Podcasts for Young Philosophers and IB Theory of Knowledge Students

Reflection for the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time
Deacon Douglas McManaman

The readings for the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time are very interesting, and I had to take some time to think about how the first reading in particular relates to the second reading and the gospel. I am not sure if I succeeded in figuring it out, but I was intrigued by the first reading from Proverbs, which focuses on the ideal woman, in particular, the married woman–but of course, the text is really about the dignity of women in general. 

I was particularly struck by the line: “Her husband, entrusting his heart to her, has an unfailing prize.” It is this “entrusting his heart to her” that is important. When you entrust your heart to someone, you have placed complete trust in that person, that this person will not squeeze that heart and leave you wounded. Marriage demands a great deal of trust, because in time couples come to know one another very well; they know each other’s flaws, imperfections, and idiosyncrasies. And in time, the libido begins to wane, the flower wilts, and we simply don’t look like we did when we were younger, and so if a marriage is going to endure, it demands a charity that can love one’s spouse not for what that person can do for me, but for that person’s own sake and unconditionally. That’s a love that is very difficult to achieve, which is why so many marriages crash after a time. 

What is also particularly interesting is that the woman is depicted here not as a passive, submissive and frail little maiden, dependent upon the care of the all governing man of the house. No, she is active, she has initiative; she has business acumen. 

She seeks wool and flax…She considers a field and buys it,…She girds herself with strength, and makes her arms strong. She perceives that her merchandise is profitable. Her lamp does not go out at night. (Prov 31, 13-15)

This is not the image of the typical woman of a highly patriarchal society, the subservient housewife that we are familiar with from the sitcoms of the early 60s. The Jewish scriptures provide a very different image. It begins in the second chapter of Genesis in which the woman is created last. This signifies that she is the culmination, climax, and crown of creation, not a subordinate afterthought.[1] The depiction of woman coming from the rib of man is very revealing; for the man (e-adm) has nothing to do with the creation of woman; he is put into a deep sleep; thus, he exercises no dominion over her. In this instance, he is the one who is entirely passive. The depiction of a woman coming from his side is very symbolic; for the man (e-adm) comes from the mud of the earth (ath-e·adme), while the woman comes from a higher place, above the ground, from a more refined source, namely the rib. This narrative symbolizes two things: that woman is of the same substance as man, hence, man and woman are equal, but it also suggests that since she comes from a higher and more refined place, her role is to reach down towards the ground and lift him up, challenging him to a greater moral and spiritual nobility. So although the man and the woman are equal, there is a hint that the woman is, in some sense, superior, and his role is to be humble and allow himself to be thus challenged and to rise to the occasion. 

And then we have the following verse: “…let her works praise her in the city gates”. In the ancient world, the city gates were not merely the entryways in a wall; they were the civilian, economic, and the legal heart of the community, and so this verse constitutes in fact the ultimate declaration of the highest public honour, legal recognition, and economic respect.

It is in the third chapter of Genesis that we see the introduction of a perpetual conflict between the man and the woman: “You will have desire for your husband, but he will rule over you” (Gn 3, 16). What this means is that the domination and oppression of women throughout history was the result of man’s sin and his desire to be “as gods”, and not the expression of the divine will; it is a perversion of the order of creation. 

If I am to relate this first reading to the gospel (the Parable of the Talents), I will say this. Over the years, I have been increasingly impressed with the talents and brilliance of others, first my colleagues in teaching with their unique minds (historical, mathematical, scientific, literary, etc.), but more generally the special talents and gifts of the faithful. And I’ve been especially impressed with the brilliance of certain women, who have real gifts of leadership, such as school principals, directors of education, as well as women psychiatrists, surgeons, research scientists, women philosophers, writers, theologians, women biblical scholars, etc. I’m thinking of people like Elizabeth Anscombe, Flannery O’Conner, Jungian psychologist Ann Ulanov, or Ruth Barnhouse, Barbara Reid, Ilia Delio, Beatrice Bruteau, and of course we have great women in our tradition, such as Catherine of Siena, Hildegard of Bingen, Theresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, Beatrice of Nazareth, etc. But there is no doubt that over the centuries, the extraordinary talents of women were in large part buried, as it were, so we are kind of like the man in the gospel who buried the single talent, all as a result of his misperception of the character of God—looking upon God as stern and unreasonably demanding. The man buried the talent because he was risk averse, and was more concerned about controlling the outcome. Out of the more than 10,000 officially recognized saints and blesseds in the Church, only a fraction, close to 800, are women. That leaves a lot of buried talent. To be fair, the hierarchy has actively worked to address this imbalance, in particular Pope John Paul II and his successors–they accelerated the canonization of women, focusing more and more on laywomen, mothers, and female foundresses of religious orders. But it is so important for us to become attuned to the unique and extraordinary talents of others, especially women, to recognize them and allow them to lift us higher. But this requires that we recognize and embrace our limitations, which can be more or less difficult for some of us. 

Finally, the description of the ideal woman in the first reading really is about all of us, men included, because in relation to God, we are woman: creation is woman, the Church is woman. In fact, we were created in the image and likeness of God, and according to St. Maximilian Kolbe, there is divine motherhood in God, which is the Holy Spirit. Kolbe refers to the Holy Spirit as the uncreated Immaculate Conception–Mary being the created Immaculate Conception. He points out that the one thing that a mother desires more than anything else is to see the bond between Father and Son, and the Holy Spirit is the Personified love that binds the Father and the Son. And so the Holy Spirit is the divine motherhood in God.[2] And in the same way, there is what Carl Jung refers to as the anima in every man, which is the feminine aspect within us, and it is utterly important for men to embrace this anima, this feminine aspect within themselves; if the male represses it, he will simply continue to oppress the female gender outside of himself.[3] So today’s readings call us to allow the great women of our lives and our tradition to lift us to a much higher psychological and spiritual level. The world can only be healed not through domination, coercion, show of force, fear and intimidation, but through nurture, which is why the great Rabbis teach that it is by man’s union with the feminine that he can learn to heal the world through nurture, and so learn to become more truly a man [4]. 

Notes

1. Phyllis Trible. “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Mar., 1973, Vol. 41, No. 1, Mar., 1973.

2. “In God, in the very depths of the divine being, there exists a certain motherhood of love, the Holy Spirit, who links Father and Son with each other in joy and peace”. Fr. H. M. Manteau-Bonamy, O.P. The Immaculate Conception and the Holy Spirit: The Marian Teachings of St. Maximilian Kolbe. Libertyville, IL: Prow Books, 1975, p. 23.

3. “Jung believed that within every person there are elements of the opposite sex. This contrasexual core, which Jung calls the anima in the male personality and the animus in the female, performs the specific psychic function of connecting the conscious male or female ego-identity with the deeper regions of the unconscious which Jung calls the objective psyche. Jung calls this deep unconscious layer of the psyche objective because our subjective ego-consciousness gradually emerges out of its prior existence and continues to experience that existence as other than itself, alien to its own subjective ego-territory. In contrast to what Jung calls the personal layer of the unconscious, whose contents consist of repressed memories and traits which can be recalled to consciousness and experienced as belonging to the ego, the contents of the objective psyche, the archetypes, are more impersonal and collective in nature and hence harder to integrate into conscious adaptation…. Thus, to the conscious ego the anima or animus seems to be an impersonal “other” that confronts the ego from outside itself. Somehow the ego must learn to bring this force into connection with its own personal identity. Jung coined the word “anima” and “animus” as a result of observing in countless patients split-off sides of the psyche recurrently appearing in personified forms as male or female figures. One common example was the overly rational male who consistently dreamed of being confronted by an emotional and sexy female who tempted him into “irrational” behavior. On awakening, the dreamer still felt possessed by the mood of this dream anima-figure, invaded by a bittersweet mixture of excitement and longing. This anima-lure is typical of the way the unconscious tries to acquaint the one-sided ego with affects and impulses it has excluded from its conscious functioning. This is what Jung means when he says that the function of the contrasexual factor is to lead us to the deeper realms of the objective psyche. The anima-figure points the way, in this example, to the split-off nonrational side of life.” Ann Belford Ulanov. “C. G. Jung on Male and Female” in Male and Female: Christian Approaches to Sexuality, edited by Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse and Urban. T. Holmes, III. New York: Seabury Press, 1976, pp. 197-199.

4. “A woman’s influence is different from a man’s. A man needs to conquer, to vanquish an opponent. Therefore, his victory is often superficial—he may get the other guy to nod his head, but not to surrender his heart. A woman is able to reach inside a man, so he may not even recognize her influence. He feels as though this was his idea all along. Her conquest is through nurture. From where does this talent come? Paradoxically, from the woman’s union with a man. In that union, she discovers what it is to be a woman, and how a woman conquers with love. So too, from the man’s union with a woman, he can learn to heal the world through nurture. To be truly a man.” Sefer Hasichot 5751, Noach

 

Homily for the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Deacon Douglas McManaman

What stood out to me in these readings for the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time was a line from the first reading: 

You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt (Ex 22, 20).

In order for this commandment to have any weight at all, it was necessary that Israel experience oppression, that is, taste what it is like to suffer as slaves without intrinsic value. Without that experience, the commandment not to oppress a resident alien would have been nothing more than an idea, and ideas are abstract. Israel would be a people without empathy. For the Greeks, knowledge was the product of reasoning on a rather high level of abstraction, and the emotions are to be governed by reason. But for the Jews, knowledge is union, that is, it is a matter of experience. We don’t know something until we are united to it in some way. I don’t know a country until I’ve been there, and the more time I spend there, the more complete is my knowledge; I really don’t know someone until I am united to that person in some sort of friendship that loves the person as another self, as another me–as opposed to merely utilitarian friendships. The Hebrews were aliens once; they tasted alienation, they felt the pain of oppression, so now they really understand why oppressing an alien is reprehensible. Without that experience, they would quickly become an oppressor, particularly in times of prosperity. 

Some people see empathy as a raw emotion that on its own will lead a person or a society to self-destruction, and so they see empathy as dangerous, a passion that needs to be reigned in by logic and reason. But empathy is fundamentally a movement of the heart that follows upon knowledge. In fact, it is a kind of knowledge, the fruit of an experience, a knowing that is a result of union. 

There is so much in our lives that we have no real knowledge of because we simply have not had the experience. That is why as we get older and acquire more experience, we come to understand things we simply did not get when we were younger and without experience–unforunately, there are some who, despite the passing of time, never seem to learn from experience. But typically, when a person becomes a parent of a child, and that child becomes an adolescent, the parent suddenly understands something about his own parents that he just could not understand before. Moreover, when a teacher becomes an administrator, he soon begins to understand something about the administrators that he, in his youth, condemned in his ignorance.

One of my first assignments shortly after ordination was the Queen Street Mental Health Center in Toronto. Not too long after that, I came down with a crippling illness which left me in bed for most of the day in great pain. In fact, the pain was like nothing I ever had to endure before. What made matters worse was that the doctors had no idea what it was–the emergency room doctor thought it might be Polymyalgia Rheumatica, which is a condition that can suddenly come upon men over 50, and there is no known cure. That was frightening, because I knew that I could not return to the classroom should this persist. The worst part of this suffering, however, was the feeling of profound despair. I was surrounded by a dark cloud that felt as if it would never lift. Every night I was on the phone with my spiritual director, who was content simply to listen. At one point I said to him: “I think I’m beginning to understand what my patients have to go through every day”, referring to those who have to live with clinical depression and who have to learn how to live not one week at a time, nor one day at a time, but one moment at a time.

Eventually the illness began to subside and after some time I was weaned off the prednisone, but the experience was very important for me, because it gave me a much greater understanding of the patients I visit, a much deeper empathy. As a result, there are certain things I would never say to a person suffering from clinical depression precisely because I had gone through an experience that was really only a small taste of what they have gone through for most of their lives. People say all sorts of things that they believe are helpful but are in fact hurtful and alienating precisely because they don’t know any better, and they don’t know any better because they haven’t experienced certain aspects of human life. The result is a lack of empathy, at least with respect to certain situations.

For many years now I have maintained that human beings are at their worst in times of prosperity but at their best in times of suffering. We see this on a national level as well as an individual level. When a nation is enjoying great prosperity, the result is not necessarily gratitude and a willingness to share the fruits of that prosperity with others less fortunate, but an increase in greed, a fear of immigrants, and an increase in cruelty, racism, and incidents of racist violence. But when a nation suddenly experiences economic hardship, i.e. the Great Depression, or war, etc., we see an increase of moral heroism. And this is true on an individual level as well. Prosperity does not bring out the best in us, but often the worst, while suffering tends to make us much more humane. 

And that is why God permits suffering in this world. He does not will suffering upon us, but he does allow it. But more to the point, God has joined himself to human suffering in joining a human nature to himself in the Person of the Word, and in his passion and death on the cross. Because of that divine presence in the depths of our humanity, we don’t suffer alone. In fact, we acquire a certain dignity in our suffering, because we keep Christ company in his suffering, and he in ours. 

The life of Christ is a victory over the darkness of suffering and death, and it is only in him, in the Person of Christ, that we are given the strength to be victorious over the darkness of our sufferings and ultimately our death. Without any kind of suffering in our lives, human nature is such that we’d gradually become loveless, self-centered, focused only on our own comfort level. Suffering makes genuine empathy for others who suffer a real possibility. And that was how God described the change that the New Covenant would bring about: “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh” (Ez 36, 26). 

In other words, he gives us the capacity of love. When our life is united to Christ’s, who was a man of sorrows, a man of suffering, we become like him. Our soul is beautified by that union with him. Without that and with a life of ease and constant pleasures, we can become relatively loveless and unable to empathize with those whose lives are difficult, and the result is we remain indifferent to them. But suffering can bring us a new heart, because in the depth of our suffering, we encounter the heart of Christ. 

 

 

A Short Reflection on the Gospel for Wednesday, the 28th Week in Ordinary Time.
Deacon Douglas McManaman

The Lord said: “Woe to you Pharisees! You pay tithes of mint and of rue and of every garden herb,
but you pay no attention to judgment and to love for God. These you should have done, without overlooking the others. Woe to you Pharisees! You love the seat of honor in synagogues and greetings in marketplaces.  Woe to you! You are like unseen graves over which people unknowingly walk.” Then one of the scholars of the law said to him in reply, “Teacher, by saying this you are insulting us too.” And he said, “Woe also to you scholars of the law! You impose on people burdens hard to carry, but you yourselves do not lift one finger to touch them.”

The good news of the gospel is not a heavy burden, for Christ said it: “Come to me all you who labor and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest. For my yolk is easy, my burden is light”. We know the gospel has been corrupted when it becomes burdensome. Life itself is filled with burdens, but the gospel is the good news of the kingdom of God, the redemptive presence of God through the power of his reconciling Spirit. Participating in that kingdom (participating in the risen Christ) does not remove life’s burdens, but it does give us the power to carry them with joy and added strength, in order to rise above them.

That kingdom is within you, we are told, (Lk 17, 20-21), and so the joy of participating in that kingdom is to begin today. Joy, however, is very different from pleasure, as Merton so famously pointed out.[1] I spent the first fifteen years of my teaching career making difficult thought easy for my students to grasp. Germain Grisez is one moral philosopher that I spent much time re-formulating, since his work is highly structured, and adolescents need and appreciate structure. One of the more interesting moral principles formulated by Grisez is that “One should not choose on the basis of emotions which bear upon empirical aspects of intelligible goods (or bads) in a way which interferes with a more perfect sharing in the good or avoidance of the bad.” [2] This is not an easy principle to understand, but Grisez explains it thus: “Violating this mode means sacrificing reality to appearance, as is done, typically, by someone more interested in the conscious experience of enjoying a good or avoiding an evil than the reality.” An example of this might be drug use: a person opts for the “feeling” of having his life all together (integration) by getting high, but without the reality of that integration or integrity, which takes time and effort to achieve.

Now, there are certain “empirical aspects” to the liturgy, such as ambiance, lighting, incense, beautiful vestments, colors, the smell of flowers, art, stained glass, choral music, chant, silence, etc. But the intelligible human good pursued and expressed in the liturgy is, or is supposed to be, the good of “religion”, which is, in short, “relationship with God”.  But just as it is possible to be motivated by the “empirical”, that is, the sensual, without a proper interest for the intelligible human good of which the empirical is only an aspect, it is very possible to love the empirical aspects of the liturgy without a corresponding love for all that the liturgy is supposed to represent, namely the love and worship of God and, by extension, the love of neighbour. In other words, it is very possible for a condescending, arrogant, envious, controlling, indifferent, self-centered, narcissistic, misogynistic cleric to “love the liturgy”. 

Pious devotions, orthodoxy (being right), liturgical choreography, the love of vestments, etc., are not the same thing as holiness. The former can and often do amount to sanctimony. But holiness is love, and sacrifice is the language of love, and love bears upon concrete human beings, especially those who struggle, who are burdened by life’s challenges. Love does not separate oneself from the mess of broken human lives, but is a willingness to enter into the sufferings of others for their sake and for Christ’s sake, because love sees beyond the superficial and changeable characteristics of a human person to the very core of the person who may not be able to say “I am a physician”, or “I am a teacher”, or “I am a highly talented musician”, or “I am a writer”, “a renowned actor”, etc., but can say “I am”, along with everyone else. It is in this that a person exists in the image and likeness of God, who revealed Himself to Moses as “I AM”. 

Notes

1. “Never seek rest in pleasure, for you were not created for pleasure; you were created for joy. And if you do not know the difference between pleasure and joy, you have not yet begun to live”.
2. The Way of the Lord Jesus: Christian Moral Principles, Vol. 1. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1983. P. 214.

Homily for the 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Deacon Douglas McManaman

The gospel for today, the 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time, compares the kingdom of God to a king who gives a wedding banquet for his son, a feast of rich foods and choice wines. And so we can believe that heaven is going to be one great eternal party. However, the kingdom of God, Christ tells us, is within you (Lk 17, 21). It is here, it has been established in Christ’s death and resurrection, a kingdom that grows and develops throughout history, and so the party is meant to begin now. And we know it is a party that serves wine, because Christ’s first miracle was at the wedding of Cana where they ran out of wine, so Jesus changed gallons of dirty water into the finest wine, which, according to the twenty fifth chapter of Isaiah, is really an announcement that the Messiah has come and is here to achieve a complete victory over death. 

But wine is a symbol of joy; for Psalm 104 tells us that “God created wine to cheer the heart of man”. And so although heaven is going to be an eternal state of unimaginable joy, the very fact that the kingdom of heaven is “within you” means that this life is meant to be the beginnings of that state of supernatural joy. 

Everyone is invited to this feast, the good and the bad alike–not just the good. The invitation, therefore, does not depend on being a person of great moral nobility. The worst of the worst are invited. The problem, of course, is that not everyone accepts the invitation. Some people are just not interested. They make light of it. They have better things to do, matters of business, establishing the economic conditions for a successful and pleasant life, etc. In the first century, the religious leaders, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, represent those who refuse the invitation, while the tax collectors, prostitutes, the rejects, the liturgically unclean, sinners, etc., represent those who were brought in–the latter accepted the invitation to the joyful celebration; the former did not. In other words, the ragamuffins believed Jesus, while the religious elite refused to do so. But this is precisely the will of his Father. Jesus said: “For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him may have eternal life, and I shall raise him on the last day” (Jn 6, 40).

But the question is this: “What did Jesus do that required faith?” The answer is that he forgave sins–which in many ways is a claim to divinity. If you recall the paralytic who was lowered through the roof on a stretcher. Jesus said to him: “Child, your sins are forgiven”. But the scribes reacted. They said: “He is blaspheming. Who but God alone can forgive sins?” And it is indeed true, only God can forgive sins. But Jesus also forgave the woman caught in adultery, as well as the woman in Simon the Pharisee’s house who anointed Jesus’ feet with expensive ointment. And of course, his death on the cross is a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins. St. Paul said: “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us”. What did the woman caught in adultery do to merit forgiveness? Nothing. What did Lazarus or the twelve year old girl do to merit being raised from the dead. Nothing. 

In other words, our redemption, our invitation to the eternal wedding banquet, did not come after we got our act together. No, Christ’s death and resurrection took place while we were still a mess. And the world is still a mess. Our lives are still a mess. But the good news is that “cleaning up our act” is not a condition for our presence at the party. What all this points to is the utter generosity of divine grace. Our debt has been cancelled. Why? Not on account of anything we did. The only requirement on our part is a trusting faith. 

The good news of the gospel brings joy, not sadness. It is not a heavy burden. It is light and easy, as Christ said: “Come to me all you who labor and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest. For my yoke is easy, my burden is light”. We know the gospel has been corrupted when it becomes heavy and burdensome. Life itself is often heavily burdensome, and although the gospel may not remove such burdens, it does bring light, life and strength to our lives so that we may be victorious over those burdens and difficulties. As a volunteer chaplain in a hospital, I will tell you that there is a profoundly significant difference between those who have faith in Christ and those who do not. When I encounter patients with genuine faith, they are joyful, even in the midst of their suffering. They smile, they are grateful, they don’t complain, they are gracious, kind, and thoughtful, which is already a witness to victory over their sickness. Sickness has not defeated them. But those who lack that faith, a light has gone out, and their eyes do not radiate joy. 

But imagine this: Imagine committing a very serious felony, and you’ve been charged, and you are most certainly going to be convicted and sent to prison for the rest of your life, because you cannot by any means pay the debt that your crime has created. And you’ve been waiting a long time behind bars for your trial date. Then one day you receive a visit from the Prosecutor. All charges have been dropped. The prison bars are now open. You are free to go.  

And somehow, in a way that you cannot yet understand, the harm your crime caused others has been transformed such that your victims come out victorious, fully restored and of radiant beauty. You don’t understand how that’s possible, but you are assured that is the case. Think of the joy that would be yours, after living in deep darkness caused by anxiety and dread. It would very much be comparable to opening a bottle of the best wine and drinking till your hearts content. 

Those who refuse the invitation can be compared to a felon who refuses to believe the charges have been dropped and the prison bars have been opened, and so he stays put, sits right there in the prison cell and doesn’t move. He does not celebrate, because he doesn’t believe he’s been freed. In fact, it is probably more true to say that he doesn’t really believe he’s a prisoner; he doesn’t know how miserable his life is now and much better it could be. He certainly does not believe he’s won the lottery. In his mind the gospel is a fairytale.

But that’s our situation. We have been liberated and an inexhaustible treasure is ours for the taking. To believe that, however, is one of the most difficult things for human beings to believe. Accepting the reality of such a crazy deal is not easy at all. It just seems too good to be true.

Now, it was Jewish custom in the first century for a wealthy host to provide festal garments for the guests invited to the feast. Because the invitation went out to everyone on the streets, good and bad alike, no one was expected to own a royal wedding garment. Therefore, the man in this parable who was without a royal garment did not lack resources. He simply rejected the king’s provided clothing in favor of his own. Now the clue to what this means is in the sixty fourth chapter of Isaiah: “We have all become like something unclean, all our just deeds are like polluted rags”. In other words, the man without a festal garment represents the person who relies on his own works, which are like polluted rags. But as St. Paul says: we are not saved by our works, we are saved by grace through faith: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so no one may boast” (Eph 2, 8 ff).

However, faith does give rise to genuinely good works. Paul continues: “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”

There are works that come from grace through faith, and works that don’t come through a living faith, but come from ourselves. This is the person who refuses to wear the garment of grace offered by the king. Instead, he does things his way and for his sake. He relies on his own works to achieve all that he has set out to achieve in his life. This is a life lived not in a spirit of trust in God, but a life that is lived only on the basis of oneself.  

There is a serious difference between a life lived in the spirit of faith and trust that I have been loved and forgiven by God, not spurned and forgotten. When I know through faith that I have been forgiven by God and that Christ died for me, my actions from that point onwards are acts of gratitude and they are rooted in the real desire to love him back. But without that faith, without receiving and wearing the wedding garment of Christ’s supernatural grace, my works are not the expression of gratitude nor are they rooted in a longing to love him back for his generosity to me. The result is that my life is lived completely on a horizontal plane–there is no vertical element in my life. I am not moved to pray, nor do I see the world from God’s point of view.  

But it is a living faith that allows me to believe I am loved by God and freed from the prison bars of death, and that renders you and me able to love Christ; for those who are forgiven much, love much, as Jesus said to Simon the Pharisee. But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little. And then I begin to see the world differently. I will begin to see Christ in everything, like Irish poet John Donne who could say that “I see his blood upon the rose and his face in every flower, his crown of thorns in every thorn, and his cross is every tree”.* Above all, however, we see the face of Christ in the suffering faces of our neighbor. 

And that’s what evangelization is primarily. We know that unless we love others, pay attention to them, visit them, feed and clothe them, they are not going to know that they are loved and that they have importance, but that is what we want above all when we are genuinely transformed by the love that God has for us personally. That’s how we proclaim the good news of our salvation. 

So our faith is not about having the right answers. It’s not about apologetics, defending the faith, rather, it’s about “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, sick and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.” What these verses reveal is that the hungry, the poor, the sick, and imprisoned–hence, even the guilty–have someone joined to them, such that when I relate to them I relate to that someone, and of course that someone is God the Son. In his Incarnation, he has joined himself to every human person, good and bad alike. 

Proclaiming the good news, or evangelization, is really about making the world aware of that mysterious and hidden presence in each one, and we do that only if we can first see and then respond to that hidden presence in each person. 

 

*I See His Blood Upon the Rose
by Joseph Mary Plunkett

 

I see his blood upon the rose

And in the stars the glory of his eyes,

His body gleams amid eternal snows,

His tears fall from the skies.

I see his face in every flower;

The thunder and the singing of the birds

Are but his voice—and carven by his power

Rocks are his written words.

All pathways by his feet are worn,

His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea,

His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn,

His cross is every tree.

 

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Each year, a number of my students studying to be teachers wonder about how best to deal with the issue of Residential schools and the Church’s involvement with them. Let me say two things here. First, don’t hide it. Bring it out in the open. This is precisely what is so unique about the Jewish people and the Hebrew Scriptures. When you read the Old Testament, which is the history of the Jewish people, the sins of the patriarchs and kings are completely out in the open. There is no attempt to hide such rotten behaviour on the part of Israel’s patriarchs and leaders, from the sins of Abraham, the lying of Rebecca, the indifference of Esau who sells his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of stew, the sons of Jacob who out of jealousy threw Joseph down a well and lied to their father about it, the sin of David who committed adultery and murdered in order to cover it up, the great king Solomon who ended up with 700 wives and 300 concubines, the book of Judges and the infidelity of Israel, to the murder of the prophet Zechariah and Uriah, etc. The bible is not about glorifying Israel, but about glorifying the steadfast love (hesed) and fidelity of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And if you study the history of the Catholic Church, you’ll see enough sin and stupidity to send chills up and down your spine. 

Some people, however, like to hide all that and present a very sanitized and harmonious history that is simply not true to the facts. We are a sinful people; every day we pray: “…forgive us of our sins and we forgive those who sinned against us”. So, it is important not to hide these sins, unless of course we are under the mistaken impression that Catholicism is about us, the Church, and not Christ. We cooperated with the Canadian government in the oppression of the Indigenous peoples of Canada. We don’t make excuses for that. The Catholic faith is not at all about us; much less is it about the clergy or the hierarchy. It’s all about Christ. The Church is his body, and he knew right from the beginning that the twelve would betray him. He said to Peter: “…this very night before the cock crows, you will deny me three times”. He knew Judas would betray him, but chose him as one of the twelve nonetheless. When we gloss over the sins of the Church, we set our students up for disillusionment in the future, because eventually they will discover the humanness of the Church. Pope Francis warned not to put clergy on pedestals, but we continue to do so all the same.  

The next point I’d like to make is that it is certainly true and tragic that the Canadian government decided to remove indigenous children from their homes and send them to the Residential schools, and it is true that certain Catholic religious orders, like the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, cooperated with the Canadian government in this unjust usurpation of parental rights, but it is important to realize that doing so was a violation of the Church’s very own principles (the principle of subsidiarity), and although hindsight is 20/20, the religious orders should have known better. In fact, the Church as a whole should have known better, for she knows that it is parents, not the Federal government, who are the primary educators of their children. And so Catholics today need to be very careful about jumping on the government bandwagon and cooperating with government initiatives that are contrary to the express teachings of the Church, especially on the basis of her teaching on human dignity, the rights of immigrants, and so on. The Church has a fundamental obligation to Christ, not to a government bureaucracy whose authority is subordinate to the divine law. That is why it is so important for Catholic parents and Catholic educators to know the faith, to study it, study its principles, and know well the Church’s understanding of the human person. Governments clash with one another because they have a radically different understanding of the human person, and this is true within democracies, like Canada. In a nation like ours, although certain parties embrace the principle of democratic rule, some parties do tend towards a more totalitarian view of the relationship between the individual and the state as a whole, and so we need to watch for that. It is also true that some parties tend towards a more extreme libertarian view of the human person, which is also problematic in many ways.