Christ – Page 2 – Mysteries and Manners

Three Pseudo-Christian Approaches

February 13, 2016

Some two and a half years ago, Pope Francis told us about the Christian way to encounter God in the world:

“We need to touch Jesus’ wounds, caress Jesus’ wounds, bind them with tenderness; we must kiss Jesus’ wounds, literally. Just think: what happened to St. Francis, when he embraced the leper? The same thing that happened to Thomas: his life changed. To touch the living God”, Pope Francis concluded, “we do not need to attend a ‘refresher course’ but to enter into the wounds of Jesus.” (Pope Francis, VIS)

Read the rest of it here: Vatican Information Service

pope-francis-favela-wyd — via thoughtsfromacatholic.wordpress.com

In this homily, the Pope contrasts this Christian approach of touching the wounds of Jesus with three other approaches: the “Gnostic” approach (pursing “knowledge of God” rather than a relationship with the God-Man, Jesus Christ), the “Philanthropist” approach (doing good things, creating the Kingdom of God rather than working to receive it as a gift) and the “mortification” approach (earning one’s way to God through self-denial).

These three approaches are what you could call “pseudo-Christian”. Each has an element of Christianity in it, but each neglects something or exaggerates something.

As a teacher, especially a former ACE teacher, I think I am very much tempted to adopt these mistakes:

1) The Gnostic Approach: Let’s face it, I’m what Flannery O’Connor disparagingly calls a “big intellectual”. So are a lot of people who went to liberal arts colleges. We thrive on ideas, and connections, and relationships, and books. We love learning ABOUT God. But of course, that is not the same as learning to know God. The former is fascinating, the latter is frightening–and causes us to change. Gnosticism treats one’s relationship with God as an elite journey into higher levels of spiritual knowledge and tends to either despise the world or ignore it.

2) The Philanthropist Approach: ACE teachers, and members of other service organizations, are especially prone to this error I think. The theology goes something like this: Jesus was always talking about “The Kingdom of God.” This “Kingdom” is “the reign of God on earth,” or a society founded upon peace and justice. As Christians, we are responsible for creating this society by opposing and changing the pre-existing unjust structures.

There IS a lot of truth to this approach–but like all distortions, it’s all the more dangerous because it has only part of the truth. This was the Christianity I learned in high school and many learn at colleges that are comfortable professing only the parts of the faith that no secular person could be offended by.

The philanthropist’s mistake is a misunderstanding of what “The Kingdom of God” really is. Notice Jesus never says, “Go out and build the kingdom of God, and as soon as you manage that, I’ll come back!” He says “The Kingdom of God is at hand” and “The Kingdom of God is within you.” That is, the Kingdom is the gift of God’s presence that we can choose to participate in or reject–but it is not something we can bring about by our own efforts.

Often I think it’s up to me to change education single-handedly. Really, it’s God’s work in which He invites me to participate.

3) The Mortification Approach: This is the approach that, I believe, the Philanthropist approach (ie. “Spirit of Vatican II) was trying to correct. This more “traditional” mistake falls too far in the other direction– it makes the journey of faith a bunch of requirements. It encourages people to remove themselves from the sinful world and focus on personal acts of self-denial and good works. It is rigid and prideful. It’s the error of the Pharisees.

Interestingly, it makes the same fundamental mistake as the Philanthropist approach: it relies far too heavily upon human effort and not enough upon God’s grace. Unsurprisingly, the Self-Mortifier and the Philanthropist fall into similar sins of pride and lack of charity toward others.

The Christian approach, according to Pope Francis, is quite different. Unlike the Gnostic, who prizes knowledge and esoteric ways of knowing God, the Christian realizes that knowledge of God is available to everyone, and that the only real way to know God is through love. Unlike the Philanthropist, who focuses only on trying to bring about a utopia on earth, the Christian remembers he is a citizen of heaven and that the Kingdom is a gift, not a political agenda. Unlike the Self-Mortifier, who focuses so much on his idea of heaven and his own advancement in the spiritual life that he cuts himself off from the world, the Christian is willing to walk boldly into the mess to find Jesus in everyone he meets.

If there were another Narnia book

January 20, 2016

There are some books you always come back to, no matter how long you have been away from them. You come back to be comforted, uplifted, to see old friends again…

Or you come back because there is something still nagging at you.

This post is for people who have read The Chronicles of Narnia. There are spoilers, so if you have not read the books, please go fill the gaping hole in your childhood as soon as possible and come back to this post afterwards.

hipster-belle-meme-generator-i-read-that-book-before-it-was-a-movie-66fd20

Now then–

The Pevensie children, who enter the world of Narnia through the wardrobe, help put an end to winters with no Christmases, and become kings and queens, appear in five out of the seven books in the series. One wonders if perhaps Narnia with all its creatures was created just for them — for their particular salvation, though of course they play a large role in saving Narnia in return many times.

They appear at the very end of book seven, The Last Battle, on the other side of the stable door and in Aslan’s country.

There are three fascinating plot choices Lewis made in this last book regarding the Pevensies:

Peter, Edmund and Lucy die in a train crash. That is how they end up in Aslan’s country (heaven) at all.
Susan, however, was not on the train, and does not die. So she is left alive in our world and is not present with the other three in the last book.
We learn that Susan has stopped believing in Narnia altogether.

Briefly – #1 is fascinating because up until this point, the only main character who dies during any of the stories is Aslan himself, and he comes back because of the “deeper magic before the dawn of time.” The children’s deaths are not dwelt upon at length, but I remember feeling a little shock when my dad read this part to me when I was a child. I may have been dimly aware that I would have only been a few years younger than Lucy was at that point. Lewis does not seem to shy away from hinting at his young readers’ own mortality as they learn that the characters they have followed and identified with met a rather tragic end.

But it is points 2 and 3 that surprised me far more when I first read The Last Battle. In fact, “surprised” isn’t really the right word. “Horrified” might be closer.

The whole book, of course, is about the battle of belief. Eustace and Jill find themselves in a Narnia where many people do not believe in Aslan anymore, or confuse Aslan with the demonic figure Tash. The Pevensie children, who had saved Narnia long before, are now perceived as mere legends themselves.

And then we find out that Susan herself has also stopped believing:

“Sir,” said Tirian, when he had greeted all these. “If I have read the chronicle aright, there should be another. Has not your Majesty two sisters? Where is Queen Susan?”
“My sister Susan,’ answered Peter shortly and gravely, ‘is no longer a friend of Narnia.”
“Yes,” said Eustace, “and whenever you’ve tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says, ‘What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.’”
“Oh Susan!” said Jill. “She’s interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up.”

C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle

I was crushed.

Initially, I was devastated by Peter, Edmund and Lucy’s seemingly quick recovery from the loss of their sister. They seem irritated with her instead of deeply wounded by her absence.

Then, I was angry with the culprit herself. How could Susan give Narnia up for nylons? How could she leave her brothers and sister and the world they had shared? Above all, how could she leave Aslan?

And, finally, I was furious with the author. How could Lewis have left Susan?

If your feminist side, like mine, is also angry with Lewis for condemning Susan’s interest in “nylons and lipstick” and growing up, see Eileen Lee’s wonderful response to that complaint here. A taste:

It is not so much Susan’s external activities, I think, that Lewis wanted to highlight, but the condition of her heart. And this was her condition—that she was preoccupied with things that, while not necessarily bad, were not worthy to be the foundation of her identity or source of affirmation. For she was a Queen. She had simply forgotten so.

My younger self was angry with Lewis, and my older self is still troubled by his choice, but now I think perhaps he was onto something.

Losing one’s faith really is a form of forgetting.

I’ve written about the connection between faith and memory before, and so have Popes Francis and Benedict in Lumen Fidei. How often does our faith in God waver because we forget what he is really like? How often do we sin because we forget ourselves?

How many friends of ours, or family members, have fallen away from faith because they seem to have forgotten something? You kind of want to shake them sometimes and say, “But don’t you remember?”

In Susan’s case the relationship between faith and memory is particularly striking. She wants to be “grown up” and leave her former identity behind. She has forgotten who she really is.

But of course Aslan has not. He always did say, “Once a king or queen in Narnia, always a king or queen.”

That line gives me hope for Susan, and for all the Susans in the world (of which number I am often included).

JustinSweet_Narnia-concept — Concept Art via Narniafans.com

Later, Lewis gave this tantalizing response to a concerned young reader in 1957:

“The books don’t tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having by then turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman. But there’s plenty of time for her to mend and perhaps she will get to Aslan’s country in the end . . . in her own way.”

via Matthew Alderman, “Whatever Happened to Susan Pevensie” First Things

His words still echo in my mind.

I have this crazy desire to write that book. How does Susan “get to Aslan’s country in the end, in her own way”? How does she react to the death of her entire family? (We learn the Pevensie parents also died in the crash.) Does she grow up like she wants to? Does she get married and have kids? Does her daughter get to Narnia somehow, even after the ending of that world in The Last Battle? (Time always was flexible between that world and ours.) Does the story somehow involve the horn of Queen Susan, which was lost after the events of Wardrobe and rediscovered in Prince Caspian? Or does it perhaps explore the chase of the ever-elusive White Stag?

I have, of course, no right to attempt such a story. The “canon” is closed.

And perhaps leaving Susan’s fate unresolved is wise. Lewis’ troubling, irritating choice alerts young readers to the fact that “the last battle” of your life–the only battle of your life–is the battle of faith, and that it is ongoing. You win, you lose, you win again, you lose again. Even a Queen of Narnia is not safe. And even a “grown up” is not lost.

Peter, Edmund, and Lucy are not devastated by Susan’s departure not just because the “sorrows of hell cannot touch the joys of heaven” but also because, perhaps, the separation may only be temporary. Susan’s story, Lewis indicates, is not over yet.

Neither is ours.

I can see the beginning chapter now.

They were not to take the train, because Mother hated trains. But Father was very ill and the doctors said country air was the kindest medicine left for him. The small farm cottage that had been left to them years ago was prepared. So the Walker family took a bus from London, and then another bus, and then another—each a little less crowded than the last…

Augustine, Advent, and the “O Antiphons”

December 3, 2015

One of my all time favorite passages from the Office of Readings is Saint Augustine’s meditation on desire:

Why he should ask us to pray, when he knows what we need before we ask him, may perplex us if we do not realize that our Lord and God does not want to know what we want (for he cannot fail to know it), but wants us rather to exercise our desire through our prayers, so that we may be able to receive what he is preparing to give us. His gift is very great indeed, but our capacity is too small and limited to receive it. That is why we are told: Enlarge your desires, do not bear the yoke with unbelievers. (Office of Readings, Saint Augustine, “Letter to Proba”, emphasis added)

I remember reading this while I was studying in Rome seven years ago. I was praying a lot then, for many things, and the idea that my prayer was a means by which God was “stretching” my heart so that I could have the capacity to receive his gift really helped me.

It strikes me that this meditation describes very well what Advent is all about. We are waiting and hoping for God to finally come, just like Israel waited (and still waits).

Augustine continues:

The deeper our faith, the stronger our hope, the greater our desire, the larger will be our capacity to receive that gift, which is very great indeed. No eye has seen it; it has no color. No ear has heard it; it has no sound. It has not entered man’s heart; man’s heart must enter into it. (Ibid)

Because, of course, the “gift” which is “very great indeed” is the Emmanuel Himself.

If you read the Old Testament this way, it makes more sense. All of that wandering in the desert, the exile and return, the judgment of the prophets, the takeover by Babylonians and Greeks and Romans was an enormous stretching process whereby the desire of Israel for the Messiah was increased. By the time of Jesus, that desire was so intense that people were identifying messiahs everywhere.

We see this same desire in the Church as we look forward to the Messiah’s second coming. We see it especially in the “O Antiphons” and the repetition of the word “come” over and over again. Each antiphon has a different name for Jesus– “Wisdom”, “Leader,” “Root”, “Key”, “Radiant Dawn”, “King”, “Emmanuel”, and in each antiphon the speaker begs for the Messiah to “come”:

O Wisdom of our God Most High,
guiding creation with power and love:
come to teach us the path of knowledge!

O Leader of the House of Israel,
giver of the Law to Moses on Sinai:
come to rescue us with your mighty power!

O Root of Jesse’s stem,
sign of God’s love for all his people:
come to save us without delay!

O Key of David,
opening the gates of God’s eternal Kingdom:
come and free the prisoners of darkness!

O Radiant Dawn,
splendor of eternal light, sun of justice:
come and shine on those who dwell in darkness and in the
shadow of death.

O King of all nations and keystone of the Church:
come and save man, whom you formed from the dust!

O Emmanuel, our King and Giver of Law:
come to save us, Lord our God!

(“The ‘O Antiphons’ of Advent”, USCCB website)

Every antiphon is a prayer and an exercise in desire.

Advent is a season for this desire, as Fr. James Martin in his recent seasonal reflection explains. But of course, in some sense, we are always living in Advent, until the Second Coming itself or our own death–whichever comes first.

Augustine even alludes to “set times and seasons” in which we pray to God “in words” to help us “mark the progress we have made in our desire.” I think this is exactly what Advent is:

In this faith, hope and love we pray always with unwearied desire. However, at set times and seasons we also pray to God in words, so that by these signs we may instruct ourselves and mark the progress we have made in our desire, and spur ourselves on to deepen it. The more fervent the desire, the more worthy will be its fruit. When the Apostle tells us: Pray without ceasing, he means this: Desire unceasingly that life of happiness which is nothing if not eternal, and ask it of him who alone is able to give it.

(Office of Readings, Saint Augustine, “Letter to Proba”, emphasis added)

“Beauty Will Save The World”

November 5, 2015

The other evening I attended the Archbishop’s Lecture Series. Dr. Jonathan Reyes came and spoke about how to preach the Gospel in a skeptical age–and an age in which reasoned arguments no longer have much purchase.

Jenny over at Mama Needs Coffee has a beautiful reflection on his talk. An excerpt:

That’s the kind of love that speaks to a world grown blind to logic and deaf to reason. They might not believe in absolute Truth any more, but they can still perceive its counterpart, absolute Love. And from that encounter of being loved, of being valuable…a conversation can begin. (“My Little Lepers”)

She goes on to recount Dr. Reyes’ reflection on Mother Teresa. The reason the world loves Mother Teresa is because although it cannot comprehend faith very well, or the idea of “objective truth” (the phrase even makes me cringe a little), or rational argument, it is still attracted to beauty, for all of its infatuation with ugliness. And because Mother Teresa went to the ugliest human places with love, she reminded us of what real beauty is like. And the world noticed.

Dr. Reyes encouraged all of us to “get our hands dirty.” The world will not really listen to what Christians have to say anymore, but it is still watching us closely, and it may yet be moved by something beautiful.

Dostoevsky famously said, “In the end, the world will be saved by beauty.”

I thought about this in the context of my own world–my students. They are, as I am, products of a “skeptical age” that has lost the ability to reason. Our generation does not have the patience careful argument requires. Just watch the Presidential debates. We prefer slogans, soundbites, tweets, and hashtags.

I’ve noticed this countless times when I try to teach essay writing at the beginning of the year. Especially this year, I have been bewildered and discouraged by my student’s intellectual poverty–their struggle to form coherent thoughts, never mind reasoned arguments. Many of them still have a hard time wrapping their minds around what an “arguable thesis” even is. They can parrot back cliches and soundbites, but they cannot prove a basic claim.

It is my responsibility to try to teach them how to do this.

And yet, Dr. Reyes’ talk gave me pause. Maybe I am starting in the wrong place. Maybe I shouldn’t start off the school year with essay writing– essentially, teaching kids how to think and prove a point.

Maybe I need to start off the year with beauty.

Maybe they would be more open and eager to learn how to think, how to write, how to formulate a thesis and use evidence to support it, if they were at first struck by something beautiful.

I’m still not sure what that would look like. But I’m going to give it some thought.

A Letter to Parents

October 24, 2015

Dear Parents of my Students,

I am writing you this letter to let you know that we are on the same team. It may not always feel like it, but we are. We both want your child to succeed in English class this year, to learn a lot, to improve in writing and reading and grammar usage. We also want your child to be responsible, kind to others, and hard working. Above all, we both want your child to be happy and to be close to God.

You should know that I love all of my students, including your child.

I hope you know it would be much easier for me, as a teacher, to just give everyone a “good” grade. I would avoid a lot of angry emails from you that way and a lot of hurt feelings and a lot of heartache.

But what is easy isn’t always right.

I hope you know that when I give your child a grade, I am not grading your child at all. I am assessing his work. I am trying to give him as accurate feedback as possible on what he has demonstrated he has learned, and what he has demonstrated he hasn’t learned yet. Your child’s grade in my class is a grade he has earned.

So when you say to me, “My child is not a D student!”– I completely agree. She might have a D in my class right now, but she is not a “D student.” There is no such thing as a D student–or, I might add, a “B student” or “A student.” Because, whether or not he or she is doing well in my class, your son or daughter cannot be defined by a mere letter grade.

The grade merely attempts, as accurately as possible (but certainly not perfectly) to reflect the learning your child has demonstrated so far.

I am on your team. I love your son or daughter and I hold them to high expectations not in spite of, but because of that love.

I promise to give them help, support, encouragement, and guidance. I promise to show my own love of learning and of English literature.

Anything you can do to support that effort is greatly appreciated. You are the primary educator of your son or daughter and I very much honor and respect that huge responsibility. I honor the fact that you are making many sacrifices to send your child to a Catholic school. I thank you for entrusting your child to me. I can only imagine how challenging it is to be the parent of a teenager, and I know you are doing your best. You have your own crosses to carry every day that I know nothing about.

I ask you to believe that I, too, am doing my best. I ask you to respect my professional background, my dedication, my experience, and my dignity during parent-teacher conferences this week.

Let’s work together for your child.

Sincerely,

Ms. Shea

What Education Can’t Fix

October 9, 2015

I’ve been having a lot of good–but difficult–conversations with teachers about the state of Catholic education in the United States.

And as I was talking to one of my former ACE roommates about all the struggles I’m having this year with my kids, I realized something that maybe I had only been aware of before on a subconscious level.

Education can’t fix the problems it faces.

That sounds pessimistic. But it’s true.

And maybe also a little bit liberating.

I was frustrated a few days ago with a kid who did not come to finish an essay we had written in class. I was offering her support and extra help, and she did not come after school even after I had reminded her. And then I reminded her the next day and she did not come. And I had made myself available during lunch this time even though originally I had planned on trying to keep my lunchtimes this year. I was upset. Why oh why won’t you come when I am bending over backwards trying to help you?

And suddenly, later, on the phone with my ACE friend, I realized — this kid doesn’t really give a damn about my essay. And that’s kind of reasonable. From the little I know about her situation, she has so much going on at home that if I were her I wouldn’t give a damn about some essay either. She has bigger battles she’s fighting.

I mean, she still has to write that thing and I reminded her again today and she did come, thank goodness.

But sometimes as a teacher I get so caught up in my goals for my kids– or the curriculum standards — that I lose some perspective.

And I starting feeling like it’s my job to “save” them, when of course that’s God’s job.

But I think all educators–not just Catholic ones– are suffering from an identity crisis. We think that education can save these kids from their apparently grim destinies. But although a good education can make a big difference, it is not the only thing.

We get kids with learning disabilities. We get kids from broken homes. We get kids who have never met their dads. We get kids whose parents are struggling to pay the bills. Many of these parents — for all of our Catholic talk of “primary educators”– do not have the time or resources to read to their kids or get them books or help them with homework. Some of them may not know how to read well or at all. Indeed these parents are the primary educators, but many of them do not have the ability to educate. And no matter how good a school is, a school cannot fill the role of a parent.

Education isn’t just trying to overcome ignorance– its trying to overcome material poverty and broken families and cultural decay and entitlement and prejudice and despair.

But really all educators can do is try to teach kids who may be unwilling or exhausted or distracted by bigger problems.

Even the best charter school networks with all the money and resources and professional development and “best practices” in the world cannot quite make up for those things.

All we can do is help. All we can do is love our students and hold them to high expectations and give them the support they need to meet those expectations. And some of them will get there, and some of them won’t.

As Mother Teresa says, “We are not called upon to be successful, but to be faithful.”

Let’s be faithful to our students and leave the success part to God.

images — via Roy Bennet @ InspiringThinkn

Thoughts at a Funeral

September 21, 2015

Today our school community went to the funeral of a student’s father who passed away last week. It was a very beautiful Mass. But the most beautiful part was seeing so many of my current and former students supporting their friend. We had a half day of school and they did not have to come to the funeral, but they did.

My great aunt’s funeral was last week and I thought a lot about her during the Mass. I wasn’t able to attend her funeral. I thought about the prayer blanket she knitted for me a couple of years ago; it is folded on my bed and contains a lot of Hail Marys. My great aunt had a great devotion to Our Lady, and lately I’ve been realizing that God is probably asking me to increase my own devotion.

I also found out the other day that my eighth grade teacher died suddenly this past week. She was entering her fortieth year of teaching.

All of these deaths were very much on my mind during the funeral Mass today. But I kept coming back to my former teacher. And I feel like my memories of her are the ones I can write about here.

My earliest memory of Ms. A was when I was in kindergarten. That was before the yearly Christmas recital was held in the town hall–it was probably the last year it was held in the main church. I remember standing in front of the altar with my other classmates, a big paper bell taped to my dress. I was very nervous. I glanced to the side and caught the eye of a very tall, thin lady who was minding a group of enormous-looking eighth graders. She saw me and gave me a big smile. Then she winked at me, nodded approvingly, and gave me a thumbs-up.

I felt immensely better.

And I never forgot that moment. I think that for the rest of my parochial school days I looked forward to being in the eighth grade when I would have that kind lady with the encouraging smile.

When I was in the second grade, my middle school “buddy” was an eighth grader. It was around Christmastime again and we were doing some sort of art project with our buddies. They were talking about The Hobbit, since evidently Ms. A was reading that with them.

I was overjoyed. I began babbling about Frodo and Sam and the other hobbits, since at the time my Dad was reading The Lord of the Rings to my sister and me. I think my buddy was a little confused since I was jumping ahead in the series, but she was pretty impressed nonetheless and squealed, “Ms. A! Ms. A! My buddy is reading Tolkien!”

I don’t remember Ms. A’s reaction but I do remember hoping that she remembered that I was that girl in the Christmas recital and that in just a few years I would be her student.

Just a few years went by and I was her student. In the sixth grade she taught us math. In the seventh grade I had her for literature only. Finally, in the eighth grade, she was my teacher for most of the day.

She was far stricter at first than my kindergarten memory of her had suggested, but her strictness was really quite wonderful. All the boys that made seventh grade rather miserable had to shape up for Ms. A. She had very high expectations of us, and she helped us achieve them. I think I earned the lowest grade of my life in her class on a Math quiz because I didn’t follow the directions. I was very upset, but I remember how kind she was when I met with her. She explained to me my mistakes and showed me how to fix them.

She didn’t change my grade. And I’m grateful.

I remember that she had all of us keep writing journals, which we wrote in almost every day about the books we were reading or about current events. And she would read them and respond to us in elegant cursive. There were twenty-six of us, and as a teacher myself I suddenly realize how much time and effort those responses took, and how painfully awkward a lot of our journal entires must have been.

9/11 had already happened by then and George Bush was taking America to war in Iraq. I remember writing a lot of journal entries about that and yet disagreeing with Ms. A’s purely pacifist position. But she was very kind and very patient with me. I was probably a know-it-all. We even put up a sign on our eighth grade class window: “If you want peace, work for justice – Pope Paul VI.” I think originally we were going to say something very anti-war but we settled on this quote. I was gratified.

She loved Edgar Allan Poe and read to us the entirety of “The Raven” with gusto. Her passion for literature was very compelling and inspired me more than I realized at the time.

She was very mischievous and had a wonderful delight about her. It was clear to me how much she loved teaching and how happy she was to be there for all of us, especially at the end of our illustrious parochial school careers. She provided sound guidance and kind recommendations as we considered different high schools. She was definitely someone who had discovered her vocation and lived it every day.

I do not think life was easy for Ms. A. Perhaps it was her deep admiration and sympathy for Edgar Allan Poe that suggested to me most that she must know a lot about suffering. Yet, as long as I knew her, she bore all suffering — and teaching eighth graders must have involved a lot of it — with grace and love.

I’m writing this in gratitude to Ms. A for all that she taught me and the many students she had over the years. I am sure my own teaching has been influenced by her example.

And I think it’s really beautiful to remember how young children really do remember the little gestures, and what a difference they can make.

Tomorrow, I will stand in front of my own students. Sometimes I still feel like that little kindergartener with the paper bell, getting ready to sing and feeling very unsure of herself. But I will remember Ms. A’s encouraging smile and her characteristic nod, and I will do my best.

Everything That Rises

August 6, 2015

Summer is a good time to be reading Flannery O’Connor again.

On a flight to Boston a few weeks ago I read one of her more disturbing and controversial stories, “Everything That Rises Must Converge.”

You can read the full story online here.

The title comes from the philosophical work of a French Jesuit, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and like all of O’Connor’s titles ought to be closely attended to while reading. You can look up excerpts from Chardin’s “The New Spirit” here and try to decipher his complex mystical theology, but just considering O’Connor’s title “innocently,” with the plot of the story in mind, I would guess it could mean that as things “rise” closer to the truth, they also come closer to — that is, “converge” upon — one another.

There are also several instances of “convergence” in the story itself.

Brief summary: the plot centers around a young man (whom Flannery herself would probably call a “big intellectual”) who is bringing his mother to her exercise classes at the local YMCA. He is embarrassed by her racism and narrowness, and she is proud of his college education.

Some instances of convergence that I noticed: The mother’s ugly purple hat, described in detail at the very beginning of the story and a frequent topic of conversation, is echoed by the narrator’s description of the sky: “The sky was a dying violet and the houses stood out darkly against it, bulbous liver-colored monstrosities of a uniform ugliness though no two were alike.”

So – the hat and the sky converge? I say that with a complete lack of authority.

Later, the hat comes up again while they ride the bus. A black woman who sits down across from them is wearing the exact same hat as the mother. Despite racial and societal divide between them, they match. (The son is delighted by the irony of this convergence).

The black woman also has her own son. The mother plays with the little boy and condescendingly offers him a penny — which the black woman angrily rejects.

The mother’s intellectual ignorance is matched by her son’s emotional ignorance.

And the son’s persistent judgment and disgust throughout the story is completely reversed at the end to… well, I won’t spoil the ending. If you’ve ever read O’Connor, you know it will be interesting.

But it’s the title itself that continually arrests me – everything that rises must converge – and the following story acts like a lyric poem – responding to the entitle, enfleshing the title, challenging the title – but never really explaining the title. I don’t pretend to understand it.

Still, this short story gives me hope that no matter how twisted and damaged our attempts at truth are, they nevertheless eventually converge into the truth of God, rising little by little until they finally reach His peace.

tumblr_static_everything-that-rises-banner-2 — source: everythingthatrises.com

Home and the Joyful Mysteries II

July 21, 2015

In my first post I described something I had never noticed before about the Joyful Mysteries of the rosary – that they all seem to present the idea of home in profound ways.

I was particularly attuned to this idea because I had been looking for a house to rent with a few friends with no success.

The day after praying that rosary, by the way, we got a house!

4. The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple – God’s House

The Gospel of Luke tells us that Mary and Joseph brought Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem after his circumcision to present Him to the Lord. The Temple was the house of God, the locus of His presence. In the Holy of Holies rested the Ark of the Covenant. So it was God’s earthly home, and the home of His people.

The Jews made yearly pilgrimages to the temple to celebrate the Passover. They remembered their own ancestors’ search for home after being freed from slavery in Egypt. Is that not what the Promised Land was really about? It was to be a place of belonging for the Israelites.

The Psalms speak of the temple with such longing:

Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere;

I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God

than dwell in the tents of the wicked. (Psalm 84:10)

Even our word “nostalgia” comes from the Greek nostos, which means homecoming. That’s what Odysseus’ complex, wandering journey was all about. Interestingly, the other part of the word, algos, means “pain” in Greek. So although we have diluted the use of the word in English to a mere sentimentalism, it’s original meaning expresses the fourth mystery of the Rosary quite well.

Presentation_of_the_Lord — via ncregister.org

Interestingly, when Mary and Joseph bring Jesus to the Temple, they encounter Simeon, a mysterious old man who “takes the child in his arms” and prophesies about Jesus’ ultimate destiny as Savior. Simeon tells Mary that “a sword will pierce your heart also” (Lk 2:35). So, although this journey to the Temple is a homecoming in some sense — most profoundly for Jesus, because this is His “Father’s House,” as He will say later — it is an encounter overshadowed by future suffering.

5. The Finding of Jesus in the Temple – God’s house

The fifth Joyful Mystery is very much a sequel to the second. We see Simeon’s prophesy about the sword piercing Mary’s heart coming true already.

jesus-at-the-temple-by-brian-jekel.277103818_std — via catholicbookwriter.com

The twelve year old Jesus has been missing for three days, and his parents have been searching for him everywhere. Of course they cannot go “home” to Nazareth without him, and in a deeper sense there really is no such thing as home without him. They finally go to the Temple and find him there, astonishing all of the elders and teachers with his understanding.

Mary, although I imagine very relieved, is understandably still very upset: “Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety.”

Jesus’ response is (at first glance) irritating and (at second glance) rather mysterious: “And he said to them, “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”

So already Jesus is defining his home, his identity, with God the Father. He seems to take for granted that Mary and Joseph must realize this. His Father’s house is not Joseph’s house in Nazareth, but here in Jerusalem. But later He will no longer identify the temple as his home, but rather will express his homelessness: “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Mt 8:20).

This, of course, is not literally true. The Gospels identify Peter’s house in Capernaum as a “resting place” for Jesus. And I am sure Mary, if she was not always following among her son’s disciples, would always have welcomed him home to the house in Nazareth. But Jesus is expressing a much more profound homelessness here, the homelessness not only of the “Son of Man,” but of all men.

Finally Jesus will predict the destruction of “my Father’s house” and identify this temple with His own body: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). Ultimately Jesus Himself is the locus of God’s presence, not a building or tent of any kind. He gives to all of us our true homecoming.

Home and the Joyful Mysteries

July 6, 2015

My prayers, as Flannery O’Connor says somewhere, are more dogged than devout and this is especially the case with the rosary. I do not pray it every day, probably because I find it so difficult, but nevertheless I take comfort in the rosary like I take comfort in the Mass: if you show up, you’re there. Similarly, if you say the prayers, you’ve prayed. You can say with some confidence that you have actually prayed the rosary whether or not your effort felt very successful. This approach might arise from strange mixture of laziness and scrupulosity on my part, but I can tell you in the drier areas of the prayer desert the bare-bones structure of the rosary and of the Mass have helped me a great deal.

Well, today was little different except for the fact that I found something in the Joyful Mysteries I had never noticed before.

Recently I have been very stressed out about finding a new place to live. A couple of friends and I have been on the house hunt since the end of May. Unfortunately, the three of us never seem to be in Denver at the same time this summer. I’m in Boston as I write this. Moreover, the housing market in Denver has become extremely competitive in the last few years, and trying to find an affordable place on three teachers’ salaries is no easy task.

I’ve written before as well how the idea of home has been problematic for me in the past few years, and is also problematic, I imagine, for a lot of transient young adults and likely for many of my own students.

So I suppose homes and houses have been on my mind. But I had never noticed before how much the concept of Home, in all of its spiritual complexity, is present in the Joyful Mysteries of the rosary. And that was the gift I received in prayer today.

1 – The Annunciation – Home in Mary

annunciation2 — Henry Ossawa Turner, “The Annunciation” via ncregister.com

Christian tradition has since ancient times associated Mary with the Church, but also with the Tabernacle of the Lord – that is, the Ark of the Covenant from the Old Testament. The Ark of the Covenant, you probably know, was the dwelling place of the Lord of Hosts before the construction of the Temple in Jerusalem. And even after the Temple’s construction, completion, and various re-buildings, the Ark was placed in the Holy of Holies there. And so Mary is the Ark of the New Covenant.

God comes to Mary in this mystery of the rosary to make His home inside of her. Mary’s womb becomes the first home of Jesus, and it is a proper home for Him because of her purity and openness to God. She welcomes Him into her house, so to speak, even though she is afraid. She is the perfect Temple of the Holy Spirit that St. Paul will preach about later (1 Cor 6:19).

And yet John says in his Gospel, of this moment, that “the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us” (Jn 1:14). The Greek word is usually translated “dwelt” – as in “dwelt among us” – but it literally means “to pitch a tent” – which is so much more evocative and moving. A tent is a temporary home. God leaves heaven to become a wanderer with us. As Jesus says later, “Foxes have their holes and birds have their nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head” (Mt 8:20). He knows what it means, also, to be homeless.

2 – The Visitation – Home in Elizabeth

1356113864 — via stjosephcathedraltriplev.weebly.com

This is about as homey a mystery as there is, and has always been my favorite mystery of the rosary. Mary leaves her home in Nazareth to visit her pregnant cousin Elizabeth in a beautiful gesture of love. The journey was actually about 100 miles! Yet I have also always thought that, upon hearing of Elizabeth’s miraculous pregnancy, Mary could not help but want to be with the only other woman in the world who would understand what she herself was going through. Their meeting has always been to me the model of true Christian friendship.

And notice, again, the welcoming in this scene. Elizabeth greets Mary with joy and with understanding – she recognizes her at once as “the Mother of my Lord” (Lk 1:43). Elizabeth knows who Mary is, and Who it is that is hidden within her. She welcomes Mary and she welcomes Jesus unreservedly because she truly understands who they are. (Is that not what real friendship is?) So this intimate scene is very much about finding that sense of belonging and trust and family that is so essential to being truly at home with someone.

3 – The Nativity – Searching for a Home

36315_all_21-02-BirthOfChrist — via lds.org

Joseph and Mary have to leave their home in Nazareth at a very difficult time. Mary is almost ready to give birth. To make matters worse, when they arrive in Bethlehem -which is supposed to be a sort of home, as is the city of David and the city of Joseph’s ancestry – they find that there is “no room for them at the inn.”

How often do we all feel like there is “no room” for us at our own homes?

And how often do we not make room for others? We are jealous of our space and of our time.

I think the immigrants to our own country, past and present, can find solace in the immigrant family of Nazareth – who, even after finding temporary shelter, had to flee to Egypt to escape the wrath of a political ruler.

I kept thinking how stressed out Joseph must have been. Most husbands are when their wives are about to give birth. And he must have been afraid that they would not be able to find a safe place to stay. God provides, of course, but according to tradition He provides them a stable or cave of some sort, which is hardly an ideal location for giving birth, even in ancient times.

I could really relate to this mystery. Searching and searching for a place to live and encountering so many “no’s” – too expensive, too far away, too suspicious of multiple women living in the same house… you name it.

I wonder if perhaps it was hard for Joseph to accept the makeshift home God provided them in Bethlehem. Maybe not – he was a saint and probably trusted God far more than I do – but still I wonder if he was frustrated by having only a manger for Jesus and the company of animals for Mary. And yet the image of the stable, popularized later by St. Francis, has become so important for us later Christians. Joseph and Mary may not have known, at the time, how providential it was for them to suffer this uncertainty and this homelessness, yet for generations afterward the image of them in the stable has been a way for so many people to approach Christ.

Pope Benedict says:

Christmas is an epiphany – the appearing of God and of his great light in a child that is born for us. Born in a stable in Bethlehem, not in the palaces of kings. In 1223, when Saint Francis of Assisi celebrated Christmas in Greccio with an ox and an ass and a manger full of hay, a new dimension of the mystery of Christmas came to light. Saint Francis of Assisi called Christmas “the feast of feasts” – above all other feasts – and he celebrated it with “unutterable devotion” (2 Celano 199; Fonti Francescane, 787). […] [T]hrough [Francis] and the character of his faith, something new took place: Francis discovered Jesus’ humanity in an entirely new depth. This human existence of God became most visible to him at the moment when God’s Son, born of the Virgin Mary, was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger. (Pope Benedict, Christmas Eve 2011 Homily)

Christ’s homelessness makes God accessible to us, because deep down we know that we all are homeless. We are all wanderers in a strange land. None of us want to stay forever in our stables, our caves. We want, like the Prodigal Son, to go Home.

I think this post has gone on long enough, so I will finish writing about the fourth and fifth mysteries later.