Good Sugarplum Dreams

Long ago, a Christian friend of mine said he would not teach his young children about the myth of Santa Claus as it was a distortion of the true meaning of Christmas. I don't know whether he went on to fulfill that assertion, but I think that if he did, it was to his children's detriment.

Santa is one of the “good myths” that C.S. Lewis talked about and he holds an important, formative place in the imagination of children. Long before I understood the meaning and primacy of Jesus in my life, Santa Claus occupied and in fact, created, a space within me which Jesus would later occupy. The myth of Santa was perhaps my first encounter with the magical sense of the otherworldly and supernatural to which good religion should bring us. Santa was the first being who allowed me to know and exercise faith in that which I couldn't see and who first caused me to feel responsibility to a higher power whom my senses couldn't know. In short, he prepared me to be a Christian.

He was a giver of gifts and taught me the value of being one myself. He was an unerring doer of good and inspired me to try to be the same. I was taught that he had the power to transcend time and logic in a way that a child could understand and accept. That acceptance was the first instance I had that prepared me for my eventual faith in the Almighty.

I hope that my friend didn't deny his children the capacity to dream the good dreams of “sugarplums dancing in their heads” which, in their maturity, could be replaced with the sure knowledge of God.

I thought about this after reading the following article posted to Facebook by my friend and former associate pastor, Fr. Addison Hart.

http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2012-09/saved-fiction#.UJ6C-bytCY8.facebook

Farewell, Monsignor Nelson

After seven years at my church, our pastor, Msgr. Glenn Nelson, is moving on. He's been asked to resume a position he previously held in our diocese, which is as an assistant to the bishop -- this time the newly installed Most Reverend David J. Malloy. As far as I know, he will continue to be the Diocese's point man for the deaf ministry as well. And he's the first and only priest I've ever seen use sign language as he delivered his homily. He also sometimes signed the mass when another priest was celebrating it.

While I never got to know Monsignor terribly well, he's a good priest with a good heart and his homilies were always excellent. I belong to a Newman Center parish (Christ the Teacher University Parish just off the campus of Northern IL University in Dekalb, IL.) Newman Centers, named for Blessed John Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), serve university parishes all over the country.

Monsignor's connection to our parish began when he was a student at NIU in the 80s. So being sent to Newman by then-Bishop Thomas Doran was a sort of homecoming for him. He served us well as pastor and had to hold back tears as he gave his farewell homily at mass this evening.

I'm a lector at Newman (one of the people who delivers the readings at a Catholic mass, for the uninitiated) and I had the peculiar honor of lectoring at his first mass there as well as doing so tonight – the first mass of his final weekend. (I'm a lector for the Saturday night “vigil mass”; he'll celebrate at least one other Sunday mass tomorrow) It was gratifying to me that I got to serve as sort of bookends to his Newman experience and told him so at a farewell reception for him after mass this evening.

Our previous pastor, Fr. Michael Black, was good enough to return to Newman to sponsor my son, Eric, at his confirmation mass some years ago. That mass was concelebrated by him, Monsignor Nelson and another of our associate pastors at the time, Fr. Godwin Osukwo. Each of those three men is a twin and I wonder if any other mass has ever been concelebrated by three twin priests. Monsignor, the principal celebrant that evening, got a good laugh at the end of mass when he told us that while they were all twins, they weren't identical. (Fr. Osukwo is a black Nigerian; the other two men are white.)

While all of us at Newman will miss Monsignor, we can be heartened by the fact that he will continue to serve our diocese well in his new position. Many well-wishes and blessings to him as he begins the next stage of his wonderful career.

Hey, There's a Point to All of This, People!

In the men's group I'm a part of, we're reading a commentary called The Gospel of Mark by Mary Healy. (Hey, how did that woman get in the room?) The chapter we just covered reflects on Jesus' interactions/arguments w/the scribes, Pharisees and Sadducees.

When one of the scribes asks which of the 613 commandments of the Torah is most important, Jesus responds with the primacy of the two great ones. “The first is this: '. . . You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these.”

Healy says that the Jews – in a religious world of polytheism – was the first people to say that there is only one God. She further states that “Jesus is the first one known to have explicitly combined these two commandments. But they are the foundations underlying the first three and last seven commandments of the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) respectively. His implication is that they are inseparable: our love for God is concretized and expressed in our love for (our) fellow human beings. To love others 'as yourself' means to make their well-being as high a priority as your own – a very demanding standard. Although in its original context 'neighbor' meant one's fellow Israelite, elsewhere Jesus makes clear that our love must extend to every person without limit, since the one God is God of all.”

She goes on to say “Jesus concludes there is no other commandment greater than these. The rest of the law merely spells out how to love God and neighbor. To fulfill this twofold commandment perfectly would be to fulfill the entire law”

Now, I don't know the Torah and I'm painfully aware that I have the benefit of 20/20 hindsight here, but shouldn't this have been a no-brainer? What else could possibly be more important? And to some degree, in spite of the enormous benefits of our Christian faith, doesn't loving God and neighbor trump even that? It seems to me that one could be the most fervent and pious Christian, yet lacking love for God AND neighbor defeats the purpose of that religious belief. Of course, from the Christian perspective, better to have both. In fact, having Christian faith, it would seem to me, puts and even greater onus on us to love both God and neighbor. Why is it that in the Christian world we see so much evidence that the great twofold commandment is so largely ignored?

Mrs. Messiah?

It seems that every few years we get another religious controversy – some archaeological discovery that threatens to upend everything we know about religion: the debunking of the Shroud of Turin – then the new school that says it's legitimate after all; the ossuary that allegedly contained the bones of James, a brother of Jesus, which would put to rest the notion of Mary's perpetual virginity; the Gospels of James, Judas and Mary; and now a scrap of papyrus containing an incomplete phrase, in the voice of Jesus, in which he refers to “my wife.” While all these controversies pertain to Christianity, I'd suppose other religions have their own controversies as well.

In regards to the newest kerfluffle, first of all, even the Harvard scholar who announced the find doesn't yet attest to its authenticity. It's an incomplete phrase on a fragment of papyrus smaller than a credit card and there's no wider document yet known; therefore we have no context for it. It's written in Coptic and presumably dates to the fourth century, but that has yet to be authoritatively established.

I'm not denying its validity outright, but there are compelling reasons to doubt that validity so we shouldn't get our shorts in a twist over it just yet. And while I firmly believe the conventional wisdom that says Jesus was a celibate man, it would be rash to have the reactionist opinion that it's all so much hogwash.

If Jesus had been a married man after all, that wouldn't refute my belief that he is Lord and Messiah. Neither would the revelation that Mary had mothered other children after him. But it would also be rash to jump to the conclusion that this discovery discredits the Christian religion. That would be the other unfounded extreme that this discovery might represent, and which I'm sure some unbelievers will seize upon. I attach the article here.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/19/jesus-wife-papyrus-authen_n_1897169.html?&ncid=edlinkusaolp00000009&utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false

The Passion of Mary

In the Catholic church – to which I belong – today is The Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. In my own terminology, I often refer to what I call “the Passion of Mary.” Any Christian is well acquainted with the “Passion of the Christ,” which gives Mel Gibson's famous film its name. All believers know about the crucifixion and its attendant redemptive suffering – the central event of Christian life and experience.

Jesus suffered agonies incomprehensible to us leading up to and including his crucifixion and death. Everyone knows about the horrible details – even non-believers get the gist of it; there's no need for me to scourge a dead horse here, as it were.

We usually – and rightly – see it in the context of the horrors that Jesus personally endured for our sake. But think for a moment what Mary endured through all of this. Any parent, if they think of their own kids, can imagine the anguish of another parent who experiences the loss of a child. Some, tragically, have lived it, God bless them.

The worst thing I can imagine as a Dad would be my child having been abducted and dying some ghastly death at the hands of, for instance, a sexual predator. We hear all the time of this unspeakable sort of thing. Any parent worthy of the name would eagerly wish such a fate happen to themselves rather than to their child if that were possible.

For all the fear and pain Jesus endured, Mary had to witness it happening to her own son. Don't you suppose that, if she could have effected it, Mary would have gladly switched places with him? She saw the unsurpassingly strong, self-assured, adult Jesus go through this. But how far removed from her heart could have been the little boy been whom she had held, nursed, laughed and played with all those years before -- with the love that any mother knows?

But for all of that, bolstered by God's presence and promises, Mary suffered through it unflinchingly. She accepted and took on board her heart being “pierced by a sword,” as the prophet Simeon had put it at the time of the infant Jesus' presentation at the temple. In my mind, this adds yet another layer to the complex economy of redemption that lies at the heart of our faith. And to add one more layer to that complexity, Jesus – being the earthly manifestation of God himself – knew and understood, not only his own suffering, but that of his mother. This was among the infinite human sufferings by which his own redemptive suffering led to “all things being reconciled to himself.”

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Atheist

      (Cue Jack Paar's re-entry. Focus holographic image. Hold and sustain . . . NOW!!!) :

      Sorry, that's just me being an idiot. Anyway . . . to the matter at hand . . .

      There's a daily devotional I've been reading called, Praying With St. Mark's Gospel. Yesterday's entry talked about the Sadducees' unbelief in a resurrection. Its author, Fr. George William Rutler, made what I thought to be an insightful point about their questioning of Jesus on the matter. To wit:

While they would have been reasonable in saying that they saw no evidence of life after death, they were unreasonable in denying resurrection simply because they had no evidence. They exalted their opinion to the rank of a truth. By so doing they assumed that truth is only opinion. Faith roots us in something more, not less, substantial than opinion . . . The Sadducees thought they “knew it all” because they did not know how small what they “knew” was, and how vast “all” is. That was simply because they had a limited definition of “it.”

      This is perfectly analogous to and can be applied to atheism. I've long maintained that atheism is an intellectually unsustainable concept. Like the Sadducees in Fr. Rutler's observation, atheists are perfectly reasonable is saying that they see no evidence for God. Merely holding that opinion makes one an agnostic. But to claim that there is NO God is to make a negative claim that, by definition, can't be proven.

     Many of us have heard of the “dark matter” that scientists in recent years have theorized makes up something like ninety percent of all matter in the universe. It can't be seen or observed in any manner yet known to science. But a lot of very smart thinkers in the world of cosmology have stated – by methods that are well beyond your humble narrator's capacity to fathom – that the existence of dark matter has been established (as far as theories go.) And I, for one, tend to trust scientists and their claims.

     How do the skeptical establish that dark matter doesn't exist? People may have reasons not to trust science (and frankly I don't trust those people); they may well believe in science but say that the whole dark matter thing is balderdash and I'm content to let them think what they want to about it. But how can one empirically prove that dark matter doesn't exist? They can't. They may not like the idea, it may make them uncomfortable because of various prejudices associated with their religious beliefs, etc., but like the atheist's denial of the existence of God, it's an unprovable negative statement.

     One can summon nearly infinite reasons for thinking that there's no God – wars, human misery, the worldly domination of the violent and prejudiced, and so on. But none of that establishes empirically the nonexistence of God. (And to be fair – outside of some demonstrable existence of the miraculous, neither can believers empirically prove that God does exist. The atheist, of course, will deny the possibility of that demonstrable existence.)

     So regardless of any intellectual muscle that atheists like Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher, the late, great Christopher Hitchens, et al, bring to the table, the essential thing that they can't bring is empirical proof. Like the Sadducees of Jesus' day, they have no intellectual leg to stand on.

     As for the belief in God that I hold, I can't prove to the unbeliever that God does exist. But when it comes time to breathe my last (something everyone knows will also occur for them one day) at least I'll have a lifeboat to reach for. Unless there's a God who'll rescue him despite his unbelief, the atheist is just plain screwed. I'm content to take my chances and am grateful that that chance – however fleeting or illusory some may say it is – exists.

Secret Prayers of Secret Prayers

     This afternoon I was at an electronics store with my son to get a new charger for his phone. He found one that had been marked down because it had been a returned item whose package had been opened. The price conveyed to the register by the UPC symbol had to be overwritten manually because it didn't reflect the marked-down price. The cashier was unable to do it and needed a supervisor to do it for him. He called his manager on the radio, asking him to come to the register to give him a hand. So we had to wait for Wes to come to the rescue.

     A couple of minutes passed by and – no Wes, whom the young man called again, apologizing to us for the delay. I indicated that it wasn't a problem; we were in no rush. Meanwhile a couple of other customers had gotten in line behind us. Eric and I continued to idly fidget, looking at the floor. Eric looked at the packaging of his new charger again. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other – something I need to do when I'm standing for very long at one time. I don't think the customers who'd gotten in line behind us had been there long enough yet to begin to get impatient.

     Apparently the young cashier had – or anticipated that I might – so he called Wes again. And we continued to wait. A little more time passed. Another customer got in line. It was becoming a little bit annoying now, but I knew the kid behind the counter had no control over the situation – and seemed to be more put out about it than I was. So I continued to be patient.

     Eventually, a good five minutes had gone by and my mind began to imagine what might be going on. Was Wes tied up with another customer? Was he on the john? Was there some major problem he had to deal with? After all, he was a manager and problems do come up, whether with a customer, an employee, whatever.

     Maybe because I was well beyond bored by this time, my mind really began to run wild. Had there been an accident? Maybe Wes had fallen off a ladder or slipped on a freshly mopped floor. Maybe such a thing had happened to one of his employees and Wes was out of touch because he was busy giving assistance. For whatever dumb reason – just in case – I said a little prayer for Wes. There was no discernible reason why, and I didn't know him from Adam. But I prayed for him all the same. Almost certain nothing was wrong, I prayed anyway that everything was okay for him.

     Half a minute later, he came strolling by, put a key in the register, hit a few buttons, solved the problem and left. The cashier finished the transaction and we were off.

     Now I'm sure none of this added up to anything – and for Wes, least of all, I presume. But it occurred to me that maybe – just maybe – there could have been something difficult going on in Wes's life at that moment. Something I'd never have reason to know about but which I was being led by God to pray for – not knowing the reason, but knowing that if there was one, that God knew the details.
      Now I seriously doubt that this is the case, but this strange little incident led me to consider the importance of being available. Of trying to keep the spiritual feelers out there, as it were. To try to at least be in a cogent enough frame of mind to be open to this kind of thing. Maybe it was a practice run for when I would be called upon to lend spiritual assistance to a stranger.
     On the other hand, maybe it was a teachable moment designed with me as the unwitting object. On any number of occasions, I've seen someone at a restaurant, on a bus – wherever – whom I've sensed could use a little prayer: a mother having trouble in public with her unruly kids; a person on the side of the road who'd had an accident or whom I saw talking to the police after apparently getting pulled over; maybe someone whose expression appears to betray that they were just having a bad day. And thinking about all this gives me pause to consider that perhaps this kind of anonymous prayer cover has been lofted my way a time or two by one of my fellow believers – maybe even a believer of a different faith. If this has ever happened, who knows what benefit I might have received from this little gift offering?
     And so, to all of you secret prayers of secret prayers, on behalf of your unknowing recipients, I say thank you. And please, if you will, keep paying it forward.

Meat or Be Meaten

I always welcome Lent with its theme of reflection and renewal. I think it good that we have this annual occasion to take stock of what and where we've been for the past year -- and being human, we can always see room for improvement. For whatever reason, I come into it this year with even a bit more enthusiasm than usual (check back with me in two weeks to see how well ol' Mr. Enthusiasm is doing.) I've lined up some daily devotional reading and a couple of other books that I hope to finish between now and Easter; over the coming weeks at church, I'll be going to some lecture and discussion groups pertaining to the season; I feel like I've generally got my brain screwed on right this year to make the greatest use of Lent that I reasonably can.

And then last night, just as I was turning in for bed, it dawned on me – a few hours earlier, I'd eaten meat on the first Friday of Lent. At which point I accosted myself, “Nice going, ya dope! Love that enthusiasm . . . dumbass!”

I hadn't even given it a thought.  Earlier in the week (and no, not on Ash Wednesday; I did refrain from eating meat then) I'd had some Hamburger Helper and, now that it was a few days old, I thought I'd better finish it off before crawly things began to colonize it. And so I did, not thinking anything more about it. Until I was about to go to bed. “Doh!”

To be honest with you, I've always been puzzled about the whole meatless thing. After all, Jesus tells us that it's what comes out of a man (lies, hatred, lustful thoughts, whatever) that defile him – not what goes into him. Essentially, he's admonishing the Jews to lighten up on the whole pork thing, and then our church turns around and creates something like it but with fish (at least on Fridays.)

Trying not to get too hung up on what I consider petty details, I've always gone along with it. If I'm going to reap the benefits of the church (the Eucharist, confession, the intercession of the saints, etc.) I can live with not eating meat on Fridays and certain other days during Lent. And I also always have to realize that maybe there's more to it than my meager understanding will allow me to digest. Besides, this has given me an excuse to take advantage of – at least once a year – the dangerously delicious heart-attack-on-a-platter that is Long John Silver's Fish and Fries. (Love those hushpuppies!)

I think that one benefit of refraining from meat on Fridays during Lent is the notion that, by doing so, it gives us pause to stop and think for a second that nothing we have – not even ourselves – would exist without the grace of God. The meager gesture of this partial fast is easy to make (although -- *ahem* -- easy to forget) but it more than rewards us by allowing us this reflection on the true nature of ourselves and of God. All of which reminds me: I haven't been to Long John's since last year. Hoo-hah!

The Medusa-Hair People of My Mind

     Many years ago while in college – and to be perfectly blunt – while in a state of mild quasi-acid flashback, I was walking down the street and imagined every person and thing I saw as existing in four dimensions. That is to say that, for instance, I imagined a woman walking across the street from me as a single organism stretching all the way back through every place she'd ever been, worm-like, to her mother's womb.

    Imagine a baby being born and existing all its days as one continuous life-form, living each moment through time and space while never losing its existence from the moment before. What you'd see in this weird conception are organisms that resemble something like vines, wending from place to place through every experience of their lives but never losing their physical existence from the moment before.

    A poor, but accurate, representation of what I'm talking about is the following:  Imagine a dash (-) as a human being. What I'm trying to convey is that I imagined the woman not as a dash (-), but as a line (----------), stretching (again, from her mother's womb) twenty-some-odd years to the very moment I saw her walking past a shop with a bag of groceries in her arms. In this conception, the whole of humanity would appear – not as a horde of single, isolated individuals – but as a tangle of vine-like creatures covering the earth.

     I've thought about this experience many times over the years, but never figured out what, if any, truth it might convey. Maybe it doesn't convey anything but the odd imagination of a kid who probably spent too much time smoking dope when he should have been studying. But still, I've always wondered what I had stumbled upon in these musings and am no less intrigued by it now than I was then.

     I just started reading Father Robert Barron's book, Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith. In the introduction to the book he says something that brought this weird thought back to my mind:

      “Essential to the Catholic mind is what I would characterize as a keen sense of the prolongation of the Incarnation throughout space and time, an extension that is made possible through the mystery of the church.”

      What Fr. Barron is getting at is the fact that Jesus' once and for all-time sacrifice continues to live today. Not that the church re-crucifies Jesus at every mass. It doesn't. But the loving gesture of the act of submitting to that terrible ordeal is eternal and immutable. The sacrifice Jesus made was at the same time “one and done” (it happened once and will never happen again) and yet continues to live in the form of his love for us that brought him to his sacrifice in the first place.  It radiates out to us, the happy receivers, through space and time.

     The church, as Fr. Barron says – and as the church itself has always held – is something like a living organism that continues to exist, its purpose to carry the flame of that sacrifice through all time and to as many places as possible. The church is far from being the source of the flame. Rather, its whole reason for being is to tend to it and to continually renew the promise that God entrusted to it by giving it to her.

     Looking at the church from the long view of its 2,000-year history, one will see a vine replete with scars and foul infestations manifested by the sins of her children over the years. The Catholic who believes the church is free from sin simply isn't paying attention – or is denying reality. But if one takes into account the horrors of things like the Crusades, the Inquisition and the sexual abuse of minors by priests that are still so much in the news today, one must accept the fact that there has been much about our church that has been defiled by sin.

     And yet, the truth is that it isn't the church, but the people who populate it who've caused all the trouble. Fr. So-and-So diddling an altar boy doesn't obviate the truth that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior. It just renders his promise less effective – or ineffective – to those who can't square salvation with the reality of such horrors. And can you really blame them? Can you call them condemned for denying the reality of Christ when confronted with the sins of his followers? (Hint: one of the chief sins Jesus preached against was the judgment of others. So don't even go there.)

      I've got another blog called “Clutterjam.” I've failed over the years to do much with it and I think part of the reason has been that I've never quite known what it is or what it should be. Sometimes I just talk about stuff, but I also have a very important spiritual side to myself. I'm not always sure that topics on that subject are “appropriate,” for lack of a better term. It's as if there are two different audiences out there, some of whom may not care for or prosper from my spiritual musings, and others who might.

     So I've created a second blog which I've dubbed “Clutterbread.” It's meant to be a place where I can muse on spiritual matters without worrying about the prospect of offending – or more importantly – boring people with my observations, rants, etc.

     Like one of my heroes, C.S. Lewis, I make no effort to hide my own position. I'm an ordinary layman of the Catholic church who still has problems with some of the details. For instance, I don't understand the apparent contradiction of meatless Fridays in a church whose founder said that it's what comes out of man that defiles him – not what goes into him. I'm also not wild about -- nor do I completely understand the purpose of – the new translation of the Catholic mass. (I suppose that'll be the subject of some future entry.)  Anyway, I do have a certain level of devoutness on my better days, though I'm not on board culturally with a lot of my fellow Catholics. I'm still trying to sort all of that out and, for what it's worth, anticipate mulling a lot of it over in this space. 

 

      I've only just created Clutterbread and am admittedly pretty obtuse when it comes to manipulating the magic that is the worldwide web. (Is that where the prefix “www.” comes from? I'd never thought of that til this moment. Hah!) I've made an initial exploration of the properties of this blogsite, Google's “Blogger.” (Clutterjam is done through livejournal.com) My expectation was that it would be simple to create on each site a link to the other so that the interested (merely a theoretical prospect at this point) could easily go from one to the other. But this didn't prove to be such an effortless task after all. I'll look into it.

     We'll see whether this bifurcation of my interests provides any assistance to the sorting out of the thoughts therein, but I do want to point out something for the record: I want visitors to Clutterjam to be able to easily access Clutterbread. I'm not conducting this segregation experiment, as it were, to hide my religious beliefs from readers. To the contrary, I'm proud of my faith and think I even have a thing or two worth saying about it. More than anything else, I've created the second site to help my meager brain focus on the particular topic that may be at hand. It's actually very important to me that those who might care to, have access to my thoughts. Why the hell else do people blog in the first place?

Happy Meatless Friday,

je