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A couple of brief thoughts about St. Athanasius whose feast we celebrated today.

First, I have served in African American Parishes most of my priesthood. And in this context, I have often wondered why there are not more African American Parishes named for this North African Saint. So many black parishes are named for  Augustine or Cyprian, both of whom, while denizen’s of North Africa, were likely of Berber stock, and looked more European than African. Athanasius, on the other hand, while certainly not a sub-Saharan African, is described as having dark, even blackish skin. Yet  almost no African American Catholic commentary claims him, and I have never heard a Black Parish named for him.

Just a curiosity on my part. I once wrote a rather prominent historian who has written on African American Catholicism to ask why this was so, but I never heard back.

My favorite description of Athanasius comes from Robert Payne’s The Holy Fire. The Book is out of print now but I just love Payne’s style. He is at his best in describing St. Athanasius. Enjoy this vivid excerpt:

There are times when the dark heavy syllables of his name fill us with dread. In the history of the early Church no one was ever so implacable, so urgent in his demands upon himself or so derisive of his enemies. There was something in him of the temper of the modern dogmatic revolutionary: nothing stopped him. The Emperor Julian called him “hardly a man, only a little manikin.” Gregory Nazianzen said he was “angelic in appearance, and still more angelic in mind.” In a sense both were speaking the truth. The small dauntless man who saved the Church from a profound heresy, staying the disease almost single handed, was as astonishing in his appearance as he was in his courage. He was so small that his enemies called him a dwarf. He had a hook nose, a small mouth, short reddish beard which turned up at the ends in the Egyptian fashion, and his skin was blackish. His eyes were very small and he walked with a slight stoop, though gracefully as befitted a prince of the Church. He was less than thirty when he was made Bishop of Alexandria.  He was a hammer wielded by God against heresy.

There were other Fathers of the Eastern Church who wrote more profoundly or more beautifully, but none wrote with such a sense of authority or were so little plagued with doubts….He wrote Greek as though those flowing syllables were lead pellets….His wit was mordant. He did not often employ the weapon of sarcasm, but when he did, no one ever forgot it. When Arius, his great enemy died, he chuckled with glee and wrote off a letter to Serapion giving all the details of Arius’ death, how the heretic had talked wildly in church and was suddenly “compelled by a necessity of nature to withdraw to a privy where he fell, headlong, dying as he lay there.” As for the Arians, Athanasius hated them them with too great a fury to give them their proper names. He called them dogs, lions, hares, chameleons, hydras, eels, cuttlefish, gnats and beetles, and he was always resourceful in making them appear ridiculous….At least twice Athanasius was threatened with death, and he was five times exiled. He was perfectly capable of riding up to the Emperor and holding the emperor’s horse by the bridle while he argued a thesis.

In the end he had the supreme joy of outliving all his enemies and four great emperors who had stood in his path, and must of known, as he lay dying, that he had preserved the Church….It was a long triumph of one man against the world – Athanasius contra mundum! pp. 67-68

Here’s a video that shows a softer side to St. Athanasius.

As we have discussed on this blog before, the Western World seems to have embarked on a (failed) experiment, testing whether a culture can exist without a shared cultus. That, is to say whether a true and unifying vision that we call culture can really exist at all without something above and beyond it,  which unifies it and to which it must answer.

Unfortunately the word “cult”  has strongly negative connotations in English, referring to extremist forms of religious association. But the Latin word cultus refers to devotion and/or religious adoration to God or to a body of religious beliefs and vision. As such, it serves as the basis for culture and makes up the very heart of that word.

In America, and to some extent parts Europe, the cultus did not have to be so specific that it admitted only of a strict sectarian quality. It was enough that we had a basic agreement on the biblical vision of God and a general assent to what has been called the Judeo-Christian vision.

But having largely shed this premise, our culture has broken down into a series of increasingly isolated and warring sectors which have no real basis even for simple discussion, let alone some significant agreement.

In fact, many now refer to our culture as an “anti-culture” given the iconclastic shredding of most of what was once considered sacred and inviolable. Almost nothing in our “culture” has withstood the efforts of those who recklessly tear down and exultantly destroy any vestige of anything they consider to limit their freedom or raise doubts about their behavior. In a way, to the cultural iconoclasts, everything must go. And while it is true that individuals may possess this iconoclasm to a greater or lesser degree, collectively, the devastation is vast, and shows no signs of stopping.

I would like to comments on excerpts of an article recently published over at the American Conservative by Rod Dreher entitled: Sex After Christianity. In that article he details some of demise of culture that we have discussed here as well. He focuses especially on how and why the recasting of sex has been the pulling of the linchpin in culture. And while he focuses on the issue of same sex unions and how we have gotten here, since we have discussed that issue a lot already, I will here excerpt the sections of his article on the wider question of culture. But I do encourage you to read the whole article as it sheds a lot of light on the bizarre celebration of same-sex attraction in our culture and where it has come from and where it will lead.

As is the usual case I will present Mr Dreher’s remarks in bold, italic print, and my remarks in plain red text.

Is sex the linchpin of Christian cultural order? Is it really the case that to cast off Christian teaching on sex and sexuality is to remove the factor that gives—or gave—Christianity its power as a social force?

The term linchpin refers to a pin inserted through the end of an axle to keep the wheel on. By extension it is something that holds the various elements of a complicated structure together. Sex, of course, is not the only element in a culture, but it is surely critical since it serves not only the future of any community or nation, but also rests at the heart of social order and the proper rearing and raising of the next generation.

Those who like to argue that “sex is no big deal” are simply living is a magical fantasy world. Of course sex is important, and getting it right is critical to the success of any culture. It also makes sense that if you want to quickly destroy a culture that distorting this mysterious and powerful force is a quick way to wreak havoc and bring down institutions. Properly understood and exercised in well ordered way, sex is a kind of glue that holds things together, that is meant to walk in harmony with love, loyalty, family ties, and the procreation that reaches into the future. Pull this linchpin and the wheels come off quickly. Welcome to decaying West.

Philip Rieff , author of the landmark 1966 book The Triumph Of the Therapeutic was an unbeliever, but he understood that religion is the key to understanding any culture. For Rieff, the essence of any and every culture can be identified by what it forbids. Each imposes a series of moral demands on its members, for the sake of serving communal purposes, and helps them cope with these demands. A culture requires a cultus—a sense of sacred order, a cosmology that roots these moral demands within a metaphysical framework….

Exactly. And note too how “moral demands” and the forbidding of certain things exist for the purpose of serving communal ends. The rather childish and prideful rejection of limits and the “nobody will tell me what to do or judge me” mentality does not stop to consider that limits are necessary for the true exercise of freedom. Absolute freedom is anarchy and chaos. But constructive freedom exists only within a range and with certain limits in place. I am free to communicate only if I and we  observe the limits of grammar. I am free to drive only if we all accept the rules of the road. 

Hence to “forbid” and to speak of moral limits or demands, while politically incorrect today, are necessary for there to be a culture. And, given the need for a culture to have a cultus, Christianity has had that role in our culture. Now, being kicked to the curb, there is little to fill the place left by the Christian vision. Things break down, power struggles ensue, litigious court battles become the daily fare.

The radical individualism of the West, and the generally selfish and egotistical mindset of many Moderns, has little time or appreciation for “communal purposes.” And to the degree we talk about this at all, it is in the boiler-plate socialist jargon of the “collective” rather than the communal. Socialist thinking transfers moral responsibility to the State and away from the individual. As such is it paradoxically individualistic as well, at least in its decadent Western expression. But I digress.

[R]enouncing the sexual autonomy and sensuality of pagan culture was at the core of Christian culture—a culture that, crucially, did not merely renounce but redirected the erotic instinct…. Indeed, “sexual autonomy” is a kind of oxymoron. For, of its nature sex orients one to the other and to the third, since it is procreative. Of its very nature sex is about the other, and the third, indeed, the whole community since it is about the future of the community, Church and nation. 

It is nearly impossible for contemporary Americans to grasp why sex was a central concern of early Christianity. Sarah Ruden, the Yale-trained classics translator, explains the culture into which Christianity appeared in her 2010 book Paul Among The People. Ruden contends that it’s profoundly ignorant to think of the Apostle Paul as a dour proto-Puritan descending upon happy-go-lucky pagan hippies, ordering them to stop having fun. In fact, Paul’s teachings on sexual purity and marriage were adopted as liberating in the pornographic, sexually exploitative Greco-Roman culture of the time—exploitative especially of slaves and women….Christianity, as articulated by Paul, worked a cultural revolution, restraining and channeling male eros, elevating the status of both women and of the human body, and infusing marriage—and marital sexuality—with love.

And excellent analysis here. Too often we Christians have simply allowed ourselves to be defined in terms of what we are against, rather than to insist that if we are “against” something it is for a greater good. In this case, the sexual ethic of Christianity exists to preserve the dignity of women, of the family, of marriage, of children, of the human body, and even of sex itself. We are FOR these things, not merely, in some puritanical sense, against sex.

Without these limits sex is too easily about exploitation and ends up being imposed by the powerful rather than in a mutual self-giving rooted in promise of stable, fruitful and faithful commitment we call Holy Matrimony. Without such loyalty and respect there can be little basis for social order, let alone culture.

Christianity encountered the Greco-Roman world that was breaking down on account of the violation of these insights. It took the rearticulation of these insights to refashion and restore the culture of the ancient world.

The point is not that Christianity was only, or primarily, about redefining and revaluing sexuality, but that within a Christian anthropology sex takes on a new and different meaning…In Christianity, what people do with their sexuality cannot be separated from what the human person is….[This] established a way to harness the sexual instinct, embed it within a community, and direct it in positive ways….what culture must do [is] restrain individual passions and channel them creatively toward communal purposes. Excellent. George Gilder makes a similar point in his book Men and Marriage

[But], in the modern era, we have inverted the role of culture. Instead of teaching us what we must deprive ourselves of to be civilized, we have a society that tells us we find meaning and purpose in releasing ourselves from the old prohibitions. Usher in the iconoclasm of the West!

How this came to be is a complicated story….[but] gradually the West lost the sense that Christianity had much to do with civilizational order…. In the 20th century, casting off restrictive Christian ideals about sexuality became increasingly identified with health. By the 1960s, the conviction that sexual expression was healthy and good—the more of it, the better—and that sexual desire was intrinsic to one’s personal identity culminated in the sexual revolution, the animating spirit of which held that freedom and authenticity were to be found not in sexual withholding (the Christian view) but in sexual expression and assertion. That is how the modern American claims his freedom.

Yes, what a strange assertion of “health.” I have often heard Catholic teaching on sexuality referred to as “unhealthy” as repressive etc.

But it is so strange that such a sick culture speaks of my “health.” And I mean literal health. What the “healthy” sexual expression of the libertines ushers in is and explosion of STDs, AIDS, herpes, sterility, women on heavy doses of hormones, not to mention the outright death of children dismembered by abortion. And then there is the “unhealth” of broken families, higher divorce rates, single motherhood, teenage moms, addictive pornography, and all the social ills that explode on the scene through broken and malformed families.

Hmm…And I am ‘repressed’ and unhealthy? But try to raise this with a libertine and be prepared for either a blank stare or a diversionary tactic such as pointing to the sins of some clergy etc.

…Because it denies the possibility of communal knowledge of binding truths transcending the individual, the revolution cannot establish a stable social order.

Exactly my own point above and before on this blog. There can be no culture without the cultus that transcends the community and has a binding power. Without this, there “cannot” establish a culture, cannot establish a stable social order. Something from above and outside must order and focus a culture, and something we call God.

Our post-Christian culture, then, is an “anti-culture.”….The death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling.

Yes, because it is iconoclastic, “culture” is actually an “anti-culture.” Note finally too our part in all this. We have failed to communicate our ideals in ways that are inwardly compelling. Hence the new evangelization, the need to repropose the gospel in new and more compelling ways.

Rod Dreher blogs at www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher.

Please take time to read the whole article, it is well worth the time: Sex After Christianity.

At a recent meeting wherein an elderly relative was preparing advanced medical directives, a friend of the family, a secular Jew, expressed the discomfort the speaking about dying brings something to most people.  I happened to mention in passing, that for a Christian, the day we die is really the greatest day of our life.  She looked to me with some surprise and while I expected her to articulate that she thought that heaven was a dubious reality, instead she Said something quite different.  She said, “Perhaps there is heaven for the faithful who believe after death. And perhaps then, to die is the greatest day of one’s life. But I do not observe the Christians live this way. It seems that they are just as anxious as anyone else about dying, and earnestly seek to avoid death just as much as anyone else.”

A very interesting observation, and one that I found mildly embarrassing, even as legitimate explanations quickly entered my mind. But even after giving her some of the legitimate explanations for this, I must say some mild embarrassment still lingered as to the kind of witness we Christians sometimes fail to give to our most fundamental values.  Based on her remark, and I’ve heard it before, most of us Christians don’t manifest a very ardent longing for heaven.  I have remarked on this before, but in today’s conversation this concern once again came home to roost.

There are of course some legitimate reasons that we do not rush towards death as well as some lesson illegitimate reasons. Briefly, I’d like to speak of a few legitimate reasons that we drawback from death, but also articulate some other reasons that are less legitimate and frankly a bit embarrassing.

As for some legitimate and understandable reasons we may draw back from dying, and may not at first think of dying is the greatest day of our life, there are some of these:

1. There is a natural fear of dying which is certainly part of our physical makeup, and it would seem, hard-wired into our psyche as well. Every sentient and physical being on this planet, man and animal, has a strong instinct for survival.  Without this instinct, strongly tied to the hunger instinct, as well as to sexuality, We might not only die as individuals, but as a species. Further, the instinct also helps us to look not merely to the moment, but also to the future as we work to procure survival, even a thriving for our children and those who will come after. So this is a basic instinct for the human person and we ought not expect, even for believers, but this will simply disappear, since it has necessary and useful aspects.

2. Other things being equal, most of us would like to finish certain important things before we leave here. It makes sense, for example, that a parent would like to see their children well into adulthood before, as parents, they meet their demise. Parents rightly see their existence in this world as critical to their children. Hence we love life here and cling to it, but not only for our own sake, but because we understand that others to depend on us to a greater or lesser degree.

3. The Christian is called to love life at every stage.  Most of us realize that we are called to love what we have here, and to appreciate it, for it is the gift of God. To so utterly despise the world that we are almost suicidal and wish only to leave it, manifests a strange sort of ingratitude.

It also manifests a lack of understanding that life here, somehow prepares us for the fuller life that is to come. I remember that at a low point in my own life, afflicted with anxiety and depression, I asked the Lord to please end my life quickly and take me home out of this trouble. And yet, without hearing words, I understood in the sort of infused way, the Lord’s rebuke: “Until you learn to love the life you have now, you will not love eternal life. If you can’t learn to appreciate the glory of the gifts of this life, then you will not and cannot embrace the fullness of life that is called eternal life.”   Indeed, I was seeing eternal life merely In terms of relief, or an escape from life, rather than the full blossoming of a life that has been healed and made whole. We don’t embrace life by trying to escape from it.

Thus a healthy Christian attitude learns to love life as we have it now, even as we yearn for an strive for life that we do not yet fully comprehend, a life which eye has not seen, nor ear heard what God has prepared for those who love him.

4. Most of us seek to set our life in order to some degree before we go to face judgment. While it is true that we can procrastinate, there is a proper sense of wanting time to make amends and prepare in a fitting and growing way to meet God.

5. And finally, it is not necessarily death that we fear, but dying.  Dying is something none of us have ever done before, and we tend to fear the unknown. Further, most of us realize the dying involves some degree of agony. Instinctively, and understandably, we draw back from such things.

Even Jesus, in his human nature, recoiled at the thought of the agony before him, so much so, that he sweat blood and asked if possible, that the cup of suffering could be taken from him. Manfully though he embraced Father’s will, and our benefit rather than his.  Still, he did recoil humanly at the suffering soon to befall him.

So then, here are some reasons that explain and make understandable why we do not run toward death.

But it remains true, that for a faithful Christian, the day we die is the greatest day of our life.  And while it is true that we go to judgment, a day  that we ought to regard with sober reverence, nevertheless if we die in Grace, with joyful hope we go to the Lord who loves us and for whom we have longed. And that day of judgement, awesome though it is, will , for the future saint, disclose only that which needs final healing in purgation, not that which merits damnation.

But I wonder of my family friend’s observation that Christians do not seem to live as though dying is the greatest day of our life. I am not speaking here of the cheesy slogans and attitudes at Catholic funerals these days of how Uncle Joe is in heaven now playin’ cards with Jesus and Moses! But rather, of a serene and joyful march through life that rejoices that every step brings us closer to going home to live with God.

Instead we hear lots of fretting about how we’re “getting older” and lots of anxiety about health, even usual matters due to aging,  and there are such grim looks as death approaches. Where’s the joy one might expect? Does our faith really make a difference for us, or are we like those who have no hope? Older prayers often spoke of this life as an exile, and expressed a long for God and heaven. But few of our prayers or sermons ever speak this way today.

Why is this? Perhaps a few reasons are:

1. We live comfortably. Comfort is not the same as happiness, but comfort is very appealing. It is also very deceiving, seductive and addictive. It is deceiving because it tends to make us think this world can be our paradise. It is seductive because it draws and shifts us from the God of comforts, to the comforts of God. We would rather have the gift than the Giver. It is addictive because we can’t ever seem to get enough, and we set our whole life on gaining more and more comforts. Comfort here becomes our preoccupation rather than attaining to our truest happiness which is to be with God in heaven.

2. Comfort leads to worldliness. Here worldliness means that the whole of our attention is to make the world more comfortable, and any notion of God and heaven recedes to the background. Even the so-called spiritual life of many Christians is almost wholly devoted to prayers asking to make this world a better place: “Fix my health…fix my finances….grant me the promotion…etc.” And while it is not wrong to pray about these things, the cumulative effect of them plus our silence on more spiritual and eternal things give the impression that we are saying to God, “Make this world a better place and I’ll just be happy to stay here forever.” What a total loss, because the world is not the point, it is not the goal, Heaven is, being with God for ever is the point.

3. Worldliness makes heaven and being with God seem more abstract and less desirable. With our magnificent comfort that leads to worldly preoccupation, heaven and any talk of heaven or going to be with God recedes to the background. In this climate few talk of heaven or even long for it. They’d rather just have the new cell phone, or the Cable upgrade with the sports package. Some say they never hear about Hell anymore in sermons, and that is regretfully true (though NOT from my pulpit thank you). But it is also true that they almost never of heaven either (except in the cheesy funeral moments mentioned above which really miss the target altogether and make heaven seem trivial rather than a glorious gift to be sought). Heaven just isn’t on most folks’ radar, except as a vague abstraction for some far off time, certainly not now, thank you.

And here then is the perfect storm of comfort+worldliness leading to slothful aversion to heavenly gifts. Thus, when I utter that dying is the greatest day of our life, or that I am glad to be getting older because it means I’m getting closer to the time I can go home to God, or I say that I can’t wait to meet God….people look at me strangely and wonder if I need therapy for depression or something.

No, I don’t need therapy, at least not for this. I am simply expressing the ultimate longing of every human heart. Addiction to comfort has deceived, and seduced us such that we are no longer in touch with our hearts greatest long and we cling to passing things and (I would argue, as does my family friend) we seem little different from those who have no hope. Put most regretfully, we no longer witness to a joyful journey to God that says, “Closer to Home!….Soon and Very Soon I am going to see the King….Soon I Will be Done with the troubles of this World….Going home to live with God!”

As stated, there are legitmate reasons to be averse to dying. But how about even a glimmer of excitiment from the faithful as we see the journey coming to an end.  St Paul wrote to the Thessalonias regarding death We do not wnat you to be like those who have no hope (1 Thess 4:13).  Do we witness to the glory of going how to be with God or not? It would seem not. Or am I just crazy?

This song says:

The golden evening brightens in the West,
Soon, soon to faithful warriors cometh rest
Sweet is the calm of paradise most blest. Alleluia!

There is a rather humorous aspect of the story of the Tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis. You likely know the basic story which begins with the men of that early time saying, Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves (Gen 11:4). It was an image of pride, of grandiosity. The humor comes, that when the tower is built, the great tower, with its top reaching to the heavens, the truth is, it is actually so puny that God has to come down from heaven to see it. The text says, And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built (Gen 11:5).

Now, of course, as omniscient, God clearly sees everything, and the humor in the text is not some primitive notion of God. Rather the humor is for our benefit. For in effect it says that our greatest, tallest, most prominent and glorious work that we saw as reaching heaven itself, is in fact so puny that God has to stoop to “see” it. He has to descend to get a glimpse of it. What ultimately DOES alarm God is how colossal our pride is, and he has to humble us, by confusing our language and scattering us about the planet.

I recalled this story as I flew to the Midwest today and observed that even the taller buildings of some bigger cities were hard to see from 30,000 feet. I also thought of the video below which I saw recently. It is wonderful footage of earth, taken from the Space Shuttle. There is verbal commentary and explanation by one of the astronauts, explaining some of the features we are seeing, and where on the globe we are looking as the pictures pass by. The view is remarkable. But what is more remarkable is what we do NOT see: us!

It is an astonishing thing that, even though the shuttle is passing over well populated areas, there is no visual evidence that we even exist. No cities or buildings are visible, no planes streaking through the skies, even large scale agricultural features seem lacking. There is only one mention of a color difference across the Great Salt Lake, due to a railroad bridge preventing lake circulation. But the bridge is in no way visible, only its effect.

We think of ourselves as so big, so impressive. And yet even in low earth orbit, we cannot be seen. It is true, at night, our cities light the view, but during the day – next to nothing says we are here. Even the magnified picture on my 30″ iMac screen shows no evidence of us below.

And having viewed the video I think of Psalm 8:

O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens….When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? Yet, You made him a little lower than the angels and crowned him with glory and honor. You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet: all flocks and herds, and the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas. O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

Yes, we are so powerful (by God’s gift), and yet so tiny as to be nearly invisible from a short distance into space. Our mighty buildings rise. But they rise on a speck of space dust called earth, revolving around a fiery point of light, called the sun. Yet our huge sun is but one point of light in the Milky Way Galaxy of over 100 Billion Stars. And the Milky Way Galaxy, so huge to us as to be incomprehensible, is but one Galaxy of an estimated 200 Billion Galaxies.

What is man O Lord that you are mindful of him? Jesus says of us: And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered (Matt 10:30). Yes, God who knows the numbers of the stars and calls them by name also knows the number of the hairs on each of our heads. Nothing escapes him.

And old preacher’s saying goes: “We serve a God who sits high, yet looks low!” Indeed, never forget how tiny you and I are, yet never cease to marvel that God knit you together in your mother’s womb and sustains every fiber of your being. We cannot even be seen from low earth orbit, but God who sees all, looks into our very heart. Do not cease to marvel that, though tiny, you and I are wonderfully, fearfully made (Psalm 139), and that He has put all things under our feet.