There is a tendency that any group has to use words that make sense to some of its members, but are often unintelligible to outsiders. I have sometimes had to coach recent converts in “Church speak”.
For example I may proudly announce that “RCIA classes will begin next week….so if you know anyone who is interested in attending, please fill out an information card on the table just outside the sacristy door.” Thinking I have been perfectly clear, a new member approachs me after Mass to ask what “RCIA classes are….and also what is a sacristy?”
I have had the same reaction when announcing “CCD classes.” One angry parent called me to protest that she was told by the DRE (more Church speak) that her daughter could not make First Holy Communion unless she started attending “CCD.” The mother, a non-Catholic spouse of a less than faithful Catholic husband, had no idea that the parish even offered or required religious education for children, since she had never connected the term “CCD” with “Sunday School” or any form of religious instruction.
As a priest I have come to discover that I use terms, ordinary terms of traditional Catholicism, but given the poor catechesis (another Church word, meaning “religious training,” by the way), the meaning of what I am saying is lost on many. For example, I have come to discover that many Catholics think “Mortal Sin” means “killing somebody.” Even the expression “grave sin” escapes many, who know it isn’t good, but are not sure beyond that, what it means. And then mention “venial sin” and the conversation approaches stand-still.
Still other words, such as fornication, covenant, matrimony, incarnation, transubstantiation, liturgy, oration, epistle, gospel, sanctus, chalice, paten, alb, Holy Orders, theological, missal, monsignor, Eucharistic, etc., while being meaningful to many in the Church are often only vaguely understood by many others in the Church, not to mention the unchurched (is that another Church word?).
Once at daily Mass I was preaching out of the First Letter of John, and I was attempting to make the point that our faith is “incarnational.” I began to notice the blank stares, and vacant looks. And so I asked the small group that day if any of them knew what “incarnational” meant, no one did. I went on to explain that it meant that the Word of God had to become flesh in us, it had to become real in the way we live our lives. To me “incarnational” captured it perfectly, but most of them did not even really know for sure what “incarnation” meant, let alone “incarnational.”
Ah Church-speak.
The seminary years took the art of Church-speak to new levels. I remember how many of my professors, while railing against the use of Latin in the liturgy, seemed to have a strange fascination with Greek-based terminology. Mass was out, Eucharist was in. “Going to mass” was out, “confecting the synaxis” was in. Canon was out “anamnesis” was in. Communion was out koinonia was in. Mystagogia, catechumentate, mysterion, epikaia, protoevangelion, hapax legomenon, epiklesis, etc, etc. Necessary words, I suppose, but surely opaque to parishioners we were training to lead and teach. Church speak indeed, or should I say ekklesia-legomenon.
Ah, Church-speak…. or in this case seminary silliness.
At any rate, I have learned to be a little more careful when speaking today to avoid too much Church-speak, too many “insider” terms, too many older terms, without carefully explaining them.I think we can and should learn many of them, but we should not assume that most know them.
The great, and Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen once said that he discovered, early on, that he often got credit for being learned, when in fact, he was merely being obscure. And, for any who knew him in his later years, especially on television, he was always very careful to explain and set forth Church teaching in a very accessible way. Good advice for all of us, a little less of the CCD and RCIA stuff, and little more of the clearer “Religious Instruction” can help decode our Church-speak.
Please enjoy this brief and very funny video from the Protestant side of the aisle. Tim Hawkins is a Christian Comedian. I’d also love to hear some of the words that make your “church-speak” list.
We usually think of distractions or interruptions as coming form the world around us. But is that really the most fertile or frequent source? Consider the following parable drawn from the stories of the early Desert Fathers and monastic experience:
Sometimes there would be a rush of noisy visitors and the silence of the monastery would be shattered.
This would upset the disciples; not the Master, who seemed just as content with the noise as with the silence.
To his protesting disciples he said one day, “Silence is not the absence of sound, but the absence of self.”
The fact is, our greatest distraction is usually our very self. And if this may surprise us, we should probably chalk that surprise up to pride. Why? Because what God most often wants us to see and focus on is outside and above us: in the beauty of creation, the wonder of others, in the magnificence of God. These are not distractions, they are often exactly what God is saying to us, revealing to us.
St. Augustine described our essential problem as Homo curvatus in se (man turned in on himself). And in so turning inward, a host of distractions assail us:
I’m bored.
I’m tired.
What will I do next?
What do people think of me?
Do I fit in?
Am I handsome/pretty enough?
Have I made it?
What does this have to do with me?
What have you done for me lately?
When will it be my turn?
What about me?
Why are people upsetting me? What gives them the right?
Yes, distractions like these, a thousand variations swim through our mind as we are turned inward, most of them rooted in pride and its ugly cousin, vanity.
But as the parable above teaches, it is the absence of self, that brings truer focus and serenity. Indeed, of this I am a witness, for my freest and most joyful, and most focused moments have come when I was most forgetful of myself:
* Perhaps it was simply a movie that gripped my attention and drew me outside of myself into the plot and the moments in the lives of others, even if they were fictional.
* At other times, it was being powerfully aware of the presence of others and listening carefully to what they said.
* Perhaps it was just in the company of close friends where I am less concerned to seek or need approval, and can just relax in the moment, and enjoy whatever is happening.
* Perhaps too, it is in those moments of deep appreciation of the natural world where I walk through a field and am captured by “the color purple” and am deeply moved by the beauty of what God has done.
* And surely there are those moments of deep and contemplative prayer when, by a gift of God, I forget about myself and am drawn deeply into the experience of God.
In moments like these God takes us (who are so easily turned inward) and turns us outward and upward and the ten thousand distractions that come from self-preoccupation hush for a time and we, being self-forgetful, are almost wholly present to others, to creation and to God. The noisy din of anxious self concern quiets, and our world opens up and out.
The Psalms often speak of God placing us in a spacious place (e.g. 18:19; 31:8; 119:45; inter al): You have set my feet in a spacious place, O Lord (Ps 31:8). There is nothing more tiny and cramped than to be turned in on ourselves.
Ask the Lord to set your feet in the wide spaces, to open you outward and upward. For the worst distractions are not the noises outside us, but rather, the noises within us, noises that come from being too self-preoccupied. The silence which we most crave is not really found in the mere absence of sound, but in the absence of self preoccupation.
Most of us experience from time to time that God seems distant. Here we do not consider the distance that may come from mortal sin, but simply that distance of which the psalmist says, Why do you hide your face O Lord? (e.g. Ps 44:24, inter al).
Recently I came across a dialogue from an unknown source wherein a monk speaks to a saintly and wise abbot about his struggle to experience God, about the fact that God seems distant:
Speaking to the Master, the Monk said, “So what does one do about the distance?”
“Understand that it isn’t there.” Said the Master.
“Does that mean that God and I are one?” Asked the puzzled Monk.
“Not one. Not two.” Said Father Abbot.
“How is that possible?” Replied the disciple.
And looking at him, the master replied:
“The sun and its light,
the ocean and the wave,
the singer and his song –
–not one….Not two.”
One of the great balances to find in theology is the balance between the transcendence of God and the immanence of God. For God is utterly above and beyond what he has created and this is His transcendence. And yet, at the same time He is profoundly, immediately and intimately present to all he has made. He is not just the author and foundation of all things, he is being itself, and nothing has being apart from him. And this we call his immanence.
And thus, when we speak of God being “distant” we can speak only in a metaphorical or psychological sense. But the fact is, God is NOT distant. He is more present to us than we are to ourselves. And thus, distance is a human problem, not a divine one.
True spirituality and true healing come from being increasingly in touch with reality. And the reality is that the distance we experience isn’t really there. The reality is that God is profoundly, absolutely, and powerfully present to all that has being. And if He ever were to become “distant,” that from which he became distant, would cease to be at all. God is being itself, and to have being is ipso facto to be profoundly present to God.
So when God “seems distant” realize that the distance isn’t really there. Stay in touch with reality and remember that every fiber of your being is present to God, held and sustained by Him and that your being is caught up in Him who is being itself.
Scripture says of Jesus He is before all things, and in him all things hold together (Col 1:17).
St Augustine also says, You (O Lord) were with me, but I was not with You. [Created] things kept me far from You, which, unless they were in You, were not. You called, and cried aloud, and forced open my deafness. You gleam and shine, and chase away my blindness. You exhaled fragrance, and I drew in my breath and do long after You. I tasted, and do hunger and thirst. You touched me, and I burned for Your peace. (Confessions, 10.27)
I have written here before on the reality of Hell, as revealed in Scripture. And though many dismiss Hell as either non-existent or a very remote possibility, no Biblical figure spoke more of Hell than Jesus, who also taught that “many” go there. It is a sober and straight-forward teaching of Scripture that there is a Hell and that many mysteriously choose to live apart from God and the values of God’s Kingdom.
Yet, while fully asserting all this, I do wonder why the teaching on Hell is so unambiguously “hellish” and why the focus of the Lord’s teaching is almost entirely on physical torments. There is very little subtlety in what the Lord teaches. Hell is described as a fiery furnace (e.g. Matt 13:42), an outer darkness (e.g. Mt 8:12), where there is wailing and grinding of teeth (e.g. Mt 13:42), where the worm dies not, and the fire is never quenched (e.g. Mark 9:48; Matt 25:41, inter al).
Let me be clear, the Lord is the Master teacher, and for reasons of his own he seems to have decided that speaking of Hell in more subtle terms was unnecessary. Yet we live in times when even many believers, consider the teaching on Hell as set forth in the scriptures to be cartoonishly excessive and hardly worthy of a God who is Love.
Thus many of us, pastors and teachers, who seek to reestablish the teaching on hell as both reasonable and necessary (in light of human freedom and our capacity to choose for or against God and his Kingdom values), also look for other ways to teach on Hell. We use these methods out of no disrespect for Scripture and our Master teacher Jesus. But these are “dainty” times and even many believers are easily offended and lack the spiritual strength and courage necessary to hear Jesus’ undiluted words and accept their straight-forward admonition. Both believers and unbelievers, just get stuck on the images and miss the teaching.
To my mind, no modern metaphor for Hell is better than the “Golf story” told by the Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. It is remarkable for its subtle yet clear teaching that the heart of Hell is ultimately to be lacking in the “one thing necessary.” It is from his book, Three to Get Married. Sheen repeats the following joke in his Book:
There is not a golfer in America who has not heard the story, which is theologically sound, about the golfer who went to hell and asked to play golf. The Devil showed him a 36-hole course with a beautiful clubhouse, long fairways, perfectly placed hazards, rolling hills, and velvety greens. Next the Devil gave him a set of clubs so well balanced that the golfer felt he had been swinging them all his life. Out to the first tee they stepped, ready for a game. The golfer said: “What a course! Give me the ball.” The Devil answered: “Sorry….we have no golf balls. That’s the hell of it!” (Three to Get Married, Kindle Edition, Loc. 851-57).
Wow! Ouch! That IS the hell of it! To have all that, and lack the one thing necessary! Nothing else really works, or matters much, without the one thing necessary. In the joke, everything is in place and wonderfully set forth on the golf course, except the one thing necessary, the ball! The golf course becomes a golf curse.
In my last parish I lived in a rectory with a long hall. I used to putt a golf ball up and down the hall. I had an executive putt-putt set with obstacles, and golf goals with automatic returns, etc. But in the end, all I really needed was a ball to have fun. I didn’t even need a club, I could use a long umbrella if I had to, or even just kick the ball. My cat would also love to chase the ball up the hall and pounce. But all the other gizmos and gadgets I had meant nothing without the ball, they were useless. Without the ball even the cat wouldn’t show up.
The heart of Heaven is to be with God. Scripture says, Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these other things will be added unto you. (Matt 6:33)
The heart of Hell is to lack God, to lack the one thing necessary. God is the sine qua non, the absolute requirement for every other joy or pleasure to make any sense or be operative. The heart of Hell is to have rejected God permanently, and to discover that the absolute and final rejection of Him is to experience the withdrawal of every other pleasure. Only in God will my soul be at rest! (Ps 62:5)
In fact, like the golf course in Hell, those pleasures look at the denizens of Hell and mock them, make the suffering more intense. Because, though the pleasures are near at hand, they may as well be ten thousand miles away. They are useless and their nearness only intensifies the pain and the frustration. This is possibly worse than any hell-fire and may well explain the wailing and grinding of teeth by the hell-bound described in Scripture.
In life, don’t miss the one thing necessary, which is not a thing at all, but is God himself. The Father, in the prodigal son parable came out and begged his second son to enter the feast and celebrate with him. The Heavenly Father does the same now….What is your answer?
I have noticed that it is very common today that moral assessments seem to center quite a lot around the intentions and feelings of the person involved. What is actually being done seems less significant and as long as a person “means well” or feels something is right then it is OK for them and we should make no further moral discernment. It is enough for too many that the person feels the act is right and means well.
But the fact is such criteria are NOT enough. Moral uprightness consists in doing well, not just meaning well or feeling good. Intentionality is not wholly insignificant, especially when it comes to assigning a level of “culpability” (guilt or blame). But intentionality and surely feelings cannot be the only determinative factors in assessing a moral act. We must look at the act itself, what actually happens, as the primary consideration of the moral quality of that act. We cannot simply say that something is good, it must actually be good.
Let me give a few examples as to how the actual, concrete act overrules whatever feelings or intentions we have:
1. Intentions alone do not turn locks, keys do – Every day I move between the buildings that make up our parish plant. Going in and out of buildings requires the use of keys. Now many of these keys look alike. As I approach the Church door, I take out my keys and put what I think is the Church key in the lock. Now I do this with best of intentions. I think I am doing what is right, I feel that what I am doing is right. Only problem is that I put the rectory key in the Church lock. Despite all my good intentions, despite that I thought and felt I was doing what was right, the lock does not turn.
All the good intentions in the world will not make that lock turn. I may swear that I think I am right, and that I feel right. But none of those things will win the day and turn that lock. I actually have to DO what is right to get the proper result. The right key has to go in the right lock to get the right result. What I actually do is the determinative factor. Feelings, thoughts and intentions cannot win the day.
2. Good intentions alone do not get me there, following the directions does. To get to your house you tell me to turn right on Park Ave. But I turn left. I may think you said left, I may sense or feel I am going in the proper direction, I may intend to be doing what is right, but none of that is going to change the fact that I am going 30 mph in the wrong direction and am not going to get to your house until I actually DO what is right.
3. Accidents happen, but there’s still a mess. There is a can of paint in a hallway as I walk down. I kick the can of paint over and paint spills all over the floor. Whether I did so intentionally or not will not change the fact that we’ve got a mess on our hands here that has to be cleaned.
But in this example, intentionality and what I think or know is important to determine how blameworthy I am. It is possible that my act of kicking the paint over was purely accidental. Perhaps I was unaware that painting was going on in the hall and I could not see the can as I rounded the corner. In this case my culpability (or blameworthiness) is probably very low if not non-existent. But suppose I knew there was painting going on and failed to exercise proper attentiveness. I kick the can of paint over through carelessness. In this case I have some blame. But suppose I saw the can of paint and (perhaps out of anger) purposefully kicked it over. Now my blame is full.
So intentions, knowledge and feelings are important in assessing the blameworthiness of a person. But these things cannot render a bad thing good. No matter what my intentions thoughts or feelings, we still have a big mess to clean up. The objective truth is that there is paint all over the floor. Simply saying, I had good intentions or didn’t know any better does not make the mess go away.
Rectitude is tied to reality – Too many people today use flawed or incomplete reasoning when it comes to morally assessing acts. Intentions, how a person feels, or what they think and know can affect blameworthiness, but they cannot make a bad thing good, they cannot make an evil act upright, they cannot remove the harm or negative results of an incorrect, bad or evil act. There is still a mess to clean up. There is still a U-turn to make, there is still a right key to find. Reality sets in.
There is a lot of flawed moral reasoning today around the issue of intentionality, feelings and thoughts. Important though these factors are they cannot undo reality. They cannot form the basis for judging the uprightness or wrongness of an act. Time to get back to reality in moral judgments. Time to do well, not just mean well. Time to actually do what is right not just think or feel you’re right. Back to reality.
The following video is a good example of the world’s moral reasoning. A man is in jail. All we need to know is that he meant well and had the best of intentions. How he landed in jail, all the other wrong things he’s done in his life, they matter so little that we are not even told what they were. ALL that matters is that he had the best of intentions. “Enjoy” the video.
In the recent killing at the Batman movie the alleged perpetrator James Holmes said eerily, “I am the Joker.” Let me state right away, I do not pretend to understand what set this alleged mad man off, but his self-identifying with the Joker, the featured nemesis of Batman in the last “Dark Knight” movie, resonates deeply with the horrific, violence the gunman committed. The Joker was a sadistic, violent killer. There was nothing humorous about him at all.
Writing back in 2008 about the Batman move “The Dark Knight” English columnist Jenny McCartney wrote of the intense violence of the satanic “Joker.” Her words give context to the chilling words of James the alleged killer in Colorado.
Our attitude to violence is beyond a joke as new Batman film, The Dark Knight, shows. The new Batman film reaches new levels of brutality, so why are we letting children watch it? …..The maniacal, deranged face of The Joker, grippingly played by the late Heath Ledger, leers from posters all over town.
If I were the parent who relented and took a 10-year-old child to see The Dark Knight, would I be sorry? …You bet I would. It’s different from other superhero films, as fans are quick to point out. Certainly, there are surprises in its swooping camera angles and darkened, ominous screen.
But the greatest surprise of all – even for me, after eight years spent working as a film critic – has been the sustained level of intensely sadistic brutality throughout the film.
….The film begins with a heist carried out by men in sinister clown masks. As each clown completes a task, another shoots him point-blank in the head. The scene ends with a clown – The Joker – stuffing a bomb into a wounded bank employee’s mouth.
After the murderous clown heist, things slip downhill. A man’s face is filleted by a knife, and another’s is burned half off. A man’s eye is slammed into a pencil. A bomb can be seen crudely stitched inside another man’s stomach, which subsequently explodes. A trussed-up man is bound to a chair and set alight atop a pile of banknotes.
A plainly terrorized child is threatened at gunpoint by a man with a melted face. It is all intensely realistic. Oh but don’t worry, folks: there isn’t any nudity. [1]
Do the movies simply reflect these trends or to they help mold it? Probably both. But it in the context of the last Batman movie, that the words of the Movie Theater Killer “I am the Joker” can stun us with their overwhelming and sadistic darkness.
Was the Colorado killer an isolated and deeply disturbed man, an anomaly who, on account of his madness indicates little or nothing, other than his own madness? Sure.
But he did not grow up in isolation and we ought not simply dismiss him as a “one-out” situation. Our culture did reach and form him somehow: “I am the Joker.” He did not say “I am Neutromax from Xenon Alter.” He uttered a cultural artifact from this planet and this culture. He referenced a sadist killer and a context of intense violence that many of us see with moral neutrality, as entertainment and diversion.
It is a certainly significant that the recent Batman series emphasizes the word “dark” in its titles. Even the cinematography is shadowy, dark, and brooding. And it is not the Batman series alone. (By the way, Film Critic Tony Rossi says the New Batman movie redeems itself from its last violent escapade HERE).
Yes, it is far more than Batman. We have discussed on this blog before how so many movies today are steeped in darkness. There is terrible violence, mass destruction, mass killing, natural disasters, chase scenes, death and destruction all about. High kill ratios compete with explosions. And even our hero is often portrayed as a dark figure, deeply conflicted, lonely and brooding over his own demons. It is all very dark, very brooding, violent, and a seeming picture of nihilistic, self-destructive drives. This is film noir on steroids. There are increasingly deep threads of this in our culture.
Jesus spoke in the Gospel of Matthew about our eyes as being the lamp of the body. And while the original meaning of these words is caught up in a complex cultural anthropology of the time, to us in the modern world, his words can serve as a strong reminder to be very careful of what we admit into our mind and heart through our eyes:
The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how deep is that darkness! (Matt 6:21-22)
Yes, if the light we choose to see by is already dark, how deep the darkness in which we walk.
But, Father, but Father, watching violent movies doesn’t make me violent. Perhaps not in the short run. But when this sort of fare becomes the steady diet of a culture, can we say that we are wholly unaffected? Or, from the other perspective, when these themes continue to recur in the movies that theoretically depict “us,” what does that say about us?
The Colorado killings are not a mere anomaly. We are getting more and more of these in our culture. Indeed, call it a steady stream:
• January 8, 2011: U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords and eighteen other people were shot during a public meeting held in a supermarket parking lot in Casas Adobes, near Tucson, Arizona
• November 5, 2009, at Fort Hood, TX, Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 people and wounded 29 others.
• April 3, 2009: A gunman walked into an immigration services center in downtown Binghamton, N.Y. on Friday, killing 4 people, wounding at six, and taking as many as 41 hostage.
• March 29, 2009: Robert Stewart, 45, shot and killed eight people at Pinelake Health and Rehab in Carthage, N.C. before a police officer shot him and ended the rampage.
• March 29, 2009: Devan Kalathat, 42, shot and killed his two children and three other relatives, then killed himself in an upscale neighborhood of Santa Clara, Calif. Kalathat’s wife was critically injured.
• March 10, 2009: Michael McLendon, 28, killed 10 people • including his mother, four other relatives, and the wife and child of a local sheriff’s deputy • across two rural Alabama counties. He then killed himself.
• Feb. 14, 2008: Former student Steven Kazmierczak, 27, opened fire in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, fatally shooting five students and wounding 18 others before committing suicide.
• Dec. 5, 2007: Robert A. Hawkins, 19, opened fire with a rifle at a Von Maur store in an Omaha, Neb., mall, killing eight people before taking his own life. Five more people were wounded, two critically.
• April 16, 2007: Seung-Hui Cho, 23, fatally shot 32 people in a dorm and a classroom at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, then killed himself in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
• Oct. 2, 2006: Charles Carl Roberts IV, 32, shot to death five girls at West Nickel Mines Amish School in Pennsylvania, then killed himself.
• March 21, 2005: Student Jeffrey Weise, 16, killed nine people, including his grandfather and his grandfather’s companion at home. Also included were five fellow students, a teacher and a security guard at Red Lake High School in Red Lake, Minn. He then killed himself. Seven students were wounded.
• March 12, 2005: Terry Ratzmann, 44, gunned down members of his congregation as they worshipped at the Brookfield Sheraton in Brookfield, Wisconsin, slaying seven and wounding four before killing himself.
• March 5, 2001: Charles “Andy” Williams, 15, killed two fellow students and wounded 13 others at Santana High School in Santee, Calif.
• Nov. 2, 1999: Copier repairman Byran Uyesugi, 40, fatally shoots seven people at Xerox Corp. in Honolulu. He is convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
• July 29, 1999: Former day trader Mark Barton, 44, killed nine people in shootings at two Atlanta brokerage offices, then killed himself.
• April 20, 1999: Students Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, opened fire at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., killing 12 classmates and a teacher and wounding 26 others before killing themselves in the school’s library.
• May 21, 1998: Two teenagers were killed and more than 20 people hurt when Kip Kinkel, 17, opened fire at a high school in Springfield, Ore., after killing his parents.
• March 24, 1998 School Shooting – Jonesboro, Arkansas: 5 killed
• May 20, 1998 School Shooting – Springfield, Oregon: 2 killed, 22 wounded
• April 26, 1998 School Shooting – Edinboro, Pennsylvania: 1 killed, 3 wounded
• March 24, 1998: Andrew Golden, 11, and Mitchell Johnson, 13, killed four girls and a teacher at a Jonesboro, Ark., middle school. Ten others were wounded in the shooting.
• October 1, 1997: School Shooting – Perl, Mississippi: 3 killed, 9 wounded
• December 1, 1997: School Shooting – Paducah, Kentucky: 3 killed, 6 wounded
• Oct. 16, 1991: A deadly shooting rampage took place in Killeen, Texas, as George Hennard opened fire at a Luby’s Cafeteria, killing 23 people before taking his own life. 20 others were wounded in the attack.
• June 18, 1990: James Edward Pough shoots people at random in a General Motors Acceptance Corp. office in Jacksonville, Fla., killing 10 and wounding four, before killing himself.
• Aug. 20, 1986: Pat Sherrill, 44, a postal worker who was about to be fired, shoots 14 people at a post office in Edmond, Okla. He then kills himself.
These are just the most prominent cases. You will likely remember more. Note too how many of the killings above are school shootings.
And in just about all these incidents the case is usually made that the given shooting is just a “one-out” case, a local madman with his own issues. Perhaps, but we are producing a pretty steady stream of them. There are more than a few nuts falling from our family tree and something, many things, work to produce them, beginning with Satan himself. But we do well not to be wholly dismissive of the steady stream of shootings and violence as mere “anomalies.” They are regular features of our culture.
I would also say we cannot simply dismiss the regular fare of violent movies, video games and TV. They are a factor. I am not for Government censorship, and I realize it is more than movies. Mother Teresa traced violence in the West to violence in the womb through abortion. And violence from all its sources is continuing to overflow in our society.
Think about it, and give serious consideration to what your children are watching, to what you are watching.
The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how deep is that darkness! (Matt 6:21-22)
This song talks about a better place to turn our eyes:
The word virtual has become, for most people, a euphemism for the Internet, or the computer world; as in “occurring or existing primarily online.” But the word virtual has an original meaning that is actually quite descriptive of a modern problem.
Prior to its application to the computer world, the word virtual meant: being something in effect, though not actually or expressly being such. In other words, it has aspects of the real thing, but is not the real thing. So, in the sentence. He is a virtual goldmine of knowledge on the subject one would be silly to look for physical gold mine or to think that he is either gold or a mine, or both. There is no actual, no physical, goldmine. Rather his knowledge has aspects of a gold mine (value, worth, depth) but he is not an actual goldmine.
The adverb, “virtually” means,for the most part, almost. In other words, it is close to the thing, but is not the thing or quality described. So in the sentence He was so exhausted, he was virtually dead; he is not, of course, actually dead but, rather shares in some of the qualities of the dead (unmoving, unconscious, lying down, etc). But he is not dead.
So virtual may mean “almost, like, or similar,” but NOT “is.” The virtual is not the full reality. It is lacking in existence and other important qualities of the actual reality.
And this is very important truth to recall in today’s “virtual” world of the Internet. Many people are substituting too much of the virtual for the actual. Many people spend more time interacting with Facebook friends than physically interacting with actual family members and friends. Many people digest large quantities of virtual Internet life, and only small amounts of real life. In an actual meeting with real people present, many will be seen to have their heads in their phone and be only vaguely present to the real meeting (see photo above right).
I have noticed some tourists here in DC so buried in their phones (perhaps studying about a particular monument), that they spend less time looking at the actual monument. Some fiddle so much to get the picture that they really miss the actual moment. A picture is not real (it is virtual, it shares aspects of the real thing but us not that thing). We spend a LOT of time with our eyes focused on a virtual world, and often neglect the real world among us.
A strange migration has happened for many today wherein we interact more “virtually” than really. As a result, old fashioned things like dating, marriage, meeting new people and just getting together with friends has declined.
Another problem with the virtual world is that it is, most often, self-defined. We select our favorite sites and bookmark them. We set Facebook filters, RSS feeds, twitter feeds, iPod playlists, and the like. In effect we create our own little virtual world. Meanwhile the real world with all its diversity and less desirable things is increasingly neglected and our world becomes smaller and our personal formation more stilted.
Even more so, our patience at listening and being a “captive audience” has declined and we are increasingly demanding that everything should appeal to us quickly. Otherwise I should be able to click on a new bookmark, change the channel, of skip to the next song in the shuffle. But the real world is not quite so accommodating. Patiently listening and working with what “is” seems more odious as we start to prefer the virtual to the real.
Well, let the following video make the point. Enjoy a humorous look at our obsession with the virtual while the real passes by.
One of the great losses to Western Culture is the increasing refusal to accept that there is a Natural Law to which we may commonly refer. This is especially problematic in pluralistic and secularist societies like the post-Christian West where reference to the sacred text of Scripture is not considered authoritative by many.
Hence, it has been the long practice of the Church, even before secularizing trends to base her witness to the truth not only on Scripture but also on Natural Law. The recourse to such a basis for discussion is now largely impossible for us, as most secularists have adopted a radical skepticism that our nature, and that the reality all around us, has anything to say to us in terms of the moral life. Thus, little discussion is possible between believers and secularists and the impasse is clearly on display in the comboxes of blogs such as this and others.
What is the Natural Law? According to St. Thomas, the natural law is “nothing else than the rational creature’s participation in the eternal law” (I-II.94). There are two reason we call this law “natural.” First, because it is set forth in our very nature itself, and second, because it is manifested to us by the purely natural medium of reason, rather than by supernatural revelation. The law, however, we observe does not rest on some particular element or aspect of our nature (e.g. only the physical). The standard is our whole human nature and also the special ends to which we are directed: e.g. justice, truth, rationality, and openness to the eternal.
For example, in observing our overall nature we rightly conclude, by the use of reason, that it is wrong to indulge the satisfaction of some lower need or tendency in a way that is not properly subordinated to the higher goods. We rightly conclude that reason should maintain a proper order and balance among our conflicting tendencies and desires.
– Thus, to nourish our bodies is right; but to indulge our appetite for food to the detriment of our overall bodily health or spiritual life is wrong.
– Self-preservation is right and good, but there are times to accept dangerous and even deadly undertakings when the well-being of wider society requires it.
– A glass of wine may be good and relaxing, but it is wrong to drink to intoxication, for it is injurious to health, and deprives one of the use of reason, the guide and dictator of conduct.
– Theft is wrong, because it subverts the basis of social life and sows fear and distrust; so does lying; and man’s nature requires for its proper development that he live in a state of well functioning society.
– Sexual pleasure is good, but promiscuity of any sort undermines the family, spreads disease and endangers children in innumerable ways from abortion to being raised in less than the ideal setting of a committed, complimentary, and stable marriage of a mature mother and father. Outside of this ideal setting for children, a host of social ills follow as we well know today.
Note that in these examples, we have not referenced Scripture, which is supernatural revelation. Natural Law however is accessed through the unaided operation of reason. Founded in our nature and revealed to us by our reason, the natural law is known to us in the measure that reason brings a knowledge of it home to our understanding. The supreme and primary principles (e.g. not to steal, lie, commit adultery, murder) are known to every one having the actual use of reason and are held in every culture. Another class of conclusions or principles are those which are reached only by a more or less complex course of reasoning. This would be due to the more complex nature of the situation encountered. [1]
Thus, in effect, Natural Law is the law available to us by the use of natural reason. It presupposes that the existing world is intelligible, that it manifests order, and tends toward a purpose or goal (e.g. sustaining life). It presupposes that the natural world is steeped with meaning, and maintains a vigorous optimism that we, who are rational creatures, can learn from what the natural world and our own human nature testify to us.
But this optimism that creation shouts meaning and truth has suffered many serious blows in Western Culture, in the wake of the radical doubt and skepticism set in motion by the Cartesian revolution of the late 16th and early 17th Centuries. Increasingly, many influential Western philosophers came to articulate that things are ultimately, meaningless. Many scientists have taken up the notion that all the intricate order we can observe is only the result of random chance mutations and that the existing world ultimately has no real or ultimate meaning; it is just a chance accident. Materialists refuse to accept anything beyond physical matter, and reject metaphysical concepts such as justice, love, beauty, longing, and moral sense as mere emanations of brain synapses ultimately signifying nothing. Nihilism and other reductionists tendencies have plagued the West and robbed us, collectively speaking of the optimism that we, our lives, or the existing world have meaning and something to teach us.
Thus it is we who believe who are left holding the candle and who optimistically assert that the existing world is steeped with meaning, with teachings, with intelligibility. From the Christian point of view, God made all things through his “Word” (who is our Lord Jesus Christ). The Greek word Logos points to a kind of “logic” that permeates all things and is discoverable to our human reason. The universe was “thought into being” and thus we who possess reason are able to observe, to recognize, the Law, the reason, and the wisdom that underlies and permeates all things.
So, along with the supernatural Book of Sacred Scripture we also have the natural Book of Creation. The Church esteems them both as pointing to the one truth. Thus there can be no absolute or ultimate conflict between true science and faith. As Catholics, we are frequently considered together with our Fundamentalist and Evangelical brethren who do not often esteem the Book of Creation and Natural Law as we do. There are important distinctions that Catholics uniquely make that are often lost on atheists and secularists. We do not insist that our moral teachings and most of our doctrinal teachings are only available by Scripture, we also strive to show them and demonstrate them by way of natural law and that they are quite often accessible to reason.
Again we may note with sadness that this avenue is of late shutting down. Note because we have changed or moved, but because the world has become doubtful and cynical that the existing world or our bodies have anything to tell us.
One cannot judge individual hearts to be sure, but it is not without sobriety to suggest that some, if not many, who have rejected Natural Law have done so, not out struggle or doubt, but because the existence of any law above them is inconvenient to the moral life they wish to lead. Such judgements may be beyond us in individual cases, but collectively it seems clear that the wholesale abandonment of Natural Law has coincided with the declining West’s collective decision to take a moral holiday.
Perhaps as a prosaic conclusion to the Church’s optimism that the created world shouts forth meaning and truth we can end with the words of St Athanasius. Certainly he writes from the standpoint of faith and his words would matter little to a secularist or atheist. But to we who still have that “old time religion” it is a good reflection on how creation mystically manifests the immanence and wisdom of God.
By his own wisdom and Word, who is our Lord and Savior Christ, the all-holy Father (whose excellence far exceeds that of any creature), like a skillful steersman guides to safety all creation, regulating and keeping it in being, as he judges right. It is right that creation should exist as he has made it and as we see it happening, because this is his will, which no one would deny. For if the movement of the universe were irrational, and the world rolled on in random fashion, one would be justified in disbelieving what we say. But if the world is founded on reason, wisdom and science, and is filled with orderly beauty, then it must owe its origin and order to none other than the Word of God.
He is God, the living and creative God of the universe, the Word of the good God, who is God in his own right…. the Word that created this whole world and enlightens it by his loving wisdom….produced the order in all creation….and gives order, direction and unity to creation.
By his eternal Word the Father created all things and implanted a nature in his creatures. He…in his goodness he governs and sustains the whole of nature by his Word (who is himself also God), so that under the guidance, providence and ordering of that Word, the whole of nature might remain stable and coherent in his light. From a Discourse Against the Pagans by Saint Athanasius, bishop (Nn. 40-42: PG 25, 79-83)
