Trust in God

Jennifer over on Conversion Diary is musing about trust in God in the context of answers to prayer. Here are what she calls her initial thoughts:

I don’t have all the answers, but my initial thought is that appropriate trust in God hinges on having a proper understanding the following three things:

1. Who God is
2. What God wants
3. What the meaning of life is

Who God is:
He’s not a wish-granting genie. He’s not a concierge. He’s not a living magic wand for us to wield to change the world according to our liking. He’s our heavenly Father, and he is perfect and all-knowing — in other words, his ideas are better than ours, and he knows what’s best for us more than we do. We can get way off track of we start to forget this.

What God wants:
I’ve heard many amazing stories of divine providence at work in people’s lives, and one common thread is that people who experience a lot of this crazy miraculous stuff live their lives according to what God wants, not what they want. I wrote about this more here, but these people spend a lot of time asking: “Lord, what do you want me to pray for?”

So, to use the example of the cake for the Bible study tea, I do believe that that was God at work, but I don’t believe that the cake appeared because the missionaries were in the mood for something sweet. Each day they spent hours in prayer seeking the Lord’s guidance. The idea to host the event didn’t come from their personal whims, but rather was an idea the Holy Spirit gave them in prayer — thus it’s no surprise that all the details just so happened to work out.

What the meaning of life is:
I think this is where it’s easiest for us Americans to go wrong, and where many “health and wealth gospel” proponent have gone wrong. Surrounded by incomparable wealth, luxury and access to medical care, it’s easy to start to think of our lives here on earth as our eternal destinations. The natural human inclination is to make the overarching goal of our lives to have the longest, healthiest, most comfortable life here on earth as possible. But that’s not how the saints have seen it, and it’s not how God sees it. Not that God wants us to suffer — suffering and death wasn’t even part of the world he originally planned for us — but, in a heaven-centered worldview, suffering is not the worst evil. Sin is.

And that’s another thing I’ve noticed about people who seem to have radical but healthy trust in God: they accept this. They trust that God will pave the way for them to get themselves and others on a path to heaven, and know that sometimes it will involve sending cake for a tea party…and other times it might involve suffering, or even an early death. But when they compare that prospect to an eternity of ecstatic peace, it doesn’t seem like such a bad proposition.

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In God’s face, I see yours

Dom Christian is at the far right.

This is the last testament of Dom Christian de Chergé, the abbot of the monastry of Trappist monks whose story is told in the movie Of Gods and Men (see the trailer in the post before this). He left it with his mother in France; it was opened after his death.

If it should happen one day – and it could be today – that I become a victim of the terrorism which now seems ready to engulf all the foreigners living in Algeria, I would like my community, my Church and my family to remember that my life was GIVEN to God and to this country.

I ask them to accept the fact that the One Master of all life was not a stranger to this brutal departure.

I would ask them to pray for me: for how could I be found worthy of such an offering?

I ask them to associate this death with so many other equally violent ones which are forgotten through indifference or anonymity. My life has no more value than any other. Nor any less value. In any case, it has not the innocence of childhood. I have lived long enough to know that I am an accomplice in the evil which seems to prevail so terribly in the world, even in the evil which might blindly strike me down.

I should like, when the time comes, to have a moment of spiritual clarity which would allow me to beg forgiveness of God
and of my fellow human beings, and at the same time forgive with all my heart the one who would strike me down.

I could not desire such a death. It seems to me important to state this. I do not see, in fact, how I could rejoice if the people I love were indiscriminately accused of my murder. It would be too high a price to pay for what will perhaps be called, the “grace of martyrdom” to owe it to an Algerian, whoever he might be, especially if he says he is acting in fidelity to what he believes to be Islam.

I am aware of the scorn which can be heaped on the Algerians indiscriminately. I am also aware of the caricatures of Islam which a certain Islamism fosters. It is too easy to soothe one’s conscience by identifying this religious way with the fundamentalist ideology of its extremists.

For me, Algeria and Islam are something different: it is a body and a soul. I have proclaimed this often enough, I think, in the light of what I have received from it. I so often find there that true strand of the Gospel which I learned at my mother’s knee, my very first Church, precisely in Algeria, and already inspired with respect for Muslim believers.

Obviously, my death will appear to confirm those who hastily judged me naïve or idealistic: “Let him tell us now what he thinks of his ideals!” But these persons should know that finally my most avid curiosity will be set free.

This is what I shall be able to do, God willing: immerse my gaze in that of the Father to contemplate with him His children of Islam just as He sees them, all shining with the glory of Christ, the fruit of His Passion, filled with the Gift of the Spirit whose secret joy will always be to establish communion and restore the likeness, playing with the differences.

For this life lost, totally mine and totally theirs, I thank God, who seems to have willed it entirely for the sake of that JOY in everything and in spite of everything. In this THANK YOU, which is said for everything in my life from now on, I certainly include you, friends of yesterday and today, and you, my friends of this place, along with my mother and father, my sisters and brothers and their families, You are the hundredfold granted as was promised!

And also you, my last-minute friend, who will not have known what you were doing: Yes, I want this THANK YOU and this GOODBYE to be a “GOD-BLESS” for you, too, because in God’s face I see yours. May we meet again as happy thieves in Paradise, if it please God, the Father of us both.

AMEN !   INCHALLAH !

Algiers, 1^st December 1993
Tibhirine, 1^st January 1994

Christian +

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So this is love

Elizabeth Scalia pointed me to this poignant post about giving, loss and faith.

I was going to have to experience great pain and sacrifice without expectation of gaining anything for myself.  I also recalled my husband’s words, meant in jest at the time, that to be friends with God usually involves much suffering, if the lives of the saints are any guide. We teased each other about not getting “too holy” in order to avoid any special attention or unusual blessings we might receive. In truth, I thought our lives were pretty darned perfect, what with a happy and stable Catholic marriage, a steady job for me and a law degree on the horizon for my husband. That we had conceived our little Paloma on the first try was more icing on the cake.  We wondered — sometimes together, sometimes privately – what God would choose to bring us by way of a cross. Can one truly draw close to the Lord’s Eucharistic heart without first suffering and dying with him?So this is our first big cross. So this is love.

I’ll lay my cards on the table and say that the article really resonated with me. I’ve stood where she is. I’ve learnt what she is learning; and when I forget, life comes round and gives me the opportunity to learn it again.

While I might argue with some of her language – I think nasty things happen because that’s the way the world works, and it’s not about God choosing to make it happen – I can’t argue with the truth that good things come from willingly taking up the cross that is ours to carry.

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God and plate tectonics

This was posted by Fr Frank Breen, a Maryknoll priest, shortly after the Haiti earthquake:

Plate tectonics have been around for at least four billion years and they have been indispensable for enabling the evolution of the huge diversity that we have on our planet.

As the continents move around on top of the molten material below them, different genera and species evolve along very different lines on each continent. Life-shattering incidents, such as the K-2 asteroid collision 65 million years ago that led to the extinction of almost every species of dinosaur, do not destroy all forms of life on earth because of biodiversity. Plate tectonics, which have as unfortunate side effects, earthquakes and tsunamis, have been one of the indispensable elements that have made planet earth a very rare planet with complex animal species and an intelligent species (I am referring to homo sapiens here, in case he thought I was talking about ants or cows), and perhaps the only planet in our galaxy or universe with such species.

We have already discovered over 400 planets revolving around stars within 1000 light years of our own solar system and so far, none have given evidence of the many circumstantial but extremely fortuitous elements that planet earth has been endowed with. (Or what is the word we should use here: ‘blessed with’, or ‘graced with’? Those who have a mechanistic understanding of God may prefer religious words regarding the evolution of earth; I prefer not to use words implying supernatural causes of natural events.)

If Henry thinks that the Haiti earthquake or the Indonesia tsunami were bad, he should have been around about 4.2 billion years ago when earth collided with another planet almost as big. That planet left behind its molten core on earth, and began revolving around earth. We call it the moon. The moon does tremendous things to help earth evolve and maintain biodiversity, such as its instrumentality in tidal forces, which 500 million years ago helped evolve aquatic species to gradually become land based species, over a period of millions of years. The moon also helps stabilize the earth’s tilt and rotation, keeping earth a stable planet that life can live on and continue evolving greater biodiversity.

There are many other things we can learn from science. Before asking simplistic religious questions, we should understand science.

What is the religious question? Scientists have known for some time that an earthquake was due in Haiti, an area called a Zone of Fire. So why were so many Haitians living, schooling and working in buildings that could not withstand an earthquake? Poverty is of course, one obvious answer, maybe corruption another. There is enormous corruption in Kenya. When an earthquake strikes Nairobi (actually I don’t know if Nairobi is in an area prone to large earthquakes), and many buildings fall down, will people blame God, or more rightly blame the corruption that enabled so many people to live in poorly built buildings?

Regarding earthquakes: there is a 99.7 percent chance that a big earthquake will strike southern California in the United States sometime in the next thirty years. In other words, it is definitely going to happen. God will not cause this earthquake. Have Californians built buildings that will withstand this huge earthquake? Only time will tell.

The ethical questions for Kenya are: how can we eliminate corruption from society? How can we make inroads into the ever-growing poverty that is ruining the social fabric in Kenya? How can we make politics responsive to the needs of the countless numbers of average Kenyans? Is growing inequality in Kenya a major factor in the facts of increasing poverty, entrenched corruption, and unresponsive, insensitive politics?

Another religious question concerns life and death. Is death bad? All life in fact depends on death. Food comes from organic material that has died. Without other species dying, our species can not live. (There are many questions regarding how humans obtain food, such as overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, overuse of fossil fuels in growing, processing, and transporting food, and humane or inhumane methods of raising animals for human food. But I will not address these here.)

Life and death is broader than even this. Galaxies that go out of existence give life to new galaxies. It is the same with stars and solar systems. Our own solar system will go out of existence in about five billion years, in probably a supernova explosion. This will give life to new solar systems that are beginning at that time. (Not biological life, but the atoms and molecules of all the physical elements, which may eventually evolve into biological life on some other lucky planet.)

What meaning does the death of 50,000 to 100,000 Haitians have for us? If it does not bring about the resolve of the international community to enter into a full and caring partnership with the Haitian people to create a new society on that island, the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, then their deaths will have no meaning.

If the international community provides not only relief and medical care, and homes for orphans, but also a true re-structuring of the economy of that country, of its social fabric, of its politics, then maybe we can say that somehow the earthquake was some form of mysterious way in which we humans were being called to repentance and to God-like action.

Once we are talking about mystery, we have no answers. A mystery is something that can not be known. God is Mystery. God’s ways are unfathomable.

Atheists will see what they want to see. They will be scornful, derisory, and cynical. Believers will see the hand of God calling us to repentance, to compassion, to solidarity with the poorest and to hear the Word of God, and Act on It.

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It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it…

I was playing around with another post on the existence of the soul. I was going to line up the various options we’ve discussed, from the concept that ‘soul’ is just another name for ‘life force’ through to the concept that our ‘soul’ is the real us, and the body is just a temporary home. (Neither of these is the Catholic teaching, by the way.)

Then I came across a post of DarwinCatholic’s, which seems to address part of the issue, so I’m posting some of that, instead:

Darwin talks about a scientist who believes we can create a potentially unlimited labour source by scanning people’s brains and downloading them into a computer (whole-brain emulation). Darwin asks:

Why should we believe that the sum and total of what you can physically scan in the brain is all there is to know about a person? Why shouldn’t we think that there’s something else to the “mind” than just the parts of the brain and their current state? Couldn’t there be some kind of will which is not materially detectable and is what is causing the brain to act the way it is?

The scientist replies that we’ve been looking, and we’ve never found anything. Darwin again:

When we say, “Physicists have done all this work, and all they’ve ever found is matter and energy,” you are really saying, “Given the tools and methodology physicists use, all they are able to detect is matter and energy.” But I’m not clear how getting from that to, “Therefore there is nothing other than matter and energy,” is anything other than an assumption.

Is there any valid reason why we should accept the jump from, “Tools that scientists use to detect things can only detect the existence of material things,” to “Only material things exist”?

This seems particularly troublesome given that the project here is supposedly to create an emulation program which can be given a brain scan and then act like an independent human. If our experience of being human is that there is something in the driver seat, something which decides what is beautiful or what is right or who to marry or whether we want rice pudding for lunch today, then unless there is some active, non-deterministic thing within the brain which can be measured by this scan, then what you get is going to be, for lack of a better word, dead.

Read the whole thing and let me know what you think.

 

 

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John Paul II to be beatified on Divine Mercy Sunday

The Vatican has announced that John Paul II is to be beatified.

Catholic Culture has the details.

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Original sin and original grace

I’ve been enjoying an off-line discussion on the origins of humankind, and I want to share some of it with you.

My correspondent is questioning the Catholic teaching that all humankind is descended from a single human couple who failed in some test and passed the consequences of this failure on to their descendants.

Here’s her summary of the key points of conflict between the Adam and Eve story and science:

• a single human couple who sinned against God vs  science can’t say anything about this
• this couple lived in isolation with no other humans anywhere on the earth vs human population never dropped below some ten thousand
• all humanity is descended ONLY from this couple vs the matrilinial and patrilinial most recent common ancestors lived some 70,000+ years apart AND examination of the human genome shows we are descended from a much larger pool of ancestors. There is NO evidence of a early ancestor couple and plenty of evidence that there was NOT a single couple.
• the effects of the sin have been passed that on to all their descendants vs again, science doesn’t have much to say about this apart from the fact that the ancestor pool was never as small as a single couple (so perhaps original grace was passed on too from those ancestors who didn’t sin?! LOL!).

I pointed her to my speculative attempt to reconcile these points. She came back with seven quotes from me followed by her questions. I’ll get to them all over the next few weeks, but here is the first, and it’s a doozy:

“Adam and Eve failed in a task God gave them – a metahistorical event we call ‘the Fall’. “
–> Any thoughts on what the nature of this ‘task’ was to merit so severe a consequence? It seems quite out of proportion. Perhaps God was taking a break from being merciful that day and instead putting all his efforts into exploring the wrathful side of his divine nature? LOL!

This is too big a topic for one post.

For this post, I’d like to tease out two points. The first is to do with the nature of the prelapsarian state; the second with what we mean by original sin. Later, we can look at what the actual task might have been, following the thoughts of various Jewish and Christian commenters.

A word before we start – these are my preliminary ideas: I hope to develop them further with your help.

What was the prelapsarian state?

I love that word ‘prelapsarian’. Pre=before; lapse=the fall – prelapsarian=existing before the fall.

According to Catholic tradition, God gifted Adam and Eve with four privileges. These were the complete mastery of their will, passions and instincts; exemption from death; sanctifying grace; and the vision of God in the next life. Sanctifying grace unites us with God; it is a permanent tendency to turn towards God. Before the fall, then, Adam and Eve were ‘full of grace’.

Note that these were gifts. Adam and Eve did not have an entitlement to them. Further, they were not (yet) natural to humans, as intelligence, humour, story-telling, and an appreciation of beauty are natural.

To make these gifts part of themselves; to accept them and make them inheritable; the first couple (I’m using the term ‘first’ in the royal sense of the word) needed to co-operate with grace and freely choose to do something simply because God told them to. Is this as petty as my correspondent fears? We’ll come back to that point.

What is original sin?

Just before Christmas, Richard Dawkins published a comment in which he lambasted the Pope and the Church for the pernicious doctrine that we were all born guilty of sin. It’s a common misunderstanding, and one that I think results from changes in language as well as from some of the robust language of the early Fathers.

The Church draws a firm line between actual sins – the sins we ourselves commit – and original sin – the hereditary condition of human kind. We are guilty of – culpable for – the first. We are not culpable for the second. There is a sense (clearer to those who think in terms of community responsibility) in which the actions of the head of the community are the responsibility of all members of the community – that is, we are part of the whole of humankind, and so bear a part in both the sinful act of Adam and the redeeming act of Christ. But we can’t be blamed for the first or credited with the second.

Hence, Catholic doctrine supposes no punishment for children who die in a state of original sin. They have done nothing to be punished for. Until recently, the Church has commonly supposed that such children are deprived of the sight of God – one of the four prelapsarian gifts to which we are not entitled. However, most modern thinkers agree with those of the Fathers who held that – while baptism is the only way to Heaven – baptism of desire counts, and God can baptise who He will, before death or after.

Adam’s action deprived us of those four prelapsarian gifts. We are not masters of our will, passion, and instincts. We are not exempt from death. We are born without sanctifying grace. We are not entitled to the vision of God in the next life. So does baptism restore all four gifts when it removes original sin? No, clearly not.  Baptism gives us access to the sanctifying grace we need to achieve mastery and the vision of God, and life after death, but it doesn’t put us back into the prelapsarian state. In our current state, we suffer from concupiscence – concupiscence being a desire of the lower appetite contrary to reason. Concupiscence is not itself a sin, but giving into it often leads to sin.

We are not responsible for the sin of Adam any more than we are responsible for our parents’ decision to settle in the town where we were born. But we are born in that town nonetheless.

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Patron saint for 2011

A couple of times during 2010 I’ve noticed conversations about the custom of choosing a patron saint for the year – or, as several commenters put it, letting a patron saint chose you.

As far as I have been able to find out, the modern custom is based on an excerpt from St Faustina’s diary:

“There is a custom among us of drawing by lot, on New Year’s Day, special Patrons for ourselves for the whole year. In the morning, during meditation, there arose within me a secret desire that the Eucharistic Jesus be my special Patron for this year also, as in the past. But, hiding this desire from my Beloved, I spoke to Him about everything else but that. When we came to refectory for breakfast, we blessed ourselves and began drawing our patrons. When I approached the holy cards on which the names of the patrons were written, without hesitation I took one, but I didn’t read the name immediately as I wanted to mortify myself for a few minutes. Suddenly, I heard a voice in my soul: ‘I am your patron. Read.’ I looked at once at the inscription and read, ‘Patron for the Year 1935 – the Most Blessed Eucharist.’ My heart leapt with joy, and I slipped quietly away from the sisters and went for a short visit before the Blessed Sacrament,where I poured out my heart. But Jesus sweetly admonished me that I should be at that moment together with the sisters. I went immediately in obedience to the rule.”
Excerpt from “Divine Mercy in My Soul, the Diary of St. Faustina”

There are several sites on the Internet that offer to draw you a patron saint and send you the name. But in the busy rush up to Christmas, I’d forgotten all about the custom. Thanks, then, to the Anchoress, who linked to Jennifer Fulweiler‘s online Patron Saint Generator.

Here’s what one of the other sites suggests:

…take time to research your saints so you get to know them better and then you will be able to recognize the connections and intercessions that you and your saint will share. The more sites that you can go to, the more you will learn. I also suggest that you treat your patron as a friend and confidante. Talk to your saint. Tell them your wants, your troubles, your fears, etc…Ask them to intercede for you. Most of all, listen to your saint … ask them to open your eyes and mostly your heart to what they have in store for you during this yearly walk with them.They may have chosen YOU as an intercessor for THEM and for what they stand for … in other words, maybe they want you to pray for people who are bearing certain crosses or they may want you to pray for priests or any of the number of things that they are patrons of. Perhaps they possessed a quality that they would like to see blossom in you and they are going to be there to help you do that. Or they could have lacked a certain quality that you are strong in and they will help you help others grow in that particular quality or talent. These are only suggestions on how to look at your saint. Most importantly , they will help you to grow spiritually, if you allow them to help you.

As you’ll see from my sidebar, Jennifer’s nifty generator linked me with St Josephina Bakhita. I’ve been finding out about her, and will post her story shortly. Why not give it a try, and please let us know about your saint for 2011.

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Commercialising reproduction

In New Zealand, parents who have struggled to conceive are complaining about an ad for one of our leading banks. In the 60-second ad, a photogenic couple struggling to conceive sell their vintage car to fund IVF, and then, when that fails, borrow money from the bank for another cycle which culminates in triplets. Overseas, ads by fertility clinics for clients and donors have also come under fire.

This set me thinking about some other campaigns that have received some publicity: those for reproductive rights (generally a code word for abortion) and family planning clinics (read planning to have a small or no family).

Now it’s a bit of an exaggeration to say that ads always cluster where the money is. But certainly, if I see an industry working hard and spending lots of money to put its product in front of the public, I think it is fair to ask whether they’re doing it to benefit the public, or to benefit the industry.

I don’t want to talk today about the rights and wrongs of abortion, contraception, IVF, or any of the other reproductive technologies that are on offer in our Brave New World.

I do want to talk about how a simple function of our animal natures has become a major money spinner for our capitalist economies.

Having babies is not a consumer activity

Long ago, women had babies with support from their women relatives and friends – not a good commercial model, but quite good for the women as long as everything proceeded as normal. Because it didn’t always do so, some women developed specialist skills in helping babies to be born. Recently in our history, doctors got involved. At first, things took a turn for the worse, since doctors often came straight to the delivery bed from someone else’s sick bed, and killed the mother with the bacteria they brought. But eventually they started to wash their hands, and the maternal mortality rate dropped. General anaesthesia brought another drop in maternal mortality, and so did better nutrition for and monitoring of mothers. Then, in the late 19th Century in much of Europe and the 1920s and 30s in Britain and its colonies, the fashion for medical interference in naturally progressing births gave way to a hands off approach, and highly effective antibiotics were introduced to deal with infection, and mortality in the upper and professional classes dropped to below the level of mortality in the lower classes for the first time in over a century.

Which brings us to the mid 20th century, by which time a woman’s chance of dying in childbirth was around 50 times less than it would have been 30 years earlier. My grandmother had seven children in an age that saw as many as 75 women die per 10,000 births. My mother began having children at a time when her risk of dying was six in 10,000 births. Twenty-five years later, my own children were born in a cottage hospital and death in childbirth was nearly unknown (fewer than two per 10,000 births, similar to today’s rates).

How to make money out of reproduction in nine easy steps

I’m not suggesting some capitalist plot, much though I like the image of a shadowy group of moguls in a secret boardroom high in a tower lost among a forest of sidescrapers moving their cigars to one side of their mouth in order to ask each other: “If women are going to conceive, how can we make a dollar on it?” Nonetheless, I have no doubt that each of the elements below has commercial drivers, or that those who make money from these elements would fight tooth, claw, and legislative amendment to keep it.

1. Remedicalise childbirth. Make Caesarians a designer choice. Insist on regular foetal scans ‘to protect baby’s health’. Office and lounge furniture manufacturers will co-operate by encouraging women to sit in unnatural postures that mitigate against the baby coming head first.
2. Encourage women to delay childbirth, but not sexual experience. Sell them treatments designed to make them more sexually attractive, medication and other devices to prevent them from conceiving, and anti-depressants to cope with the emotional fallout.
3. When women conceive despite the contraceptives, sell them the idea that the problem can be dissolved medically through an abortion, and that it is their ‘right’ to do so.
4. As women who have delayed childbirth into their thirties meet the issue of drastically reduced fertility, sell expensive treatments designed to produce babies after several expensive tries. If need be, employ surrogates.
5. Note that 3 makes 4 a more attractive option, by reducing the number of babies available for adoption. Make it even more attractive by convincing people that adoption is bad for children, and it is better to kill them first.
6. Sell more antidepressants.
7. Convince women that they are being self-indulgent if they stay home to raise their own children, and are contributing to society if they pay for childcare, a cleaner, and afterschool programmes.
8. When marriages break under the pressure of these ‘reproductive strategies’, sell each partner their own house, car, furniture etc (as well as their own lawyer). With luck, the children will be so messed about that they will each need their own psychiatrist.
9. If people insist on having babies despite all these discouragements, convince them that their babies will not be healthy and happy without expensive designer baby gear, training, opportunities, and medical supplies.

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Bishop John Cunneen RIP

Born 5 May 1932; died 11 November 2010

Eternal rest grant unto him o Lord and let perpetual light shine upon him

May he rest in peace. Amen.

A full obituary and details of the requiem Masses are here.

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