2022 Highlights: April

All April 2022 posts here.

Lots of history this month. The reason is that I’d been asked to do a presentation for our Cathedral adult education program on the Church in the Deep South, so why not share the wealth?

Here’s a link to the slide element of the presentation – I think it should be accessible, but I’m sure someone will let me know if it’s not.

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• Left Behind

So to live in the present, respectful of the past but not burdened by it? How?

That seems to me a key to spiritual wholeness, and how we treat the objects we inherit can be expressive of our inner disposition. The healthy place is neither casual dismissal or mournful clinging. The healthy place prioritizes the present, informed by, but not controlled by the past.

And when you shake loose, you might be surprised to find how faulty your understanding was all along.

• Influential

I have a very hard time seeing how a persona-centered “outreach” can be squared with the Gospel call to humility.

• Catherine of Siena’s self-image

The saints are a varied lot. They are extroverts. Introverts. rich, poor, young, old. artists, queens. beggars. scholars, and doorkeepers. But all of them, Catherine included, embody authentic humility. Their sense of a life well-lived challenges mine. Success? Achievement? Opportunity? Talents? I some-times wonder how to navigate all of those values, especially as a disciple of Jesus. I’m here on earth right now. I’m willing and able. What am I supposed to do and how am I supposed to figure it out? In Catherine. I get a glimpse of another landscape, one not that far away after all, one peopled by those who know the truth of who they are, how precious and yet how small; who know their own weaknesses; and who know that God’s infinite strength is as close as their own fiat.

Drawn from the Cathedral presentation:

• Link to the slides.

• Confessionario
• Fray Pareja
• The martyrs of Georgia and Florida
• Fulton Sheen in Alabama

• The Toad on the Host

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January 2022 Highlights

February 2022 Highlights

March 2022 Highlights

April 2022 Highlights

May 2022 Highlights

June 2022 Highlights

July/August 2022 Highlights

September 2022 Highlights

October 2022 Highlights

November and December 2022 Highlights

Books of 2022

Movies and Television of 2022

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2022 Highlights: March

I did this last year (Here’s one post, with links to all the others.) It’s a way for me to sort through things, retrieve ideas that might work for longer pieces in other spaces, make me feel horrible about my terrible memory (did I write that?) and so on. I don’t include posts on saints or travel here. The saints because I tend to re-run them, no apologies, and the travel posts because they are collected here. Gender-related posts here.  Book and movie takes, as well as links to other monthly highlights, at the end of this post.

All March 2022 posts here.

(As you can see from the images below, it was also the month we saw Lyle Lovett and Dwight Yoakum within a 2-week span. I didn’t write at length about either concert, but the pics are there for my memory’s sake.)

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• Welcome to TMI Elementary

Do you or any of the adults that you know want to talk to other people’s kids about either sexual matters or even your own personal lives? Is making sure that any kids in your circle understand you or even know what you did last weekend important?

Is it even normal for a 40-year old to want a bunch of 11-year olds to “know who I really am?” much less to want to dig into their personal lives?

Um, no.

It would seem to me that after decades of discussing how the “fun mom” and the “cool coach” and the “drama teacher who lets us hang out at his apartment” and the “priest who drinks beer with us” are all basically emotionally arrested groomers and often abusers – we would be determined to insist on more walls between the adults who care for and educate young people and their charges, not fewer.

• Parental Rights and Wrongs

If Mom is always “doing her best” just because she’s Mom – why the heck are so many of us still grappling with Mom and Dad issues into adulthood?

• De Nada

We waited for the carrier, and when it came, she asked the baggage handler, Maleta? – referring to her checked bag, so now my Spanish vocabulary has been expanded by one more word, and then her phone rang while the baby was fussing a bit, so I took the baby – Jose! – and ended up carrying him through the airport while she talked on the phone, I presume to her relatives who were, indeed, there to meet her, with the women immediately swarming over the baby and everyone saying gracias and buenas noches and some of us…. phew.

• Progressives

In other words, our instinctive reaction to some Catholic moment from the past might be: Wow, that’s pretty crazy. And it might have been! But we might consider a follow-up as we consider our own lives: Wow, that’s pretty crazy, too, to be honest.

As I said, ours is not to point and laugh and bask in our superiority. Because we don’t have anything to brag about.

That is not to argue that the past is golden, ossified and preserved in amber for our devotion and emulation. The Catholic past is a riotous dynamic which includes moments worth reverencing and moments worth critiquing.

For the history of the Church may not be properly understood by the secular definition of “progress” but it certainly has the dynamic of reform baked into it – that is indeed, our history: Establishing a thought or practice or other reality that is faithful to the Gospel, and then, invariably, that moment drifting, corrupting and being an example, no longer of love, but of human pride and folly. And so we pray, discern, perhaps painfully tear down what have become idols, and begin again.

• It is not I

I was once at a Mass celebrated by a bishop, who was very happy at the end of Mass. He crowed, “We were really Church tonight!” I got it. I understood. On an emotional level, it was not an unreasonable reaction. But the point is: no matter how freaking boring it may seem to you– it’s still Church.

So there’s where ritual comes in.

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January 2022 Highlights

February 2022 Highlights

March 2022 Highlights

April 2022 Highlights

May 2022 Highlights

June 2022 Highlights

July/August 2022 Highlights

September 2022 Highlights

October 2022 Highlights

November and December 2022 Highlights

Books of 2022

Movies and Television of 2022

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Te Deum

The Te Deum is prayed on the eve of the new calendar year – that is today. It’s a prayer of praise and thanks. Why do we pray it on this day? What’s the subtext?

Is it – thanks for a fabulous year full of success! Is it – thanks be that this rotten year is over! or is it – thanks for a new year for me to find fulfillment, satisfaction and success!

Nope…it’s not that at all. It’s a prayer of praise to God and the few petitions embedded within are not about thanking God for how great our lives are or rescuing us from our present earthly difficulties in favor of earthly healing and comfort…. but to bring us closer to Him and save us from sin.

We praise your name forever.
Keep us today, Lord, from all sin.
Have mercy on us, Lord, have mercy.
Lord, show us your love and mercy;
For we put our trust in you.
In you, Lord, is our hope:
And we shall never hope in vain

The words of the Old Testament prophets were proclaimed in the midst of the great suffering of God’s people. Jesus entered a world of empire and oppression, of material poverty, division, violence, sickness and death. God’s Word was proclaimed, the Good News shared and lived thousands a years ago to suffering people…and so today.

And so, his coming isn’t about “Now he’s here, next year will be better.” It’s about something different, which you know and live if your mental and spiritual framework is first, God’s Word and secondly the Body of Christ’s reflection on that Word, lived, written, sung and spoken over two thousand years.

This season is one of rejoicing…but for what? Why do we rejoice?

Of course we seek an end to our earthly suffering and we work to alleviate the suffering of others near and far, in ordinary ways in daily life, and in our big projects and grand visions.

But our hope and our joy doesn’t rest on “wow, I really had a great time last year” or “it will be better tomorrow.” Because, you know…it won’t. We will still get sick, we will still die, we will still live on this earth restless and unsatisfied at our deepest levels. And even if earthly existence is eased a bit for me…what suffering is being endured next door? In my neighborhood? All around this world I live in?

To preach that Jesus is Real and Jesus is Fantastic because I feel physically and materially better today is a false Gospel. It has nothing to say to the terminally ill child or her parents who are holding her in her last hours, the family dwelling in abject poverty with no hope of surmounting it, to the whole world, suffering, groaning and waiting.

It is worth sitting with this truth, this irony, this tension: The Body that has done the most, through human history, to alleviate physical suffering and ameliorate material poverty, that has done the most to fashion beauty out of the raw stuff of this world in every way, is also the Body that reminds the world, day after day:

Yet the world and its enticement are passing away.
But whoever does the will of God remains forever.

The Good News that reminds us that God answers prayers and cares for every hair on our head also, paradoxically, reminds us that God is present here and now, no matter what is happening. It’s that Jesus Tension: strengthening, helping me grow, but leading me deeper into friendship with him in the midst of weakness and suffering that, if it’s overcome, is overcome with his strength and grace. We pray, with the Psalmist and with every believer through space and time for deliverance from what burdens us in the present moment – and pray for the grace to accept what is.

A paradox.

This time next year, at the end of 2023, some things about your earthly life will be “better.” Some will be “worse.” You might have successfully overcome some problems, and been surprised by new ones. You might have met your goals. You might have changed in some ways and remained exactly the same in others. You might be empowered to tackle problems in your community and lead change, you might be empowered to help people live fruitfully in difficult circumstances.

Who knows, you might even be dead.

The faith, hope and joy we celebrate and sing about doesn’t rest on the “good” things on that list happening and the “bad” things disappearing.

Radical acceptance. Radical change. Life with Jesus isn’t about one or the other. It’s about both: lives of radical acceptance and openness to radical change.

The Kingdom of God is within you.

They dropped their nets and followed him.

That’s the Christian journey, a non-binary lifestyle choice if I’ve ever heard one. How does it work? There’s no formula. No set of steps. It’s lived out, first, in listening and paying attention, and then, as long as our hearts keep beating and our lungs give us breath, it’s lived in tension, questions, joy, pain, strangeness, and paradox, as in the midst of suffering, we raise our voices:

Come then, Lord, and help your people,
Bought with the price of your own blood,
And bring us with your saints
To glory everlasting.
Save your people, Lord, and bless your inheritance.
Govern and uphold them now and always.
Day by day we bless you.
We praise your name forever.
Keep us today, Lord, from all sin.
Have mercy on us, Lord, have mercy.
Lord, show us your love and mercy;
For we put our trust in you.
In you, Lord, is our hope:
And we shall never hope in vain

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From the 2020 Book of Grace-Filled Days – which includes two December 31. So here they are.

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Dorothy Day’s New Year’s Resolutions

Here are a few.

Source: The Duty of Delight

1936:

1945:

1960:

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Requiescat in pace

‘We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.’

Painting by Ann Engelhart, from “Friendship with Jesus.”

I will offer reflections over the next few days, not to repeat what many others are saying, but to offer a different perspective when I see a gap in commentary. As I often am, I will be quiet interested in the commentary itself as a window into the state of the Church in this moment, as well as fighting, the best I can in this little space, manufactured narratives of all kinds, whether the engine be fueled by laziness, ignorance, cynicism or duplicity.

Regular readers of this blog know, of course, my appreciation for Benedict. A quick history: I knew little about him beyond his name and theological reputation before his election. His election – and particularly the panicked, negative reaction to his election from the Catholic managerial class – sparked my interest. Reading the homily he delivered during his inaugural Mass fanned the flame. I was struck by its depth and its simplicity. As one who had spent her professional life up to that point working to communicate what I believed was the truth of the Faith in substantive yet understandable ways both in the classroom and in print, I was taken with Benedict’s almost effortless mastery of this responsibility, even in this one homily.

My late father, who was a lapsed, non-practicing Methodist and a retired college professor with a mild interest in Catholic matters, mostly from a political standpoint, and in a nod to his (by then) late Catholic wife and Catholic daughter – even he was impressed enough to remark upon it to me. He’d taken the time to read Benedict’s homily and when he spoke to me afterwards, he said simply, That man’s a teacher.

Aside from some links for you, I think that is an apt ending for this first post. That man’s a teacher.

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I wrote a book introducing Pope Benedict’s thought to a general audience. It’s out of print, but you can access the pdf here. Feel free to download and share.

This book is centered on Christ as the center of Pope Benedict’s thought and work as theologian and vocation as Pope.  It seems to me that he is “proposing Jesus Christ” both to the world and to the Church.  He is about reweaving a tapestry that has been sorely frayed and tattered:

• Offering the Good News to a broken humanity and a suffering world that in Jesus Christ, all of our yearnings and hopes are fulfilled and all of our sins forgiven.  We don’t know who we are or why we are here. In Christ, we discover why.  But it is more than an intellectual discovery. In Christ – in Christ – we are joined to him, and his love dwells within us, his presence lives and binds us.
• Re-presenting Jesus Christ even to those of us who are members of the Body already.  This wise, experienced man has seen how Christians fall. How we forget what the point is. How we unconsciously adopt the call of the world to see our faith has nothing more than a worthy choice of an appealing story that gives us a vague hope because it is meaningful.   He is calling us to re-examine our own faith and see how we have been seduced by a view of faith that puts it in the category of “lifestyle choice.”
• Challenging the modern paradigm that separates “faith”  and “spirituality” from “religion” – an appeal that is made not only to non-believers, but to believers as well, believers who stay away from Church, who neglect or scorn religious devotions and practices, who reject the wisdom of the Church –  one cannot have Christ without Church.

Finally, I discovered this morning that the venerable website The Pope Benedict XVI Fan Club is still up – if you are at all curious about the man’s work, this is your one-stop shop. It was begun before he was elected pope, as the Cardinal Ratzinger Fan Club, in part as a corrective to the pervasive negative caricature of “God’s Rottweiler.” The blog is still updated, I was surprised to see, and the forum is moderately active.

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2022 Highlights: February

I did this last year (Here’s one post, with links to all the others.) It’s a way for me to sort through things, retrieve ideas that might work for longer pieces in other spaces, make me feel horrible about my terrible memory (did I write that?) and so on. I don’t include posts on saints or travel here. The saints because I tend to re-run them, no apologies, and the travel posts because they are collected here. Gender-related posts here.  Book and movie takes, as well as links to other monthly highlights, at the end of this post.

All February posts here.

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• Pitiable People

I got to church a little late, and left a little early as is my probably unfortunate habit these days. I was surprised because the church was more full than I’d seen it ages. The music was as mediocre as always, but the preaching was good and there were no narcissistic liturgical shenanigans. A crowd of teens sat in the front, I’m thinking at the end of a Confirmation retreat. A man in the back pew smiled and graciously made room for my latecoming self. A mentally disabled man limped past me after Communion. The deacon brought the Eucharist to an elderly woman in a wheelchair, and the mother in front of me pointed to the words of the Creed in her little boy’s Magnifikid.

It is not easy to be a person, to be a human, to be a Catholic. I don’t think it ever has been, and the institution and the people help sometimes and hurt quite a bit.

I don’t know what to make of it all, and have not yet figured out how to say what I do make of it, but I think I do know that nothing begins until you open the door, take that uphill walk, find your place with the rest of the broken, no matter when you arrive, and try to listen.

• Here’s a thought

This is conjecture on my part, and I’m generally not a fan of conjecture or scene-construction when it comes to Jesus words and activities in the Gospels, but this simple possibility – that Jesus could have told similar stories and made similar points in many different contexts  – might point to, for some of you, perhaps, a more helpful way to the presence of Jesus in the Gospels than the constant focus on intra-Gospel differences and authorial intention does.

• Let truth and falsehood grapple

The assumption of certain narratives as normative, deviations as heresy and honest discussion and exploration of data, evidence and experience as a threat is not what I call progress.

• Sell by

I’m thinking about this, not just because I happily stir-fried some asparagus the other day, but also because it’s time to start thinking again about the Gallery of Regrettable Lenten Food and how much even home cooking has changed over the years, mostly thanks to access to higher quality ingredients – and also because I made salmon cakes last night. I’ve never made salmon cakes or loaf or croquettes in my life, but it was also a regular part of our menus growing up (not with fresh salmon, but with canned, of course) – and also because as I was making the slaw to go with the salmon cakes, I pulled out some powdered mustard and some celery seeds, saw they were from Kroger’s, which meant they’d come from my parents’ house, looked at the sell-by dates, saw they were….. 2004 and 2009 – since my parents died in 2001 and 2011, that was not surprising, and well, I guess it’s time to toss them. Finally.

• A Modest Proposal

It’s worth a read, always, and perhaps especially as we live in a time in which government and corporate solutions are not only proposed and suggested but mandated by our betters who assert that the evidence is sound and settled and who present it all with the highest confidence in their own expertise and the deepest contempt for their skeptics’…skepticism.

• They do not badger us

Even with the post-Conciliar anxiety about “participation,” I have always felt that one of the great strengths of the Catholic Mass has been the sense that we do, indeed, come as we are to this place, and that’s okay. We are joyful and mourning, curious, doubtful, restless, fearful and content. God has gathered us here, and we trust that in the liturgy, in this point in space and time, he will meet us where we are, as we are. The liturgy – in its objective nature, its traditional formality and even its silence – gives us all room to celebrate, to grieve, to wonder, to praise, to drift.

• The ways of Wordle

This entertains me because all three takes are very expressive of our respective personalities: Careful and usually accurate assessment of the landscape, then making a decision based on that; A willful determination not to be wrong, ever; and, er…hope something works, be glad when it does, but you know, whatever happens happens, so let’s move on.

• Wyoming Mission

• Play on

Back to music. We’ve never been on the High Performance Road. But we’ve also been blessed because from the beginning, his excellent teacher has understood this kid, accepted his goals, made sure that if he changed his mind he had the tools to take those steps, but if he doesn’t – well, even if you don’t want to practice three hours a day and try for Julliard, you can still go deep into the music, play it beautifully, grow from the experience, and bring some of that beauty with whoever happens to be listening at the moment, whether it’s the fifty parents and grandparents at the recital, or if it’s the elderly woman and her daughter, walking quiet, steady laps around the church after their rosary while you practice in there.

I think I made her cry again.

And hopefully, all of this will bear fruit in that no matter where he goes, he’ll always find a keyboard when his fingers start itching, and maybe even find others to jam with, not because there’s a big audience to please or a scholarship on the line, and to certainly use his gifts for God’s glory and the service of others when called to, but in the end, to sit at the piano, most of all, for the pure, absolute joy, in communion with that mystery in your own soul, expressed in musical language gifted to you by a riot of brilliant, quirky friends across time.

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January 2022 Highlights

February 2022 Highlights

March 2022 Highlights

April 2022 Highlights

May 2022 Highlights

June 2022 Highlights

July/August 2022 Highlights

September 2022 Highlights

October 2022 Highlights

November and December 2022 Highlights

Books of 2022

Movies and Television of 2022

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2022 Highlights: January

I did this last year (Here’s one post, with links to all the others.) It’s a way for me to sort through things, retrieve ideas that might work for longer pieces in other spaces, make me feel horrible about my terrible memory (did I write that?) and so on. I don’t include posts on saints or travel here. The saints because I tend to re-run them, no apologies, and the travel posts because they are collected here. Gender-related posts here. Book and movie takes at the end of this post.

All January posts here.

I’ll knock off 2 or 3 a day until we’re done. So let’s go:

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• Wordle Wisdom

How radical.

To respect other people’s time.

To understand the addictive nature of activities like this and just online life in general and not exploit it.

• They Were Her Property

None of us are saints. None of our movements are pure. None of our “progress” comes without someone else, somewhere, paying a price.

I appreciated Jones-Rogers’ work here – and am interested that her next project focuses on women’s involvement in the slave trade – because I am up for anything that shakes the mythos that women are inherently kinder and more fair than men, and that “if women ran the world…..”

Yeah.

Watch Yellowjackets and contemplate its popularity to see how much people actually buy that claptrap.

• Medical Nemesis

I first encountered Illich early, as we like to say, in my homeschool journey. Reading Deschooling Society was an exhilarating confirmation of all of my intuitions about the mess that is modern education.

I later encountered more via the technology-contemplating newsletter of L.M. Sacasas, The Convivial Society – also deeply inspired by Illich.

Last week, I read Medical Nemesis – available in pdf form here. It had a similar effect.

If I could summarize both works, I’d say Illich’s theme is: Institutional forces take over these needs – education and health care – in the name of justice, efficiency and the common good of society. What ends up happening, not surprisingly, is that the institutional definitions and processes become determinative and definitive with an ultimate net loss to human freedom and, paradoxically, the needs they claimed to address.

• But do you gird your loins

There are a lot of ways we can say that the Second Vatican Council “failed,” but it’s always seemed to me that the greatest failure was that, unintentionally, the move to reform, which was offered as a way of equipping the Church to go into the world with more power and credibility, ended up severely handicapping that effort as “reform” became, unsurprisingly, decades of internal, inward-looking conversations and infighting.

Instead of the go out that’s packed into every word of the Gospel, every breath of even just this Sunday’s readings, we end up with: talk and fight about territory, role, organization and process.

• Leave Us

I am always writing about today, this moment, the present. For the truth is that yes, Jesus has arrived in your district. At this moment. He’s here. Healing, calling, inviting, challenging, sending.

The townspeople are watching, fearful. What are they afraid of? Why do they want Jesus to just depart?

What does this mean practically?

It will mean different things to different people, depending on where you are. Your temptations, the voices discouraging and fearful, will vary.

It can come from nothing more than life’s responsibilities, distracting us from the goodness and grace of the present moment.

It might come from the walls we’ve put up ourselves – I’m undeserving, I’m too far gone, no way I can be changed, no way things can be different. These are the tombs, and this is where I live, chained.

• Blessed Epiphany

One of the great puzzles to me about the past now almost seventy years is how those who make the biggest noise about a church from the ground up and sensus fidelium are not willing to critique an event that transformed the Church and was engineered from beginning to end, from the top down, and reflected the concerns of clerics and academics.

Certainly, the argument can be made that these clerics were acting on concerns emerging from engagement with the lived experience of the Church as a whole – that is obviously the stance we see in the motivation for the Council and its documents. Modernity, post-war crises, concerns about a detachment between professed faith, practice and everyday life among the laity were all real concerns.

But the jump from there to we know what’s best rooted mainly in contemporary philosophical and theological trends and a total disregard for the psychological and spiritual impact of dramatic, rapid change is huge. And worth examining and critiquing.

• Look at me!

One can argue – and probably correctly – that these religious cultures that developed these devotions were actually heavily clerical – that is, cultures in which the word of the ordained was law, wielded often with an authoritarian hand. Well, yes – and devotional life was the space in which the laity could operate, relatively free of that. My point: it’s no different now. And in fact, the focus on the Mass (legitimately, yes) and the loss of popular devotional life intensifies that clerical focus. It may not be with such a heavy hand these days, but it’s still there.

So yeah, fight clericalism: Throw yourself into those Works of Mercy,  celebrate the feasts, make things for God’s glory and then build a shrine, process to it with your friends, and keep the candles burning.

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January 2022 Highlights

February 2022 Highlights

March 2022 Highlights

April 2022 Highlights

May 2022 Highlights

June 2022 Highlights

July/August 2022 Highlights

September 2022 Highlights

October 2022 Highlights

November and December 2022 Highlights

Books of 2022

Movies and Television of 2022

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Not waving but drowning

It’s the feast of the Holy Family. Here, from the Denver Art Museum (visited in November) is what is now one of my favorite depictions.

Here’s the entry for this feast (the Holy Family) from the 2020: Book of Grace-Filled Days.

2023, written by Tom McGrath, is available here for $6!

Here’s the poem:

And here’s a brief analysis.

Language failed him. Salutations failed him. We are all odd birds, all in danger of having our gestures, habits, and roles misread, mistaken for our substance.

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Wednesday Random

I had people in and out of here pretty constantly over the past week, complicated by weather-related changing traveling plans (no one caught in the Southwest mess, thank goodness…). We have a little more than a week more of College Guys in the House until everyone leaves and it will be very weirdly quiet around here again.

So let’s be random:

• You might have followed Art and Theology for Advent – but great posts continue for the Christmas season:

One of South Africa’s most important printmakers, Azaria Mbatha was a student and later teacher at the Evangelical Lutheran Art and Craft Centre at Rorke’s Drift. In his Nativity linocut he shows a Nguni bull, two bushpigs, an elephant, and an antelope calf paying homage to the Christ child, whom a bald, long-bearded Joseph gestures toward. Three wise men approach on elephant-back from the left, and further to the left, King Herod lurks with lion and spear, waiting to pounce on this perceived threat to his power.

More….

• Ted Gioia: What can we learn from Barnes & Noble’s surprising turnaround?

Here’s the surprise: This company has been a failure at digital media, and has succeeded by embracing the most antiquated technology of them all: the printed book.

That’s quite an achievement. So let’s look at the turnaround at Barnes & Noble….

Gioia runs over B & N’s missteps – the Nook, trying to become a toy store, even the cafes – and then outlines the changes that new leadership has brought. There’s some balance to his assessment in the comments section, but as a whole it’s hopeful and intriguing.

• Also from Gioia – this might keep you occupied – his list of notable online essays from 2022.

• As will Micah Mattix’s “This is not a ‘Most Anticipated’ Books List”
• Mattix also highlights some recent online reads – including Dan Hitchens on British filmmaker Shane Meadows:

What would happen if a truly great religious artist appeared in modern Britain? Would he be celebrated for the profundity of his imagination? Or would he be laughed at for having such an unfashionable hobby-horse? My guess is neither. I suspect that he would, instead, be completely misunderstood. People would rave about his films and give him baftas and write glowing profiles of him, and they would completely miss what he was actually up to.

• Finally, the most recent from the Convivial Society – I am going to come back to this one. Consider this link your homework.

What I mean by this is simple: when we think of the way our days are structured, the kinds of activities most readily on offer, the mode of relating to the world we are encouraged to adopt, etc.—in each case we are more likely to find ourselves spent rather than sustained. The default set of experiences on offer to us are more likely to leave us feeling drained and depleted rather than satisfied and renewed. In our consumption, we are consumed.

There are many ways to think about this. We are depleted by the pace and structure of contemporary life, particularly by how spatial and temporal boundaries that provided modest respites from the demands others could place on us have been eroded by the capacities of digital technology. Now we are always on and always available, our freneticism masquerading as flexibility. We are also depleted by our media ecosystem, which, if we let it, will overwhelm us with cognitive and emotional stimuli. We are depleted, too, by a techno-economic system that is bent on treating the human and the non-human alike as raw material, as sites of extraction.

All of this can be summed up briefly by observing that the human-built world is not built for humans. As the 20th-century French thinker Jacques Ellul noted, the operating principle of modern human society is technique, a relentless drive to optimize all things for efficiency. At no point is any care taken for the human as such. Even our games, diversions, and therapies can be best understood as what Ellul called human techniques, the bare minimum therapies necessary to keep the human component of the machine operational.

This picture is admittedly bleak, but what ultimately concerns me here is to think about what experiences might actually offer something like rest, renewal, or a modest measure of satisfaction. What practices can thrive outside of the bounds of economic rationality, optimization, and consumption? Is there a way to recalibrate the rhythms of our days and weeks and months and years so that they generate meaning and a measure of internal and communal harmony?

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Life indestructible

To belong to him, to be called by him, is to be rooted in life indestructible.

-Ratzinger, Eschatology.

The news coming out of Rome has perhaps led some of us to think about Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, about death, about life.

Several years ago, Word Among Us published a short book I wrote as a popular introduction to Benedict’s thought. No, I was not seeking to compete with actual theologians writing quite ably on the topic, but simply to provide a way into his thinking for a general audience – especially since so much was available online in the form of papal homilies, addresses and so on.

The book is out of print, but you can access and download a pdf of the book here. Feel free – feel free to download, print and use in whatever way you choose. From the Introduction:

His fellow academics have correctly discerned many fundamental themes in the work of theologian Joseph Ratzinger: an interest in the relationship between faith and reason, religion and culture, modernity and faith; the liturgy; and the continuity and discontinuity in historical development.

A pope does not leave his own interests and expertise at the door of the Sistine Chapel when he is elected, so all these points of study that interested Joseph Ratzinger over his decades as an academic theologian continue to inform his writing as pope.

However, when you listen and read the papal writings attentively, it is difficult not to notice one particular element that seems to come into focus no matter what the specific topic or who the audience is.

That “element” is a person: Jesus Christ.

Benedict made this focus clear from his first homily as pope. He referred to Pope John Paul II’s 1978 inaugural homily in which his predecessor exhorted his listeners to “Open wide the doors for Christ.” Benedict concluded his own homily in this way:

If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful, and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation. And so, today, with great strength and great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you, dear young people: Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return. Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ—and you will find true life.

Pope Benedict has articulated this invitation countless times over the years of his pontificate. Whether the initial occasion concerns liturgy, vocations, justice and charity, or a particular moment in the Church’s year, for the Holy Father, everything always comes back to Jesus Christ. It is in Jesus, the pope reminds us, that we find the peace for which our anxious, restless hearts yearn. In him we find joy and comfort when the world lets us down. It is in him that we find the true, lasting answers to the anxieties and fears that beset us all in the darkest nights and in the midst of the most intense suffering.

Come Meet Jesus highlights the ways in which Pope Benedict is inviting his listeners, both inside and outside the Catholic Church, to discover the saving, healing, life-giving love of Jesus. Pope Benedict’s words are not difficult to understand. He writes in a lucid, clear style. However, as I mentioned at the beginning, the quantity of works available from even a few years of his papacy is great, and not many of us have the time to follow the pope’s words on a daily basis. This book is offered with the hopes that more might be inspired to listen with open minds and hearts to Pope Benedict’s persistent and heartfelt invitation for all of us to put friendship with Jesus at the center of our lives.

I thought I’d share with you the end of the book, the last chapter of which is centered on suffering and death.

Death looms in all of our lives. Some of us have lived more intimately with it than others.

Perhaps we have come close to death ourselves, or been in the presence of someone who have died, or engaged in that corporal work of mercy we call “burying the dead”—caring for what is left with respect for what God has made.

There is no question that to face death and commit to seeing the other side that Jesus promises is an act of faith. None of us reading these pages has ever walked to that other side and returned. We cannot know what it was like in the same way that we can know what it is to visit Chicago, for example, or give birth, or even come close to the brink of death itself. It is in the company of this reality that we must finally and absolutely confront the issue that has lurked for so long: who is this Jesus of whom we speak, in whom we say we believe?

If he is only a teacher, even his most powerful teachings cannot really help me as I face death, for there are many teachers who have taught many things. Why believe him and not them?

If he is one in whom I believe because belief in him joins me to others on this earth and gives me a ticket to various rituals that bestow a particular identity, what good is that ticket when my skin is cold and my body is lowered in the ground?

If his story gives me comfort now, but is no more or less true than other stories that others share, what fruit can the story bear for me when my ears can no longer hear them?

Throughout this book, we have listened to Pope Benedict “propose” Jesus of Nazareth to us. He has not proposed a useful idea, an interesting story, or a profitable life plan. He has proposed a Person, the Son of God who really lived, died, and rose, and who lives now and who can be known now and who is Lord of creation now.

Faced with the void, I must ask: Do I really believe that?

Because if I do—if Jesus is the Lord who is with me now, who forgives me, who guides me, who gives me his very life in Eucharist, whose every word in the gospels is directed at me, then there is no void. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? (1 Cor 15:55).

This is the joy of the Easter Vigil: we are free. In the resurrection of Jesus, love has been shown to be stronger than death, stronger than evil. Love made Christ descend, and love is also the power by which he ascends. The power by which he brings us with him. In union with his love, borne aloft on the wings of love, as persons of love, let us descend with him into the world’s darkness, knowing that in this way we will also rise up with him. On this night, then, let us pray: Lord, show us that love is stronger than hatred, that love is stronger than death. Descend into the darkness and the abyss of our modern age, and take by the hand those who await you. Bring them to the light! In my own dark nights, be with me to bring me forth! Help me, help all of us, to descend with you into the darkness of all those people who are still waiting for you, who out of the depths cry unto you! Help us to bring them your light! Help us to say the “yes” of love, the love that makes us descend with you and, in so doing, also to rise with you. Amen!

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