Peter’s Dispute with Simon Magus

Many years ago I rashly volunteered to teach a 7th-8th grade Sunday school class at a rural and somewhat fundamentalist church, and, on my first Sunday on the job, was tasked with teaching the first three chapters of Second Samuel, which includes one of three accounts of the future King David presenting 200 Philistine foreskins as the bride price for Saul’s daughter Michal. Fortunately none of the kids had read their Bibles beforehand, so I did not feel compelled to explain the passage. I have since used it in arguments with Christian fundamentalists as an example of a Biblical passage whose relevance to spirituality and salvation is tenuous at best, one that no modern preacher would touch with a ten foot pole.

Perhaps I spoke to soon. Recently, reading a letter of Peter Damian (1007-1072), Benedictine monk, church reformer, and canonized saint, I encountered a commentary on the episode of the Philistine foreskins as an illustration of simony, and it seemed relevant not only to ecclesiastical appointments in the 11th century, but to the process of appointment and advancement in the sciences in American universities. If that seems like to wild a leap of speculation, consider at least that for many people in the West science has become the new religion, and that there are distinct parallels between a medieval bishop, supposed advocate for the spiritual well-being of the masses and defender of ecclesiastical purity, and a modern tenured professor or department head, who becomes the gatekeeper determining who is allowed to pursue a scientific career, what are legitimate objects of scientific inquiry, and what results are disseminated under the imprime of a prestigious peer-reviewed journal.

Simony is defined as the sale of ecclesiastical offices. The term refers to Simon Magus, a first -century figure who fell afoul of Saints Peter and Paul when he attempted to purchase the gift of the Holy Spirit. His downfall is frequently depicted in medieval art. In Damian’s day, the task of appointing bishops fell to secular noblemen, some of whom were quite corrupt and lacked any motivation to further the physical or spiritual well-being of the people they governed. Paying large sums of money and/or serving the lord’s corrupt ends became the only avenue for entry into the higher echelons of the church hierarchy.
Damian used the example of the Philistine foreskins to illustrate the principle by which continued service to a corrupt lord is actually worse, spiritually, than a straight cash payment. In the case of the cash payment, the aspirant could have gotten the wealth by honest means, and once he had bought the office, he was a relatively independent man. The man who had obtained his position by enabling the interests of a corrupt Lord, on the other hand, earned the office through malfeasance and was expected to continue toeing the line. David’s motives for marrying Michal (influence, inclusion in the royal succession) were not inherently bad, but he used his military prowess in the service of a king who had, in the words of scripture, “abandoned God.”

Until well into the nineteenth century, becoming a scientist was pretty much a career objective limited to men of independent means. Academic positions did not pay very well. The purer the science, the less likely it was to produce a saleable product in a reasonable time frame. Although the cost of tuition was not necessarily high, the cost of withdrawing from the labor force for the time required to get an advanced degree discouraged people of modest means. On the plus side, many scientific disciplines did not require a huge amount of capital on an ongoing basis, so independent researchers had a better chance of succeeding.

At present, in the United States at least, entry into a scientific career is in theory open to anyone with the ability and the drive to invest a huge amount of labor into a path that offers no guarantee of success for the laborer. The work that graduate teaching and research fellows, postdoctoral fellows, and people on the lowest rungs of the faculty ladder expend goes disproportionately towards enhancing the power, prestige and wealth of a small number of people at the top. The person on the bottom labors to increase knowledge and to make discoveries that benefit humanity, and hopes someday to gain enough autonomy to realize that vision. That’s how science is supposed to work. That’s how most people seem to assume science works.

Both academic science departments and government laboratories have become heavily dependent upon government grants for their continued existence. The ability to bring in money has become the main criterion for hiring into tenure-track positions and promotion in academic ranks. The granting agencies are under strong pressure from corporate interests to favor lines of inquiry that strengthen the corporate bottom line, and, conversely, to suppress anything that calls into question a lucrative paradigm. The dependence upon grant funding also favors costly, technology-intensive branches of science over more traditional method of observation.

A result of the very long unpaid or inadequately paid period of apprenticeship, during which survival is dependent on adhering closely to programs established at the higher levels of the hierarchy, is training in avoiding independent thought, especially avoiding noticing when the results of research are not serving the general public. It would be remarkable indeed if any great proportion of people who succeeded in such a system, upon finally achieving a position of relative security, miraculously recovered the idealism they were forced to shelve two decades previously.

I was three years into a PhD program in ecology at Cornell University when I dodged the request to teach seventh graders about Philistine foreskins, and I was still excited about the prospect of finding solutions to pressing dilemmas through observation of the natural world. More than forty years later, I can still get excited, at least momentarily, by a fleeting glimpse of synergy between that experience and the writings of an eleventh-century theologian who is currently under an even deeper shadow in academia than his contemporaries, because of his attacks on sodomy. I have given up all hope that it is anything but an armchair exercise.

Image Credit

“Peter’s conflict with Simon Magus,” by Avanzino Nucci, 1620. Public domain.

Giotto: Adoration of the Magi

People react in a variety of ways when some piece of information, apparently reliable, contradicts a long-held belief.  Changing beliefs, especially core beliefs, is rather rare, and tends to occur only after a long process of accumulation of contrary evidence until critical mass is reached.

When I was in grade school, I had an interest in astronomy and read popular books on the subject aimed at adults. I was taught that the periodicity of this celestial body was discovered by Edmund Halley, England’s Astronomer Royal, in the early 18^th century, and confirmed in 1758. This story is still the dominant textbook account on sites like this one:  http://www.space.com/19878-halleys-comet.html. Years later, researching something called the Astronomy wars, I learned  that the actual discoverer was John Flamsteed, Astronomer Royal before Halley, whose painstaking observations on two comets visible in 1682 led to the conclusion that they were one body and allowed orbital calculations that confirmed a pattern of recurrence already long suspected.  Halley used his clout with Sir Isaac Newton, president of the Royal Academy, to obtain Flamsteed’s notes and publish them under his own name. So it’s not really Halley ’s Comet after all, and the pedestal on which that icon of the enlightenment stands has a few cracks in it.

But is the discovery Flamsteed’s? Textbooks will mention a reference by Chinese astronomers in 239 BC, the notable appearance in 1066, and perhaps the visit in 1301, which was depicted by Giotto di Bandoni in a fresco of the Nativity. In a review of historical records he compiled for writing a novel about Dante (who also witnessed and recorded the 1301 appearance) the novelist Christopher Cervasco noted that Eilmer of Malmesbury, writing in 1066, assumed that the comets of 1066 and 989 were the same comet. The scribe Eadwine, commenting on the appearance in 1145, also mentioned it as a recurring phenomenon.  (http://christophermcevasco.com/2011/07/22/halleys-comet-part-3-12th-15th-centuries/) According to Cervasco, the earliest possible mention of periodicity is from the Talmud, of a star that appeared in 66AD and appears every seventy years. The recurring nature, then, was common knowledge in the Middle Ages.

What follows now is speculative in the extreme, but is based on Dante’s explicit mention in Paradiso of the Catholic Church’s reaction to Mesopotamian charts of solar eclipses, produced in the 13^th century and vindicated by a total eclipse of the sun crossing Spain and Italy in 1297. At the time, the church taught that the darkness that occurred during Christ’s crucifixion in 33 AD was a solar eclipse; the Arab charts showed no eclipse in Palestine near that date. The discrepancy caused great consternation because people placed great stock both in the accuracy of the Bible and in the reliability of the heavens. Some church apologists claimed the passion was so momentous an event that it affected the movements of the sun and the moon; Dante concluded that the darkness was not an eclipse, and suggested what we now know as volcanic veiling as an alternative.

The astronomers who produced the eclipse tables had the capacity to use observations from the 989, 1066 and 1145 appearances of a comet to model its movement in the heavens and accurately pinpoint its return in 1301. However, to produce anything like a tidy model of a body with the observed characteristics is impossible in the Ptolemaic earth-centered cosmos. That model already required a great deal of fudging, but Halley’s comet clinched it. The earth revolved around the sun, not the other way around. This was a much more serious discrepancy than the lack of coincidence between celestial phenomena and specific biblical events, for it required rethinking an entire world view. The world in 1301 simply wasn’t ready for that, either in Europe or in Mesopotamia, where the most radical astronomy was also labelled as heretical.  It would take another 150 years before Copernicus found currency for his heliocentric theory, which did not find immediate acceptance and was indeed still the subject of learned debate when Flamsteed began his researches in the 17^th century.

Have we made significant progress in dealing with cognitive dissonance in scientific thought since the beginning of the fourteenth century? I wonder.  Models of the primordial earth have been rewritten at least three times in my adult life to preserve the organic soup theory of the origins of life in the light of the discovery of increasingly ancient fossils. Philosophically, at least, our models of the cosmos still reflect a geocentric perspective.

Image Credit

Giotto, Adoration of the Magi, ca. 1305. Lucas. Creative Commons Flickr. Some rights reserved

Blood Moon

The approaching lunar eclipse on September 28 promises to be a spectacular event, and some people who are inclined to focus on Biblical prophecies of Armageddon claim to see in this “blood moon” an echo of the sixth chapter of Revelation. The problem with equating a lunar eclipse (even the uncommon phenomenon of a lunar eclipse when the moon is at its closest approach to earth) with the onset of the apocalypse is that such eclipses occur at roughly 25-year intervals and do not correlate with natural disasters.

“Blood moon” can also refer to a moon whose light is obscured by dust and smoke in the atmosphere. This may be local, as those of us in the West who were affected by forest fires can attest. On rare occasions it may be a more general phenomenon caused by a massive volcanic eruption, in which case sun, moon, and stars are all affected, and the effect may persist for months. In recent times, volcanic veiling has been observed in conjunction with Mt. Pinatubo (1993), Krakatoa (1887) and especially Mt. Tambora (1815), and in every case the visible veiling preceded a drop in global temperatures and poor harvests.

The simultaneous darkening of the sun and a blood moon, visible over a wide area, can only occur as a result of atmospheric veiling. The orbital configurations that produce solar and lunar eclipses are diametric opposites, and observable solar eclipses are restricted to a small geographic area. This combination is a genuine portent of impending crop failures and famine, something recognized in ancient times in the Middle East, China, and Central America.

The prediction found in the sixth chapter of Revelation, and repeated elsewhere in the Bible, includes an additional portent: stars falling from the sky. “I looked when He broke the sixth seal, and there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth made of hair, and the whole moon became like blood; 13 and the stars of the sky fell to the earth, as a fig tree casts its unripe figs when shaken by a great wind.…” Allowing for a certain amount of exaggeration, this sounds like a description of a meteor shower, and, if the shower were immediately followed by massive discharge of dust into the atmosphere, obscuring all but the brightest stars, if would appear that the stars had indeed fallen from the sky.

The likelihood that a notable meteor shower, an uncommon event, will coincide this closely with a massive volcanic eruption is small, but atmospheric veiling can also follow asteroid impact. This is the presumed mechanism for the end-Cretaceous extinction of the dinosaurs. The largest impact explosions documented in modern times are the 1908 Tunguska meteorite incident in Siberia and the much smaller disaster in Chelyabinsk, also in Siberia, in 2013. The Tunguska explosion produced visible veiling in North America.

As it travels in its orbit, the earth is constantly encountering objects traveling in their own orbits, ranging from pebble-sized missiles that produce a momentary flare in the night sky, or a house-sized rock like that which exploded above Chelyabinsk with a blast several times the power of the atom bomb that leveled Hiroshima, to objects kilometers in diameter with the capacity to wipe out the human race. Of particular note are comets like Swift-Tuttle, which crosses the earth’s orbit every 133 years, leaving a trail of pebbles that fall to earth as the Perseid meteor shower. If Swift-Tuttle were to collide with the earth, the result would be massive extinctions, but a smaller object with similar properties, exploding over the Pacific Ocean, would produce effects in Europe and the Middle East that approximated the description in Revelation 6.

Specifically, the first visible manifestation would be a spectacular meteor shower as the earth entered the cloud of gravel accompanying the comet. Within days of the explosion, sun and moon would darken, temperatures would start to fall, accompanied by extreme weather events, and crop failures would precipitate famine. The sequence famine – war – pestilence is well documented historically.

Did the author of Revelation personally witness this sequence of events? Possibly. There is an abrupt cooling event in 186 AD that does not connect neatly to any known massive volcanic eruption. This is later than the traditional date for the composition of Revelation but not outside the bounds of what serious biblical scholars consider possible. According to this speculative scenario, the author, drawing upon a number of traditional sources, correctly predicted a chain of natural disasters and their human consequences but erred in extrapolating to an end-of-the-earth scenario.

This has implications for the present day. In the modern world, if we see these signs, we will also be presented with a scientific explanation. It will be tempting, when presented with them, to go to one of two extremes: either to opt for superstitious apocalypticism and assume that real-world approaches are futile, or assume that our scientific knowledge alone will ensure an adequate response. The world’s food supply is already unstable, and our political institutions unable to maintain society in the face of even local natural disasters. If human society is to survive a disaster of much greater magnitude than anything we have experienced in modern times, some meeting of minds is necessary.

Image Credit

“Moon becomes as Blood,” by Waiting for the Word. Creative Commons Flickr. Some rights reserved.

Einsiedeln Abbey

(We had bought second-class travel on our Swiss Travel Pass and when we boarded the train for our first official day of rail travel we were surprised to see how luxurious second-class is in this country. The trains are modern and very clean and the seats are comfortably plush. Through the huge windows of the second-class car we inhaled the lovely scenery and gorgeous homes along our route.)

Once we arrived in Einsiedeln and received directions from a train station employee and then again from a man on the street, we made our way through the town and up to the monastery, a huge complex of buildings, dominated by an impressive church, built in the early eighteenth century. As we entered the church just before ten, it was immediately apparent that a Mass was about to begin in the chapel of the Black Madonna, called the Chapel of Grace, located at the back of the church. The chapel itself appeared to be constructed of black marble and featured a fifteenth-century statue of the Madonna, her face blackened by centuries of dust and the soot of candles and incense; she was surrounded in gold and dressed in a beautiful robe (which apparently changes according to the seasons of the liturgical calendar), behind the altar. As we walked around the church we could hear the progress of the Mass, some of which was beautifully sung, behind us.

The Grace Chapel

The church is decorated in the baroque style, and how over-the-top baroque it is! It seems that every square centimetre of this church is covered with painting, iconography, and gold filigree. Even the pipes of the organ are decorated. Down either side of the church are numerous altars, dedicated to various saints, of different sizes and made of different materials. The main, high altar at the front of the church is the quintessence of baroque excess.

Going for Baroque

Einsiedeln Abbey is a working monastery with about sixty monks in residence. According to Switzerland.com, “The monastery complex includes not only the living space for the monks but also a diocese school, ten workshops, a wine cellar for the monastery’s own wine and stables for the monastery’s own breed of horses.”

View from the Abbey into Einsiedeln

The heavily decorated church at Einsiedeln Abbey stands in marked contrast to many of the large churches in Switzerland, like the Grossmünster in Zurich and the Cathedral of Lausanne, which were once Catholic but were taken over by the Protestants in the early 1600s during the Swiss Reformation, which was led by Huldrych Zwingli, who had once been a priest at Einsiedeln. In the process of the takeover, these churches were stripped of all their icons.

Image Credit

Photos by Juswantori Ichwan. All rights reserved.

Not technical, I mumbled something about not being able to make anything. He said, “What do you do?” I said that these days I’m a writer. “You mean you make books?” When I said yes, he exclaimed, “Then, you’re a maker!”

Christmastime makes me think, spiritually of ‘the’ Maker; of course, I realize not everyone feels this way.

“Now I don’t mean to make you frown / No, I just want you to slow down”
Have You Never Been Mellow by Olivia Newton-John

At home, this time of year, we watch the TV version of Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’. And, the more you read/see it, the more you get out of it.

In one scene, after Scrooge’s spiritual awakening, he decides to make amends with his nephew by showing up at their Christmas celebrations – after stubbornly rejecting previous such invitations. He asks his nephew’s wife, “Can you forgive a pig-headed old fool for having no eyes to see with, no ears to hear with… all these years?”

Some can handle everything on their own. I can’t. Is there someone you know that’s deaf, blind and dumb to forgiveness and understanding? I can relate.

“Someone’s Knockin’ At The Door/ Somebody’s Ringin’ The Bell…
Do Me A Favor/Open The Door and Let ‘Em In”
Let ‘Em In by Paul McCartney

For me, life’s much easier with knowing God’s love, but that doesn’t make me a religious man, a saint, or even a “good” man. I may be a maker, but I didn’t make myself.

Maybe we’ve lost all patience with those who don’t love us first… with those that are mean-spirited, even. I know that I’ve often felt the same way. But, what I’ve found, every time, is that it was I who became cynical, negative and excessively critical – the very things I detested in others.

Scrooge felt that he had to steel himself against the harshness of the world. And, as he became wealthy, his fiancé found that he wanted a golden idol more than her. Cutting himself off from her love, he failed to realize that she hadn’t changed – no matter the state of the world.

“High stepping strutters who land in the gutters / Sometimes need one, too”
Rainy Day People by Gordon Lightfoot

At moments, I know it’s possible to make our personal world into one full of love, peace and joy. And, at least at times like Christmas, we have a better chance of seeing this in others. Although some will insist (like Scrooge) that it’s all “humbug”, yet if we wait for others to love us first, we’ll wait a long time.

Whatever our personal faith, let’s be ‘makers’. Be the first to show forgiveness and love … encouragement … patience … to smile … to be positive … to be happy.

“Merry Christmas!” to all.

Image Credit

Image is Public Domain – Wikimedia Commons

Guest Author Bio

Fred Parry

Fred Parry lives in Southern Ontario. He is a lover of people and a collector of stories, music, wisdom, and grandchildren. His newspaper column, Music in Me, can be found in ‘The New Hamburg Independent’ Metroland Media. His book, ‘The Music In Me’ (2013) Friesen Press is Available from Amazon.

Blog / Website: Fred Parry

The Shoes of the Fisherman

 As in other films of this ilk and of this era, the acting is generally less than stellar, perhaps because much of the cast is attempting—sometimes with ludicrous results—to speak in one foreign accent or another. Moreover, the movie relies a great deal for its dramatic impact on the opulence of the Vatican, from its magnificent buildings to its stately rituals. The Shoes of the Fisherman is also marred by a cheesy subplot.

 But there is more to this film than its Cold War setting and plot orientation, and in light of current events unfolding in the Roman Catholic Church, it is well worth spending 162 minutes to experience Morris West’s idealized vision of the papacy, a vision rendered achingly compelling by the possibility of its realization.

 From the outset, the movie deals sensitively with the question of tension between orthodox and unorthodox theology, an ever-present theme in the post-Vatican II Church. When Kyril Lakota, political prisoner 103592R (played by Anthony Quinn), is brought to Moscow from a Siberian work camp, he is released into the custody and care of a representative sent by the Vatican, Father David Telemond (Oskar Werner). The young priest is a theologian/archaeologist/philosopher whose “work is under study by a special pontifical commission.” On the flight to Rome Father Telemond tells Lakota, “For years I have been forbidden to teach or to publish anything. I was suspect of holding opinions dangerous to the faith.” Once in the Vatican, the newly appointed Cardinal Lakota reads one of the young cleric’s books and declares to the dismayed theologian that he does not understand and cannot support his radical views. Nevertheless, a close friendship develops between them.

 Meanwhile, Father Telemond is called to explain his views in front of a commission composed entirely of clergy. He is told that the purpose of the commission is to examine the content of his works “to see if they conform to fundamental Christian doctrine.” Telemond claims that he is “one man trying to answer the questions of every man…Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? Is there any sense in beauty and ugliness, in terror and suffering and in daily death, which make up the pattern of existence?” Through a series of leading questions, his interrogators eventually come to the ultimate question of Father Telemond’s views on “good or evil, right or wrong, in the Christian sense.” At one point the young priest is accused of heresy.

 The meeting is adjourned when a priest arrives to announce that the pope has collapsed. The pontiff soon dies, and the inquisition resumes only after the new pope has been elected. In the end, the commission rules that “the works of Father Telemond present ambiguities and even grave errors in philosophical and theological matters which offend Catholic doctrine.” The commission recommends that the priest “be prohibited from teaching or publishing the dubious opinions above mentioned until a full and formal examination has been made.” The newly elected Pope Kyril, who has not only remained Telemond’s friend but has also appointed him as a special papal advisor, has no choice but to accept the ruling of the commission and to silence the earnest young theologian. One wonders how many times those words of prohibition were used during the pontificates of Pius XII and John Paul II.

 The movie also gently criticizes the pretensions and perks of the Roman curia, the elite group of senior clerics that governs the Church from the Vatican. Here is a conversation between Cardinals Rinaldi (Vittorio De Sica) and Leone (Leo McKern) which takes place shortly before the conclave to elect a new pope begins:

 Rinaldi: We are all too old. There are not more than half a dozen of us who can give the church what it needs at this moment.

 Leone: Do you think you are one of them?

 Rinaldi: One what?

 Leone: One of the half dozen.

 Rinaldi: I know I’m not.

 Leone: Do you think I have a chance of election?

 Rinaldi (laughs): I hope not.

 Leone (also laughs): Don’t worry. I know I haven’t. You know, Valerio, I should have been a country priest, with just enough theology to hear confession and just enough Latin to get through Mass. I would sit in front of my church on summer evenings and talk about the crops. And what am I now? A walking encyclopaedia of dogma. A theological dictionary on two legs.

 Rinaldi: Each of us has his own cross….Do you know what mine is? My cross, I mean. To be rich and content and fulfilled and to know that I have deserved none of it and that when I am called to judgment, I must depend utterly on the mercy of God.

 One wonders whether Leone is sincere in his desire for the simple life, but if he does covet the papal ring, he is soon disappointed. After seven rounds of voting have failed to elect a new pope, the frontrunners have all exhausted their chances. During a break in the conclave, a group of cardinals is discussing the new generation of priests who favour change, even revolution, and the Russian cardinal is asked for his opinion as he has experienced revolution first-hand. Reluctantly he offers his thoughts, and the humble but steel-willed Lakota makes a powerful impression.

 Lakota: We should manufacture the authentic Christian revolution: work for all, bread for all, dignity for all men.

 Leone: But without violence.

 Lakota: Well, excuse me, but violence is a reaction against a situation that has become intolerable, isn’t it?

 Leone (dubiously): Oh?

 Lakota: Well, in the camps in Siberia, we were starved and brutalized. I stole…I….I stole some bread. I fed it crumb by crumb to a man whose jaw had been broken by a guard. I…I fought the guard to save my friend. I could have killed him. That was a terrifying experience. I, a bishop, could have killed a man.

 Rinaldi: So as a bishop you would give your approval to social disorder.

 Lakota: I might be forced to accept it as a price for social change, yes.

 Rinaldi: You are walking a moral tightrope.

 Lakota: We all have to walk it. That is what we pay for being men.

 Rinaldi: But what if you had killed the guard?

 Lakota: I don’t know. I…I don’t know, Eminence. I do know we’re in action in a brutal world. The children of God are ours to protect, and if we have to fight, we fight.

 In the voting session that follows this conversation, Rinaldi stands to pledge his vote to Lakota, and within moments enough cardinals follow suit to ensure that the Russian is proclaimed pope. It is from this point, and throughout the second half of the film, that the movie’s ideal image of a modern pope is presented. We should keep in mind that the film was released just three years after the end of the Second Vatican Council.

 The film strives to depict the new pope as a man of simplicity and humility. Upon his election he introduces himself to his private butler as Kyril Lakota. A short time later, he prevails upon that same butler to find him a black cassock and hat so that he can sneak out of the Vatican and explore the alleyways of Rome as an ordinary priest. In one of the more touching scenes from the film, Kyril brings medicine from a pharmacy to an English doctor who is treating a dying man in a crowded tenement. When he sees the condition of the man, Kyril immediately begins to administer the last rites, but he is quickly told that the man is not Christian; he is a Jew. The Holy Father puts his hat on, covers his face with his hand and begins to chant the Hebrew prayer for the dying.

 When Kyril I meets the Soviet premier Kamenev on the way to negotiate with the Chinese leader in an effort to avert nuclear war, Kamenev says, “You are changed.” Lakota responds, “I do not feel changed.” Kamenev tells him, “There was a pride in you once. More, an arrogance, as if you carried the truth in a private purse and no one could dispute it with you. When I hated you—and I did—it was because of that.” Lakota says, “I am a low man who sits too high for his gifts.”

 Yet Pope Kyril recognizes both his power—as religious leader of 800 million people—and his terrifying responsibility to embrace and carry out the charitable mission of the Church. After the meeting with the Chinese premier, in spite of the opposition of many in the inner circle of the Vatican, he pledges the entire wealth of the Church to save the Chinese people from famine. The pledge is made as an example to remind all in the West of their duty in charity.

 At his coronation, in front of half a million people in St. Peter’s Square, Kyril rejects the Triple Tiara that has been a papal symbol since ancient times and says, “Our Lord Jesus Christ, whose Vicar I am, was crowned with thorns. I stand before you bareheaded because I am your servant.”

 He then recites the famous verses from 1 Corinthians: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not charity, I am become a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. Though I have all faith so that I could remove mountains and have not charity, I am nothing.”

 As I said above, the film offers us its vision of an ideal pope, one who has the humility to recognize that he—along with his Church and all its wealth—is the servant of the people of God, in other words, of all people.

 Should this film, by some miracle, be shown to the cardinals participating in the coming papal conclave, and should the fact of that screening, by an equally stupendous miracle, be made known to the world, a glimmer of childish hope for the election of a humble shepherd held by millions of thoughtful Catholics and non-Catholics alike might in fact grow into a ray.

Image Credit

“The Shoes of the Fisherman.” Wikipedia Image

This is an updated version of an article that appeared in my blog, Confessions of a Liturgy Queen, on April 14, 2010

Don’t get me wrong: I certainly did make resolutions regarding my physical health. But one of the biggest challenges we face these days is finding time in our schedules just to enjoy life. It might sound crazy, the idea of scheduling fun or leisure, but since we schedule everything else in life, why not? And more important than just scheduling, by setting New Year’s Resolution goals for my Morale, I ensured that I would make my Morale a priority in 2012. As with all my other goals, I kept my Morale goals simple, realistic and measurable.

Each one of us will have unique Morale goals, depending on our life situation, our abilities and our interests. Some examples for the year might be: I want to spend 100 hours of real, quality time with my kids; I want to compose 12 new songs; I want to devote 50 hours to volunteer work; I want to read 10 new books. What I’m emphasizing here is that these goals shouldn’t be connected with physical activity. I’m talking about the rest of life: quality time with people who are important to you; quality time spent on a hobby; quality time giving to the community, etc.

For me, I chose two things which were very important to me and which I thought deserved to take priority over any other choice I might make with my leisure time. The first was quality time with my wife. If this goal isn’t applicable to you, you might consider more time with your kids, your parents, your siblings, your close friends, or anyone who is really important to you and with whom you want to invest effort into building or maintaining a relationship. My second Morale goal was quality time with God. If you’re not religious, this might mean a new priority on education, or learning a new skill, or just quiet, reflective “me-time” where you get away from the demands of the world. No matter what this goal might look like to you, the point is to somehow improve yourself in a way that is important to you.

For quality time with my wife, I used as a unit of measurement the “date”. I imposed this constraint because it can be difficult to quantify the regular interaction between spouses. Was that shared joke part of my score? What about that wonderful family afternoon playing with the kids? In order to make my job of measuring progress toward my goal I needed something that was easy to measure, and I figured that a date, where we actually get out of the house and leave the kids in someone else’s care, showed a commitment on our part to making time together a priority. Occasionally I would count a date that happened at home, but I only did so when we’d pre-planned to set that time aside for each other and then actually did spend quality time together (as opposed to doing chores or checking emails, etc). I travel overseas a lot, so setting up a regular date routine was challenging, but I established the baseline goal of 24 dates in the year. On top of this I added known periods where we’d be away from the kids (a week away in March, two days in July and our anniversary) and came up with a total goal of 32 dates. With my monthly milestones set at 2 dates per month plus those three extra groups in March, July and December, I had a useful progress line to follow as my unpredictable travel schedule often swept me away for 2 or 3 weeks at a time. The whole point of this goal was to ensure that my wife and I carved time out of the chaos to devote to each other.

For quality time with God, I used simple hours as the unit of measurement. Due to my travel I knew I couldn’t rely on regular church attendance to take care of this, so I was forced to find other ways to stay connected. I started reading my Bible more regularly, and I’d take breaks every so often to read a book on Christian spirituality that interested me. I made time for a Christian small group study in order to make new friends and be part of the community. And I started praying a lot more often. For anyone who thinks that prayer can only be done in church on one’s knees, I can tell you from new experience that I’m amazed at how easy it is to have a meaningful conversation with God walking through an airport (which I do a lot). I didn’t track every second that I spent in prayer towards my goal, but just by making my relationship with God a priority I found myself making time to pray much more often.

Please let me stress again that these goals were what I wanted to accomplish: yours may be completely different. The general principle on New Year’s Resolutions and goals I wanted to make in this article is that it’s essential for our overall health to consider aspects of life separate from physical health. Our emotional/mental/spiritual health – our Morale – is at least as important as our physical health, and I encourage everyone to consider their real priorities when setting resolutions for 2013.

Photo Credits

All photos courtesy of the author – All rights reserved

The tone and content of the article are astonishing. Fr. De Souza writes about two elderly and distinguished experts on the Second Vatican Council, both of whom were slated to be “highlighted” at a Vatican II conference in Ottawa this past weekend. One of these men is Gregory Baum, a former priest who was a peritus, or theological advisor, at the council. Baum is nearly 90. Here is what Wikipedia says about him: “He was the Professor of theology and sociology at University of Saint Michael’s College in the University of Toronto and subsequently professor of theological ethics at McGill University’s Faculty of Religious Studies. He is currently associated with the Jesuit Centre justice et foi in Montreal.” Professor Baum has written thirteen books. Here is what Fr. De Souza says about him in the B.C. Catholic column: “Baum too was a peritus at the council. But at nearly 90 years old he is a lion no longer able to hunt whose roars have long since lost their capacity to terrify the jungle. More than a theological force, he is now of principal interest as an archaeological specimen, the relic of a time when the future of the Church was expected to be an abrupt break with her past.”

Fr. De Souza is equally dismissive of the Catholic journalist Robert Blair Kaiser, 82. Wikipedia: “As a correspondent for Time Magazine, [Kaiser] won the Overseas Press Club’s Ed Cunningham Award in 1962 for the ‘best magazine reporting from abroad’ for his reporting in the Second Vatican Council.” Fr. De Souza: “…Kaiser is another of the old lions rather grumpy now that the new Church never quite took hold in the Catholic world as it did world [sic] of mainline Protestantism.”

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council by Pope John XXIII. The council, consisting of four sessions from 1962 to1965, was attended by nearly three thousand bishops from all over the world. The pope’s vision for Vatican II—and for the Church—is captured in the Italian word aggiornamento—“updating”—a word which he used in the 1959 announcement of his intention to hold a new ecumenical council; John XXIII saw the mission of the council as bringing the Church into the modern world.

A significant aspect of aggiornamento was to effect the reversal of a trend that had been evident in the Church since the eleventh century but had intensified in the past one hundred years, a trend which saw power increasingly concentrated in the hands of the pope and his officials in the Vatican, the latter collectively known as the Roman Curia.

The council attempted to redefine the Church as “the people of God,” empowering the laity and encouraging them to participate more fully in the liturgical and pastoral life of the Church. A recent editorial in America Magazine described the effect of this re-imagining: “It encouraged a keen awareness of corporate belonging to the one body of Christ based on the unity of baptism, the priesthood of all believers and the universal call to holiness. Appropriating the image as their own, hierarchy and faithful, clergy and religious experienced an intensified sense of communion in one body.”

Vatican II, then, was striving to flatten the hierarchical structure that had rigidified over the centuries and in doing so create a Church characterized by the harmonious participation of all its members in bringing the message of love to the world.

The council fathers concretized this re-imagining in several ways. The Mass was now to be celebrated in the language of the congregation, rather than in Latin, and the celebrant was to face the people in the pews as he conducted the liturgy. The altar rail that separated the priest from the people was removed. Lay persons became acolytes, lectors, and Eucharistic ministers. Diocesan pastoral councils and parish councils, with full and equal participation of the laity, were formed.

Lay people, including, for the first time, women, became theologians and experts in religious studies, invigorating parish education programs with their newfound religious perspectives and theological knowledge and expertise and adding a new dimension to the faith life and the intellectual life of the Church. Finally, in the face of virulent opposition from the Curia, the authority of bishops, particularly within their own dioceses, in communion with the pope as “the perpetual and visible source and foundation of the unity of the bishops and of the multitude of the faithful,” was reaffirmed, in effect diminishing the power of the papacy and of the Curia.

Despite shock experienced and expressed by certain members of the laity and clergy at the sudden and radical changes in the liturgy, there was a general sense of euphoria among the Catholic faithful both during and after the council. The council fathers had succeeded in overcoming the resistance and machinations of the Curia and set in place the foundation for a new and modern Church, one in which “The People of God are the Church. Whatever structures and other institutional elements exist within the Church are to assist the People of God to fulfill their mission and ministries. These elements, therefore, exist to serve the whole People of God, not the other way around” (Richard McBrien, in The Church: The Evolution of Catholicism).

Father de Souza’s article, and the dismissive and disrespectful tone he takes toward two distinguished men who undoubtedly know more about Vatican II than this arrogant priest ever will, is a small, parochial example of a much larger reality: the communion of all the faithful envisioned by the council fathers and celebrated by the majority of Catholics in the early post-conciliar years has been forestalled by reactionary forces within the Church. Beginning with the weak and indecisive Paul VI, successor to John XXIII (who died in June 1963), and followed by the ultraconservative and restorationist John Paul II and his successor, Benedict XVI, the papacy, with the support of the Roman Curia, has succeeded in restoring the hierarchical, patriarchal structure of the Church and the dominant and privileged position of the Catholic clergy.

While Rome attempts to enforce unity through papal and curial authority, there can in fact be no communion of the faithful under the present conditions in the Church as the unity that the hierarchy seeks is in fact merely conformity to its view of what the Church should be. In their desperate attempt to maintain power and to hold together the medieval structure of the Catholic hierarchy, pope, cardinals, and bishops use threats, disciplinary procedures, and campaigns of condemnation against groups or individuals perceived as departing from orthodoxy as it has been defined by Rome. Clearly the reformist vision of Vatican II, not to mention the gospel message and the example of Jesus proclaiming universal unconditional love, has been replaced with a thinly disguised megalomania that has transformed communion into division.

Given the vision of Blessed John XXIII, the courage of the bishops in attendance at Vatican II, and the hopes of millions of laypeople sparked by the council, the state of the Catholic Church—divided, defensive, exclusive—fifty years after this miraculous event is sad indeed. It is little wonder that thinking people, many of whom are lifelong Catholics, are leaving the Church in frustration, even despair. Writer Michael J. Walsh states, in another America article, “Pope Benedict has launched a ‘new evangelization’ in an effort to win people back to the practice of their faith. But loss of belief is not, I am convinced, the main reason Catholics no longer turn up to church on Sundays. Rather, it is the feeling that their church has been stolen from them.”

To this I can only add a sorrowful “Amen.”

Photo Credit

“Second Vatican Council” by Lothar Wolleh. 

The only Roman Catholic priest I have met in recent years who was truly himself was “Father Bob,” a Basilian, who said Mass most Sundays and Tuesday mornings at my parents’ church in the small town of Chase, British Columbia. His always-succinct homilies rang with a truth that often speaks to me even to this day. I remember one of Bob’s sermons, delivered in 2007, less than a year before his death, in which he assured the members of the congregation that God dwelt in each of them. At the end of that homily he said that he had long wondered why Catholics always genuflected to the tabernacle and never to each other.

Today is Sunday and again I am not in church.

I have been restless over the past 14 months. In April 2010, I left the Catholic church to which I had belonged for four years; my departure was in protest over a blatantly homophobic article that had appeared in the weekly archdiocesan newspaper. A few months later I began attending Mass at another parish only to leave this church as well after a brief spell.

Finally, in March of this year, I contacted the pastor of an Anglican church that had been recommended to me, met with him, and subsequently began attending his church, a community that is welcoming, inclusive, and committed. The pastor is a brilliant homilist: his sermons, like those of Father Bob, are profound reflections on faith as it relates to how we live our lives every day. The parish is deeply involved in social justice. And this year’s Good Friday liturgy was the most beautiful church service I had ever experienced. I believed that I had at last found a spiritual home.

Yet, after only a few weeks, I stopped attending services at this wonderful church as well. I admit that I did not really give it a chance. The church is not in the most convenient location for me; thus it is easy to make excuses for Sunday-morning laziness. Furthermore, I am practically pathologically socially inept, so it takes me five times as long as “normal” persons to insinuate myself into a community.

But the real reason for my restlessness is, I believe, that I am simply unfulfilled by the church-going experience, no matter how beautiful the service, no matter how friendly the community. And it all goes back to what Father Bob implied in his homily and indeed to what the mystics have said throughout the ages: we must seek God — the Divine Spark — within; we will not experience that spark in the Word, in the Eucharist, in liturgical music until we have recognized that God is within us as we are within him.

I have been seeking God in the external “trappings” of church. Yet instead of leading me to God as I once believed they were, these elements of ritual have in fact been distractions that have kept me from doing the “work” of creating the silent space within which I may experience the divine. The trappings are meaningless unless they can be seen as symbols of that divine experience, reminders that God dwells within me as I dwell within God.

Will I go back to church? Given that even in my long agnostic period I was deeply attracted to the traditional liturgical expression of faith, it is likely that at some point I will return. I understand now, however, that if I do begin attending services again, whether the community is RC or Anglican, I will be experiencing the liturgy and the community in a profoundly altered way.

Photo Credit

“Summer breeze” archangel _raphael @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

I am a child of the modern world. On the one hand, I have been educated to think critically and thus do not suffer gladly what I consider to be foolish ideas or foolish beliefs. On the other hand, I keenly desire to be a fool for God in the sense that I seek to submit fully to “that which is greater than we are”— in the Christian tradition, this would be God. Moreover, I long to be fully engaged in a faith community that accepts me unreservedly and unconditionally for the person that I am while seeking to be uplifted by the beautiful liturgical traditions of the Church in which I grew up and with which I have a powerful emotional connection.

The tension becomes even more acute when I reflect on my belief in God. Who is God? Is he the bearded (and somewhat fearsome) figure sitting on a cloud and touching the finger of his creation Adam? Few of us can relate to this Old Testament image. But if the personification of God does not work for us as it did when we were children, who, or what, do we pray to? How do we experience God?

I am certain that there are others who feel, or have felt, this tension. The lucky ones find an individual church or faith community within their religious tradition that supports their personal quest and fulfills their spiritual needs. Others may deal with the tension by becoming secular humanists or “spiritual but not religious” people, by adopting a faith or subscribing to a philosophy outside of their cultural experience, or by simply setting the whole business of God to the side and going on with their lives.

Shortly following my return to Catholicism after many years of “lapse,” I had lunch with a young priest. In our conversation, the subject of faith came up and the priest told me that when he was a teenager, he, like many other young people, was bored with church and did not share the strong faith of his parents. I asked him what had restored his faith so radically that he decided, before he reached the age of twenty, that he wanted to become a priest. He gave me a few reasons, but the first thing he said in answer to my question was, “Well, we all have to believe in something.”

As I had already begun to experience the great tension between faith and reason, I was stunned by this statement. Was all that stood between agnosticism and faith a conscious decision to “believe in something”? Do we just sit down one day and say, “Let’s see now: I have to believe in something, so I guess, since I was raised Catholic and I pretty much know all the doctrines and stuff, it might as well be Catholicism”? And once that belief decision is made we are magically able to accept holus-bolus the body of Catholic teaching. No doubts, no going back, no questioning this belief or that doctrine. True peace of mind.

Despite his years of seminary indoctrination, his conservative cultural background, and the predominance of orthodox Catholicism among clergy and laypeople in the archdiocese in which I live, it is difficult to imagine that doubt does not at some point swamp this young man’s confident and comfortable belief. Can there be no conflict when you refuse Holy Communion to a couple you know is living together without the sacrament of matrimony yet offer it to a “legally” married couple you are 99 percent certain are using contraceptives? In your homily, when you tell us what God wants us to do, do you really believe you know what God wants? I am curious as to what happens to the orthodox believer when new information or problems of everyday life intrude upon the comfort zone of belief.

If we acknowledge God as our creator, surely we must also acknowledge that part of that creation is a brain and that the little creature is simply not content to accept whatever it is told. As modern, educated individuals, we also have to acknowledge the significant body of religious-historical research, biblical scholarship, and theological insight that has formed over the past one hundred years.

Let’s start with the concept of faith. If you asked any Christian the definition of faith, the reply would likely be that faith is belief; the more intellectually sophisticated Christian might say that faith was belief in something for which there is no evidence. When I was thinking of becoming a priest, I had a talk with a spiritual director (arranged by the young priest I mentioned above). The spiritual director, who writes a weekly article on scripture in the archdiocesan newspaper, told me that he had no difficulty believing in God. After all, he said—with a straight face—he had never seen Australia but it is obvious to everyone that Australia exists. (Well, Father, that’s because we all have to believe in something; it might as well be Oz.)

How did we come to adopt this narrowly defined concept of faith as belief?

It turns out that the idea of faith as belief is relatively new. New Testament scholar Marcus Borg tells us that “two developments account for its dominance in modern Western Christianity.” The first is the Protestant Reformation, which created a number of different Christian denominations, all of which distinguished themselves from other groups by emphasizing what they believed, “that is, by their distinctive doctrines or confessions.” In the subsequent Catholic Counter-Reformation, Catholics firmly reasserted their version of Christian truth.

Borg says that the second development was the Enlightenment, which “identified truth with factuality” and which “called into question the factuality of parts of the Bible and of many traditional Christian teachings.” So Christians, and especially Catholics, had to defend their territory by declaring the literal-factual “truth” of the virgin birth, the miracles performed by Jesus, the Resurrection, and all the other biblical events; and if you didn’t believe these truths, you had no business calling yourself a Christian.

The post-Enlightenment Church, then, has defined faith for us as belief in the literal-factual interpretation of the Bible and agreement with/adherence to a set of doctrines stipulated by the institution. The Catholic Church has taken a particularly hard line on the issue of faith in the modern era. In so doing it has created an unending cycle of conflict with those who don’t accept the whole package but wish to remain in the church, and it has cast many others out to wander alone in the desert.

So what are the “faithful doubters” among us supposed to do?Marcus Borg expresses his understanding of the tension between reason and faith-as-belief by saying that “we cannot easily give our heart to something that the mind rejects.” In his book The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith, Borg offers alternate definitions of faith that have more to do with the heart than with the head. One of these is faith as fiducia, which amounts to “radical trust in God.” Borg says, “Significantly it does not mean trusting in the truth of a set of statements about God….Rather, it means trusting in God.” He also defines faith as fidelitas, which is fidelity or faithfulness to our relationship with God; and as visio, “faith as a way of seeing the whole, seeing ‘what is.’”

These are liberating definitions if we accept them; they free us from the constraints imposed by “faith in a box,” the requirement of believing in a predetermined and fixed set of dogmas and doctrines and following a code of man-made laws in order to maintain our status as members of an institutionalized faith community. Naturally, if we are to adopt this new paradigm of faith, we must also free ourselves of the guilt of imagined disloyalty to the faith of our childhood, the faith of our parents. To make such a change requires emotional, psychological, and spiritual adjustment. For some of us it may also mean moving to a new faith community.

Borg’s faith paradigm assumes that we are comfortable with how we perceive God. But many of us are not. We have not made the transition from our childhood belief in a personal, even anthropomorphic God to a more mature understanding and acceptance of a being or entity that embraces and infuses all creation and that dwells within us and is a part of us. We are stuck in our logical thinking mind and are afraid to make the imaginative leap necessary to experience the divine in all of creation.

In his book Jewish with Feeling: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Practice, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the “spiritual leader of the Jewish Renewal movement,” acknowledges the contradiction between our logical minds and our heart’s desire to experience God in our lives. But, he says:

“Contradictions we can live with. Nothing we can say about God will survive the rigors of logical analysis. But that shouldn’t get in the way of our search for the presence we have felt in our most spiritually open—or spiritually hungry—moments. If there is a tension between what we know in our minds and what we feel in our hearts, let’s stay with that tension. If there is a contradiction let us take it upon ourselves. Only let us press on with our desire to experience the numinous and serve the patterns of the universe in a deeper, more meaningful way.”

At the same time Reb Zalman recognizes our very human need for “spiritual intimacy” with an Other, a God we can relate to in our moments of great joy and great pain. After all, we cannot talk to—or pray to—an abstraction or a concept. But Reb Zalman recommends that in order to deal with “the limitations language imposes on our grasp of the infinite,” we create our own names for God and our own ways of speaking to God that reflect our unique understanding and experience of the divine.

What I get from all of this is that for faith to work for us in the modern age we must be able to joyfully manage the tension between the head and the heart. On the one hand, I cannot believe that God would give me an active brain and then ask me to check it at the church door. I am very happy to be a “cafeteria Catholic,” freely choosing what to believe and eschewing what does not resonate. On the other hand, I must accept that an imaginative, childlike approach to God is not a bad thing if it allows me to experience the divine. Perhaps our need for God is as much emotional as it is spiritual.

A friend who read this article shared the following observation: “I sense that your journey is very much head stuff and you need a real blast of heart stuff. Not the emotional stuff that comes from good music, well performed liturgies, moving and meaningful sermons. You need a blast of the infinite.” She knows me well.

Photo Credits

“Thinking then having a doubt” fabio @ Flickr.com Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.
“Blind faith” xurde @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.
“Blind Faith Cafe” Swanksalot @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.