Merciful Love

Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima, the 101st anniversary of the Blessed Virgin Mary's first apparition at the Cova da Iria in Fatima, Portugal.

Today is also the day of my Offering to Merciful Love, after the example of Saint Therese of Lisieux.



I want to wait another week, for Pentecost (the birthday of the Church and the last day of the Easter season), before I really sum up how much has changed for me over these months, but I can at least continue beyond my last blog entry for the moment.



In keeping with the spirit of my previous blog entry, I will start with my main point: letting God be God.



What I mean is this: it is in God's nature to be present everywhere, and to share His love everywhere. He gave us free will, but He wants us to freely choose to let Him do this, to cooperate: to let Him give us His love, and work His love through us, with us, and in us.

While we have free will and can choose not to do so, if we do this we are not letting God be God.  We are not letting Him act to His full capacity.  And aside from this being to our own detriment (since we only exist as relationships to God), it breaks His Heart that we don't want to accept what He wants to give us.  And the worst part of it is that He knows we're not perfect and doesn't expect us to be perfect on our own--but He wants to raise us up and make us the best we can be.  But He will only do that if we show Him that we want Him to.



Many times I have noted that the Gospel Reading at the Byzantine Catholic church at which I'm registered is in perfect keeping with what I needed to know, or what I was thinking about, without knowing in advance what it would be.  But at the Vigil yesterday, something happened to a greater degree than I can remember having happened before.

While I was still at home, before going to the Liturgy, I thought about how I need to distinguish between the reality of things, and my idea of them--because traditionally I haven't been good at that.  I have so clung to my idea of things that, even when I have gotten clear signs that I was wrong, I stubbornly stuck with my idea even though my heart wasn't in it anymore.  (Specifically I was thinking about my college degrees, and how I concluded that the major wasn't for me even before I finished and got the degrees--but I got them anyway.)

Then, after making confession, while I was doing my penance, I came to the above realization, and that's how I put it: we need to let God be God.

And then during the Liturgy, the Gospel Reading was about how Jesus is the true vine, and we are the branches.  And I realized that this is simply another way of saying the conclusion I had come to: a more concrete version of my abstract realization!  And then I realized that what I'd been thinking about at home fell into this same category: if I cling to my false ideas, I am denying the reality of things as God made them--in particular, my own destiny.  If I do that, I become the dead branch that gets broken off and thrown into the fire.  But if I accept the signs of my true destiny and act on them, I become the branch that (with some pruning) bears much fruit.

On top of all this, I thought about how fitting it was that I should come to this the day before my Offering to Merciful Love--and how this relates to the "Little Way" of Saint Therese.  Like water, God's merciful love goes as low as it possibly can--so the littler we are, the more we will receive.  But the bigger we are, the less we will receive--just as a container full of concrete can't fit much water into it.

All these things linking together meant that it was very exciting waiting for midnight, when I chose to make the Offering to Merciful Love.  And now I have made it, and all I have to do is be faithful to it, to the best of my ability--and know that if I fall, God will always be there to pick me up again as long as I keep trying.

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I've also now read, for the first time, J. R. R. Tolkien's unfinished and posthumously published novel "The Notion Club Papers" (found in Sauron Defeated, Volume IX of The History of Middle-earth, edited by his son Christopher Tolkien and published first in 1992).

Talk about inspirational!  I'll save it for a later blog entry in terms of the specifics, but the main conclusion that I came to is this: we human beings universally have two desires which only God can reconcile.  Those desires are as follows:

1) We want to experience things that go beyond anything that is possible in this life, but

2) We want to genuinely experience them, not just have our senses fooled into imagining we do.



By way of an example: the most immersive experience of another world that we can experience with our senses, according to a website I've found, is the dark ride--found usually at themed amusement parks.  But however much a dark ride gives the impression to our senses of taking us out of the real world and into a world that we cannot get in the real world, ultimately it is all a trick.  It isn't real.

I think my first inkling of such a thing was when I went to Disneyland and was disappointed that Mickey Mouse and company didn't talk--I fully expected them to, that's how young I was.

But however clever the trick--usually easiest to find with visceral experiences like "jump scares"--that's all it is, a trick.  It's not real.



Only in the imagination can we find the kind of experience we're looking for.  However far technology goes, it will never compete with our imaginations for taking us out of the world we know.

The problem here is that we're not experiencing it with our senses at all: our minds are participating, but our bodies and sense organs are not.  Someone may be such a good storyteller that we can "see", "hear", "smell", "taste", and "feel" what is described--but we can "see" just as easily with our eyes closed as with them open, and all we're hearing is the storyteller's words.  We can't go there.



The point is that, in our temporal existence, it's a trade-off.  The further we go, the less we can experience it with our senses; the more we experience it with our senses, the more it is only a trick, and limited by technology.

At best we can have both, but usually not at the same time.



The closest that we usually get to this is in dreams.  Tolkien's characters make mention of this phenomenon in "The Notion Club Papers", and it squares with my experience.

The way I would describe it is this: it's like I'm watching a movie, except that I'm in it: as myself, not playing a role, even if the "dream reality" doesn't completely square with the waking reality.  This means that 1) there is no screen at all, everything is literally in three dimensions and I can move my position wherever, rather than being held in thrall by what the camera picked up; and 2) I can interact with the other characters, so that it isn't a passive experience.

And yet there is a quality that is more like I'm watching a movie than like I'm experiencing real life.  Things happen that I have never experienced and can't expect ever to experience in my waking life, for example.  In addition, things seem to be distinctly purposed in a way that, while this is so in real life, we often find it harder to see--so that it's almost as if it was scripted, at least to some degree.  Plus I'm interacting with characters, not with actors portraying characters, who have an existence outside of the characters and the dream-drama.

I definitely enjoy this experience, but I cannot duplicate it in my waking life.



Only God can truly reconcile these desires.  The reason we have this desire to go beyond the confines of our bodies is because (whether we know it or not, whether we will it or not) we long for God.  We thirst to experience Him directly--for the beatific vision.

When we're little children, this longing is first practiced in our imaginations and playing pretend--just as pretending to be a doctor, say, can be practice for someone becoming a real doctor.  All pretend or imagination is childish practice for the real thing when we're older--it's just that we can see playacting what a child might be when he grows up, but we might not see what kind of practice it would be to pretend to be, say, a flying dog from the moon.

And indeed, the specific make believe isn't the point so much as the practice of imagining existence besides this one, and longing for something more--in the abstract.  But children watching Mister Rogers' Neighborhood aren't thinking in those terms.  They think in more concrete terms based on what interests them.



But while this satisfaction can only be found in heaven, we have to die first.  That is, our souls experience it first without our bodies.  So far, only Jesus and Mary are in heaven alive, body and soul.  All other human beings in heaven have died, and only their souls are in heaven--not their bodies.  Only in the End Times will that change, when Jesus resurrects the dead on Judgment Day.  And then the bodies of the saints will join their souls in heaven.

The point that I'm trying to make is that, while we desire to go beyond the confines of our bodies--we also want our bodies to come along!  We would rather really fly than either imagine we're flying, or have our senses deceived into thinking we're flying.  (And I have flown in dreams: in particular, I've jumped and then tensed up my feet, which prevented them from reaching the ground--and it was a short step from this to flying.)  But in this life we cannot fly without technology (falling doesn't count because we're not controlling our movement down).

And only God can satisfy both desires.  Stories on the one hand, and immersions like dark rides or drama on the other, can simulate two aspects of what we're looking for, but only at the cost of the other.  Only when history ends and eternity begins can we get what we truly want--and only if we go to heaven.

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Knowing this, and keeping in mind my above conclusions about the Little Way and letting God be God, frees me up somewhat.

First and foremost, nothing has to be "perfect" (as that isn't possible anyway), just good enough.  And there is no one experience that will grant everything I want anyway, so more than one kind are perfectly fine, even for the same basic story.

In particular, the two extremes would be dark rides that give visceral experiences, and that have some interactivity (for total immersion), and oral storytelling (for not worrying about the confines of safety and budget, and for no fooling of the senses)--the latter regarding the specific words (and body language) as secondary to the story, and interchangeable, so that the same story need never be told the same way twice (and the storyteller interacts with the audience).

This helps me in particular with my current project, Young Blood.  The main thing is that I get the entire story fleshed out and share it in some form--and I need not limit it to just one form.  And that's just fine because I have a lot of passions and skills, and it's so hard to choose: that's why I still don't have steady work and steady income to this day (but I hope to change that soon).



In particular, I've always enjoyed drawing, and I have thought about designing dark rides when I was little (although I didn't know what they were called and didn't think of it in that capacity)--but I am also good with my voice, and I enjoy telling other people things with my voice.  And I am a cantor now (not quite a year yet!).  I also like voice acting, which isn't appropriate in oral storytelling but is immersive.

And in thinking about dark rides, I've looked into their history.  The most fundamental aspects that you find in a dark ride can be done with murals on the walls of a building or a tunnel, that progressively tell a story.  I have considered painting my walls to have some kind of images, and I have admired that at my eye doctor's office.

Also, the rail transport (and a tunnel) help give the impression of leaving the real world behind (and returning to it), similar to the familiar words in storytelling ("Once upon a time" and "And they all lived happily ever after").  Even on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, where Mister Rogers wanted to indicate this so that even preschoolers could understand it, he had a trolley travel along tracks through a tunnel (with the camera irising out or in, as the case was).  And that got me to thinking about rail transport in general.  My great-grandfather, for example, was a train engineer.

Traditionally I've found trains scary, but maybe I don't need to.  It's good to face my fears.  I don't know about driving an ordinary train to transport passengers or freight, but I could at least get some experience riding such transport, and learn something about how engineers do what they do.

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I'd already considered oral storytelling, noting that the main places where we get that in our modern Western culture are children's storytelling (like story time in the library) and standup comedy--unless it's singing a story.

And this dichotomy of putting oral storytelling (among other things) into categories indicating that our culture doesn't take them seriously (but also doesn't get rid of them), makes me feel that they are part of what it means to be human, so that it's a shame that our modern Western culture, unique among all cultures worldwide through history, does this.



In keeping with this notion, I want to close by elaborating on one thing I touched upon in my last blog, that having to do with the premise of Michael Ward's book Planet Narnia.

After reading his shorter The Narnia Code, I've read C. S. Lewis's posthumous non-fiction book The Discarded Image, and realized just how truly different the medieval view of things was from how it is now (and from how we moderns falsely imagine the medieval view of things was).  And I concluded something about the real loss to our "post-Christian" culture and what it truly means.



Before the last 500 years (and then mostly in the West--and any place the modern West has left its footprints), all cultures regarded existence as (to one degree or another) personal, and involving relationships.  That's why the sun, moon, stars, and planets were thought of as gods; that's why the predominant form of society has been monarchical, with the family as its nucleus but extending to the entire nation.

This reached its culmination in Christendom: Western Europe in the Middle Ages.  I say this because Catholic Christianity teaches that God is everywhere, that God is personal, and that God is three Persons in relationship.  He provides the true explanation for what pre-Christian pagans only grasped at dimly.

But starting in the early 1500's, the West has become steadily less and less personal--not only less personal than Christendom, but less personal even than pre-Christian pagan cultures.  In particular, I now think that the most revolutionary thing about our modern view of the stars and planets is NOT the mere mechanics (Earth rotating and revolving around the sun, rather than Earth being stationary and the sun, stars, and planets revolving around Earth)--but the very fact that we think in such mechanical terms.

That is, I think the most revolutionary thing was the depersonalizing of the cosmos.  Read The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, especially Paradiso, and you'll see something of the personal qualities that he took for granted--and he was a Catholic Christian who put idolaters in hell in Inferno.



Out of a good but misguided attempt to avoid idolatry, the Protestant reformers depersonalized the cosmos, and in doing so diminished God into someone who can be threatened by his own creation, something impossible for the real God (but mere wish fulfillment on the part of the Devil).  Hence, the new version of the cosmos wasn't only heliocentric rather than geocentric, it was mechanical, like a machine, with no life or influence outside of perhaps gravity.

And that's without getting into the Protestants doing away with the papacy and even the separate ordained priesthood and Church hierarchy.  It isn't hard to see how this depersonalizing continued into deism, agnosticism, atheism (at least secularism), and thence to overthrowing monarchies in favor of republics (as well as the dehumanizing of indigenous peoples by European colonists and their descendants, and the dehumanizing of women by modern European men)--and ultimately dissolving the family itself and denying the personhood of unborn babies, the most helpless and innocent of all human persons.  (This last is especially an issue on Mother's Day!)

(And let's not forget the rejection of the existence of angels and demons and ghosts--and therefore of hauntings, possession, witchcraft, etc.)



The point is that this is how I see the last 500 years of history in the West now.  But more to the point, this is how I now see the fullest understanding of a Christ-centered worldview: it isn't just about Catholic monarchies and patriarchal nuclear families, but about recognizing that existence is by its very nature personal and relationship--and this extends even to the stars and planets.



Before I leave off this subject I need to make certain things clear:



First, I am not referring to the existence of extraterrestrial corporeal creatures, similar to us in ways but not native to earth.  I don't think the mechanics of the universe as we know it supports this notion.  (A mere small centrifuge can defy the gravity of the entire Earth.  Think through clearly what that means.)

Nevertheless, before I stopped believing in aliens, I clung to that belief because I didn't see why God had made the universe if it was that empty.  Now I see things differently: for one thing, the sun, moon, and stars are made for signs and seasons--they were our first timekeepers, and there were many signs in the stars mentioned in the Bible.  But more to the point, medievals believed that each planet itself was associated with a singular spiritual, rational intelligence causing it to move and causing influence upon us on earth.

In short, I think I was right to believe that God wouldn't make the universe so empty--but I was thinking about it in the wrong way.



Second, a caveat about astrology.  It is grievously sinful to worship the stars and planets as if they were divine by their own nature, when God created them out of nothing; it is grievously sinful to believe in such a deterministic view, denying human free will and moral responsibility, that one can believe in horoscopes and specific predictions about the future and our "fate"; it is also grievously sinful to lead others astray in this regard in any case, but also to make money off it.

Nevertheless, these are not the only aspects to astrology.  Indeed, until the 1500's, the Church regarded astrology and astronomy as simply two focuses of the same kind of knowledge.  Compare it, if you will, thus: astronomy is like the study of human biology (including medicine); astrology is like the study of human behavior--the will, desires, and actions (and interactions and relationships).  The point is that the above aspects of astrology are what the Church has always condemned--but tellingly, the Church has never condemned astrology in and of itself.

Saint Thomas Aquinas noted that the stars and planets do exercise influence over us--and why shouldn't they?  Earthly persons and even non-persons do this, so why not celestial bodies?  The sun, moon, stars, and planets can even be partly responsible for certain dispositions we have--not unlike genes, which we've only known about since the late 1800's--but our free will means we are not bound to these dispositions; we are not fated to act upon them in everything we do.



What's more, an astrology rooted in Christ can be something extremely useful for us today, I think.  Another aspect of the "discarded image" is the belief that only up to the moon's orbit was creation tainted by original sin; everything beyond the moon's orbit was regarded as perfect, identical to the way it was before original sin.

Given that, the celestial bodies point to God perfectly in a way that we fallen human beings cannot--and yet, unlike the angels and the souls of human saints, we can see the celestial bodies.  At the very least, the ancients knew the sun and the moon existed, as well as the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn--and the "fixed stars".  They didn't need telescopes to see them.  And this is precisely why the pagan gods associated with the sun, moon, stars, and planets died hardest.  Even if you don't believe in the Holy Trinity, and even if you don't believe that Jesus of Nazareth existed as a historical person (irrespective of whether He was and is the Son of God), it is an accepted fact that the sun, moon, stars, and planets exist because we can detect them with our senses.

I would argue that this is also why this notion of the planets being associated with intelligences has visited us in a different form today: that of extraterrestrial corporeal persons ("aliens").  And this is why I think a return to Christian astrology can counter not only dangerous non-Christian astrology (backed by demons), and not only lifeless astronomy, but also any UFO cult about "ancient aliens" that could threaten people's souls.



In sum, I now think of a Christ-centered astrology as the missing piece of the puzzle that I began years ago, in attempting a Christ-centered philosophical worldview.

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I didn't mean to go on and on about astrology, so I'll leave it there.  I might try to get into a more detailed and organized indication (and a more concise summary) of how I've changed in this year 2018 (the Year of Grace, and the year that all the planets are on the same side of the sun), next week or so.



In the meantime, thank you for sharing part of your day with me.

May God show you His divine mercy, through and with and in Mary.  Amen.