The Holy Family

Boy Jesus Teaching the Elders in the Temple

Today we celebrate the feast of the Holy Family. It is always the Sunday after Christmas. On Dec 28th we have the feast of the Holy Innocents. That is when we remember the children in Bethlehem who were killed by King Herod. In recent times it has become traditional to think about abortion at that time. The modern massacre of children that continues in our society. Yet it is interesting that of the two feasts the Holy Family is considered greater. That is that focusing on how to do family right is more important than thinking about how badly society is currently doing with children. We don't ignore those dying from abortion but we want to give a Yes to how we should raise children more than we want to say No to what we are currently doing. That is true even when we are seeing the massive moral failure that abortion represents today. 

The story in the gospel is interesting. Jesus is a 12 years old. The go to Jerusalem for the Passover like they do every year. Jesus stays behind. His parents don't know. It takes them 3 days to find Him. You would think with a sinless mother and a sinless child stuff like this would not happen. Families are like that. When you think you have things figured out something happens to shock you. Kids are growing up and they are much more complex than we give them credit.

The other thing that happens is we underestimate the power of religious rituals. They went to the Passover every year. It became a little bit routine. A bit like going to church or doing family devotions can become routine for us. Yet these sort of things are quite powerful. Just because it is routine for us does not mean it is routine for our kids. When something impacts them we might not be ready for it. That is OK.

Then there is the 3 days. The span of time that is pointing forward to the 3 days that Jesus spends in the grave. The reality of the family is the reality of love. We can suffer when children make sinful choices and brings bad consequences on themselves. Yet there is the other side. They make good choices. Yet their love leads to suffering. It is still hard for the parents. 

It says they didn't understand. That Mary took these things into her heart. They talk about the difference between creating something out of knowledge or creating something out of love. If we build something with out knowledge we always understand it. Yet it is limited. It can never do more than what we know how to do. 

When we love another person there is no such limit. We often don't know what is going on because there is a relationship between God and this other person which we mostly don't see. Yet it is not limited by our knowledge either. Our children can end up being much greater than us. That is where the real joy comes. Not that we reproduced ourselves. Any ape can do that. What is great is when our children are able to love God and to bless people in ways we never could.     

The Fruit of the Womb

Christmas has at its core the choice of Mary to say Yes to life. She chose a difficult path of motherhood in the face of ridicule so that God could do something wonderful through her. in this weeks gospel Elizabeth utters the now famous line from Luke 1:42, "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb." Elizabeth goes on to say, "Blessed is she who believed that the Lord would fulfil His promises to her."

Yet many still don't get the connection with our own openness to life. That what Mary did is what we are all called to do. When God calls us to bring new life into the world it is a sacred thing. That love must involve saying Yes to the fruit of that love. To render love sterile is to stop loving the whole person. Really not loving the whole person is not loving at all. 

I am reminded of some conversations at my company Christmas party. One workmate of mine was expecting his second child in February. Both him and his wife repeated a few time that they were definitely done after this. It seemed like with every message of congratulation came a message of sterilization. Some even went into comparing various vasectomy doctors. This is before baby #2 is even born. 

I didn't know what to say. I didn't say anything. Still I wondered at how we can see children as a blessing and at the same time be so eager to stop them from coming. Yet it maps very well to how society sees God. We want His blessings but we don't want too much. We want to love but only to a point. We don't want to give ourselves totally to the beloved. You see this in the high numbers who self-identify as Christians yet don't go to church often and don't follow most of the more counter-cultural teachings of Christianity. 

I am reminded of a gospel from a few weeks ago from Mark 9:36,37.

He took a little child whom he placed among them. Taking the child in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me.”

Here again Jesus connects welcoming children with welcoming God. Really there are a lot of parallels. We have an impulse to love children and an impulse to love God. We know that is right. Yet the cost is incalculable. It is like writing a blank cheque. Except what you are committing to is not limited to money. Both children and God are allowed to make very personal demands. 

We see this with refugees as well. They are not safe. Of course not. A culture that wants safe sex also wants safe refugees. Guess what? God is not about safe. He is about faith. He does not guarantee anything except Himself. Not comfort, not health, not success as you imagine it. He does say He will be with us. Is that enough? 

Incarnation

Reading about Acedia. Acedia is sometimes translated as sloth. Yet that is not quite it. A lack of energy or motivation about spiritual pursuits is part of it. Yet St Thomas talks about a sadness. That is we are actually sad about the thought of becoming more holy. Then he gives an answer. He says we need the incarnation. We need to contemplate the fact that God became man so man can partake in God's nature. When we think about sharing in the divine love we can think it is impossible or we can think it would not be that much fun. The incarnation is God's answer to both those objections. It is possible because God is merciful. It is desirable because God is beautiful. Both these are communicated most powerfully through Jesus.

We need to be constantly reminded that our faith is not about a bunch of rules. It has rules but they are in the service of the greater good. Christmas is the time we think about that greater good. It is the time of Emmanuel, God is with us.

Acedia leads to us pursuing lesser goods. St Thomas talks about divine beatitudes and animal beatitudes. Animal blessings are just those that we get from being animals. We enjoy food and sex and music and athletics and walking in the sun. These are all good things we can enjoy because we are animals. Yet we are more than that. We are spiritual beings as well. We need to pursue God.

Christmas is a time where you see that very clearly. We have lots of lesser pleasures that are available. Our Catholic school has a Christmas concert. Do we sing about the incarnation or do we sing about Santa Claus? Happily this year teachers and principals had the courage to choose the former. What about our Christmas lights? Or Christmas cards? Or Christmas hampers? Are they just nice or do they call us to heaven?

Today is Gaudete Sunday. We are to rejoice. What are we to rejoice in? The fact that we are called to be holy. We are made for love and we can become united with a God who is love. There is a false humility where we tell ourselves that is not for us. That we are just plain folk and would never expect to be capable of heroic virtue. Like most false humility it is disguised pride. It rationalizes our failure to cooperate with the grace that will lead us there. So let us rejoice that God wants to take us all the way up. He wants to draw us to Himself. To experience an intimate and powerful union with our Heavenly Father. That is the dignity of our vocation. Pursuing anything less is acedia. 

Peace

As we anticipate Christ's coming this week the church asks us to focus on peace. The peace that Jesus will bring. In the gospel John the Baptist quotes Isaiah.

A voice of one crying out in the desert:“Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.Every valley shall be filledand every mountain and hill shall be made low.The winding roads shall be made straight,and the rough ways made smooth,and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

The words describe a dramatic change when God arrives. Valleys filled. Mountains made low. Not just some of them but all of them. How are we supposed to have peace when God is coming with such power and demanding such huge changes? Maybe the second reading can make things clear:

Brothers and sisters:
I pray always with joy in my every prayer for all of you,
because of your partnership for the gospel
from the first day until now.
I am confident of this,
that the one who began a good work in you
will continue to complete it
until the day of Christ Jesus.

Jesus is going to come and make much needed changes. Yet they are going to take time and they are going to take cooperation. Because of that we can have peace. Otherwise we would never be comfortable with changes to your heart. The heart refers to our most private thoughts, emotions and opinions. Letting someone in that space means risking who you are. Yet that is what Jesus came to do. To change you in the most personal way possible.

Logically God is someone we can trust to change our hearts for the better. It is not like they are pristine and wonderful. They have been darkened by sin and scarred by pain. God is our creator and God is love so we can trust him completely to change us. He will not only make us better but make us more into what He originally intended us to be. So the changes will make you more authentically you and me more authentically me but still make us better. Nobody but God is qualified to do that.

Despite the logic it is hard to call this a peaceful process. We tend to stress out over it a lot. What if something goes wrong? Think of the folks as ISIS. They allowed someone to change their hearts and the result was not good. Yet the change goes so deep they can't even see it is not good. How can we be sure that won't happen to us? How would we know if it did?

What is going to give us this peace is an intimate relationship with God. That we experience God more and more.  It reminds be of a book by Henry Blackaby. He describes a process. Humans just need this sort of process. You can argue that someone should become Christian using Pascal's wager or whatever else. Yet we can't give that much of ourselves in response to logic. We need to trust. We need God to satisfy our deepest desires. That is what Jesus does. He comes to us so we can experience God peacefully rather than violently. 

Maranatha

This Sunday we talk about the second coming of Jesus. In November we think about the last things. That is heaven, hell, death and judgement. In advent we think about waiting for the coming of Jesus. So the two connect well with one Sunday to contempalte the second coming. 

Really the coming of Jesus that matters most is when Jesus comes to us. When we encounter Him in our heart and allow Him to love us. Jesus approaches us in both ways. He comes as God in the form of a simple carpenter and even a baby. Yet He also comes to us as the King of Kings. We need to encounter Him both ways but often one comes first and the other lags behind a bit. 

This week's gospel contains some real apocalyptic language. The signs of the end times. There has been a ton of effort put into trying to figure out exactly what is going to happen by analysing these passages. It is probably the least useful area of biblical interpretation. I know when I was a teen I read a book by Hal Lindsey called "The Late, Great Planet Earth." It argued that a significant war was going to begin in 1984. Russia was going to invade the Middle East. Europe and China were going to get involved. This guy had it all figured out. Needless to say 1984 came and went and no such war took place. 

So if we are not supposed to figure out exactly what these prophecies mean then why are they there? Why does the church ask us to contemplate them this Sunday? We are supposed to learn some thing. One is that God's plan is going to involve a lot of sin and suffering. There will be days when it feels like evil has won. Can God's plan really involve wars and famines and persecutions and apostasies?  God answers that question for us. It can and it does. 

That is important because many suggest than an all-knowing, all-good and all-powerful God would prevent disasters from happening. It can be helpful and interesting to think about that argument and figure out why it fails. Yet it is important to note that God never makes that claim. He never says He won't tolerate the existence of any evil, any where. He says the opposite. That the forces of evil will be allowed to run their course. That when we do good many times we will feel like we are all alone. That it will take faith to believe God is in charge.

We can actually get great comfort from this. Why is that? The real problem of evil is not out in the world. The real problem of evil is in our hearts. We look at our lives and think an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God would not want anything to do with us. We want to be good but sometimes it seems that goodness is swimming upstream against a very negative tide. Yet if the world is an evil place and God still wants to save it then maybe we can also believe that this same God would want to save a guy like me. If the world's salvation takes a long time and has a lot of setbacks then we should not be discouraged if our own salvation takes time and includes many embarrassing episodes. 

This is why it is fitting that the Year of Mercy that Pope Francis declared would start this advent. Ultimately it is all about Mercy. Judgement is there to show us the need for mercy. Jesus' birth show us how much He is willing to lower Himself to offer us mercy. God's willingness to tolerate centuries of evil and love us through it all despite the fact that many philosophers say it is illogical. That shows us just how awesome God's mercy is. 

Ultimately any encounter between us and God needs to involve extraordinary mercy. There is just no other way it can happen. The gap between us and God is just so great. Christmas is a time to marvel at God's amazing willingness to bridge that gap by becoming man. Yet His goal is not just to be on the same planet with you. His goal is intimacy. He wants to enter your heart and transform you. Astounding. 

Aquinas

I am reading Ed Feser's Aquinas book. It is interesting. It gets very involved and deep into abstract thinking. What strikes me about it that is where Catholicism goes. He makes assumptions. He argues for them so they are not strictly assumptions but it is well known that many modern thinkers simply don't accept his argument. Yet it typically seems that Catholics should accept them. 

For example, the idea that the intellect is immaterial. That it exists apart from the body. Now I know that it is trendy to deny this. Modern science has shown some strong connections between what physically happens in the brain and our consciousness. People have have put 2 and 2 together and gotten 473. That is they have boldly claimed that this proves the entire human person can be reduced to a series of chemical reactions.  It does not prove that but it does make it more plausible to believe that. Yet as Catholics we don't believe that. We believe the dead continue to have intellect, emotion and will even apart from their bodies. That is why we pray to saints. 

Anyway, what you see in Aquinas is so different from what you see in the modern mind. Modern philosophy is dominated by scepticism. Scepticism is very good at tearing down and destroying ideas. It is not very good at building up anything that would lead to morality or meaning. We deal with it all the time. It is just very strange to read somebody who actually builds up something positive and dares to go deep and follow things to their logical conclusions.

I am reminded that Bl. John Henry Newman said that only Catholicism and Atheism stand up to scrutiny. Really I am thinking he should have said only Catholicism and nihilism because most atheists don't follow their reasoning to its hard conclusions. Catholicism comes to some pretty hard conclusions as well. Are we willing to go there? 

It makes me wonder because the battle lines in debates is very much between moderate scepticism and extreme scepticism. Mostly you run into atheists who claim they can be good while denying the very existence of goodness. Then you run into liberal Christians who are not that different. Very few defend traditional protestantism any more. There are many that believe it but not many that defend it. What it means is that when you encounter people where they are at your mind is often far from the real depth and beauty of the Catholic faith. 

I often find myself arguing that something, somewhere somehow has some meaning. What Catholicism really says is everything means everything. That is that everything that exists is kept in existence every moment by God. That means that everything that exists has the potential to connect us with God. It is such an awesome thought. Wrestling with it is such a different experience. 

You wonder where we should spend our time. Should we be out on the street meeting people where they are at like Pope Francis says or should we be unveiling Catholicism in all its depth and beauty like Pope Benedict did. 

Interstellar and Religious Dialogue

Just got back from vacation in Ireland. I saw Interstellar in the plane. I know I am way late to these things because I don't see all the latest movies. Still I thought is was pretty thought provoking. I fount a review in Christianity Today that picked up on some of those themes. Still I thought the stuff I read still missed a lot. I don't see the fact that movies tackle the same questions as religion as being that interesting. Of course these do. These are the deepest questions of human existence. Nobody denies that. So artists as well as scholars are going to address them. What I find interesting is that the artists give answers that have the same problems that bother skeptics so much about Christianity. Atheists sometimes claim that they could design a better word that the Christian God designed for us. Obvious they don't give details. Yet when even gifted SciFi writers try and imagine another world it runs into the same questions. I will explain after the break but there will be spoilers there.

Boyhood

Saw the movie Boyhood. I know it is old but I can't be bothered to see the latest movies. The movie was very good in that it draws you in and makes you care about the characters. It is not good in what they do with it once they have your interest. There is a searching and a longing for something truly meaningful in life. None of the characters actually finds anything. That is kind of the point they are trying to make but it is quite an unsatisfying point.

One thing that did capture my They came dangerously close to making some points just by accident. One episode had me thinking. Mason has sex with his girlfriend, Mindy, and ends up regretting it. He thinks sex is a big deal to her. That she only agrees to it because she has strong feelings for him. Then she sleeps with another guy without knowing him very long. She has no remorse about it. It just blows his mind. What he thought was a deep sexual connection with a fascinating woman turned out to be a very cheap and confusing encounter with someone he didn't know that well after all.

The question becomes how to avoid this kind of thing in the future. His father tells him you can't avoid it. You just get drunk and move on. Typical of the advice kids get in this movie. Yet what if he serious wanted to avoid it? What if he wanted to make sure his partner was not being casual about sex? The thing is it seemed like Mason and Mindy were both virgins. The movie does not explicitly say so but you get the idea they are going slow because neither is that comfortable with sex.

The point is that just asking if your prospective partner is a virgin is not enough. What you really need to know is what their philosophy of sex is going to be in the future. After the inhibitions wear off what are you going to want to do? How can anyone possible know that? If your sexual morality depends on how you feel about something today then you can't. But what if it doesn't? If your morality comes from God and you can't change it just because some college jock swept you off your feet then you can know that.

Remember it was not so much about what she did but about how she viewed her actions. Casual sex was now fine and therefore all her sex became casual. It was not a matter of making a mistake but a matter of changing the meaning of sex. Making sex mean what we want it to mean sounds appealing at first but it creates a confusing world where our most intimate relationships can be redefined at any time. Mason knew intuitively that he didn't want that. Yet he didn't know how to avoid it. It is something just not available outside of Christian communities.

Mason knew this because his mother has made a mess of her love life. She went from one bad relationship to the next looking for financial security for her children but sacrificing every other type of security. She does have a moment of wisdom late in the movie. She talks about being celibate and in the next breath she turns around and talks about being a whore. She realizes she has really been giving sex and getting money. She had a lot of relationships with men who were good providers but not good husbands or fathers. She wonders if that was a mistake. If she just remained celibate she would have been poor but she would have more self-respect. Maybe that would have been better for her children.

Mason always wanted his mom and dad to get back together. So the movie has an unspoken undertone that divorce is bad. So you married a jerk. So he yells too much and drinks too much. The next guy is unlikely to be much better for you and very unlikely to be better for you kids. People mature. Give it a chance. The Catholic idea that she could kick him out but neither part should pursue another romance would have worked well. They may or may not have gotten back together. They certainly would have been spared a lot of heartache.

It is the strange thing about Catholicism. You can't avoid it. This movie seems like it is trying to be nihilistic. Yet it is fairly easy to pick out some Catholic themes. I know people will say I am imagining them but I don't think so. Some of the most ridiculed ideas in Catholicism get argued for quite strongly. Strongly mostly because you know they are not preaching this. If a Catholic made a movie with such themes you would just say they are imagining these characters having these feelings and saying these things. Yet when a secular person comes out with it you feel like it confirms Catholicism fits with the truth about humanity. 

Corpus Christi

Today is the feast of Corpus Christi. That is the body of Christ. It is when we remember the great gift of Himself Jesus gives us in the Eucharist. What I was reflecting on today is the craziness of it. Discussing the idea that maybe someone made up the resurrection of Jesus. Maybe they made up the idea that Jesus is God. Maybe they made up all the miracles. It is a bit much. Could early Christians really believe so much based on no real data in an environment of persecution. If you read them it is harder to believe. The Apostolic fathers had the mindset of staunch conservatives. They fought heresies and searched instead for a deeper understanding of what came from the apostles and the old testament.

Yet after all that I think what maybe the least plausible thing for them to make up is the teaching on the Eucharist. Saying Jesus is God is a stretch, a big stretch. Saying Jesus told them to eat His body and drink His blood is beyond a stretch. Jews didn't even eat meat until all the blood was drained. They would never drink an animal's blood. Yet the early Christians are supposed to have made this up? It is just impossible. Yet the teaching of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist goes right back to the beginning and without controversy. John relates the words of Jesus in John 6 acknowledging how radical they are yet not backing down from them at all. His disciple, St Ignatius of Antioch, uses these words as an argument against Gnosticism. That is that the body of Jesus must have been physical because it is physically present to us in the Eucharist. It is an interesting argument because it would make zero sense if anyone believed in a symbolic Eucharist.

Then we have St Paul. He accepted the teaching of the apostles without any explanations. Jesus said, “This is my body.” So you had better come to the table contemplating that fully. A lot of the teachings of Jesus are explained further by St Paul in the light of the crucifixion and resurrection. It is quite significant that for this he just relates what Jesus said and did.

So if you are a skeptic and think Jesus was just a man then how does this story come into being? It kind of raises the bar on the liar-lunatic-lord argument. That is whoever sold the early church on this idea had to have been crazy. It is just a hard thing to believe. If it isn't true then there is no benefit at all to believing it. You can see why the resurrection might be popular to believe. You can see why the divinity of Jesus might be implausible but might also have some upside in being attractive to some. The eating and drinking of Jesus' body and blood? Who is going to be attracted by that. The Romans would not be. One of the few really strong moral prohibitions they had was against cannibalism. Yet Christians just asked to be accused of cannibalism by teaching this doctrine and, in fact, many Romans did make that claim. Where is the benefit?

So there are many teachings that came from Jesus that the non-Christian has to find a source for. The New Testament changed human society in so many ways. Where did the wisdom and power come from? Much of what flowed from that secular people agree with. The dignity of the human person. Love as a central virtue. The importance of forgiveness. Yet whoever brought us these ideas also brought us many ideas about God, about miracles and about resurrection. That is strange enough but the Eucharist is so much stranger. They tend not to want to believe Jesus taught anything that would make them label him crazy. Yet his followers arrive at such a strange place. How does that happen? 

Peter's Miracle

I was listening to a homily at my son's graduation mass. It frustrated me because I saw the potential for such a good homily from this gospel. We got a series of nice wishes that could have easily come from a secular person. So I did something I probably should not do. I started to compose a better homily in my head. Still, having lost some of my blogging momentum, I thought I would try and share of those thoughts here. The gospel was Luke 5:1-11:

One day as Jesus was standing by the Lake of Gennesaret, the people were crowding around him and listening to the word of God. He saw at the water’s edge two boats, left there by the fishermen, who were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little from shore. Then he sat down and taught the people from the boat.

When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into deep water, and let down the nets for a catch.”

Simon answered, “Master, we’ve worked hard all night and haven’t caught anything. But because you say so, I will let down the nets.”

When they had done so, they caught such a large number of fish that their nets began to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them, and they came and filled both boats so full that they began to sink. When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at Jesus’ knees and said, “Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!” For he and all his companions were astonished at the catch of fish they had taken, and so were James and John, the sons of Zebedee, Simon’s partners.

Then Jesus said to Simon, “Don’t be afraid; from now on you will fish for people.” So they pulled their boats up on shore, left everything and followed him.

What we see here is Peter having an encounter with Jesus. Peter is a fisherman. He has fished all night. Yet he has not caught any fish. This is a symbol of emptiness. Peter's is working hard and things are not working out. He has done nothing wrong. Yet the blessings are not coming.

This happens to people. Sometimes they are even doing quite well materially. Yet they feel they are empty. They work very hard and feel like they are getting nowhere. Often it is because they have not found their vocation. We need to know we are created by God with a purpose in mind. If we are doing something other than what we were created for it is never going to be quite satisfying.

So what do we do? We go to Jesus. Peter does that. He calls Jesus “Master.” He lets Jesus use his boat. He is comfortable with Jesus to a point. We can be like that. We come to a graduation mass. We are comfortable with Catholicism to a point.

Then Jesus tells Peter to “put out into the deep water.” St John Paul reflected on this and saw Jesus inviting us to go deeper with Him. To go beyond the shallow religious observance and let Jesus into the deeper thinking of your life. When you ask: Who am I? What kind of career should I pursue? What kind of marriage and family life do I want? What kind of person do I want to be? When you go out into those kind of deep waters then take Jesus with you. Let Him be your master even there.

What follows is a personal miracle. Something that amazed Peter but someone who is not a fisherman would think, So what? This can happen to you. When you let God into you personal place of failure and give Him control He can work miracles that will amaze you and only you. He shows not only His power but also a willingness to tailor that power to precisely your frustrations.

This touches Peter deeply. He knows that Jesus is much more that just his master or rabbi. He is Lord. That is a word used in the Greek scriptures to refer to God. He gets it. I am not dealing with someone who has some interesting ideas about God and life and whatnot. I am in the presence of the divine.

Yet he reacts in a way we might find somewhat strange. He asks Jesus to leave. Why? Because Peter has something darker than his failures. He has his sin. Like the song says:

When you feel my heat
Look into my eyes
It’s where my demons hide
It’s where my demons hide
Don’t get too close
It’s dark inside
It’s where my demons hide
It’s where my demons hide

Peter would relate to a song like that. He has things about which he is quite rightly ashamed. He was hiding them from Jesus. They were just to embarrassing to face. Now he knows he cannot do that. You can't come close to God and keep any secrets. So he tells Jesus to go.

What comes next is a relief for Peter but also for every one of us. Jesus tells him not to be afraid. That He has great plans for Peter. It is a relief for all of us because we all have those demons hidden somewhere. It means we can come to God as sinners and not be afraid. It means we can still become what God intended us to become despite having made some mistakes. Even if we have some things we do over and over that are not very nice and perhaps downright despicable we don't have to be afraid of God. We can be honest and we will be loved.

What is more, that does not put us at the back of the line in terms of God. You need to understand that we are all sinners. Jesus used Peter powerfully despite the fact that he messed up quite a few more times. The powerful thing is he knows he is a sinner. He knows he needs forgiveness and Jesus is willing to give it. That is the first step to being a great saint.

Slow Victory

One thing modern minds have trouble with is the fact that it takes God so long to bring about the transformation of the human heart. We see the Old Testament where God uses much more brutal tactics to force his way into human society. Humans were much more violent back then and needed God to use violence before they would take him seriously. He did so in way He really does not today. People don't understand. Why could God not just work the way He does today? 

It takes time. Sin closes off grace. The more serious the sin the more explicit God's intervention needs to be. As we slowly learn to cooperate with God's grace we receive more and more graces in more gentle ways. Yet it goes very slow. They say the church sees history in centuries while we see it in years. 

Yet even in our lives we see the same dynamic. We grow in grace but it happens slowly. Every step is a struggle. It can take years before we make a breakthrough. Again we wonder why it takes so long. If God is almighty then can't He move a little quicker?

This is especially true at lent. We make the same fasts and pray the same prayers year after year. Are we making progress? You really have to look back 10 years before anything becomes obvious. Even when we see that we wonder why we have grown in some area and not in others. 

The answer is we need to appreciate just how far we need to go. How big a gap there is between where we were and where God is leading us. If we just changed in an instant we would never get it. We don't really understand the nature of sin until we fight against it and lose. We really don't get how big a deal salvation is. That we are not just made truly good but that such goodness is so far out of our reach. That we don't just need a little help from God. We need to become more and more dependent on Him. We need to invite Him into places we could not imagine when we started our journey.

The other dimension to this is freedom. God can't just ask us to choose heaven or hell. That would not make any sense. Like in the movie the Matrix. There was a choice given to the main character but he didn't really understand that choice because at that point he was still mostly ignorant of what was involved. God does not give us choices like that even if it sometimes feels like it. The choices are between taking the next step down the road to heave or the next step down the road to hell. It is a choice we can understand. We can feel the pull towards good and the pull towards evil. We have the real possibility of going either direction. 

How long does it take before the allure of evil stops being attractive to us? Some sins lose their attraction but there is always something deeper. Every step seems so slow. When you try and explain it to a non-Christian it becomes hard. It is not logical. We trust God so far and then we are afraid to take the next step. Why is it so hard? It is very personal ground we are talking about. It takes time for us to get comfortable with the intimacy. 

So the victory of the cross is slow just like the crucifixion was slow. God could be more efficient. He just wants us to see salvation in all it's gory detail. He ants us to feel it and He wants us to choose it knowing all that. 

The Advantages Of Being Catholic

I went to mass early Saturday morning. TMIY challenged me to go every day this week. I set the alarm but was up before it went off. I arrived at the church about 20 minutes early. I had a bit of fear in getting there. I used to do that more in my single days. I would arrive early for an event and often find the church doors locked. Sometimes just the leader were there trying to prepare. It was awkward. I wondered if I had done it again. 

The difference is now I am Catholic. I got there and were 6 or 8 people who had also arrived early and were praying. People do that in a Catholic church. Catholics believe there is something about the church building. Jesus is there is the blessed sacrament. If you go to church you come early and just spend time. I guess you forget that a bit when you have a big family and don't end up coming early for much. I guess I still knew that but somehow this morning I was fretting about the awkwardness of those protestant experiences so many years ago. It made me feel at home. 

It is just a small thing but it got me thinking. Frank Weathers calls his blog Why I Am Catholic. I can see why. For years after you convert you get little things that strike you about how wonderful the church is. It makes sense. Jesus' Church should be wonderful in a million amazing ways. Yet when it happens it still strikes us. There is another example of that here. 

Lent is a big time for that. There is just so much. Connecting with God through fasting and contemplating Jesus' passion. So powerful and yet we rarely did it as protestants. It is the sort of thing that only really makes a difference after a few years. It is the long term, slow burn transformation that Catholicism does well. Protestants are much better at the big life-changing moment. Catholics can learn a lot from them there. Yet so many of our sins go very deep and healing them is long and slow. 

Lizard Brains

I was at a seminar about parenting children with Downs Syndrome. It was taught by a psychologist. Lots of great information. At one point she was talking about out brains. That we have one section of the brain that controls our fight/flight/freeze type response. It kicks in when we experience stress. She called that the lizard brain. Then there is the other part of the brain where we have reason and logic and language. Now the tendency modern people have is to think good brain/bad brain. Logic is good. Emotion is bad. Right?

She didn't go there. She encouraged us to learn how to connect the two parts of the brain to apply the wisdom of the left brain to the emotional issues of the right brain. I am sure there is nothing inherently wrong with the lizard brain. That is why I don't like the name much. Yet why do I know that? It is rooted in creation. God made us and would not give us such a powerful part of our brain if it did not serve some important function. 

Certainly many religious conversions come from the lizard brain. Atheists scoff at those. People making a decision to follow Jesus based on an emotional crisis. They would be much better off being purely rational. Would we really? I wonder what a purely rational humanity would look like. Emotions are indicators of a deeper reality. It is a reality that the modern mind looks down on but that is where we find the deepest truth about ourselves.

I know the lizard brain is good based on my faith. How can one know it based on logic and science? I don't see how. It appears that there is much time and energy wasted in dealing with people hurting each other's feelings. What is the payoff? We don't need the fight/flight/freeze thing nearly as much as we used to. Physically we are pretty safe. Could we not assess risk better using reason? 

When you don't start with the belief that creation is good but fallen then you can arrive at many different places. You can start to hate a part of yourself. If we are just products of evolution then there is no reason to think parts of us are just not helpful in today's society. We might have outgrown our emotions.

I think that is a big part of why people who are emotionally hurt often feel the need to talk to someone who has been hurt in the same way. They feel the question in society of why don't you just get over it? It is a question based in pure logic. Why should you let a bad childhood or a traumatic experience ruin your life? It is hard to explain that to someone looking for a rational answer. Sometimes it is hard for such people to explain it to themselves. 

That is unfortunate because to some extent or other we are all being influenced by deep emotional forces we don't completely understand. That is rooted in our blindness to the spiritual. Many of our deepest emotional needs mirror spiritual realities. We want authentic sexual intimacy because God is love and we want to be like God. We want good human fathers and mothers because we need to be children of God. We hate violence because we know we are meant to live in peace. If we see these lizard brain longings not as accidents of evolution but as desires for something more then we can love that side of us.

Psychology still gets that but does not admit it gets it from the Christian assumptions embedded in society. We see that being questioned more and more and science cannot arrive at the same conclusions. Science can only say what is and not what should be. So modern psychology has the tendency to assume what is for the majority of humans is what should be. That is they are losing their awareness of our fallen nature. Our hearts desire perfect parents and perfect lovers and perfect peace. In short our hearts desire God. The more psychology loses sight of that the less valuable it will be.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry has been getting a lot of attention for this YouTube clip. I don't know why. It is a fairly old argument. It focuses on a few of the most difficult examples of the problem of pain and basically acts as if all of life is full of those examples. Like every child dies of cancer or has their eyesight lost to some strange insect. The truth is these examples are shocking because they are rare. If they are the only things one can think of when assessing the whole of human existence then we have really lost perspective.

This does remind me of something Bl John Henry Newman said in one of his sermons. He said some people have shown so little interest in God or being close to God or being holy or anything of the sort that sending them to heaven would just be cruel. Heaven is about intimacy with God. It is about love. It is about purity. It is about self-sacrifice. Some people simple do not want that. They want ignore God and focus on themselves and try and use other people to pursue their own happiness. That is not heaven. That is hell. Yet that is what many have chosen with the way they have lived their life.

Fry is like that. I am not sure he is being totally honest about his innermost feelings but assuming he is it is quite striking. He comes before God. He can imagine no sense of awe. He can give God no credit for anything good in the world. All he can do is throw out the typical atheist talking points. Not really being willing to concede atheism has been proven wrong even when that is the premise of the question. For a guy like that heaven would not be mercy but would be a violation of his freedom. He really makes a very good argument for hell.

Like I said, you hear these same arguments  made over and over again. I always try try and draw them into a rational discussion. Atheists love to think of themselves as being rational but rarely react well when their beliefs are questioned rationally. In the case of the children who die of cancer I typically ask if all death is considered problematic or just the death of children. Just trying to discern the real issue. If all death is what is being questioned then Christians have a response to why people die. If death itself is not the central issue but just the fact that some people die younger and with more pain then other then that is another issue. There is something to be said on that to but it is a bit different.

Atheists almost never answer questions like that. They often response with outrage and ridicule. That is OK. Still they should admit it. They should say they don't like the fact that Christians respond with reason and logic to their raw emotionalism. Yet somehow they think of themselves as the logical ones. It is too strange.

Now you need to be careful. People make these emotional arguments and you don't know their story. Maybe they have had a child die of cancer. That is a very different situation than some guy looking for the hard cases to make his point. Then you really do want an emotional answer. The logical reply might seem cold. So throwing around all this emotional rhetoric to short-circuit the logical debate also ends up being very insensitive to the people who have actually lived the emotions. Many continue to believe in a good God. We just need to be sensitive to the fact that these are real people living these very hard realities.

Religious Extremists

Spielberg at Auschwitz Memorial

There was a statement by Steven Spielberg that made me think. He was talking about some of the recent violence against Jews. He said said one of the main sources of hatred was religious extremism. My thought was what the phrase means. It has to do with the quantity of your religion rather than the quality. That is the problem is not bad religion but rather too much religion. It suggests the solution is not to find a better religion but rather to simply believe whatever religion you have less intensely. 

I know he was not trying to make a controversial religious statement. I rather suspect he was going for the opposite. That is the point. This is the kind of thing people say without thinking about it. I should not pick on Spielberg. Any number of folks are making similar points.

It really does not make any sense. Religion is something extreme. It is the answer to life's biggest questions. What is the meaning and purpose of my life? What happens after I die? How can I know what is highest good or highest truth?  If we have answers to these questions they have to have an extreme impact on us. If a religion does not give you something to live for and something to die for then why bother with it? 

The truth is that it is the content of the religion that is the problem rather than the intensity of it. That is one of the ways to evaluate a religion. Ask yourself about the people who believe it most intensely. Are they good people or are they scary? Catholicism has its saints. There is no better way to evaluate the faith than looking at the saints. Do you want to be more like they are? 

When it comes to violence the key question to ask is if a religion respects the dignity of the human person even if that person does not believe that religion? Do Christians respect non-Christians? Do Jews respect gentiles? Do Muslims respect non-Muslims?  How well developed and consistent is this teaching? Does that religious group have a strong consensus around the idea that non-adherents do have the right to live and to put forward ideas that are offensive to their faith?

The reason Spielberg does not go there is obvious. To ask the question is to answer it. They one major religion that lacks that strong consensus is Islam. All other religions seem to have a few people who have gone nuts but very few. The vast majority of even very strong adherents do not believe in violence even against their most offensive opponents. 

Islam is a different story. From Al Qaueda or Boko Haram to ISIS to Hamas we have Muslims concluding over and over that violence is the way to go. Even extreme violence against defenseless people. It is not that they are too religious. It is that they have embraced the wrong religion. 

Spielberg can't say that. Modern society has as a dogma that all religious are the same. They give you some comfort. They give you some guilt. They give you some holidays. The trouble is it isn't true. They are not all the same.