The following linked passage is, I believe, based on a hymn from the early Church, which St. Paul quotes to make a point.  Always making points, that one.

I particularly like this hymn.

The following is a sentimental notion, and therefore not of much use to anyone’s spiritual journey.  Nevertheless, I have imagined such an event, such an uttering of Jesus’ name which would, in fact, bring every beast and human to its knees.  Would it be the very voice of God, calling for His Son?  Would the sky be stained with the colors of the Apocalypse, the wind dense with the presence of the Creator?

This can’t be more than silly.

And yet…I believe we were at Mass when Amelia, as is her custom, was rummaging through her purse and our pockets and the missalette.  She stopped at the cover which held the image of an icon.  There was the Virgin Mary, holding the child Jesus.  Standard stuff, if you’re looking for song number #438 and just flipping past it.

Amelia pointed, which cued Marcy to tell her who those people are.  She said, “That’s Mary, and that’s Jesus.”

For a long moment, Amelia did nothing but stare.  It was longer than usual, and what I wasn’t thinking before that moment, I began to think anew.

Did some part of her somehow know that Name?  Was this like the silent shudder that comes over the children in Narnia, when they hear Aslan’s name for the first time?  Was Amelia’s spirit kneeling, even if her mind and body didn’t quite know what to do about it?

Probably not.  But I would be pleased to have my doubt removed.

That may seem to be a harsh or morbid subject to accompany this picture.  Is it any less true for babies?  (This particular baby being my three-month-old daughter, Ruth).

More importantly, though, I think there is something in the levity of a baby receiving ashes that is easy to miss for “serious” Catholics – namely, perhaps we are sometimes too serious about ourselves.  Perhaps there is great truth in the notion that a baby does not think any more of herself than what she is – if she really thinks that much about herself at all.

If the majority of our time could be spent in carefully attending to – and punctuated by wonder at – the souls around us, then maybe it is not so harsh a thing to say, “You are dust.”  In the context of such a truth you see how wondrous the Lord is.

Confession is a little-understood practice, and I’m not here to say that I understand it very well.

It seems related to this:  Once, in a group prayer, the leader asked us to imagine an encounter with Jesus Christ.  Then, we were asked to choose our expected response from the following:  Would you fall to your knees in worship?  Would you run to Him and embrace Him?  Would you approach and simply begin speaking to Him?  Or what?

I was among the minority who said that they would first fall to their knees, while the greatest percentage said they would first seek to embrace Him.

I was tempted, at the time, to feel a little superior about this.  Fools!  Don’t you know Who this is?  You will be stopped dead (read: dead) in your tracks.

Yet I tried not to feel superior, and reflected on the variation in responses.  To me, it remained an almost scientific fact:  This is God.  If you came within 10 feet of a lightning bolt, you would hit the deck.  How much faster will you fall before the Almighty, and never even look up unless you are invited to?  My answer was based in psychology, and perhaps physics.  Certainly not sentimentality.

There is something to say for God’s tendency to veil His glory, and therefore allow a human to look upon Him and still live.  Even the embrace – I have little doubt that there is something like a hug in Heaven, or better still, something more complete which hugs (and even sex) can only point to, but never approach.

Now here is a question for you:  Have you ever experienced unmitigated shame?  Shame so severe that your ego could not stand up against it?  Shame that taught you to understand, “I am heartily sorry for having offended you”?  Shame – and this comes from my too-limited experience – that shook your whole body with sobbing, scattering unending tears about your anguished face…

My suspicion is that, first of all, we will be no more capable of approaching God than we would a lightning bolt.  Furthermore, I suspect that the very presence of God will, among other things, be an immersion in shame, and each soul will understand precisely how he or she fell short of holiness.

Confession teaches us that this shame, total though it is, should not cause us to despair.  It’s more like the waters of baptism, from which we emerge washed and prepared.  Then, as the Sacrament shows us, there is a magnificent reconciliation, and probably something much better than a hug.

Just cracked open Thomas Merton, “The New Man,” and within two pages I was struck by something which points at one of the more mysterious elements of my life.

To begin, here’s the passage from Merton:

“Life and death are at war within us.  As soon as we are born, we begin at the same time to live and die.

“Even though we may not be even slightly aware of it, this battle of life and death goes on in us inexorably and without mercy.  If by chance we become fully conscious of it, not only in our flesh and in our emotions but above all in our spirit, we find ourselves involved in a terrible wrestling, an agonia not of questions and answers, but of being and nothingness, spirit and void…

“Everything hangs on the final issue, in the battle of life and death.  Nothing is assured beforehand.  Nothing is definitely certain.  The issue is left to our own choice.  But that is what constitutes the dark terror of the agonia:  we cannot be sure of our own choice.  Are we strong enough to continue choosing life when to live means to go on and on with this absurd battle of entity and nonentity in our own inmost self?”

Yeah, he’s not wasting any time getting into his subject, which is very appealing to this reader.  Moreover, I am especially drawn to a writer who can somehow name, or point to, or even describe an experience in my life which I came to believe was mine alone, or at least seldomly shared.

The experience is this:  When I was younger, one of my recurring dreams saw me being chased throughout the night.  The reasons for the chase might vary, though the one chasing me was, every time, intending to kill me.

I would run forever, up and down innumerable flights of stairs, over fields and through busy streets.  There might be someone with me, also running, or I might be alone.  If we split up, the chaser was still after me.

I would run so long in these dreams, and with such great bursts of energy, that soon I was weary of the hunt.  Somehow I could feel that burning emptiness in my body, after all of the adrenaline was used up.  Moreover, it was truly the emotional drain that caused me to lag.  Would I never be able to lose the chaser?  Would I never stop running?  If so, what was the point?

The chaser never quite caught me, even when I decided in my dream to stop running.  I would always wake up before it could happen, except once.  (This was the rather gory incident when the chaser, with a chain saw, was cutting through one of my legs while I watched on, out-of-body like.  But the dream was over before I died).

So, to answer Merton – I suppose I agree that I can’t be sure of my choice.  I wonder what anyone else would say.

I have been listening to “A New Earth,” by Eckhart Tolle, which was pitched on audible.com as an introduction to Buddhism.

Buddha.

I’ve long been curious about Buddhism, and so sought to educate myself on the basics.

The book deserves a complete review, but that isn’t going to be possible here.  What follows are some of the highlights and conclusions from my “reading” of Tolle’s work.

1. There is a great deal to admire in Buddhism and the pursuit of Enlightenment.

2. Tolle narrates, and has a tremendous presence through his voice.

3. I say as a matter of faith (and not as a self-deluded “theologian” or some such) that Buddhism has a great deal of truth in it, but perhaps not all.  The remaining points will focus on this.

A. Of all the people Tolle quoted, he quoted Jesus most often.  I suspect that he was targeting the Western audience and saw Jesus as common ground.  At one point, he suggests that many of history’s enlightened have had their teachings twisted and misinterpreted posthumously.  (Obviously the Christian takes issue with the implication that this happened with Jesus).

B. Still, in his use of Jesus’ sayings, Tolle offers new angles.  For instance, in the paradoxical saying, “He who clings to his life will lose it, and he who loses his life will save it,” Tolle sees the “life” of the ego.  The person who seeks only to increase himself in the eyes of the world will lose his spiritual (true) self, and he who is willing to give up that life in favor of “awareness” and “consciousness” will truly find life.  (I am, of course, almost grossly paraphrasing Tolle).  In awareness and consciousness, Tolle also finds the “abundant life” that Jesus promises.

C. I took another of Tolle’s/Buddhism’s concepts and extended it to Christianity, as well.  Namely, that of the pain-body (spelling mine).  A pain-body is a kind of spiritual phenomenon.  Everyone has a pain-body, and they appear to be as unique in size and shape as our actual bodies.  What they represent is a sort of pre-programmed want of pain and drama in life, and any pain or drama is attributable to the pain-body.  It’s a bit like a split-personality, and this one is essentially masochistic.

In any case, on the road to Enlightenment, a person will first attempt to keep the pain-body at bay, therefore enabling the person to become familiar with peace and consciousness.  Ultimately, the pain-body becomes fuel for the consciousness, spurring it onward to Enlightenment.  The analogy might be in suffering for the Christian.  It is not desirable, but if one can see beyond it, learn to endure it, and even offer it up to be redeemed by Christ, the very same suffering can actually be a path to holiness.

More toward the central teachings, it would not be a very great leap to talk to a Buddhist and suggest that Christ, in His Passion, took on the collective pain-body for all of humankind.  While the Buddhist would probably steer away from the suggestion that Christ was uniquely God while others may simple be godly, he/she might also have something to contribute to the idea.

D. In the end, it became clear to me that any attempt to perfectly assimilate Buddhism into Christianity, or vice versa, would be in vain.  Not least of all, for this reason:  Tolle eventually comes to describe God as the “formless Consciousness” of the universe.  Until this point, I found Tolle so fascinating, and the teachings of Buddhism so refreshing and even Truthful, that I was already attempting to assimilate them into my Christian faith.  This can likely still be done, to some extent.

But the Christian can’t be satisfied with God as “formless Consciousness.”  We know Him as a person – as three Persons – and we start to see in Scripture and in our lives a composite of His Face.  Moreover, Consciousness does not come down from Heaven and die for us.  It does not even desire the drama of that great love story, from Creation and Fall, through Prophecy, and finally to Salvation.

The Buddhist might say that I must learn to separate myself from my pain-body and not desire this drama.  I would counter that storytelling is fundamentally human (even Tolle employed it), and that any higher existence without stories must also be devoid of an Author, and therefore not really be a higher existence.

And since this is my post, I get the last word.

Taken from Orthodoxy:

“The modern latitudinarians speak, for instance, about authority in religion not only as if there were no reason for it, but as if there had never been any reason for it.  Apart from seeing its philosophical basis, they cannot even see its historical cause.  Religious authority has often, doubtless, been oppressive or unreasonable; just as every legal system (and especially our present one) has been callous and full of a cruel apathy.  It is rational to attack the police; nay, it is glorious.  But the modern critics of religious authority are like men who should attack the police without ever having heard of burglars.  For there is a great and possible peril to the human mind: a peril as practical as burglary.  Against it religious authority was reared, rightly or wrongly, as a barrier.  And against it something certainly must be reared as a barrier, if our race is to avoid ruin.

“That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself.  Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought.”

I love a good joke in the service of a good point.  Here are a few more jokes, these about Chesterton’s renowned girth (courtesy of Wikipedia):

Chesterton was a large man, standing 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 m) and weighing around 21 stone (130 kg; 290 lb). His girth gave rise to a famous anecdote. During World War I a lady in London asked why he wasn’t ‘out at the Front’; he replied, ‘If you go round to the side, you will see that I am.’ On another occasion he remarked to his friend George Bernard Shaw: “To look at you, anyone would think a famine had struck England”. Shaw retorted, “To look at you, anyone would think you have caused it”. P. G. Wodehouse once described a very loud crash as “a sound like Chesterton falling onto a sheet of tin.”

From the book of Jeremiah, 1:4-10:

⁴ The word of the LORD came to me, saying,

⁵ “Before I formed you in the womb I knew^[a] you,
before you were born I set you apart;
I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”

⁶ “Alas, Sovereign LORD,” I said, “I do not know how to speak; I am too young.”

⁷ But the LORD said to me, “Do not say, ‘I am too young.’ You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you. ⁸ Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you,” declares the LORD.

⁹ Then the LORD reached out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me, “I have put my words in your mouth. ¹⁰ See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.”

My spiritual director keyed me in to this passage as I dwelt on the blessings God has given me, and whether I am wasting them.  She was trying to strengthen, I think, the sense of God’s presence and purpose in my life.  If I stay close to Him, nothing will be wasted.

My wife is due any day now with our second child, and when the spiritual director asked how this passage was affecting me, I noted that it was doing so greatly, and over a couple of generations now.

If it’s not already, this passage should be a clarion call for Catholics on the matter of abortion.  Truly, I don’t encounter very many professed Catholics who are pro-choice.  Sometimes I’ll hear about exceptions, but it’s not as divisive as the issue of gay marriage, for example.

This passage took me to those exceptions.

As someone physically incapable of being in the same situation, I can only say that there is surely not enough consolation in the whole world to make up for the trauma of rape.  I hope that my closest encounter with rape will only be the disturbing thought of it; even then, if my eyes are pointed in the right direction, I am sure that I would rather die than suffer it.  If it happened to someone I love, I would become murderous.

What occurs to me, however, might constitute a fragment of the divine consolation that awaits those victims.  In other words, God would even wring the rag that has soaked up your tears, and out will come holy water.  He will raise up the lowly, and is there anyone more lowly than a fetus conceived through rape?  (If you need evidence of this, consider the context:  These fetuses are offered, too lightly, as the sacrifice given for exceptions to any rule against abortions.)

God did not make the rapist a rapist.  The gift of life which He endowed in that man is complementary to the gift He endowed in you.  Taken by itself, this gift is the awakening of each new generation, and an awakening to the miraculous of the generation becoming parents.

Moreover, that may be a prophet growing in your belly.  It will surely be someone uniquely called, uniquely “set apart” by God.

Perhaps most of all, there may be nothing more God-like that any human can do, than to fulfill the term and give birth to that person.  To my mind, there is nothing I can possibly do which would be so grace-full as that.  (It now occurs to me that so many stories featuring a male hero through history have only been my gender’s attempt to match the heroism of a woman in labor).