The Water Is Wide

What It Means To Be Human

Strange and wonderful are the "coincidences" of life. My last post reflects upon the idea that we are not made for this earth, and a reader responds to that proposition with a slice of Rilke. Today on First Things appears a post from one of the thinkers I love to read, archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver. The archbishop not only sounds the same theme as I did with much more erudition and insight than I could ever hope to muster, he enhances it with another poem of Rilke's.

Slowly now the evening changes his garments
held for him by a rim of ancient trees;
you gaze: and the landscape divides and leaves you
one sinking and one rising toward the stars.

And you are left, to none belonging wholly, 
not so dark as a silent house, nor quite
so surely pledged unto eternity
as that which grows to star and climbs the night.

To you is left (unspeakably confused)
your life, gigantic, ripening, full of fears,
so that it, now hemmed in, now grasping all,
is changed in you by turns to stone and stars.

Philosophers and psychologists have offered a lot of different theories about the nature of the human person. But few have captured the human condition better than Rilke does in those twelve lines. We are creatures made for heaven; but we are born of this earth. We love the beauty of this world; but we sense there is something more behind that beauty. Our longing for that “something” pulls us outside of ourselves.

The whole piece is worth a read. When you're finished you'll understand another truth in which I firmly believe: we need first to look to ourselves before we worry about the "reformation" of others.

Nostalgia For The Unknown Home

While walking late one afternoon this past week, the sun was low in the sky and obscured by a thin layer of clouds. I looked up at it and saw it's orange-yellow glow burning behind the white-gray cloud cover and felt something I'd not felt since I was a teenager, walking on crisp fall nights along the streets of my small town. Then, I couldn't explain to myself, much less to anyone else, why I so loved to leave my home after dark and roam the empty streets alone. I'd see the lights through the windows of the houses I'd pass and take comfort in my isolation, my separateness, the darkness that hid me from the light. I was outside, I was looking in, I was separate, I was alone.  And the damnedest yearning would grow within me, a longing not to be within the homes I passed, but for something that I could not define yet was intensely important to me.

I would return home filled with a paradoxical mix of melancholy, satisfaction, and contentment. I had absolutely no idea why I was feeling what I felt or what it meant.

In my walk of a few days ago I felt it again. This time, I would describe the yearning as a nostalgia for a place and time I had never consciously experienced, and, moreover, could not describe. It hit me in a moment of absolute stillness, when there was no sound of children playing, automobiles passing, dogs barking, or even wind blowing. A rare moment of prefect stillness. The feeling startled me, overwhelmed me, then passed out of me like the tide moving back out to sea.

I wonder if anyone else ever feels such moments. My wife claims that she does not.

I also sometimes wonder if this is a symptom of the fact that we are not made for this earth, and what we are feeling is nostalgia for a home we unconsciously know we are presently separated from and to where we unconsciously yearn to return.

Brother Wind, Tim O'Brien and some of the best musicians of Ireland, the UK and America

The Road To Hell

"It is only the infinite mercy and love of God that has prevented us from tearing ourselves to pieces and destroying His entire creation long ago. People seem to think that it is in some way a proof that no merciful God exists, if we have so many wars. On the contrary, consider how in spite of centuries of sin and greed and lust and cruelty and hatred and avarice and oppression and injustice, spawned and bred by the free wills of men, the human race can still recover, each time, and can still produce man and women who overcome evil with good, hatred with love, greed with charity, lust and cruelty with sanctity. How could all this be possible without the merciful love of God, pouring out His grace upon us? Can there be any doubt where wars come from and where peace comes from, when the children of this world, excluding God from their peace conferences, only manage to bring about greater and greater wars the more they talk about peace?"
--Thomas Merton

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
--Martin Luther King, Jr.

For The Good That I Would I Do Not: But The Evil Which I Would Not, That I Do.

Do not love the world or the things of the world.
If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
For all that is in the world, sensual lust,
enticement for the eyes, and a pretentious life,
is not from the Father but is from the world.
Yet the world and its enticement are passing away.
But whoever does the will of God remains forever.
--1 John 2:15-17

I cannot read these words often enough (and a h/t to Father Heines for, once again, prompting a useful reflection). Yet, no matter how often I read them, no matter how much I think I understand their meaning, I still find myself "loving the world," and loving it unconsciously, reflexively. It's not that I don't want to love God more than I love the world, it's simply that it is extremely difficult to overcome so many decades of ingrained bad behavior, of a lack of correct perspective, and of feelings of (false) comfort that arise from having a repeated way of responding to life's everyday occurrences that gives the illusion that I have some type of "control" over what "life" has in store for me. In so many ways, I'm a morally dysfunctional autistic, a man who must do what he knows he ought not do because it feels so right--for an instant.

Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, it is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth.
--1 Cor 13:4-6.

So why, when I run across one more misguided jacktard Catholic blogger who revels in pouring forth his or her pompous, inflated, rude, and vicious mocking of people with a different political perspective, I don't just move along with the recognition that there, too, but for the grace of God, I would still dwell? Why, instead, do I yield without reflection to the temptation to blister his or her backside with a broadside that points out their utter hypocrisy, which, in turn, marks me as no less pompous, inflated, rude, and vicious (and just as unchristian) as the object of my ire?

Because, obviously, I'm not one whit better than the people I criticize.

For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.
--Romans 7:19

Kent Hansen of The CS Lewis Foundation Blog had a nice post not long ago about a conversation with a friend of his about this problem.

“I try so hard,” [his friend] said. “I start the morning with a prayer, ‘Jesus, help me be more like you,’ and that is what I really want.” Within the hour I am defensive and mean and having to apologize for falling short once again.

Hansen told his friend that rather than praying to be more like Jesus, he should be praying that Christ gets him out of the way, because his friend isn't up to the task of doing much of anything in the way of making himself more like Christ, with or without the help of Jesus. Only Christ has the power to overcome sin.

Hansen realizes that this approach is "counter-intuitive" to lawyers like Hansen (and yours falsely).

...I am strong-willed, results-oriented, pride myself on sticking to principle, and I’m hot-tempered to boot. It is a trap to think that I’ve got the strength and smarts to make things happen because the boundary between working on the solution and becoming part of the problem is ephemeral. I get inflamed and swollen with pride and effort and push harder until something breaks. Usually what breaks is relationship. So, I often pray Psalm 61:1-2 when I feel the swelling of pride and anger coming on.

Hear my cry, O God;
listen to my prayer.
From the end of the earth
I call to you,
when my heart is faint.

Lead me to the rock
that is higher than I. . . .

“What that prayer does for me is restore the connection to God that is weakening and failing because I have gotten way out there on my own. More importantly, I need my perspective restored to see that God, the rock, towers over me and overshadows me with a love that I’ve too easily forgotten and left behind. I really can’t trust myself in my natural bent to sin and the inconsistencies of my performance. The talents that I’ve been given for organization, strategy, intellectual focus and eloquence are no substitute for the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control that is the fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5:22).

Yes, this course is hard, as Hansen and his friend admit. It's dying to oneself in the purest sense. Which makes it laughable when nonbelievers sneer that religion's merely a "crutch" for those of us too stupid or too weak to take responsibility for our own lives. Christianity truly lived is the hardest thing that I can conceive, especially for strong-willed, results-oriented, prideful, hot-tempered fools like Hansen and me. Certainly, I'm so far from living it truly that I'd have a tough time seeing the "goal" of life with the aid of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Getting little (and not-so-little) clues like Hansen's do give me hope, however, that one day, I'll finally get out of my own way. If so, it will be solely because of God's grace and nothing else.

Where All Men Are At Home

The House of Christmas by G. K. Chesterton

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay on their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost - how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky's dome.

This world is wild as an old wives' tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.

To anyone who stumbles across this post, have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I hope that everyone finds their way home for the holidays.

In the Bleak Midwinter, The Gloucester Cathedral Choir

God Will Forgive Me, But I...

My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.
---Woody Allen

        Regret
       --Charlotte Bronte

 Long ago I wished to leave
'The house where I was born;'
Long ago I used to grieve,
My home seemed so forlorn.
In other years, its silent rooms
Were filled with haunting fears;
Now, their very memory comes
O'ercharged with tender tears.

Life and marriage I have known.
Things once deemed so bright;
Now, how utterly is flown
Every ray of light!
'Mid the unknown sea, of life
I no blest isle have found;
At last, through all its wild wave's strife,
My bark is homeward bound.

Farewell, dark and rolling deep!
Farewell, foreign shore!
Open, in unclouded sweep,
Thou glorious realm before!
Yet, though I had safely pass'd
That weary, vexed main,
One loved voice, through surge and blast
Could call me back again.

Though the soul's bright morning rose
O'er Paradise for me,
William! even from Heaven's repose
I'd turn, invoked by thee!
Storm nor surge should e'er arrest
My soul, exalting then:
All my heaven was once thy breast,
Would it were mine again!

I regret the simpaticas I've pissed away through sheer pissantedness. One in particular, who was too much like me to survive me. Yet, I can't apologize for having been someone I no longer am. You live, you learn, you love again. And again. And again.

Until, you pray, you finally get it right.

Frivolous Pursuits

A reader of a former blog where I posted music and poetry asked me, "What's with the poetry?" In the course of a little back-and-forth, he confessed that while he enjoys my thoughts on other matters, especially spiritual and religious themes, he's not much for poetry, and wonders what connection I see between "frivolous pastimes" like poetry and music videos, and the more serious business of exploring my faith.

I'm not offended by his observations. To some degree its a matter of personal preferences and sensibilities. I don't like all poetry and all music, but I like a good deal of both. Furthermore I strongly disagree that poetry and music, singly or in combination, can't profoundly aid a person seeking to explore nature both human and divine.

As a Catholic, I believe that God communicates with us not merely on a spiritual level, but on a physical one, as well. The very meaning of the word "sacrament," as used by the Church, is that it is a visible manifestation of God's grace. Touch, sight, sound, smell, all of the senses, are engaged to communicate to us some of the most moving and profound manifestations of love, in a way that mere words, spoken or written on a page, standing alone, fail to do. The entire human being is a receptacle, and all of his physical, emotional and psychological "senses" can be conduits that profoundly supplement and enrich the meaning perceived by his intellect.

But why struggle to communicate what I want to, when Catholic apologist and publisher Frank Sheed, writing over 60 years ago, explained it so much better than I ever could?

...But far more than novels, the theologian might gain by reading the poets - and not only because they might improve his style, though that is more important than he always understands. In that awareness of reality which is so vital, the poet really has something to give the theologian.

    Wordsworth's
                        
                    The moon doth with delight
                    Look around her when the heavens are bare

and Virgil's "Sunt lachrymae rerum" witness across eighteen hundred years to the same truth: the poets cannot be happy with the idea that nature is dead. They feel the life in it, though they do not always know what the life is that they feel. The Christian is exactly the reverse: he knows what the mystery is, but for the most part does not feel it. He knows as a fact of Christian doctrine that God is at the very center of all things whatsoever, sustaining them by His own continuing life above the surface of that nothingness from which He drew them: but he does not experience things that way. What the Christian knows as a truth, the poet responds to as a living fact: he sees things so. That is the one-half of his gift. By the other half, he can communicate his experience, so that we see them so, too. Thus the poet can help many people who know a great deal more about creation than he does. He can help them by making creation come alive to them.
---Theology and Sanity

Sometimes, I feel a certain truth, yet don't know how to express it in prose, or don't know how to express it with the force and power that I feel within myself at that moment. I find that during those restless moments a song, a poem, or both, alone or in combination, seem to communicate that truth and that feeling in a powerful way. Whether I'm particularly astute in selecting poems and music that express such feelings or truths accurately is debatable. Nevertheless, I've had a couple of experiences where people have either commented, or e-mailed me, and told me that a particular post that consisted of nothing more than, say, a Chesterton poem and a Groban ballad, spoke to them in some important and moving manner. Even if only one person had ever shared that experience with me, it would still mean that, through this young medium, two people who without it would never have encountered one another, have shared a communication that meant something profound to each.

There are few things better in life than two couples sitting before a fire in a comfortable family room, a couple bottles of decent red wine, or a pitcher of margaritas, on the coffee table between them, talking and laughing and sharing with one another the best that each has to offer. While a blog post is a poor substitute, nevertheless, it can be a means of discovery and communication on many levels.

The remaining number of our "small hours" dwindle with each day. To someone who spent the lion's share of his life heading in the wrong direction, I can't move quickly enough in the other direction, a direction in which the profound truths are to be discovered and the best of them are to be shared. If a little bit of poetry and a little bit of music aids that discovery and that sharing, then I'll employ those tools of expression and communication. If they don't work for a particular reader, either because I haven't chosen well, haven't much of substance to express, or the reader simply doesn't "get it," there's always the next blog down the cyber-highway, reachable with a click of a mouse.

Regardless, I don't see either poetry or music as "frivolous" vehicles for communication, whether the subject matter is the "serious business" of my faith or other "truths" about the human condition.

Belief

A friend asked me a short question that would require a long book to answer: "Why do you choose to believe in Christianity?" I will only give a brief answer, since it's likely that no one other than my friend would be interested (not that the disinterest of the rest of the world should hinder a narcissist like me, but it occasionally does). I could be flip, and answer that I choose to believe due to the grace of God, which would be correct, but not likely helpful.

According to the Catholic Church, faith is man's response to God, who reveals. That response, according to St. Paul, "is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen." (11 Hebrews 1). John Henry Cardinal Newman observed that faith's "desire is its main evidence; or, as the Apostle expressly goes on to say, it makes its own evidence, being the evidence of things not seen.' And this is the cause, as is natural, why Faith seems to the world so irrational, as St. Paul says in other Epistles. Not that it has no grounds in Reason, that is, in evidence; but because it is satisfied with so much less than would be necessary, were it not for the bias of the mind, that to the world its evidence seems like nothing." (John Henry Newman, Oxford University Sermons, "No. 10, Faith and Reason, Contrasted as Habits of Mind").

The process that I went through to reach the point where I accepted the truth of the Roman Catholic Christian faith was not easy, but, then, as I've noted many times, I'm a slow learner. I long felt the  "longing" that St. Paul also possessed. It's the longing C.S. Lewis described "as this desire for our own far-off country." (The Weight of Glory). My former parish priest, Father Heines, says simply "We were not made for this world." He's a Franciscan who fell in love with Christ at the age of five, so he understood these simple truths early in life, and his has been a life spent plumbing the depths of these mysteries by not only thinking and praying about them, but by living them, embodying them. I spent most of my life stumbling down dark alleys that ended in brick walls. Thus, I'm way down the learning curve.

Father Heines also told me that many people think that the decision to believe is an intellectual one, but, really, it is not. It is a choice, made by a person through the grace of God, to realize the heart's deepest desires. Those deepest desires are not the false, purely secular desires that I pursued for most of my life, and, to an uncomfortable degree, still find myself pursuing when I don't keep my eye on the prize. Rather, the heart's deepest desires are those apparent within, and only fully realized by pursuing, those truths that God has revealed.

Before I reached the point where I was willing to stop resisting the gift of the grace of God that is freely and continuously offered, however, I had to go through an intellectual process. At one point in my journey home, I read G.K. Chesterton's book Orthodoxy, in Chapter IX of which, he describes a process that he went through before he finally accepted Christianity (and the Roman Catholic doctrines).

If I am asked, as a purely intellectual question, why I believe in Christianity, I can only answer, "For the same reason that an intelligent agnostic disbelieves in Christianity." I believe in it quite rationally upon the evidence But the evidence in my case, as in that of the intelligent agnostic, is not really in this or that alleged demonstration; it is in an enormous accumulation of small but unanimous facts. The secularist is not to be blamed because his objections to Christianity are miscellaneous and even scrappy; it is precisely such scrappy evidence that does convince the mind. I mean that a man may well be less convinced of a philosophy from four books, than from one book, one battle, one landscape, and one old friend. The very fact that the things are of different kinds increases the importance of the fact that they all point to one conclusion. Now, the non-Christianity of the average educated man to-day is almost always, to do him justice, made up of these loose but living experiences. I can only say that my evidences for Christianity are of the same vivid but varied kind as his evidences against it. For when I look at these various anti-Christian truths, I simply discover that none of them are true. I discover that the true tide and force of all the facts flows the other way.

He then proceeds to "take cases" and to make his own "case" for rejecting the alternatives and accepting Christianity, all the while claiming that he's not an apologist. I smiled at that claim. He's not only an apologist, he's the most brilliant, if perhaps not the most widely read (C.S. Lewis has that title), Christian apologist of the last century. His process was similar to mine, only I struggled through my process without Chesterton's genius. I also engaged in a process of elimination of what I found to be false alternatives, but only after I lived some of those false alternatives before I fully understood their falsity. Ultimately, none of them seemed to be "true" to me.

Yet, when I attended my first RCIA class, I immediately felt that I was "home," in every sense of that word. Studying seriously, for the first time in my life, The Word, based on Scripture and tradition, convinced me that this way was The Way.

As Chesterton also said in another highly influential book, The Everlasting Man, Christianity is a story, only it's a story that happens to be true. He spends the whole book explaining why he makes that claim. I read it. I believed it. It wasn't the definitive work on which my faith rested, but having read it, I decided to open up my mind to the possibilities. My wife and I sought out our local parish, and volunteers there suggested that we attend an RCIA class to explore the faith from an adult perspective. As I said, I immediately believed that I was where I was meant to be. I was arrogant enough to think that I was intellectually observing and judging, but I'm sufficiently humbled by the experience I've had since that date over four years ago to realize that it was my whole being, centered in my "heart," that was yielding. Like rushing water wearing down stone, the love of God continues its slow, inexorable work.

You pick your life's story, or it picks you. Either way, unless you're a reed blowing in the wind, your life has to have a story if it's to have meaning. I've chosen one, or it's chosen me, (or, as I believe, both have occurred), that seems to me, in a profound, and ultimately inexpressible way, to be the one and only true story.

That's the best I can do in a short blog post. I understand why other people don't believe. After all, I've been there, done that. As to those who tell me that they don't understand, all I can do is offer them, one more time, the words of a man far more intelligent and eloquent than I:

For when he who doubts can only say 'I do not understand,' it is true that he who knows can only reply or repeat 'You do not understand.' And under that rebuke there is always a sudden hope in the heart; and the sense of something that would be worth understanding. (G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man).

Kyrie Eleison, Part II

The Journey
--Emily Dickinson

Our journey had advanced;
Our feet were almost come
To that odd fork in Being's road,
Eternity by term.

Our pace took sudden awe,
Our feet reluctant led.
Before were cities, but between,
The forest of the dead.

Retreat was out of hope, --
Behind, a sealed route,
Eternity's white flag before,
And God at every gate.

The Painful Truth

There is nothing so agonizing to the fine skin of vanity as the application of a rough truth.
---Edward Bulwer-Lytton

I had a nice back and forth with Father Timothy Heines today on his blog post about the nature of relationships and how they change as we "die to ourselves" on our journey home, although frankly it was a painful one for me. I'm an old dog who God is teaching new tricks, it's "the kids" who are teaching me the new tricks, and it's a process that pricks my vanity. It's an uncomfortable thing to realize that you've lived a good portion of your life as a damned fool, and that any good you might have accomplished may very well have been, in many cases, God using your bad acts as an instructive lesson for someone else he was trying to save. You know, turning the evil that we do to his own purposes.

Some of my wonderful character flaws from an early age have been a hot temper, a judgmental mind, an uncanny ability to understand what words might emotionally wound another, and the willingness to utter them, most often when I feel that the other person has wounded me and I'm trying to "win" a race to the bottom of the moral pit by making them hurt more than I do. In other words, I'm a naturally created son-of-a-bitch. I've made a decent living by being one, too.

Since I returned to practicing my faith a little over four years ago, one of the many mistakes I've made in thinking about that faith is that I need to intentionally and actively "cut the cords" with some friends from my "old life" who, having shared some character traits that I was no longer fond of in myself, I feared would drag me back into being the kind of person I no longer desired to be. Father Heines made me realize that such a desire was a folly, an act of vanity. I was vain in thinking only of myself, that I was "right" others were "wrong," and that I needed to separate myself from them in order to save myself. What I needed to do is not to distance myself from them, but to love them.

As Father Heines notes, love (agape) is "not rational, it is volitional." We choose to love, and we must choose to love all human beings, not just those that make us feel good about ourselves from an emotional perspective or who might happen to agree with our specific opinions about our faith. "We have to meditate on the fact that through his covenants, God strengthened the cord with his people. Even though they got stupider and stupider."

To voluntarily "cut the cord" is a common human failing. When done by reason of hurt feelings or anger, it is at least understandable, although still not "the Christian thing to do." When done out of a desire not to "contaminate oneself" with the "bad effects" of people who are just like you (with all your innate faults), it's something worse, in my opinion. It's an ultimate act of vanity, putting your own sense of self worth above your sense of the worth of other human beings who also are made in the image and likeness of God.

I'm glad for these moments of clarity and opportunities for reflection. I'm glad that God puts the random postings of people like Father Heines in my path to help me grasp the cord God refuses to cut, even though I often seem to get "stupider and stupider."