Thoughts on the Sexual Revolution

Not mine. Somebody else's.

John C. Wright put up a brilliant little piece the other day which is both insightful and apt, and in which we learn, among other things, that there is a correlation between theft and ice cream sales.

I do actually like rock and roll music, so reacted somewhat to his comments on that subject, but he's right about the dancing at least. I remember having seen a waltz done well once. Very few can do it well these days- most just manage to make some semblance of it at weddings and such- and it is difficult to find a woman and a man who can both dance it well who find themselves at the same function together, much less a woman and a man who can dance it well and are also in love. It was some time ago that I did manage to see a couple who could both waltz superbly and were also in love. I recall being struck by the beauty of it; the simultaneous simplicity and complexity of co-ordinated movement, the juxtaposition of two utterly unlike figures tracing a seemingly effortless tandemness across the floor, and the look in their eyes as they looked into each other's faces, their feet in perfect sync all the while. Wright is right. The kind of dance you can find in any nightclub in Sydney on a Saturday night may be fun, but it doesn't compare.

On a similarly personal note, I was particularly struck by these lines:

Let none think I am complaining of the depravity of my surrounding culture because I behold a paragon of virtue in the looking glass. I am complaining because I myself am a vomiting drunkard of the wine of vice, and friendly people keep offering me free drinks while I am trying to quit, and they keep telling me that I am sober enough to drive and pushing the car keys into my hand.

I hear you, brother.

The Sound of Silence

A nice quote from this book by Fr. Dwight Longenecker, about monastic silence. It probably applies best to the Carthusians, who are the monks of silence par excellence, but is actually concerning a portion of St Benedict's Rule which treats of how monks should talk.

The spiritual person is silent because at heart he wants to spend time with God, and to do that he must withdraw from human conversation. He does not keep silent because he dislikes other humans, but because small talk is small.

The Bologosphere Grows

It seems to be catching. Another Bolas has made her presence felt online. Those who are interested may read the ongoing thoughts, troubles and assorted reflections on life, God and whatnot of my sister-in-law here.

Blogging Bro

I don't actually know how many, if any, actually read this blog. Its generally better for me spiritually not to check hits (if there were few I would be tempted to get depressed; if many, I would be tempted towards vanity- so better just to remain ignorant).

Those who do, however, may or may not be interested to learn that my spiritually zealous and recently married brother has entered the blogosphere. Seeing as there are now two Bolas's blogging, I hereby dub our collective contributions to the online community "The Bologosphere"! Let those who tremble at bad puns quake all the more and hide their faces in fear (or maybe embarrassment)!

It is early days for his blog yet (and he is at a certain disadvantage, being on Wordpress and all) but I am keen to read what he has to say as time goes on. Maybe some of you might be too. Those who are can find him here.

Feast of St George

Happy Feast of St George!

Today is a particularly good day to pray for England. There is much darkness that hangs over her. There are also spots of light. I am certainly hoping the new Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols will prove to be one of these. You can also find others in places like this and this.

St George, though you never set foot there, England in days past called you her patron and asked for your prayers. In this day when so many in that land have forgotten the Saviour for whom you gave your life, pray for them. Pray also for courage for those in leadership in the Church, and for those called to bear witness in the public square, that they may be rewarded with fortitude by the Holy Spirit as you were at the hour of your martyrdom. Pray that a soldier's spirit may be in those called to defend the truth against much opposition, an attitude that forgets itself and does not count the cost. Unite your voice with ours to intercede for England and her people, for whom Christ died, to the Father through Our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Cool Lutheran Stuff

I have come to appreciate in the last six months the dynamism of Lutheranism, not least due to this magnificent commentary on Leviticus which I have mentioned before. The marriage of solid biblical scholarship and exegesis with a sacramental sensibility corrects the two big blindspots that exist in our time among the rank and file of the Catholic Church on the one hand and of Protestant Evangelicalism on the other (N.B. I did say the rank and file- this is not a blanket statement by any means). It makes it all the more tragic that Luther felt the need to turn his reformation into a revolution, setting up his own authority in opposition to that of the Church of God. What all that energy and zeal, that towering intellect, could have achieved if wedded to the virtue of obedience and directed to the support and edification of the servants of God and not to opposing them!

But I digress..

What I meant to draw attention to was a couple of excellent posts at Pastor Wheedon's blog. First, there is an able and biblical defense of Christian liturgy. A breath of fresh air. I like biblical explanations of the liturgy (I appreciate historical explanations as well, being an incurable amateur historian, but these often seem rather arbitrary- we do this because somebody else did this a while ago and somebody did something similar before them, etc.- whereas taking it back to Scripture gives a surer foundation and makes the whole thing come alive in a quite unique way to boot). It makes ample sense, given that the liturgy is absolutely saturated in Scripture (in fact, at St Benedict's, we're in the process of saturating it even more by cutting back on hymns and restoring the Psalms the Church recommends be sung at the Introit and during Communion each week). So why not go to Scripture to justify it? Defending biblically a thoroughly biblical approach to worship is utterly appropriate and contrasts the liturgy starkly with its alternative (not to mention answering those who either favour or reject it for aesthetic reasons or those who, ironically, think of it as mere dead ritual and an obstacle between the individual and true worship). It makes a lot more sense than the reinvention of the wheel that obtains at many churches, where the structure of the service is revised and recast anew from week to week and year to year, and where Scripture occupies a minor place, all but crowded out by endless songs (not Psalms) and the interpretations of the preacher (which may be good or bad but remain in either case interpretations and not the Word itself). Pastor Wheedon's post is, as I say, a breath of fresh air.

There's also an excellent poem from John Updike there.

And I can't help but mention also this whimsical post, where it is observed that our Lord, unlike many of us (mea culpa), set an example by making His bed after the resurrection.

Definitely worth a look.

Elevatio

Kiran Newman has written a wonderful poem which is essentially a long and profound meditation on the Easter Triduum. It is set in the early days of the Jerusalem Church (before the Apostles and believers were first persecuted and spread out from Jerusalem to Antioch and so on) at Mass on the Lord's Day. One of the participants, as he worships, recalls all the events of Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday. I won't give away who the narrator is supposed to be- it isn't revealed until the end of the poem, and a profound surprise it is. It is a marvellous piece of work- the kind that inspires one to pray and/or pull out one's Bible and read (and let's not forget that with lectio divina, you can do both at once!).

Kiran tells me the poem will only be posted on his blog for a short while, as he may want to publish it in the future and doesn't want to spread it too far abroad online for copyright reasons. So check ye it out while ye may!

UPDATE: Sorry, got the title wrong the first time (mixed it up with a different poem of Kiran's). All fixed now.

Death Like Water

Here's a quote I stumbled on here, which expresses well the general direction and content of my prayers and reflection the past couple of weeks- emerging from the desert of Lent and coming down from the high of Easter Sunday- and challenges me further still. It's originally from Archbishop Fulton Sheen's "Life of Christ".

"But He will not allow us to pick and choose His words, discarding the hard ones, and accepting the ones that please our fancy. We need a Christ Who will restore moral indignation, Who will make us hate evil with a passionate intensity, and love goodness to a point where we can drink death like water."

Complementary Lessons from the Friar and the Cenobite

One of the fruits of Lent and Easter for me this year was a lot of thinking about the various kinds of monasticism and how they embody the Christian life.

One thing I noticed is how seemingly diametrically opposed modes of living both completely fulfill the Gospel counsels. This, I suppose, is not beyond the pale and should not surprise me after five years in the Catholic Church, which, by virtue of its catholicity, has a habit of marrying disparate and opposite things on a regular basis. Nonetheless, it is counter-intuitive. Even, somtimes, to the saints, as it turns out.

Here is the case where I noticed it most directly:

Benedict, in his Rule, says a lot about stability. This, of course, is one of the vows Benedictines make, and in its most pure form it means the person who takes the vow will spend the rest of his life at the monastery. The vow binds him to this plot of land. For the rest of his life, he will see the sun rise over those hills and set below that field. From this day to the day he takes his final breath, that horizon will not change. Many people may visit the monastery; he will be there every time. Stability means binding oneself to a particular set of people too- the community of monks or nuns at the monastery. In this way, the monastery becomes like a ship- you're all stuck with each other for the length of the journey. If one person annoys you, you have to deal with it somehow because you can't just go somewhere else and leave them behind or meet new people.

Why would a person do this to themselves, vow to take on this kind of life? Surely this is how we treat criminals who need rehabilitating! Well, quite apart from the fact that we are criminals and we do need rehabilitating, Benedict tells us the rationale behind this vow. One can only ever meet God in the present moment in this present place. You will not find Him on the other side of the world, in some holy place or in the presence of some holy person if you have not found him here, now, with these people. If we travel to other places, if we seek to meet new people, out of a desire for novelty or because we think we will find happiness there or with them, Benedict tells us, we haven't learnt the first thing about the Christian life. If we do it in order to escape where we are or someone in our life, we may even be in spiritual danger. The mind of Christ is foreign to such a desire to escape.

Benedict spoke scathingly of monks and hermits who wandered about, preying upon people's charity or moving from one monastery to another, never satisfied with where they were, bored, always on the lookout for something new. He calls them gyrovagues and says, "[They] are never stable their whole lives, but wanderers through diverse regions, receiving hospitality in the monastic cells of others for three or four days at a time. Always roving and never settling, they follow their own wills, enslaved by the attractions of gluttony."

Ours is a culture bouyed up by stimuli, diversions and distractions. The majority of people's lives are made bearable by these things, by the next magazine issue, the new movie, this week's exciting episode. Robbed of these things, we must face ourselves (a scary prospect) and we must face God. Our surroundings and the people we must contend with day after day only make the vision of both more stark. And yet here is freedom, freedom from chasing after things (and therefore in many ways, from the tyrrany of time), freedom to love persons (really love, which transcends liking and disliking), freedom to stand naked before God with clear vision- of Him, revealed in Jesus Christ, and of myself, a sinner.

Here, clearly, is a sure avenue to the knowledge and love of Jesus Christ. And one cannot help but agree with Benedict about the futility of gyrovagues, of boredom, of wandering and not settling. And yet....and yet....

Exhibit 2. The friar and the pilgrim.

When I was a pilgrim on my way to Canterbury, I had a different but no less Christian experience of life with Christ. As I journeyed, I received a palpable sense of the transience of things. An undeniable sensation of things flowing away, passing by, never remaining stationary, always changing; not just the scenery or the places I was passing through, but all things. All things are flowing away from us, and if we try to grip them, they slip through our fingers. As a pilgrim, I always had to keep moving. I could stop to look at a beuatiful view, but only for five minutes, then I had to keep going. I would never see that view again. I might meet kind and charitable people, fascinating personalities with stories to tell. I would stay with them a night, two at most. Then I had to be on my way. I would never see them again. I might happen upon a market or a bookstore and see some must-have volume or trinket, something I would love to have on my shelf. But I couldn't take it- there was no room in my backpack. Nothing, not things, relationships, nor beautiful landscapes could I take with me. All had to be left behind. From that experience, I took away the profound lesson that nothing in this world is solid. All is fleeting. I cannot take anything with me. All ends sooner or later, even the best, and the only really unchangable and solid thing in the universe is God.

A corollary of this was the necessity of reciving everything as a gift. When I set out each morning, I didn't know what the day would bring, what I would see, who I would meet, what opportunities there would be or what might be required of me. Literally anything could happen, but I set out in the knowledge that whatever happened, it was ordained by God. It was given by Him, shortly it would be taken by Him. My attitude had to be endlessly flexible, able to gratefully receive whatever person or thing or experience might come my way, and able to let it go just as freely when the time came to leave it behind.

In many ways, this is a microcosm of what life is like, and of what our attitude ought to be in all circumstances. Pilgrimage only served to make it clearer.

This kind of wandering from place to place (albeit with a final goal in mind) seems to be the antithesis of the counsels of Benedict. And yet, here too is a sure avenue to the love and knowledge of Jesus Christ. And there have been some who have made a lifestyle of it and not been gyrovagues or fallen under Benedict's condemnation. The friars, especially the early ones, embodied this attitude of pilgrimage. Almost every story one hears about Dominic or Francis (certainly after their vocations were taken up), they are on a journey, travelling. Francis especially embodied the receiving of all things as a gift from God without seeking to possess them. This is not due to boredom or a desire for novelty. Friars are not gyrovagues (or they shouldn't be). Benedict condemns those who "never settle, following their own wills", but the friar never settles precisely because he is not following his own will but rather seeking to leave himself open to God's will, relinquishing his grasp on anything he might desire to keep for himself in the hope it might satisfy him, even people and places. Yet the friar is not unstable. The whole world is his monastery. Every person he meets is a brother or sister (even, in Francis' case, the animals). The two ways of life complement each other beautifully.

By the vow of stability, the Christian puts on armour to protect himself from the endless pursuit of novelty and the suspicion God can be met somewhere other than here and now; that I could learn love if I wanted to, if only I could get away from that guy.

In the life of wandering and journeying taken up by the pilgrim and friar, the Christian puts on armour to protect himself from undue attachment, from a false feeling of security in the presence of the known, against the substitution of transitory things which will pass away for the love of God which will not.

Saints Stoop

Here is a wonderful quote that I stumbled across recently:

God always approaches man from beneath
And man must always stoop to meet Him.
- Nicholas Zernov