The Ark and The Dove

My Take on Filling Up

I was going to post this as an addendum to my comment on Thomas' thought-provoking post on marriage, but I thought I'd throw it into a new post because I wanted to make sure he'd read it. (feel free to insert the emoticon of your choice here)

Perhaps the contemplative religious life is more "perfect" because it is closer to a direct marriage to Christ here and now, whereas marriage is a sign or figure of the Church's marriage to Christ. Marriage represents the union of Christ and his Church foretold in the Apocalypse; religious life is that union.

To put it another way, a married man and woman are the ink on the pages in the Book of Revelation, and their marriage is the grammar of the sentence they form.

A religious vocation, however, is the thing actually being described when the Lamb marries his Bride.

Marriages are like living Bibles; religious vocations are the Bible come to life.

The thing being signified is always more "perfect" than the signifier.

Thus, the religious life is more "perfect" than the married life.

Of course, this doesn't answer the question Thomas asked below as to why God wants to represent things so often rather than just zapping the things themselves into our notion of reality...but it does perhaps rephrase (or refigure?) it. 

Mini-Jeremiad

It's kind of a truism by now that a lot of modern Biblical scholars prefer political theory over divine revelation. Some like to point out that the Old Testament prophets didn't need a voice from God directly telling them which way the winds were blowing in the ancient Middle East. They argue that it would have been obvious to the careful political thinker of those times that a decadent society would be easy-pickins for the nearby aggressive empires (at least, that's what they always told me in class. ). The theory is that God doesn't have to exert any supernatural influence over the hostile nations to make them his scourge; rather, the Israelites merely generate the conditions of their own destruction as a natural and logical consequence of disobeying a code of law that protects them. If you have an internal social meltdown, you have no chance against a hostile invader. Of course, in the Old Testament, the evil doers were usually optimistic, so they ignored the prophets. They didn't think they had to change their way of life because they were sure of their own strength. They ended up paying the price of their hubris.
Today, however, the decadent portion of our society has no such delusions. Rather, the same people who are telling us that we should do everything that is against moral law are also telling us that we can't help but lose to our military enemies. The same force that promotes our internal meltdown is also encouraging our military dissolution. They do not fall from too much national pride, but rather a complete lack of any national pride at all.
It doesn't take a direct voice from God to prophecy that we are in for some Babylonian smackdown unless a large portion of our nation completely reforms its way of thinking...
But how do you convince people who don't value the lives of their own unborn children and grandchildren to protect the lives of people they'll never see? How do you convince people who do not value their own dignity to protect others' ability to live in dignity? How do you teach people who do not know how to love their own nation to appreciate another's true love for their nation?

Tongue Tied

From an article by Harry R. Jackson, Jr. on Townhall.com:

In Canada, a Catholic city councilor was fined $1,000 for simply restating the church’s teaching on homosexuality. He publicly stated that a gay couple’s lifestyle was “not normal and not natural.” his personal beliefs were deemed “hate speech” under Canada's hate crimes law. (LifeSite News, January 19, 2007: Canadian City Councilor Fined $1000 for Saying Homosexuality Not Normal or Natural)

Jackson's article is about how hate crimes are curbing the freedom of religious expression. Later, he argues:

As an African American, I have long questioned the attempts of the gay community to piggy back on the legislative breakthroughs blacks have achieved in civil rights.

I'm not sure if "piggy back" was necessarily the best verb to use in this case...

Cheryl Crow on Natural Law

Her words would seem to indicate that she takes it for granted that there are at least some rights that come from God (the alternative view would be that if you have any rights it is only because the political entity in charge of you has kindly decided you should).  So she can't be all that bad.

Blog-keeping

I am somewhat embarrassed to say that although I have been blogging for several years now, I still have not invested the effort to figure out how trackbacks work.  It may have been better blog etiquette if I had tracked back to the other blogs when I link to them, but I always seem to spend the time posting rather than fiddling with the nuts and bolts.

I am always delighted, though, when people like the blog and am certainly happy to be linked to.

Square One

Via Drudge and Foxnews...

"Now, I don't want to rob any law-abiding American of his or her God-given rights, but I think we are an industrious enough people that we can make it work with only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where 2 to 3 could be required," [Sheryl Crow] wrote.

Yes, singer Sheryl Crow has, apparently in all earnestness, proposed we voluntarily take it our own hands to reduce toilet paper use to one square per visit.

Maybe they cut toilet paper squares a lot bigger where she comes from, or use some kind of really durable paper...but I think we might now have a better understanding about why Karl Rove reacted so negatively when she touched him. "Wait? You took care of business with one square only? Gross! Don't touch me with that hand!"

The Joy of Giving to Gaia

Did you send your very own Earth Mother her Goddess card today?

I hope you did.

We all know how she gets when people ignore her.

Very, very mad!

Maybe that's what's causing global warming. Gaia is getting so mad that she's fuming.

Maybe if we bought her more cards and celebrated her more often, she'd cool down a bit.

Appease the Earth Mother.

Throw your carbon-emitting car into a volcano. You could throw in a virgin or two for good measure.

Maybe she will spare us her wrath.

Filling up what is lacking

There - for the weekend I'll leave you with this musing I cobbled together the other night.

I have this idea that God's desire for the redemption of mankind includes not only the desire that all men be saved but extends even to a desire that the entirety of human life be redeemed.

Let me explain what I mean by this, if I can - you could think of this as related to a theory of the lay vocation, as well as a rather puzzling passage in Scripture.  If it has any validity, maybe it is an answer, at least in some small way to why the Church doesn't expect all of us to be contemplative monks and nuns (or the equivalent), since that is the most perfect form of life.  What if you were trying to explain this?  Perhaps you could suppose that all of us ought to, but only some of us love God enough to give everything up and do it.  But if you say this, how do you reconcile this with the fact that you can't do that unless you have the vocation to it, and God doesn't give this vocation to everyone.  In fact, most people have a vocation to some other state in life.  Do some people just get to be more special than others?  Well, yes.  Think of the Virgin Mary - only one person gets to be her.  But is there something more or besides just that God has pegged you for a less perfect vocation and that's that?  If you have a vocation, you have a mission from God, something that He has entrusted to you to do for Him, such that fulfilling it is your path to holiness.

If you acknowledge the reality of Original Sin, that most evident of Christian doctrines, you can't help but notice that in wounding human nature, it has by extension set all human activity out of order, some things more than others.

Here is a prime example of what I'm talking about: ever since Adam's fall, people have been doing marriage wrong.  In fact, on the whole, they've been wrecking it.  This beautiful idea that God had from all eternity, that not only should man not be alone, but that man and woman should have this exalted relationship that is an icon of the Holy Trinity - throughout human history, have people done it that way?  No.  I do not need to go into the manifold ways that human sexuality has been perverted and deranged and abused throughout human history.

So as God unfolds his plan of salvation, culminating in the End Times with His Holy Catholic Church, in which people have the full means, direct access in the Sacraments to the grace they need for human perfection, what does He do?  Does He just write off marriage as a loss?  As in "Well, I had a good idea, but they blew it, so just forget about it, sin wrecked my plan, so I'll just let it go."?

If you know God, you know that He never does anything by half measures.  He does it completely, thoroughly, perfectly, and superabundantly.  Does it seem likely that He would just give these things up to the devil without a fight?

What if instead of writing off marriage as a loss, He desires that it be redeemed?  Since (Plato notwithstanding) it's not a thing that exists in itself apart from its individuated existence in particular marriages, how would you go about compensating for people doing it wrong?  How about having people do it right?  Our Lord Jesus gave us an example in His life and redeemed us once and for all by His sacrifice of the Cross.  But, subject to the human condition as he humbled Himself to assume, even He couldn't do everything possible in human life.  Even He couldn't (for instance) both be celibate and beget children.  It doesn't seem, furthermore, that it was fitting for Him to do every single thing that is possible to human beings.  So even though His Passion and death suffice to redeem every single person in the entire world, yet something is "lacking," so to speak, in the redemption, some suffering and striving - because in a world broken by Original Sin, journeying toward perfection won't be comfortable and easy all the time - some suffering left for us to "fill up" in His body, the Church.

What if it's something like this: God says "Because of man's sin, sex and marriage - that I created - are in bondage to sin.  I respect the freedom I gave to human beings, but I desire that marriage and sex should serve Me.  Who will accomplish this for Me?"  And the people whose vocation is marriage say, "Yes, Lord, I will do it."  That's why 98% or so of people have the vocation to marriage.  I heard that some saints have opined that "marriage bore the brunt of original sin."  Some people think this sounds pessimistic to say this, but if this is so, doesn't it make sense then that it is fitting that there should be a lot of vocations to it so as to redeem it?

In like manner, there are many aspects of human life that are waiting to be redeemed.  Things that aren't as central to the human person as marriage, so that they don't need so many people, but that are still worth redeeming and perfecting.  Like being an oboeist, or a mathematician, or a stockbroker, or a stand-up comedian, or a guy who works in an office, or an NFL player, or a businessman, or things we haven't even invented yet.  Things, though, that God desires that rather than being for nothing or for the devil they serve Him.  And the way to do that is to do them right, that is, morally, honorably, virtuously, so that even though they aren't explicitly religious things, just doing them gives glory to God and serves Him and shows forth His goodness.

Of course this isn't a theory I'd entertain if it was contrary to any teaching of the Church.  But I think I'm on to something - I think this is what the II Vatican Council meant where it talks about the call of the laity to sanctify the world.

Re: Little contest

John is absolutely right: this passage is from the 1863 encyclical Quanto conficiamur moerore of Bl. Pope Pius IX.  In Catholic doctrine there is always a tension (not a contradiction) between the truth of the universal salvific will of God and respect for the necessity of Baptism.

When you read or hear something that seems so emphatic on the first as to make you wonder if the person has remembered about the second one and you are afraid that perhaps he is being excessively liberal, lax, modernist, or whatever, first compare it to what Bl. Pope Pius IX says.  Whether or not you count being conservative as a good thing, for one, he's a pope and a beatus besides, and for two, it is impossible (reasonably speaking) to impugn the conservative credentials of Bl. Pius IX.

And when you hear in the news about "new" "changes" in tradition and so forth on this account, first hear what they have to say, then go back and read paragraphs 7-9 of the encyclical letter linked to above to put it in perspective.

Indult rumors

This time from John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter.  It's only a matter of time, it seems, so you might as well learn the facts before you are "informed" by people who don't really understand the Church.

Conservatively sticking to the old ways of established traditional print media, NCR doesn't do links (as Amy Welborn notices).  Also, "some wag" is the Curt Jester.