Lost awhile
Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home —
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene — one step enough for me.
Unfittest
The Church has been horrifyingly corrupt in previous eras and still survived. It’s been led by ecclesiastics who make Bernard Law’s hands look clean, and still survived. It’s faced fiercer enemies than Richard Dawkins and still survived. Time after time, Chesterton wrote, ‘the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs.’ Each time, ‘it was the dog that died.’ But if the Church isn’t finished, period, it can still be finished for certain people, in certain contexts, in certain times. And so it is in this case: for millions in Europe and America, Catholicism is probably permanently associated with sexual scandal, rather than the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Ross Douthat, in a little piece for this month’s Atlantic’s ‘Ideas’ feature.
Thou long-expected
We see the light!
The sign of something living
The reflection that the Church of the incarnate Word is in turn the Church of the word, and not just of the sacrament, leads us to a complementary aspect: sacrament and word are the two pillars upon which the Church stands — and we find in the relationship of these two elements, yet again, a polarity of unity-and-duality that cannot be further analyzed; this is the sign of something living that precedes and goes beyond any logical constructions and can never be entirely enclosed within them.
Bloody backward
In the end the cross is a scandal because Israel is a scandal, with its ineffaceable particularity of election, expiation, purity, and difference for the sake of the world. The blood of Christ is repugnant to the Gentile mind, whether ancient or modern. This mind would prevail were it not continually disrupted by grace. . . . . Grace, strictly speaking, does not mean continuity but radical discontinuity, . . . not improvement but resurrection from the dead.
Christmas
Blessed be the Lord God of Israel,
For he has visited and redeemed his people,
And has raised up a horn of salvation for us
In the house of his servant David,
As he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets
Who have been since the world began,
That we should be saved from our enemies
And from the hand of all who hate us,
To perform the mercy promised to our fathers
And to remember his holy covenant.
Personality shift
Traditional religion’s ethereal immortality doesn’t strike Martine Rothblatt as much of a trade-off for dying. To the millionaire entrepreneur, who launched both Sirius Satellite Radio and one of Maryland’s largest biotech companies, death is both tragic and, through not-yet-invented technology, avoidable. Rothblatt embraces a more tangible immortality, a digital, downloadable one — a “transreligion for technological times.”
Word for word
The Council of Nicaea, in interpreting the word “Son” philosophically by means of the concept “of one substance,” is saying that “Son” is to be understood here, not in the sense of religious metaphor, but in the most real and concrete sense of the word. . . . Thus it signifies that God’s word does not deceive us. Jesus is not only described as the Son of God, he is the Son of God. God does not remain hidden for all eternity beneath the clouds of imagery which obscure more than they reveal. He actually touches man, and allows himself to be touched by man, in the person of him who is the Son.
Hermeneutic
If this is the case, it is only possible really to understand this person by entering into this act of prayer, by participating in it. This is suggested by Jesus’ saying that no one can come to him unless the Father draws him (Jn 6:44). Where there is no Father, there is no Son. Where there is no relationship with God, there can be no understanding of him who, in his innermost self, is nothing but relationship with God, the Father — although one can doubtless establish plenty of details about him. Therefore a participation in the mind of Jesus, i.e., in his prayer, which (as we have seen) is an act of love, of self-giving and self-expropriation to men, is not some kind of pious supplement to the Gospels, adding nothing to knowledge of him or even being an obstacle to the rigorous purity of critical knowing. On the contrary, it is the basic precondition if real understanding — i.e., the entering-in to the same time and the same meaning — is to take place. . . . The person who prays begins to see. . . . All real progress in theological understanding has its origin in the eye of love and in its faculty of beholding.
From then-Archbishop Ratzinger’s Behold The Pierced One, 1984.
Illumination
157 Faith is certain. It is more certain than all human knowledge because it is founded on the very word of God who cannot lie. To be sure, revealed truths can seem obscure to human reason and experience, but “the certainty that the divine light gives is greater than that which the light of natural reason gives.” “Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.”
From the Vatican web site’s catechism.
Precedent
The religious right, the social-justice left, and even traditionalists who wish to restore a past Christian order or create a new one have in common that they appear to the world as simply one group among many with a set of ideas about how to run the world. . . . Christian hope logically precedes Christian morality. . . . I would like to think we might be entering a time where the world is once again interested in Christianity’s metaphysical and mystical claims. If this is true in the modernized world — Europe, America, much of Asia — it’s probably because we have attained so much and are still so unhappy.
From Maclin Horton’s last Sunday Night Journal.
Appropriation
I maintain that the most important truth of the gospel for our times is simply this: that God saved the world, not by abolishing or transforming the human condition but by taking it on.
— Edward T. Oakes in a 2005 article in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review.
Resurrection & subversion
What we discover is that that disquiet, perhaps, was always a sign of a created openness to God and his kingdom, and that in a sense the odd tendency of primitive man to see death as unnatural turns out to be a sign of spiritual wisdom, a perfectly correct sense that most of us would do well to try to recover, the true nature of spiritual beings created in the divine image. And that maybe even that strange and haunting and irrecoverable immediacy of the small child’s experience of the world is a foretaste of our true home.
Aftermath
And despite the apparent priorities of the ministry of Christ, Jesus is moved by His mother’s maternal boldness to respond to the need. And, as is always true of His miracles, His intervention results in an excess of Grace. His miracles are always “more than enough.” There is never mere “efficiency” in Grace: the Trinitarian radiance of Love can never be characterized as “just enough.” There are always leftovers in the aftermath of the Power of God. There is too much wine. There are twelve baskets of bread. There is 153 fish in a net. There are aliens, Canaanites and Samaritans who are accidentally healed, despite historical strictures. There are Messianic secrets that are always broken. Animals speak, the rocks cry out, entire storms are soothed into Peace.
From a post of a little more than a week ago on the Orthodox blog Second Terrace.
Supra-centrist
We are appalled . . . by the domination of faith by politics, whether of the left or the right, and are weary of watching the struggle of a joyless “ain’t it awful” orthodoxy against a heterodoxy which seems intent not only on throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater but on smashing the bathtub as well. We are tired of these selective approaches to the Faith, both of which strike us as fundamentally assimilationist in nature. The whole Catholic, it seems to us, would not be a creature of the “right” or the “left” or even of the “center” but of the Transcendent . . . .
An excerpt
To imagine ourselves outside the temporality that imprisons us and in some way to sense that eternity is not an unending succession of days in the calendar, but something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality — this we can only attempt. It would be like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time — the before and after — no longer exists.