil from us anyway – misses out on the best of our people, on what can stir the depths of his priestly heart. Those who do not go out of themselves, instead of being mediators, gradually become intermediaries, managers. We know the difference: the intermediary, the manager, “has already received his reward”, and since he doesn’t put his own skin and his own heart on the line, he never hears a warm, heartfelt word of thanks. This is precisely the reason why some priests grow dissatisfied, lose heart and become in some sense collectors of antiques or novelties – instead of being shepherds living with “the smell of the sheep”, shepherds in the midst of their flock, fishers of men. 

I'm the one who bolded the brilliant phrase "become in some sense collectors of antiques or novelties" 

"Antique" collectors.  "Novelty" collectors.  He is pointing to anyone who fails to bring the good news and the acts of mercy out of themselves:  whether they be labeled traditionalists (collectors of antiques) or whether they be labeled progressives (collectors of novelties).

They're both liable to gather dust. 

More on "spiritual poverty."

Melanie picked up my ball in the last post and ran with it:

Especially in the online world it can be so hard to see others’ humanity, to risk being flamed at by approaching what seems like a scoff as if it were an invitation to a dialogue, to risk seeming like a fool for enagaging a “troll” instead of dismissing him with scornful words. And in Catholic comment boxes you also risk being chided by your fellow Catholics for engaging with such angry hurtful people. “Don’t feed the trolls,” they warn you. But perhaps that’s exactly what we are called to do? To feed them? Couldn’t it be that the troll who regularly hangs out at Catholic sites someone who is hungering for the truth but afraid of rejection so is preemptively rejecting those who he feels have already shut him out?

Mind blown by the sudden new meaning of the term "to feed trolls."

You still have a responsibility not to feed the troll on the property of the person who has the "don't feed trolls" rule, i.e., in their comment box.  But you could invite them to your own blog or you could contact them off-blog.  And you could certainly engage respectfully (and skillfully) in a manner designed to be peaceful, all light and no heat.

Having started down that line of thinking, how there is a need for the spiritually impoverished to be fed, especially online I began to imagine that some individuals might have the vocation of doing just that. Then as I talked it over with Dom he said, it couldn’t be individuals. It would have to be people living in community. And as we talked I began to envision a new sort of religious community: the Missionaries to the Digital Continent. A cloistered contemplative order who live the Benedictine motto ora et labora whose days are ordered around the monastic hours and Eucharistic adoration and who are dedicated to bringing Christ to all the darkest corners of the internet. 

Aw, man, you beat me to it.  I've been thinking of this for a long time but haven't written about it here.  Instead I wrote it in Dorian Speed's Facebook comments.  This is what I wrote after she went on her rant about that Vatican website using Comic Sans:

Dorian, I think you're just the person to take this idea and run with it (when you are done with Electingthepope.net of course): The Church needs a new religious order of blogging and HTML-savvy monks and nuns. We need to set up a cloister with high-speed Internet connection and excellent tech support. In between praying the Liturgy of the Hours, attending daily Mass, and working in the refectory and gardens, they'll do pro bono web design for struggling Comic-Sans-using parishes and church organizations everywhere. They'll also surf the Internet looking for combox discussions into which to inject a note of charity and wisdom. Also they will pray for trolls.

and in another comment, an afterthought:

We can put the adoration chapel in a Faraday cage so they don't get distracted from what really matters.

Anyway, not to get too distracted about it: 

Melanie suggests organizing the effort to be "spiritually poor" around the seven traditional Spiritual Works of Mercy.  (You can find these enumerated here.) Since we're talking about an analogy anyway, let me list the seven Corporal Works of Mercy first:

• 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 seven 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.

Just as the charism of the Franciscans was to perform works of mercy from a position of being intentionally corporally poor, we are envisioning a charism of performing works of mercy from a position of being intentionally spiritually poor.  

The intentional corporal poverty was a means of demonstrating (among other things) that none of us can pat ourselves on the back for acheiving our material riches, because so much of it was out of our control and all of it, our physical life itself, is a gift.  We may have had a hand in taking and shaping God's good gifts to our profit, in making good decisions along the way (we do believe in free will after all, and that God lets us participate in the development of our own futures) but in the end we owe it all to God.  "No shroud has pockets" indeed.

So the intentional spiritual poverty would be a means of demonstrating (among other things) that none of us can pat ourselves on the back for achieving whatever spiritual riches we have.  The intellect with which we absorb the deep theological musings of the doctors of the Church, and craft arguments to defend her teachings?  Gift from God.  The desire we have to come closer to God?  A gift.  The gift of emotions, of sorrow at the Passion, of joy at the Resurrection?  A gift.  True contrition?  Gift.  Gratitude to God for all his good gifts?  A gift in and of itself.

I am not sure how to demonstrate it outwardly except, as I said, by a radical non-judgmentalism of the person.  Even the most objectively horrible people must be reached out to with love and compassion and a recognition of "there but for the grace of God go I."   

It strikes me that, if the contemplative wing of this order be called to Internet surfing and commenting, that the active wing be called to prison ministry.

Pastoral care of the poor: both kinds.

Once I was traveling and I went to Mass at an urban church, a little jewel, run by Franciscans.    I was younger, and I was moved to see the brown habits, the combination of simplicity and reverence.  Since then I am always pleased to see the Franciscans.  I have always sensed that the exterior poverty goes all the way to the core with them.  That they inhabit jewels of churches and brocaded stoles as pilgrims and servants.

So I was privately thrilled to have a pope, if not a Franciscan, a religious who takes the name of Francis.

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We are starting to see hints of what "Francis" means to Francis, and it is more multilayered than we all originally thought.

The name of "St. Francis" brings up images of embracing material poverty and rejecting the trappings of material wealth, and bringing Christ directly to people who themselves live in material poverty.

I think it's very easy to fall into the trap of assuming that St. Francis's reason to embrace poverty was so that he could "relate better" to the poor people he was preaching to -- or worse, so that they could relate to him.  This idea reduces St. Francis's poverty to a show, something put on for effect:  "Look, I am poor like you, I am one of you, therefore you should listen to me."  

We should take St. Francis at his word:

When I was in sin, the sight of lepers nauseated me beyond measure; but then God himself led me into their company, and I had pity on them. When I had once become acquainted with them, what had previously nauseated me became a source of spiritual and physical consolation for me....

When God gave me some friars, there was no one to tell me what I should do; but the Most High himself made it clear to me that I must live the life of the Gospel. ... Those who embraced this life gave everything they had to the poor. They were satisfied with one habit which was patched inside and outside, and a cord, and trousers. We refused to have anything more.

...we were only too glad to find shelter in abandoned churches. We made no claim to learning and we were submissive to everyone. I worked with my own hands and I am still determined to work; and with all my heart I want all the other friars to be busy with some kind of work that can be carried on without scandal. Those who do not know how to work should learn, not because they want to get something for their efforts, but to give good example and to avoid idleness.... When we receive no recompense for our work, we can turn to God's table and beg alms from door to door. God revealed a form of greeting to me, telling me that we should say, "God give you peace".

The friars must be very careful not to accept churches or poor dwellings for themselves, or anything else built for them, unless they are in harmony with the poverty which we have promised in the Rule; and they should occupy these places only as strangers and pilgrims....

God inspired me to write the Rule and these words plainly and simply, and so you too must understand them plainly and simply...

St. Francis is known as a "man of the poor," in part because he voluntarily joined the ranks of the materially poor.  It seems to have been an inward choice manifested outwardly, a sign of transformation, of separation from the materially wealthy world that he belonged to, of stripping off his old identity and taking on a new one.  The symbolism embodied in a religious "habit" was made manifest in St. Francis, who literally renounced his old life by making a public act of stripping himself naked in front of his disapproving father.

But it seems to me, from comments that the Holy Father made to the diplomatic corps, that Pope Francis has something else in mind as well when he takes the name of St. Francis for himself.  

As you know, there are various reasons why I chose the name of Francis of Assisi, a familiar figure far beyond the borders of Italy and Europe, even among those who do not profess the Catholic faith. One of the first reasons was Francis’ love for the poor. How many poor people there still are in the world! And what great suffering they have to endure! After the example of Francis of Assisi, the Church in every corner of the globe has always tried to care for and look after those who suffer from want, and I think that in many of your countries you can attest to the generous activity of Christians who dedicate themselves to helping the sick, orphans, the homeless and all the marginalised, thus striving to make society more humane and more just.

So far, so good.  This is the plain meaning and connotation of "Francis."  But then:

But there is another form of poverty! It is the spiritual poverty of our time, which afflicts the so-called richer countries particularly seriously. It is what my much-loved predecessor, Benedict XVI, called the “tyranny of relativism”, which makes everyone his own criterion and endangers the coexistence of peoples. And that brings me to a second reason for my name. Francis of Assisi tells us we should work to build peace. But there is no true peace without truth! There cannot be true peace if everyone is his own criterion, if everyone can always claim exclusively his own rights, without at the same time caring for the good of others, of everyone, on the basis of the nature that unites every human being on this earth.

So, here is my question.

We know what "St. Francis" is to the materially poor.

How does the St. Francis to the spiritually poor appear?

I myself was raised materially wealthy, but in comparative spiritual poverty.  I know something, a little, about this.

And many people are raised in spiritual poverty that goes far beyond what I encountered:  a poverty that not only fails to transmit the concept of divinity of God, but also fails to transmit the concept of humanity in persons.  Abuse, hatred, exploitation, violent acts against the dignity of human beings are everywhere; and a quieter kind of deprivation that simply values objects more than people and communicates it in a thousand daily acts of obeisance to things.

It has always been a struggle for "respectable" people to acknowledge that physical, material poverty is not generally a punishment inflicted by God on the deserving, or even inflicted by the undeserving on themselves.   It is a severe temptation among the comfortable of all stripes to assume that a poor man is poor because he did something to deserve it, or because he failed to do something and he should have known better.  It goes that way for many types of physical poverty:  the healthy love to blame the ill for making themselves sick through poor choices, the safe blame the endangered for endangering themselves.  

When Francis and his followers embraced holy poverty, they became a sign of contradiction.  They did not, I think, do so, each of them, in order to be a sign -- I think they were doing so in order to become new men and women, in order to transform themselves inwardly by conforming their choices (tastes, even) to Christ, in response to a highly personal, inward call. But become a sign they did, as so many invisible transformations do.  The sign of contradiction is simple and yet ancient as Job:  here is someone both miserable and holy.  Someone whose poverty is as self-inflicted as can be, and yet, undeniably, steeped in the love of God.

What can it mean to be "Francis" to the spiritually poor?   Can this kind of poverty be embraced, the way that Francis of Assisi embraced the materially poor?  Can spiritual poverty ever be a kind of holy poverty?

And don't go telling me that there's a big difference between the spiritually impoverished and the bodily impoverished, because the spirit is important and the body is not, or some such nonsense.  We are not Albigensians here.

 If we can say that the materially poor are poor because of a mix of choices (often forced, coerced, and not entirely free) and accidents that played out in a materially impoverished environment --

...then we can say that the spiritually impoverished are impoverished because of a mix of choices (often forced, coerced, uninformed, and not entirely free) and accidents that played out in a spiritually impoverished environment.

Is Pope Francis saying that he means to find a way to look to St. Francis to reach out to those of us who live lives that are wealthy, yet rotten at the core?

What can that be like?

It seems to turn St. Francis inside out, somehow, yet I am intrigued. 

I keep thinking of one image.  From Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture:

A story current within the Franciscan order told of St. Francis' desire to have friars distribute to all the order's provinces good metal boxes for their hosts, since these were all too often left scattered and neglected.

I picture the Franciscan friars, barefoot in their ragged brown cloaks, carrying and distributing these "good metal boxes"  -- whatever they were made of, they cannot have been cheap! -- for proper safekeeping and display of the Eucharist.

Anyway, there is a paradox here that I cannot quite grasp.  I think Pope Francis may be trying to remind us all that the "spiritually impoverished" are not to be written off by us, any more than are the materially impoverished.   The "preferential option for the poor," perhaps, extends to those who dine well, carry designer bags, boast of the finest educations, and yet remain -- invisibly -- empty, fearful, and alone.

Spiritual poverty, the leperous sicknesses that permeate the culture of death, nauseates us, no?   

So can we let God lead us "into the company" of those who suffer it?  Risking by that our own infection?

Can we, there, discover pity and transformation? 

Special; connection.

Every once in a while you find a bit of half-wisdom in an unlikely place, and it sticks with you and becomes a sort of recurrent theme.

For instance:

Back when I was going through toddlerhood for the first time, I found a pretty helpful book about child discipline.  This book was a little more transcendent than the average discipline book, I think, because it was actually more about self-discipline:  developing the fortitude to restrain your own unhelpful impulses, and to walk between punitiveness and permissiveness.  Anyway, one of the questions that the author suggested asking yourself along the way was:

"Do I want to be special, or do I want to connect?"

Never mind the context.  The simplicity of this dichotomy stuck in my memory.  Often we get a choice between being special (which necessarily sets you apart from others) or connecting (which necessarily emphasizes commonalities.    And when you are a parent or caregiver, overseeing multiple children, often there is a choice between emphasizing specialness and emphasizing connection.   It comes into relationships with people you meet, too:  are you to treat such-and-such a person as special or are you to connect with them?

Leaders are "special," and with the "specialness" comes a distance.  They aren't like us.  They have different responsibilities.  Celebrities are made "special," and that makes them seem less human.  Winners are "special," afforded rewards that the ordinary person can't share (or else there wouldn't be winners).  

It isn't necessarily better to desire connection than to desire specialness.  Those of us who want to be leaders, want to be famous, want to be winners -- want to be special -- are wanting good things.  It's just that they are good things that come at a certain cost.  And those of us who want, mostly, connection -- well, that comes at a cost too.  It is not possible to have it all, or at least not all at once.

On the surface, there is a tension between specialness and connection.   They seem to be opposites, poles that you can travel between, coexisting only in the sense that you can compromise between them or that you can emphasize one or the other at different times.  

But there are some remarkable situations where the two overlap, are two sides of the same coin:  where something is made special through connection, where we connect more intimately by an act of setting apart.

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1.  Unique connections.

Consider a person wishing to marry:  The community is full of potential partners, all (more or less) of equal stature.  But when our individual chooses one -- when the act of choice is made, which is to say, the marriage vow -- that spouse is set apart, is made "special."  (Reciprocally special, of course -- the one is special to the other, and vice versa.)    "I set you apart from all others:  I choose you."  And it is in that choosing that a particularly intimate and transcendent connection is made:  a connection that would not be possible if it were not for the setting-apart, the relinquishing of all those other potential partners.  Marriage is a connection that is made possible only by "specialness."

And, of course, it makes possible other special connections:  mother-and-child, father-and-child, siblings-to-each-other.  In the family each person is known as special.  My children each only have one mother in the world; I am the only, the unique; I am irreplaceable; I am distinct from all other women and also from the other members of the family; I get a pedestal, you might say.  But that pedestal exists only because of the particular and intimate connection I have to each one of them.   I am special to each because of my relationship with each.  And the connection exists only because of who I am to them:  Mama.

 

2.  Unique communities.

Consider Israel:  not the modern nation-state, but Israel as it understood itself in the biblical sense:  a chosen people, a people set apart.  Israel felt a duty to maintain a severe separation between itself and the other nations around it; intermarriage with people from other nations was generally forbidden, tolerated only under strict regulation; adopting cultural and religious elements from neighboring groups was unthinkable, and regarded as bringing down punishment on the whole people; careful practices were developed to emphasize their differences.  They regarded themselves as a holy people, and of course "holy" and "sacred" and "consecrated" and all such words have to do with "this thing is set apart as special for a special purpose" more than they have to do with goodness and rightness.  They were supposed to be very careful not to make too much connection with other peoples.

But:

They were "a people" made up of "people," a whole community, and within that community there was deep identification and connection.  Because they were so set apart, because the boundaries between Us and Others were clear, because they kept strictly to traditions that identified them as a people, they had a particular connection with one another and also with their ancestors and their descendants.  Insulation from the surrounding peoples was accomplished through deep connection -- not to mention all the ordinary sorts of connection that make a collection of persons a community rather than, well, just a collection of individuals.

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Those are two examples.

Specialness -- in its form sacredness -- and connection are attributes of the elements of the Trinity toward each other:  one and differentiated at the same time.  And they are attributes of the Dual Nature of Christ:  Man and God, one of us and unutterably holy and Other from us at the same time.  Nothing on earth has ever managed to be "special" and "connected" more perfectly than the Christ.  

And so when we relate to Christ, we have somehow -- at the same time -- to treat Christ with perfect respect for His sacredness and perfect unity and communion with Him.

This is manifestly difficult.

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Marriage is one image that show us how we might do that.

A "chosen people" is another image used to show us how we might do that.  

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We have a Eucharist, and that is one such way.  

We have this stuff that looks like bread that we can treat with intense reverence.  Keeping it in objectively beautiful containers of only the finest materials (as St. Francis of Assisi is said to have encouraged); allowing it to be touched, except when necessary for good reasons, only by consecrated hands; preserving silence in its presence.

And then we eat the stuff.  Connection most intimate:  It becomes part of ourselves, fuels our motion, incorporates into our own bodies.  It's almost anti-holiness, because anti-separation:  or if you like, it incorporates ourselves into its holiness and separateness.

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 All this is to say that the following is a false dichotomy:

 

Holiness

VS

Connection

 

 

One can just as easily see

Holiness

and

Connection

 

There is no opposition here.  There is none.  Connection and sacredness are united in one Person perfectly, in the rest of us imperfectly, and that includes whoever happens to be Pope; and it's precisely because persons are unique, unrepeatable, holy for that reason, that we should expect to sense different qualities of connections to different persons.  

NOT more connection with one, less with another.  

It boggles the mind:  that Christ entrusted His mission to human beings at all.  

Habemus papam.

Yesterday was an interesting day in the homeschool, I'll tell you that.  The kids were on after-lunch break and I had just settled down to work like mad on some planning for history lessons when I heard a roar from a crowd a quarter of the way around the world.  I looked up to see the chimney in the video feed in the corner of my screen belching smoke.  I called for the children and they came rushing down.   

At one point they were singing "We just got a pope" to the tune of the Blue's Clues "we just got a letter" song.

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I had Facebook, Twitter, and IM going all at once -- oh, that was so much fun, all the tweeting and status-updating back and forth.  Cracking stupid jokes about whether the conclave was peanut-free  and #conclaveseagull and #reasonsthepopeislate (my favorite: he has to go through that really big packet from HR.)

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I was watching the vatican.va feed yesterday when Pope Francis came out for the first time, and so I watched the first speech in Italian, with no commentary whatsoever.  

"Fratelli e sorelli -- buona sera..."

"Brothers and sisters -- good evening!" I whispered to the kids.  After French, Latin, and Spanish, I can get that much.  I also caught (mostly) the joke about the bishops going to the ends of the earth for their cardinal.  We figured out pretty quickly what they were up to with the prayers and joined in in English.

Here's what I watched, and Vatican Radio's translation follows:

Brothers and sisters, good evening.

You all know that the duty of the Conclave was to give a bishop to Rome. It seems that my brother Cardinals have come almost to the ends of the Earth to get him ... but here we are. I thank you for the welcome that has come from the diocesan community of Rome.

First of all, I would say a prayer: Pray for our Bishop Emeritus Benedict XVI ... Let us all pray together for him, that the Lord bless him and Our Lady protect him.

Our Father ...Hail Mary ...Glory to the Father ...

And now let us begin this journey, the Bishop and people, this journey of the Church of Rome, which presides in charity over all the Churches, a journey of brotherhood in love, of mutual trust. Let us always pray for one another. Let us pray for the whole world that there might be a great sense of brotherhood. My hope is that this journey of the Church that we begin today, together with help of my Cardinal Vicar, be fruitful for the evangelization of this beautiful city.

And now I would like to give the blessing, but first I want to ask you a favor. Before the bishop blesses the people, I ask that you would pray to the Lord to bless me — the prayer of the people for their Bishop. Let us say this prayer — your prayer for me — in silence. 

There was more -- the blessing Urbi et Orbi -- but the video I have stops there, alas.

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That weird little smile.  He looks downright bemused, doesn't he?  Like the pope hat doesn't fit quite right.  This went around yesterday:

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This is my favorite cellphone video from the crowd:

I love the news going through the crowd:  "Argentina!" (Italian accent) followed by "Argentina?! A South American!" in an obviously North American accent followed by "Ar-hen-tin-a!" by the exuberant and apparently Spanish-speaking man behind the videographer.

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We don't know a whole lot about this man yet, but I'm sure some details will come out in the next few days.

 At the moment, I would just like to point out that horror is emanating from all the right places.  

And no, I don't just mean the let's-have-women-priests-and-contraception bunch.  A friend of mine messaged me yesterday to point out that the uber-traditionalists are also horrified at the new pope's ecumenism, at the S.J. after his name, and a number of other things. 

Any pope that has the uber-progressives AND the uber-traditionalists foaming at the mouth, and -- what's more important -- the journalists confused, is probably not so bad.

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We don't know very much yet.  But I know this:  the Spirit is in charge, and we can trust a Spirit that managed to get us through the Borgia popes.  I think He can handle an elderly Argentinian soccer fan for a little while.