Category: A Still Small Voice

Profiles of people who heard a voice, some voice, and changed course. Or just ruminations on spiritual matters to which anyone, I hope, could relate and, thereafter, feel escorted into the realm of the unseen. These are, at their best conversion stories, undeniably and happily Catholic in nature. As a cradle Catholic I’ve always embraced and been enriched and inspired by these stories. It takes a lot of conviction to change religions or go from no religion to being a believer in a Higher Power or something beyond which there is nothing greater, a benevolent, loving “something.”. But I only like it if the subject has been convinced intellectually of that higher truth. This can never be about just “a feeling,” or going along because everybody else, or someone else I respect, or my spouse did it. Metanoia: change of heart. Look to 1 Kings 11-13 for the Bibilical basis for it all — “a still small voice” speaking to the prophet Elijah in the desert. We’re in the desert always, it seems, listening….

THE BIRTH

It must be concluded…that Jesus was born between the years 8 and 4 –most probably in the year 6 -before the Christian era as now dated. As for the actual date of his birth, universally now celebrated on December 25th, it can be said at once that this is purely a tradition. In the 3rd Century A.D., Clement of Alexandria chose April 19th; other suggestions were May 29th and March 28th. The Eastern Church for a long time celebrated January 6th. It was only about the year 350 that our own traditonal date gained general acceptance. Some have associated it with the feast of Mithra which the Roman calendar fixed at the beginning of the winter solstice ( December 21st) and there are certainly plenty of known instances where the Christian calendar has taken over pagan feasts. Gregory the Great himself advised his missionaries to “baptize the customs of the holy places of the heathen” and our All Saints Day (November 1st) and feastof St. John the Baptist (Midsummer Day) undoubtedly originated that way. For us December 25th is sanctified forever: it does not commemorate the persian god or the sacrificial bull, nor even the sun regaining his power over the darkness of the night, but that other star of which Malachi wrote: “…unto you that fear my name shall the sun of rigthtousness arise…. (Malachi iv, 2.)

Christ And His Times,Henri Daniel-Rops ( 1901-1965)

(translated from the French by Ruby Millar), 1954.

(This is a great, much neglected treatise and history on the life of Christ by a devout former agnostic, late, prolific and renowned French historian and member of the French Acadamy, probably a genius, decidedly odd-looking( at least based on photographs — looking sort of like Alfalfa of Our Gang fame, and always with his eyelids at half-mast. In one surviving photograph, you see him lighting up a cigarette, probably one of those strong French numbers, leading me to speculate on causes leading to his death at 65.

As for Christ’s birth, and, for that matter, death…

We must consider whether, ultimately, it matter when He was born–and simply marvel at the fact that He might actually have been born and died in the same month (April). That would be a reason to think of the springtime of April as every bit as special as the cosseting twilit advent of winter in the month of December.

For all that really matters is that he WAS born. And I, like millions, prefer to mark the time of the coming of The Light within days of the nadir of light, the season of darkness ( The winter solstice). This simply seems very right. We’ve got plenty of light of a physical kind in April and May, and blooming flowers to mark and brighten the rebirth that is the Resurrection. We’ll always keep the season of birth in early winter. The Light came in Darkness.

Winter is a better for darkly meditative thoughts about who or what might deliver us from our mess. Our darkness.

And, well…Bing Crosby never could have sung about a White Christmas in spring. (A whimsical consideration, to be sure, but, I, like millions, cherish the association of Christmas with snow, sleigh rides, jingle bells, Frosty, Rudolph,etc.)

I should point out that among the religious congregation at St. Benedict Center in Still River, Massachusetts are scholarly consecrated brothers who can make a good historic and astronomical case why Christ was, indeed, born December 25th. I’m sure they’re not alone in making that case.

But, again, what does it really matter? If He was and is who He says He was and is (I Am Who Am), He is born everyday, every hour, ever minute — and never dies, unless (as in the original story) we shut Him out or kill Him.

Let’s not do that. Let’s make room at the inn.

And let’s jingle all the way!

Amen.

THE CAVE

It’s the Yuletide again. Good time, amid all the red and green festivities, to ask some pertinent questions.

Who was this person who was, Christians believe, both human and divine– God, second person of a mysterious Trinity and known as Jesus Christ?

Who, again I ask, was He?

There IS significant evidence that a man named Jesus Christ exited, a carpenter’s son who himself became a carpenter. But it is a fact that no ancient historian, at least for a very long time, took great note of the purportedly earth-shattering events surrounding his birth, his life as a healer, or execution at age thirty-three (to summerize: birth in Bethlehem, early, mostly hidden life in the backwater Nazareth, execution and death in Jerusalem. And Christians believe he rose from the dead — all this in the first century A.D. — or even prior to that, because certain anomolies in counting up the years suggest Christ was actually born around 6 B.C..)

Let’s stick with his birth, since this is that season. The Resurrection story can wait until Easter.

There are a number of false, pious gospels — called apochrypha — that add spectacle and power to the nativity events. But we’ve come to celebrate, instead, the extremely humble nature of the birth of the God/man regarded by millions to have been –and remain –the Massiah. The ancient Jewish world had been waiting for a messiah for centuries — someone who would right every wrong done to that race of people. There had seemingly been someone claiming to be a messiah on virtually every corner for much of the millenia before that quiet, paradoxical dirt-poor birth among beasts, dung and hay just outside the village of Bethlehem in the Judean hills.

His family — earthly mother and father-were required to travel to Bethlehem because history and scripture record that a decree had gone out from the Emporor Caesar Augustus ordering everyone to respond to a census being taken over the vast Roman Empire , also requiring every citizen to return to their ancestral homes to be counted. That was Bethlehem in the case of the couple named Joseph and Mary. (There was also an ancient prophesy that a future ruler of Israel would be born in Bethlehem. So, as one writer puts it, “external obligation and divine design” were intersecting, acccording to the Christian nativity story.)

Now, wait a minute!

Why a bloody, damn census? Upending everybody’s life, putting them on the roads of the vast continental Empire? Well, for tax purposes, among other things (what else?), and so the powers in Rome could know where to go to fill in the ranks of the Roman Legions. Empires need armies. Fresh young bodies.

(With all those people traveling at the whim of the Roman boss, small wonder there was no room at the inn.)

So far, so good. But –something that’s always intrigued me: where exactly was that famous stable/birthplace? Do we really know?

Multiple spiritual writers and modern scriptural historians, not to mention archiologists, give us the following information:

There is, among other sources, testimonial evidence in the writings of the saint known as Justin Martyr that there was, for a very long time , a site in or around the town of Bethlehem where Jesus Christ was believe to have been born — “a certain cave”.

I don’t just want to take a Catholic saint’s word for anything, but Justin’s evidence is interesting and credible because he was local and nearly a contemporary.

The saint tells us locals venerated that cave from a very early date and apparently preserved it in order to preserve the memory of the nativity. That cave, we’re told, was greatly talked about, even among enemies of the faith. (It is, presumably, the site that now sits under the grand Basilica of the Nativity located in the middle of a Middle Eastern zone of perpetual combat and which itself was beseiged in the year 2002. So much for Peace of Earth in that neck of the woods! But there’s always hope. Christmas is supposed to be all about hope.)

Actually, it must be noted that little of the touching simplicity of the nativity story would seem to have been preserved from that time of the building of that magnificent edifice. I have not had the privilege of visiting it, but I’ve read that you approach it as if it were a fortress. There is a gigantic encircling wall breached by a massive tower. It is Byzantine in the way it conveys a powerful impression of majesty. And, as noted above, it has been the scene of warfare, contemporary as well as in the deep past. Indeed, in 1873 it was the scene of a physical assault by the supporters of the Ordhodox Church on the Catholics. Such virulent divisions among Christians presumably professing faith in the same God are disheartening, and never-ending.

And that cave noted by the saint/witness is now said to be the sacred sight reached by a long and narrow subterranean crypt.

Oh, how , passing down that crypt, I would long for that former, simple cave! But then, they don’t build houses of worship over, say, Paul Revere’s house. This is just the way of religions.

St. Justin speaks not just of “a cave” but of “this cave.” He had in mind a certain cave. Justin himself was born around AD 100 to a pagan family in Flavia Neapolis (today called Nablus), some forty miles north of Bethlehem. ( I told you he was local.) He knew the area and the people quite well. Apparently, a century after that stable birth, the cave was still known and being preserved.

The Church of the Nativity was built over it –presumably they had the right cave — in 326 A.D., at the order of Constantine, the first Christian emporer and, according to some accounts, at the urging of his mother Helena, a devout Christian who obviously had considerable influence on her son.

Some anti-Christians, and also what I would call anti-Christian Christians, like to say Constantine “founded” Christianity. That’s another kind of warfare that gets waged over the body of Christ: historical/theological revisionism.

And for the ancient early Christian apologist and scriptural scholar named Origen, as well as for the evangelists before him, there is a verifiable particularity about the facts of Jesus’s conception and birth in that cave, and His subsequent infancy.

All this, they say, happened, not “once upon a time,” (as in a fable), but “in the days of Herod, King of Judea,” when “a decree went out from Caesar Augustus,” the emporer. The big guy in Rome. (Luke 1:5,2:1).

Herod was the local authority around Bethlehem, Judea — and, from all accounts, an utter monster. He’s part of a Christmas story –a negative part. But the story needed every part, good and bad, to seem true to life. We’ll skip over Herod for now. It suffices to say that you didn’t want to cross him.

So -it all began, in earthly terms, with taxes, the Roman bureacracy, a vile local Roman functionary, and a noisome government decree. It began “upon a midnight clear” and persists and summons our souls and imaginations to this day.

As for all the messy circumstances leading up to — and away — from it: sounds like real life as we know it.

Whatever the case, we know that a pregnant young woman and her spouse, with their donkey, sparse belongings and weary ( ultimately, many believe, saintly and, in Christ’s case, divine) bodies and souls, wound up spending the chilly Judean night among the hay and dung and livestock of a cave — reviled, rejected, alone.

I guess that cave is also the birthplace of what for much of the world remains a supreme, incredible earthly irony: the most important soul in history — according to the beliefs of billions –was born in a cave.

Also born that night: endless wonder. And there was something about a star, too. And shepherds, and choirs of angels.

And Magi. (We’ll talk about them later.)

VOICES IN THE MINE

The late Scottish novelist A.J. Cronin (1896 to 1981) began life as a physician and, fresh out of medical school, took up an assignment in a small South Wales mining town. He was an atheist at the time but would eventually undergo a conversion to Catholicism. His novels included, The Keys to the Kingdom.

Among the formative experiences leading him to God were those times among the “grave, dark and silent people” in that mining town. They were isolated among bleak hills but were deeply religious. He wrote that their faith manifested itself in every aspect of their simple lives, but most especially during a moment of crisis.

Cronin writes:

Never shall I forget that occasion when, at the colliery, a heavy explosion of black damp gas entombed fourteen miners. For five days the men remained buried, while the village prayed. Than, as the rescuers hacked their way underground, they heard faintly, from deep in the collapsed workings, the strains of singing. It was the hymn Our God, Our Help in Ages Past. Thus had the entombed men chosen to keep their courage high. And when they were brought out, weak but unharmed, the great crowd gathered in the pit-yard took up the hymn which, sung by a thousand voices, echoed joyfully in the narrow valley and rose beyond the encircling hills.

It’s plain from Cronin’s account that, probably in his capacity as a doctor, he was among those lowered down with the rescuers, because he writes, As I came to the surface with the liberated men, blinking in the stark daylight after the blackness of the pit, this great volume of sound caught me like a tidal wave — as a demonstration of human faith it was moving beyond words. Although at that time I was conscious of no more than a momentary emotion, looking backward now I know that it left its mark on me.

Moved as well, but feeling the need for a few extra words, I’ll add that deep among those many long-ago humble voices raised in reverent, grateful song, the medical doctor, atheist, author and future convert probably heard that “still small voice.”

I listen for it, too, waiting for it to leave that mark on me.

I don’t know exactly when Cronin wrote this; most likely at mid-life in the mid-20th Century, about an event of his youth much earlier in that century. I choose to share it five days before Thanksgiving, 2023 — early in what for Cronin would be the next century he knew he’d never see.

This shall stand as among my public professions of thanksgiving for this season in which I so often fail to be either grateful or charitable and am often feeling buried in my own fears, concerns and failures.

These are more than usually troubled, violent, divided times in the world.

Let us, all who read this, listen for that “still small voice” the prophet Elijah heard from the cave (1 Kings 9-11)– and let us join those grand, prayerful, undespairing voices deep in that dark mine.

Pray for deliverance.

BRUISED REEDS

Dr. Samuel Johnson, from his 18th Century Prayers and Meditations, wound up speaking to me unexpectedly tonight. I opened an old literature text book of mine, and there they were, his words — and I was hearing his voice, the voice of a giant; among the most exalted figures of his or any time, especially that brainy time in which he lived. He was speaking to me from the heart of the Age of Enlightenment in which the mind was allegedly trumping faith and civilization had at last emerged fully from the grip of the Age of Darkness or, as it is commonly known, the Dark Ages — a time before the Renaissance and High Middle Ages that we now know was not so dark; was actually rich in scholarship and the slow, cloistered but deep, relentless nurturing of Christian civilization due to blossom brilliant hearts and minds, Dr. Johnson, it seems, among them, though, as an Anglo-Catholic, he remains a product of Henry VIII’s rebellion, however knowingly.

There he was, on the page before me, in 1761, calling out to our heavenly Father, almighty and most merciful God in whose hands are life and death….

I guess, on this late rather anxious and unhappy Sunday evening, I needed to hear a smart guy saying he believes in God. He was writing in a journal, and, in doing so, must have –through his famous amanuensis and biographer Boswell — intended to share it with me in the 21st Century.

Easter Eve, 1761

Since the communion of last Easter I have led a life so dissipated and useless, and my terrors and perplexities have so much increased that I am under great depression and discouragement; yet I propose to present myself before God tomorrow with humble hope that He will not break the bruised reed.

So devout, so humble.

As I copy this, Barbara Streisand and Don Johnson are singing a duet on that little 21st Century device in which you ask an imaginary woman named Alexa to play music. Diane requested this, for dinner. Barbara and Don, of Miami Vice fame, are saying, over and over to one another, I love you….

And then, Barbara alone, there’s a place for me….from West Side Story.

Is there a place for us? Barbara and Don ask a good question. And, well, life in ours and any time can be itchy. For instance…

At the gas pump of a filthy 7/11 in Tampa this afternoon, an older guy in shorts and jersey was done pumping gas, but would not move his high-end Porsche, even as we waited in my old Forester behind him, because with sqeegee and cups of water he was methodically cleaning the windshield of his top-of-the-line sedan edition of the coveted automobile, which markets for about $125,000 new and $77.000 used.

We waited. He went on splashing water on that crystaline windshield. “I’m going to be cleaning my windshield a bit longer,” he said. He indignantly directed us to another of the four pumps, only two of which had the gas cap on the passenger side, which I need. Another one was broken, as indicated by the red plastic bag over the pump nozzle handle. Another was occupied. It had seemed exedient just to wait for our Porsche owner to move away, since he was done pumping gas. The Porsche and its owner were worth more money than I’ll ever see in my life. He probably lived in one of those palatial south Tampa mansions.

But for Mr. Porsche, an absolutely spotless windshield was salvation.

Dr. Johnson, in a journal entry of April 21st, 1764 at age 55, wrote, my indolence, since my last reception of the Sacrament, has sunk into grosser sluggishness, and my dissipations spread into wilder neglicence. My thought have been clouded with sensuality; and except that from the beginning of this y ear I have in some measure forborne excess of strong drink, my appetites have predominated over my reason.. A kind of strange oblivion has overspread me, so that I know not what has become of the last year; and perceive that incidents and intelligence pass over me without leaving any impression….Grant, O Lord, that I may receive the Sacrament with such resolutions of a better life as may by thy grace be effectual, for the sake of Jesus Chrsit. Amen.

No more singing in the other room. I have eaten a chicken dinner 262 years and several months after the esteemed Dr. Johnson wrote those words. I wonder what Barbara and Don are doing tonight?

The guy at the 7/11 pump — he finally pulled away, but I’d already had to move a bit awkwardly into positon at another pump — has no doubt stowed his Porsche in his garage with a very clean windshield and eaten his dinner.

Perhaps he’s unwisely left that Porsche out under a tree, where a seagull or one of the other many seabirds in this region will teach him the transgency of all material cleanliness and he shall be forced to go on, once again, with a profound sense of futility, seeing the world through the clouds of avian feces spattered over that once perfectly clean windshield. The same spattering will cloud his visiion — or perhaps plunge him into a deep revelation. Perhaps, after a white dove like the Holy Spirit deposits an act of grace on that glass — even white doves have to crap before they “sleep in the sand” — he might think suddenly of the people he made wait at the pump in the filthy parking lot at the untidy, malfunctioning pumps (the kid in the 7/11 had to instruct me that the REGULAR button would only work if I punched it repeatedly. I’ll bet Mr. Porsche didn’t have that kind of trouble.

But perhaps Mr Porsche, graced by bird crap that falleth on the just and the unjust alike, might, after a jolting metanoia, sell everything and….what might be next for casually elegant, invincibly arrogant, filthy rich Mr. Porsche? A bruised reed with the illusory belief that his windshield is the window to his soul might even be visited with chunk of cement off a crumbling bridge. I pray not. Lord, please protect Mr. Porsche.

Perhaps he’ll stumble on some words by Dr. Johnson. Not that they are sharply and obviously relevant. But Dr. Johnson is always relevant –for the ages, ours and his. Someone is watching, almighty and most merciful. He sees you holding up people at the gas pump. He sees you through your spic-and-span windshield. A bruised reed at the wheel.

And, on that great celestial Interstate, I see Dr. Samuel Johnson in his 2024 Porsche Macan convertable traversing the clouds…Boswell at his side with his iPad, catching every word.

Amen.

ADVENT AGAIN

The endless beginnings: “the ways deep and the weather sharp… (“Journey of the Magi”), or, for me for the last three years: the way flat (because I dwell in Florida), and the weather soggy (because it is the sub-tropics). It is still a hard journey. There, now and then, comes a chill, a deep cold, a wind, a soul-scouring inner storm and turmoil. In Advent, we pray for sun and calm and we hope….

I was glad when they said to me: ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord.’ So, accordng to Psalm 121, did the pilgrims of old chant as they approached the holy city of Jerusalem.

Those journeys, to Bethlehem, to Jerusalem, were always hard.

I’ve just had another birthday. I’ve gone far in this journey. I’ve been lazy, strayed from the path, only to find the way harder than it most certainly would have been had I stayed the course, stuck to the pilgrim path. The Way……

On 12/1/14 at 10:09 p.m.. I wrote of a “crisis of will.” On 12/13, hour unknown, probably night, I d bright-yellow highlighted in a book the need to be “attentive to our personal prayers.” In 2013, hour unknown, I’d noted the danger of ” the dwindling and cooling of our desire for sanctity.”

Saintliness? Must I? Me? Get real!

Yeah. And that’s the point: Reality. Life on life’s terms and God’s terms…

The reality of our situation in this vale of tears, this valley of darkness. (“You better watch out. You better not cry, you better not pout, I’m telling you why…..”)

Love saves us. Love and mercy. Advent. He is coming….

Year after year, season after season, I fail to vault over big, abiding obstacles in my life. I thought it would be last year. Last year, I thought it would be the year before. And so on and on, that mountain an infinite regression in my rearview mirror….and the years have passed….

In this season, since childhood, into adulthood, the culture’s inflatable images of Santa, Old Saint Nick, are, of course, a kind of a subliminal stand-in for the true Deliverer, That babe of humble estate. For millions, both the babe in the manger and the Big Fellow in the Red Suit coming down the chimney are myths of equal incredulity. In England, and probably here, non-Christians now greatly outnumber believers. Don’t we know it. The evidence of our faithlessness is all around us. Well hidden is that One encountered in prayer and crisis, forever King, forever merciful, but expecting much of us, Our Father, full of love and mercy., so we are told, so we must believe, and begin to believe when we consider all the bitter, empty other possibilities.

Now, to my ears and written down before my eyes, all the above reads and sounds like vapid, prayerbook pretend-piety. Small wonder no one is listening. At my church, much as I love much that I see and hear and all whom I meet there, I cringe when we sing the “modern” Gloria. It’s in 3/4 time, like a waltz, and accompanied by the pipe organ in up-and-down herdy-gerdy carnival style. The herdy-gloria Gloria. (Don’t mean to be such a critic, but, in my experience, the deepest piety is inspired by solemn, polyphonic, decidedly serious but no less joyous and ancient chords, either sung or merely heard. But — I must be humble, charitable and open. That just my preference. In a way, it might be best to encounter God in silence. It’s all about grace….and a soul-healthy ‘fear of the Lord…’

Fear of the Lord. Advent. You better watch out….

And love, of course. God is love. So we are told and so I believe. For many years, as a late teenager, I doubted it all. Then I was told that a thousand difficulties do not constitute one single doubt. (accoding to St. John Henry Newman). We have only to keep chipping away at the difficulties, as we might at a rock or any other obstacle in our path. I know I made this point to my late sister, who always seemed to insist she could not delve far into the faith, “because I question” I think she feared her probing would somehow confirm her doubts, that there was no possibility it might, instead, affirm or give birth to her faith. I told her much of St. Augustine’s Confessions was written in the form of questions. She never seemed to be convinced — not in this life. Now, unlike me, she knows the answer to every question. Her earthly birthday was at the outset of Advent: December 1. I pray for her and, throughout November, prayed for all the faithful departed.

But back to that prayerbook of mine….

I would read, paragraphs later in that prayer book, “for he is to come, he will not delay” among the Advent Antaphons. In 2012, I read that the growth of our Christian life is obstructed and hindered by the rocky obstacles that are “the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life” I John 2:16.

I’ll say!

Believe. Look at us, helpless, pitiable… Waiting. For centuries, waiting.

What I recall, year to year, is everydayness, things unchanged in all those centuries. I just took out the garbage again. I stay mired in…Situations. In sin. In cowardice and damnable life habits of thought and action. In garbage.

On a bookmark dated Christmas, 1987, from friend and mentor, Rev. J.L. Donovan wrote: “St. Paul tells the Ephesians 2:14 “He” is our peace. He reconciles our unconsious and conscious. He speaks to us from within ourselves. I hope this book becomes a “vade mecum” of your own quest for Peace.”

The book for which this was the bookmark was a collection of the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ( a 19th Century Jesuit whose works are celebrated by poets of every era since, be they secular or religious). In Hopkins’s poems we find examples of the depth-charging syntax he used over and over to write, for instance, of “God’s Grandeur”, “It will flame out, like shining from shook foil/ It gathers to greatness, like the ooze of oil. Crushed.”

G.M. Hopkins died in 1899 and is buried in Dublin. J.L. Donovan died in 2019 and is buried in the hill above the grave of parents, sister and brother-in-law in Boston. Both the poet and the priest told us we will live forever. It is what Christ told us.

But for now — we are’ ‘on a darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night.” Old Matthew Arnold amid his prolong doubt and despair could not fathom the isolated piety of the monks sequestered far up in the Alps at the Carthusian monastery of the Grand Chartrreuse (yes, where the monks make the yellow liqueur). Arnold went on wandering between two worlds, the one dead/The other powerless to be born. The year was 1855.

We’ve gone on wandering between those two worlds, through two World Wars, living in fear of a Third.

Advent. When Frosty and Santa appear on lawns, sometimes in illuminated plastic, hard or inflatable; sometimes (especially or Frosty) in great white balls of Styrofoam.

Joy. Sin all around. We are children forever; forever williing to be awed by the delightfully kitchy. And that’s good.

About this time last year, a young girl cut me off in traffic and responded to my gentle toot with an obscene gesture which she kept displaying for about a block. She’s a year older now. I wonder if any wiser. Am I? Do such things still bother me? Do I do such things myself?

It was Advent. I wanted to break her finger. I silently wished her a Merry Christmas she could not hear.

All civilizaton, all history is Advent. He Is Coming, sometime. Coming always.

Sin and evil abide, like traffic. Like surly, obscene, embittered teenagers.

Abides in me. Am I wrong that some of the worst crimes I remember were committed in Advent? Again, all time is Advent. The Evil One is always busy, and busiest in holy seasons. So my mentors Hopkins and Donovan would remind me.

He is coming….

Enough. Pray like crazy. Get ready. Again. Change. Above all change. Pray I change. I’ve already had one sinful argument this morning.

Yes, I’m talking to myself. I was talking to myself as I took out the garbage — again.

But it’s Advent again.

I go on talking to myself, but I must make that talk into prayer.

Pray. Pray….without ceasing. Persevere to the end.

It’s Advent again.

BELIEF

And what, then, is belief? It is the demi-cadence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life.

American philosoper Charles Sanders Peirce, from How to Make Our Ideas Clear

The word “God,” so “capitalised” (as we Americans say), is the definable proper name, signifying Ens necessarium*; in my belief, really creator of all three Universes of Experience.

*Necessary Being

Charles Sanders Peirce, A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God, 1908

MARRIAGE

There are words signifying human arrangements or states of life which should never be emptied of their true meaning. Marriage and all that it signifies is such a word.

This remains true even if every soul in our culture succumbs to the temptation to treat marriage merely as a fungible civic “institution” or solely as means to a beneficial personal financial end. It becomes a mere human contract, and, compared to a contract to buy or sell land, is perhaps not nearly as serious or consequential.

The word marriage in our culture still implies love, intimacy, total, “ideally” unbreakable commitment between human beings. I think many would agree that it should be “sacred,” however one wishes to interpret that word. In the religious culture I embrace, it is one of seven Sacraments. It is prohibited to regard it merely as a civic, possibly temporary and reversible arrangement. It is eternal. It must be borne through all human trials of sickness or poverty. The universal evidence reveals it to be a source of enormous joy and fulfillment for multitudes and a natural and desireable state of being for all humanity in all times.

The Catholic Church and much of the secular culture still regards marriage, of necessity, to be between a man and a woman. And religious and non-religious peoples alike probably never expected that fundamental fact to be upended.

But that’s where we are in our culture. There is no telling where it will lead us.

Marriage is also fundamentally supposed to be about new life — children, family. This comes about through an intimacy that God-oriented people regard to be special and sacred and, in Catholic teaching, reserved only for the sacramentally married. The culture at large flaunts this shibolith in a spirit of indifference, even mockery, and in the name of “progress”. Like all the most special and sacred things that exist, the powerful human drive for intercourse can be grandly abused, but remains an infinitely serious form of human expression. No one, even the most unreligious and secular-minded, denies that, though many deny that abstinence is possible or desirable, sometimes regarding it to be “unnatural” in the wake of the so-called “sexual revolution”. (Whenever I hear that line urging us to “crown our soul with self-control” from “America the Beautiful”, I believe I’m hearing lyricist Katharine Lee Bates propounding the pre-modern understanding of how we should deal with everything from anger and hunger to sex. I guess that was the “old” America, “from sea to shining sea.”)

But in the new, still beautiful America, we have gradually embraced polymorphous means of being intimate, and unnatural means of conceiving children. No telling where this will lead us, either.

Sex, seen as merely a primal impulse or appetite, has largely been “divorced” — another troubling word — by much of the whole world’s culture from marriage. So has the necessity of procreation as a unific, inseperable aspect of sex.

So many, like me, are either guilty bystanders or active, sinful collaborators in this cultural unraveling –which millions define as “progress”.

Random sexual, temporary parings between the male and the female of the species are, based on scientific evidence, premordial. They are common in the animal kingdom. But the arrangment called marriage is for humans and involves a number of human norms and understandings. Sometimes people, regardless of their age, come together in this bond out of shortsighted immaturity and emotional infirmity. ( I ain’t preaching. I’m as frail and shortsighted as the next person.) We all know about those early, ill-considered, half-forgotten marriages. Those who engaged in them failed to grasp the seriousness or nature of the journey upon which they were about to embark – or didn’t know their future spouse as well as they thought they did. The list of problems goes on.

But, as it happens, the most thoroughly secular marriage I ever attended took place in a grand stone castle above a beautiful, mist-shrouded Massachusetts beach between two atheists, at least one of whom (the male) I know to have –to this day — an utter, insistently reasoned disdain for religion. He is a professor of philosphy.

Nonetheless, the Introductory Address at that wedding by the “celebrant” in the presence of a Justice of the Peace read as follows:

“In all cultures and at all times, people have entered into matrimonial union in recognition of the mystery of love, the power of moral commitment and the enlightening force of communication which connect them and give meaning to their lives. “

Further, that address went on to speak of “(L)ove, the fundamental bond which ties the human family together and which gives us hope for a world in which peace and community reign….”

Beautiful! And very serious, and true. This was well over thirty years ago. That couple is still married.

But I would submit that this atheistically-oriented address ( which, in my book, qualifies as a “prayer”), recited in the presence of the bride and groom, though they were never referred to as “bride” or “groom”, nonetheless invoked a number of theological concepts, e.g., “the mystery of love” and “hope” which Catholic Christians regard to be a theological virtue along with charity, often rendered as “love”. And “family”, too, is a bond that Christians or other religions see as of divine origin.

If there is no God, why should love be a “mystery”?

I have attended Christian marriages that did not seem so steeped in the beauty of things I, for once, see as of divine origin. In everything good thing we mortals do, if it is worth doing, there is an echo of eternal truth.

But then there is cohabitation — or marriages that are mere cohabitations. Here is where two humans can experience endless, deep, psychological and spiritual lacerations, live in a state of mendacity and illusion, anger, recrimination, sexual and emotional objectification, financial ruination, trapped like addicts in one another’s emotional grip, aware, however subconsciously, that they are merely hostages to one another. It is a nightmare, a horror. True love is obscenely mocked and strangled.

Then someone comes along and says to the unmarried, “you two should be married.” They cite Social Security benefits, scold a person who would deny the other party both the SS benefits and tax benefit. If the “mystery of love” is baffling, so, too, is the mystery of modern cohabitation among those we might diagnose as “codependant.”

It is understandable that those well-meaning kibitzers should be baffled– not realizing that they are urging those two souls to make a horror permanent; seal the bonds made of fear and emotional infirmity, born of what we have come to call, again, co-dependancy.

God help us. God help them. God help me, as a matter of fact.

To be single, alone, living and responsibly maintaining our own orderly, charitable lives, possibly experiencing lonliness, but bonded to all those we love and even find it necessary, through circumstances of our own making, to support financially — even to our own detriment and for as long as we live — this is truth, integrity and reality.

A decision to do so is every bit as essential as the decision to marry. Like true marriage, it is a state of life that can bestow true peace, engender true love. I, for one, believe this.

I pray for it.

God hear my prayer. God care for those I love and with whom I hope to escape all illusions, all disorder. Let me be an instrument of your peace, your love and your truth. And of divine and human — reality!

Amen.

EASTER MORNING

The two Marys kept their vigil, the men had fled. In their mind, they’d endured a tragic, shocking defeat and their savior a tortured, humiliating betrayal and death. It was all over. All was death. Life would go on, empty. It had all seemed so — possible, that this was not all there was, and as good as it gets. Back to the fishing boats and the drudgery.

None of these thoughts or expressions are very original on my part. There must be a way to jolt us to greater — awareness. Cold, hard truth. The truth that liberates. I want it. I need it.

Yes, he was dead.

But He had come to die, and he had died. He foretold it all. No one was listening or believing Him.

Then, the Resurrection. Without it, the whole story is meaningless. And the churches — or The Church — a big costume show and money pit. A place where teens are abused by their homosexual overseers.

Really?

Secular historians and theologians have examined the matter of the Resurrection exhaustively over centuries. In the early years of the Christian era, Celsus, an anti-Christian polemicists, suggested that the whole story emanated from the disordered imagination of an ecstatic Mary Magdalene. Others theorized a case of mass hallucination. People thinking they’d seen things they didn’t see. I could be wrong, but I think that’s the belief of the ever-popular James Carroll.

The Church has examined all these claims stringently. The precise details of the empty tomb, the encounters in the flesh — for many it is important to deny it all, because if He rose, then absolutely nothing matters except that.

“He thrown everything off balance. If He did what he said, then there’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him.”

So says Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit, a serial murderer. He decided it all must be false. All that could possibly matter to him was pleasure and cruelty and self-seeking – and pleasure in cruelty. But at least he understood what was at stake and made his conscious, perversely reasonable choice. Like all of us, he had difficulty believing such a thing could be true, but if it was, how could anything else be more important than that?

Admittedly, his fictive testimonial is all a little too overt, too credulous for most of our tastes. We can doubt such literal depictions of nihilism.

See, instead, images of Vladimir Putin, reverently touching the cross of Christ (as he did as it was held before him by his bishop), then crossing himself, then ordering an ongoing mechanized slaughter, destruction, horror and cruelty on an industrial, civilization-killing scale. Joe Biden, his forehead smudged with the visible chrism of salvation, a “devout Catholic”, seeing to the slaughter through abortion of millions, insisting on it. A more banal and to many seemingly innocuous, perhaps necessary mass killing — until we’re forced to think about it, hear that Silent Scream….as each soul is “cancelled”. (Yeah, I know. We don’t want to believe such stuff. We do what we do for the “good of humanity.”)

If He didn’t rise, all is folly, says St. Paul.

And if He didn’t, all should be permitted — within “reason”, of course.

Tertullian would ask, a century later, “how many of the crowd standing around us, shall I not prick in your inner conscousness as being the slayers of your own off spring?” He spoke to the mobs who cried for Christian blood while they drowned or exposed to the dogs those unwanted among their newborns. Then there were these tawdry other matters — among the Persians, he claimed, there was word of those who had intercourse with their own mothers.

All is permitted. Our own darkness spreads. “Self-will run riot,” as they say in the recovery community trying to rescue folks from substance addiction. But you don’t have to be drunk or high to be atrocious.

For the record — Mary Magdalene’s reaction at the sight of the empty tomb was not disordered. A disingenuous gospel-writer might have depicted it so, but instead, shows a woman perplexed and assuming the body of her savior has been stolen and proceeding to investigate based on that assumption. She summons the men and Peter and John run to search for the body. They find the burial cloth arranged in an orderly way one would not immediately assume was the work of grave robbers. Slowly, sluggishly, they come around to accepting the seemingly impossible. That would be us, too. And then — they see Christ in the flesh. He stays with him for forty days, and they stay with him for life, even unto their own cruel deaths for his sake.

St. Paul: “If Christ is not raised from the dead, then our faith is in vain.” This from a man who had zealously persecuted Christians and overseen their execution. They were a threat and a nuisance to his mind. Then he became one of them. Did he ever! I guess he believed Christ rose. But he had the extra advantage of being struck with a bolt of light and hearing His voice.

For us, it is a matter of faith. Investigate. Think about it. Compare and contrast the stories. Listen to the doubters or deniers. “Test everything,” said that same St. Paul. “Cling to what is true.”

But even believing, the course is hard, the temptations and distractons many. Sin, however you define it, abounds. It’s easier just to not think about it. Unconscious living, in the manner of those anti-Christian mobs who were addressed by Tertullian.

Well, He told us we were weak. He told us we’d need Him.

And, by the way, He promised He’d rise. And that He’d come again.

Meanwhile, I beg You, please come to me….life’s getting a little flaky.

Where is the Life we have lost in living?

T.S. Eliot, from “Choruses from ‘The Rock’

Where, indeed.