As I said before, saints’ days, most holy days and special topics (movies, books, gender, TC, synod) are and will be collected elsewhere. These posts are taking it month-by-month. More links at the end of the post.
To separate oneself from the great literature from the past is to cut oneself off from community with the human beings who, in every time and place have grappled with the same mysteries you are wondering about tonight: I am choosing this…but am I really free? And if God is God , what place do my actions have?
It’s a deep disservice to young people to make the essence of education the exploration of their own feelings and identities, with no reference to the greater world, present or past.
No wonder they feel so alone.
The Total Woman Thinking Positively about the Man Nobody Knows (9/7)
Trends, fashions and fads. Popular religion reflects them. Religious practice reflects the culture in which it exists in great and small ways. We are not disembodied angels. We are embodied, Jesus was Incarnate, and the Church is His Body, He dwells in His tent among us and so this is who we embodied humans know Him – or anything. We can’t be or do anything else.
But perhaps this quick glance at some powerful spiritual fads of the past decades might remind us that a testing, discerning spirit is essential to the healthy, holistic Christian life. We know what Paul tells us – now we see through a glass but darkly – but do we know it? Do we admit that we are no different?
This self-protective narrative construction can happen anywhere – in personal conversations, on social media, in institutions.
It’s fairly simple to identify, more challenging to combat. How to identify?
If the response to your question or inquiry is to call you a name, characterize you according to some identifier or alliance, or, more seriously, seek to expel you from whatever form of civilization is at stake – there you go.
And of course, social media, especially Twitter, lends itself to this tendency quite effortlessly and perhaps purposefully.
Even on Catholic Twitter (should I even say “even?” No reason to…) – the narrative-shaping, manufacturing of consent, caricatures and excommunications are constant – and as McLuhan says, there’s that media shaping the message again, because when you have 280 characters, who has time to present a case?
Slapping on labels – that is, creating the story – then pointing and laughing at whoever we’ve declared is to blame is much, much easier.
The story of Haggai, and more broadly, the return of God’s people to Jerusalem, is certainly an effective and suggestive way to reflect on the present situation of the collapse of Catholicism in Europe – and the West in general, as a well as a way forward. Read Haggai, and you’ll see it all, much of which Pope Francis brings out in his homily: the prophetic condemnation of fearful clinging to comfort, the call to courage, and evocations of the emptiness of life when we rely on ourselves and push God out of His rightful place.
So much more complex than a war between past, present and future, with the past always held up as the enemy.
For besides all the other problems with this framing, we might well ask: where does “the past” begin anyway?
What’s the cutoff?
100 AD? 1100? 1900? 1962? 2013?
How do we discern which part of “the past” is permissible to keep or draw from?
Because, you know, the Second Vatican Council started three generations ago. Long time!
When does a genial rootedness in “living tradition” transform into ideological “tastes?”
How can you tell?
What is this “restorationism” that “kills us all,” exactly?
Restoration of what from what part of the past?
But it’s still amazing to encounter this blatant, casual, brutal bigotry, not just as a part of, but as the climax, the clincher in a ringing ode to free thought and reasoned discourse as opposed to the ignoble, blighted, darkness of “belief” that had held humanity back from real progress for millennia.
Of course, what’s essential to remember is that during this era, racism, bigotry and eugenics were considered “scientific” and “rational.”
One might say, in fact, that for these big brains dedicated to reason…. the science was settled.
Charlotte was Both 