The Ark and The Dove

Between the Lines

Today's Gospel, Jn 7:1-2, 10, 25-30, sounds a little contradictory with the lines missing in-between:

Jesus moved about within Galilee;
he did not wish to travel in Judea,
because the Jews were trying to kill him.
But the Jewish feast of Tabernacles was near.

But when his brothers had gone up to the feast,
he himself also went up, not openly but as it were in secret.

Some of the inhabitants of Jerusalem said,
"Is he not the one they are trying to kill?
And look, he is speaking openly and they say nothing to him..."

There's actually something of a build-up between when he sneaks into the city and when he starts speaking publicly. You find out that his brothers (i.e. kin) have been egging him on to do something public and prove himself, "For his brothers did not believe in him." You also find out that people have been murmuring about him:

Some said, "He is a good man," (while) others said, "No; on the contrary, he misleads the crowd."

Still, no one spoke openly about him because they were afraid of the Jews.

It is halfway through the feast when Jesus starts to publicly teach, and accuse people of plotting against his life...and the people tell him that's just crazy talk. Well, we saw who was crazy at the end of that story, didn't we...

Anyway, what most speaks to me about this passage is the fact that Jesus was trying to be prudent. He knew he had enemies and tried to avoid them. He even tried to conceal himself from them for a time.

This continues to be perhaps the biggest challenge I face given my career path...whether to stick my neck out or bide my time. I've pretty much been choosing the latter unless I'm directly pressed on an issue. I'm not going to deny something if asked pointblank (and I have been on occasion), but I haven't often felt that I've been in the position to actually affect any kind of change of hearts or minds by speaking up when people are riffing against things I value.

Two questions that crop up become why does he ultimately reveal himself and what does he do?

I'm not sure I'm equipped to answer the first question at the moment. It seems to me that he would have been recognizing how the rest of the community is searching for him, how some in the community recognize his goodness, but how they are afraid to speak of it. I think part of his revelation is to give them courage.

But I think there is also a difference between a courageous witness and just being obnoxious...and that leads to the second point.

Jesus reveals himself by teaching. We aren't provided with what he taught. We are only told that he amazed the crowd who question him, prompting a response that his knowledge comes from the Father. This suggests, then, that he what he taught them wasn't about his origins or authority...that what he was teaching them wasn't about him as an individual or a person, even though that is what they question him about.

The whole reading, really, becomes about Christ trying to avoid some kind of early cult of personality, foregoing the temptation by his relatives to seek public approval or recognition, and I suppose this ties in with the theme from yesterday. If anyone deserves to be the center of a cult of personality, it would be Jesus. But he tries to extinguish his "self" rather than advance it. If Jesus suppresses his "self" for the greater glory of God, then who the heck are we to become preoccupied with ourselves?

Daily Exegesis

Every Lent, I pretend that I'm going to do daily blog posts on that days Mass readings.
It never happens.
Heck, I'm already a day behind.
So, instead, I'm going to compromise with my procrastination and say that this Lent, I will be occasionally posting some thoughts about the daily readings.
You may or may not find this particularly insightful. It's more of an exercise for me, really.

Anyway, today's readings are some of my favorites.

Deuteronomy 30 is awesome -- and not just because it ends up making Moses sound like a proto-pro-lifer with his argument "Choose life, then,that you and your descendants may live."

If only for a moment, this passage puts us back into the Garden of Eden. It reinscribes that first test onto each of our hearts. You can follow the path of life, or you can be an idiot and screw up everything by thinking you know better on your own.

If you obey the commandments of the LORD, your God,
which I enjoin on you today,
loving him, and walking in his ways,
and keeping his commandments, statutes and decrees,
you will live and grow numerous,
and the LORD, your God,
will bless you in the land you are entering to occupy.

It's a free choice and it works both anagogically and allegorically. It lays before us Heaven and Hell and reminds us of our agency in redemption. We can only be saved through Christ, but Christ can only save us if we opt into salvation. You can't force a person to experience happiness.
Believe me, I've tried to.
It doesn't work.
And just imagine all those fundamentalists who try to force happiness upon others.
It usually creates a scandal and leads to atheism.
Happiness must be accepted, or else it isn't experienced as happiness.

This passage also debunks the notion that God's salvation can be through a mere verbal acceptance of Him. It has to be lived out in order to flourish and come to fulfillment.

If, however, you turn away your hearts and will not listen,
but are led astray and adore and serve other gods,
I tell you now that you will certainly perish;
you will not have a long life
on the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and occupy.

The passage also suggests a certain degree of utilitarianism. Benjamin Franklin once pointed out that Judeo-Christian morality seemed, for the most part, just to make common sense in terms of conducting a healthy and viable society, whether or not it was a Divinely inspired system being secondary to this truth.
Granted, Moses isn't exactly referring to Christianity...and he was known for the violent suppression of dissent every now and then...but this passage in particular leaves the society free to choose its path. Taken in isolation, this passage reinforces the idea of free will -- virtue, life, and God must be accepted freely, not by compulsion. Refusal to accept God becomes its own punishment -- corporeal punishment at the hands of men becomes completely unnecessary. Utopian plans for societies will never work because the best means of organizing society is sitting right in front of us every day but is largely rejected. The fact of the matter is that we typically choose death on a daily basis. Lent is our opportunity to focus on trying to tip the scale in favor of life.

The Gospel reading, Luke 9, I also love because it really sticks it to all those people who mope about in life saying that they have to "find themselves." Anyone who goes on a quest to find themselves is pretty much doomed to a spirituality-FAIL.

First of all, self-knowledge is a kind of impossible paradox. I don't see how it is possible to simultaneously acquire new knowledge of yourself without actually changing who you are. The second you realize what it means that you are now self-aware, you are going to be transformed into someone else...which means you have to start the process over again to figure out who it was that you were when you figured out who you were...which of course is going to be different than the person you are once you've figured out who it was you were when you figured out who you were.

I'm pretty sure that any attempt at figuring out what I meant in that last sentence counts as your Friday mortification.
It's certainly a grammatical mortification, at the very least.

The way I see it, while you might have certain distinct personality traits that might more or less remain static over the course of your life, you are ultimately in a process of continual change until you die. The question shouldn't be "Who am I?" but "Who can I become?"
I've always taken that to be at the heart of Christ's statement when he says "If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me."
Forget trying to figure out who you are...instead, think about becoming someone better.
Granted, to get closer to Christ, it might be worthwhile to conduct some limited self-reflection. It would be hard for us to learn how to get closer to Christ without recognizing those areas in our lives where we are furthest removed from him. If I don't recognize my weaknesses, it can be hard to open those problems up to Christ. But I think it's also important to recognize that my weaknesses aren't really "me"...and I think that's where people on a quest for self-discovery often get gummed up.
I'm speaking totally from anecdotal evidence of course, but it seems to me that the voyage of self-discovery often ends with people defending some pet vice by saying, "But this is who I am. This is how I was made. Not doing what comes naturally to me is denying myself."
Exactly. But doing what comes naturally to you is often denying your true self--your destined self--the self you were meant to be.
Our weaknesses and vices aren't really how we are made, though. They are how we are broken.

Christ is the service patch update to the Windows Vista of our souls.

I Don't Get It...

I'm seriously perplexed by all the buzz surrounding the NYPost cartoon about the cops shooting the chimpanzee. Primarily, I don't understand why so many people have leapt, rather like deranged primates, to the conclusion that the chimp must be a political allegorization of Barack Obama.
The cartoon policemen clearly say, "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill."

I understand why it would be upsetting to depict a man with an African father as a chimpanzee, but what I don't understand is why anyone with any basic knowledge of American government would think the chimpanzee in this comic represents the President.

The cartoon would only point towards Obama if Obama had written the stimulus bill. Since when does the executive branch write bills? Aren't bills written by the legislative branch? Does anyone really think Obama personally wrote the 1,000+ page package? If the monkey allegorizes anything, it is the Congress and the Senate -- or rather, the unleashed Democratic majorities in those legislative bodies.

It's just a shame the cartoonist didn't write, "Obama will have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill." It would have saved a lot of headache for him.

In any case, the Democrats are getting about as heated up over this as a bunch of Islamic radicals getting heated up over those Danish Mohamed cartoons (only I think I have a better understanding of what the Islamic radicals would take offense to the Mohamed cartoons).

Reasoning Evolution with Theology?

With all of the fanfare and controversy in the news surrounding Darwin's bicentennial, I've been toying with various thoughts on evolution and how evolution seems to fit God's overall pattern of behavior.

Re-reading Augustine's On Christian Doctrine recently, I was struck by the sections where Augustine explains that God could directly reveal Himself to every individual if He wanted to, but that He chooses not to. He could have pre-programmed us all with the ability to read without having to learn to read, but He chose not to. He could have angels appear before to interpret the Bible for us instead of having us rely on scholars and preachers, but, again, He chose not to.

And, of course, God could have miraculously written the Bible Himself, if He wanted to but chose not to.

Instead, in all of these cases, He chose the lesser being, Man, to do the creation, the writing, the reading, the interpreting, and the teaching.

And this seems to be a fairly consistent pattern for the God who raises up the lowly.

God might be the inspiration, the Divine Muse if you will, of the Bible, but the Bible arose out of a process of evolution. For all we can tell, it's creation was subject to all of the randomness, competition, adaptation, and, eventually, selection before it reached its current form.

The creation of the Bible was a messy process that yielded a final body with some awkward vestigial organs dangling here and there that we don't quite know what to do with anymore, nor do we even know their original function (and our own vestigial organs are one of the best indicators of our own evolution, according to biologists).

God might have been the Prime Mover of the process of creation, and He certainly keeps His hand involved as a living God, but it seems entirely consistent that He would allow us to be shaped by natural forces the same way He allowed the Bible to be shaped by human forces.

Analogy:
Animals are to Man what Man is to Bible.

It is a miracle is that the canonical texts of the Bible were still recognizably the inspired word of God despite being produced over centuries of human scribbling and squabbling, just as it would be a miracle that Man is recognizable as being in the image of God despite being the product of millions of years of reproductive competition and selection.

Consider even that the authors of many of the Biblical texts may have been no more aware that they were composing what would be considered the Word of God than our animal ancestors were aware that they were producing a species that would some day be shared by the Son of God.

"The Female Orgasm"

I guess The Vagina Monologues are so 20th Century. These days, those of us who prowl about the sacred halls of education have to deal with giant "I (heart) Female Orgasm" posters lining the walls and printed in bold, sans serif fonts on our female students' chests.
The Female Orgasm (TM) is an organization that visits campuses to deliver what is apparently the opposite of a chastity talk.
According to its Website:

Sex educators Marshall Miller, Dorian Solot, and Melissa Lopez present funny, smart, honest lectures, trainings, and keynotes about sexual health and responsible intimacy, safer sex, female orgasm, GLBTQ issues, and more.

The site also spends quite a bit of time defending itself from puritanical fears that it is crude or tasteless by offering a page of testimonials from College administrators professing to have found the lectures to be on the up-and-up.

That might be true, but it doesn't do much to alleviate the professional and/or social awkwardness that a teacher encounters while trying to hold a mature conversation with a student wearing a shirt with the word "orgasm" on it.

Heteros Pay More!

As Isabel and I deliberate honeymoon destinations, I came across this little coupon on the Laguna Beach Website...

The

Casa Laguna Inn

& Spa is pleased to offer a 10% discount to all same-sex couples arriving at the hotel with a signed California Marriage License. 

Casa Laguna Inn

& Spa offers special packages for happy couples and their guests including elopements, ceremonies and receptions.

Uhm...isn't that discrimination based on sexual orientation?

If a hotel offered a 10% off coupon to heterosexual couples, wouldn't that be a travesty?

Or, for people who like to say that same-sex marriage is a civil rights issue, what would happen if this discount applied only to white couples? or only black couples? or whatever other only group you want to insert?

Super-Obama Misses the O-Signal

The Anchoress is just one of the blogs calling foul that the media doesn't seem to mind Obama hosting a fancy-shmancy dinner instead of overseeing a national response to the killer frost that has hit Kentucky.

Her point isn't so much that it is Obama's job to personally oversee the relief services (because it technically isn't), just that the press blamed Katrina on President Bush and yet has absolved Obama of any responsibility for this disaster. Plus, it should be embarassing that Obama is eating $250 a pound steak while 40 Kentuckians have frozen to death...

Heck, I don't think I've eaten $250 worth of any amount of steak in the last year...

I guess if the economy was better, Obama would be eating thousand-dollar-a-pound steak...so maybe I'm being too hasty in my satire.