Wednesday, January 14, 2009

The Christian Humpty-Dumpty

do we even know what it means to live a Christian life?

The Problem.
What does it mean to be a Christian? What does it mean to follow after Jesus Christ in my life? What does it mean to be a Christian today, here, now? Is Jesus of Nazareth someone too foreign and too ancient to be able to be grasped, to be held on to in today's climate, like sand slipping out through loose fingers?

I know I have a few presuppositions that I bring with me to the table in answering these questions. First, I know that Jesus of Nazareth is God, is Savior, and is glorified at the right hand of the Father for all eternity. Second, I have encountered and been filled with the powerful presence of the Holy Spirit on more than one occasion so that- even if I wanted to- I could not doubt His action in my story and in others. Also, I know the flawed and broken Catholic Church is the virgin bride of Christ and the fruitful Mother of humanity's gift of salvation. And finally, it is with all pride that I can say I am really bad at this whole "Christian living" thing.

What I want to do in this article is just bounce around a few big problems that we have in trying to understand how we are to live the Christian life. In this article I will introduce one main problem and its significant offspring. This is the problem of specialization. I seek to do this in four articles of which this is the first introduction to the series.


One Wild Divorce Court!
When it comes to being a Christian I think there is this weird double-think that occurs far too often, especially with young people searching for Him in their new lives. This double-think is a really annoying obstacle to intelligent thought, but it so widespread that I don't think this little article is going to contribute much to answering the above questions. The problem is a modern peculiarity, so I am told countless times in various Christian philosophical, theological and historical comments, and it is this: we are so specialized into tiny compartments that we have lost all sense of the whole, of the integrity of life and the universe and God. As Chesterton said it, and said it far better than me, "this world is one wild divorce court!"

What I mean is simple and is seen in every day life. The ordinary man feels impotent and inadequate when contrasted with the technical skill of the specialist. We have given up the right to think for ourselves, practicing a strict fideism to the men and women in white coats or with alphabets of degrees after their last name. We keep specializing so narrowly, we keep dividing up and dividing up subjects into its constituent parts that there is no longer any possibility of synthesis. We have put everything in life on the dissection table and have absolved ourselves of the responsibility to put it all back together again. The real tragedy is that without the whole the parts really do not make any sense. Like tearing upon the rear legs of the frog to scrutinize its muscles and then wondering why it no longer jumps. You've killed the thing!

So goes the world into divorce after divorce, and so goes the Church. Imagine a world where you can study theology without studying Scripture. "No! That is left to the exegetes to banter about." And those in Scripture would never think about making dogmatic, theological statements, for "That's the task of the systematic theologian! We just deal with declensions, grammar, and the politics behind the texts!" I mean, this divorce and specialization and analysis became so silly that Christology - the study of Jesus Christ - was actually separated from Soteriology - the study of the salvation that Jesus won for us. The Savior was separated from salvation! How huge an obstacle to rational thought!

In many ways, however, this scholarly attitude of distinguishing-so-as-to-divorce has seeped into the ordinary person's own mode of thinking, acting, talking and praying. Somewhere along the line between the 13th Century and the 20th Century we divorced the subject of Christian Spirituality from Morality and Christology. We sent each subject to its own corner to be studied, analyzed, picked apart and dissected and then when all was said and done, there was nothing that connected them back together. This was first done in teaching, then in the practices of ordinary persons. We lost the forest for the sake of the pine needle, let alone the trees!

Ethics Without Salvation, Prayer without Morality
Here is the common double-think that impairs our understanding of living the Christian life. On the one hand there is morality and on the other there is spirituality. Faith and morals have been separated and asked not to talk to each other any more. And who Jesus Christ is and does has nothing really to do with either. This happened for at least the period between the Councils of Trent and Vatican II, if not earlier back to the 14th Century.

Consequently, it is a crisis today in evangelization when the cautioned and careful proclamation of the Gospel has distilled away any controversial moral principles that could offend. So we have a truncated form of the basic kerygmatic message of the cross and resurrection. We talk a lot about who God is and what Jesus Christ has done, while glossing over the opinion of Jesus who said, "Repent!" and not just "believe." That is, you need to change because God hates your actions.

The encounter with the Gospel meant that we had to accept the moral implications of its message and the theological revelation it unfolded as one and the same Gospel. Cult prostitutes in pagan religions were not allowed to be Christians and carry on their fornication. Some early Christians steeped in pagan society had to become vegetarians in order to escape eating meat that other people sacrificed to idols, then sold in local markets. Why? Because it was a violation of faith to eat meat sacrificed to idols, and thus it became immoral for any Christian to participate in it, even in a more remote way. Homosexuals became chaste. Thieves made restitution. Fornicators married. Adulterers found forgiveness in the cross, but also found their way back to their own marriage beds in renewed faithfulness.

Let me make this point more clear. Just as a person cannot say, "I'm a communist" and also "keep the government out of the free markets;" just as a man cannot declare himself an anarchist and then advocate the divine right of kings; just as a person cannot say, "I'm a Christian" and say in the next breath, "but there was no such person as Jesus;" so too a person cannot say, "I'm a Christian" and utilize contraception, support abortion, or advocate euthanasia. The reason why is because these are things that have nothing to do with giving glory to God, and such actions or advocacy of them, like free markets to the communist, demonstrate whose you really are: the world's.


Conclusion
I know a lot of this sounds harsh, but it really should not. It is only because so much of our lives are separated into neat little compartments that never touch each other and have next to no significance with one another that we find what I have stated above as mean-spirited or over the top. The truth is faith and morals are the one Christian Gospel, united as one together in reality, so what our task needs to be is to unite them in practice and in theory. We need to stop allowing the immoral message of this world turn back our voices from preaching the truth, the whole truth, so help us God!

In the next part of this series, I wish to treat how the divorce between faith and morals, seen as possessing two different types of content, limits the way we view "Christian Living" and how we experience the moral life.


God bless,
gomer
AMDG

Trained Up in Love, Part II

Always Faithful
Love is not just the emotional satisfaction that one person can offer to another, for that would be too limited and would just be weak sauce. True love has got to be so much more than these tattered attempts at wholeness that the world presents to us as "real love." We may start with the physical beauty of the other or the way that other person makes us feel, but brothers and sisters, we have to keep love moving onwards and upwards from there.

Love, for it to be real, must be faithful.

Many people, especially men it seems (myself included!), have this irrational fear of commitment to another person for the whole of their lives. We can understand why many people feel this way, after all, I did say earlier that love limits freedom because freedom serves love, not the other way around. Giving up options, choices, Plan B, this scares people! And I think in a lot of ways people should be a little scared. Love is a serious thing and should not be entered into lightly. It carries with it the weight of two whole lives, two hearts, the past of two different people and also their futures, even including their eternal destiny. This is heavy stuff!

That being said, love is liberating in a new way. Love opens up new levels of service and self-disterestedness that never could exist in the bachelor's life, which is almost always self-centered. Faithful commitment is so often resisted because we are not used to saying to another, "You" and "Always;" but "Me" and "Now."

So what does it mean to be faithful in love?

First, it means learning how to break yourself of the most dangerous habit that fights against the heart of love, which is the "me-first" disease. The understanding of love as the gift of self to another means that the opposite is the use of others for oneself, which, let us be honest with one another, is really how most of us just naturally think. But for love to be real, love must think, "How can I serve you today?"

How do we break ourselves of this me-first disease? Slowly, but steadily, we have to choose to love the other person each day. Do not rely on the intensity of emotions or the agreeableness of the other person's personality to our own in order to win over your heart. It lies in the power of each man and woman to choose the other and to choose to serve.

And it is in the service of the other than the me-self disease begins to break. Just like any disease, it may take some distasteful medicine in order to cause the cure, but without it we will fail. So without mincing any words or trying to water it down I will just come out and say it: you cannot love someone without dying to yourself, without killing your own goofy self-love. Appealing? Probably not, but it is good and it is the only way to true and lasting love. Why is dying to yourself so important? You have to create room in your heart for your Beloved to truly take root. You have to stop thinking, "What's in it for me?" and you need to start thinking, "How can I love her?" It is in the day-to-day struggle that your love finds its fullness. It is in self-denial that commitment becomes transformed into faithfulness.

Being faithful is not just don't have sex with other people who aren't your spouse. Faithfulness is a positive virtue that is more than a lack of sin, but is a growth of the mind and heart of one person with his beloved. One can refrain from sex but be an adulterer of the eyes. One can refrain from adultery of the eyes, but still be an emotion whore, seeking intimacy that are reserved only for your Beloved. How many wives regard themselves as "harmless flirts" and how many husbands loose control of their eyes when about town or in the office? This wounds faithfulness and reveals deeper levels of selfishness, conceit, or maybe just plain vanity.

Is it Creative?
In his beautiful mediation on love, The Jeweler's Shop, Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) expresses a central point that escapes many today when it comes to real love: "only one question is important, is it creative?"

The root of love is freedom, its shoot is completeness, its flower is its faithfulness, and it is with all of these together that love is fruitful, growing and expanding into the lives of the couple and into the lives of others surrounding them. Here, love becomes not just a power between the two, but an environment that overflows into others.

Essentially, love bears fruit. First, in the lives of the lovers as deeper and newer levels of selflessness are discovered. The sick baby, the elderly parents, the meaningless job that clothes and shelters the family, the drudgery and tediousness of the daily grind- all of these become the jagged rocks upon which love spills and splashes itself against, wave upon wave. The Lover discovers new virtues within himself that previously did not exist, as love is the form of virtue, engendering values, virtues, principles, commitments and perspectives that otherwise would never have existed before. The Beloved finds wellsprings of strength and patience, hope and wisdom that were dormant in her sleeping heart before love's wake up call sounded loud.

And the fruitfulness continues as love conquers all.

In the giving of self and the receiving of the other, love reciprocates into a whole environment, but love demands more. Love seeks to turn its gaze from the couple to others, to enlarge their hearts even more than has been up till now. Love is so fruitful that in our human world it takes on a further dimension of creativity; that is, love wills to overflow so much that it will bring about the creation of new persons to be known and loved.

Love, in the eyes of the world, is not creative. It may be expressive, even a little artistic, but it cannot be fruitful because the grain of wheat refuses to fall to the ground and die. At the heart of real, passionate, true love is dying of the one into the life of the other. It is self-sacrificial. The fullness of the fruit comes in the dying of the seed, in its crushing down and breaking open. It is the only way. It is life's way. But our world, on top of being "One wild divorce court" as Chesterton put it, is also dominated by the contraceptive mentality, wounding love's fruitfulness in order to attempt the harnesses of love's pleasures without its demands.

There is the argument that sex, for it to be a positive and loving act, must uphold simultaneously its two ends, or purposes, which are procreation and unity. The act of making love between spouses ought always to be a unifying act, bringing the two bodies closer and causing their to be one heart in place of the two. Also, sex is clearly, naturally, and obviously ordered towards the generation and education of children. But, many hold, sometimes there are good reasons to separate the procreative end from the unitive end, to divorce babies from bonding.

The great tragedy of the situation is the thought that this child created by your reciprocal self-giving to one another is somehow not the ultimate expression of your unity. I mean this clearly: your children are your unity, writ large in their DNA, their personalities and their hearts. The child is the incarnation of the whole environment of your love. The child is the walking, talking, living, breathing enfleshment of two lovers, a love so real that nine months later you have to give him/her a name!

Concluding Remarks
And it is in the creative fruitfulness of love that we can see why there must also be the faithful commitment to one another in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, for richer or poorer. A new life needs the loving stability of two parents bound to one another regardless of the obstacles that life throws at them. Love endures because this created life endures. Love is, then, meant to be a sure and stable thing, a rock or fortress in which the garden of love may grow abundantly.


For love to be real, it must be true. For it to be true, it must be free, total, faithful and fruitful. Otherwise, it just cannot satisfy the human heart!


God love you,
Mike
AMDG