"'And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.'" (Luke 1:45)
When I was going through my private retreat in preparation for my consecration to Merciful Love, this was one passage that I tried to keep in my heart. It is Saint Elizabeth's blessing, at the Visitation, to Mary. Mary believed that what Saint Gabriel the Archangel said to her, from the Lord, would be fulfilled--even as impossible as it sounded (a virgin giving birth?). And that is why she is blessed.
One of the first lessons I learned through reading Father Michael E. Gaitley's books is that all sin is derived ultimately from fear and distrust of God--even though God is the source of trust itself and isn't capable of being untrustworthy or of wanting to be.
In thinking about this, I have now begun to think about the various promises that God has made to man throughout history--in particular, His covenantal promises, and more specifically those that are unconditional.
The first recorded covenant in the Bible is that made with Noah and his family after the Flood. "'I establish My covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.'" (Genesis 9:11) Blessed are we who believe that the world will not flood and destroy all life on earth again.
Next is the covenant made with Abram (later to be renamed Abraham): "And He brought him outside and said, 'Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.' Then He said to him, 'So shall your descendants be.'" (Genesis 15:5) Blessed are we who believe that the descendants of Abraham (both by blood and especially by faith) will not be snuffed out.
Next is the covenant made through Moses, the permanent part of which is the Ten Commandments. Blessed are we who believe that God will not abandon us, will not cease to be our God. Blessed are we who believe that God shows "'...mercy to thousands of those who love Me and keep My Commandments.'" (Exodus 20:6)
Then is the covenant made with King David of Israel. "'"And your house and your kingdom shall be made sure for ever before Me; your throne shall be established for ever."'" (2 Samuel 7:16) Blessed are we who believe that the House of David reigns over Israel forever, and will never lose authority nor be snuffed out.
Finally there is the New Covenant in the Blood of Christ. "'...for this is My Blood of the Covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.'" (Matthew 26:28) Blessed are we who believe that Christ's Blood, shed on the Cross and drunk in Holy Communion at Mass, forgives the sins of many.
Blessed are we who believe especially when it seems least possible.
In this day and age there is "climate change" fearmongering, which sows seeds of doubt in our minds as to God's promise never to flood the world and destroy all life on earth again. It sows seeds of fear that our efforts might raise the global temperature, melt the polar ice caps, raise the ocean levels, and flood the land--and it sows the desire not only to prevent this at all costs, as though it were a possibility, but to have a "contingency plan" in case it does happen (like colonizing outer space). And the sign of this covenant, the rainbow, has become co-opted by the LGBTQ+ movement, a movement promoting dangers to our immortal souls.
Blessed are we who do not fear this but trust God's promise. We must respect the Lord's creation because He created it and we did not, but He created it for us, and it is not within our power to bring about a flood He promised would never happen again.
In this day and age there is fearmongering of the potential for human extinction, which especially got underway with the arrival of the atomic age after World War II. Even before that, there was what's called the Holocaust, which has unjustly been raised to the level of a religious dogma since the Allied victory in World War II--rooted in attempted genocide.
Blessed are we who do not fear this but trust God's promise. We must respect all children of Abraham, by blood and by faith, and even to take a single human life (even a non-child of Abraham) is a sin that cries out to God for justice--but it is not within our power to extinguish all children of Abraham, either Jews or Christians, and we need not fear such a thing being possible.
In this day and age the West is no longer rooted in God's Covenant, so that the Ten Commandments are removed from public places. Again, fear and distrust of God leads to doubt being sowed that God shows mercy to those who love Him and keep His Commandments. Instead, we get a distorted view of an "Old Testament God" (as if it were God and not our relationship to Him that had changed) who calls down fire and brimstone at the slightest provocation--a God who, if He existed, would make life a constant nightmare, thereby creating the temptation to believe that God doesn't exist at all (or at least doesn't care about us--and maybe doesn't even know about us).
Blessed are we who do not fear this but trust God's promise. We do not have license to do whatever we want, but God gives us His Commandments for our sake--even less than we do, God doesn't want us to suffer punishment for our sins.
In this day and age we are taught to give unequivocal support of the State of Israel, a republic that recognizes no king, certainly not Jesus Christ the Son of David. We are even taught that to do less is to be "anti-Semitic".
Blessed are we who do not fear this but trust God's promise. Israel is the first chosen nation of God, and God will never abandon her--and we must bless and not curse God's chosen people--but for her own sake Israel must accept her true King and God, and to support Israeli rejection of Him is as anti-Semitic as it gets, and worse than anti-Semitic.
In this day and age we are taught that there are sins too great to be forgiven (and that these are few), and that other sins aren't sins at all but are merely called so by phobic people (and these are many). We are taught that the bread and wine at Mass do not become the Body and Blood of Christ but only that Catholics believe this. We are taught to question whether God exists, or even whether Jesus of Nazareth existed as a historical Person, irrespective of whether He is the Son of God or not. We are taught that it is within our own power to prevent and undo sin, and therefore that if we fail, we are entirely to blame--or else the sin isn't sin at all. We are also taught that it is within our own power to achieve immortality--and therefore to escape the wages of sin that is death.
Blessed are we who do not fear this but trust God's promise. There are sins deserving of the worst possible punishment, and even the least of sins keeps us out of God's loving embrace--but He mercifully keeps us alive that we might repent and return to Him before it's too late.
Blessed are we who believe that there will be a fulfillment of what is spoken to us from the Lord.
Thank you for being with me. God bless you.
Friday, September 7, 2018
Thursday, September 6, 2018
Trilemma
I intend to make this a short blog entry: brief and to the point.
When I was in my spiritual journey en route back to the Catholic Church, I happened upon what is called C. S. Lewis's "trilemma" (he didn't invent it but it's become associated with him). The intent was to point out that Jesus specifically rejected the possibility that, as so many think, He was a good but merely human teacher. Someone who claims to be God, either directly or indirectly (as by not denying it and rebuking the one who said He was), either is God (and is therefore NOT a merely human teacher!) or else is not God (and is therefore NOT a good teacher!).
More specifically, if a man claims falsely to be God, either he knows he isn't God (and so is lying and invoking God's Name in the lie), or else he doesn't know it but imagines falsely that he is God (and so is insane).
Therefore the trilemma is this: given that Jesus claimed to be God (or at least refused to deny it or rebuke those who said He was), there are only three possibilities as to His identity. Those three possibilities are as follows:
Lunatic (if He is not God but falsely imagines that He is)
Liar (if He is not God and knows it but claims to be so anyway)
Lord (if He is God)
The Catholic Church teaches that she, the Church, is the Mystical Body of Christ. That being the case, therefore, if we are truly Christian, true followers of Jesus Christ, then we too will specifically reject any other possibility, not only for Our Lord but for ourselves. Just as there is no possibility that Jesus was a "good but merely human teacher", there is no possibility that the Catholic Church is a "good but human-founded and human-run organization"--as in, one among many, more or less equally valid.
If we are true followers of Jesus Christ, then the world will only be capable of seeing us in one of the following ways:
Lunatics (not being in full communion with the Creator but falsely imagining that we are)
Liars (knowing full well that we are not in communion with the Creator but claiming we are anyway)
Servants of the Lord (actually being in full communion with the Creator)
And it isn't necessarily easy, either. We might fool ourselves into thinking that we believe what the Catholic Church teaches and practice it to the best of our ability, but what if we are put to the test? What if someone who rejects the idea that we are the Mystical Body of Christ were to say something like "Come on, you don't really believe that, do you?" (This very non-argument has been used by real people.)
It's a non-argument because it doesn't even address the teaching of the faith. Rather, it presumes before the fact (the definition of "prejudice") that the teaching is so absurd that a sane person would never "really" believe it. Consequently it is accusing the Christian of merely pretending to believe it, akin to those who pretended they could see the Emperor's New Clothes.
By definition this is a weak approach. It's a weak approach, but it's used anyway because it can easily ensnare those with weak faith. It's good for us to know what the Church does and does not teach, and to a degree even to know why, so that we can be confident in our faith and be good apologists. But at some point, knowledge must give way to faith. At some point we must be willing to say "I don't know why the Church teaches this, but I believe it's true and I mean to act on that belief." If we aren't, we succumb to peer pressure, and that means that our faith is weak.
But the point is this: this weak approach calls out those who are in fact lying to themselves, who in fact "don't really believe that" at all, but are pretending to for some purpose of their own. It may not be an intentionally malicious purpose, but it is still lying to the self and others--and God Himself. Therefore I suspect that, while these people don't intend such a thing, God is using them to weed out those with weak faith.
How many people would become believers if I said, "Come on, you don't really believe that the universe came into existence without the action and conscious will of a Creator, do you?" Probably not many--and I would question the strength of the faith of those who seemed to be convinced of God's existence by my saying that. Our Lord Himself didn't preach that way.
We are called to LOVE: there is no true faith, no true belief, without love. What love is there in saying "Come on, you don't really believe that, do you?" Even if you're right, saying that is presuming not only that your belief is true, but that it is obviously true--that only the insane could believe otherwise.
What does this really mean? First, it denies revelation having a part in one's beliefs: if something is obviously true, so that only a lunatic could believe otherwise, then by definition we don't need to have it revealed to us--and the Church teaches not only that God has revealed things to us but that they were things we could NOT have come to on our own.
Second, it is arrogant, refusing to consider the possibility that there could be anything wrong with one's own beliefs, and that someone who disagrees might have a point and might be worth listening to. It presumes that one knows all that one needs to know, which goes against what the Church teaches.
Third, it is making a serious judgment call against the other person, basically accusing that person of lying--and worse, lying about God. Not only might this not be the case, but even if it is, how can we see clearly to remove the speck from the other's eye if we have a log in our own eye?
Fourth, substitute something else and see if there is anything Christlike about that rhetorical question: "Come on, you don't really think anyone will believe you were sexually molested by a priest, do you?" The question "Who's going to believe you?" comes from the Devil, and we faithful in the Church must never let ourselves be deceived either into doubting that we will be believed (and so doubting the point of speaking up), nor into using this against other people.
Ultimately, though, my point is this: if we are true believers, then those who refuse to accept that the Church is the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, will find themselves in a dilemma about how to interpret our sayings and our behavior. They will be inclined to believe one of the following things about us:
1) We are liars, but unbelievably good liars, so that we don't give any sign whatsoever of our lie;
or
2) We are insane, honestly believing things that aren't capable of being true and that "anyone" ought to know aren't capable of being true--and yet showing no other signs of mental illness.
It should go without saying that we must not actually be either of these things, not if we are true believers of Jesus Christ. God is Truth itself, and so we do not follow Him if we lie (the Devil is the Father of Lies). And God's ways are not our ways: we are finite, and we are fallen, and so to follow Him might seem like madness (how can salvation come from being nailed to a Cross?), but that's because of our perspective, not because it objectively is madness. God knows what we do not, and He wills only good, unlike us.
How can sugar, which tastes so good, be bad for us and cause a disease like diabetes? And if it can, how do we KNOW if we don't try it out for ourselves?
We cannot get by without trust, without faith--and there is no true faith without love.
I say this so that we can examine ourselves and see which category we fall into, so that we can do something about it if we are not being faithful--and also so that we can know others by their fruits, and recognize false Christians and expose and avoid them.
And again, being faithful doesn't mean we will never sin--only by God's grace can we avoid sinning--but that we genuinely sorrow for our sins and want to be liberated from sin, not only or even primarily for our sake (though certainly for that reason!), but simply because it breaks Our Lord's Heart to see us want to hurt ourselves, and we love Him too much to do that to Him.
Thank you for being with me. God bless you all.
When I was in my spiritual journey en route back to the Catholic Church, I happened upon what is called C. S. Lewis's "trilemma" (he didn't invent it but it's become associated with him). The intent was to point out that Jesus specifically rejected the possibility that, as so many think, He was a good but merely human teacher. Someone who claims to be God, either directly or indirectly (as by not denying it and rebuking the one who said He was), either is God (and is therefore NOT a merely human teacher!) or else is not God (and is therefore NOT a good teacher!).
More specifically, if a man claims falsely to be God, either he knows he isn't God (and so is lying and invoking God's Name in the lie), or else he doesn't know it but imagines falsely that he is God (and so is insane).
Therefore the trilemma is this: given that Jesus claimed to be God (or at least refused to deny it or rebuke those who said He was), there are only three possibilities as to His identity. Those three possibilities are as follows:
Lunatic (if He is not God but falsely imagines that He is)
Liar (if He is not God and knows it but claims to be so anyway)
Lord (if He is God)
The Catholic Church teaches that she, the Church, is the Mystical Body of Christ. That being the case, therefore, if we are truly Christian, true followers of Jesus Christ, then we too will specifically reject any other possibility, not only for Our Lord but for ourselves. Just as there is no possibility that Jesus was a "good but merely human teacher", there is no possibility that the Catholic Church is a "good but human-founded and human-run organization"--as in, one among many, more or less equally valid.
If we are true followers of Jesus Christ, then the world will only be capable of seeing us in one of the following ways:
Lunatics (not being in full communion with the Creator but falsely imagining that we are)
Liars (knowing full well that we are not in communion with the Creator but claiming we are anyway)
Servants of the Lord (actually being in full communion with the Creator)
And it isn't necessarily easy, either. We might fool ourselves into thinking that we believe what the Catholic Church teaches and practice it to the best of our ability, but what if we are put to the test? What if someone who rejects the idea that we are the Mystical Body of Christ were to say something like "Come on, you don't really believe that, do you?" (This very non-argument has been used by real people.)
It's a non-argument because it doesn't even address the teaching of the faith. Rather, it presumes before the fact (the definition of "prejudice") that the teaching is so absurd that a sane person would never "really" believe it. Consequently it is accusing the Christian of merely pretending to believe it, akin to those who pretended they could see the Emperor's New Clothes.
By definition this is a weak approach. It's a weak approach, but it's used anyway because it can easily ensnare those with weak faith. It's good for us to know what the Church does and does not teach, and to a degree even to know why, so that we can be confident in our faith and be good apologists. But at some point, knowledge must give way to faith. At some point we must be willing to say "I don't know why the Church teaches this, but I believe it's true and I mean to act on that belief." If we aren't, we succumb to peer pressure, and that means that our faith is weak.
But the point is this: this weak approach calls out those who are in fact lying to themselves, who in fact "don't really believe that" at all, but are pretending to for some purpose of their own. It may not be an intentionally malicious purpose, but it is still lying to the self and others--and God Himself. Therefore I suspect that, while these people don't intend such a thing, God is using them to weed out those with weak faith.
How many people would become believers if I said, "Come on, you don't really believe that the universe came into existence without the action and conscious will of a Creator, do you?" Probably not many--and I would question the strength of the faith of those who seemed to be convinced of God's existence by my saying that. Our Lord Himself didn't preach that way.
We are called to LOVE: there is no true faith, no true belief, without love. What love is there in saying "Come on, you don't really believe that, do you?" Even if you're right, saying that is presuming not only that your belief is true, but that it is obviously true--that only the insane could believe otherwise.
What does this really mean? First, it denies revelation having a part in one's beliefs: if something is obviously true, so that only a lunatic could believe otherwise, then by definition we don't need to have it revealed to us--and the Church teaches not only that God has revealed things to us but that they were things we could NOT have come to on our own.
Second, it is arrogant, refusing to consider the possibility that there could be anything wrong with one's own beliefs, and that someone who disagrees might have a point and might be worth listening to. It presumes that one knows all that one needs to know, which goes against what the Church teaches.
Third, it is making a serious judgment call against the other person, basically accusing that person of lying--and worse, lying about God. Not only might this not be the case, but even if it is, how can we see clearly to remove the speck from the other's eye if we have a log in our own eye?
Fourth, substitute something else and see if there is anything Christlike about that rhetorical question: "Come on, you don't really think anyone will believe you were sexually molested by a priest, do you?" The question "Who's going to believe you?" comes from the Devil, and we faithful in the Church must never let ourselves be deceived either into doubting that we will be believed (and so doubting the point of speaking up), nor into using this against other people.
Ultimately, though, my point is this: if we are true believers, then those who refuse to accept that the Church is the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, will find themselves in a dilemma about how to interpret our sayings and our behavior. They will be inclined to believe one of the following things about us:
1) We are liars, but unbelievably good liars, so that we don't give any sign whatsoever of our lie;
or
2) We are insane, honestly believing things that aren't capable of being true and that "anyone" ought to know aren't capable of being true--and yet showing no other signs of mental illness.
It should go without saying that we must not actually be either of these things, not if we are true believers of Jesus Christ. God is Truth itself, and so we do not follow Him if we lie (the Devil is the Father of Lies). And God's ways are not our ways: we are finite, and we are fallen, and so to follow Him might seem like madness (how can salvation come from being nailed to a Cross?), but that's because of our perspective, not because it objectively is madness. God knows what we do not, and He wills only good, unlike us.
How can sugar, which tastes so good, be bad for us and cause a disease like diabetes? And if it can, how do we KNOW if we don't try it out for ourselves?
We cannot get by without trust, without faith--and there is no true faith without love.
I say this so that we can examine ourselves and see which category we fall into, so that we can do something about it if we are not being faithful--and also so that we can know others by their fruits, and recognize false Christians and expose and avoid them.
And again, being faithful doesn't mean we will never sin--only by God's grace can we avoid sinning--but that we genuinely sorrow for our sins and want to be liberated from sin, not only or even primarily for our sake (though certainly for that reason!), but simply because it breaks Our Lord's Heart to see us want to hurt ourselves, and we love Him too much to do that to Him.
Thank you for being with me. God bless you all.
Tuesday, September 4, 2018
Mercury
I've mentioned Catholic astrology on this blog before. I don't want to talk too much about a subject that I know so little about, as I don't know of anyone personally whom I can trust to be devout Catholics and root any kind of astrology in God and the Catholic doctrine, rather than inverting this and trying to predict the future in violation of the First Commandment while still claiming to be Catholic or otherwise Christian (I still recoil when I look into most things labeled as "astrological", and I don't get on astrology websites at all, for example). And I certainly don't want to lead anyone astray.
In particular, I don't know if it is appropriate to venerate the planets as we would angels or saints. I don't mean the celestial bodies--that would NOT be appropriate--but traditionally, saints such as Thomas Aquinas have believed that their movement is due to heavenly spirits (the same species as angels, although the word "angel" technically only applies to the lowest ranks who communicate with us), spirits associated with the bodies of the planets, but not as inextricably as our souls are with our own bodies. And if this were true, I would think it would be appropriate to venerate these Intelligences. (The word "venerate" relates to the word "Venus".) But without clear word either way from the Church, I'm not comfortable specifically venerating them, as in asking them to pray for me or intercede on my behalf (or others), or in telling other people to do so. Still, I'm so uncertain that, at least for now, I prefer to take a similar position to that of private revelations: we aren't required to believe in them or act on them, but if the Church has approved them, we must not contemn those who do even if we choose not to ourselves. (Then again, I don't know of people who would believe in this or act on it who are NOT breaking the First Commandment.)
Nevertheless, I'm coming to notice a recurring theme throughout my life, that (if the pattern I seem to detect is indeed legit) both suggests some truth to the influence of the planets, and also puts the lie to astrology being so certain that people might try to predict the future based on horoscopes and such. Therefore, I think it might be a good idea for me to mention it here, at least to throw it out there.
I'm a Capricorn, and so my ruling planet is Saturn--and I have definitely noticed some degree of saturnine elements in my life: I recall reading some stories I'd written in 2005, as a young man, and realizing that I must have suffered from depression at that time; also, when I was trying to predict the future myself from 2012-2016, I kept looking at my neighborhood and world as if I were Sarah Connor from Terminator 2: Judgment Day, as if it were all gone already.
But if I'm being honest with myself, I think I'm noticing more of a mercurial influence in my life (hence the title of this blog entry). I didn't recognize it as specifically "mercurial" before I came back to the Church, or even at all before this year (and maybe that's a good thing), but I now feel that I can put a label on it.
Before I go any further, I want to get a few things clear:
1) Even if there is anything to planetary influence on our lives, there need not be hard and fast boundaries, and that's doubly so where Mercury is concerned (Mercury is mutable and therefore has fuzzy boundaries)--so just because you see something in your life associated with one planet doesn't preclude the same for others, nor does it mean that's the dominant influence in your life.
2) Nevertheless, Mercury is so far removed from Saturn, and I feel so strongly a mercurial influence in my life, that I think it puts the lie to the idea of astrology being 100% reliable. I wasn't born with any astrological sign ruled by Mercury (such as Gemini), so my birthday cannot explain this apparent mercurial influence in my life. And so if I'm correct in mercurial influence dominating my life, that alone should suggest that astrology is NOT so reliable as to have it be practical to try to know the future thereby (which is a grave sin against the First Commandment).
3) While I have Asperger's Syndrome, and this makes it easier for me to miss the forest for the trees compared to ordinary people, I don't think that alone accounts for what I call a mercurial influence. I can only speak for myself, not for everyone with Asperger's Syndrome, but I don't think this condition alone is mercurial. (In fact, while I won't get into it in this blog entry, if anything I wondered if it was due more to influence from Luna, the moon.)
Ever since I read the book Peter Pan for the first time in 2003 (after seeing the P. J. Hogan film), I've considered it to be my favorite story ever, the one with which I could most identify and the one I most loved, reading it over and over until I practically had it memorized (not something I usually do with novels, let me tell you). I identified specifically with Peter Pan, especially when he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be forever barred (seeing the happy reunited Darling family, now including the adopted Lost Boys), and when he discovered that Wendy had grown up without him, leaving him behind in childhood, and he cried.
Nevertheless, I wondered (and was unnerved) by the fact of people associating "Peter Pan" (not the character as such, but adults identifying with him) with pedophilia, or even with sex of any kind. Peter Pan is sexless: he doesn't even know of (or want) any male-female relationship other than mother and son, and he is himself prepubescent and so his body is not sexualized. Still, it was such a recurring theme that I wondered why it existed, and I didn't want it to exist.
Now I think that what it was is mercurial influence. Mythologically, Mercury is the winged messenger, associated both with speed and with communication--and the latter means not only language but also being an intermediary between two people (one to give the message to the messenger, and one to receive it from the messenger), hence Mercury ruling the constellation of Gemini, the Twins. He is also, uniquely among the gods, depicted as beardless, suggesting youth (like Peter Pan). In addition, Hermes (the Greek equivalent of Mercury) is the father of Pan, the nature deity who is half-man and half-goat, and for whom Peter Pan was named.
What got me to thinking specifically about Mercury was reading The Narnia Code by Michael Ward, specifically the chapter about the Narnia book called The Horse and His Boy. In particular, what caught my attention was the fact that, when the boy Shasta asks the Voice (later revealed to be Aslan) "Who are you?", he answers "Myself" three times, but each time his voice sounds different, revealing a different property of himself. Michael Ward says that this is the most Trinitarian part of the entire Narniad, and he's right--and it's in the mercurial Narnia book. He explains the relationship with Mercury with regard to "Hermes Trismegistus", the founder of hermeticism--which brings me to another caveat.
In the Middle Ages, the Church held that anything above the orbit of the moon was perfect, unsullied by Adam's original sin, and so reflecting God without corruption, the only imperfection being by virtue of the planets being created, and therefore finite (each having a different realm of influence). By that reckoning, in and of itself, the influence of Mercury or any other planet (possibly excepting the moon) could only be good--but because of our fallen nature, we are vulnerable to putting such influence to evil purposes. (This is especially so for Mars, and even more so for Saturn.) Therefore, there are mercurial matters that are good, and those that are evil (but the evil comes from us, not from Mercury himself).
On the good side, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is the Word. We only speak truly when we root ourselves in Him, otherwise our talking might as well be the braying of donkeys. God is Truth itself. Therefore there is holy silence (hence vows of silence), and there are short prayers, brief and to the point, contrasted with lengthy pagan prayers that rely on human efforts to get on the good side of the gods. And when messages are important, speed is a good thing (the Internet itself is a speedy way to broadcast information to a large audience). In addition, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, and so I see Mercury reflecting Him as well, going between the two and uniting them--and the Holy Spirit is the Love of God, the Gift.
And of course, Saint Gabriel the Archangel (the patron of my church parish, and therefore one of my patrons) is the patron of messengers. Not only does the word "angel" mean "messenger", but Gabriel is the one who made the Annunciation to Mary that she would bear the Christ Child.
Mercurial people include teachers, logicians, clerks, interpreters, translators, ambassadors, representatives, lawyers, judges, actors and other performing entertainers. Mercury is also associated with money and business: such words as "merchandise", "commerce", etc. are etymologically related to "Mercury".
But we fallen human beings can corrupt Mercury's influence too. Corruptions of mercurial influence include trickery, lying, cheating, stealing, ambition, envy, sorcery, alchemy, esotericism, sexual deviance, treachery, immaturity, necromancy, blackmail, gossip, slander, cowardice, kidnapping, etc. Hence we see things like this in the pagan myths about Mercury or Hermes. And this is also where "hermeticism" comes in.
If you were to boil down the word "mercurial" to one word, I would probably suggest "between". On the one hand, that is the only way there can be trust and love, and therefore society on earth and salvation when this life is over. But on the other hand, if we don't root ourselves in God, we corrupt such influence by attempting to find nonexistent categories "between" the ones established by God. Hence, for example, sorcery and alchemy (the attempt to change one thing into another), and sexual deviance (belief that the male and female sexes aren't mutually exclusive but opposite ends of a spectrum, and that people aren't fixed to one place on that spectrum--which also divorces our sexual appetites from conceiving children) as well as denial of growth and age.
It also leads to using speed and language for evil purposes: evil purposes of speed include running away in cowardice and abandoning others to their fate; running away with something one has stolen, to avoid getting caught; being impatient and refusing to wait for things we need to; never taking the time to slow down and be quiet, and listen to God and talk to Him in prayer. And evil purposes of language include lying and manipulating people into doing what we want; harming others' reputations; and especially lying under oath and so betraying trust--and even simply talking and talking and saying nothing.
And one of the worst corruptions of mercurial influence is just plain being untrustworthy, both in word and in action--being unreliable and an unpredictable liar, and being treacherous, a betrayer. Trickster figures in stories are mercurial. (I need not mention that Pan, half-goat and half-man, also closely resembles much traditional Christian imagery of the Devil.)
And this accounts for the sexual component associated with "Peter Pan" in our culture. Our animal appetites (such as our sexual appetites) will not be denied even if we try to manufacture a false world to live in, to replace the real world--and if we don't root ourselves in Christ and so be chaste about our sexuality, look what happens.
Given this, not only must I root myself in the Lord in order to put any mercurial influence upon me to good use instead of evil use, but this suggests that the right occupation for me might be mercurial as well.
I've been initiated into the Secular Franciscan Order, and it seems to me that the Franciscan charism is mercurial as well: Saint Francis of Assisi said only to use words to preach the Gospel when necessary, but mostly to preach the Gospel by our actions. And he focused on creation in its entirety, hence his association with animals and nature.
In addition, I have taken a LONG time in trying to figure out the right job for me with regard to steady work and income. Even when I thought I'd found it, I would tire of "it" after awhile and move on to something else. The only things that have stayed with me are mercurial: communication, logic, story and art, performance, change, etc. A big part of the reason I am still not working full time is because I sought to find a "day job" because I recognized the impracticality of living off the salary of artistic and creative endeavors, and because I recognized that I was uncomfortable being in a leadership position (someone mercurial would want someone above and below him, not just one or the other).
But aside from some of the jobs that I mentioned above being mercurial, perhaps the most mercurial thing I can do is to work freelance, not tying myself down to one boss or company alone, but hiring out my services to whoever needs them and wants to hire me. It might even be a good idea for me to have a job that requires me to travel.
That doesn't mean that I now have a plan, though. Not only do I need to root myself in praying to Christ, but I need to be open to anything He sends my way, whether I want it or not, whether I even expect it or not. And so I can't have any one rigid plan anyway: any plan I make would have to be flexible.
But at least I think I've zeroed in on what makes me tick, and so I have something to focus on in that regard. Again, ultimately, being mercurial is being "between", which suggests travel, communication, and commerce. Plus, if I were to make a living with art and creativity, I would have to sell what I produced (unless it was a performance--but even then I could record my performances and sell the recordings), and that means I would have to be some kind of salesman--there's commerce. And performing is mercurial as well: being "between" means being able to play different roles, like an actor or a mime; plus there are stage magicians and ventriloquists; also, I think that "fools" (clowns, jesters) can be thought of as perpetual "children" in a similar way to kings and queens being fathers and mothers.
And again, hiring myself out freelance is the most mercurial work of all.
Pray for me, though, because I still need to reconcile this in my heart.
Thank you for being with me. God bless you.
In particular, I don't know if it is appropriate to venerate the planets as we would angels or saints. I don't mean the celestial bodies--that would NOT be appropriate--but traditionally, saints such as Thomas Aquinas have believed that their movement is due to heavenly spirits (the same species as angels, although the word "angel" technically only applies to the lowest ranks who communicate with us), spirits associated with the bodies of the planets, but not as inextricably as our souls are with our own bodies. And if this were true, I would think it would be appropriate to venerate these Intelligences. (The word "venerate" relates to the word "Venus".) But without clear word either way from the Church, I'm not comfortable specifically venerating them, as in asking them to pray for me or intercede on my behalf (or others), or in telling other people to do so. Still, I'm so uncertain that, at least for now, I prefer to take a similar position to that of private revelations: we aren't required to believe in them or act on them, but if the Church has approved them, we must not contemn those who do even if we choose not to ourselves. (Then again, I don't know of people who would believe in this or act on it who are NOT breaking the First Commandment.)
Nevertheless, I'm coming to notice a recurring theme throughout my life, that (if the pattern I seem to detect is indeed legit) both suggests some truth to the influence of the planets, and also puts the lie to astrology being so certain that people might try to predict the future based on horoscopes and such. Therefore, I think it might be a good idea for me to mention it here, at least to throw it out there.
I'm a Capricorn, and so my ruling planet is Saturn--and I have definitely noticed some degree of saturnine elements in my life: I recall reading some stories I'd written in 2005, as a young man, and realizing that I must have suffered from depression at that time; also, when I was trying to predict the future myself from 2012-2016, I kept looking at my neighborhood and world as if I were Sarah Connor from Terminator 2: Judgment Day, as if it were all gone already.
But if I'm being honest with myself, I think I'm noticing more of a mercurial influence in my life (hence the title of this blog entry). I didn't recognize it as specifically "mercurial" before I came back to the Church, or even at all before this year (and maybe that's a good thing), but I now feel that I can put a label on it.
Before I go any further, I want to get a few things clear:
1) Even if there is anything to planetary influence on our lives, there need not be hard and fast boundaries, and that's doubly so where Mercury is concerned (Mercury is mutable and therefore has fuzzy boundaries)--so just because you see something in your life associated with one planet doesn't preclude the same for others, nor does it mean that's the dominant influence in your life.
2) Nevertheless, Mercury is so far removed from Saturn, and I feel so strongly a mercurial influence in my life, that I think it puts the lie to the idea of astrology being 100% reliable. I wasn't born with any astrological sign ruled by Mercury (such as Gemini), so my birthday cannot explain this apparent mercurial influence in my life. And so if I'm correct in mercurial influence dominating my life, that alone should suggest that astrology is NOT so reliable as to have it be practical to try to know the future thereby (which is a grave sin against the First Commandment).
3) While I have Asperger's Syndrome, and this makes it easier for me to miss the forest for the trees compared to ordinary people, I don't think that alone accounts for what I call a mercurial influence. I can only speak for myself, not for everyone with Asperger's Syndrome, but I don't think this condition alone is mercurial. (In fact, while I won't get into it in this blog entry, if anything I wondered if it was due more to influence from Luna, the moon.)
Ever since I read the book Peter Pan for the first time in 2003 (after seeing the P. J. Hogan film), I've considered it to be my favorite story ever, the one with which I could most identify and the one I most loved, reading it over and over until I practically had it memorized (not something I usually do with novels, let me tell you). I identified specifically with Peter Pan, especially when he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be forever barred (seeing the happy reunited Darling family, now including the adopted Lost Boys), and when he discovered that Wendy had grown up without him, leaving him behind in childhood, and he cried.
Nevertheless, I wondered (and was unnerved) by the fact of people associating "Peter Pan" (not the character as such, but adults identifying with him) with pedophilia, or even with sex of any kind. Peter Pan is sexless: he doesn't even know of (or want) any male-female relationship other than mother and son, and he is himself prepubescent and so his body is not sexualized. Still, it was such a recurring theme that I wondered why it existed, and I didn't want it to exist.
Now I think that what it was is mercurial influence. Mythologically, Mercury is the winged messenger, associated both with speed and with communication--and the latter means not only language but also being an intermediary between two people (one to give the message to the messenger, and one to receive it from the messenger), hence Mercury ruling the constellation of Gemini, the Twins. He is also, uniquely among the gods, depicted as beardless, suggesting youth (like Peter Pan). In addition, Hermes (the Greek equivalent of Mercury) is the father of Pan, the nature deity who is half-man and half-goat, and for whom Peter Pan was named.
What got me to thinking specifically about Mercury was reading The Narnia Code by Michael Ward, specifically the chapter about the Narnia book called The Horse and His Boy. In particular, what caught my attention was the fact that, when the boy Shasta asks the Voice (later revealed to be Aslan) "Who are you?", he answers "Myself" three times, but each time his voice sounds different, revealing a different property of himself. Michael Ward says that this is the most Trinitarian part of the entire Narniad, and he's right--and it's in the mercurial Narnia book. He explains the relationship with Mercury with regard to "Hermes Trismegistus", the founder of hermeticism--which brings me to another caveat.
In the Middle Ages, the Church held that anything above the orbit of the moon was perfect, unsullied by Adam's original sin, and so reflecting God without corruption, the only imperfection being by virtue of the planets being created, and therefore finite (each having a different realm of influence). By that reckoning, in and of itself, the influence of Mercury or any other planet (possibly excepting the moon) could only be good--but because of our fallen nature, we are vulnerable to putting such influence to evil purposes. (This is especially so for Mars, and even more so for Saturn.) Therefore, there are mercurial matters that are good, and those that are evil (but the evil comes from us, not from Mercury himself).
On the good side, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is the Word. We only speak truly when we root ourselves in Him, otherwise our talking might as well be the braying of donkeys. God is Truth itself. Therefore there is holy silence (hence vows of silence), and there are short prayers, brief and to the point, contrasted with lengthy pagan prayers that rely on human efforts to get on the good side of the gods. And when messages are important, speed is a good thing (the Internet itself is a speedy way to broadcast information to a large audience). In addition, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, and so I see Mercury reflecting Him as well, going between the two and uniting them--and the Holy Spirit is the Love of God, the Gift.
And of course, Saint Gabriel the Archangel (the patron of my church parish, and therefore one of my patrons) is the patron of messengers. Not only does the word "angel" mean "messenger", but Gabriel is the one who made the Annunciation to Mary that she would bear the Christ Child.
Mercurial people include teachers, logicians, clerks, interpreters, translators, ambassadors, representatives, lawyers, judges, actors and other performing entertainers. Mercury is also associated with money and business: such words as "merchandise", "commerce", etc. are etymologically related to "Mercury".
But we fallen human beings can corrupt Mercury's influence too. Corruptions of mercurial influence include trickery, lying, cheating, stealing, ambition, envy, sorcery, alchemy, esotericism, sexual deviance, treachery, immaturity, necromancy, blackmail, gossip, slander, cowardice, kidnapping, etc. Hence we see things like this in the pagan myths about Mercury or Hermes. And this is also where "hermeticism" comes in.
If you were to boil down the word "mercurial" to one word, I would probably suggest "between". On the one hand, that is the only way there can be trust and love, and therefore society on earth and salvation when this life is over. But on the other hand, if we don't root ourselves in God, we corrupt such influence by attempting to find nonexistent categories "between" the ones established by God. Hence, for example, sorcery and alchemy (the attempt to change one thing into another), and sexual deviance (belief that the male and female sexes aren't mutually exclusive but opposite ends of a spectrum, and that people aren't fixed to one place on that spectrum--which also divorces our sexual appetites from conceiving children) as well as denial of growth and age.
It also leads to using speed and language for evil purposes: evil purposes of speed include running away in cowardice and abandoning others to their fate; running away with something one has stolen, to avoid getting caught; being impatient and refusing to wait for things we need to; never taking the time to slow down and be quiet, and listen to God and talk to Him in prayer. And evil purposes of language include lying and manipulating people into doing what we want; harming others' reputations; and especially lying under oath and so betraying trust--and even simply talking and talking and saying nothing.
And one of the worst corruptions of mercurial influence is just plain being untrustworthy, both in word and in action--being unreliable and an unpredictable liar, and being treacherous, a betrayer. Trickster figures in stories are mercurial. (I need not mention that Pan, half-goat and half-man, also closely resembles much traditional Christian imagery of the Devil.)
And this accounts for the sexual component associated with "Peter Pan" in our culture. Our animal appetites (such as our sexual appetites) will not be denied even if we try to manufacture a false world to live in, to replace the real world--and if we don't root ourselves in Christ and so be chaste about our sexuality, look what happens.
Given this, not only must I root myself in the Lord in order to put any mercurial influence upon me to good use instead of evil use, but this suggests that the right occupation for me might be mercurial as well.
I've been initiated into the Secular Franciscan Order, and it seems to me that the Franciscan charism is mercurial as well: Saint Francis of Assisi said only to use words to preach the Gospel when necessary, but mostly to preach the Gospel by our actions. And he focused on creation in its entirety, hence his association with animals and nature.
In addition, I have taken a LONG time in trying to figure out the right job for me with regard to steady work and income. Even when I thought I'd found it, I would tire of "it" after awhile and move on to something else. The only things that have stayed with me are mercurial: communication, logic, story and art, performance, change, etc. A big part of the reason I am still not working full time is because I sought to find a "day job" because I recognized the impracticality of living off the salary of artistic and creative endeavors, and because I recognized that I was uncomfortable being in a leadership position (someone mercurial would want someone above and below him, not just one or the other).
But aside from some of the jobs that I mentioned above being mercurial, perhaps the most mercurial thing I can do is to work freelance, not tying myself down to one boss or company alone, but hiring out my services to whoever needs them and wants to hire me. It might even be a good idea for me to have a job that requires me to travel.
That doesn't mean that I now have a plan, though. Not only do I need to root myself in praying to Christ, but I need to be open to anything He sends my way, whether I want it or not, whether I even expect it or not. And so I can't have any one rigid plan anyway: any plan I make would have to be flexible.
But at least I think I've zeroed in on what makes me tick, and so I have something to focus on in that regard. Again, ultimately, being mercurial is being "between", which suggests travel, communication, and commerce. Plus, if I were to make a living with art and creativity, I would have to sell what I produced (unless it was a performance--but even then I could record my performances and sell the recordings), and that means I would have to be some kind of salesman--there's commerce. And performing is mercurial as well: being "between" means being able to play different roles, like an actor or a mime; plus there are stage magicians and ventriloquists; also, I think that "fools" (clowns, jesters) can be thought of as perpetual "children" in a similar way to kings and queens being fathers and mothers.
And again, hiring myself out freelance is the most mercurial work of all.
Pray for me, though, because I still need to reconcile this in my heart.
Thank you for being with me. God bless you.
Monday, August 27, 2018
The Church Militant
It's been a few months since I've written a blog entry here, but it was always my intent to continue with my blog, which I dedicate to the Blessed Virgin Mary and to the Merciful Love of God.
Right now we are going through a greater time in history than I have ever known in my life. It doesn't appear that way, not even to me, but would the disciples of Christ have seen it as "Good Friday" while it was happening--while their Master was arrested, tried, convicted, tortured, sentenced, crucified, and buried?
It doesn't appear to be a good time--it appears just the opposite, in fact--because we are discovering, little by little, solid proof that even at the highest levels those in temporal power cannot be trusted to be acting according to God's will, or in our best interests.
This is true, for example, of the United States of America, with the #MeToo movement demonstrating the true magnitude of the level of sexual abuse that has been going on for decades and still goes on today. It is true of both major political parties and members of both, including President Donald Trump. I've been following a blog called "Five Pilgrims" which, while not Catholic, does take Christ's Gospel very seriously, and in 2016 a blog entry said that if it were true that then-candidate Donald Trump had truly repented, the best thing for his immortal soul would have been for him to withdraw from the election--even going so far as to say that to vote for him was the equivalent of throwing a baby to the wolves to save your own hide. And it's clear that he hasn't, given that he has said he didn't think he had done anything (or not much) that needed forgiving. A man who says this is not a man of God. This makes me all the more glad that I didn't vote for him, though I could never in good conscience have voted for Hillary Clinton either. And given this, I'm beginning to think it might be a good idea for President Trump to resign. While I refuse to give up hope that he might truly repent, given this magnitude a true repentance might require resignation. (It doesn't help that may Evangelicals, who rightly condemned similar evils by Bill Clinton in the 1990's, are being hypocritical in refusing to do the same for President Donald Trump now.)
This is also true, and worse, of the human element of the Church, with the #CatholicMeToo movement demonstrating the true magnitude of sexual abuse that I never fully appreciated until now. And Pope Francis's recent silence on the accusations that he was aware of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick's sins and did nothing to expose them or punish the man, especially given his papacy before now, does not bode well for him. Jesus said "Let your yes mean yes and your no mean no; anything more is from the Evil One." If Pope Francis is innocent, why not simply say so? Granted, he is right to tell the journalists to do their job (though I wonder how many will), but in practice silence is often seen as consent--and Pope Francis has talked of transparency in his papacy before, so why stop now? It pains me, but now I'm beginning to think it might be a good idea for Pope Francis to abdicate the papacy, as his predecessor Benedict XVI did--though I would hope that the College of Cardinals would be cleaned up first, lest they elect another pope who will put the world before God. And in the latter event, an abdication by Pope Francis would only be a regime change. Again, I cannot make myself the pope's judge, and even if he is guilty I refuse to give up hope that he might truly repent--but again, if he is guilty, then given this magnitude a true repentance might require abdication of the papacy.
But this is a good time. God is shining His light on the evil that has taken over our world, the evil that cannot go back into hiding in the darkness now that we've seen how ugly its face truly is. God knows all and will reveal all--except, in His mercy, those sins of which we truly repent. Only evil loves the darkness; true good loves the light.
It may not appear that way, and it might even seem worse in the near future: when evil discovers it has nowhere left to hide, it will fight tooth and claw for its own survival, and those who get in its way WILL be hurt. But it will not survive: evil never can. It will die in the end.
God, through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is cleansing the world of evil. The villains in power will be exposed and removed from power, separated, so that the true good Church can shine for all to see. I have less certainty that the United States of America will survive, at least not in its current form, but God's will be done.
However dark a time the near future appears, this is the equivalent of Good Friday for us. Jesus said, "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" The priesthood of old Israel in His time was so corrupt that they put the Son of God on trial and judged Him deserving of death. Yet Jesus rose from the dead, and the wicked priesthood suffered the destruction of the Second Temple at the hands of the Romans. If the priesthood of the Church today does not repent, how can they expect any more lenient treatment? How can they not expect to suffer even more greatly than the likes of Joseph Caiaphas who accused Our Lord of blasphemy?
And if this is our Good Friday, this is when our faith, hope, and love will truly be tested. Even Christ's hand-chosen Apostles fell away on Good Friday. Judas the betrayer took his own life; of the rest, only Peter and John continued to follow the Lord in any capacity, and Peter denied Christ three times. Only John was present at the foot of the Cross. And yet it wasn't too late for the Apostles (except for Judas): they repented and are now saints in heaven.
Likewise, even the best of us might be tempted to run away, as if the Church (which Christ promised would never be overcome by the gates of hell) were crumbling into ruin at last--even those of us who will not betray Her as Judas did. And even many of those who try to continue to follow Christ might be so afraid of what will happen to them if this becomes known that, like Peter, they might deny being Christians to save their own hides. But even then, God is merciful, and if we repent before we die, we can still become saints in heaven even if we commit such a terrible sin.
I don't pretend to know what I will do, as I am a very anxious person and I don't like to disappoint others. But I hope and pray that I may be willing to suffer any earthly evils before I would jeopardize my immortal soul. And if I prove less than faithful (and I cannot claim to know for certain that I won't--Saint Peter did), I hope and pray I may be forgiven, as Saint Peter and the other Apostles were.
Whatever happens, the Lord will win in the end. I believe we're in a martial age of the Church now, soon to be followed by a jovial age: an age of the kings, of righteousness and justice, and of merriment--before the Anti-Christ comes in the Last Days.
********
And now I choose to open up myself. Thank God, I have never been a victim of sexual abuse at anyone's hands, priests or no--nor has anyone close to me. However, I don't know whether that might be in part due to the fact that I have been away from the Church for most of my life. (Apparently a priest of my parish turned out to be an offender and was removed when I was a child--but I never would have known it.) At least, I've never had to worry about that since I returned to the Church.
Because of this, I don't pretend to know what it's like to suffer from something as evil as sexual abuse. Nor am I comparing my situation with anyone who has. My heart goes out to all who have thus suffered, and I welcome comments from anyone who has been thus abused and want to speak up.
Nevertheless, this epidemic has affected me to some degree. I have Asperger's Syndrome, and while I don't presume to speak for everyone with Asperger's Syndrome or Autism Spectrum Disorder (I can only speak based on my own individual experience), I suspect that my Asperger's Syndrome has something to do with it, at least.
Having Asperger's Syndrome, I am more sensitive to sensory input than ordinary people are. And that obviously includes sexual input. Where someone else might derive excitement from a thunderstorm or a loud rock concert, I can only endure such a thing, and not happily or willingly. (I still cannot fathom how anyone can find a thunderstorm relaxing--exciting maybe, but relaxing?)
And not only is the sexual appetite common to us all, but sexual arousal is overwhelming: it is very easy to lose control in the heat of the moment. But it's all the more so for me--it is downright terrifying.
Because of this, combined with my fears of what other people will think of me (even before I returned to the Church), I have taken a false, Puritanical, phobic view of sex. Not only have I never had a sexual relationship with anyone else, but I have avoided even the possibility of such, by turning my head away quickly if I so much as saw an attractive girl, not wanting her to think I found her sexually attractive. I didn't just fear the possibility that she might think I was a stalker; I feared the possibility that she might be sexually interested in me and want a relationship. (I still find it difficult to understand how women, in particular, enjoy sex.)
This is NOT the teaching of the Catholic Church, and it is NOT healthy. God gave us all a sexual appetite, and commanded us to "Be fruitful and multiply". Sexual intercourse is the way in which we conceive babies, participating with God in bringing about new life. And I now believe that a deliberately phobic attitude towards sex is misanthropic as well as offensive to the Lord.
But because that's the case, a Puritanical, phobic attitude towards sex is not practical. It will not erase our sexual appetites. And without recourse to God, we have no power to resist: in the end, we will exhaust ourselves and end up going to the opposite side of the coin, that is, indulging sexually. (I suspect this accounts for the stereotype of the most verbally sex-phobic of people, who condemn even legitimate sex in other people, secretly indulging in it themselves.) And if we are phobic of sex, then such indulgence will make us feel dirty and unloved by God--and we will desire all the more that this never be found out.
(Note: I said "without recourse to God." A celibacy vow, taken by a priest or religious, means that one has recourse to God--only if the individual refuses to come to Him will he or she be helpless to keep that vow.)
Given this, and knowing that the sex abuse scandal (at least in the coverup, and to some degree in the deed itself) goes to the highest levels of the human element of the Church, it is difficult for me to even open up to a priest and ask what I should do--not just what I need NOT to do, but what proactive thing I need to do instead.
It doesn't help that, until 2016, I was exceedingly untrusting of authority figures just in general--too much for a true Christian.
But I need guidance such as only a true Shepherd can give me. Without that, without recourse to the Lord, we are stuck in a false dichotomy: either indulge sexually (which is mortally sinful), or be phobic about all sex (which is even worse).
********
I am now inspired to make mention of my current formation in the Secular Franciscan Order. Yesterday I was initiated, and it was such a wonderful blessing! I didn't feel anxious at all, or like any sign was pointing away from it being right for me. I felt the love, the laughter, the comfort, of everyone there, and I felt like I was one of them. Having been thus initiated, I have now received my own copy of the Rule of the Secular Franciscan Order, as well as my own Tau cross to wear.
The reason I bring this up here, rather than in another blog entry as I originally planned to, is this: as part of my formation I have been reading Come and See, a formation book for those in the first two stages of formation into the Secular Franciscan Order. The chapter that I discussed yesterday specifically referred to the "paschal imagination", a term that stuck with me.
In particular, this chapter distinguished the paschal imagination from the "petrified imagination" (what we might call "conservative") or the "fuzzy uncritical imagination" (what we might call "liberal"). The petrified imagination hardens one's heart against God's active will. On the other hand, the fuzzy uncritical imagination regards just about any course of action as equally valid, without direction by the Lord. Only through recourse to God, through Jesus Christ, can we be liberated from this false dichotomy with the paschal imagination: open to change, directed by God.
I was inspired to write this when I wrote what I did above of the false dichotomy regarding sex from a non-Christian perspective.
The "petrified imagination" would regard all sex as evil--only making indulgence for opposite-sex coitus as a "necessary evil" given that it's how we reproduce (but we're not supposed to enjoy the act itself or the feelings we have when we have it).
The "fuzzy uncritical imagination" is what we largely have in our culture today, regarding (almost) all forms of sexuality as equally valid, without allowing God to direct our sexual appetites towards their proper ends. The only sexual activity that such an imagination does (rightly) condemn are things that human beings themselves find repulsive: rape and pedophilia, for example.
The "paschal imagination", on the other hand, sees life in Christ as Paschal, as Eucharistic, as a sacrifice. Unless called to take a solemn vow of celibacy (as in the priesthood or religious life), we are called to act on our sexual appetites--and to enjoy the good feeling that it gives us to satisfy it. But we are called to let God direct it to its proper end, of attempting to conceive children (or at least being open to it) within the context of marriage: a promise between a man and a woman to be exclusively loyal to each other for life.
Again, the trouble is that, with so many clerics, even at such high levels, failing to exercise a paschal imagination, how can we mere sheep hope to have a model to follow, to know how to do this ourselves, and not fall into the trap of either embracing all sex (except rape and pedophilia), or being phobic even about conceptive sex which leads to new life?
And for someone like me, with Asperger's Syndrome, who is overwhelmed by sensory input that wouldn't overwhelm an ordinary person, how can there be hope? And for someone like me who is so afraid of disappointment that he is afraid to "rock the boat", how can I even hope to be brave enough to ask, especially if I don't get the answer I'm looking for the first time?
********
In Dante's Inferno, the lustful went to the second circle of hell (out of nine total). Lust is the least of the Seven Deadly Sins. That's because it is nothing more or less than a perversion of a normal, natural, healthy human appetite.
But for the very same reason, it claims a lot more souls than sins done out of malice, such as violence, fraud, and treachery (the three lowest circles of hell in Inferno). Our Lady of Fatima, I believe, said that more people go to hell because of lust than because of any other sin.
For this reason we cannot divorce this issue from the scandals going on. If I allow my sexual appetite to rule over me, I am as much a slave as if someone were to rape me. Worse, I am a willing slave.
But first and foremost, we need to love God and neighbor, and refuse to identify people (made by God and loved by Him) with their sins--ourselves or others--whether such people choose themselves to identify with their sins or not. It won't be easy, especially if they do so identify: they will then not see love but "hate".
Again, a petrified imagination sees only sin and condemns the sinner prematurely to hell; a fuzzy uncritical imagination sees loving the sin (and therefore redefining it as "not sin") as a prerequisite to "loving" the sinner. A paschal imagination loves the sinner first, and hates the sin due entirely to love of the sinner.
********
I don't pretend not to be afraid of what comments might come my way, if any do. But I welcome them from anyone who wants to speak up. And any prayers on my behalf are welcome and I will pray for you as well.
Thank you for being with me. God bless you.
Right now we are going through a greater time in history than I have ever known in my life. It doesn't appear that way, not even to me, but would the disciples of Christ have seen it as "Good Friday" while it was happening--while their Master was arrested, tried, convicted, tortured, sentenced, crucified, and buried?
It doesn't appear to be a good time--it appears just the opposite, in fact--because we are discovering, little by little, solid proof that even at the highest levels those in temporal power cannot be trusted to be acting according to God's will, or in our best interests.
This is true, for example, of the United States of America, with the #MeToo movement demonstrating the true magnitude of the level of sexual abuse that has been going on for decades and still goes on today. It is true of both major political parties and members of both, including President Donald Trump. I've been following a blog called "Five Pilgrims" which, while not Catholic, does take Christ's Gospel very seriously, and in 2016 a blog entry said that if it were true that then-candidate Donald Trump had truly repented, the best thing for his immortal soul would have been for him to withdraw from the election--even going so far as to say that to vote for him was the equivalent of throwing a baby to the wolves to save your own hide. And it's clear that he hasn't, given that he has said he didn't think he had done anything (or not much) that needed forgiving. A man who says this is not a man of God. This makes me all the more glad that I didn't vote for him, though I could never in good conscience have voted for Hillary Clinton either. And given this, I'm beginning to think it might be a good idea for President Trump to resign. While I refuse to give up hope that he might truly repent, given this magnitude a true repentance might require resignation. (It doesn't help that may Evangelicals, who rightly condemned similar evils by Bill Clinton in the 1990's, are being hypocritical in refusing to do the same for President Donald Trump now.)
This is also true, and worse, of the human element of the Church, with the #CatholicMeToo movement demonstrating the true magnitude of sexual abuse that I never fully appreciated until now. And Pope Francis's recent silence on the accusations that he was aware of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick's sins and did nothing to expose them or punish the man, especially given his papacy before now, does not bode well for him. Jesus said "Let your yes mean yes and your no mean no; anything more is from the Evil One." If Pope Francis is innocent, why not simply say so? Granted, he is right to tell the journalists to do their job (though I wonder how many will), but in practice silence is often seen as consent--and Pope Francis has talked of transparency in his papacy before, so why stop now? It pains me, but now I'm beginning to think it might be a good idea for Pope Francis to abdicate the papacy, as his predecessor Benedict XVI did--though I would hope that the College of Cardinals would be cleaned up first, lest they elect another pope who will put the world before God. And in the latter event, an abdication by Pope Francis would only be a regime change. Again, I cannot make myself the pope's judge, and even if he is guilty I refuse to give up hope that he might truly repent--but again, if he is guilty, then given this magnitude a true repentance might require abdication of the papacy.
But this is a good time. God is shining His light on the evil that has taken over our world, the evil that cannot go back into hiding in the darkness now that we've seen how ugly its face truly is. God knows all and will reveal all--except, in His mercy, those sins of which we truly repent. Only evil loves the darkness; true good loves the light.
It may not appear that way, and it might even seem worse in the near future: when evil discovers it has nowhere left to hide, it will fight tooth and claw for its own survival, and those who get in its way WILL be hurt. But it will not survive: evil never can. It will die in the end.
God, through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is cleansing the world of evil. The villains in power will be exposed and removed from power, separated, so that the true good Church can shine for all to see. I have less certainty that the United States of America will survive, at least not in its current form, but God's will be done.
However dark a time the near future appears, this is the equivalent of Good Friday for us. Jesus said, "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" The priesthood of old Israel in His time was so corrupt that they put the Son of God on trial and judged Him deserving of death. Yet Jesus rose from the dead, and the wicked priesthood suffered the destruction of the Second Temple at the hands of the Romans. If the priesthood of the Church today does not repent, how can they expect any more lenient treatment? How can they not expect to suffer even more greatly than the likes of Joseph Caiaphas who accused Our Lord of blasphemy?
And if this is our Good Friday, this is when our faith, hope, and love will truly be tested. Even Christ's hand-chosen Apostles fell away on Good Friday. Judas the betrayer took his own life; of the rest, only Peter and John continued to follow the Lord in any capacity, and Peter denied Christ three times. Only John was present at the foot of the Cross. And yet it wasn't too late for the Apostles (except for Judas): they repented and are now saints in heaven.
Likewise, even the best of us might be tempted to run away, as if the Church (which Christ promised would never be overcome by the gates of hell) were crumbling into ruin at last--even those of us who will not betray Her as Judas did. And even many of those who try to continue to follow Christ might be so afraid of what will happen to them if this becomes known that, like Peter, they might deny being Christians to save their own hides. But even then, God is merciful, and if we repent before we die, we can still become saints in heaven even if we commit such a terrible sin.
I don't pretend to know what I will do, as I am a very anxious person and I don't like to disappoint others. But I hope and pray that I may be willing to suffer any earthly evils before I would jeopardize my immortal soul. And if I prove less than faithful (and I cannot claim to know for certain that I won't--Saint Peter did), I hope and pray I may be forgiven, as Saint Peter and the other Apostles were.
Whatever happens, the Lord will win in the end. I believe we're in a martial age of the Church now, soon to be followed by a jovial age: an age of the kings, of righteousness and justice, and of merriment--before the Anti-Christ comes in the Last Days.
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And now I choose to open up myself. Thank God, I have never been a victim of sexual abuse at anyone's hands, priests or no--nor has anyone close to me. However, I don't know whether that might be in part due to the fact that I have been away from the Church for most of my life. (Apparently a priest of my parish turned out to be an offender and was removed when I was a child--but I never would have known it.) At least, I've never had to worry about that since I returned to the Church.
Because of this, I don't pretend to know what it's like to suffer from something as evil as sexual abuse. Nor am I comparing my situation with anyone who has. My heart goes out to all who have thus suffered, and I welcome comments from anyone who has been thus abused and want to speak up.
Nevertheless, this epidemic has affected me to some degree. I have Asperger's Syndrome, and while I don't presume to speak for everyone with Asperger's Syndrome or Autism Spectrum Disorder (I can only speak based on my own individual experience), I suspect that my Asperger's Syndrome has something to do with it, at least.
Having Asperger's Syndrome, I am more sensitive to sensory input than ordinary people are. And that obviously includes sexual input. Where someone else might derive excitement from a thunderstorm or a loud rock concert, I can only endure such a thing, and not happily or willingly. (I still cannot fathom how anyone can find a thunderstorm relaxing--exciting maybe, but relaxing?)
And not only is the sexual appetite common to us all, but sexual arousal is overwhelming: it is very easy to lose control in the heat of the moment. But it's all the more so for me--it is downright terrifying.
Because of this, combined with my fears of what other people will think of me (even before I returned to the Church), I have taken a false, Puritanical, phobic view of sex. Not only have I never had a sexual relationship with anyone else, but I have avoided even the possibility of such, by turning my head away quickly if I so much as saw an attractive girl, not wanting her to think I found her sexually attractive. I didn't just fear the possibility that she might think I was a stalker; I feared the possibility that she might be sexually interested in me and want a relationship. (I still find it difficult to understand how women, in particular, enjoy sex.)
This is NOT the teaching of the Catholic Church, and it is NOT healthy. God gave us all a sexual appetite, and commanded us to "Be fruitful and multiply". Sexual intercourse is the way in which we conceive babies, participating with God in bringing about new life. And I now believe that a deliberately phobic attitude towards sex is misanthropic as well as offensive to the Lord.
But because that's the case, a Puritanical, phobic attitude towards sex is not practical. It will not erase our sexual appetites. And without recourse to God, we have no power to resist: in the end, we will exhaust ourselves and end up going to the opposite side of the coin, that is, indulging sexually. (I suspect this accounts for the stereotype of the most verbally sex-phobic of people, who condemn even legitimate sex in other people, secretly indulging in it themselves.) And if we are phobic of sex, then such indulgence will make us feel dirty and unloved by God--and we will desire all the more that this never be found out.
(Note: I said "without recourse to God." A celibacy vow, taken by a priest or religious, means that one has recourse to God--only if the individual refuses to come to Him will he or she be helpless to keep that vow.)
Given this, and knowing that the sex abuse scandal (at least in the coverup, and to some degree in the deed itself) goes to the highest levels of the human element of the Church, it is difficult for me to even open up to a priest and ask what I should do--not just what I need NOT to do, but what proactive thing I need to do instead.
It doesn't help that, until 2016, I was exceedingly untrusting of authority figures just in general--too much for a true Christian.
But I need guidance such as only a true Shepherd can give me. Without that, without recourse to the Lord, we are stuck in a false dichotomy: either indulge sexually (which is mortally sinful), or be phobic about all sex (which is even worse).
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I am now inspired to make mention of my current formation in the Secular Franciscan Order. Yesterday I was initiated, and it was such a wonderful blessing! I didn't feel anxious at all, or like any sign was pointing away from it being right for me. I felt the love, the laughter, the comfort, of everyone there, and I felt like I was one of them. Having been thus initiated, I have now received my own copy of the Rule of the Secular Franciscan Order, as well as my own Tau cross to wear.
The reason I bring this up here, rather than in another blog entry as I originally planned to, is this: as part of my formation I have been reading Come and See, a formation book for those in the first two stages of formation into the Secular Franciscan Order. The chapter that I discussed yesterday specifically referred to the "paschal imagination", a term that stuck with me.
In particular, this chapter distinguished the paschal imagination from the "petrified imagination" (what we might call "conservative") or the "fuzzy uncritical imagination" (what we might call "liberal"). The petrified imagination hardens one's heart against God's active will. On the other hand, the fuzzy uncritical imagination regards just about any course of action as equally valid, without direction by the Lord. Only through recourse to God, through Jesus Christ, can we be liberated from this false dichotomy with the paschal imagination: open to change, directed by God.
I was inspired to write this when I wrote what I did above of the false dichotomy regarding sex from a non-Christian perspective.
The "petrified imagination" would regard all sex as evil--only making indulgence for opposite-sex coitus as a "necessary evil" given that it's how we reproduce (but we're not supposed to enjoy the act itself or the feelings we have when we have it).
The "fuzzy uncritical imagination" is what we largely have in our culture today, regarding (almost) all forms of sexuality as equally valid, without allowing God to direct our sexual appetites towards their proper ends. The only sexual activity that such an imagination does (rightly) condemn are things that human beings themselves find repulsive: rape and pedophilia, for example.
The "paschal imagination", on the other hand, sees life in Christ as Paschal, as Eucharistic, as a sacrifice. Unless called to take a solemn vow of celibacy (as in the priesthood or religious life), we are called to act on our sexual appetites--and to enjoy the good feeling that it gives us to satisfy it. But we are called to let God direct it to its proper end, of attempting to conceive children (or at least being open to it) within the context of marriage: a promise between a man and a woman to be exclusively loyal to each other for life.
Again, the trouble is that, with so many clerics, even at such high levels, failing to exercise a paschal imagination, how can we mere sheep hope to have a model to follow, to know how to do this ourselves, and not fall into the trap of either embracing all sex (except rape and pedophilia), or being phobic even about conceptive sex which leads to new life?
And for someone like me, with Asperger's Syndrome, who is overwhelmed by sensory input that wouldn't overwhelm an ordinary person, how can there be hope? And for someone like me who is so afraid of disappointment that he is afraid to "rock the boat", how can I even hope to be brave enough to ask, especially if I don't get the answer I'm looking for the first time?
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In Dante's Inferno, the lustful went to the second circle of hell (out of nine total). Lust is the least of the Seven Deadly Sins. That's because it is nothing more or less than a perversion of a normal, natural, healthy human appetite.
But for the very same reason, it claims a lot more souls than sins done out of malice, such as violence, fraud, and treachery (the three lowest circles of hell in Inferno). Our Lady of Fatima, I believe, said that more people go to hell because of lust than because of any other sin.
For this reason we cannot divorce this issue from the scandals going on. If I allow my sexual appetite to rule over me, I am as much a slave as if someone were to rape me. Worse, I am a willing slave.
But first and foremost, we need to love God and neighbor, and refuse to identify people (made by God and loved by Him) with their sins--ourselves or others--whether such people choose themselves to identify with their sins or not. It won't be easy, especially if they do so identify: they will then not see love but "hate".
Again, a petrified imagination sees only sin and condemns the sinner prematurely to hell; a fuzzy uncritical imagination sees loving the sin (and therefore redefining it as "not sin") as a prerequisite to "loving" the sinner. A paschal imagination loves the sinner first, and hates the sin due entirely to love of the sinner.
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I don't pretend not to be afraid of what comments might come my way, if any do. But I welcome them from anyone who wants to speak up. And any prayers on my behalf are welcome and I will pray for you as well.
Thank you for being with me. God bless you.
Sunday, May 13, 2018
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.
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.
Monday, April 9, 2018
Morning Glory
Christ is risen from the dead!
Today, the Feast of the Annunciation (moved from March 25 which was Palm Sunday this year), is the day of my total consecration to the Blessed Virgin Mary. And today, I finished watching the DVD series Divine Mercy in the Second Greatest Story Ever Told, hosted by Father Michael E. Gaitley, reminding myself of what I had read three months ago in the book it was based on.
And now I have made up my mind to continue with this Pair O' Dimes blog after all. I'm going to be more prudent (I hope) with what I put on it, but I will NOT end it. I have a lot to say but I want to be concise, so I'll focus on my main point:
When it comes to God, I have been working backwards for almost eight years now. (I wish I remembered the exact date so I could say exactly when the eighth anniversary will be.)
Let me explain:
In 2010, Mortimer J. Adler's arguments persuaded me that God exists, where I wasn't sure before that. Later that same year, Peter Kreeft's arguments persuaded me that Jesus of Nazareth not only existed historically, but that He rose from the dead--and therefore that He is the Son of God, making Christianity the one true faith. Later still, that same year, I used a process of elimination to reject all Christian faiths except for the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. I had only gotten that far when I returned to regular Mass on the First Sunday of Advent: November 28, 2010.
But for awhile, I didn't know enough about either the Catholic faith or the Eastern Orthodox faith to choose decisively between the two. In the Spring of 2011 I took Confirmation classes and was confirmed in the Catholic Church on May 10, 2011. But it was Father Brian Harrison's scrutiny of Eastern Orthodoxy that persuaded me to reject it in favor of Catholicism. Even at this point, however, though I tried my best not to give in to them, I still had nagging doubts prodding me--specifically with regard to the claims of those who distrust the Second Vatican Council (the most recent one).
At some point (I wish I remembered when, but I think it was early on), I concluded that I could use Father Brian Harrison's arguments against sedevacantism as well. And as I felt more and more strongly that I understood the Catholic faith, I thought I had reached the Truth more than ever before. But I still wasn't finished.
It wasn't until the last few months when Shane Schaetzel (in late 2017) and Father Michael E. Gaitley (in early 2018) finally persuaded me that even "radical Traditionalism" is false. To clarify: it's okay to be a Traditionalist Catholic, but it is not okay to have contempt for Vatican II or those who follow the true Vatican II rather than the heretical perversion of it that has been running rampant for so long.
It's taken me almost eight years to learn all this (again, I wish I remembered the exact date when I learned of Mortimer J. Adler's cosmological argument for God's existence, so that I could mark the exact eight-year anniversary).
But I've been working backwards all these years. I've sort of known that for awhile now (and I have Peter Kreeft to thank for it), but I think I now understand it more fully than ever before. Jesus said "No one comes to the Father except through Me." (John 14:6) In other words, it isn't through the Father that we come to the Son, but the other way around--yet I had come to the conclusion that Jesus is the Son of God only after I had come to the conclusion that God's existence could be known with certainty. But the arguments regarding Jesus's identity necessarily imply the existence of God on their own--so that the cosmological argument for God's existence isn't needed simply in order to satisfy us that God exists.
In addition, I had heard the phrase "to Jesus through Mary", and especially this year when I've been reading Father Michael E. Gaitley's works about consecration to the Blessed Mother. Again, it isn't through Jesus that we come to Mary, but the other way around--and yet, again, I had come to the conclusion that the Catholic Church (which venerates Mary) is the true faith only after I had concluded that Jesus her Son is the Son of God.
More to the point, though, is that I had been thinking too much and not experiencing enough. I had been looking at it from a philosophical perspective, not a personal perspective. I had been treating God, Jesus, even Mary, as philosophical concepts--the same that I would for fictional characters, even though in my head I knew they were real, and no one could convince me otherwise. But I hadn't truly been engaging them in my relationship with them--or at least, not as much as I might have.
Part of this may not be my fault, not entirely (I do have Asperger's Syndrome)--and better late than never, but I'm still glad that I've finally come to understand better than ever before.
The way it's supposed to go is this:
We, the Church, united by the Holy Spirit and led by Mary, His Spouse, must lead the world to Jesus Christ, who in turn leads us to the Father. We do this by receiving merciful love from the Father and the Son through Mary and the Church, and then sharing that merciful love with others.
Here's a summation of what I've taken away from Father Michael E. Gaitley's inspiring wisdom:
God is Love itself--but sin (original and personal) is rooted in a distrust of God. Because of this, our sin (the original sin of Adam into which we are all conceived, plus our personal sins) distort the image of God that we hold in our hearts. Rather than see Him as He is, completely trustworthy and completely loving, we see Him as untrustworthy and frightening. To put it another way, we see not the handsome Prince of Peace, but a scary Beast judging us and inflicting wrath upon us when we displease Him. (I'm beginning to wonder if this might have something to do with the pre-Christian pagan religions, where the gods were indeed like that.) That's why we are often scrupulous, or else we despair that we will ever measure up--or we deny that God even exists, just to have some relief.
But because God is Love itself, He has spent all of history since the Fall of Man showing us how He really is, in contrast to the capricious heathen gods. The culmination of this was the Incarnation and Nativity of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Jesus Christ has the fullness of human nature, like us in all ways except sin--and this makes it easier for us to trust Him than it was for us to trust God before the Incarnation. Historically, Jesus of Nazareth was never anyone frightening, treacherous, or judgmental. On the contrary: He was little and humble, and He reached out to sinners, children, people being ignored by the powers that be--and He subjected Himself to the powers that crucified Him for a traitor.
The point is this: our distorted image of God, caused by sin, does NOT apply to creatures. If it did, babies wouldn't trust their own parents, and so they couldn't survive--they wouldn't accept their parents' loving help that they need so desperately. It also makes sense: while all sin necessarily offends God, only some sins (not all) offend any one creature--which is why only God can forgive all sins. And so, Jesus Christ having the fullness of a created human nature helps us to trust Him better than anyone could have trusted God before He took flesh. God didn't change, but our relationship to Him did.
But here's the rub: even though this is the case, Jesus Christ is still a Divine Person, not a creature--He has the fullness of Divine nature, and is the eternally begotten Son of God through whom all things were made. Jesus of Nazareth the historical Man is identical to the Second Person of the Holy Trinity through whom the Father created the entire universe, visible and invisible. And at His Second Coming, Jesus will be our just Judge, exercising justice to good and evil alike. Added to this, in order to have the fullness of human nature at all, He needed a human creature as His Mother--and because God loves us (and because love isn't true love if it is coerced), she had to agree to be His Mother, uniting her will to His in that regard.
And that is where Mary comes in. She is the Immaculate Conception, and so her will is always perfectly united to God's will--therefore our sins upset her as they upset God--BUT, because she is a mere creature, our sins only upset her by proxy, not all do so directly. Mary cannot forgive us all our sins, and she cannot punish us for our sins--she is not our Judge. She is a creature, exactly like us except for being Immaculate.
The long and short of it is this: Mary is a creature, and Jesus gives her to us to be our Mother--and sin doesn't distort our image of creatures (and babies and children naturally trust their parents, especially their mothers). Plus she is not our judge. This all makes it easier to trust her--easier for us sinners even than it is to trust Jesus Christ Himself, who will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. But because Mary is the Immaculate Conception, her will is perfectly united to God's will, and therefore she is completely trustworthy--it isn't only easier to trust her, but she will always be worthy of our trust.
And so the Virgin Mary is God's primary instrument in healing us: she is no more trustworthy than God Himself, but because of our sin (our fault, nothing to do with God whose loving nature is unchanging), we can find it easier to trust her (a creature, and a Mother, who isn't our Judge) than to trust God. And because she is the Immaculate Conception, she is also no less trustworthy than God Himself. Mary, of her own free will, leads us to Jesus, who leads us to the Father.
Therefore, we creatures, sinners though we are, should be the same: not only trusting Mary to lead us to Jesus, who leads us to the Father, but uniting with her purpose in leading others in the same direction. And we do this by accepting love through Mary that comes from Jesus and the Father, and sharing it with others--in effect, by ourselves being trustworthy and loving, and NOT scary, judgmental, and treacherous. And we must be this way to everyone without exception or condition.
But it took actually doing a 33-day do-it-yourself retreat in preparation for consecration to Mary to make me understand more fully what I was missing. Towards the end of this retreat, I realized something: Mary wants us to share our innermost life with her. She wants to participate in our every joy and sorrow, as well as in our every work and prayer--no matter how small. As long as what we're doing isn't sinful, she wants to be a part of it. Mary is interested in who we are as people, not just in the biggest sense (our not being in danger of death or mortal sin), but in the smallest sense. And that's what true love really is. Not only is Mary like that, but so is Jesus Christ--and so is God our heavenly Father. And knowing this is making it easier for me to share with Mary--and therefore with Jesus and God the Father--even little details. I'm not used to it, and so I'm not perfect in it, but I don't have to be: I'll get better with practice and with heavenly aid, and even then I won't be perfect in this life, not until I die to sin completely and go to heaven.
But now that I know this, and know that I am completely consecrated to Mary, I feel more strongly than ever before that God loves me, and I feel more strongly than ever before that I want to return that love and share it with everyone.
Think of it this way: a lot of the time, people begin prayers with "God, I hate to bother you, but...." or "God, I know you're busy, but...." Unless we are sinning, we NEVER bother the all-good God, and the all-powerful God is NEVER too busy to listen to a heartfelt plea. God wants us to thank Him for, and share with Him, even the littlest things, because they are never too small for Him to notice or to appreciate. Only if they are sinful does He not want them--but even there, God knows our weakness. "For a righteous man falls seven times" a day (Proverbs 24:16), and no sin will ever make Him stop loving us. It's the sin He hates, not us--and He hates it because it's hurting us, because He loves us.
And it's partly because I've been working backwards since the year before I started this blog, that I've decided to revive it--and to dedicate it to the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose image you see to the right.
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But I've also been working backwards with regard to what I am meant to do, as I realize now more fully than ever before.
C. S. Lewis's "trilemma" helped me to conclude that Jesus is the Son of God, but now (through Bruce Charlton and Dr. Michael Ward) I'm coming to conclude that I have more in common with him than I thought. I already knew that he left the Christian faith and then returned to it as an adult, and his theological writings made an impact on me (as did some of his fiction), but only now do I really feel closer to C. S. Lewis in a way that I haven't felt with any writer since J. M. Barrie, beginning in 2004.
Bruce Charlton's blog pointed out to me that C. S. Lewis's writing style is different from that of J. R. R. Tolkien--and while I share a birthday with Tolkien, I discovered more of myself in the description of C. S. Lewis.
For one thing, C. S. Lewis finds it difficult to make long works cohere into a singular unit--that is, he does better with episodic works than with a single novel-length plot. I recognize myself in that: indeed, after reading part of Alice's Evidence: A New Look at Autism by Robert B. Waltz, I had a name to put to this common trait in people on the autism spectrum. It's called "weak central coherence"--a stunted ability to see the forest for the trees, compared with neurotypicals. I have definitely found it easier to go with a single burst of inspiration, writing shorter pieces (including shorter or episodic fiction), than to write long novels.
For another, C. S. Lewis's inspirations tend to be philosophical ideas or still images. The same seems to be true for me--and that, combined with what I said above about how I'd been working backwards since 2010, is why I've chosen to keep this blog up, to begin it anew. This blog, which I began in 2011, has always been a philosophical blog, and I have always had a mathematical-logical-spatial mind. In addition, I have been drawing since I can remember, and new ideas that aren't philosophical ideas tend to come to me in visual form (that might be why I didn't notice my singing gift until I was 26).
Again, I've been working backwards: since shortly after the turn of the millennium, I concluded that what I wanted to do was to make up stories, irrespective of medium, and so I thought that the job title I wanted for myself was "writer". Only now am I coming to accept the truth that I understood better before I became an adult.
But in recognizing and accepting this, I've decided to go further than C. S. Lewis did. That is, if I'm going to "write" anything, I intend to stick with my strengths--so that the closest things to original stories that I might write will (at least in large measure) probably be one or the other (or a combination) of two things: 1) Socratic dialogues after the fashion of Plato (done in dialogue form but essentially philosophy texts); 2) stories told pictorially (in our modern Western culture, we can most often find this in children's picture books and in comic books).
In particular, I want to use these strengths in writing my epic fantasy Young Blood. And it's here where my connection to C. S. Lewis really feels complete.
I haven't read his book yet, but I've become fascinated by Dr. Michael Ward's claim in Planet Narnia, which sounds outrageous on the surface but which seems to be backed up by solid evidence in C. S. Lewis's works themselves: namely, that what truly unites and makes sense of all seven Narnia books being what they are is actually expression of the qualities associated with the seven non-fixed celestial bodies known to the ancients, as they understood it before the Scientific Revolution: the sun, the moon, and the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
In learning what these qualities were and how Lewis utilized them in the Narnia books, I've come to realize that I have (quite unknowingly) done something similar with the overall Young Blood story--but in a different order. My own order is more comparable to the Ptolemaic model's order of the planets from Earth outward, which seems to me to make more sense than any order (perhaps excepting that associated with the days of the week).
Given this, I now feel more than ever that I'm doing the right thing with my Young Blood story, and I intend to do it as a heptalogy (seven volumes telling one progressive story). With regard to its roots in Christ and my faith, I intend to take greater inspiration from Lewis's Narnia books--but in terms of its progression and a young protagonist growing up (and the fact that I have it in mind to do seven even before I've finished and published any of them), it will probably more obviously resemble J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books.
But again, I've been working backwards: I've been trying to find a goal first, before deciding on the best way to achieve that goal. But that way takes longer and takes more effort. I've come to realize that the more sensible thing to do is actually to start where I am, and then take the next step. I may have to trust some, and risk going in a zigzag, but as they say, God does more with a mistake than with inaction. And I've been inactive for far too long.
In other words, as long as where I'm going isn't sinful or dangerous, all I need to do is move away from where I am now. God will let me know if I'm going the right way or not, as long as I trust Him and ask Him.
And now that I am consecrated to Mary, and recognize that Our Lord and Our Lady are interested in everything that I do or want (that isn't sinful), I think I will find it easier to do that than ever before--and this, combined with my conclusions about philosophy and art, makes me feel that I'm more ready to begin than ever before. I may be in my mid-30's, but I'm still alive: better late than never.
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In addition, partly thanks to the inspiration of Shane Schaetzel (although he's going about it a different way than I am), I have also done something that, for the last six years, I thought I would never do:
I am once again a registered Democrat.
Sadly, the Democratic Party's platform hasn't become pro-life or pro-marriage as of the Democratic National Convention of 2016 (and it won't change again until 2020), so that's not the reason.
The real reasons are as follows:
1) I kept thinking that, if an election were held in which the Democrat and the Republican held the same pro-life and pro-marriage views and planned to act on them if elected, I would vote for the Democrat--because the Republican would be towing the party line, but the Democrat would be showing courage and integrity by going against the party line to stand up for good, and in my view that really deserves a vote.
2) I had already come to the conclusion that, if the Son of God had become Man today, the people He would most rebuke would be self-proclaimed "conservatives" and "right-wingers": people one might more expect to vote or register Republican than Democratic. I base this on the example of the Gospels themselves, plus my own experience: for all that the Democratic Party gets fundamental morality wrong, many people vote or register Democratic because of a perceived focus on people, on individuals; and for all that the Republican Party gets fundamental morality right, too many who vote or register Republican dehumanize this morality, which is hypocritical and even worse than outright rejection of it. The so-called "right" can accuse me of condoning abortion and homosexuality all they want in deciding to register as a Democrat, but it doesn't make it true.
3) Related to the above, the Democratic Party is closer in other ways (notwithstanding abortion and homosexuality) to what I believe as a Catholic Christian. In particular, while I don't like the idea of big government in principle, the fact of big business and big banking and big money means that big government is kind of necessary. Without it, big money can hold the government hostage, through a combination of bribery and threatening to cut off funds. And while I am against illegal immigration on principle (it is illegal, let's not forget), we need to address the reasons why it happens, not just build a wall along the border with Mexico (I especially want to do something for pregnant women, Mexican immigrants, and drug addicts). As I said even during the 2016 election, I think the Republican Party is being too idealistic and unrealistic on this issue--in particular with regard to President Donald Trump's desire to build a wall--and that it will have economic repercussions if it succeeds. In this way, I think the Republican Party hasn't changed since it began: it was right to oppose slavery, as it is right to oppose illegal immigration, but it failed to take into account economic practicalities in its idealistic crusade against it.
4) I came to realize that "Democrats for Life of America" still exists, and according to their website, it is pro-life Democrats who have made the difference between the Democratic Party being the majority in Congress, or the minority. In other words, from the 1970's even to this day, the Democratic Party has needed pro-lifers in order to control Congress!
5) Notwithstanding the party platform, I realized that I didn't have to undergo a "loyalty test" to prove my loyalty to abortion or homosexuality in order to be a registered Democrat--I just had to select that as my party registration, nothing more, and there is nothing innately sinful in doing that. And this, combined with #4 above, meant that there was nothing innately sinful (nothing innately pro-abortion or pro-homosexuality) about being a Democrat. Indeed, registering as a Democrat is the only way I can vote in Democratic primaries and so help any pro-life Democrats to be nominated.
So even though the party platform hasn't changed, I am once again a registered Democrat, and I don't feel that I have compromised my Catholic faith in doing so, even as I have not changed my understanding of it.
That said, however, I am against the concept of "party loyalty". I owe loyalty first to God and Church; after that to my parents and family, and to my country. But Democrat or Republican (or neither), we are all Americans.
Indeed, that's led me to something else I should mention:
Recently, my friend Eric read me an article (by a Christian) condemning the God's Not Dead movie series. And I couldn't agree more: with friends like those, who needs enemies?
The Christian author of the article points out that the movies are not about the existence or nature or will of God, so much as they are about a persecution complex on the part of Christians in the West today. That is, it doesn't suggest that the Christian fight is within, but only without.
But what I really took away from that article is this:
Our modern culture isn't exactly Christian-friendly, and it's no use pretending it is--BUT (and this is crucial) we are NOT being persecuted for our Christian faith. At worst, Christian bakers and photographers are getting in trouble for not wanting to offer their services to same-sex "weddings"--but that's a FAR cry from being threatened with torture and death unless we renounce Jesus Christ, or unless we do something that He commands us not to do. We have the first 280 years of Christian history to see what real persecution looks like, and I for one have never experienced any such thing.
Indeed, in my experience, when I say something like "God bless you" to a stranger, the response is usually positive. I don't usually even hear them saying things like they don't believe in God, or "What's God done for me lately?" or anything like that--never mind attacking me physically because I'm a Christian. Nor has any such thing happened during Mass in my experience.
And this is a GIFT from God! The very fact that we don't have a Christian culture anymore is proof positive that this lack of persecution is God's merciful, loving gift to us--NOT coming from man! And we are being ungrateful to the Lord (and so risking losing what we have, just because we are greedy for more) if we don't appreciate it and thank Him. As someone said, with gratitude a spoonful is a feast, but without gratitude, a feast is a spoonful.
And so I've come to the conclusion that this is one clear way to be patriotic. I am grateful that in the United States of America I still have freedom of religion, even though this is not a Catholic monarchy I'm living in but a secular republic. And so I both can and should exercise that freedom of religion as long as I do have it.
And again, now that I'm consecrated to Mary and better understand what it means to love, I feel more ready to do just that--and that's another reason why I've decided to revive this blog.
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One more thing, as regards vocations.
On February 20, at the beginning of Lent, I woke up that morning feeling what I can only describe as a stronger feeling than ever before in my life that my true vocation is Holy Matrimony: marriage.
After that experience, I thought it over and realized that it made sense, even though I haven't yet met a woman that I want to marry.
One thing that I've come to learn from reading Father Michael E. Gaitley's books is that, as Saint Maximilian Mary Kolbe pointed out, what matters most is our will. If we will what God wills, we will become saints. Our free will is the only thing that we control: God controls the rest. We have no control over our outside circumstances, including the exact results of our efforts (and the future in general)--we don't even necessarily have any way of knowing the future with certainty. Therefore, God cares more about us exercising our wills in union with His, than He does in what results. He will take care of the results.
That being the case, then, I've come to conclude that a true vocation (which means "calling") is God telling us His will for us--whether we will it or not. In other words, the truest clue to our vocation is what we feel the most strongly about, what we can't get out of our minds--whether we like this or whether we don't.
And while I've been fearful about it more than anything, the one vocation that I have indeed felt the most strongly toward is marriage, which requires being open to having children--and that requires sexuality, which is something that frightens me.
Until February 20, 2018 my thinking went like this:
I don't want to get married, or even get started on that route, unless that's my true calling. Certainly I don't want to get married solely in order to have a legitimate excuse to face my fears (or a chaste way of having sex).
But then I remembered The Sound of Music, and how I felt about Maria in the second half, and I realized that I had been acting not entirely dissimilar to her. I concluded that I had been using the religious life (being a friar) as an excuse to run away from my fears--which isn't what God calls me to do at all. Whatever my true vocation is, God does NOT call me to give in to my fears and run away, but to face them with His help.
The difference is that she came to this conclusion after meeting the man she ended up marrying. I haven't even met a woman I'm in love with and want to marry, which makes it more difficult. But I must remember the lesson that the Reverend Mother told Maria: If I do fall in love with a woman, to the point to where I want to marry her, that doesn't mean that I love God any less. Matrimony is holy too--indeed, it's a sacrament.
(I'm even coming to reflect on the old joke--even mentioned in the musical Camelot--that a brave man who faces the most powerful monsters and diabolical villains without a second thought is brought to his knees at the thought of facing a woman in a romantic sense.)
Indeed, maybe this is why I wrote Your Health!, to which Young Blood began life as a sequel: to show that this isn't scary at all.
In fact, this relates very much to what I said earlier about what I took from Father Michael E. Gaitley: I have a distorted view of sexuality. In my mind I know it is holy: it is the complete sharing of bodies, and the only way that children are born. But it's difficult for that to trickle down into my heart. Instead of seeing the beautiful princess, I see the ugly frog, and she makes me uncomfortable.
This is why I used terminology from the fairy tale of "Beauty and the Beast" in talking about our distorted image of God--that's my own comparison, not Father Gaitley's, although I'm sure he would agree.
And again, now that I am consecrated to Mary, and understand better that she and God are interested in everything to do with me as an individual, I feel like I might be more ready to discern my vocation than ever--and like I might be better able to trust that I will get an answer and that it will be the correct one, however I might feel about it initially. Again, better late than never: I'm still relatively young, and I look even younger.
(I still intend to look into the Secular Franciscan Order. Married people can be Secular Franciscans--indeed, I found out about it through a married couple at my parish. In addition, I'm coming to recognize that being saintly isn't about how much you do, but about obedience and doing what is right for you, and no less--or more. It's about the will, not results--we don't "earn" our way into heaven. So my previous conclusions about the Franciscan Order can still apply even if my vocation is to be a husband and father, rather than a Franciscan friar.)
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In sum, Father Michael E. Gaitley was right: yesterday was the 33rd day, and today I am experiencing my morning glory.
But my story isn't over yet. I must be faithful to my consecration in preparation for whatever God has in store for the world and for myself as an individual. I must act on my vocation and on my love of philosophy and art.
But I'm also going to begin another 33-day do-it-yourself retreat in preparation for consecration: to Divine Mercy. And once again, I'm going to go by a book by Father Michael E. Gaitley: 33 Days to Merciful Love.
Tomorrow (April 10, 2018) will be day one, and my consecration will take place on May 13, 2018: the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima (which, this year, will be Mother's Day, as well as the Sunday before Pentecost, which ends the Easter season). Pray for me.
Thank you for sharing part of your day with me.
May God show you His divine mercy, through and with and in Mary. Amen.
Today, the Feast of the Annunciation (moved from March 25 which was Palm Sunday this year), is the day of my total consecration to the Blessed Virgin Mary. And today, I finished watching the DVD series Divine Mercy in the Second Greatest Story Ever Told, hosted by Father Michael E. Gaitley, reminding myself of what I had read three months ago in the book it was based on.
And now I have made up my mind to continue with this Pair O' Dimes blog after all. I'm going to be more prudent (I hope) with what I put on it, but I will NOT end it. I have a lot to say but I want to be concise, so I'll focus on my main point:
When it comes to God, I have been working backwards for almost eight years now. (I wish I remembered the exact date so I could say exactly when the eighth anniversary will be.)
Let me explain:
In 2010, Mortimer J. Adler's arguments persuaded me that God exists, where I wasn't sure before that. Later that same year, Peter Kreeft's arguments persuaded me that Jesus of Nazareth not only existed historically, but that He rose from the dead--and therefore that He is the Son of God, making Christianity the one true faith. Later still, that same year, I used a process of elimination to reject all Christian faiths except for the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. I had only gotten that far when I returned to regular Mass on the First Sunday of Advent: November 28, 2010.
But for awhile, I didn't know enough about either the Catholic faith or the Eastern Orthodox faith to choose decisively between the two. In the Spring of 2011 I took Confirmation classes and was confirmed in the Catholic Church on May 10, 2011. But it was Father Brian Harrison's scrutiny of Eastern Orthodoxy that persuaded me to reject it in favor of Catholicism. Even at this point, however, though I tried my best not to give in to them, I still had nagging doubts prodding me--specifically with regard to the claims of those who distrust the Second Vatican Council (the most recent one).
At some point (I wish I remembered when, but I think it was early on), I concluded that I could use Father Brian Harrison's arguments against sedevacantism as well. And as I felt more and more strongly that I understood the Catholic faith, I thought I had reached the Truth more than ever before. But I still wasn't finished.
It wasn't until the last few months when Shane Schaetzel (in late 2017) and Father Michael E. Gaitley (in early 2018) finally persuaded me that even "radical Traditionalism" is false. To clarify: it's okay to be a Traditionalist Catholic, but it is not okay to have contempt for Vatican II or those who follow the true Vatican II rather than the heretical perversion of it that has been running rampant for so long.
It's taken me almost eight years to learn all this (again, I wish I remembered the exact date when I learned of Mortimer J. Adler's cosmological argument for God's existence, so that I could mark the exact eight-year anniversary).
But I've been working backwards all these years. I've sort of known that for awhile now (and I have Peter Kreeft to thank for it), but I think I now understand it more fully than ever before. Jesus said "No one comes to the Father except through Me." (John 14:6) In other words, it isn't through the Father that we come to the Son, but the other way around--yet I had come to the conclusion that Jesus is the Son of God only after I had come to the conclusion that God's existence could be known with certainty. But the arguments regarding Jesus's identity necessarily imply the existence of God on their own--so that the cosmological argument for God's existence isn't needed simply in order to satisfy us that God exists.
In addition, I had heard the phrase "to Jesus through Mary", and especially this year when I've been reading Father Michael E. Gaitley's works about consecration to the Blessed Mother. Again, it isn't through Jesus that we come to Mary, but the other way around--and yet, again, I had come to the conclusion that the Catholic Church (which venerates Mary) is the true faith only after I had concluded that Jesus her Son is the Son of God.
More to the point, though, is that I had been thinking too much and not experiencing enough. I had been looking at it from a philosophical perspective, not a personal perspective. I had been treating God, Jesus, even Mary, as philosophical concepts--the same that I would for fictional characters, even though in my head I knew they were real, and no one could convince me otherwise. But I hadn't truly been engaging them in my relationship with them--or at least, not as much as I might have.
Part of this may not be my fault, not entirely (I do have Asperger's Syndrome)--and better late than never, but I'm still glad that I've finally come to understand better than ever before.
The way it's supposed to go is this:
We, the Church, united by the Holy Spirit and led by Mary, His Spouse, must lead the world to Jesus Christ, who in turn leads us to the Father. We do this by receiving merciful love from the Father and the Son through Mary and the Church, and then sharing that merciful love with others.
Here's a summation of what I've taken away from Father Michael E. Gaitley's inspiring wisdom:
God is Love itself--but sin (original and personal) is rooted in a distrust of God. Because of this, our sin (the original sin of Adam into which we are all conceived, plus our personal sins) distort the image of God that we hold in our hearts. Rather than see Him as He is, completely trustworthy and completely loving, we see Him as untrustworthy and frightening. To put it another way, we see not the handsome Prince of Peace, but a scary Beast judging us and inflicting wrath upon us when we displease Him. (I'm beginning to wonder if this might have something to do with the pre-Christian pagan religions, where the gods were indeed like that.) That's why we are often scrupulous, or else we despair that we will ever measure up--or we deny that God even exists, just to have some relief.
But because God is Love itself, He has spent all of history since the Fall of Man showing us how He really is, in contrast to the capricious heathen gods. The culmination of this was the Incarnation and Nativity of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Jesus Christ has the fullness of human nature, like us in all ways except sin--and this makes it easier for us to trust Him than it was for us to trust God before the Incarnation. Historically, Jesus of Nazareth was never anyone frightening, treacherous, or judgmental. On the contrary: He was little and humble, and He reached out to sinners, children, people being ignored by the powers that be--and He subjected Himself to the powers that crucified Him for a traitor.
The point is this: our distorted image of God, caused by sin, does NOT apply to creatures. If it did, babies wouldn't trust their own parents, and so they couldn't survive--they wouldn't accept their parents' loving help that they need so desperately. It also makes sense: while all sin necessarily offends God, only some sins (not all) offend any one creature--which is why only God can forgive all sins. And so, Jesus Christ having the fullness of a created human nature helps us to trust Him better than anyone could have trusted God before He took flesh. God didn't change, but our relationship to Him did.
But here's the rub: even though this is the case, Jesus Christ is still a Divine Person, not a creature--He has the fullness of Divine nature, and is the eternally begotten Son of God through whom all things were made. Jesus of Nazareth the historical Man is identical to the Second Person of the Holy Trinity through whom the Father created the entire universe, visible and invisible. And at His Second Coming, Jesus will be our just Judge, exercising justice to good and evil alike. Added to this, in order to have the fullness of human nature at all, He needed a human creature as His Mother--and because God loves us (and because love isn't true love if it is coerced), she had to agree to be His Mother, uniting her will to His in that regard.
And that is where Mary comes in. She is the Immaculate Conception, and so her will is always perfectly united to God's will--therefore our sins upset her as they upset God--BUT, because she is a mere creature, our sins only upset her by proxy, not all do so directly. Mary cannot forgive us all our sins, and she cannot punish us for our sins--she is not our Judge. She is a creature, exactly like us except for being Immaculate.
The long and short of it is this: Mary is a creature, and Jesus gives her to us to be our Mother--and sin doesn't distort our image of creatures (and babies and children naturally trust their parents, especially their mothers). Plus she is not our judge. This all makes it easier to trust her--easier for us sinners even than it is to trust Jesus Christ Himself, who will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. But because Mary is the Immaculate Conception, her will is perfectly united to God's will, and therefore she is completely trustworthy--it isn't only easier to trust her, but she will always be worthy of our trust.
And so the Virgin Mary is God's primary instrument in healing us: she is no more trustworthy than God Himself, but because of our sin (our fault, nothing to do with God whose loving nature is unchanging), we can find it easier to trust her (a creature, and a Mother, who isn't our Judge) than to trust God. And because she is the Immaculate Conception, she is also no less trustworthy than God Himself. Mary, of her own free will, leads us to Jesus, who leads us to the Father.
Therefore, we creatures, sinners though we are, should be the same: not only trusting Mary to lead us to Jesus, who leads us to the Father, but uniting with her purpose in leading others in the same direction. And we do this by accepting love through Mary that comes from Jesus and the Father, and sharing it with others--in effect, by ourselves being trustworthy and loving, and NOT scary, judgmental, and treacherous. And we must be this way to everyone without exception or condition.
But it took actually doing a 33-day do-it-yourself retreat in preparation for consecration to Mary to make me understand more fully what I was missing. Towards the end of this retreat, I realized something: Mary wants us to share our innermost life with her. She wants to participate in our every joy and sorrow, as well as in our every work and prayer--no matter how small. As long as what we're doing isn't sinful, she wants to be a part of it. Mary is interested in who we are as people, not just in the biggest sense (our not being in danger of death or mortal sin), but in the smallest sense. And that's what true love really is. Not only is Mary like that, but so is Jesus Christ--and so is God our heavenly Father. And knowing this is making it easier for me to share with Mary--and therefore with Jesus and God the Father--even little details. I'm not used to it, and so I'm not perfect in it, but I don't have to be: I'll get better with practice and with heavenly aid, and even then I won't be perfect in this life, not until I die to sin completely and go to heaven.
But now that I know this, and know that I am completely consecrated to Mary, I feel more strongly than ever before that God loves me, and I feel more strongly than ever before that I want to return that love and share it with everyone.
Think of it this way: a lot of the time, people begin prayers with "God, I hate to bother you, but...." or "God, I know you're busy, but...." Unless we are sinning, we NEVER bother the all-good God, and the all-powerful God is NEVER too busy to listen to a heartfelt plea. God wants us to thank Him for, and share with Him, even the littlest things, because they are never too small for Him to notice or to appreciate. Only if they are sinful does He not want them--but even there, God knows our weakness. "For a righteous man falls seven times" a day (Proverbs 24:16), and no sin will ever make Him stop loving us. It's the sin He hates, not us--and He hates it because it's hurting us, because He loves us.
And it's partly because I've been working backwards since the year before I started this blog, that I've decided to revive it--and to dedicate it to the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose image you see to the right.
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But I've also been working backwards with regard to what I am meant to do, as I realize now more fully than ever before.
C. S. Lewis's "trilemma" helped me to conclude that Jesus is the Son of God, but now (through Bruce Charlton and Dr. Michael Ward) I'm coming to conclude that I have more in common with him than I thought. I already knew that he left the Christian faith and then returned to it as an adult, and his theological writings made an impact on me (as did some of his fiction), but only now do I really feel closer to C. S. Lewis in a way that I haven't felt with any writer since J. M. Barrie, beginning in 2004.
Bruce Charlton's blog pointed out to me that C. S. Lewis's writing style is different from that of J. R. R. Tolkien--and while I share a birthday with Tolkien, I discovered more of myself in the description of C. S. Lewis.
For one thing, C. S. Lewis finds it difficult to make long works cohere into a singular unit--that is, he does better with episodic works than with a single novel-length plot. I recognize myself in that: indeed, after reading part of Alice's Evidence: A New Look at Autism by Robert B. Waltz, I had a name to put to this common trait in people on the autism spectrum. It's called "weak central coherence"--a stunted ability to see the forest for the trees, compared with neurotypicals. I have definitely found it easier to go with a single burst of inspiration, writing shorter pieces (including shorter or episodic fiction), than to write long novels.
For another, C. S. Lewis's inspirations tend to be philosophical ideas or still images. The same seems to be true for me--and that, combined with what I said above about how I'd been working backwards since 2010, is why I've chosen to keep this blog up, to begin it anew. This blog, which I began in 2011, has always been a philosophical blog, and I have always had a mathematical-logical-spatial mind. In addition, I have been drawing since I can remember, and new ideas that aren't philosophical ideas tend to come to me in visual form (that might be why I didn't notice my singing gift until I was 26).
Again, I've been working backwards: since shortly after the turn of the millennium, I concluded that what I wanted to do was to make up stories, irrespective of medium, and so I thought that the job title I wanted for myself was "writer". Only now am I coming to accept the truth that I understood better before I became an adult.
But in recognizing and accepting this, I've decided to go further than C. S. Lewis did. That is, if I'm going to "write" anything, I intend to stick with my strengths--so that the closest things to original stories that I might write will (at least in large measure) probably be one or the other (or a combination) of two things: 1) Socratic dialogues after the fashion of Plato (done in dialogue form but essentially philosophy texts); 2) stories told pictorially (in our modern Western culture, we can most often find this in children's picture books and in comic books).
In particular, I want to use these strengths in writing my epic fantasy Young Blood. And it's here where my connection to C. S. Lewis really feels complete.
I haven't read his book yet, but I've become fascinated by Dr. Michael Ward's claim in Planet Narnia, which sounds outrageous on the surface but which seems to be backed up by solid evidence in C. S. Lewis's works themselves: namely, that what truly unites and makes sense of all seven Narnia books being what they are is actually expression of the qualities associated with the seven non-fixed celestial bodies known to the ancients, as they understood it before the Scientific Revolution: the sun, the moon, and the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
In learning what these qualities were and how Lewis utilized them in the Narnia books, I've come to realize that I have (quite unknowingly) done something similar with the overall Young Blood story--but in a different order. My own order is more comparable to the Ptolemaic model's order of the planets from Earth outward, which seems to me to make more sense than any order (perhaps excepting that associated with the days of the week).
Given this, I now feel more than ever that I'm doing the right thing with my Young Blood story, and I intend to do it as a heptalogy (seven volumes telling one progressive story). With regard to its roots in Christ and my faith, I intend to take greater inspiration from Lewis's Narnia books--but in terms of its progression and a young protagonist growing up (and the fact that I have it in mind to do seven even before I've finished and published any of them), it will probably more obviously resemble J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books.
But again, I've been working backwards: I've been trying to find a goal first, before deciding on the best way to achieve that goal. But that way takes longer and takes more effort. I've come to realize that the more sensible thing to do is actually to start where I am, and then take the next step. I may have to trust some, and risk going in a zigzag, but as they say, God does more with a mistake than with inaction. And I've been inactive for far too long.
In other words, as long as where I'm going isn't sinful or dangerous, all I need to do is move away from where I am now. God will let me know if I'm going the right way or not, as long as I trust Him and ask Him.
And now that I am consecrated to Mary, and recognize that Our Lord and Our Lady are interested in everything that I do or want (that isn't sinful), I think I will find it easier to do that than ever before--and this, combined with my conclusions about philosophy and art, makes me feel that I'm more ready to begin than ever before. I may be in my mid-30's, but I'm still alive: better late than never.
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In addition, partly thanks to the inspiration of Shane Schaetzel (although he's going about it a different way than I am), I have also done something that, for the last six years, I thought I would never do:
I am once again a registered Democrat.
Sadly, the Democratic Party's platform hasn't become pro-life or pro-marriage as of the Democratic National Convention of 2016 (and it won't change again until 2020), so that's not the reason.
The real reasons are as follows:
1) I kept thinking that, if an election were held in which the Democrat and the Republican held the same pro-life and pro-marriage views and planned to act on them if elected, I would vote for the Democrat--because the Republican would be towing the party line, but the Democrat would be showing courage and integrity by going against the party line to stand up for good, and in my view that really deserves a vote.
2) I had already come to the conclusion that, if the Son of God had become Man today, the people He would most rebuke would be self-proclaimed "conservatives" and "right-wingers": people one might more expect to vote or register Republican than Democratic. I base this on the example of the Gospels themselves, plus my own experience: for all that the Democratic Party gets fundamental morality wrong, many people vote or register Democratic because of a perceived focus on people, on individuals; and for all that the Republican Party gets fundamental morality right, too many who vote or register Republican dehumanize this morality, which is hypocritical and even worse than outright rejection of it. The so-called "right" can accuse me of condoning abortion and homosexuality all they want in deciding to register as a Democrat, but it doesn't make it true.
3) Related to the above, the Democratic Party is closer in other ways (notwithstanding abortion and homosexuality) to what I believe as a Catholic Christian. In particular, while I don't like the idea of big government in principle, the fact of big business and big banking and big money means that big government is kind of necessary. Without it, big money can hold the government hostage, through a combination of bribery and threatening to cut off funds. And while I am against illegal immigration on principle (it is illegal, let's not forget), we need to address the reasons why it happens, not just build a wall along the border with Mexico (I especially want to do something for pregnant women, Mexican immigrants, and drug addicts). As I said even during the 2016 election, I think the Republican Party is being too idealistic and unrealistic on this issue--in particular with regard to President Donald Trump's desire to build a wall--and that it will have economic repercussions if it succeeds. In this way, I think the Republican Party hasn't changed since it began: it was right to oppose slavery, as it is right to oppose illegal immigration, but it failed to take into account economic practicalities in its idealistic crusade against it.
4) I came to realize that "Democrats for Life of America" still exists, and according to their website, it is pro-life Democrats who have made the difference between the Democratic Party being the majority in Congress, or the minority. In other words, from the 1970's even to this day, the Democratic Party has needed pro-lifers in order to control Congress!
5) Notwithstanding the party platform, I realized that I didn't have to undergo a "loyalty test" to prove my loyalty to abortion or homosexuality in order to be a registered Democrat--I just had to select that as my party registration, nothing more, and there is nothing innately sinful in doing that. And this, combined with #4 above, meant that there was nothing innately sinful (nothing innately pro-abortion or pro-homosexuality) about being a Democrat. Indeed, registering as a Democrat is the only way I can vote in Democratic primaries and so help any pro-life Democrats to be nominated.
So even though the party platform hasn't changed, I am once again a registered Democrat, and I don't feel that I have compromised my Catholic faith in doing so, even as I have not changed my understanding of it.
That said, however, I am against the concept of "party loyalty". I owe loyalty first to God and Church; after that to my parents and family, and to my country. But Democrat or Republican (or neither), we are all Americans.
Indeed, that's led me to something else I should mention:
Recently, my friend Eric read me an article (by a Christian) condemning the God's Not Dead movie series. And I couldn't agree more: with friends like those, who needs enemies?
The Christian author of the article points out that the movies are not about the existence or nature or will of God, so much as they are about a persecution complex on the part of Christians in the West today. That is, it doesn't suggest that the Christian fight is within, but only without.
But what I really took away from that article is this:
Our modern culture isn't exactly Christian-friendly, and it's no use pretending it is--BUT (and this is crucial) we are NOT being persecuted for our Christian faith. At worst, Christian bakers and photographers are getting in trouble for not wanting to offer their services to same-sex "weddings"--but that's a FAR cry from being threatened with torture and death unless we renounce Jesus Christ, or unless we do something that He commands us not to do. We have the first 280 years of Christian history to see what real persecution looks like, and I for one have never experienced any such thing.
Indeed, in my experience, when I say something like "God bless you" to a stranger, the response is usually positive. I don't usually even hear them saying things like they don't believe in God, or "What's God done for me lately?" or anything like that--never mind attacking me physically because I'm a Christian. Nor has any such thing happened during Mass in my experience.
And this is a GIFT from God! The very fact that we don't have a Christian culture anymore is proof positive that this lack of persecution is God's merciful, loving gift to us--NOT coming from man! And we are being ungrateful to the Lord (and so risking losing what we have, just because we are greedy for more) if we don't appreciate it and thank Him. As someone said, with gratitude a spoonful is a feast, but without gratitude, a feast is a spoonful.
And so I've come to the conclusion that this is one clear way to be patriotic. I am grateful that in the United States of America I still have freedom of religion, even though this is not a Catholic monarchy I'm living in but a secular republic. And so I both can and should exercise that freedom of religion as long as I do have it.
And again, now that I'm consecrated to Mary and better understand what it means to love, I feel more ready to do just that--and that's another reason why I've decided to revive this blog.
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One more thing, as regards vocations.
On February 20, at the beginning of Lent, I woke up that morning feeling what I can only describe as a stronger feeling than ever before in my life that my true vocation is Holy Matrimony: marriage.
After that experience, I thought it over and realized that it made sense, even though I haven't yet met a woman that I want to marry.
One thing that I've come to learn from reading Father Michael E. Gaitley's books is that, as Saint Maximilian Mary Kolbe pointed out, what matters most is our will. If we will what God wills, we will become saints. Our free will is the only thing that we control: God controls the rest. We have no control over our outside circumstances, including the exact results of our efforts (and the future in general)--we don't even necessarily have any way of knowing the future with certainty. Therefore, God cares more about us exercising our wills in union with His, than He does in what results. He will take care of the results.
That being the case, then, I've come to conclude that a true vocation (which means "calling") is God telling us His will for us--whether we will it or not. In other words, the truest clue to our vocation is what we feel the most strongly about, what we can't get out of our minds--whether we like this or whether we don't.
And while I've been fearful about it more than anything, the one vocation that I have indeed felt the most strongly toward is marriage, which requires being open to having children--and that requires sexuality, which is something that frightens me.
Until February 20, 2018 my thinking went like this:
I don't want to get married, or even get started on that route, unless that's my true calling. Certainly I don't want to get married solely in order to have a legitimate excuse to face my fears (or a chaste way of having sex).
But then I remembered The Sound of Music, and how I felt about Maria in the second half, and I realized that I had been acting not entirely dissimilar to her. I concluded that I had been using the religious life (being a friar) as an excuse to run away from my fears--which isn't what God calls me to do at all. Whatever my true vocation is, God does NOT call me to give in to my fears and run away, but to face them with His help.
The difference is that she came to this conclusion after meeting the man she ended up marrying. I haven't even met a woman I'm in love with and want to marry, which makes it more difficult. But I must remember the lesson that the Reverend Mother told Maria: If I do fall in love with a woman, to the point to where I want to marry her, that doesn't mean that I love God any less. Matrimony is holy too--indeed, it's a sacrament.
(I'm even coming to reflect on the old joke--even mentioned in the musical Camelot--that a brave man who faces the most powerful monsters and diabolical villains without a second thought is brought to his knees at the thought of facing a woman in a romantic sense.)
Indeed, maybe this is why I wrote Your Health!, to which Young Blood began life as a sequel: to show that this isn't scary at all.
In fact, this relates very much to what I said earlier about what I took from Father Michael E. Gaitley: I have a distorted view of sexuality. In my mind I know it is holy: it is the complete sharing of bodies, and the only way that children are born. But it's difficult for that to trickle down into my heart. Instead of seeing the beautiful princess, I see the ugly frog, and she makes me uncomfortable.
This is why I used terminology from the fairy tale of "Beauty and the Beast" in talking about our distorted image of God--that's my own comparison, not Father Gaitley's, although I'm sure he would agree.
And again, now that I am consecrated to Mary, and understand better that she and God are interested in everything to do with me as an individual, I feel like I might be more ready to discern my vocation than ever--and like I might be better able to trust that I will get an answer and that it will be the correct one, however I might feel about it initially. Again, better late than never: I'm still relatively young, and I look even younger.
(I still intend to look into the Secular Franciscan Order. Married people can be Secular Franciscans--indeed, I found out about it through a married couple at my parish. In addition, I'm coming to recognize that being saintly isn't about how much you do, but about obedience and doing what is right for you, and no less--or more. It's about the will, not results--we don't "earn" our way into heaven. So my previous conclusions about the Franciscan Order can still apply even if my vocation is to be a husband and father, rather than a Franciscan friar.)
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In sum, Father Michael E. Gaitley was right: yesterday was the 33rd day, and today I am experiencing my morning glory.
But my story isn't over yet. I must be faithful to my consecration in preparation for whatever God has in store for the world and for myself as an individual. I must act on my vocation and on my love of philosophy and art.
But I'm also going to begin another 33-day do-it-yourself retreat in preparation for consecration: to Divine Mercy. And once again, I'm going to go by a book by Father Michael E. Gaitley: 33 Days to Merciful Love.
Tomorrow (April 10, 2018) will be day one, and my consecration will take place on May 13, 2018: the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima (which, this year, will be Mother's Day, as well as the Sunday before Pentecost, which ends the Easter season). Pray for me.
Thank you for sharing part of your day with me.
May God show you His divine mercy, through and with and in Mary. Amen.
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