Monastery of the Holy Cross

Lenten Food for Thought

March 8, 2019

[The following is from the program notes from our last celebration of Solemn Vespers.]

“The life of a monk ought to be a continuous Lent,” writes Saint Benedict, the Patriarch of Western monasticism and Patron of Europe. What characterizes the life of a monk? The vows that a Benedictine monk or nun makes today go all the way back to Benedict’s Rule, composed around the year 540 A.D. Rather than the later ‘traditional’ vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, Benedictines vow obedience, stability and “conversatio morum.” The latter phrase is notoriously difficult to render into English. The contemporary Benedictine who makes this vow is saying, “I promise to live like a monk!” “Conversatio” is an entire ‘way of life’, and Saint Paul says that for all Christians, our true conversatio is in heaven [Philippians 3: 20].

Paul further contrasts this way of life to the way of life of an unspecified “many” who “live as enemies of the Cross [3: 18].” Thus to be friends of the Cross is to be act as a citizen of heaven. This helps to explain why a monk’s life should be not only a continual Lent, a personal, loving embrace of the Cross, but also a heavenly way of life. Saint Benedict’s chapter on Lent is further distinguished by twice using the word “joy” to describe the monk’s or nun’s disposition during the holy days of Lent.

It is noteworthy, too, that the opening prayer (or “Collect”) for the First Sunday of Lent makes use of this Latin term conversatio. By “worthy conduct” we hope to pursue the riches that are hidden in Christ. Why are they hidden? These riches are available only to faith. The sacrament of our faith, baptism, which is the culmination of the Easter Vigil (itself the culmination of our Lenten aspirations), is our full embrace of the Cross, our plunging into the mystery of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Through the Cross, the world is crucified to us and we to the world. But this very death unveils for us the hidden meaning of all creation, of all history, of each human person. Lent is the time to push further down this path, to scrub away the worldliness that has overtaken us in the past year and so to live the new conversatio of a heavenly life.

A final observation, following upon a two-fold question: What causes us to slide subtly back into a worldly way of life? And what exactly is this unheavenly way of life? We tend to understand this as a question of ‘morality’ and furthermore as a question of obeying a set of rules imposed by God, Who of course has every right to set the laws of His own kingdom. Without setting aside the necessity of obedience to God’s commandments, we can ask ourselves whether this is the proper overall understanding of the ‘Two Ways’.

Once again, the monastic tradition, being rooted in the Apostolic age itself, tends to have a slightly different perspective on this question. Christ not only reveals to us His kingdom, but also helps us to delineate with greater clarity the “prince of this world,” and the nature of his rebellion [see John 12: 31]. “We are not contending against flesh and blood, but against…the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts…[Ephesians 6: 12].” Lest we be carried away into speculation about the nature of demons, principalities and powers, let us note the plausible realism inherent in the traditional gospel of the First Sunday in Lent.

Jesus undergoes baptism in the Jordan. This is a mystical prefiguration of the entire Paschal Mystery, and the first thing He does afterward is to go out to the desert for combat with the Devil himself. This is another prefiguring: this time of the harrowing of hell. The gates of hell have no chance against the Son of God, nor does Satan in the contest of wits in the desert. The devil uses thoughts to appeal to the human nature of Jesus. Forty days of fasting does make one hungry…why not relax? Bread is only a wave of the wand away! But this would risk making a god of one’s belly [Phil. 3: 19]. And similarly with temptations to vainglory and pride. Why not work wonders and take the world by a brilliant display of power? Jesus refuses to let these thoughts work away at him, neither to be swayed by fear about his human body, nor to be swayed by the use of power to bully His way to the kingdom.

So our battle, too, is at the level of thoughts. As Sr. Margaret Mary Funk, OSB, has put it, “Thoughts Matter.” Fasting, prayer and almsgiving will likely give rise to disordered thoughts and fears regarding our bodily mortality, our root helplessness against the ravages of time and blunderings of fortune. The only stronghold we have is faith, trust in the love of God, our true Father. This faith allows us to imitate Jesus in identifying every deceitful thought that enters our hearts, thereby purifying them. And the pure of heart shall see God. Indeed, to return finally to the Collect again, we hope by our spiritual warfare against wrongful thoughts, to “grow in understanding of the riches hidden in Christ.” Let us pray for one another that we may be ready to greet the Lord at Easter with the eyes and affections of our hearts truly made pure!

Grace in Retrospect

February 20, 2019

The Orthodox theologian John Behr has written that we live the faith going forward, but we understand it looking backward, as we see the mysterious working out of God’s grace in our lives and in the Church.

I thought of this in pondering the meaning of my recent election as Prior of the community. You read that correctly, by the way: we had an election on February 3 as the last step in our long process of obtaining full autonomy. We hadn’t wanted to publicize the election ahead of time because explaining the need for this is not straightforward, and we hadn’t wanted to cause any undue alarm. Perhaps that was an excess of caution. On the other side, it seems important to explain, for the benefit of our friends and others, the significance of the election.

Christ in the Desert, near Abiquiu, NM. Our association was always mutually enriching–the desert and the city!

As I’ve already indicated, this was necessitated by a “process” put in place to grant us full autonomy. That any process was necessary is already an indication that our situation was unusual. The Constitutions of our congregation give guidance for the normal route to autonomy of a newly founded monastery. Typically, a large house sends a group of 6-12 monks to a new location. This new house remains intially dependent on the motherhouse for resources of all kinds: members, money, and so on. After a certain amount of time, the new house stabilizes, starts to recruit its own new members, and gains the means to support itself financially. At this point, there is a canonical separation of the daughterhouse from the motherhouse, and the new house becomes autonomous. Autonomy is very important in Benedictine life: we are not, strictly speaking, a religious order, but a confederation of autonomous houses. This reality protects our vow of stability and its implications (we can’t be moved from monastery to monastery, and so we remain rooted in a particular culture). It also protects the notion that Benedict lays down, that a monastery is an image of Christ and His disciples: it is a group of monks gathered around a teacher and father (“Abba”=abbot).

Our road to autonomy was quite unusual. We were not formed by a motherhouse. Rather, three former missionaries began to live the monastic life, then went about looking for an abbey to adopt them. The monastery of Christ in the Desert responded to our request, and here is a place to express my profound gratitude to their community especially to the recently-retired Abbot Philip Lawrence, whose generosity and creativity have allowed many new houses to become part of the Christ in the Desert family. We were, in fact, one of four foundations or adopted houses, along with Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, near San Miguel de Allende in south-central Mexico, Santa María y Todos Los Santos near Teo Celo in southeast Mexico, and Thien Tam (Vietnamese for Sacred Heart) in northern Texas. About ten years ago, this situation began to pose certain problems. There were more monks canonically a part of Christ in the Desert living in the dependent houses than there were at the motherhouse. In fact, there were so many of us, we couldn’t feasibly have a meeting together because of the limitations of the desert.

At that time, in 2011, we were considered the strongest of the daughterhouses, but we lacked the canonical number of monks needed to be autonomous (normally eight, with exceptions given for six or seven; we had five in solemn vows). At a series of meetings at the provincial level, our Abbot Visitor, Anselm Atkinson, and his council worked out a special statute that would allow us to be autonomous, but with limitations and oversight given to the Visitor (who is the juridical head of the dozen or so houses of our English Province, but whose authority is limited to triannual visitations and more or less emergency situations). This meant that I was not elected by the brothers, but appointed by the Abbot President (the head of our congregation, which is divided into eight provinces, with a Visitor at the head of each province), after consultation with the community. Any such statute requires the approval of the Holy See, which we obtained at the end of 2011.

Abbot President Bruno Marin, who appointed Father Peter as the first superior of the autonomous monastery.

Now at that point, I had already been prior for seven years; I was appointed first by Abbot Philip as the prior of a dependent house, and I served at his bidding. He was the canonical superior, though he was always quite gracious in giving us a lot of freedom to propose our own way forward. This freedom helped prepare us for autonomy. When we became autonomous by the special statute, we were authorized to make our own decisions, with a few exceptions. One of those exceptions was that we could not elect our own superior until we had the full number of eight monks. When we reached this number, the statute stipulated that I had to resign so that we could elect a superior on our own. The Visitor and President agreed that they would accept my resignation only when the election began. This is a common occurence with bishops, who must, by Canon Law, submit resignations to the pope when they reach the age of 75, though the pope is under no obligation to accept these resignations immediately. Often, the Holy Father will do so only when he has a replacement ready to go, so that the diocese does not go for too long without a bishop. So it was in our case.

For a couple of days while we waited for the election to be confirmed by the Abbot President (thank God for email!), Father Brendan was acting superior. It was the first time in fourteen years that I was back in the ranks. I enjoyed it! But I was (re-)installed on February 5, and I’ve been happily back in action ever since.

Current Abbot President Guillermo Arboleda Tamayo, who was in Viet Nam when he got news of our election. He was able to confirm the election by his contact with our congregation’s curia via email.

I began by talking about the way in which we understand our faith in retrospect. The experience of our first-ever election was another opportunity to look back at how unlikely our survival and growth have been. The 70’s and 80’s were decades of great experimentation in religious life, and many, many new communities cropped up. Very few survived. That we have not only survived, but have continued to be confirmed in the path that God has opened up is a great sign of God’s will slowly unfolding in our particular project. Our growth has been deliberate and steady, allowing us to reflect quietly on the sources of monastic life and spirituality in a way that might not have been possible had there been a great swell of enthusiam earlier on. Who know what the future holds for us and the many friends we’ve made along the way, but we can go forward in confidence, in faith, seeing how Christ has led us through each stage so far.

Feast of the Presentation

February 6, 2019

[The following is from the program notes from our last celebration of Solemn Vespers.]

The Law of Moses prescribes that childbirth renders the mother ritually impure for a period of forty days after the birth of a male child and eighty days in the case of a female child [Leviticus 12: 1-5]. Thus it comes about that today’s feast, falling forty days after Christmas, was until recently referred to as the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is this connection with Christmas that warrants our keeping the Christmas tree lit throughout this time. Tomorrow, we turn more purposely toward the penitential seasons of Septuagesima and Lent, and ultimately toward the Cross, foreshadowed in so many ways in our Lord’s first temple appearance today.

Like most of the Torah, the theology and practical implications of this ruling regarding a mother’s purification are manifold. We should be cautious when interpreting its meaning lest we project twenty-first century biases onto Iron Age civilization. Practically speaking the forty or eighty day period helped to assure that the mother and child would be together in the home. But it is the theology behind the notion of ritual purity that is worth examining this evening.

The book of Leviticus is a book concerned preeminently with holiness. It is easy for us to imagine, reading the multiform (and often enough picayune) mandates of Torah, that holiness is a matter of correct action, detailed obedience to ritual behaviors that separated one out from the “profane.” There is something to this, but if we stop there, we miss the great beauty that is the vision of the temple priesthood. The priests who authored the book of Leviticus also, according to most scholars, authored or edited the majestic creation account that opens the book of Genesis.

In this great of the newborn cosmos, God’s holiness is manifested mainly in the fecundity of His Word and Spirit. God is the God of the living. When God speaks, His Word gives life, an abundant life, overflowing with richness, newness, variety, order, and surprise. In Israelite priestly theology, God comes to reside in the temple, and it is from the temple that this life-giving, bountiful energy bursts forth, especially at the hour of the sacrifices. This theology will find its ultimate expression in the sacrificial opening of the side of Christ, the holiest of victims, from which pours forth the life-giving sacraments of the Church.

Before I get too far ahead of myself, let’s return to the book of Leviticus. The priests aimed to manifest this holiness, holiness-as-life, by restricting access to the temple, allowing only persons who showed no marks that signified death. These defiling marks could be in the form of blemished skin, illness, or recent contact with a corpse. Death has no place in the temple, which is understood as a kind of restoration of Eden, a foretaste of the Kingdom of God toward which the temple points. It is noteworthy that in the book of Revelation, heaven has no temple; there is no need, for death is no more.

What has this to do with childbirth? Three thousand years ago, childbirth was far more likely to cause death in the child or the mother than is the case today. The entrance of a child into the world comes with the shedding of much blood, and this is a sign that birth is, in this fallen world, tainted with accents of death. It is also the case that the first weeks of life are precarious for newborns, more so again in the premodern world. Until the health of both mother and child are established, they remain in this hazardous state. The purification of the mother and presentation of the child are a kind of resurrection, a reintroduction of both into the land of the living.

Thus it is that Jesus’s first visit to the temple so profoundly foreshadows His salvific mission. His very birth is already an acceptance of death, as is Mary’s fiat, ratifying her participation in the Passion of Christ. And just as at the Easter Vigil, candles signify the light of Christ that overwhelms the darkness, at Mass on today’s feast, the faithful bear blessed candles (hence another traditional name, “Candlemas”). The prophet Simeon stands in not only for Israel, but for us. As he sees the significance of the event by the power of the Holy Spirit, may we be enlightened by the same Spirit, that our faith in the life-giving power of God may be deepened. May our understanding of what Christ is accomplishing in us grow through our participation in today’s Joyful Mystery!

Hitchcock and the Power of Anti-Expertise

September 19, 2018

We have the custom of watching one movie a month in the monastery. I pick out the movie, which is to say, we watch a lot of Alfred Hitchcock.

Hitchcock, Joan Fontaine, and Laurence Olivier on the set of “Rebecca”

Last night, it was Rebecca. It features a twist on the “wrong man” motif that drives many of Hitch’s most suspenseful films. In this case, it’s the vulnerable blonde beauty, Mrs. de Winter, who is the “wrong man,” thrown into a situation that is beyond her own experience, strange, and threatening. Hitchcock is frequently criticized for his allegedly patronizing handling of female characters. On a superficial level, one can see Joan Fontaine’s Mrs. de Winter in this light. What’s unusual in this film, which is based on a novel by Daphne du Maurier–and thus is told from the female perspective–is that Mrs. de Winter turns out to be quite resourceful. Her resolve to stay with her husband (Laurence Olivier) turns out to be one of the pivots of the plot, and this resolve emerges once she separates herself out from the influence of the housemaid Mrs. Danvers. Early in the film, in her insecurity over having married upward into the aristocratic world, she trusts Mrs. Danvers. Danvers represents expert knowledge of the bewildering world of de Winters’s Manderley estate. Once the heroine recognizes the malice in Danvers, she begins to rely on her own inner compass, helps her husband to add new behaviors to his repertoire of responses, and helps to clear him against the wrongful accusation of murdering his previous wife. The final scene, which I won’t spoil for those who might wish to see the film, is perhaps a symbol of Maxim de Winter’s newfound freedom afforded by the unexpected emergence of resolve in his new wife.

Joan Fontaine as the “everywoman.” Her character has no first name and no maiden name in the film.

This got me thinking of this trope in Hitchcock’s work. Biographers will tell us that Hitch always felt a bit like a pretender. As the son of an English Catholic greengrocer, he grew up on the outside of higher class society looking in. His “wrong man” characters (Cary Grant in North by Northwest, Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo and The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Robert Donat in The 39 Steps, though I could go on) all awaken suddenly to find themselves aliens, lacking critical information to make sense of a dangerous situation. All of them grow into their parts by acting decisively and determinedly. None of them have the luxury of gaining expertise, or, in the case of Mrs. de Winter, trusting in someone else’s expertise.

There is nothing wrong with expertise, but an over-reliance on it creates the opposite of what we see in Hitchcock’s characters: irresolution and paralysis. We become afraid to tackle any problem before reading five books and consulting the internet for further references. We become passive, waiting for the experts to weigh in, losing any sense of adventure.

I would like to suggest that this anxious paralysis is related to the meritocratic state we’ve been trying to create in the U.S. over the past hundred years or so. The older, frontier mentality was based on risk-taking and an entrepreneurial desire to exit the sclerosis of the Old World. While late 19th-century Progressivism had many virtues, the general drift of this tendency in American history has been away from the frontier pluckiness and toward a greater reliance on sedentary expertise and bureaucracy. This shift has made us more anxious and less creative in dealing with the inevitable threats that come with life. It makes sense that Hitchcock would have moved away from England to America; his favorite character type is more at home in the States. Is this character type still recognizable in American culture today?

Cutting to the Chase Re: Jordan Peterson

May 28, 2018

Internet chatter about Jordan Peterson continues unabated. I was hoping to write a slow and leisurely commentary on the phenomenon of his appearance, but I’m not sure one has that luxury. So I am going to jump in a say what I find hopeful about his ideas and the response to those ideas, and then offer some critiques of the same. Afterward, I may take the time to unpack the different themes in his writing and lecturing, particularly in the ways in which his approach and startling insights can help those of us tasked with spreading the Gospel.

Here, in bullet-point form, are the ideas that I find hopeful and helpful:

Life is lived in a fruitful tension between chaos and order. Too much of either robs us of the meaning and joy of life. We can’t eliminate chaos because we don’t know everything yet. Every time we meet a new person or situation, we experience, personally, the intrusion of chaos.
We bring order out of chaos by speaking. For this reason, it is extremely important to learn how to speak carefully and truthfully. “Tell the truth–or at least do not lie,” is one of Peterson’s Twelve Rules. We create unnecessary chaos when we cheat, exaggerate, fib. Worse, we make underlying chaos a fixture of our reality, conditioning future choices. Ideology is lazy thinking grown to monstrous proportions. It may stem from an anxious desire to sort things too quickly.
Since our words and actions contribute either to a) playful meaning and a workable order or to b) uncontrollable chaos and/or brutal and repressive mockeries of good order, each individual has a monumental responsibility. Each of us moves the world closer to heaven or hell by our decisions. This is an ennobling insight, and perhaps the one that most attracts dispirited millennials stuck playing video games, abusing drugs and pornography, and terrified of committed relationships. All is not lost! All that you need to do, in a sense, is to start telling the truth, even if it hurts.
And, you know what? Life will hurt. But some suffering is worth undergoing because it makes for a more meaningful future. Not all goods are worth the same amount. What are you willing to give up to get something better? Life may also bring incredible beauty, but to find it, I may have to sacrifice who I am and what I have today to obtain a better version of myself and the world tomorrow. Such is the meaning of sacrifice, as Peterson rescues it from flat dismissals of crude visions of bloodletting (yet, see objections #4 and #5 below).
We can find our way to this better world, not so much by rational thinking, but by realism and attentiveness. Ivan Karamazov can’t reason his way through suffering; Alexei his brother (and monastic novice) gains insight from a contemplative awareness of the world, a “noticing” in Peterson’s words.
This discipline of noticing extends to other people, even long-dead people. Peterson has many rich things to say about myths because he takes the people who wrote them and who learned from them seriously.
The way of wisdom is gratitude and humility. I benefit from the countless sacrifices of persons who lived before me in conditions often much more challenging than my present situation.

All of that I find quite acceptable, even good. It’s a shame that we priests haven’t been able to tap into the deep longing for just this kind of wisdom. Moreso is it a shame because there are elements of Peterson’s approach that are problematic. Let me outline a few as best I can, and again, hopefully, with the aid of some responses and comments, I can clarify with greater rigor at a later time.

He’s trying to rescue liberal modernity from inside. He doesn’t seem to see the inherent contradictions in being an heir of the anti-tradition Enlightenment while appealing to traditional ways of thinking. He really does promote a kind of “self-help,” while trying to help others. He is fiercely on the side of the individual against collectivism, and yet he’s oddly at the forefront of a kind of mass movement. In my opinion, he recognizes this incoherence at some level. But:
His non-stop public appearance schedule seems to have robbed him of the interior space required to address these paradoxes. He’s in danger of letting public criticism set the agenda and of becoming defensive.
He could use a crash-course in metaphysics. He has an interesting take on Being and Becoming. Being is something like his name for what others call “God.” His take on Becoming is problematic because it is divorced from a teleological notion of human nature. In laymen’s terms, “If Becoming is a weighty moral responsibility, what exactly should I become?” I’m not sure that Peterson answers this. Which is to say that he really is part of liberal modernity, which wants to maximize for each individual the possibility of whatever future he or she wants. The lack of a clear goal is also the reason that Peterson does not talk about virtue, while he dances all around it.
I would also be interested to see what would happen if he would broaden out his dialogue partners. His take on myth would be enriched (and improved, I think, though his own ideas are creative and richly rewarding) by an engagement with the writings of Réne Girard and Girard’s many followers. This last point is one where I have a lot of work to do. It seems that Dr. Peterson is returning to a paganized understanding of myth. According to Girard, this would require a scapegoating of a victim or victim class. This, I think, is why lots of commentators accuse Peterson of dog-whistling for the alt-right. His discussion of myth would be less open to this (legitimate) critique were he aware of the work that others have done in this area.
His contrast between thinking and noticing would be enriched by a similar broadening of sources. Josef Pieper and many others in the Catholic tradition have pointed to a contrast between ratio and intellectus, covering much the same ground but with greater rigor. I am grateful that Peterson’s gifts as a writer and speaker have gained a different audience that needs to hear what he is saying. Lost Millennials are not likely to stumble upon a copy of Leisure, the Basis of Culture and benefit from it right away. But Dr. Peterson could ground his own insights more securely by reading it (and Aristotle and Aquinas) himself.
This is all to say that he’s a bit simplistic at times, and this corrodes his effectiveness. His insistence on the correlation of chaos with femininity and order with masculinity is, hmm…, maybe accurate….from a self-interested male standpoint.And, of course, men wrote all the old myths. This sort of simplification really is a shame. I want to emphasize that because his intuition that men’s views of the world differ from women’s views, and that this difference should be noticed and honored, is so needed right now. I’d hate to see his eloquent confirmations of the goodness of manhood and womanhood undermined by a headstrong defense of this counterproductive reading of old myths.

To conclude: there is a lot to learn from Peterson’s achievements. He has discovered a way to reach persons desperate for meaning in a way that traditional religion has largely failed. He has reminded us of ways to read ancient myths with appreciation and profit. He’s demonstrated that religion (broadly understood) and science can coexist in an integrated psyche. I hope that he will continue on this trajectory and be open to further insights. In the meantime, I’d like to see Catholics step up and creatively engage within the spaces he’s opened for us in popular culture.

Come, Holy Spirit!

May 8, 2018

“With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus [Acts 4: 33].”

This power that the apostles had was the gift of the Holy Spirit. Just before the Ascension, our Lord instructed them, “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses…to the end of the earth [Acts 1: 8].”

Notice that this is the power of speech and that the purpose of speech is testimony. In other words, this is not precisely political power, in the sense of holding sway over another person. It is the power to speak to the experience of others and thereby liberates others to affirm their (truest) experiences. In the words of Verlyn Klinkenborg (that’s his real name), “Writing doesn’t prove anything,/And it only rarely persuades./It does something much better./It attests./It witnesses.” But apostolic witness, which is the Church’s testimony, is possessed of a Spiritual power. This power is a gift, The Gift, that our good Father will give to anyone who asks [Luke 11: 13; cf. Matthew 7: 11].

A personal note: changes in the monastery required me to resume responsibility for our finances about two years ago. In order to attend to this task, I set aside writing for a time. This calendar year, I’ve received a surprising number of invitations to speak, coaxing out of my relative silence. I hope to share with you some more extended thoughts on three topics, to begin with: 1) The continually increasing polarization of our country, what it means, what we might do about it as Christians; 2) The need for beauty in our lives, especially in the liturgy; and, 3) The intriguing rise of Professor Jordan Peterson, whose YouTube videos on the Bible receive hundreds of thousands of views.

This last topic is especially striking. There is a hunger for the Word of God, but who is proclaiming it with the Holy Spirit and power? Are we experiencing a “famine…of hearing the words of the Lord [Amos 8: 11]”?

This consideration also moved me to reconsider whether it’s time to get back to the keyboard.

There is also the matter of my stalled memoir. Perhaps you could offer a prayer that I can find a way to finish that. In the meantime, I may also use this forum to offer my reflections on music and how music brought me back to the Church and into the monastery.

The three topics I highlighted above are all related. They all evidence the Church’s loss of confidence. Polarization in politics is one consequence of the defeat of beauty, the loss of poetry, and the reduction of words to utility. The vaunting of the utile over the poetic is a gambit for enslaving, diabolic power, not the liberating power of the Holy Spirit.

Veni, Sancte Spiritus!

Liturgical and Political Untidiness

February 26, 2017

One of the more remarkable aspects of sixteenth-century music (and other arts, such as the theater of Shakespeare) is the fact that it was composed and performed in an era of unusual political instability. The medieval political arrangement had been in its death-throes for some time. The Reformation sent Europe in a rather new direction. Old verities seemed not to hold.

While God was still understood by virtually all to be the Judge and final arbiter, the splintering of the Church made discernment of His active presence in the world ambiguous at best. As historian Brad Gregory has pointed out in his amazingly detailed book The Unintended Reformation, we are still living with the fallout from this disintegration today. What had been ambiguous five hundred years ago has, if anything, turned into a welter of vagueness today. Is God involved at all in politics? Should He be?

That many Christians today even entertain such a question indicates the immense change that Western culture has undergone. Enthusiasts for the new order (rapidly becoming a disorder at the moment) would claim that we have finally succeeded in disentangling what should have been separate concerns in the first place, namely religion and politics. Those less enthused would point out that the consequence of this disentanglement is a practical atheism, what generally goes by the more genial name of secularism.

It was with these considerations in mind that Kevin Allen and I chose to include in last evening’s celebration of Solemn Vespers Jubilate Deo by Cristobal Morales. His work combines the Offertory of Quinquagesima Sunday (more on that anon) with a text celebrating the Truce of Nice (1538), which ended the conflict over Northern Italy fought for two years between the kingdoms of France and Spain. Morales interprets the truce as a moment of liturgical significance: the peace, brokered by Pope Paul III between two princes, was sent down from heaven as a blessing on “all nations.”

Pope Paul III certainly had a political stake in hostilities near the papal states. Yet it is significant that the restored peace is one in which the Church and her principal Vicar on earth play the substantial part. One can’t imagine the Holy Father brokering an analogous peace between, say, Elizabethan England and Spain fifty years later, at the time of the famous naval battle resulting in the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

Still, a sense of united purpose endured in Europe until very recently. There have been several lasting arrangements of European nation-states, the most recent being the European Union. All of these recognize in Europe something of a kinship bond. The proposed constitution for the EU was controversial in no small part because it failed to recognize the nature of this kinship—the shared Christian, and indeed Catholic, foundation of the very idea of Europe.

What we are seeing in the rejection of the EU by large parts of the population (most pointedly in the Brexit decision), is a sense that the new order, which prides itself on toleration of differing cultures, is anything but tolerant. Here, let me return to two earlier ideas, the medieval situation and the fact that we begin Quinquagesima Sunday tonight.

The Catholic Church is universal (kata-holos; according to the whole), but not uniform. And if the papacy and other ecclesial structures (such as eleventh-century Benedictine monasteries) were instruments of peace between peoples, it was precisely because love of neighbor and the associated virtue of prudence are able to discern what belongs to the genius of a nation and what belongs to its vices. If the medieval arrangement appears too unsystematic, this may have been with a larger purpose of genuine toleration, the tolerance that works from love. What broke down in the sixteenth century was not a sense of political uniformity, but a sense that peace and salvation could be achieved by solidarity and tolerance within one visible Church.

Our present liturgy in the Roman Rite currently uses two calendars, one for the Ordinary Form and another for the Extraordinary. This Sunday, then, is both the Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time and Quinquagesima Sunday (which is the Sunday that precedes Ash Wednesday). The modern rationalist, who prefers clean systematic arrangements, would balk at this irregularity (and there’s certainly a part of that in me!). Is this septic rationalism a species of the same generic intolerance that modernity has ushered in? The medieval political world was a mélange of ad hoc arrangements by treaty, privilege, and custom—quite unsystematic and untidy. And the medieval liturgy mirrored and helped to shape and make sense of this multiplicity. Different dioceses employed different rites and calendars and recognized different saints. All, however, were committed to the sense of shared purpose that came about through one baptism into the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. We might, therefore, dignify the lack of tidiness with a word that denotes a different kind of system. The medieval liturgy was organic, the system of a living organism, the Body of Christ.

In this way, we can learn, by necessity if for no other reason, how to celebrate our present liturgical diversity as a blessing and life-giving sign. To do this, we must relearn how to see God active and present everywhere, even in that most untidy world of politics from which He’s been nearly banished.

Silence: Scorsese and Endo

February 6, 2017

“The crosses were set in place….Our brother, Paul Miki, saw himself standing now in the noblest pulpit he had ever filled. To his ‘congregation’ he began by proclaiming himself a Japanese and a Jesuit. He was dying for the Gospel he preached. He gave thanks to God for this wonderful blessings, and he ended his ‘sermon’ with these words…’I tell you plainly: there is no way to be saved except the Christian way. My religion teaches me to pardon my enemies and all who have offended me. I do gladly pardon the Emperor and all who have sought my death. I beg them to seek baptism and be Christians themselves.’

“Then, according to Japanese custom, the four executioners began to unsheathe their spears….[They] killed them one by one. One thrust of the spear, then a second blow. It was over in a very short time.”

–from the Acta Sanctorum, read at the Office of Vigils on the feast of St. Paul Miki and companions, February 6

It is of no small significance that the universal Church celebrates today the Japanese martyrs. We hear little of the brave European missionaries who brought the faith to Japan. Attention gradually focuses in on Saint Paul Miki, who begins his final apologia by proclaiming himself Japanese. For him, Christianity is not a betrayal of his culture, but its goal, its fulfillment. True, it comes with the trappings of faraway Rome, and yet what impresses me is that in the person of Paul Miki, it becomes Japanese. It is easily forgotten just how deep an impact the Catholic faith made upon Japan in their first encounter.

I’ve been asked to comment on Martin Scorsese’s most recent movie, Silence. I haven’t seen the movie, nor am I likely to soon (I wouldn’t mind seeing it at some point), but I am an enthusiast of the book. Two questions jump out as being pastorally weighty. Should Catholics see this movie/read this book? Are the movie and book anti-Catholic?

[SPOILER ALERT: plot developments will appear in what follows]

I separate these two questions, even though it would seem that they are intimately connected. As I attempt to answer them, my reason for considering them separately will hopefully be clear. Now, there are many excellent reviews of the movie and of the book, and the two I’ve found most helpful are those of Bishop Robert Barron and Amy Welborn. It’s also worth noting the effect of playing a Jesuit missionary had on actor Andrew Garfield. I encourage you to read them. In what follows, I will primarily focus on the questions that have been posed to me, with a few final words about the crucial issues of the novel.

In beginning to answer the first question, I should note that I hold the somewhat unpopular point of view that not all literature and not all art is for everyone. We all know this, in fact. This is why we withhold certain types of stories and images from children. Once we reach some arbitrary age, however, it is assumed that we can read or view more or less anything and derive profit from it. A more ancient wisdom respects that different persons are in different places, and not all of us are prepared to grapple with particularly vexing or troubling ideas. When I first read Endo’s Silence, I’m not sure that I was fully ready for it, even though I was thirty-three and a monk in solemn vows. I found the book quite disturbing because of the dilemma faced by the Portuguese missionaries, and the solution of external apostasy (perhaps at the command of Christ Himself?) was gravely disappointing to me. I wanted some clever escape from this version of the Kobayashi Maru test.

But the novel stayed with me. I felt that I was missing something in it, that my own personal maturity and faith needed developing before I could fruitfully engage with Endo. As I understand it, the movie is largely faithful to the book, and so to the first question, I would say that Catholics should feel no particular need to see the movie or read the book. If you do decide to see the film, it’s important to be aware that aspects of it may try your faith, and depending on where you’re at, you might change your mind and go to see something else. On the other hand, it’s also possible to remember that stalwarts like Bishop Barron have watched the film and/or read the book, and do not find it an insoluble challenge to the faith.

Which brings me to question two. Endo’s book is a great work of art, and as such, it “resists a univocal or one-sided interpretation,” in Bishop Barron’s words. Reading the book to determine whether it is pro- or anti-Catholic is a disservice to the book, and probably to the movie as well.

In fact, I do not believe that the book is anti-Catholic at all, and in the end, I doubt such a thing can be said of the film. While it is true that Endo’s own Catholic faith was strained at different times in his life, he did come to love the Church more and more as life went on. We should, as Bishop Barron warns us, be careful not to overlook the heroism of the Japanese martyrs in the novel and in the movie. It is easy to do. Why? I believe that a major difficulty in understanding the book is roughly equivalent to the major difficulty faced by the missionary Fr. Rodrigues: we read as Westerners expecting a European/American novel written for us, and what we are confronted with is a Japanese novel written for a Japanese audience. Fr. Rodrigues struggles with a somewhat patronizing attitude to the simple, vulnerable folk who embraced the faith with tremendous vigor. He struggles to establish any kind of genuine rapport with the natives (significantly, the one native with whom he regularly interacts is the conflicted Kichijiro). His training has not really equipped him for the culture shock he’s navigating. This makes it difficult for him to see Christ alive and glorified in the suffering of his fellow Christians. He is oddly modern in this way. It is a stretch for him to communicate (or even comprehend) the joy of martyrdom for Christ, in the way that Saint Paul Miki did with apparent ease. “When a Christian in the crowd cried out to him that he would soon be in heaven, his hands, [Saint Paul Miki’s] whole body strained upward with such joy…” Saint Paul has entered into and embodied an understanding of the Gospel that ennobles what it means to be Japanese. This nobility extends from the Emperor down to the poorest peasant. The Portuguese missionary in Silence never quite comes around to seeing their fellow Christians as genuine brothers and sisters, members of the Body of Christ. This doesn’t mean that there were not such missionaries. But it does mean that the trials faced by Fr. Rodrigues and his fallen-away fellow Jesuit Fr. Ferreira are met by men who discover themselves unprepared and out of their depth, a situation that neither anticipated or could have properly imagined.

One of Amy Welborn’s most important points is that Endo wanted to name his novel The Scent of a Sunny Place. This title would have placed more emphasis on Fr. Ferreira’s apostasy and its enfeebling consequences. He is a defeated man who puts a good face on his personal failure by…blaming the incurable strangeness of Japanese culture. Endo apparently feared that the title Silence would suggest something about the silence of God in general, which is how many do interpret it.

Here I must say something about the weakness of modern Catholic spirituality. And by modern, I mean roughly post 1350 A.D. Various factors moved the locus of communication between God and man further from the liturgy and world toward the private “cloister of the heart.” There were a few dissenting voices along the way, St. John of the Cross being the most insistent and consistent among them. God’s Logos, His Word, is that through which all things were made. Fr. Rodrigues would know this from the Final Gospel read at the end of every Mass in those days. This means that God speaks through all things, once we learn how to listen. By the early 17th century, the time of the novel’s story, prayer had become routinely interiorized to the point that well-educated priests could plausibly focus on the strained, inward search for the voice of God, especially when tossed into a profoundly alien and dangerously unfriendly culture. Yet, this notion of prayer is profoundly in tension with the attitude of the Church Fathers, including the great monastic founders of the Early Church. St. Ignatius of Loyola, who addressed a genuine need when he urged his followers to find God in all things, also warned about the real possibilities of self-delusion when we depend entirely on inner locutions and extraordinary signs (in his biography, the Devil deludes him into thinking that he is speaking with and adoring God in a beautiful display of lights, and is nearly led to commit suicide as a result). It is realistic of Endo to posit that not all Jesuits had been fully formed by their founder’s insight when so many cultural drifts were going the opposite direction.

It is for these reasons that I am personally not inclined to believe in the authenticity of the alleged voice of Christ coming from the fumie (the iconic representation of Christ, used by the Japanese persecutors to confirm apostasy). That’s not to say it’s definitely demonic, either. The monastic fathers and mothers taught that these sorts of phenomena have three sources, God, the Devil, and us. The voice of the fumie is what Fr. Rodrigues wants to hear. Perhaps a demon gave him a shove, but he was wandering in that direction already. And in my opinion, one main reason for his failure is his inability to see Christ in the Japanese whom he was sent to serve.

Did he go to serve them? Or did he go to prove a point about Fr. Ferreira? This is another important question that Endo implies.

I might sound a bit hard on these two Jesuits. I don’t see them as weak as much as caught up in a situation for which they are unprepared. The missionaries of the New World enjoyed the consolations (and, to be sure, the complications) of an accompanying imperial power. The Japanese missionaries are utterly isolated, and it is not surprising that they struggle to read the signs of God’s Word in such unfamiliar surroundings.

There is one detail from the movie which has come to my attention. Bishop Barron points it out: that when Fr. Rodrigues’s body is shown in his coffin, he is clasping a crucifix. The implication is that he remained inwardly, privately a Christian. As the bishop goes on to point out, “that’s just the kind of Christianity the regnant culture likes: utterly privatized, hidden away, harmless.” I suggested above that in the crucible of a no-win situation, Fr. Rodrigues gave in to what he wanted to hear. One hopes that Martin Scorsese hasn’t done the same in his own reading of Silence.

American Demons and the Ghost of Calvin

November 17, 2016

Some years ago, at community recreation, we watched the movie “Selma.” It happened that at the same time, we had been reading together a biography of Lyndon Johnson, and we were in the midst of reading about his role in the passage of the Civil Rights Act. One young monk grew frustrated with conflicting portrayals of President Johnson. “I don’t get it!” he said at one point, “Was he good or not?”

The temptation to divide people neatly between good and evil, to separate the sheep from the goats as it were, is a perennial one. It tends to be stronger, however, in certain eras. In my opinion, this desire for black-and-white moral categories is stronger in times of social instability. Two highly influential, and more or less institutionalized versions of this dualism, are Manichaeism and Calvinism. A strong version of Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, in which persons are destined either for heaven or hell, continues to exert a strong cultural influence in America, even post-Christian America. [See Joseph Bottum’s excellent book “An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America, to see how a peculiar brand of American Christianity morphed into today’s liberal ideals, for example.] I experienced a kind of awakening to this aspect of American culture while watching Clint Eastwood’s (violent) masterpiece “Unforgiven,” and discussing it with a devout Protestant friend. It is interesting to consider Eastwood’s own development from the unforgivable crimes of the Wild West to the redemptive death of Walt Kowalski in the more recent “Gran Torino.” Kowalski becomes a champion and defender of the Hmong families whom he had disliked and mistrusted at the beginning of the film. Was Kowalski good or evil? A lot depends on when we ask the question.

I sense a certain lingering Calvinism in the contemporary American tendency to demonize. Labels like “racist,” “misogynist,” “xenophobe,” are useful and often descriptive of actual behaviors and institutional structures. I would not deny that. But we should use caution when applying them to persons. Let me return to Lyndon Johnson.

Was he good or not? Was he a racist? Like all of us, Johnson was complex, a mixture of good, even magnanimous impulses, along with resentments and weaknesses, especially when positions of power afforded him the license to indulge himself at the expense of, say, women who happened to be nearby. What I am saying, however, is not that we need to resign ourselves to a muddle-along world with good and bad in everyone. The mixture of the good and the bad is in part a side-effect of the fact that we are all unfinished. The dynamic and dramatic arc of a human life is what both (strong) Calvinism and Manichaeism deny. Walt Kowalski changed from being a person with suspicion and hatred toward others based on race to someone who was a friend and defender of the same persons. President Johnson also changed. As a white southerner, he did and said things, especially in his earlier life, that fit with the racist ethos of the circles in which he walked. But he also came from intense poverty, and had a feisty protectiveness for hard-luck cases that could mature into a zeal against injustice. So he also underwent a kind of conversion that made him a champion of civil rights. Other limitations, it seems he never overcame, which will be true for most of us.

Persons can also change for the worse, of course. My point here is that a label such as “racist,” when applied to specific persons, can have the effect of fixing that person in one moral location and foreclosing the possibility of growth. It reminds me of a friend I had growing up whose mother continued to accuse her of being on drugs…even though she wasn’t at first (she was highly creative and goofily energetic by temperament). Well, eventually she decided, “Why not use drugs, if I’m pegged that way anyway?” Literally damned if you do and damned if you don’t. That’s the danger of dualism. It tends to reinforce and bring about the very evil its adherents wish to combat, in addition to blinding those who are lobbing the accusations as to the dynamism of human life.

What I’m saying should not be taken to mean that we shouldn’t name injustices and their causes for what they are. When, however, we recognize that we and others have the capacity to change, we can set about to effect this change through rational argument and action. This is a painstaking process. Impatience with the process can tempt us to fall back on the expedient of power, as I wrote on Sunday. And the difficulty we have in believing that others can change is rooted in our experience of others as irrational, about which I wrote in the same post. When we perceive someone as irrational, another temptation is to despair, for we have no hope of rationally persuading that person to change.

Eastwood as Walt Kowalski. Is there any hope for this man? Is he good?

In “Gran Torino,” Eastwood draws on explicitly Christian language of repentance and forgiveness. So for the benefit of non-Christian readers whom I’ve been inviting to read the blog this past week, I should explain that this notion of personal change is not limited at all to Christian vocabulary. Aristotle and the classical tradition that followed him (in pagan Greece and Rome, Judaism, Christianity and Islam) understood human beings as possessing potential. Human infants are amazingly helpless compared to the offspring of other animals. But they also have greater potential. Morality is more or less a question of how we end up developing that potential, whether we become the sorts of persons that we aspire to, or fall short of this goal. As the example of Walt Kowalski suggests, we can’t know for certain how to characterize a life until it has reached its end. In the meantime, even my enemies and others who hold political opinions completely opposite of mine can change. So can I. Colonialists and slave owners of the past denied full human potential and rationality in slaves and in the colonized. But we risk doing the same when we deny rationality and potential in others.

[Disclaimer: I can only claim some expertise in the theology of the Catholic Church. I’ve tried to indicate that my take on Calvinism here is focusing on a specific strand within a complex historical tradition. I hope that I have not mischaracterized Calvinist theology in general by doing so.]

Love of Neighbor, Love of Enemies

November 11, 2016

Several persons have contacted me and asked me to share some thoughts on the election and its meaning and aftermath. What are our responsibilities as Americans, as Christians and Catholics? If anything, Tuesday’s results and the response of those who opposed Mr. Trump have crystallized in my mind certain ideas in moral philosophy that the brothers and I have been hammering out together for many years. I have found it difficult to convey these ideas in other fora, especially on-line discussions such as take place on Facebook. Our ideas tend to get distorted by the typical political and cultural narratives that pervade the internet and other media. Last year, I began to write out a systematic outline on this blog, but I think it’s worth going through the exercise again, with newer insights from Nietzsche, Max Scheler, James Alison, and William Cavanaugh. Not only that, but much of our work turns out to be applicable to the present political situation.

But this first post is meant to establish the context for everything else that is to be said, lest the rest of what I write appear as an irresponsible escape into navel-gazing.

We are still a nation of laws

…or at least we have always aspired to be. When political rhetoric of any kind is used as an excuse to perpetrate bodily harm or issue threats, this should be met not only with disapproval but with the full force of the laws against such behavior. Those of us who denounce violence will make our own insistence on this point more credible by our own principled respect for the law. There are multiple reports of violent incidents that are being connected to the election results. Most of what appears in the media (and, plausibly, most of what has actually taken place) is violence directed against persons such as Muslims and Mexicans, whose religious and ethnic identities are bound up not only in Mr. Trump’s rhetorical gestures, but in his stated policies. Some of the violence has been against Trump supporters. All violence is out of bounds and deserves the condemnation of every American.

Christian discipleship is authenticated by love of enemies

This past political campaign was demoralizing in its constant ratcheting up of the language of demonization. This happened on both sides, and neither side seems to see its own demonization for what it is. This makes civil discourse impossible. Or, perhaps the gradual breakdown of civil discourse has left us with no way of engaging in truly rational discussions (see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, chapter 2). Without the possibility of rational argument, the temptation is to resort to demonizing those who disagree. In many cases, we have no way of making common cause, even with those inclined to agree with us, without scapegoating someone (this Girardian insight has been inverted and made into a conscious political tool by Saul Alinsky). Christians cannot settle for this state of affairs, and certainly ought not to demonize those who hold divergent ideas from our own. Pope Saint John Paul II, while an archbishop in Poland, used the strategy of holding the communist regime to account for the gap between their official rhetoric and the actual state of affairs. Václav Havel followed a similar strategy in the former Czechoslovakia.

The simplest way of stating this is that we are commanded to love our enemies and not to meet violence with violence.

Christian social thought is grounded in love of neighbor

Who is my neighbor? The rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump was an indication of a widespread sense in communities blue and red that the general drift of American politics has been at the expense of a great many Americans. Trump’s hope to “make America great again,” and Sanders’s “political revolution,” need to be seen in the long-range context of a failed war in Iraq, the ongoing symbiotic relationship between the federal government and defense contractors, banks, et al, 5.5 million home foreclosures, with virtually no repercussions for those responsible for this widespread suffering. The Washington and media elites are widely understood to belong to a utopian (i.e. “no-place”) globalist class that has forgotten the responsibility they have for their fellow Americans. Instead of seeing fellow Americans as neighbors with a common cause, elites unthinkingly deride the suffering as the irresponsible “47 percent” or lob them into the bucket of deplorables.

Again, I will have much more to say about how we got here, and what sort of strategies are needed to recover a sense of solidarity between Americans. In various ways, the healing follows from the principle of love of neighbor. The priest and the Levite, political insiders and beneficiaries of political power, were afraid to show compassion to the man left for dead on the way to Jericho. Perhaps we need to become outsiders, like the Samaritan, in order to see the suffering in front of us for what it is. Through the strengthening of local networks of concern, we can bring to bear a properly political pressure to bear upon government leaders, most of whom, after all, are chosen by us and work for us.

Love of God, love of neighbor, love of enemies. These are the measure of Christian witness, which is needed now.

Next: Why emotivism leads us to court political power.