Bless

Someone told me that in high school the janitor once reprimanded him in the hallway over something stupid he was doing. That he would get chastised in such a way infuriated him, for whatever reason (certainly not because he was never chastised at home - on the contrary), and he nursed the adolescent fire of his anger over it.

A couple weeks later the janitor was driving along a rural road; ahead of him the wheels of a dump truck kicked up one of those small sized manhole covers - approximately seven inches in diameter and half as thick - and it went through the janitor's windshield and took his head off.

Not too long after this, again getting reprimanded in the hallway, this time by the principal, he fell to brooding resentment, burning with anger. Exactly a week later the principal died in his sleep.

He told me that after this, he never again got angry. Of course, he did not mean that he never again felt the emotion of anger, but that he never again chose to nurse a grudge or stew in resentment. And I believed him.

Whether he actually believed that his wrath cursed the two adult men and caused their deaths or not is beside the point, for what is certain and beyond coincidence, and what caused him to change (or more accurately, to grow up), is that he saw the ultimate end of his anger in their untimely deaths - and it made him afraid. It put fear and the dread of sin in his heart. He turned away from it.

Strangely, one of the things that causes people to get angry at other people is that they care too much about what other people think of them. This produces a mockery of social interaction wherein people place the worth of their dignity at the whims of fickle human nature in others, seeking confirmation in their apparent lights.

It reminds me how little resentment is based in truth, in reality. In fact, to resent is to insist upon a falsehood: that the you who is demanding this recompensation in whatever form, is the real you. When in fact, that you is a shadow of yourself. I am not intoning Jung. I simply mean the self that is unreal, that is not who you really are, like a shadow.

When you bless people, you grow. When you nurse a grudge, which is to say, when you entertain a curse, you do nothing but hurt yourself, as you shrink into the state of the Inadequate Midget. Which in turn, does nothing but cause more resentment.

Why do you shrink or diminish when you curse? Simply in that you have allowed yourself to become a person who curses, or who interiorly entertains cursing's kissing cousin, resentment.

Why do you grow when you bless? Because God blesses. Cursing is the Devil's business.

Immediately what comes to mind is the image of someone pietistically suppressing anger and pretending to have good feelings towards others. But really to choose to bless instead of curse is extremely practical. It is to remain in, or be released into, the joyful pain of reality; while insisting on resentment is the endless mental anguish of a fantasy world.

It is about getting your will straight, and sticking to it, and making your sticking to it the prayer, the potential cause, however small, of other people's blessings and not bad happening to them, and letting that ride roughshod over the piping voice of insecurity, or the outraged voice resenting disrespect, or the worrywart voice of being seen falsely.

If anger, brooding, resentment, bitterness, really starts choking you, say out loud, as prayer, and say it out loud, "Oh God, I don't want to be this person! Please bless..." It's about getting out of yourself, using the intent to pray for others as the key that gains you that refreshing exit. Leave the Spirit of the World which seeks to remove and tarnish your dignity making you think you need to please other people in order to have true worth.

Your prayer becomes: whatever it is I want others to recognize in me - namely my dignity and inherent worth - I put away, in your hands God, for that is yours; I won't bother with that, and anyways I am wretched without you, and moreover, I should earn their spite for my sins; and anyways they don't even know me that well, and instead I ask blessings for them and abundance in good things and health and well-being, length of days and increase to their gifts, holiness of life and conversion from sin.

And that should be our prayer for everyone all the time.

As for any who would bring up the cursing of the barren fig tree, or the litany of denunciations that Jesus leveled against the Pharisees as though that might be an "Au contraire, Mr. Stilwell" - well, actually, take it up with Jesus who asked the forgiveness of those who were torturing and killing him, because He came down to die for them that they would have life in abundance.

"But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire." --Matthew 5:22

 "Bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you." --Luke 6:28

"When Solomon grew old his wives swayed his heart to other gods; and his heart was not wholly with Yahweh his God as his father David's had been." --First Kings 11:4

Duty Bound

Duties are the basic stepping stones that put one in touch with life, if you actually perform and fulfill them. I don't understand how spontaneity has come to be thought of as opposed to duties, or as an escape from them, or as something stiffled by them. The spontaneous impulse has always been at the heart of choosing to do my duties, while forming plans for them has always kept me from actually doing them. Plans impose, and what imposes tends to paralyze.

The understanding that doing one thing leads to doing another, and that you can only do one thing at a time, has a great power to accomplishing much more than you thought. Pairing a basic attitude of seeing to what's at hand with silencing one's thoughts is a key to moving towards some higher aim; there is also that animal instinct to do something simply to get it out of the damn way.

There is a meeting with life that must take place for one to really live - an encounter, that is always encountering. It's not showy; it's certainly not glamorous. This basic encounter with life is constituted in doing our duties. Show me a person who shirks doing his duties and I'll show you someone who buries life like a corpse in a grave, again and again. Show me a person who does his duties with deliberation and I'll show you a living contemplative.

The deadly sin of sloth - Lord, of sloth, do we hear of this deadly, deadly sin anymore? perhaps only from the Pope (and a handful of others) - is a sin of willful alzheimers, of willful amnesia. For we perform acts that make us remember. We do not just remember. The link has such union that one cannot merely say that performing acts triggers memory, but is its constitution. When we are not performing those most basic acts that constitute the encounter with life that keeps real memory alive, and not it's facsimile - well, you can understand why St. Thomas Aquinas said that laziness is a kind of sadness.

One wonders if it is that same sadness that is felt in the face of someone losing their memory - say, a husband witnessing his wife no longer recognizing him in old age. The latter deterioration is not that person's fault, but laziness pathological and otherwise can be construed as having the same sadness about it, but deliberately wrought. It is a deadly sin.

(Certainly this is part of the reason why the elderly frequently lose their memory, partly or mostly: not simply because their minds are dwindling, or their brain cells are diminishing, but because they retire and become inert.)

What gives me joy is to know that union with Jesus leads to a strengthening of the link between act and remembering. How real Jesus becomes when you "hear" him nudging you - not with force, but with his own life - towards fulfilling things at hand, little or otherwise, your duties. Anyone who says outright or implies that the spiritual leads away from the mundane - rather than enters into and transforms the mundane - is a fraud.

Sloth is also a kind of demon hoarder, whose hoarding devalues everything it receives. It's not really the same as greed which overvalues in grasping after more, and has a nasty sort of leanness about it. Greed can at least have the fire of ambition behind it. Sloth is more scarily omniscient. Shaking off acedia seems daunting precisely for this reason. It's a stubborn old bastard that refuses to respond to life.

And here is a good way to understand the word "duty" or "duties". They are everything and anything that is a response to life. Life with all of its "details" - we think of them as details, it's weird. Because God accepts the response and builds with it, no matter how little or tedious. Here is where Sloth raises its ugly countenance: upon the realization that this response is constituted in something very much of the minute, of the moment, right here and right now - that now is an acceptable time and that this moment like every other moment truly constitutes the drama that is your life. Dishes, laundry, cleaning of various kinds, diapers, dust, papers to organize, phone calls to make, etc.

Frequently when I drive by one of those public storage facilities - you know those places that people rent; high security box warehouses storing people's possessions - when I drive by these places - and there seem to be many of them - I think of how everything inside of them, everything, be it bags of cash or gold or lamborghinis - all of it - is just a bunch of crap. Total, utter crap. I feel the useless, square foot, sluggard dust of it all. Crap, crap, crap - all of it crap.

You understand the flip side of those admonitions of Jesus and the saints then? Those reminders that your extra pants and extra coats belong to the poor. The flip side is this: the hoarding of your extra pants and extra coats is not only to deprive the poor, but it's doubly sinful in that it devalues your extra coats and your extra pants. Whatever is hoarded is turned into crap.

The same applies to withholding your life from encountering the duties of life.

So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, 'We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.' --Luke 17:10

Heart this interview segment so much

ROFL!

"The planet has enough food for all, but it seems that there is a lack of willingness to share it with everyone." --Pope Francis, homily for the general assembly of Caritas Internationalis.

Great words from the Holy Father

I say this not to scare you, but simply to say that our life is today: now or never. I think of this: tomorrow will be the eternal tomorrow that never sets, with the Lord forever – if I am true to this day; and the question that I put to you is the same the Holy Spirit is putting to all of us, i.e. 'How ought I to live, this day?'

'Today' is played out in our hearts. Are our hearts opened to the Lord? To me it always strikes me when I find an older person – often priests or nuns – who tell me, 'Father, pray for my final perseverance' – 'But, you did well all your life long, all the days of your 'today' are in the service of the Lord, and still you are afraid?' 'No, no, my life has not yet waned: I want to live it fully, I pray that the day arrives full, full, with a heart strong in faith, and not ruined by sin, vices, corruption.'

Today does not repeat itself: this is life – and the heart, the open heart, open to the Lord, not closed, not hard, not hardened, not without faith, not perverted, not deceived by sin. The Lord has met so many of these, who had closed their hearts: the doctors of the law, all these people who persecuted Him, put Him to the test to convict Him – and in the end they managed to do it. We go home with these two words only: how is my 'today'? The sunset can be today, this day or many days later. But how are you, my today, in the presence of the Lord? And how is my heart? Is it open? Is it firm in the faith? Is it led by the Lord? With these two questions we ask the Lord for the grace to which each of us needs. --Pope Francis, Homily 1/12/17

We on our own cannot handle it

Good video from Bishop Barron on the strangeness of the cross.





Making Christianity respectable is not a prerogative, nor a commission.

Always remember that the authorities arrested him, but not before falling on their faces before him. He became sin for us; there was nothing in his countenance that we should regard him. Yet he was completely in charge, the one who went before and led the way.


Aside: I tend to align with the tradition that says that Mother Mary used her veil to protect the modesty of her son after he was stripped. Could be historically otherwise of course.

To be self-centered is to incapacitate yourself

An amazing paradox. The more self-centered a person is the more incapable they become of carrying out their own responsibilities. This works conversely: seeing to our own responsibilities and to our own duties carries us out of ourselves, and we become aware and sensitive to others.

The failure to carry out one's own responsibilities is not just a failure; it becomes the way of one's life; it is to live irresponsibly. There is one kind of person who lives irresponsibly: the one who is incapacitated. He may be strong - mentally, physically, and seemingly spiritually, but with regards to the most mundane forms of justice, of doing what ought to be done because it is right, he is a total midget.

The world is full to brimming with such people. They conjure up the most fantastic entitlements to themselves but cannot meet the most simple demands of one's ordinary duties.

To live responsibly is to live. The more responsible that a person becomes, the more duties he has to meet; because the more of life that he meets with. A person becomes "just".

Hence another paradox: duties well performed become a kind of love affair - very different from what we imagine when we think of the word "duty".

Euthanasia is an intrinsic evil

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

Euthanasia

2276 Those whose lives are diminished or weakened deserve special respect. Sick or handicapped persons should be helped to lead lives as normal as possible.

2277 Whatever its motives and means, direct euthanasia consists in putting an end to the lives of handicapped, sick, or dying persons. It is morally unacceptable.
Thus an act or omission which, of itself or by intention, causes death in order to eliminate suffering constitutes a murder gravely contrary to the dignity of the human person and to the respect due to the living God, his Creator. The error of judgment into which one can fall in good faith does not change the nature of this murderous act, which must always be forbidden and excluded. 
 
2278 Discontinuing medical procedures that are burdensome, dangerous, extraordinary, or disproportionate to the expected outcome can be legitimate; it is the refusal of "over-zealous" treatment. Here one does not will to cause death; one's inability to impede it is merely accepted. The decisions should be made by the patient if he is competent and able or, if not, by those legally entitled to act for the patient, whose reasonable will and legitimate interests must always be respected. 
 
2279 Even if death is thought imminent, the ordinary care owed to a sick person cannot be legitimately interrupted. The use of painkillers to alleviate the sufferings of the dying, even at the risk of shortening their days, can be morally in conformity with human dignity if death is not willed as either an end or a means, but only foreseen and tolerated as inevitable Palliative care is a special form of disinterested charity. As such it should be encouraged. 

 
Suicide
 
2280 Everyone is responsible for his life before God who has given it to him. It is God who remains the sovereign Master of life. We are obliged to accept life gratefully and preserve it for his honor and the salvation of our souls. We are stewards, not owners, of the life God has entrusted to us. It is not ours to dispose of.

2281 Suicide contradicts the natural inclination of the human being to preserve and perpetuate his life. It is gravely contrary to the just love of self. It likewise offends love of neighbor because it unjustly breaks the ties of solidarity with family, nation, and other human societies to which we continue to have obligations. Suicide is contrary to love for the living God.

2282 If suicide is committed with the intention of setting an example, especially to the young, it also takes on the gravity of scandal. Voluntary co-operation in suicide is contrary to the moral law. Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide.

2283 We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives.

Happy Solemnity of Mary, Theotokos!

And happy New Year!



Yeah, the song either makes you kind of happy or it makes you kind of queasy. Sorry if it makes you queasy. When Knopfler's geetar starts up it makes me kind of happy - as in driving a rusted-out pick-up truck and doing a lawn-job in front of parliament happy.