Advent wrath [sic]

But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. “I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
~Matthew 3:7-10, from the Gospel reading for 2nd Sunday of Advent

Who are we to "flee from the wrath to come"? The Forerunner speaks of God's wrath not as something we're saved from, but as the very thing that will save those who repent. The Eastern church is right about this. The West views God's wrath mostly as vindictive, retributive punishment which we are saved FROM by some forensic transaction in which Christ's blood is merely the payment. This is why Catholics have so few concrete teachings or examples of a LIFE of repentance since we think of repentance as a transaction for the confession booth. Repentance as transaction renders John's call into little more than a pro forma hat tip or a weapon to be used on the Other (Jews, Muslims, non-believers, non-Catholics, everyone but ourselves). As Protestant and Catholic, I always felt repentance seemed superfluous to those who are already saved or absolved; if we're saved from divine wrath, what do we need to repent for?

But to the Eastern church, God's wrath is simply the hard edge of God's light, but it is not modeled after human, pagan wrath. God's wrath exposes, chastens, purifies, cleanses, cauterizes, heals, emancipates, even deifies. Like all of God's energies and operations, God's wrath is Good because it is of God who loves mankind, as the Eastern church prays over and over again. No epistemological voluntarism here: God's wrath is not good just because God says so, as if divine cruelty and bloodthirst are good by arbitrary definition. It's good because it's not cruel or bloodthirsty because God is not cruel or bloodthirsty. The only thing that makes divine wrath so hard and terrifying to us is sin in us. The West has made God's wrath into the problem we must solve or be saved from, when in actuality His wrath is the solution. Sin as that which alienates us from the divine life in us experiences God as wrath. So wrath is the enemy of sin. So if the enemy of my enemy is my friend, then divine wrath is my friend.

Divine wrath calls us to repentance because that's the natural human response to it. Flight from divine wrath is flight from God right back into the arms of sin. A life of repentance unites us with the good wrath of God, separates us from the life of sin, liberates us from slavery to our passions, not to remove a juridical sentence hanging over us, but to prepare us for deification, to restore the image and likeness of God in us, to make us men in full again. To be Christian is to incline one's heart to the wrath of God like leaves incline towards the sun. How much more are we to anticipate the coming of the Sun of Righteousness? This is why ascesis is necessary in Advent. The West has lost all sense of ascetic preparation and anticipation for the Nativity because the modern Church has watered down John's call to repentance into a nice story befitting pastel-colored candle wreaths, sentimental dioramas, and cute kids dressing up as Joseph and Mary like it's Halloween.

The Peepees

Fr. Tom Hopko has often spoken of the Peepees as a neat summary of the temptations of Christ in the wilderness that we must renounce if we are to follow Him: power, prestige, position, possession, and pleasure.

I see another set of adjectival Peepees lately infecting me and a lot of today's uber-Catholics: priggish, peevish, petulant, polemical, pedantic, pretentious, and pompous. These are not cute peccadilloes or personality flourishes that can be laughed off as the marks of a Chesterbellockian curmudgeon-saint. They just make us pathetic. Hey, there goes another peepee.

"I grew up Catholic, and I was going to church hungry and I would leave starving."

I used to respond to these sorts of sentiments with dismissive slogans and nerdy references like "crappy catechesis" or "Christ in the Eucharist is the True Bread from which we will no longer hunger" or "Americanization of Catholics" or "Robert Bellah's Sheilaism," etc. Now I realize how I had it all wrong. The more honest I am with myself, the more I have to agree that this line sadly but aptly describes my experience of the modern church ever since I converted.

Not that I deny or reject the content of any of these slogans or concepts. But I have come to realize they do not speak for themselves or stand alone apart from the human person. Christian truth is not a slogan or a proposition existing in some alternate Platonic realm of ideas or even in some "mind of God" separate from our reality. The truth that sets us free and truly heals us is found in this reality, in persons who are personally in Christ, in those who personally partake in Christ from within the heart. The truth comes from the inner being of a man, so it's just as much the vibe, energy, aura, subtext, and emotion we give off as it is in the content of the ideas or words we communicate. As the Fathers implied, the truth is enhypostatic.

So I disagree when I hear Catholicons quip, after they've privately and with self-congratulatory pomp thrashed the arguments and sentiments of non-Catholicons, "I'm being a bastard, but it's the truth..." It's as if St. Jerome and Chesterton at their most pugnacious have become the model of Catholic orthodoxy.

There really can be no separation between the ideas or words we profess and who we are as persons in Christ. If I am a cruel or arrogant man or speak in a cruel or arrogant manner, all the doctrinal orthodoxy I profess intellectually alone is rendered null and void. If the demons can know and speak the truth about Christ, then perhaps I should be more careful with my grip of the truth of Christ lest I join their ranks.

So when Christ says "I am the Truth," it means we abide in the truth only to the extent we are personally dying Christ's death in order to live Christ's life, not just ritually (often confused for sacramentally) but actually. If we act in an un-Christlike way, that's not just another forgivable offense or charming foible (moralistic attitude towards sin). We're not just being "who we are" with all our imperfections which God loves anyway because His Son paid the debt already (quasi-heretical Christology). To act in a un-Christlike way may be unavoidable in this valley of tears, but it is NOT human, or more precisely, it's not humanizing or masculating. When we do so, we're choosing to live outside of Christ. We're turning against our true nature which is Christ. We're inclining ourselves towards Death. I am betraying myself, for my identity does not begin with ME in some pre-graced state outside of Christ. My true identity IS Christ Himself and Christ in me. Yet we hear so much psychotherapeutic identity talk among Catholics, which is partly Rahner and the Jesuits' great achievement and which is why I almost always leave Mass starving these days.

Ex sese et non ex consensu Ecclesiae

For not from his Apostolic Confession does he glorify his Throne, but from his Apostolic Throne seeks to establish his dignity, and from his dignity, his Confession. The truth is the other way.

~Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs, A Reply to the Epistle of Pope Pius IX, "to the Easterns," §11, 1848

Catholic polemics

From A Word From the Desert:

The man who cries out against evil men, who does not pray for them, will never know the grace of God.

St. Silouan the Athonite +1938

Catholics tend to moralize exhortations like this, as if he's saying God merely wants us to be more charitable ideally or by force of will, like our moms wanting us to eat our vegetables. Then the legalistic approach kicks in: God's justice may punish us for not being more charitable but God knows we're nothing but sinners (in this life) and has waved the magic wand of forgiveness from the Cross because He loves us, so we don't have to sweat charity too much (in this life), especially when "speaking the truth to power" (in this life) demands forceful protest against evildoers (like that "bastard Obama"). Sometimes we have the further gall to presume Purgatory voids out all negative spiritual consequence (in the afterlife) from our lack of charity (in this life) because what's the Great Laundry Room in the Sky for if not to clean up our little sins like not being charitable enough to enemies? Often this is accompanied by giggly joking about how "I'm so going to hell." (Catholic irreverence is more often than not a disguise for cognitive dissonance.) Usually it goes completely unnoticed that this attitude is patently un-Scriptural and un-Patristic and that it's all quite cloyingly blasphemous, not to mention sophomoric. I'm not even going to get into the "two-storey universe" this attitude implies.

But St. Silouan spoke his words quite literally and without any guile. We render ourselves incapable of receiving, knowing, experiencing, becoming, participating in God, if we, like the "godless anti-Christs" we criticize, cry out against evil but never pray in the heart for evildoers. Bearing hatred on the inside for anyone is to commit murder, literally in the Kingdom. Even worse, it is murder of our own very souls because it reinforces our slavery to hatred and its many vicious kinsmen.

Sobriety and novelty

When speaking to gung-ho Western Christians today, it's hard to avoid being smacked in the face with their passionate enthusiasms and hobbyhorses, whether it's the latest church plant, the latest papal encyclical or book, the latest theological speculation or cultural fad, the latest activist, collectivist, do-gooder "movement of the Spirit."

Whether Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox, in much of Christian America there's a certain lust for the spiritual high, a yearning for a special knowledge or experience of God that only the select few are granted, a grasping for a liberation from mundane, commonplace existence, a longing to be swept up to the heavens by some new group identity. Nothing new here. Academics call it gnostic elitism or something like that.

But I've grown to appreciate the Eastern Church's emphasis on vigilant sobriety of the mind and heart. I'm deeply drawn to their quasi-instinctive resistance to fads, a resistance which, it is important to note, is not new and intimately tied to the plain teaching of Christ and the Apostles. Western traditionalists are resistant to fads only to the extent they can distinguish an old fad from a tradition, which is to say not very resistant.

At any rate, it's always good to watch Eastern Christians practice what they preach. From Orthodox media, I've heard mostly enthusiastic praise for Fr. Seraphim Rose, who has been touted as the Eastern Thomas Merton (never sure if we're supposed to take that as compliment to Rose). So it's encouraging to see intellectual sobriety applied by one Orthodox towards a specifically Orthodox phenom.

I do not promote Fr Seraphim Rose because he represents a very rigorous form of Orthodoxy that is also committed to excessive speculation, especially about the afterlife. His ideas fuel a kind of Orthodox elitism which causes people to look down on others as being not truly Orthodox.

Fr Seraphim's ideas also are taken up by those who feel they must live as radically Orthodox as possible, and startle the world with their extreme expressions of otherworldliness.

For me, the heart of Orthodoxy is Christ, and the life in Christ is the Orthodox way, following behind the Master, doing what we see Him doing, saying what He says.

.......

I said “I do not promote” Fr Seraphim Rose, and neither do I condemn him. Whether his ideas are false or true, our good and loving God knows, who holds us all tenderly and forgivingly in His hands. As for the man, I hope he is what all who follow Christ are.

His note against condemning Fr. Rose is crucial as well. The typical traditionalist will be vigilant against all deviations or extrapolations from the tradition, but he will usually be quick to judge and condemn, invariably causing an equally forceful defense and digging in of heels from the innovators.

The sobriety comes into play when we refrain from impassioned, unilateral judgment and condemnation, which only has the appearance of vigilant defense of the tradition, but remains lacking in vigilance towards one's own ego. Fidelity to tradition must be in the first place vigilant and sober against oneself.

Un-"American Beauty"

There is a different sort of beauty in the faces, places, sounds, and spaces of ancient Christians. They seem to be clothed with a different aura in contrast to the glossy, corporate smiles, the vacuous eyes, the manicured coifs, and the adulterated children of American Christianity. For a long while I've suspected the American Jesus to be Anti-Christ. We who have been baptized into the American Jesus have put on the American Jesus from whence comes "American Beauty."

Thy Will Be Done

The remedy is severe, but it needed nothing less to free us from ourselves and to storm the defensive walls of our pride.  We want to die, but to die without any pain and in full health.  We want to be tested, but only while looking on with conscious superiority to the trial.  It is a saying of the old lawyers with respect to donations: You cannot both give and keep.  We must give all or nothing when God asks it.  If we do not have courage to give, at least we can let him take.  ~Archbishop Francois Fenelon

We cannot give and keep.  But it's not a choice between the two for the Christian either, for even if we cannot give, we still cannot keep.  Refusal to give leaves only one option: to allow, to suffer, to accept, to say "Let it be" to His takings, which effectively raises "letting God" above "giving to God."  And so we honor the Blessed Virgin, not for giving God her womb as a grandiose, ego-filled gesture of "self-sacrifice" but for the smallness of her Fiat.  So we honor Christ's Fiat at Gethsemane, for his self-offering is really giving to God the Father an unconditional license to take all.  How easy and light is this burden, and yet how difficult and heavy!  The mystery of Fenelon's observation is that it may require more, not less, courage to let him take.

Political performance art

The typical way of having one’s cake and eating it too here is to say that we need to think about both government help and self-help. But in practice this too often becomes a handy way to focus on the comforts of underdoggism while genuflecting to the obvious but undramatic logic of self-direction. Wax usefully asks: “Is it possible to pursue an arduous program of self-improvement while simultaneously thinking of oneself as a victim of grievous mistreatment and of one’s shortcomings as a product of external forces?” To the extent that our ideology on race is more about studied radicalism than about a healthy brand of what Wax calls an internal locus of control, her book provokes, at least in this reader, a certain hopelessness. If she is right, then the bulk of today’s discussion of black America is performance art. Tragically, and for the most part, she is right.  ~John McWhorter in TNR

 Exhibit A:

Velimirovich on Gandhi

 Pearls wasted on swine (modern Western Christians):

Sadly, in our time, among Christians, many of these principles [fasting, prayer and silence] are disregarded, and many wonder-working mysteries are forgotten. People have started thinking that one wins only by using steel, that the hailing clouds are dispersed only by cannons, that diseases are cured only by pills, and that everything in the world can be explained simply through electricity. Spiritual and moral energies are looked upon almost as working magic.

I think that this is the reason why ever-active Providence has chosen Gandhi, an unbaptized man, to serve as a warning to the baptized, especially those baptized people who pile up one misfortune on another upon themselves and their peoples by using ruthless and harsh means.

 via Salt of the Earth

Identity crisis: church or state?

I used to find no contradiction in the concept of the Vatican being both a globally-recognized independent state on the one hand and the headquarters of the Catholic Church on the other.  The Vatican state is not the Church, nor even is the Vatican as religious institution the Church.  But with the outbreak of hostilities in Europe over pervert priests and their coverup, I'm beginning to see the huge cracks. 

The indomitable vaticanista Sandro Magister simply ignores the cracks in his coverage of the Belgian raid on Church records, without even blinking:

The searches ordered by the Belgian judiciary – called "brutal" by no less than the country's justice minister, Stefaan De Clerck – are not at all reassuring. There the Church has been considered on a par with a gang of criminals.

I guess one should expect this sort of irony when your hymnography has been emptied of pieces like "Criminal on the Cross," or has gutted the sanctoral and liturgical cycle of any significant veneration of St. Dismas.

So let me get this straight: we worship a God who did not see it beneath Him nor cried of injustice to be crucified "on a par" with vile criminals for being perfectly God and perfectly man, but we His latter-day disciples are offended that the mighty Roman Empire the Belgian police scourged and crucified without due process of law searched and seized diocesan records via judicial process on the grounds that we innocently and bravely preached the Gospel abused children in the name of Jesus Christ and have consistently covered up for our pervert priests.  If only Jesus were treated so kindly for being such a criminal perfectly righteous and blameless. 

Not only in Belgium and the United States, but a little bit everywhere, there is a growing tendency to judge the nature and organization of the Church while ignoring what it is and its unique original organizing principles, which nonetheless have entered into the best legal culture and have been recognized by internationally valid pacts. 

I almost got whiplash reading that last line.  Magister sets up a nice teaching moment with "while ignoring what it [the Church] is and its unique original organizing principles."  I was ready for a clear-eyed exposition of eucharistic ecclesiology or something.  Instead we get awkward flattery about "the best legal culture" and "internationally valid pacts."  Right.  Cuz that's precisely what Jesus purposefully availed himself of when he faced Pilate and the Sanhedrin. 

The rest of the Magister's post goes on to lecture us about the principle of sovereign immunity.  The simple syllogism here is: Vatican is a State; States have immunity; therefore Vatican has immunity.  Period, cuz international law says so and the Church has always taken shelter under the Patronage of St. Ius Gentium the Archangel.  It's like playing Truth or Dare.  Church or State?

Related: If this Wamp is Christianity in the public square, who can blame anyone for going with ardent public square secularism?

Fruit of the Beat/Hippie Generation

#1,432: "There are no more old people, only decrepit youths.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 242

Unity vs. Obedience

But the anti-canonical practices that are bewailed in "unity rhetoric" go beyond mere inconsistency: if there is any inconsistency, it lies in the fact that some jurisdictions are better at complying with the Church Canons than others. If I saw this list for the first time, without having read it first in the context of unification, I would have said, in my untutored "the-emperor-has-no-clothes-on" wit, that this list of problems must have spilled out from a departure from Tradition, or a failure of apostolic leadership – not disunity. If a funeral service in one Temple ends up with a trip to the crematorium, administrative unity is not what is needed: obedience is.
~Fr. Jonathan Tobias

I wish Catholics would get this distinction straight. Do we seek liturgical/doctrinal conformity for unity's sake or is it to grow in unity with the Fathers? Is unity from without or within? On both Catholic left and right, it seems the former is more important, hence our endless carping and strutting over what does the Pope or the prayer "really say." Administrative or jurisdictional unity is so illusory. Catholics (and apparently many Americanized Orthodox) have come to believe that unity is something that can be established, enforced, and extended by institutional, impersonal power. I now realize how this is the mind of Anti-Christ.

The Story of Having No Story

From a lecture by my (and, it seems, every other Catholic's) favorite Protestant theologian Prof. Stanley Hauerwas back in March.

Of course the problem with the story that you should have no story except the story you choose when you had no story is that story is a story that you have not chosen.

Thankfully, Hauerwas elaborates:

But Americans do not have the ability to acknowledge that they have not chosen the story that they should have no story except the story they choose when they had no story. As a result they must learn to live with decisions they made when they thought they knew what they were doing but later realized they did not know what they were doing. Of course they have a remedy when it comes to marriage. It is called divorce. They also have a remedy for children. It is called abortion.

The story that you should have no story except the story you choose when you had no story obviously has implications for how faith is understood. The story that you should have no story except the story you choose when you had no story produces people who say things such as, “I believe Jesus is Lord — but that is just my personal opinion.”

Via Ochlophobist