christianity | A Catholic Philosophy and Theology Resource Page by Deacon Douglas McManaman

Poor in Spirit and Pure in Heart

Deacon Douglas McManaman

As we all know, Jesus commanded us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves (Mk 12, 31). That’s not easy to do, because we tend to love ourselves a great deal more than our neighbor. In fact, if we require some visible evidence of the extent of our self-love, just take a look at the property values of the homes of some of the richest celebrities. I know of one, whom I won’t mention by name, who has a 165-million-dollar estate. But that’s not all. He also has three others in Florida, all three totaling 230 million. He has another property in Hawaii at 78 million, another in Washington for 23 million, and a collection of apartments in New York City for 80 million. That’s a total of 576 million in total properties.

Now, I’m not about to whine about people having more than they need or the sin of greed, etc., and I don’t mean to suggest that this person neglects giving to charity. My point is that we can see that loving another person, as we love ourselves, is rather difficult, because the ratio between our self-love and our love of neighbor is far greater than we realize. The wealth that I call attention to is merely a visible image of what happens when all the conditions are in place that permit a person to provide himself with everything that corresponds to the degree of that self-love. Is it possible that my real estate portfolio could look something like that, if billions of dollars were to suddenly fall on my lap? Of course it is possible, but I hope not, and if not, it will only be by the grace of God. But whenever we see this kind of luxury, it is really a manifestation of what happens when all the conditions are in place that permit a person to look after himself in a way that measures up to the degree of his own self-love. We want the best for ourselves and we probably don’t realize just how great that love is because of our circumstances. These celebrities help us get a glimpse of it.

And it is a strange phenomenon that the more wealth a person acquires, the greater is his desire for more. One would think that greater wealth would be accompanied by a corresponding decrease in desire, that one is gradually reaching the point at which one no longer feels the need for more wealth–after all, I have everything I need and more. But it seems the opposite happens; the more wealth is acquired, the desire for more continues to increase.

The first beatitude in today’s gospel is the most fundamental: “Blessed are the poor in spirit; the kingdom of heaven is theirs”. Those who are poor know it. They feel their poverty, their lack of life’s basic necessities; they struggle to make ends meet. Those who are poor in spirit, however, are poor not necessarily in material things, but “in spirit”, and they too know it, they are aware of their spiritual destitution, that is, aware of their utter need for God. The poor in spirit know that independence and control are basically illusions. We are, all of us, one freak accident away from ending up in a hospital bed, dependent upon the care of others, or worse, on the streets with a serious mental incapacity to take care of ourselves.

A person poor in spirit is open to God, desires God, will go in search of God–and of course, anyone who seeks God finds him. In fact, anyone who is actively seeking God has already been found by God. The difficulty is getting to that place where one actually begins to feel one’s own radical need for God. That is much rarer than we tend to think. Most of us, it seems, have to “hit rock bottom” before it begins to dawn on us that we really do need God. I believe this is one reason God allows suffering in our lives.

And so, poverty of spirit, the experience of a deep interior need for God, is really the greatest gift that a person can receive, for it is in fact the gift of faith, because faith begins with precisely that openness to God and readiness to surrender to him. And the blessing that goes with poverty of spirit is the kingdom of God, which Jesus compares to a treasure hidden in a field that someone finds and who goes off and sells everything he owns in order to buy that field. In other words, having the kingdom of God, living within it, having Christ reign over one’s life, is far more valuable than a collection of properties that add up to about 600 million dollars. To have found that interior treasure is to have become aware of that, which is the fruit of true poverty of spirit.

The ones whom I have met in my life as a Deacon who are truly poor in spirit have been those who suffer from mental illness, in particular clinical depression. In my experience, these have had the deepest sense of their utter need for God. It was precisely the experience of their darkness that made them call out to God. It seems counterintuitive to imply that clinical depression can be one of God’s greatest gifts, but there is some truth to this. Friendships are typically based on common qualities and interests, which is why mental sufferers really do have something in common with Christ, namely, their life of suffering, a life that amounts to accompanying Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, keeping him company in the mental anguish he experienced on Holy Thursday night. That vocation imparts a much greater dignity and identity than does owning a multi-million-dollar estate and a private jet. As they say, we bring none of our wealth with us to the grave, only what we have in our souls, that is, our spiritual and moral identity. And the more like Christ that identity is, the more beautiful it is, and that is a beauty we will possess for eternity.

The other beatitude that I would like to address is purity of heart, because according to the Desert Fathers and Mothers, that is the very purpose of the spiritual life. The pure in heart shall see God. “Pure” (katharoi) means clean or unmixed (as in pure maple syrup, which is unmixed with any artificial additives). A pure heart is one that loves God with an undivided love, a love not mixed with a competing love of self.

Purity in heart involves a loss of a sense of “I”. In many ways, it is a return to the innocence of childhood, the innocence of the first parents in the Garden. When we compare ourselves to others, perhaps feeling a kind of satisfaction in knowing we are better than another in some way, there is a definite felt sense of “I”. But consider the times when you are watching a great film; you lose all sense of a “self” watching the movie. It’s as if you and the movie are one. That’s the place we need to get to in the spiritual life, if we are to be pure in heart. At that point, everything is seen in God and God is seen in everything; everything is loved in God, and God is loved in everything, and that sense of “I” disappears, at least for the most part.

The only regret we will have at the end of our lives is that we did not achieve this level of purity. In other words, we loved ourselves too much and did not love others enough. The real joy in human existence, however, is loving others as another self. St. Teresa of Calcutta often employed the expression “the joy of loving”. Think of the self as a kind of prison cell. The more we love others as we love ourselves, the more we go outside of ourselves, outside of the prison walls. That’s true freedom, and the result is that we bring so much more light and life to others who are living in darkness.

Thoughts on the Church

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Recently I introduced a homily I was asked to give by calling attention to the exorbitant wealth of a certain celebrity, who owns a 165 million dollar estate, not to mention three others in Florida totalling 230 million, another in Hawaii at 78 million, one in Washington for 23 million, and a number of apartments in New York City for 80 million. My purpose was not to call attention to human greed or whine about having more than one needs. The point I wanted to reflect upon was that loving our neighbour as we love ourselves, is very difficult to achieve, because our self-love is far greater than we realize. The wealth that I call attention to is merely a visible image of what happens when all the conditions are in place that permit a person to provide himself with everything that corresponds to the degree of that self-love. If I have no concept of the degree of self-love that exists in me, then it is quite possible that if billions of dollars were to suddenly fall on my lap, my real estate portfolio might very well look like the above, at least after a few years. To love one’s neighbour as one loves oneself is a lifetime task to be achieved.

The Church, like the world, is made up of individuals who love themselves inordinately, so inordinately that we really have no concept. We don’t know until circumstances allow that monster to rear its ugly head. Is it any wonder, then, that the more a person gets to know the inner machinations of the institutional Church, the more discouraged, despondent, frustrated, angry, disappointed, disillusioned, disheartened one becomes? There are saints among us, and it is always wonderful to find them. These are the faithful who really do love others to the degree that they love themselves, as another self, as it were. And we do expect them to be in the majority in the Church–certaintly the majority of clergy. But this is not so, and it is always painful to discover this. It’s the pain of disillusionment at the very least.

Most people are not able to withstand the force of discouraging winds that an awareness of the current ecclesial state of affairs has on a person, which is why most people are kept in the dark, by the design of divine providence. I shake my head very often at the naivete of a good number of parishioners who seem to be utterly clueless, oblivious, to what is going on under their very noses, but I have to remind myself that they don’t see what I see, because they don’t have the inside angle that I have. And it is a darn good thing that they don’t, because they’d leave and we’d never see them again. I am very happy that I did not have that vantage point early on in my life, because I would not have had the spiritual muscle mass to withstand the major and minor scandals, and I would have moved on. One has to be ready for them, and God is merciful and does not allow us to be tempted beyond our ability to withstand it. We think life in the Church should be void of such trials and struggles, a safe haven from the world in which trials, struggles, darkness, conflict, sin and stupidity are the norm. Life in the kingdom of God is void of this, but not life in the institutional Church. The kingdom of God is within you, as Jesus said in Luke, and it is among us too because among us are those who belong to that kingdom to one degree or another. It is the grace of that kingdom that allows us to continue to commit to this institution, because some goods can only be distributed and shared when institutionalized, such as schools, hospitals, universities, military, etc. Institutions are made up, however, of human beings whose fundamental battle in this life is against the enormous ratio that exists between one’s love of self and one’s love of neighbour. Most people are not actively engaged in that battle, and that includes clergy at all levels.

Embracing Ambivalence

Article @ Where Peter Is

Deacon Douglas P. McManaman

It has been reported to me that there are quarrels among you. What I mean is that each of you says, “I belong to Paul”, or “I belong to Apollos”, or “I belong to Cephas” (1 Cor 1, 12).

It seems to me that things have not changed a great deal in 2000 years. The New Testament reading for today reveals the divisions that faced the early church. Over the years, divisions remained. In the Middle Ages, there was rivalry between the Franciscans and the Dominicans – perhaps not all that adversarial: “I belong to Bonaventure” or “I belong to Aquinas.” The Church is still divided in many ways. In the past fifteen years or so we have seen similar divisions, with some Catholics saying, “I belong to Benedict XVI”, or “I’m a JPII priest,” or “I’m with Pope Francis.” Others, clergy included, openly speak out and write against Pope Francis on a regular basis. Some even reject Vatican II and the Novus Ordo.

The problem with this is that the Holy Spirit is a Spirit of unity, not division. There is great diversity in the Church, but it should be diversity in unity. Sin divides. The devil polarizes, excludes, and sows seeds of suspicion among the faithful, which is why Jesus said a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand (Mt 12, 25).

I believe the root of the problem is both psychological and philosophical. What so many people today fail to understand is that knowledge is very hard to achieve. Most of what is in our heads, most of what we claim to know, is not knowledge at all but belief – I don’t mean religious belief necessarily, but any belief that falls short of reasonable certainty. For example, I believe I voted for the right person, but I don’t know that for certain. Similarly, I don’t know whether this or that person is trustworthy, I might be deceived. I don’t know for certain whether this medication is going to heal me or kill me – I believe my doctor. “That person’s a saint.” “Well, you don’t know that. It might all be a facade”. We do tend to conflate our beliefs with knowledge, which is why we hold these convictions with a much greater confidence level than is warranted.

When we were young adolescents, most of us thought our parents were utterly “out to lunch,” until we became parents ourselves. Most young teachers think their administration is blind and incompetent, until they become administrators themselves and realize things are far more complicated than they initially thought. I have a friend in medical research who said that he used to attribute sinister motives to Ottawa with respect to certain decisions made around public health. Then he was made the Surgeon General himself, with all the relevant information at his disposal, and found himself making the same decisions that he used to condemn in his ignorance. A very good priest friend, who has since retired, looks back and has many regrets about his approach as a young priest – including the way he sometimes preached.

The problem with being young is that we have very little experience of being wrong. In fact, when we are young, we tend to block out those times when we were wrong only to remember the times we were right–it’s much more flattering to the ego. But that gets harder to do the older we get – unless we are ridiculously close minded and have stopped learning. When we are young, we tend to believe that our worldview, our current conceptual frame of mind or the epistemic model through which we see the world, is all encompassing and far more comprehensive than it actually is. In fact, it is really a very small circle outside of which we quickly lose our way.

Human knowledge is profoundly limited. When we come face to face with the vast complexity of reality, we get a sense of those limits and that can cause great anxiety. If we cannot accept ambiguity, if we are not at ease with uncertainty, we will be tempted to latch onto a single ideological faction or limited school of thought. We can begin to see others outside that faction as a bunch of deluded morons. I’m convinced that this is how fundamentalism develops, both religious and political fundamentalism.

Fundamentalists typically limit their thinking to one source: the Koran alone, or the Bible alone, or St. Augustine alone, or St. Thomas Aquinas alone, etc. The problem with the Bible alone mentality is that we need others to teach us, to provide historical context, to help us avoid pitfalls that trapped others in the past. To know the bible well, or any classic author for that matter, requires a much larger community that is constantly developing.

Fundamentalism is essentially rooted in a fear of a reality that is much larger and much more complex than our current worldview is able to contain. It involves an inability to be at ease with ambivalence. In fact, psychiatrist Leopold Bellak proposed a dozen ‘ego strengths’ for people to aspire toward. One of these had to do with ‘contentment with ambivalence’. This is one strength that fundamentalists always seem to lack.

Life feels much simpler when a person convinces himself that all truth can be compacted into a single source and that “I have all the answers”. Of course, we will never have all the answers. Physicist Richard Feynman once said that science is an ever-expanding frontier of ignorance. This means the more we discover, the more we learn how much more there is to know and how much we don’t know but thought we knew. As our knowledge grows, our ignorance expands exponentially at the same time.

And this is the case in theology as well – perhaps especially in theology – because the object of theology is the unutterable mystery of God and the Church has always taught that God is infinitely knowable and incomprehensible, even in the Beatific Vision. We will see God directly, but God will always be infinitely more than what we know about Him at any one point. And we believe Jesus is everything that the Father can say about Himself, because Jesus is the Logos, the eternal Word of the Father. So, Jesus is infinitely knowable, which is why theology constantly develops.

Christ is the only one we are to belong to. Everyone else must be listened to and heard, because everyone is able to provide a unique angle on things. I cannot see the world from your vantage point; you know things that I don’t and so I must listen to and learn from you and from everyone else and vice versa. This is why it is fitting that the Church, under Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV, continues to emphasize dialogue and synodality. The dialogue they propose is not just between bishops but also involves bishops in dialogue with the laity from around the world; for the laity knows so much of this world in ways that we do not.

And so, we don’t belong to Paul, or to Apollos, or Cephas, or Benedict XVI, or John Paul II, or Cardinal Burke, etc. But we do belong to Christ and since we are his Mystical body, we belong to one another. As Paul says in his letter to the Romans: “…so we, though many, are one body in Christ and individually parts of one another.” (12:5) That is an interesting line. What it means is that we are not just all parts of the one body of Christ; rather, we are also parts of one another. I am part of you and you are part of me and if you are diminished, I am diminished. Just as I need healthy parts to flourish, I need to learn from everyone in order to flourish because I am a part of everyone and everyone is a part of me.

Reply to an Objection re: Jesus’ Imperfection

Deacon Douglas P. McManaman

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Doug,

The “imperfection” of the Finding in the Temple (if any) was with Mary and Joseph – their imperfect understanding of Christ’s mission – certainly not with Christ. He was doing and revealing the will of the Father (not behaving like a child who takes a chocolate bar from a store without appreciating the wrongfulness of his action). If we take your “Christ-was-imperfect-just-like-us” to the next stage then even His public ministry, His crucifixion, His 7 last words, were imperfect. I think you misunderstand what is meant by “Christ was like us in all things but sin”. Yes He was fully man, but he was also God. He did not carry His divinity around like a wallet and pull it out from time to time as needed. He was a man without original sin – without any sin – hypostatically united to the divinity. Although “like man”, he was also unlike any man before or since. He was the perfection of man, if you will. So it is misleading to speak of Christ as imperfect.

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Dear _________: It is certainly true that Mary and Joseph had an imperfect understanding of Christ’s mission. But Jesus too had an imperfect understanding of his mission at certain points in his early life–of course, I’m jumping from the frying pan into the fire here, so it’s better to stick with a simpler explanation. But Luke says it: he grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man. That’s it. If he was “perfect” from the get go, he did not grow in wisdom and stature, in favor with God and man. The exact text is:

Jesus “progressed (proekopten) to wisdom (sofia) and to prime stature (hlikia) and to grace/favor (cariti) beside (para) God (theo) and man (anthropois)”.

What is perfect does not require progress. Perfect means “made through”, the end has been achieved. Jesus was the perfect man, but what does it mean to be a perfect man? One cannot be a material organism without imperfection, and one cannot be a human being without imperfection, so a perfect human being will include imperfections. That sounds counterintuitive, but it really isn’t a contradiction.

What struck me is that when I read the WPI finished version of my article, I felt that it read much better, much smoother than my original. Now, I edited that article many times and sent in my best version of it. Still, the editor was able to see more that needed to be done, she was able to see what I was unable to see, and thus she continued to edit the piece. That’s human existence. To be a person is to have a radical need for others. The human person only discovers himself via an exit-of-self in the other, or in others. A person is an ekstasis. Let me quote John D. Zizioulas here: “…personhood implies the “openness of being,” and even more than that, the ek-stasis of being, that is, a movement towards communion which leads to a transcendence of the boundaries of the “self” and thus to freedom. (The Meaning of Being Human (pp. 14-15). (Function). Kindle Edition).

God is an eternal community of Persons, and the human person exists in the image and likeness of God, who is a Trinity of Persons. Man is a per sona, a “through sound”, that is, a communicator, a being who becomes what he is by entering into community, who can only become what he is meant to become in and through community (to communicate is to enter into community). We are conceived within a human person and born into a family, a community, and we depend in every way on that first community, but most of all our own personality development depends upon those relations. Outside of a healthy community, our personality does not develop properly. Every human being undergoes personality development, and that development depends on the specifics of personal relationships, on how much the person is loved by others and how much he or she learns to love, to exit himself or herself towards the other. All this Jesus went through. The hypostatic union is the union of the two natures in one Person, the Person of the Son, who is a subsistent Relation. He is the Second Adam. He is more than a role model, but that he is nevertheless–not merely an external role model, like the saints, but an internal one; for we are to become him. But our role model cannot be one who it is impossible to model ourselves after. Imperfection is my lot and your lot, not the imperfection of sin or moral imperfection, because that imperfection is self-destructive, but the imperfection that belongs to human material existence. At the temple, Jesus was not behaving like a toddler taking a chocolate bar off of a store shelf, rather, he was behaving like a 12 year old adolescent–with a single minded focus, without proper consideration of how his lack of communication might impact others. It wasn’t a sin, but it was an imperfection that is typical of adolescence, and he went through adolescence. He did not skip that stage of human development. Again, perfect things don’t develop. Jesus needed the guidance of Mary and Joseph. If he did not need their guidance, if he did not in any way benefit from the wisdom of his parents, then you are right, he is not like us in all things. But he is like us in all things, in every aspect of human nature: intelligence, will, emotions, human ignorance and the need to learn from experience, and above all the need to learn from others. You mentioned in an earlier exchange that he did not have a human personality. He certainly did have a human personality. He’s not a human being if he does not have a human personality. The hypostatic union means the two natures (divine and human) were united in the One Person of the Son; so he is not two persons, a human person and a divine Person, but One Person, the divine Person of the Son. Everything Jesus said and did and underwent was said and done and undergone by the Person of the Son. But he certainly had a human personality that developed (person is not the same as personality). His personality was the human personality of God the Son–personality is a complex phenomenon that includes human intellect, will, emotions, their interactions, human self-consciousness, etc.

I don’t see how all this implies that his death on the cross or his 7 last words were imperfect. His passion and death were the perfect act of love, the perfect act of religion. The perfection of Jesus does not cancel or override the imperfection that is part and parcel of human experience. His was a moral and religious perfection. He sanctified material existence. He sanctified the imperfection that belongs to living human organisms, the imperfection that is part and parcel of our day to day human existence. He actually said: “Who touched me?” in the scene involving the woman with a hemorrhage. He said “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He experienced human desolation, darkness, despair, poverty and deprivation. He experienced frustration with his disciples: “How long must I put up with you?” That sounds like learning to me. In other words, his expectations were one thing, but the reality of the disciples’ sluggishness was another thing.

I’m not sure what you mean by “He did not carry His divinity around like a wallet and pull it out from time to time as needed”. Yes, all of Jesus was God the Son. Christ’s human nature was hypostatically united to God the Son, so everything he said, did, and underwent was said, done, and undergone by God the Son. From that hypostatic union, a number of paradoxes follow quite naturally: God died on a Cross; God suffered; Life Itself tasted death; God became a slave (Phil 2, 1ff); God progressed in wisdom and stature; God wept for John the Baptist; God was hungry and thirsty in the desert; and Mary is the Mother of God (Theotokos).

Perfectionism vs Perfection

Reflection for the 2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_440perfectionismvsperfection.html

https://wherepeteris.com/perfectionism-vs-perfection/
Deacon Douglas McManaman

It is too small a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.

This is an interesting line from the first reading: “It is too small a thing that you should be my servant…” Is it too small a thing that Israel should be “my servant”? Or is it too small a thing “to raise up the tribes of Jacob”? Perhaps both. I say this because our God intends to raise us up to be his equals, so to speak, and since friendship is based on a kind of equality, God intends to raise us up to the level of friendship. We read in the gospel of John: “I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father” (Jn 15, 15).

What raises us up to that level of equality (friendship) is divine grace, which is a sharing in the divine life. It was St. Athanasius who said that “God became man in order that man might become God”. He became man so that divine grace may run through the veins of humanity, as it were, so that humanity may become the temple of the Holy Spirit, the dwelling place of the Lord. Grace is that which “makes holy”. But holiness, unfortunately, is often confused with sanctimony, and sanctimony tends to get mixed in with perfectionism, which in turn is usually a means of shaming others–children in particular. But holiness is not perfectionism. Holiness is love; holiness is charity.

We read: “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (Is 49, 6). But how can we become a light to the nations? God is Light, not us. We can be a light only by reflecting light, as a mirror does. But a mirror must be clean in order to receive the divine light and reflect it. However, in order to see the dirt and grime to be cleaned, one needs light, because one can’t see anything in the dark. But the dirt and grime prevent the mirror from receiving the light that is to be reflected, and so only the light can clean the mirror. In other words, we cannot clean ourselves in order to make ourselves receptacles of the divine light. If we take it upon ourselves to clean the mirror of our souls, we only end up becoming perfectionists, and perfectionism is not holiness.

It sometimes happens that a person who has a late conversion in life will go to religious extremes. I believe that in such cases, since they will have spent a good part of their lives not at all concerned with the will and worship of God, they will have acquired certain vices along the way, such as a disposition to anger, or envy, the need to be “one up” on others, or the need to control others, or the need to be approved by authority figures, etc. The problem is that bad habits are hard to break and virtues take time to acquire, so what can happen is that these late converts can bring those habits into their new “religious life”, and this can cause a person to look for ways to continue in these behaviors, but under a religious guise. This is where sanctimony becomes confused with holiness, and there is a danger of becoming finger wagging perfectionists who will often find ways to stand out from others.

I was part of a discussion recently in which a number of us were wondering whether or not everything Christ did was done perfectly. We all agreed that Jesus did not sin, but one person insisted that when Jesus the carpenter was sawing wood, for example, he would have made mistakes, perhaps cut the wood too short, or perhaps the table he made was not perfect in every way. Others took issue with this, insisting that Jesus was God, so he would have done everything perfectly. But we have to ask ourselves: Wasn’t he like us in all things but sin (Heb 4, 15)? If Jesus were to play baseball, would he have hit a home run every time or struck out every batter? Or, if he were in the Olympics, would he have won a gold medal in every event? Consider when Mary found Jesus in the temple: “Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety.” Jesus was a 12-year-old boy, and like a typical adolescent male was almost exclusively focused on one thing. Our purview starts out very narrow but gradually widens as we grow in experience and we begin to consider things that we would not have considered in your youth. To deny Jesus that development is completely unwarranted. Life is a learning process, and to be part of that learning process is to experience normal human imperfection–not moral imperfection, not folly, but the need for growth. I believe we can make the case that he experienced the imperfection that belongs to material existence, and because he is the God-man, he sanctified human imperfection. Hence, there is indeed a kind of beauty in imperfection (Conrad Hall).

The only thing he cannot sanctify is sin. Imperfection, on the other hand, is nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, there would be far less misery in this world if more people would come to accept their own limitations and imperfections and give up the need to achieve perfection.

Jesus did say “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect”. What he was referring to, according to St. Augustine, was perfect charity. We see this from the context: “Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, for God makes his sun shine on the wicked and the good” etc. Holiness is love, and God’s love was made visible in the Person of Christ, who descended, who emptied himself and took the form of a slave, and entered into our death in order to inject it with his divine life. And so, we become like him by descending, not by ascending. The way to ascend to God is to descend with him and love what he loved, and he had table fellowship with social rejects. Christ was not a temple priest. He was out in the world, mixing it up with the sick, the suffering, the lost and forsaken.

The spiritual life is a gradual letting go of all that blocks the divine light; it is about allowing the divine light to burn within us all disordered love of self, which is what keeps us from genuinely loving others. God is a consuming fire (Heb 12, 29), a refiner’s fire (Mal 3, 2). A blacksmith puts the iron in the fire to soften it, to make it more malleable, and then he hammers it into the shape he envisions for it. Outside of that fire, the iron remains hard, rigid, and unbending, but when placed in the fire, it begins to radiate with the color of the flame.

We do have a tendency to regard suffering, trials, difficulties as anomalies, as signs that something is terribly wrong, that we are in some way being punished by God. This is a serious misconception. In this gospel, John says: “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world”. This is Christ’s fundamental identity, the Lamb of God who has come into the world to be sacrificed. The most significant moment in the New Testament took place in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Lord, let this cup pass me by; but not my will, but your will be done”. He felt the size and weight of this obstacle, but these words were his victory, and we get to share in that victory all throughout our lives each time we are confronted with difficult and fearful choices. Our task is to allow ourselves to be molded by his hands, to allow him to make us like himself.

But what is he like? We just have to look at a crucifix. That’s what he is like. It is rather easy to live a kind of religious life that amounts to a continuous evasion of the cross. We see this, for example, in those who, while they love liturgy, vestments, incense and candles, processions and liturgical drama, will demean others, look down upon them, make their authority felt and use religion to oppress others, especially women. The Church is a strange mixture of the divine and the human, holiness and sin, a mystery that can only really be understood from the inside. We see the results of this tragic mixture all throughout the history of the Church, alongside those who are genuinely saintly, like Don Bosco who devoted his life to poor youth on the streets during the time of the Industrial Revolution, or Vincent de Paul, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Benedict Joseph Labre, Padre Pio, John Neumann who dedicated his life to the immigrants of Philadelphia, learning 8 languages in order to hear their confessions and who died on the street at 48 years of age while running some errands. And when I look back at my own life, I have encountered both those who have been a negative influence, who have done harm and have driven people away from the Church by their misogyny, legalism, and abuse of authority and who made their priesthood principally about them, alongside great men and women who had a tremendous influence on me, such as a very humble Salesian priest, an unpretentious and joyful diocesan priest from Washington D.C., who was violently murdered during a robbery, and countless women who were hidden vessels of divine patience, carriers of the divine light and love.

A Brief Note on Aquinas, Progress, and Asking Questions

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Aquinas was a genuinely progressive thinker. In fact, he was the “progressive” theologian of the 13th century. Thomas was open to everything that was good and useful for helping to explicate the faith. He exhibited great reverence not only for St. Augustine, but also for “the Philosopher” (Aristotle), as well as for Dionysius, Hilary, Ambrose, Peter Lombard, Maimonides, Avicenna and Averroes, Damascene, Gregory of Nyssa, and so many more. Although he was raised on Augustine, he clearly did not limit himself to Augustine. The irony, however, is that a number of Thomists during my early years in philosophy would limit their sources to St. Thomas Aquinas. In fact, in my 2nd year when we were taught modern philosophy for the first time, the professor would teach us some basic ideas of this or that thinker and then proceed to tell us what was wrong with them and why Aquinas had it right. This, of course, was a terrible way to teach–it was grounded in a flawed starting point. The result he was trying to achieve was for us to limit our thinking, our sources, to St. Thomas, which is a very “anti-Aquinas” way of operating.

We have much more data at our disposal today than Aquinas had in the 13th century, very important data on human nature thanks to the development of the science of psychology and its various schools of thought, as well as psychiatry, neuroscience, anthropology and sociology, physics, history and various approaches to hermeneutics, etc., not to mention the different kinds of logic that developed in the 20th century, such as mathematical, modal, epistemic, temporal and many valued logics. There is no doubt that Aquinas would have taken a deep dive into all of this and more.

There is a serious temptation in some people to want to keep things very simple and manageable, i.e., the bible alone, the koran alone, or the Catechism alone, or Aquinas alone. I believe that is why many young university students are drawn to ideological thinking, for it makes life much simpler. They can look at this utterly complex world through the lens of an ideology and everything begins to make sense. Karl Popper addressed this problem and showed how this kind of thinking is problematic–everywhere one looks one can find confirmation for an overarching idea.[1] Ultimately, this is just lazy mindedness and an inordinate need for security. In short, closed mindedness. We see this pattern of thinking in fundamentalism of all stripes, that is, in Islam, Evangelical Protestantism, Catholicism, left and right wing political ideology, etc. It makes for a very simple existence, but an impoverished one.

When we study Aquinas for years on end, we do see that out of great reverence he very often bends over backwards to defend the particular authority he leans on, such as the Philosopher (Aristotle) or whoever he cites in his Sed contra. He’s very respectful of these authorities, but not all of his arguments are of the same strength and weight–some just hang from a thread. He has been severely criticized for his arguments for the death penalty–dangerously akin to totalitarian thinking–, and Grisez took issue with what he wrote on desire after the Beatific vision, and in the end it is hard to disagree with Grisez on this. The point I make is that one can indeed argue with Aquinas, and great theologians have been doing so for the past 700 years, but especially in the 20th century. He was a genius of the highest order and a Doctor of the Church and deserves great reverence and consideration, but the notion that he cannot be contradicted and is immune from further development is not quite right. The wonderful thing about Catholic theology and Catholic teaching is that, despite what many traditionalists seem to believe, it continues to develop on the basis of questions that have never been asked. Questions are the driving force behind any science, and Aquinas asked a ridiculously large number of questions, which is why he made so much progress (progressive). But all possible questions have not been exhausted and never will be.

Notes

1. In his Science: Conjectures and Refutations , Popper writes: “These theories appeared to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred. The study of any of them seemed to have the effect of an intellectual conversion or revelation, opening your eyes to a new truth hidden from those not yet initiated. Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirming instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. Thus its truth appeared manifest; and unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest truth; who refused to see it, either because it was against their class interest, or because of their repressions which were still “un – analysed” and crying aloud for treatment.

The most characteristic element in this situation seemed to me the incessant stream of confirmations, of observations which “verified” the theories in question; and this point was constantly emphasized by their adherents. A Marxist could not open a newspaper without finding on every page confirming evidence for his interpretation of history; not only in the news, but also in its presentation which revealed the class bias of the paper – – and especially of course in what the paper did not say. The Freudian analysts emphasized that their theories were constantly verified by their “clinical observations”. As for Adler, I was much impressed by a personal experience. Once, in 1919, I reported to him a case which to me did not seem particularly Adlerian, but which he found no difficulty in analyzing in terms of his theory of inferiority feelings, although he had not even seen the child.

Slightly shocked, I asked him how he could be so sure. “Because of my thousand-fold experience,” he replied; whereupon I could not help saying: “And with this new case, I suppose, your experience has become thousand-and-one-fold.” What I had in mind was that his previous observations may not have been much sounder than this new one; that each in its turn had been interpreted in the light of ‘previous experience’, and at the same time counted as additional confirmation. What, I asked myself, did it confirm? No more than that a case could be interpreted in the light of the theory.”

O Mavros Christos (The Black Christ)

Deacon Doug McManaman

I was inspired to write this Icon (O Mavros Christos/The Black Christ) while reading James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree. It was Rev. David McClearly who, soon after we met at Southlake hospital in Newmarket, ON, suggested I read this book. At the same time I recommended that he read G. Studdert Kennedy, Episcopalian chaplain to the British Army during WWI—specifically his book The Hardest Part. One of Studdert Kennedy’s great poems is entitled Indifference:

When Jesus came to Golgotha, they hanged Him on a tree,
They drove great nails through hands and feet, and made a Calvary;
They crowned Him with a crown of thorns, red were His wounds and deep,
For those were crude and cruel days, and human flesh was cheap.
When Jesus came to Birmingham, they simply passed Him by.
They would not hurt a hair of Him, they only let Him die;
For men had grown more tender, and they would not give Him pain,
They only just passed down the street, and left Him in the rain.
Still Jesus cried, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,”
And still it rained the winter rain that drenched Him through and through;
The crowds went home and left the streets without a soul to see,
And Jesus crouched against a wall, and cried for Calvary.

This poem prepared me for the impact that James Cone’s book was going to have on me. It was one of the most deeply moving books in theology that I had read up to this point in my life. It left me speechless on a number of occasions. He writes:

The lynching tree is a metaphor for white America’s crucifixion of black people. It is the window that best reveals the religious meaning of the cross in our land. In this sense, black people are Christ figures, not because they wanted to suffer but because they had no choice. Just as Jesus had no choice in his journey to Calvary, so black people had no choice about being lynched. The evil forces of the Roman state and of white supremacy in America willed it. Yet, God took the evil of the cross and the lynching tree and transformed them both into the triumphant beauty of the divine. If America has the courage to confront the great sin and ongoing legacy of white supremacy with repentance and reparation, there is hope “beyond tragedy”.

I’ve studied iconography for many years now, and I knew that I wanted to “write” an icon of a black Christ–after all, Jesus was not white. But most importantly, the fundamental reason I have for this idea is that the moral and spiritual life of a believer is about becoming the unique Christ, which Christ can be in you individually, in me individually. When you are the person Christ intends you to be, when it is no longer you who live, but Christ who lives in you (Gal 2, 20), then Christ appears in this world uniquely, through you. No one can be that unique Christ except you. And when you are that, you have a beauty that no one else can possess. There is a beauty that only you can bring the world. And so there is a “black Christ”, an Asian Christ, an Indigenous Christ, a Caucasian Christ, etc. I also knew I wanted a Christ with dreads. The symbolism of dreadlocks is rich and broad. It symbolizes connection to the divine, resistance against oppression; it is a symbol of African heritage and identity, and it became an emblem of resistance against colonial oppression. Of course, dreadlocks are an ancient symbol of wisdom and spiritual insight. Also, I wanted to make sure to include a “lynching tree” in the background. I cannot explain this better than Cone himself who writes:

As I see it, the lynching tree frees the cross from the false pieties of well-meaning Christians. When we see the crucifixion as a first-century lynching, we are confronted by the reenactment of Christ’s suffering in the blood-soaked history of African Americans. Thus, the lynching tree reveals the true religious meaning of the cross for American Christians today. The cross needs the lynching tree to remind Americans of the reality of suffering–to keep the cross from becoming a symbol of abstract, sentimental piety. …Yet the lynching tree also needs the cross, without which it becomes simply an abomination. It is the cross that points in the direction of hope, the confidence that there is a dimension to life beyond the reach of the oppressor. “Do not fear those who kill the body, and after that can do nothing more (Lk 12, 4).

I would like to emphasize, however, that the tragedy of Good Friday was transformed into the beauty of the divine light, and thus the same is true of the lynching tree. Cone writes:

Though the pain of Jesus’ cross was real, there was also joy and beauty in his cross. This is the great theological paradox that makes the cross impossible to embrace unless one is standing in solidarity with those who are powerless. God’s loving solidarity can transform ugliness–whether Jesus on the cross or a lynched black victim–into beauty, into God’s liberating presence. Through the powerful imagination of faith, we can discover the “terrible beauty” of the cross and the “tragic beauty” of the lynching tree.

The following are pictures of the stages of development that this icon went through. The first stage of the writing of an icon is the preparation of the sketch and transferring it onto the gessoed surface of a poplar wood board. The gold leaf is then applied to the clay surface.

The first layer in the painting process is roskrysh, which is followed by first lines, and then the first highlight. After the first highlight, one applies the first float, which dampens the brightness of the highlight. After the first float, we apply a second highlight, followed by a second float, a third highlight followed by a third float, and finally the second lines. The icon then sits for two weeks to dry before olipha (applying linseed oil).

Notes for the icon Lynching tree Download

A Reflection on Beauty in Time

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Ever since I retired, I’ve had more time to reflect upon my years as a teacher, and my years of friendship with some of my colleagues, and my good friends. Sometimes I have to drive to a nearby town for an eye appointment, and I’ll have to drive right past the school at which I taught for the past 20 years, and when I do so, I experience a certain euphoria, all as a result of an influx of various memories.

So much has been forgotten, so many students that have passed through my classroom, the details of so many days, etc., and although I do remember many things, I do think I’ve forgotten more than I remember. But there is a joy there that I experience when I am brought back to that place, among other places.

My good friend is a retired priest, but I often think of my last 30 years with him, visiting him when he was stationed at this or that parish, and then after I was ordained in 2008 I could give him a break from preaching. A teaching colleague started to join me on these weekend visits; he’d cook, I’d preach, and our friend would smoke cigarettes and relax. Those were great memories. And they’re gone.

I am acutely aware that there was something beautiful in those moments, something I miss, and something I long to recover, to experience again. And I believe this is the root of tradition, which is an attempt to make the past present once again. We believe that doing something the same way, repeating an action, making it ritual, like singing happy birthday and blowing out candles, or opening presents on Christmas morning and having turkey in the evening, allows us to experience once again what we experienced in the past, which now, in the present, we long for. We long to connect to that past, to the people who perhaps are no longer with us.

But it begins with seeing something in the past that we didn’t quite see back then, or were not explicitly aware of at the time. It seems that time strips away some of the dross of our experiences and leaves us with a memory that is purified, and something now radiates.

I became more and more aware of this the older I got. I began to realize that this beauty that I saw when looking back, was there at the time, when it was not past, but present, but something prevented me from seeing it at the time, or appreciating it. It was buried underneath a host of baggage–perhaps stress, anxiety, preoccupation with what needs to be done at the moment, marking tests or creating exams, etc. What this means is that today, in the present moment, that element, that nugget of beauty that I will appreciate and see clearly 10 or so years from now (looking back and recalling this present moment), is here now, at this moment.

So, the question is: Is there a way for me to become aware of it now, so that I can delight in it now, rather than 20 years from now? And so a few years ago I began to really look for it in the present, to look for this element, this beauty, that I know I will see in retrospect.

So I know that one day I’m going to look back and remember teaching Confirmation to these kids, in the church basement either at St Lawrence the Martyr, or Blessed Trinity, or Sacred Heart in Uxbridge, taking their questions, questioning them, and I’m going to miss those moments, so, now, when I am teaching these classes, I am becoming more aware of that hidden element in the here and now. Same with preaching. One day I won’t be preaching anymore, but I’ll recall those times when I was preaching at this Church or that Church, and I’ll see something, something very memorable. I visit the hospitals often, at least once a week. Someday I might be a patient at Southlake hospital, and I’ll recall the years when I’d walk the halls and visit the patients, and I know I will long for those moments again, and I am aware of that now when I am in the hospital visiting patients, walking the halls and stairwells, making my way to their rooms. It’s hard to be attuned to this when we are young, because the young mind is just not focused on the present moment, but on the future.

And yet, the moments keep on drifting into the past. I am aware that when I discern that element in the present moment, I will often try to grasp on to it and keep it, but I can’t do it. It still drifts into the past. And it is always sad to see it drift away like that.

And yet, for God, nothing is past. God is the eternal present. So, does that mean when we die and enter into his rest, that all those moments will be recovered in some way? That we will experience the accumulated joy of each one of those moments, in the eternal present?

I think so. I am quite convinced that this is part of the joy of heaven. We are not to experience the fullness of that joy here, it will always escape our attempts to capture it, but it will be returned to us one hundredfold later on, in eternity.

Existence in time is a constant dying, drifting into the non-existent past. But Christ conquered death; he rose from the dead, so existence in time is a constant dying, each moment of which will rise again, in glory. Tradition seeks to recover the past, to make it present again, like the Mass, which actually does make present the sacrifice of Calvary. But in heaven, what tradition aims to achieve will be achieved. The joy of heaven will include the joys of each present moment of our existence, and so the deaths of each moment are not permanent; we can look at each moment and instead of saying “good-bye”, we can say: “see you again soon”.

Now, the gospel reading for the 2nd Sunday of Lent, was the Transfiguration. You know it well, so I’m not going to read it, but I have always been struck by what Peter says there:

Rabbi, it is good that we are here!
Let us make three tents:
one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.

And every time I read that, I think of Father Frank Kelly, a homily that he gave way back in the early 90s, and I think it was when we came home from a retreat in New Jersey, we took a bunch of students, and we had Mass on our return. And the translation at that time was: “It is wonderful for us to be here”. That’s a better translation than what we have now.

The Greek word here is not “good” as in “It is good to be here”. The Greek word is kalon. It is kalon for us to be here.

Aristotle used that word kalon in his Nicomachean Ethics. The word kalon is derived from kaleo, which means attractive, and it is a word used in the context of aesthetics, the study of art and the beautiful. The kalon in Aristotle is best translated as the morally beautiful.

The gospel really should read: “It is beautiful for us to be here”, or “morally beautiful to be here”. The beauty is the moral atmosphere. This is an experience of beauty, the divine beauty. And it is an aesthetic experience that Peter, James, and John want to perpetuate. They want to keep it from drifting into the past.

Moses and Elijah, they are from the past, but they are present, in the present moment of the Transfiguration, contributing to its beauty; they represent salvation history before Christ. What is past is made present, in the here and now, through Christ.

God the Son joined a human nature to himself. The eternal, who is Beauty Itself, has entered into time and joined himself to the matter of the universe. Now, Pope John Paul II said often, in joining a human nature, God the Son joined himself as it were to every human being. He is present to every human person. Those who have the theological virtue of faith, those who have allowed Christ the king to reign in their lives, are given the light of grace, the light of faith. They have become aware of that deep and hidden presence, the presence of God the Son within the interior of the soul. That’s the kalon that exists at every moment, within every moment, in the lives of the faithful. That element of beauty that we see when looking back at things that have past is the kalon of the divine presence, stripped of the dross that acted as a distraction at the time. Our life is transfigured in Christ, right now, but there is so much that eclipses the radiance that the present moment contains. Later on, our memories of these events unveil the kalon so that we have a minor transfiguration experience.

To find that experience in the present, underneath the current dross that clouds it, we need to learn to be present. To be present is to be in the present. And to be present is a skill. It is interesting how the two words are akin: present and presence. To be present to another is to be in the presence of another, to be aware of their presence–not just their position in space. To be in the here and now, focused on the person before us. It is easy to be focused on a great person, but being present to the lowest of the low, that’s a skill. It requires an ability to see something in that person that is well disguised. Mother Teresa always spoke of the poor as Jesus’ disguise.

Now, the Greeks distinguish two kinds of time: chronos time and kairos time. Kairos is used over 80 times in the New Testament, and it refers to a season, such as harvest time. Chronos time is measured time, quantified into an hour, or a minute. Chronos time moves outside of us. The clock is ticking. The present moment, the now, is here instantaneously and then quickly drifts into the past, always escaping us.

However, we can be “within time”, that is, in time. We can move in it. If we move in it, then it is always now. As an analogy: think of a spacecraft. If we are outside the spacecraft, it zooms by us. If we are inside the spacecraft, we move along with it. Kairos time is time that we are in, and so it is always present.

But, chronos time is real, and it makes demands on us. We have an appointment and so we have to move on. Peter, James, and John got a taste of the kairos time that is in heaven, but chronos time made demands on them. The experience of the transfiguration came to an end and they had to come down from the mountain.

Chronos time and kairos time are simultaneous. Chronos time says I have an appointment at 10 o’clock, so I have to take leave of my friends and make my way there. But when I get to the doctor’s office, I have to be present to the doctor, pay attention to him, be a presence to him and allow him to be a presence to me. But, even the trip to the doctors, the drive, or the bus ride, is not meant to be pure chronos. I must be present to the beauty of the present moment. The view outside the window, or to the people on the subway, the walk to the doctor’s office, or whatever.

God is outside of time, not subject to the passing of time, but time exists, and God is intimately present within all that exists, as the First Cause of all that exists. God, who is Beauty Itself, is present in each moment of time.

And my students feel it. The first assignment that I give to my Niagara University students in January is to have them write out a short essay on how it is they got to where they are now, that is, how they got to teachers college. Reading their personal stories of how they got to this point is really an exhilarating experience. Their stories are so unique and so rich in content, and there is often some hero in their lives, either their parents, who came to Canada under adverse circumstances but struggled and overcame these obstacles through faith, trust in God, and hard work, or a great and unknown teacher in their lives who had a profound influence on the student as a result of the way that teacher related to her students, with great patience and perseverance, or some priest in their lives. etc. Many of them have very positive memories of their school years. Each story from each student is so different, but each one is usually so uplifting and exhilarating. And it is so easy to see the hand of divine providence in their lives, leading them to where they are now.

Now, it is amazing how many of these prospective teachers drifted from the faith, but returned, and it was the result of memories that were gradually uncovered, a feeling like something was lost, a world, and they rediscovered it.

The transfiguration was really a gift given to Peter, James, and John, to strengthen them for the impending trauma of Christ’s passion, and the memories we create for our students, for young people in the parish, are ordered to the same end, to strengthen them for the impending sufferings and difficulties and traumas that await them.

It is a ministry ordered to the creation of memories. I was going over these ideas with a patient of mine at the hospital, a young lady who suffers from clinical depression. I’ve been visiting her for many years now. Certain months of the year are very difficult for her. But I was telling her about the themes of this retreat.

I did ask her if she has any memories that bring her a sense of peace, and she said she had very few if any. And of course, she suffers from depression. When I spoke of this, she was reminded of Erik Erickson, the final stage of psychosocial development, the stage of integrity vs despair. Now, it is not quite the same in her case, because the stage of despair results from the fact that one sees the choices that one has made, and the despair is the result of those bad choices. Clinical depression is not something that results from bad moral choices. It is a brain disease. But I did give her something to think about. This is what I said:

We believe that God the Son joined a human nature and entered into human suffering. In joining himself to every man, he is especially present in the depths of our suffering and darkness. We don’t suffer alone, although it may often feel that we do. But we don’t. And this lady has a special cross to bear, as do all those who suffer from clinical depression.

And they must feel like they’ve been ripped off terribly. Others have their health, both mental and physical, they are privileged, brought up in a family that is well off, they travel and they’ve gone to university, they’re working. Life is tremendous. And here she is, this girl, in and out of mental health wards all her life. Life seems very unfair. But of course, our God is a God of justice. He balances the scales, and the divine justice has been revealed as the divine mercy. I told her that when you stand before God at the end of your life, and you see and grasp the meaning of your entire life from God’s point of view, that is, when you see your life in the light of Christ and the paschal mystery, and you reflect on the prospect of doing it all again, you will not want to change anything. She reacted to that and said she just cannot imagine that and doubts very much that she would not want anything changed. Nevertheless, that is the case, because she will see that Christ was present all along in the depths of that suffering, that her depression was a special sharing in the mental anguish of Christ that he endured throughout his life, especially on Holy Thursday night. She will see how her suffering has imprinted on her the image of the suffering Christ, and friendships are based on common qualities, and she’ll see how much her life has in common with Christ’s life, unlike the life of prosperity and privilege. She can’t see that now, but she will in eternity. But, she can begin to look now, to reflect upon her life in that light and perhaps begin to see it, begin to discover the suffering Christ in the midst of that darkness.

But the suffering involved in clinical depression is deep, but the Lord is there nonetheless. The specific cross given to such a person may involve being unable to detect the peace of his presence at any level, but he is there nevertheless, and one day this person will see it and delight in it, and see what it has done for her, how that suffering has configured her to the beautiful image of Christ crucified. And so the scales will be balanced in her favor.