eyebeleave

(A)synchronicity

I hope you won’t cry “Apophenia!” or “Pareidolia!” once you read what I have written and that you will instead take it as my sharing a personal reflection.

It all started when I saw the photo at the top of this post, where Georges Braque, one of the fathers of Cubism, is seen looking at Vincent van Gogh’s self–portrait. The thought that came to me straight-away was that I too have seen that painting and that this, in some sense, places me beside Braque, albeit at a different time. You could think of it as asynchronous colocation and as a variant of Jung’s synchronicity, where it is not meaning (or causation) that provides the link but an object … I swiped to the next story in my Flipboard stream, but this thought of having more in common with Braque than I previously thought, and of us having – in some sense – shared an appreciation of van Gogh’s work stayed with me.

A couple of days later, during the Easter vigil’s Litany of the Saints I then felt a particular connection with some of the names as they were being called out. They were saints whose lives and thoughts I am familiar with and with whom I felt a particular connection – Peter, John, Gregory, Augustine, Martin, Francis and Teresa of Jesus being just some of the most prominent ones. I felt like their names alone were keys that enabled a connection – in some sense …

When the litany concluded, I thought back to the Exsultet, sung at the beginning of the Easter vigil, which spoke to me already when I first heard it, and I realized that a good few of the saints, whose names were so significant to me just then, must also have listened to it. In some sense I felt like I was standing beside them as we jointly listened to this profound hymn of praise. Not only did I feel a connection to these specific saints, but to all who since at least the 4th century AD have celebrated the resurrection to the tune of this hymn. When I returned home, and after my family has gone to sleep, I looked more closely both at the Exsultet’s content, which contains so many gems of synthesis (cf. “O happy fault”), and at its history, where St. Augustine is one of the earliest sources mentioning it and where St. John Damascene (another favorite of mine) is credited with being the author of the text used today.

Returning to the Easter vigil, it’s high-point came with the Eucharist, which tied this strand of reflection together for me. The Eucharist is Jesus, who is the head and heart of His mystical body. By receiving Him and thereby being received into Him, I am connected not only to Him but to all who ever have and ever will be connected to Him. Through Jesus-Eucharist I am in a real sense connected to all of humanity – past, present and future, since he is the finite-infinite, the atemporal now.¹

The intuition of connections across time and space, via a proxy like the painting that Braque and I viewed, or via a hymn that the saints, my friends, and I listened to, helped me more fully appreciate their reality in the Eucharist on Saturday night.

¹ To my delight, this topic came up again while talking to my überbestie MR last night.

Neither faith nor reason: ex nihilo butchered

Another Sunday, another “Faith and Reason” column in the “Our Faith on Sunday” newsletter, another spectacularly confused piece on an otherwise interesting topic, and this time – to add insult to injury – a complete disregard for the fact that it was Easter Sunday!

Instead of reflecting on something to do with the Easter triduum (e.g., the resurrection, Jesus’ descent into hell or his abandonment on the cross, or a myriad other aspects that could have been looked at from the faith-reason perspective), yesterday’s column was the following (with its first, superfluous sentence removed):

“[…] Creation ex nihilo (out of nothing) does not mean that, before matter was brought into existence, that there was absolute nothingness. If there had been absolutely nothing before creation, absolutely nothing could have come into existence. The nihil of ex nihilo refers to the nothing of material existence. Creation ex nihilo means that, before matter was called into being, there was no matter. God and the angels existed ‘before’ the creation of matter.”

Oh, man! Where to start? Before debunking the above hot mess, let me just put a couple of quotes from the Catechism on the table, so that the squirming irrationality of this week’s “Faith and Reason” column is counterbalanced by how the Church actually talks about God and creation:

“In [Jesus] “all things were created, in heaven and on earth… all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:16-17)” (§291)

“We believe that God needs no pre-existent thing or any help in order to create, nor is creation any sort of necessary emanation from the divine substance. God creates freely “out of nothing”.” (§296)

“The world began when God’s word drew it out of nothingness; all existent beings, all of nature, and all human history are rooted in this primordial event, the very genesis by which the world was constituted and time begun. (cf. St. Augustine, De Genesi contra Manichaeos 1, 2, 4)” (§338)

Note how there is no arguing against the nothingness that preceded creation in the Catechism (neither in the passages quoted above nor anywhere else in its 2865 paragraphs) for it would be futile to do so. Even in the context of poetic (as distinct from philosophical, theological or scientific) language, both Genesis 1 (“In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth”) and John 1 (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be.”) steer well clear of attempting to talk about what happened before “the beginning” in which God created the universe (i.e., space-time).

Why is that? Again we find the Church’s position in the Catechism as follows:

“Since our knowledge of God is limited, our language about him is equally so. We can name God only by taking creatures as our starting point, and in accordance with our limited human ways of knowing and thinking.”(§40)

“God transcends all creatures. We must therefore continually purify our language of everything in it that is limited, image-bound or imperfect, if we are not to confuse our image of God — “the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable” — with our human representations. Our human words always fall short of the mystery of God. Admittedly, in speaking about God like this, our language is using human modes of expression; nevertheless it really does attain to God himself, though unable to express him in his infinite simplicity. Likewise, we must recall that “between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying an even greater dissimilitude”; and that “concerning God, we cannot grasp what he is, but only what he is not, and how other beings stand in relation to him.””(§42-43)

To me the key here is: “we can name God only by taking creatures as our starting point,” which you could transpose into Wittgensteinese as “we can only use the rules of games we have played.” In other words – the meanings of our language (using which we can “name” God) derive from our own, direct experiences, which take place firmly within the context of the universe and which therefore have a scope constrained to it. Instead of strictly following Wittgenstein’s “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” Christianity still talks about God and about what has been revealed to it about realities beyond the universe, but does so with great caution and with lots of “in some sense.”

To take the “ex nihilo” of God’s creative act and start qualifying it in the belief that it would otherwise preclude a pre-existence of God is jut confused, since before the “beginning” in which space-time were created, there is no before (which requires time) and to consider creation to be only of matter (and not of time as well – as the column’s author does) not only flies in the face of contemporary physics but also of St. Augustine’s insights, arrived at around 389 AD.

The crowning glory of yesterday’s column though is its assertion that “If there had been absolutely nothing before creation, absolutely nothing could have come into existence,” which is a direct denial of God’s ex nihilo bringing about of the universe (and of contemporary physics pointing to the same) and stands proudly alongside the same column barefacedly denying the incarnation the previous Sunday.

The most charitable interpretation of yesterday’s mental contortions is that they were a misguided attempt at trying to resolve a fictitious contradiction or a mistimed April Fools prank …

¹ Previous ones having protested against the denial of the incarnation, the allegedly separate “orders of knowledge” of science and religion, the abuse of “cf.,” the perversion of philosophy and a plagiaristic ignorance of infinity.

Sign of contradiction

Imagine¹ sitting on the terrace of a seaside hotel, coolly sipping afternoon drinks, and spotting a yacht heading straight towards you. On beaching the yacht, its sole passenger and captain – armed to the teeth and attempting to communicate with the holiday-makers by signs – persists in the conviction that she has reached a dangerous land, hitherto unknown to civilization, while actually having landed at another of her own homeland’s tourist destinations. You’d certainly feel for her and try to gently steer her in the right direction, but you couldn’t just play along with her delusion.

The above is exactly how I felt (minus the afternoon drink) when I saw a tweet two days ago pointing to “Project Reason” having triumphantly unmasked the shocking contradictions that addle the Bible, with the hope that it would finally bring those religious fanatics to their senses.

🙂

Having scoured the Bible end to end and connected verses that contradict each other, Project Reason have built – and rather beautifully visualized (see above) – a large database of intra-biblical contradictions. I am both grateful to them for this work and certain of the good that reading the Bible has done them (as it does anyone who reads it). What they haven’t done though is in any way question the Bible’s value or present someone who approaches scripture along Dei Verbum lines (i.e., “written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author,” but since they were written by men “[we] must investigate what meaning the sacred writer intended to express and actually expressed in particular circumstances by using contemporary literary forms in accordance with the situation of his own time and culture.”) with any challenge whatsoever.

Project Reason: “Aha! The Bible contains contradictions!”
Me: “Yeah, I know and am profoundly grateful for them!”
Project Reason: “?!” (plus an outsized bead of sweat, emblematic of certain Japanese cartoons, that appears during particularly awkward or embarrassing moments)

Let me try to explain why it is that I consider biblical contradictions a strength and source of comfort rather than a challenge or obstacle. The difficulty I have here is not how to do that, but which of the many parallel reasons to start with.

First, there is the angle that has nothing whatsoever to do with religion and that comes from the impossibility of simultaneously being complete and consistent, proven for formal systems by Kurt Gödel and discussed at some length in a previous post here. A system of axioms (rules) can either be consistent or complete, but not both – if it is consistent it has to be incomplete, while if it is complete it has to be inconsistent. Christians believe that revelation is complete in the person of Jesus, which makes inconsistency in his and the Church’s teachings be no surprise to those of us who have a fondness for formal systems and mathematics. That may sound weird, but it sure as Kurt is not unreasonable or irrational.

Second, Christianity (and Judaism too) is about the relationship with a person – God – not about following rules² (as much as militant atheists would like to believe so). If anything, the contradictions in Scripture underline the necessity of seeking to personally relate to God, to listen to one’s conscience and to seek to live in every individual and unique moment in a way that is a participation in the life of God. In C. S. Lewis’ words: “Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of people who really were in touch with God.” To which my bestie ML adds: “We should not mistake a map for the territory it describes. We do not turn to the page picturing the ocean in an atlas and expect our shoes to get wet.”

Third, there is the basic fact that different contexts require different words and actions to move them towards the same goal. When a child is very young (and I am thinking ~2 years) wouldn’t you exaggerate the dangers of them sticking anything into a power socket, while when they are older you can explain to them with greater precision what it is that would be dangerous and what wouldn’t (and introduce the whole topic of electricity, conductivity, etc.)? My favorite example of this type of “contradiction” is the “not with us = against us” versus “not against us = with us” case that Project Reason also picked up on. Here we have Jesus say “Whoever is not with me is against me” (Matthew 12:30) at one point and “For whoever is not against us is for us” (Mark 9:40) at another. A contradiction. Right? No, not really – in the first, Matthean case Jesus is referring to his driving out “demons” and this meaning that him and the demons are in opposition, while in the second, Marcan case Jesus is talking about someone who was driving out demons in his name and who his disciples were jealous of. Instead of being a contradiction, this example is actually fully consistent – Jesus is against demons and those who are also against demons are with him …

Fourth, if you believe that the Scriptures were “written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, [and] have God as their author” (Dei Verbum), then this immediately points to a necessary and vast mismatch in dimensionality between the source (God) and its representation/projection (human words and concepts during the first century AD). Like projections of even just a four-dimensional hypercube into 2D, which give rise to a myriad seemingly unrelated and “contradictory” shapes when considered only in 2D (e.g., how many vertices does this shape have? 4, 7, 16?):³

So too the projections of God’s words into human language necessarily result in apparent inconsistency and contradiction when considered only on the level of human language as opposed to seen as the reductions and conflations they are.

Fifth, to avoid giving the impression of all of the above just being post hoc attempts to explain a feature that the original authors of Scripture did not intend or were not aware of, it is worth noting that contradiction has been a strand in Christian theology that has its origins in the Gospels and that can be traced throughout the last two thousand years (with a recent peak in John Paul II’s thought). This can be seen from Simeon saying to Mary that Jesus “is destined for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be contradicted” (Luke 2:34) to St. Paul teaching that “For since in the wisdom of God the world did not come to know God through wisdom, it was the will of God through the foolishness of the proclamation [of the cross] to save those who have faith.” (1 Corinthians 1:21).

¡Viva la contradicción!

¹ Thanks to G. K. Chesterton for this great image, borrowed from the opening paragraph of Orthodoxy.
² But, wait! Didn’t your first point assume that Scripture was a formal system and you are now saying that it is not about rules. Aha! A contradiction! – Yes, I know … so? (see the third point).
³ For more detail see a previous post here.

Skin and heart, not antiques or novelties

Where does Pope Francis stand on the perennial question of reform versus continuity, progress versus tradition? His sermon during yesterday morning’s Chrism mass made it very clear – like Benedict XVI, who referred to it as “reform in continuity,” Francis too rejects a focus on tradition alone (calling it “antiques”) as well as on progress alone (“novelties”) and instead calls us to “put [our] own skin and [our] own heart on the line” and to live in the midst of our communities, sharing the life of our neighbors. Another way of reading the popes’ position is to cast it in terms of past, present and future, with a firm focus on living in the present moment instead of a nostalgia for a past Golden Age or a putting off of life until a bright future dawns.

While it contains a clear position on where Francis’ priorities lie, yesterday morning’s sermon – which I recommend highly in full – will, in my opinion, go down as the founding moment of a renewal of the priesthood, with the following being its key moments:

“[T]he anointing that [priests] receive is meant in turn to anoint God’s faithful people, whose servants they are; they are anointed for the poor, for prisoners, for the oppressed.[…]

A good priest can be recognized by the way his people are anointed. This is a clear test. When our people are anointed with the oil of gladness, it is obvious: for example, when they leave Mass looking as if they have heard good news. Our people like to hear the Gospel preached with “unction”, they like it when the Gospel we preach touches their daily lives, when it runs down like the oil of Aaron to the edges of reality, when it brings light to moments of extreme darkness, to the “outskirts” where people of faith are most exposed to the onslaught of those who want to tear down their faith. […]

We need to “go out”, then, in order to experience our own anointing, its power and its redemptive efficacy: to the “outskirts” where there is suffering, bloodshed, blindness that longs for sight, and prisoners in thrall to many evil masters. It is not in soul-searching or constant introspection that we encounter the Lord[…]

Those who do not go out of themselves, instead of being mediators, gradually become intermediaries, managers. We know the difference: the intermediary, the manager, “has already received his reward”, and since he doesn’t put his own skin and his own heart on the line, he never hears a warm, heartfelt word of thanks. This is precisely the reason why some priests grow dissatisfied, become sad priests, lose heart and become in some sense collectors of antiques or novelties – instead of being shepherds living with “the smell of the sheep”, shepherds in the midst of their flock, fishers of men. […]

It is not a bad thing that reality itself forces us to “put out into the deep”, where what we are by grace is clearly seen as pure grace, out into the deep of the contemporary world, where the only thing that counts is “unction” – not function – and the nets which overflow with fish are those cast solely in the name of the One in whom we have put our trust: Jesus.”

Wow! What a wake up call! And before you think: “Yeah! Them priests better get their act together,” let me just remind you (as I remind myself) that we all share in Jesus’ royal priesthood! When I heard Pope Francis say these words, I felt that he was addressing me. Do I share in the life of those around me? Do I live in their midst or am I withdrawn into introspection? These are undoubtedly great challenges, but ones that, I believe, will help all of us Christians to be more faithful followers of Jesus.

As is his trademark, Pope Francis proceeded to put his model of the priesthood into practice straight-away, by celebrating the Maundy Thursday mass in a juvenile detention center. Not only that, but he chose – against present liturgical law!¹ – to wash the feet not of 12 men (which in the case of the popes’ Maundy Thursday masses have been priests), but of a group of youths, among whom were women as well as men and Muslims as well as Christians. This a shepherd in the midst of his flock, a fisherman putting “out into the deep”!

Not only his actions, but his words too, during the sermon of the same Maundy Thursday mass, illustrate his closeness and adaptation to the specific people he is with. The message he shares is universal, accessible to all and obviously comes from his heart:

“Help one another. This is what Jesus teaches us. This is what I do. And I do it with my heart. I do this with my heart because it is my duty, as a priest and bishop I must be at your service. But it is a duty that comes from my heart and a duty I love. I love doing it because this is what the Lord has taught me. But you too must help us and help each other, always. And thus in helping each other we will do good for each other.

Now we will perform the ceremony of the Washing of the Feet and we must each one of us think, Am I really willing to help others? Just think of that. Think that this sign is Christ’s caress, because Jesus came just for this, to serve us, to help us.”

This universality and at the same time specificity of his approach also shines through in his inviting ten parish priests from around Rome for lunch earlier that same day. One of the guests – the parish priest of the San Giacomo church in central Rome – reports:

“At first there was a bit of awkwardness – he is the pope after all – but he put everyone at ease. […] He didn’t want us to kiss his hand – instead he kissed each one of us. We asked him whether we could tell our parishioners that we had lunch with him and Francis told us to greet and bless them in his name. […] He also had a word of advice for each one of us. Since my parish is an inner city one, he invited me to keep my church open, as he already said during Wednesday’s general audience: “how sad to see closed churches!”. He told me that if the door is open, when someone passes by, they may enter and if they they also find a priest who is ready to hear their confession, it becomes an occasion for meeting Jesus and the Church.”

¹ Although, personally and individually being the Catholic Church’s supreme and ultimate legislator, this is a moot point.

To the existential peripheries!

Last week my überbestie PM and I were talking about Pope Francis and trying to come up with what the one new thing would be that we’d like him to do. After a run through the obvious candidates of married priests, female deacons and visible unity with other Christian communities (all of which merit consideration), we arrived at the following: for the Church to open herself so that anyone who wanted to could find themselves at home in her. While the Church needs to be faithful to transmitting the perfection and holiness of Jesus, she (i.e., including me!) also needs to love all and embrace all – again as Jesus did.

There are many aspects here that come to mind, from ways to be more inclusive towards those who are divorced and re-married and towards homosexual persons, via greater clarity about the rationality of our faith (which has been taught very clearly by both John Paul II and Benedict XVI, but which may not have percolated through all of the Church’s statements at the local level), to being more explicit about how it is that the Church positions herself with respect to secular society (a topic already touched upon by Francis in these first days of his pontificate). Quite how this is to be done is not clear to me, but what we arrived at with PM is that this is what we would like to see Pope Francis address. (Not that we are in a position of advising the pope, but it is still good to be clear to oneself where one sees the greatest wounds in the Church.)

Then something extraordinary happened yesterday: Cardinal Jaime Lucas Ortega y Alamino (the archbishop of Havana) published a text that I never believed would see the light of day – the notes of Cardinal Bergoglio’s pre-conclave speech. In the context of the Church’s openness, this is undoubtedly a major milestone. The discussions during the pre-conclave meetings of the cardinals are held under strictest secrecy and it is really only thanks to the pope’s explicit permission (given as pope) that Cardinal Ortega y Alamino could do what he did.

The full text is well worth reading and I would here like to emphasize just two passages.¹ The first is about the kind of outreach Pope Francis has in mind:

“The Church is called to come out of herself and to go to the peripheries not only in the geographic sense but also the existential peripheries: those of the mystery of sin, of pain, of injustice, of ignorance, of doing without religion, of thought and of all misery.”

What struck me here is the focus on what is just beyond the scope of the Church today and that Francis looks at it very broadly – not only the partly-physical dimensions of pain, misery and injustice, but also the mental dimensions of ignorance and thought and the spiritual dimensions of sin and absence of religion. His obvious focus on and love of the poor that has stood out since the get go is clearly a part of a much broader vision of the peripheries.

The second passage that spoke to me is about the Church’s inward-looking degeneration:

“In Revelation [3:20], Jesus says that he is at the door and knocks. Evidently the text refers to his knocking from outside in order to enter but I think of the times in which Jesus knocks from within so that we will let him come out. The self-referent Church keeps Jesus Christ within herself and does not let him come out. When the Church is self-referent without realizing it, she believes she has her own light.”

Wow! This is a very serious self-accusation to make for the Church – that she is in the way for Jesus to reach out to humanity – i.e., the polar opposite of her raison d’être! Two things give me great hope here: first, that Pope Francis has such a stark view of what the Church needs to do and second, that it was him whom the college of cardinals elected pope! In a recent interview (where he refused to comment on its content since he was sworn to secrecy), Cardinal Tomko said that this pre-conclave speech of Cardinal Bergoglio’s was “very short, but had such a strong effect that everyone was stunned. It was very profound.” That the cardinals went for someone whose words were so far from the typical political shmoozing that we are used to from pre-election rallies is a great credit to them.

Finally, if there had been any doubt about these notes, today’s general audience address by Pope Franics surely lays them to rest:

“Jesus enters Jerusalem in order to give himself completely. He gives us his body and his blood, and promises to remain with us always. He freely hands himself over to death in obedience to the Father’s will, and in this way shows how much he loves us. We are called to follow in his footsteps. Holy Week challenges us to step outside ourselves so as to attend to the needs of others: those who long for a sympathetic ear, those in need of comfort or help. We should not simply remain in our own secure world, that of the ninety-nine sheep who never strayed from the fold, but we should go out, with Christ, in search of the one lost sheep, however far it may have wandered.”

To conclude, I would like to quote another sentence from Pope Francis’ talk this morning: “Holy Week is not so much a time of sorrow, but rather a time to enter into Christ’s way of thinking and acting.” and wish you all a great Holy Week!

¹ But I can’t not mention his quoting the opening words of the Vatican II Dei Verbum document that is among my favourites and that he presents as the motto of the outgoing Church he wants to see: “Dei Verbum religiose audiens et fidente proclamans.” (“Hearing the word of God with reverence and proclaiming it with faith.”).

Defending the lion

True to form, yesterday’s “Faith and Reason” column¹ of the “Our Faith on Sunday” newsletter again hatcheted its way through another important question, i.e., of how the universe relates to God. It did its best both to obfuscate and to end up in absolute incompatibility with a Christian understanding of the topic. While I am still incredulous about the absurdity of the column’s content, at least the element of surprise is now taken out of the equation and I am in a position to read it and forget about it as opposed to being consumed with indignation :). Nonetheless, its confusion serves as an excuse to talk about how it is that the Church understands the various topics that it butchers.

Let me start this time with quoting the column’s full text and doing so in two parts – the first an attack on “the rationalist” and the second on “the pantheist”:

“The Rationalist’s answer to the origin of the universe can only sound absurd in the Christian’s ears. If matter were eternal and necessary, it would be divine; if divine, it would be the sufficient reason for its own existence. For matter to exist in the first place, it requires there to be a cause other than itself.”

The first thing that strikes me about the above is that it is an attack against a position that I personally have not seen held by anyone I know or even written about by anyone in the last 100 years. To give it column inches in a parish newsletter in 2013 is therefore utterly pointless to my mind. The position attacked here is one of claiming matter to have existed eternally, to have existed necessarily and to be “sufficient reason for its own existence.” This supposed position is then dealt a deadly blow by pointing out that matter requires a “cause other than itself.” At best the argument here is a re-heated Ancient Greek or Mediæval one, which starts from the position of everything requiring a reason for being and of that reason being a causal chain, which necessarily cannot be infinite. As such, it is also a regurgitated earlier “Faith and Reason” column, which I have already dealt with and which I will therefore say no more about here.

“The Pantheists would have us believe that the universe is an emanation from the substance of God. To believe this we need to hold that the infinite and the finite, that the necessary and contingent, are substantially the same; that the table I am writing on is just as divine as the supreme being that holds all things in existence. This is absurd, because, if the infinite became finite, it would no longer be infinite.”

The attack on what is referred to here as pantheism is more relevant, at least in that it is a position that some hold today, albeit in a variety of more or less strict and/or conscious ways. While the column’s author makes pantheism mean that “the universe is an emanation from the substance of God,” its meaning instead is that the universe is God (i.e., that there is an identity between the totality of nature and God). What the column’s author refers to as pantheism would more accurately be called emanationism, which in turn is sometimes linked to pantheism, but which is more about the origin of the universe than about its being.

Following this initial confusion between pantheism and emanationism, the column’s author goes on to assert that it implies that “we need to hold that the infinite and the finite […] are substantially the same.” I don’t see why that would be the case. If God is believed to be identical to nature (or even if nature “emanates” from God), there is no logical necessity to believe that there is a mismatch between the cardinality of the two, whether both be finite or infinite. The most absurd (to use the column author’s own language) part of the entire text though is the conclusion of its last sentence: “if the infinite became finite, it would no longer be infinite.” This final flourish is, I believe, a shot in the foot par excellence for a Christian “thinker” to make, since it is a direct denial of the incarnation. What else is God becoming Man in the person of Jesus, if not the infinite becoming finite, while retaining its infinity?! What the unidentified author of the “Faith and Reason” column has achieved is to first attack an irrelevant position, then mislabel and misanalyse a potentially interesting one and finally declare the heart of the Christian mystery absurd. Bravo!

Before attempting an alternative text in place of the above travesty, let me share with you my theory on the misguided fumblings of the column’s author. I believe it is motivated by the erroneous conviction that for the Christian faith to have rational credibility, all other views and beliefs have to be demonstrated as irrational, illogical and absurd, for fear of their discrediting Christianity. This is not only an insult to the freedom which is at the heart of God’s plan for us (i.e., his not forcing us to believe in him), but also an affront to the rationality and strength of the truth. Here, I believe the following quotes present the true Christian position much more lucidly and consistently than I ever could:

“The truth is like a lion. You don’t have to defend it. Let it loose. It will defend itself.” (St. Augustine)

“As far as preserving identity is concerned, it would be too little for the Christian, so to speak, to assert his identity in a such a way that he effectively blocks the path to truth. Then his Christianity would appear as something arbitrary, merely propositional. He would seem not to reckon with the possibility that religion has to do with truth. On the contrary, I would say that the Christian can afford to be supremely confident, yes, fundamentally certain that he can venture freely into the open sea of the truth, without having to fear for his Christian identity.” (Benedict XVI, Christmas Greetings to the Roman Curia, 2012)

To conclude, the following then is my alternative text for yesterday’s “Faith and Reason” column, using only one word more that the original:^{2, 3}

“The question about the origins of the universe has been the object of many scientific studies which have enriched our knowledge of its age and dimensions, the development of life-forms and the appearance of man. These discoveries invite us to even greater admiration for the greatness of the Creator, prompting us to give him thanks for all his works and for the understanding and wisdom he gives to scholars and researchers.

To counteract erroneous theories about the universe’s origins, such as claims of its eternal existence (rationalist materialism) or of its identity with God (pantheism), faith leads reason to the understanding of this truth: “By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear.””

¹ Previous ones having protested against the allegedly separate “orders of knowledge” of science and religion, the abuse of “cf.,” the perversion of philosophy and a plagiaristic ignorance of infinity.
² For a more detailed look at the topic, see a previous post.
³ Cf. § 283, 285 and 286 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is the verbatim source of ~90% of my alternative text.

Why did God make bad stuff?

Since my sons, who are 5 and 10 years old, attend a non-Catholic school, I have been giving them Catechism lessons. The format is that I try to get them to propose topics, encourage them to share what they think themselves and then attempt to round out the picture we arrive at together. When we kicked-off these weekly catechism sessions, the first one was me pretending to be an alien and asking them to explain to me what this whole God, Jesus, Church business is all about – as you can imagine it was hilarious both for me and for them and I believe it gave catechism a place in the entertainment category :).

At the end of the most recent session, I again asked my boys for suggestions for the next topic, to which my older son replied: “Why did God make bad stuff?” I have to say I was really pleased with this question, since it shows that he is thinking carefully about his faith and also that he applies and contrasts it with his life.

What I would like to do next, therefore, is to sketch out the answer that I’ll try to get across in our Q&A-style format and thereby to attempt a response to the question of evil in language accessible to a 10-year-old, with a 5-year-old listening in. The following then are some of the questions/ideas I will try to share with them. As you’ll see, they expect certain responses from the boys that you’ll just have to intuit from my half of the conversation :):¹

“What do you like best about your friends?

Great! Can you think of some examples when someone was kind/friendly/nice to you?
And you do the same to others as well, don’t you?

But do you think you can make someone be nice/friendly/kind?

That’s right, you can’t! They have to choose to be nice to you, don’t they? And sometimes even your friends aren’t nice – right? Can you think of some examples?

That’s not good, is it? But, do they stop being your friends?

Exactly, of course they don’t … What do you think you can do when they are not nice? Can you make them be nice?

Is there something else you can do though?

That’s right, you can keep being kind and loving towards them, regardless of what they do. But it’s best when they are kind and loving back to you, isn’t it?

What do you think God would like us to do?

And do you think he can make us be nice?

Sure, he could – but then it wouldn’t really be us who are loving him, would it? We would no longer choose to be kind and we’d be like robots instead. Do you think God wants us to be like robots?

So, it looks like God needs to give us the choice to be either good or bad, so that we can really choose to love him and the people around us … But, let’s think a bit more about the question we started with: “Why did God make bad stuff?” Do you think he really made bad stuff?

That’s right – he didn’t, because he is good and he always loves everyone! Good things are like light and bad things are like darkness – in the end there will be light everywhere. No matter how much darkness there is, it cannot stop the light shining from even just one candle.

So, you can see that when we are unkind to others it is not God who makes them suffer. He only lets it happen because he wants us to choose to be kind instead of forcing us. But, instead of choosing to be kind, we are sometimes mean – that’s pretty sad, isn’t it?

How do you think God feels when we are mean to each other?

Yes, he is sad too, because he loves every one of us very much and when we are mean to others we are also mean to him.

How about another, even more difficult question: Why is it that bad things happen that are not the result of someone being mean? Why do people get sick, why are there earthquakes or tsunamis, or why is it that God doesn’t stop people from being mean when what they do is very bad? What do you think?

It is tricky … And, to be honest I don’t know either! I don’t think anyone really knows. What we do know though is that when Jesus came to show us how God loves us, in the end he suffered a lot for us. As you know, he was killed in a very painful way on the cross. What do you think this tells us?

Yes, it must mean that there is a reason for suffering. We don’t know what it is, but we can trust that God is loving us even when things are difficult and painful. Just imagine that God, who can do anything he wants, chose to show us that he loves us so much that he is prepared even to suffer for us.

And do you remember what happened after Jesus was killed on the cross?

Yes, he came back to life and then went up to heaven. It is the same for us – when bad things happen we can say to Jesus: “I know you are with me now and I am with you on the cross.” You will see that you will feel Jesus close to you and he will then take you with him to heaven.”

I know the above is incomplete and far from a satisfactory treatment of the problem of evil for an adult audience (and probably even for kids). What I tried to do though is to give my sons a sense of how freedom plays a role here, how it is that we don’t have anything like a full answer and also how Jesus’ death and resurrection can help us at least intuit the value of suffering. Any thoughts on the above would be much appreciated – as always!

¹ Not that I can hope for anything remotely as masterful as Camus’ The Fall, but at least the half-dialogue format of the following is inspired by it :).

Pope Francis: Beauty, Goodness, Truth

As you many not have the time to follow all of Pope Francis’ talks during these first days of his pontificate, I have compiled the following links to them and my favorite quotes from each one of them – consider it a taster menu if you like:

Patriarch Bartholomew I’s address to Pope Francis on behalf of the religious leaders meeting him after his installation mass on Tuesday:

“This world is the domain where we realize [the] spiritual way of life, where we achieve our integration into the body of Christ, and where we are brought through Him into eternal life. [… W]e travel this way of truth, acquiring the heavenly through the earthly.”
Pope Francis’ address to the religious leaders then affirmed his commitment both to ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue and he also took advantage of the occasion to emphasize again the importance of aligning ourselves also with those who hold no religious beliefs:

“[W]e feel the closeness also of those men and women who, while not belonging to any religious tradition, feel, however the need to search for the truth, the goodness and the beauty of God, and who are our precious allies in efforts to defend the dignity of man, in the building of a peaceful coexistence between peoples and in the careful protection of creation.”

If you are an agnostic or atheist, please, don’t read the above as the Pope imposing a search for God on you. I believe it only refers to a “search for […] truth, […] goodness and […] beauty” since in the Pope’s (and my!) eyes, these all point to God whether you are looking for him through them or not.
During this morning’s mass with Vatican gardeners and cleaners, Pope Francis shared the following insight during his short, impromptu homily (with reference to today’s Gospel reading (John 10:31-42), where Jesus is facing an angry mob that is on the verge of stoning him).

“When we have a heart of stone it happens that we pick up real stones and stone Jesus Christ in the person of our brothers and sisters, especially the weakest of them.”
Later this morning, Pope Francis then met with the diplomatic corps, again returning to the topics of fraternity, poverty and peace that have been a constant throughout these first days of his being in office and he again underlined the importance of cordial relationships with all – whether they hold religious beliefs of not – and placed this also at the heart of our relationship with God:

“It is not possible to build bridges between people while forgetting God. But the converse is also true: it is not possible to establish true links with God, while ignoring other people. […] And it is also important to intensify outreach to non-believers, so that the differences which divide and hurt us may never prevail, but rather the desire to build true links of friendship between all peoples, despite their diversity.”

Have a good weekend! 🙂

Tenderness

Pope Francis’ words and actions during yesterday’s inaugural mass are rich in inspiration, where one could reflect on his adherence to the readings of the day’s feast of St. Joseph instead of those intended for a Pope’s installation, his choice to depart from custom and have the Gospel sung in Greek as opposed to Latin (surely in honor of Patriarch Bartholomew I – the first Orthodox Patriarch to be at a pope’s inaugural mass since 1054!), his nods both to Benedict XVI and John Paul II, and his insistence on “authentic power [being] service.” Of all the aspects of the day, it is the following passage from his sermon that spoke to me most:

“[L]et us be “protectors” of creation, protectors of God’s plan inscribed in nature, protectors of one another and of the environment. […] Being protectors […] also means keeping watch over our emotions, over our hearts, because they are the seat of good and evil intentions: intentions that build up and tear down! We must not be afraid of goodness or even tenderness!

[… C]aring, protecting, demands goodness, it calls for a certain tenderness. In the Gospels, Saint Joseph appears as a strong and courageous man, a working man, yet in his heart we see great tenderness, which is not the virtue of the weak but rather a sign of strength of spirit and a capacity for concern, for compassion, for genuine openness to others, for love. We must not be afraid of goodness, of tenderness!”

Taken together with the other things Pope Francis said since his election (and before it!), I see a very clear call both to making a serious commitment – a commitment that has its eyes on the cross, that understands suffering as participation in Jesus’ passion, that is concerned about the truth and that exercises control over oneself, one’s emotions and impulses – and to transmitting the warmth, compassion and tenderness that God has for us to our brothers and sisters. While it was his emphasis on tenderness that caught my eye here, I have also been thinking about his positioning it in the context of protection, which seems to have these two sides: one of strength and effort on the side of the protector and the other of gentleness shown to the protected. In many ways this mirrors John Paul II’s dictum: “Be strict to yourself and generous to others.”

In my personal experience I have had several friends who have come to the – to my mind erroneous – conclusion that a spiritual life ought to suppress what they saw as a purely human need for warmth, for tenderness, for personal connection. This has always been an attitude that has made me concerned for their wellbeing and sadly in many cases has lead them to deep crises and disillusionment, which for some resulted even in an abandonment of their erstwhile ideals. At the heart of such an assumed spiritual-affective opposition is, in my opinion, a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is to be human – a person made in God’s image.

God being three persons who love each other to the point of being one means that we too are made for communion, for closeness, for togetherness – a point also highlighted by John Paul II saying: “God is One, but not alone”. The tenderness that Pope Francis talks about is therefore not something outside what it means to be a Christian, a follower of Jesus, and a human being made in God’s image, but very much at its heart. Even just a cursory glance at the Bible reveals that it is brimming over with God’s tenderness, where the following are just a couple of my favorite examples:

“For God will hide me in his shelter
in time of trouble,
He will conceal me in the cover of his tent;
and set me high upon a rock.” (Psalm 27:5)
“Like a shepherd he feeds his flock; in his arms he gathers the lambs, Carrying them in his bosom, leading the ewes with care.” (Isaiah 40:11)
““Amen, I say to you, whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it.” Then he embraced them and blessed them, placing his hands on them.” (Mark 10:15-16)
“When Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who had come with her weeping, he became perturbed and deeply troubled, and said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Sir, come and see.” And Jesus wept. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him.”” (John 11:32-36)
“Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for your selves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how many times I yearned to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her young under her wings, but you were unwilling!” (Matthew 23:37)
“Standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary of Magdala. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple there whom he loved, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold, your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother.”” (John 19:25-17)

At the same time as placing tenderness at the heart of his message, Pope Francis also emphasizes that it – as well as the self-sacrifice implied by being protectors of the universe and of our brothers and sisters – is open to all: “The vocation of being a “protector”, however, is not just something involving us Christians alone; it also has a prior dimension which is simply human, involving everyone.” Where the Pope, and with him the whole Church, believes that every human “is a child of God.”

Pope Francis’ first week: Jesus

In spite of the very short period of time that Pope Francis has been in office, one thing is clear – all he cares about is to put Jesus first and to introduce him to all in a gentle and warm way. This is a thread I see running through everything he does and I would like to share with you the highlights of the talks he has given in addition to his greeting immediately after being elected and his address to the cardinals the next day that I already wrote about (and that also form part of this Christocentric theme).

“We can walk as much as we want, we can build many things, but if we do not profess Jesus Christ, things go wrong. We may become a charitable NGO, but not the Church, the Bride of the Lord.” (Missa pro Ecclesia with the Cardinal-Electors, 14th March)
Instead of this being a dig at NGOs, as some media outlets interpreted it, it is instead an underlining of who the Church is and that her actions are a consequence of her fundamental nature. Even if we perform charitable actions, whose goodness is not questioned here, but fall silent about Jesus, we cease to be his Church.
“When we journey without the Cross, when we build without the Cross, when we profess Christ without the Cross, we are not disciples of the Lord, we are worldly: we may be bishops, priests, cardinals, popes, but not disciples of the Lord.” (Missa pro Ecclesia)
Pope Francis here makes it clear what the “professing Jesus” that he insisted on earlier means – it means following Jesus also in suffering and sacrifice and not only in what is “nice,” easy and comfortable. This is a temptation that St. Peter himself succumbed to, when, after Jesus told the disciples that he will “suffer greatly […] and be killed and on the third day be raised,” he then took him to one side and said: “God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you.” (Matthew 16:21-22) What I found particularly meaningful here were not only the above words but also the emphasis with which Francis said them and the time he took to address these words very personally to the cardinals.
“Christ is the Church’s Pastor, but his presence in history passes through the freedom of human beings; from their midst one is chosen to serve as his Vicar, the Successor of the Apostle Peter. Yet Christ remains the centre, not the Sucessor of Peter: Christ, Christ is the centre. Christ is the fundamental point of reference, the heart of the Church. Without him, Peter and the Church would not exist or have reason to exist.” (Audience to representatives of the media, 16th March)
Here I particularly like how Francis brings two aspects of being Jesus’ followers together: first that it is through us that Jesus’ presence persists in the world and second that this presence is not an imposition or an over-ride, but that it respects our freedom. Also, he again uses his election as an opportunity to put Jesus in the foreground.
“[T]he Church exists to communicate precisely this: Truth, Goodness and Beauty in person.” (Audience to representatives of the media)
Again Francis emphasizes that it is all about Jesus, who is Truth, Goodness and Beauty personified. Here the official transcript of his address has “in person” in quotation marks, while I believe – also from having listened carefully to him saying this sentence – that the meaning was not meant to be different from what “in person” ordinarily means. Jesus is Truth, Goodness and Beauty incarnate – i.e., in person.
“Since many of you are not members of the Catholic Church, and others are not believers, I cordially give this blessing silently, to each of you, respecting the conscience of each, but in the knowledge that each of you is a child of God. May God bless you!” (Audience to representatives of the media)
Seemingly an afterthought, Pope Francis adds these words in Spanish at the end of the audience, which he already concluded by saying “I cordially impart to all of you my blessing.” in Italian. Yet again he puts himself in second place, is concerned about the freedom and dignity of his audience and at the same time is clear about his beliefs. To my mind all of this radiates his concern and love for those to whom he speaks.
“[God] has the ability to forget, [which is] special: He forgets [our sins], He kisses you, He embraces you, and He says to you, ‘Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now, on, sin no more.’ [John 8:11] Only that counsel does He give you.” (Mass at St. Anne’s – the parish church of Vatican City, March 17th)
“[W]e do not hear words of contempt, we do not hear words of condemnation [from Jesus], but only words of love, of mercy, that invite us to conversion.” (Angelus, 17th March)
Here Francis continues with the theme of forgiveness and openness of Jesus towards all that he already sketched out during the morning mass and he again emphasizes Jesus’ love and invitation to a free conversion as opposed to condemnation or coercion.
“In these days, I have been able to read a book by […] Cardinal Kasper, a talented theologian, a good theologian—on mercy. And it did me such good, […] so much good…”
“I wanted to ask her[, the woman in her eighties who came to me to hear her confession and who told me “If the Lord didn’t forgive everyone, the world would not exist.”]: “Tell me, have you studied at the Gregorian [Pontifical University]?”, because that is the wisdom that the Holy Spirit gives: the inner wisdom of God’s mercy.”
Finally, I also wanted to pick out the above moments from the Angelus address: first, Pope Francis choosing to highlight the thoughts of one of his cardinals instead of putting his own thoughts first and second, recognizing God’s wisdom in the words of a simple parishioner and sharing it with the world.