Moving With the Grain of Universe: Becoming One With the Body of Christ

In this life, reality comes to us through the senses in such a way that we are distanced from that which is outside of us, our possessions and our parents as well as God Himself. Though God isn’t truly outside of us, He seems that way to us and allows us to be separate from Him in this way as we grow up. As St. John of the Cross once said: God distances Himself from us in the manner of a wise and loving mother who steps away from her child as he is learning to walk, letting that child fall occasionally. In the case of God, there is no true distancing as there is with a human mother, but He fosters an illusion of separation while we learn a proper sort of independence.

Even with our relationships with Creation, those with our tools and those with our loved ones, there also is no true separation. As Michael Polanyi, surgeon and scientist and philosopher, pointed out in various writings, including Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, our tools become extensions of our bodies as our brains adjust to treat them as such. You can see this in the fluid movements of surgeon or carpenter or cook. That scalpel or file or spatula is an extension of the human arm and their brain is aware of its possibilities and its dimensions in a way very similar to the brain’s awareness of that arm’s possibilities and dimensions.

Those who wish for friendship with Jesus Christ have an analogical relationship to the Body of Christ though we mortal men be more like the tool than the arm or the brain. Yet, each and every human being who willingly belongs to Christ is a living and self-aware extension of the Body of Christ. The resurrected can be more perfectly a part of the Body of Christ even as they are more perfectly human beings.

The relationship of a friend of Christ to the Body of Christ isn’t a matter of an over-excited religious imagination but rather a very real relationship as is the relationship that great mathematicians and metaphysicians have to abstract — but real — domains of truths. As is necessary in such a case, I speak analogically but it’s not wholly analogical. There’s a relationship that we can’t speak of directly in words or grammatical structures available to us and which won’t exist until we stretch and try to describe greater truths which seem so out of focus no matter how we squint the eyes of our minds. (See Abstract Mathematics and the Real Presence for a closely related discussion.)

A modern Christian has a strong tendency to shout out news of his personal salvation while talking as if the reality of salvation is but a dream with no connection to reality. My salvation is real when that claim helps me feel better but salvation is a pious illusion when that claim threatens to get in the way of my effectiveness in this real world which has no seeming connection to any real Heaven. (See A Thomistic Take on Madness and Modernism for a short discussion of the schizophrenic nature of much modern thought.)

As I’ve stated before, pre-modern Christians had a view of Heaven, of the next life, which was consistent with beliefs about the cosmos, the earth and all that encircled it. On the other side of the moon’s orbit lay ethereal stuff, pure stuff and not the dirt and flesh and blood of the earth. Hell, the place of damnation, lay below the surface of the earth. When modern empirical knowledge took this relatively simple view of the cosmos-universe from us, we Christians simply etherealized Heaven, giving up our ability to speak of Heaven or the resurrection or salvation in concrete terms. Heaven and the resurrection and salvation have become dream-like and unreal to many in the modern world, including many children raised as Christians.

In any case, we Christians need to pull ourselves together, to learn to think of Creation — all of Creation — as a unity though having different phases. We need to develop words and concepts to help us think of Heaven in concrete terms that make sense as speculations of a Creation in which this universe is but a phase. When we do so, then we can begin to see that the Body of Christ was first conceived in this universe and still grows in this universe even as that Body has reached a mature stage in Heaven, that is, the world of the resurrected. That Body is mature in Heaven but not yet complete Membership remains open to all who wish to share true life, the life of God Himself.

Monday of Holy Week: March 17, 2008

In the Gospel reading for daily Mass [John 12:1-11], we hear of the anointing of the feet of Jesus by Mary the sister of Lazarus whom Jesus had raised from the dead. And then we hear:

When the great crowd of the Jews learned that he [Jesus] was there, they came, not only on account of Jesus but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. [John 12:9]

Some may have personally seen the miracle itself, the raising of Lazarus from the dead, and others may have missed it, but the great crowd came to see the result of that spectacular miracle.

And many would travel the relatively short distance to Jerusalem to welcome Christ riding on a donkey, throwing palms in front of Him and acclaiming Him as the Son of David, the Messiah.

And few indeed would remain with the Lord Jesus Christ on His journey to the Place of the Skull where He was nailed to a cross. We might wonder if there is a a relationship between this abandonment and the fascination with spectacular miracles.

When we seek spectacles, we’re trying to look at God and His actions as if we somehow existed apart from Him. We should instead be seeking a true union with God through Christ so that we move with God in His Creation rather than trying to find Him as if He were a beautiful sunset to stare at. We should be wishing to think with God and not to think about God, to pray with Christ and not to pray to Christ, to speak with God in all our words and not to speak sometimes to our neighbor and sometimes to God. Those who achieve such a union with God will be going about the work that God has set for them. They will be living in God and He in them. They won’t need to go see Lazarus being raised from the grave or to see the risen Lazarus walking about.

Wrestling with God

I’ve not been well over the past couple months or so, not well in spiritual and emotional terms though I also wore myself out physically by taking on too many hours of volunteer work and that at a time when I had been productive in studying and writing and starting to get back to larger-scale projects — writing books. And then I have had various computer problems over the past month which have impacted my calling to study and write. These are the reasons I haven’t been posting so frequently for the past few months, though I’d been trying to cut down on my shorter writings that I might return to working on some full-length book projects.

In the overall scheme of things, I didn’t suffer much at all though being keyed up for serious intellectual work is similar to being keyed up to swim or run at a high level of exertion. If someone is running 20 miles or more per week and has to stop because of a minor injury or schedule conflicts, he’s going to go through phases of agitation and depression. The situation was similar for me: I was keyed up for hours of study and writing each day. And, then, I found my days largely filled and I was too tired to do difficult mental work.

My suffering was trivial compared to the sufferings of someone dying of a painful disease or a parent who’s buried a child. It wasn’t even so intense as my sufferings during early stages of my conversion. But, this relatively shallow sort of suffering has distracted me from the lines of thought I’d been working on. I’m a bit scattered in my thoughts and somehow started to think about the strange tale of Jacob wrestling with God — see Genesis 32:22-32 of the RSV for a straight-faced account of a very strange tale.

Jacob wrestled with men and with God and was said to have beat them all, mortal men and the Almighty.

From Sin to Rights

In the state of nature, where man discovers himself as an individual, he discovers that he is something prior to being a citizen or a Christian, something more fundamental than either. Before his submission to either political or religious law, the individual is a whole, since he has in him the sufficient source of all his actions, de facto as well as de jure. Every man is a whole sufficient unto himself prior to the existence of the law. [The City of Man, Pierre Manent, Translated by Marc A. LePain, Forward by Jean Bethke Elshtain, Princeton University Press, 1998, page 34]

In the context of that quote, Manent was expressing the ideas of modern political philosophers and most certainly not his own ideas. More specifically, Manent is speaking of the “state of nature” as defined by modern political philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau and also assumed by Thomas Jefferson in The Declaration of Independence.

How is it that we got into this situation where the descendants of Christian peoples, Catholic and Orthodox and Protestant, came to believe that they’re individuals of this sort, pre-existing their relationship to a greater human community, political or religious, pre-existing even their relationship to God? How can we believe ourselves to be free-standing in this way, even autonomous agents, when we are taught by the Bible and by Christian tradition that our salvation comes when we are one (in Christ) as Christ and His Father (and Their Spirit) are one? [See John 17:11.] How is it that our efforts to guide and direct our own conversions and those of other human beings seem to accord too well to this assumption that there we’re individuals who choose to center our lives on God, or not, in the same way that we choose a toothpaste?

God Himself is communal. He is not a solitary God, not even the solitary God of Martin Buber, the great Jewish theologian who spoke of a solitary God who needed man to have a conversation partner. Father and Son and Holy Spirit have plenty to say to each other and don’t need us. Why did God create and then shape this world? Why did God create man? While we’re told that He loved us before we were even conceived, I think we need to be a bit more humble and not assume that God created us primarily for our own sakes and then to speak as if the Almighty watched helplessly as Adam and Eve fell from grace forcing Him to send His Son to suffer for us. We’re characters in a story being told by God, a story in which the main event is the self-sacrifice of the Son, a self-sacrifice which act of love and submission to His Father. When we consider the absolute centrality of God and of the relationships between Father and Son and Holy Spirit, it would seem we’re driven to the conclusion that we’re the accidental beneficiaries of a drama of love played out primarily between God the Father and God the Son. Moreover, we have to recognize that the all-powerful God is telling the story He planned to tell and not a story which has been changed by acts of Adam and Eve. We have to learn how to read the Bible in light of our basic beliefs about the all-powerful God.

Because of our tendency to read the Bible in strange ways which are in conflict with those basic beliefs about God, because of our decreasing levels of reading and thinking skills as the West continues its 500 year decay, modern Christians have no coherent view of even our physical universe let alone a greater view of Creation in all its phases and in its basic foundational elements. (See From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun for a frighteningly plausible history of the decay of the West in terms of that decay in literacy and see my other blog Acts of Being for discussions of my efforts to produce a coherent Christian view of Creation.)

Christianity and Privacy

Holy Father, keep them in thy name, which thou hast given me, that they may be one, even as we are one. [This is the second sentence in John 17:11, where I quote from the RSV -- Catholic Edition.]

This is a very difficult verse which speaks to a theme winding its way through the New Testament, a theme related to a fundamental belief of Trinitarian Christianity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three Persons but one God. They act together, think together, love together. If we are to be one in that sense, there will be no privacy in Heaven of the sort that so many of us like so well. We will not be individuals holding our own thoughts and feelings separate from others and, yet, we’ll be our own selves, just as the Father is Himself, the Son is Himself, and the Holy Spirit is Himself. They share all and act together in all They do but each one remains Himself.

Each person saved into the Body of Christ will initiate and all will participate in what each starts. And that’s the key — Christ will be with those human beings He saves even as He is still one of the Holy Trinity.

We’ll be sharing the life of God — the only life which can allow life without end. We’ll have given up so much that we consider valuable in this life, including our privacy, and we’ll have that share in the life of God.

I long to share that life. I’m also scared to give up my privacy even knowing that I’ll gain so much more.

And I’m very curious. How can I give up my privacy and yet remain myself? How can Father and Son and Holy Spirit share all and yet each remain Himself? Do each of these questions have the same answer, or at least very similar answers? I think so. I pray that I find out.

What is Love?

Love is patient and love endures. He who truly loves will persevere for true love is not just a passion of the moment — it results from a serious intention to establish and maintain a certain relationship with the beloved. He who loves doesn’t calculate short-term consequences nor does he take his eyes from the path he follows. He who loves doesn’t get lost in dreams of what’s far ahead of his next footstep.

Love is not passionate desire though passionate desire is an immature form of love, energizing the lovers at first but becoming destructive if they don’t mature in their ways of loving. She who loves will grow and mature and heal even as her love calms and deepens. She who loves will perform the acts of love through periods of passion and periods of indifference.

To enter Heaven, we must become like children in our implicit recognition of our immaturity. We must become like children in accepting the processes of growth and maturity and healing which will bring us to a true adulthood.

God’s love creates from nothing. God’s love also shapes what it has brought into being, but a creature’s love can also shape brethren and hills and cattle into forms pleasing to God. This shaping process is often labeled ‘creative’ and it’s the process of bringing particular things or relationships into a different and perhaps better form. But we must always remember the difference between divine creation and creaturely creation. Not only does God have infinite freedom and power to shape things but He can create being where there was nothing. We mortal men have a very limited but important power to shape ourselves and others around us, as well as our environments.

To enter Heaven, we have to become like children in the Presence of God or the presence of His servants, trusting our Lord and His servants to shape us into our proper forms that we be suited to share God’s life.

Love is the relationship that binds. Gravity and electromagnetism and nuclear forces bind things as love binds moral beings. All those binding forces can operate to form or to deform, to unite or to repel. Love is no different in that regard. Intelligence honed to wisdom is necessary for the proper exercise of love, though most of us can rely on the wisdom of our traditions and especially the wisdom found in the Bible.

When we relinquish our pride, we realize our ties of dependencies are forms of love. We love not just when we give freely but also when we accept without grudging our humble condition.

What is Freedom?

In the modern world, we tend to think of freedom in terms of satisfying desires. To be sure, even many who live for that false sort of freedom seem to realize that we then become no more than our desires or, more horribly, the thwarting of those desires — a terrible and humiliating state in either case. Hannibal the Cannibal is the most free of all modern men because he has become his desires and he has gained the power to satisfy them. Hannibal the Cannibal is the role-model for our politicians and our lawyers, our investment bankers and our corporate executives, our athletes and our entertainers. He may even be a role-model for many clergymen.

Let me move in a different direction with a quote from a modern philosopher:

[W]e are free when our acts spring from our whole personality, when they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to it which one sometimes finds between the artist and his work.” (page 172, Time and Free Will, Henri Bergson, Dover Publications, 2001 reprint)

Let me provide another quote, this one from a prominent brain-scientist:

An intent is the directing of an action toward some future goal that is defined and chosen by the actor. (page 8, How Brains Make Up Their Minds, Walter J. Freeman)

In Thomistic moral philosophy, ‘intent’ defines human morality and freedom. We don’t freely will to be a good man or a good woman, we choose to struggle towards that state of goodness. We don’t freely will to cut down on our drinking or stop smoking, we choose to move towards a state where we don’t continue our bad habits or bad thoughts because our brains and our bodies and our relationships to others and to our environments have all changed. We should realize that the very process of forming intents can be a bit vague if only because we don’t see the goal clearly until we’re well along the path. I’ve certainly deluded myself often about the goal of becoming a Christ-like man and I’ve also deluded myself about the nature of the path I have to travel. The forming of our moral intentions is an ongoing process and not an action taken once and for all time.

The modern concept of free-will is useful to entrepreneurs, political or commercial, as they go about their task of destroying local community life to draw us all into the gigantic marketplaces of a land where natural cultural and physical boundaries have been dismantled. That concept of free-will leaves most human beings stripped of their defenses against those entrepreneurs and other predators and parasites of a cosmopolitanism and imperialism rendered all the more damaging to human beings by the pretense, in the U.S. and other countries, that we remain dedicated to traditional human values.

Where is God?

A seemingly silly question. Any child could tell you that God is in Heaven just as many pagans could have told you that Zeus is on Mt. Olympus. Actually, it’s not clear that either the child or the pagan would have a well-formed idea or image corresponding to those words, but they would have their standard answers. All children and most adults will have a view of physical reality tied to naive perceptions of space and time and matter.

To understand is to accept reality and to have a way of viewing it as a coherent whole. Modern physics, especially the cosmological models derived from Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and modern mathematics, including geometries and logics and theories of randomness, have cast doubts upon the absoluteness or transcendental nature of any of our scientific or logical or mathematical truths. Time and space are not necessary, though they are necessary for the existence of life as we know it. Our greatest mathematical truths might well be contingent truths of Creation, that is, truths created by God as the underlying stuff of this world. See The Christian in the Universe of Einstein: 2.1. God as the Creator of Truths for a preliminary discussion of this difficult issue.

But, we all tend to think as if the necessary truths of our sort of existence are necessary truths in an absolute sense. If we wish to talk to God, we literalize that action in our imagination, thinking ourselves to be facing God and talking to Him as if He were a human companion. Of course, Christians believe it’s possible to speak with the Son of God in this way and we believe that Jesus Christ is true God as well as true man, but we quickly get ourselves into trouble this way because the Son of God is not only facing us in His human body but also inside of us, bringing us into being and energizing us each instant that we exist.

The God of Jesus Christ is present in this world of time and space. In fact, He’s deeper inside of us than we ourselves can reach, as St. Augustine of Hippo pointed out. Going back into the Hebrew Testament, He is the God who declared His own name to be I-am, a name hard to understand because we are tempted to interpret it in terms of an unbalanced existentialist theology that disdains creaturely substance, but we are equally tempted to think that Moses was merely told that God has necessary being and is the only entity which is truly immortal. The Father of the Gods in the higher forms of paganism could have also claimed such as he sat on his throne.

The Peace of Christ is Published

I’ve put up a page, accessible on the sidebar, about the publication of my book The Peace of Christ. The book should appear on the sites of major internet booksellers before long but it can be purchased from the publisher, Wipf & Stock, already. The direct link for ordering is: The Peace of Christ.

Rules of Life: Part 1

Christian religious orders are governed by rules of life which are devoted mostly to practical aspects of regulating our lives that we might better serve God and our local communities. For example, St. Benedict, who’d set out to be a hermit, couldn’t drive away the men who wanted him to be their leader and he was forced to produce a rule of life for the first community of monks in the tradition named after him — the Benedictines. Yes, the liqueur is named after the religious order because they invented it amongst many other foods, drinks, and technological items in pre-modern European history. Despite the prejudices that tell us those Medieval monks were superstitious men, they were actually the ones who safeguarded and enriched and passed on much of the Roman culture during some difficult years of political, economic, and social breakdown.

“The Rule of St. Benedictine” was the key to forming men into monks who were parts of communities that functioned like well-disciplined military units. It wasn’t like the modern age where those who accomplish much can assume fame as a reward — we know few of the names of those who accomplished so much in the various Benedictine institutions. There were other orders which had rules of life to help them carry out their duties to God and man, including many in the Eastern tradition whose rules actually preceded that of St. Benedict. In fact, St. Benedict wouldn’t have claimed either to be shaping the future nor to be original — he borrowed much from the Desert Fathers of the East and put together an eminently practical rule to allow men to live properly ordered lives. And women had started to form communities under the same rule even during St. Benedict’s lifetime.

I emphasize the word ‘practical’. The “Rule of St. Benedict” contained rules for advancing the spiritual life, rules very similar to the 12 rules of modern programs to help alcoholics and other addicts. They’re not the same, but very similar, making us wonder if the path towards holiness might involve the breaking of habits of mind and body as dangerous as those of alcoholism. But St. Benedict wasn’t a teetotaler, even though he wouldn’t have encouraged excessive drink. How do we know he wasn’t a teetotaler? One of the concerns of the “Rule of St. Benedict” is the fair sharing of the wine: brothers who do the physical work should get the greater share rather than the abbot and the cellarer (manager of provisions).

Practical. We all need practical guidelines to become God-centered human beings and we modern human beings are trained to think in ‘spiritual’ terms when it comes to our duties to God and to our fellow-men as children of God. Vague claims of deep love don’t feed our neighbors as we were told in the “Letter of James” and those vague claims don’t discipline our prayer-life or rebuild our ties to family members, neighbors, or friends. Sometimes, raising some aspects of life to a spiritual level is a good strategy for making them irrelevant. This seems to have been the case in recent centuries for those aspects of life which ground the more complete God-centered life.