Filed under: The Faith, philosophy | Tags: charity, economy, Genesis, Hittites, justice, Moses, Sarah
I’ve been perusing Genesis lately, looking for little scraps of meaning for me the Christian (and of course finding full-course meals). I happened to read chapter 23, which details the death and burial of Moses’ wife, Sarah. As I read this, I was rather amazed at the lesson in charity being taught. But before I go into what I extrapolated from this passage, here’s a summarization of this passage:
Moses *eyes full of tears*: I’d like to bury my wife in one of your sepulchers out of sight, please.
Hittites: You’re a mighty prince, and none of us will stop you from burying your wife in our best sepulchers.
Moses: Tell Ephron that I’d like to buy the sepulcher at the end of his field — full price, of course. (Ephron is sitting right there)
Ephron: Moses, you can have the whole field to bury your wife.
Moses: Seriously, though, Ephron — I’ll pay you for it.
Ephron: Don’t worry about it. It’s yours.
And Moses buries Sarah there in Ephron’s field.
There are two important aspects of Christian economy. One is on the part of Moses, and the other on the part of Ephron. For Moses’ Part, he’s willing to pay. Moses is willing to render justice to Ephron for the field; he’s not trying to swindle him, and he’s not seeking a hand-out. He knows that Ephron has a just right to shark 400 shekels for this field, and is willing to pay it. Moses, essentially, understands the justice of trading. As St. Augustine tells us, one may not buy something too cheap or sell it too dear. In Moses’ mind, free is awfully cheap and unfair to Ephron.
Ephron, and the rest of the Hittites for that matter, understand another concept: mercy. Mercy is giving what is not deserved; it is surpassing justice in the interest of charity. And this is exactly what Ephron does. Having been asked for his tunic, he’s willing to give his cloak; having been asked to go one mile, he’s willing to go two. Not only can Moses have a sepulcher, but the best; nay! the whole field! Ephron understands that charity must be at the heart of the exchange, so that when a salesman asks “what can I do for you?” he really means it.
I know this is brief and bible-study-ish, but I thought it was an amazing example of how economy should work: with justice and charity kissing in every exchange; with justice having been met but charity having excelled. Good day!
Filed under: The Faith | Tags: Abortion, Flannery O'Connor, New Orleans, poor, South, the devil
“In New Orleans, they still believe in the Devil,” Toby said as we made our exodus from the mist-beaten city. He was quoting Flannery O’Connor in his praise over the great city of the South, and for some reason, the words have made their home in my mind; they built a raft in my consciousness, and have been floating there since Sunday. I couldn’t forget the repugnance I felt seeing the pagans outside St. Louis Cathedral, peddling their sorceries and soul-stealing wares. “The Devil waits outside,” I muttered as we made our way into the cave of beauty and tourism. But O’Connor was right — it seems the Devil is a brave soul in the South. Elsewhere, he slides under the cracks of doors, whispers to husbands to beat their wives, suggests to cops that they murder a black man, and supervises the work of the most prestigious (irrational) scientists. But not in the South; not in New Orleans. Men do beat their wives, black men are shot, and scientists work to God-knows-what ends, but its as if the battle is so heated that the blood of the burnt Angel himself boils onto the streets.
Much of our country fills the Devil with lazy work — in fact, I suppose the Devil might respond to the Joker’s chilling final words, “madness is like gravity; all it takes is a little push!” with a boisterous nod and “not only madness, but the slightest sin!” Indeed, the Devil’s done his share of work for a long time, filling the minds of men with the darkest enlightenment (the Mors Dei). He has spent centuries in our country inculcating indifference toward the poor and love of riches, spurring on the deadliest heresies in the Church, and preparing the modern mind to accept the wholesale slaughter of infants. By God, his work must be so easy now! Having baked his cake for decades, he now slowly, gracefully puts the final layer of icing on the top, smirking because, for all his work, few could even smell what he was cooking all these years.
But they know in New Orleans. The Serpent there no longer seeks gently to cajole men into his pit, but shows his Diamond Devil Head in the broadest daylight in the busiest streets. What he doesn’t know is that in the daylight, the children of God can see his frail, charred, boil-ridden body; suddenly, he’s no longer the beauty he was rumored to be. We finally see that he’s been crawling on his belly for ages, and we don’t fear him nor pay him the dignity of concern. He sits outside, and we sit with the Lord. It does seems that the Devil is a brave soul in the South, but he’s not brave — he’s just a desperate failure, sitting outside of Heaven like a mangy cat. And by God, we ought to be content to leave him there in the cold.
Filed under: De Sanctis | Tags: christ, christmas, joy, leo the great, nativity, resurrection
Tonight, I heard the best Christmas homily/sermon I’ve ever heard in all my 21 years. But for this post, I’m just dropping a little Leo the Great on your plate. The following excerpts are from his first and second sermons (there are several more) on the Feast of the Nativity. Enjoy!
All Share in the Joy of Christmas.
Our Saviour, dearly-beloved, was born today: let us be glad. For there is no proper place for sadness, when we keep the birthday of the Life, which destroys the fear of mortality and brings to us the joy of promised eternity. No one is kept from sharing in this happiness. There is for all one common measure of joy, because as our Lord the destroyer of sin and death finds none free from charge, so is He come to free us all. Let the saint exult in that he draws near to victory. Let the sinner be glad in that he is invited to pardon. Let the gentile take courage in that he is called to life. For the Son of God in the fulness of time which the inscrutable depth of the Divine counsel has determined, has taken on him the nature of man, thereby to reconcile it to its Author: in order that the inventor of death, the devil, might be conquered through that (nature) which he had conquered. And in this conflict undertaken for us, the fight was fought on great and wondrous principles of fairness; for the Almighty Lord enters the lists with His savage foe not in His own majesty but in our humility, opposing him with the same form and the same nature, which shares indeed our mortality, though it is free from all sin.
The Mystery of the Incarnation Demands Our Joy.
Let us be glad in the Lord, dearly-beloved, and rejoice with spiritual joy that there has dawned for us the day of ever-new redemption. of ancient preparation1 , of eternal bliss. For as the year rolls round, there recurs for us the commemoration2 of our salvation, which promised from the beginning, accomplished in the fulness of time will endure for ever; on which we are bound with hearts up-lifted3 to adore the divine mystery: so that what is the effect of God’s great gift may be celebrated by the Church’s great rejoicings. For God the almighty and merciful, Whose nature as goodness, Whose will is power, Whose work is mercy: as soon as the devil’s malignity killed us by the poison of his hatred, foretold at the very beginning of the world the remedy His piety had prepared for the restoration of us mortals: proclaiming to the serpent that the seed of the woman should come to crush the lifting of his baneful head by its power, signifying no doubt that Christ would come in the flesh, God and man, Who born of a Virgin should by His uncorrupt birth condemn the despoiler of the human stock.4 Thus in the whole and perfect nature of true man was true God born, complete in what was His own, complete in what was ours. And “ours” we call what the Creator formed in us from the beginning and what He undertook to repair. For what, the deceiver brought in and the deceived admitted had no trace in the Saviour Nor because He partook of man’s weaknesses, did He therefore share our faults. He took the form of a slave without stain of sin, increasing the human and not diminishing the Divine: because that “emptying of Himself” whereby the Invisible made Himself visible and Creator and Lord Of all things as He was, wished to be mortal, was the condescension of Pity not the failing of Power5 (Leo 2022)
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: dorothy day, poor, saint, St. Joseph, Virgin Mary
I’m going to give this a shot, just to spice up this blog a bit. I’d like to post, with some frequency, writings and words from the saints. Hopefully, it won’t end up being a Dorothy Day-Fest! But for today, it’s Day!
GO TO THE POOR
This is an editorial for “little ones,” for the poor, the meek, the suffering. I am writing it as I sit in St. Bibianas Cathedral in Los Angeles, a place of joy and beauty, set in the slums of a great city.
How wonderful that it should be here, surrounded by the poor–yes not only by the poor, but the degraded and the lost ones of this world. Christ chose a stable as a place to be born in. So how He must love to be here.
Outside, on Second and Main streets in Los Angeles, there are pawnshops, saloons, burlesque shows, flophouses. It is the “Skid road” of the city, like our Bowery in New York. Inside, there is beauty and quiet and many bowed in prayer at early Mass.
Pope Leo XIII said the workers were lost to the Church.
Pope Pius XI said to his priests: “Go to the poor.”
Our Lord walked the highways and byways, dusty and tired, to teach His brothers whom “God so loved.” The closer we are to the poor, the closer to Christs love.
GO TO MARY
Mary was poor. St. Bonaventure, in his life of Christ, said St. Joseph was so poor that he could not earn enough even for the simple wants of the Holy Family, so the Blessed Mother took in sewing. Oh Mother of beautiful love, of fear, of knowledge and of holy hope, teach us to be poor, ever to have less so that others may have more, always to be the little, the fools of this earth. Our Lord God, Creator of the world, was born in a stable. Lend us your heart, and come to the stable of our bodies, bearing our Lord to us, loving Him, praising Him, adoring Him for us.
A NEW YEAR
This editorial, marking the beginning of the tenth year of The Catholic Worker, is for all I met this month, all those families on the march, those soldiers going to and from leave, those prisoners I met at the reformatory at El Keno, for all our readers everywhere, the little and the poor.
It is to all of us that the Church comes, “calling attention to our high vocation as Christians, and to the great tasks, the conflicts and sufferings which confront us in the Kingdom of God” (Short Breviary, page 5, footnote).
We are the sons of God, believing in His Name, and we bring messages of prayer and penance (Father Hugo), and messages of peace (Father Orchard), messages to a world at war, a world to which penance is foolishness, and peace, treason.
We enter a new year with this month of May, and we enter with a joyful spirit, mindful of the love of God for us, and the love we should bear for all, friend and foe, English, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Germans. They are our brothers, and love for them is “the fulfilling of the law.” Love is “the measure by which we shall be judged,” and that love is to be shown by works of mercy, not by war.
ST. PAULS MESSAGE
“Put ye on therefore, brethren , the bowels of mercy, benignity, humility, modesty, patience: bearing with one another and forgiving one another, if any have a complaint against another: even as the Lord hath forgiven you, so do you also. But above all these things, have charity, which is the bond of perfection: and let the peace of Christ rejoice in your hearts, wherein also you are called in one body (Col. III: 12-15).
I’m coming to terms with a dreadful fact. Friends, I’m becoming a fuddy-duddy. Seriously. I don’t think families ought to go to Disneyworld, I think women should be happy with grey hair, and men ought to throw away their PS3s and Xbox 360s. You get the idea.
But as it pertains to Christmastide, I’m more of a fuddy-duddy than ever. You know why? I hate Santa Claus. There I said it. I hate him. Not St. Nicholas, generous saint that he was. No, I hate this pagan construction we call Santa Claus. As Kelli and I were running erands the other day, we heard about 15 xmas songs, and the overwhelming majority were not about our Lord and Savior, but about Santa Claus. As though Santa Claus was the God of the Universe who took on the flesh of a man to redeem the world!
I’m not unconvinced that Santa Claus’s place in our culture is not idolatrous, considering what we tell our children about him. He provides all your gifts and blessings — not God. You’d better behave! He knows your behavior as well! And where does Christ fall into this picture? Oh, He’s just that baby in the middle of the stable — nothing too important.
Will I teach my children about Santa Claus — no sir! Call me fuddy-duddy if you must, but I won’t support this a-no longer! Our culture cannot afford a distraction from the spiritual importance and meaning of the Incarnation — and as long as we have a god of materialism like Santa Claus, we’ll never really embrace the God of the Incarnation.
*addendum*
I only use the word “hate” for Santa Claus because I think we ought to cultivate a healthy hatred of all things that draw worship away from God. I don’t oppose the fruitful mythologies which turn our eyes to the supernatural — certainly not! To truly love God is to be a poet, and the myths are dear to the poet’s heart.
But when we substitute devotion to the Child Jesus for songs written about a fat white man — my friends, we’ve lost our way.
How often my reading is simply like throwing partially cooked spaghetti against the wall –
it doesn’t stick!
I read like a machine sometimes, but with the retainment of a potato sack full of sand and holes!
I think over-reading is an evasion by an artful heart. If you read far more than you can process and apply, then you end up processing none and applying less.
May I pray for reticence and little (focused) reading.
Just as a resource, here’s a great treasury of common Catholic prayers in Latin:
http://www.preces-latinae.org/index.htm
Filed under: Uncategorized
I must be totally honest — I have, in almost all respects, failed to keep up my convictions as a Christian. I’m not speaking of my liberal eccentricities, and by “liberal eccentricities” I mean my insistence on studying and adhering to the Social (especially economic) teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.
My real vice, I see now, is my loss of poverty and prayer. In the summer of 2007 — a tragic Cross of a Season — a ray of hope emanated from the rurally Industrial stretches of Sulphur, Louisiana. While my relationship to Kelli was mutilated by my own vocational crisis, and while I was generally alone, isolated from Church and friends, my heart was in God’s for hours a day. John Senior writes that our proper tithe of prayer (for laymen) is 2.5 hours per day. I kept this nearly all the Summer to the best of my ability. My heart was full with the beauty and consolation of the Almighty. I prayed the Liturgy of the Hours, I prayed the Rosary, I offered petitions for many — I was a pray-er.
But I lost it. I struggle now to pray one hour of the divine office daily and to muster up the gumption to go before the Father before I go into my bed. There is no two ways about it — I’ve grown lax, and am in need of discipline.
Not only have I ceased to pray for any significant amount of the day, but I have rested on my laurels when it comes to Evangelical Poverty. I have indulged in many luxuries, including expensive books, alcohol, fancy foods, etc. I’ve been terribly concerned with only MY particular wants or needs, however shrouded in acceptability they are (mostly that I want new books and beer). I’ve been a “go-getter” instead of a “go-giver.” And I’m ashamed of it.
Again, I’ve *lost* something which I need to regain. But, one does not only rage against the Darkness, but makes an about-face towards the light. And so I pray and fast.
Be well this Christ-Mass time, friends, and pray for the coming of Christ into your hearts.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Three topics are soon to come:
1. The Irony of my Step-Brother, the “Certified Killer”
2. The Backwardness but not intrinsic evil of Wal-Mart
3. A Southerner Without a Twang
Stay tuned!
Filed under: The Faith, philosophy | Tags: St. Thomas Aquinas, torture, video games
Brian at Saint Superman recently received a rather scathing comment from yours truly about the hypocrisy of opposing a torture mission, “The Art of Persuasion,” in WoW while failing to oppose the myriad of similar offenses (murder, sex, gang warfare, general nastiness, etc.). My comment culminating with this line of questioning:
This brings up the big question of the illusory nature of video games — can my character have extra-marital sex? Can he kill the innocent? Can he torture? Is he an extension of me, and if so, to what degree do I at the very least take pleasure in his actions?
Brian, always thirsty for the opinions of his fellow countrymen, posted “Oh! Snap!” asking for where the morals in video games lay. In my opinion, the resulting comments were…disatisfactory, showing a refusal to look at both scripture and reality. Here was my response:
I am going to take the hard line here and say that, at the very least, these games represent a grave distortion of reality for the player, and therefore they ought to be thrown into the scrap heap. These video games allow human beings (with, as was pointed out, immortal souls) to indulge in fantasies of violence, sex, and general breaking of the moral law. Would we not say that a person was guilty of *some* offense for taking pleasure in fantasizing over the slaughter of the innocent? Should we entirely disregard Phillipians 4:8:
Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honourable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.
The reverse of this is obviously to refrain from fantasizing over evil. Clearly, this is an issue of the heart — Luke 6:45:
The good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good; and the evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth that which is evil.
So the question is — what do these games do to the heart of man? The games may be a grave distortion of realit — pixels and electrons — but the heart of man is very real, and its fluctuations have a very definite effect on the behavior and even the salvation of man. If a man stores up in his heart the pleasure of rebellion against God, the pleasure of murder, or the pleasure of torture, what is likely to come from it?
If we take Luke 6:45 seriously, then we have to admit: nothing good will come from it.
So, yeah — I think these video games are an evil distortion of reality which warp the hearts of men, and I won’t let myself or my (future) children anywhere near them.
*addendum to first comment*
I’d also add that these games represent a disordered desire for “eutrapalia,” or what St. Thomas deems “playfullness.” Being light-hearted, and even seeking necessary distraction, can be orderly and good. However, these games represent (in the broader sense of the term) lust for pleasure and a disordered desire for play which can only culminate in more and more deviant behavior (i.e. the shift from Mario squashing turtles into their shells to a New York Thug slaughtering hundreds of innocent people). Vice always breeds more vice.
But really, I think the point about these storing up evil in men’s hearts is more compelling than a Thomistic argument.
—————–
There you have it. Without being a thoroughly researched or lengthy discourse, I think I’ve at the very least laid some (extremely brief, scant) groundwork for an argument against video games. My question then becomes, however: should we avoid artwork which depicts violence/evil? Is it only the activity of video games, as opposed to the passivity of art, which renders them terrible?
