4 posts tagged “catholicism”
When my dear wife and I first made our love-life together all legally proper, it was in an unfamiliar city the day after Christmas—I had carried the marriage license around for weeks. The day also being a Saturday, just about all offices were closed. But, after romantically huddling out of the teeth-chattering cold in a phone booth, we fortuitously were able to come in contact with a disbarred lawyer that had become a justice of the peace and needed the money. For a small fee he set the whole thing up in twenty minutes.
For the required two witnesses, he secured the services of a building janitor and a man that operated a wine store on the ground floor of the building that up close to pigeon-heaven housed the justice’s dingy office. The janitor served as maid of honor—his pants legs sticking from under a dust smock and his long hair tiaraed with a Chicago Bears stocking cap. The wine-store clerk, the groomsman, sported a very Gucci look—dark pegged pants, pinstriped grey vest and an open at the neck white silk shirt.
The bride and I were bundled in the thickest winter clothing that we had—damn it was cold outside that day and only slightly less so in the official's office. Our two attendees opted to stand in the hall just outside the nuptial chamber. There, with the stairwell door propped open, some heat came rising from below.
Following a brisk ceremony, the groomsman invited everyone down to his warm and cheery wine shop for a reception that included bottle after bottle of his very finest champagne—all on the house.
The reception was well attended by people coming in off the street to redeem coupons that they had been given as Christmas presents. All were certainly in a merry mood, but regrettably our marriage officiator said that he would like to come but that he best decline—something about alcohol getting him into trouble in the first place.
Years later, after my wife had decided to join me in faith as a Roman Catholic, we got married again in the Church. Our vows were exchanged prior to a clean-up Mass that was seldom packed to the gills. For some reason both of us think that our first marriage has bound us most closely together.
If a mother of a new bride were to start describing in great detail her daughter’s grand and elaborate nuptial ceremony, I could count on seeing my wife’s face brighten with an amused squint to her eyes and a lightly forming smile on her pretty lips, and if perchance we could share a knowing glance, she’d give me a clandestine wink.
But both of our marriages have worked, but maybe in differing ways. The first one made us feel good and the second one makes us feel good.
In the Roman Catholic Church’s hiring of shepherds, schleppers and schlemiels, aside from screening males for employment as night janitors in the novice’s dormitory of nunneries, the practice of starting screening interviews for entry into Holy Orders with a chastity-clad-deal-breaker caveat, NO SEX, may continue to foster some deviations from the straight-and-narrow path as the ordained move down the road of life, or off into a secluded lane or down a dark alley.
The importance of the concept of evolution to science has developed over many decades. It was only when its efficacy became important to a wide array of scientific pursuits (from genetics, to paleontology, to agronomy, etc.) that there was an understanding that it needed to be presented to young people who might contribute to an advancing scientific and technological society.
If over time intelligent design were to demonstrate a similar utility, it too would become common fare in education. However it would somehow have to first shed its non-scientific point of departure. It pulls from an apples-for-oranges bag of assertions a contention that places the “effect” before the “cause” (a priori in place of a posteriori) and presents it as being self-evident. Like all a priori concepts, intelligent design fails the test of utility.
It neither offers a foundation from which to conduct basic scientific research, nor suggests a technical application to the solution of some practical problem. “Intelligent design” is one of those circular contentions that pretend to say something by repeating the same thing in slightly different form.
In demonstration of the tautological nature of this specious concept, one might be privy to a conversation about a child’s intelligence, Johnny’s: “Johnny is intelligent.” “Oh, how do you know?” “He did well on his intelligence test.” “Oh, why did he do well on his intelligence test?” “Because he is very intelligent.” “Oh, how do you know?” “Because….”
In the field of psychological testing, the effort to measure intelligence as some kind of innate global capacity has largely given way to a more utilitarian effort to predict future behavior from a test sample of current behavior, à la aptitude tests such as the ACT and SAT. This trend might encourage proponents of intelligent design to settle on God just having a great aptitude for creating universes.
However, the words “aptitude” and “intelligent design” will not be found in the Bible. Thus, to use either of them in explanation of the creative ways of God one has to interpret Scripture in light of information obtained from non-Biblical sources.
If it is theologically acceptable to see a root for intelligent design in Scripture, it should also be Biblically sound (inerrant) to find that evolution outlined in Scripture. To this purpose one might cite Genesis 1:20-24: on the fourth day God filled the waters of earth with abundant life and then on the fifth day He had this life “creepeth” upon the land. After all, some evolutionary biologists suggest that terrestrial creatures got their start in water
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But to me, to pass science off as religion or religion off as science is wrongheaded. In addition, some of us religious folks may take offense at having our deeply held faith passed off as nothing more than a theory. But even more important it is a threat to our freedom of conscience.
Within his first encyclical since being elevated to the Chair of Peter, Pope Benedict XVI uses some words that echo the United States Constitution’s 1st and 14th Amendment guarantee of freedom from State sponsored religion. In this moving epistle on the faithful leading lives within God’s gift of love, Deus Caritas Est, the supreme pontiff writes, “The State may not impose religion, yet it must guarantee religious freedom and harmony between followers of different religions.”
Counter to this, some religious zealots are currently bent on pressuring local public school boards into requiring teachers to insert into their lesson plans a new certitude of these true believers, intelligent-design creationism. They are free to believe what they will. However, this attempt to use government to promote their religious ideology should be troubling to all people who prize freedom of conscience.
State-sponsored proselytism is a greater threat to our religious freedom than it is a mistaken sally into the domain of science. Science has and will continue to weather all sorts of misdirected and dead-ended efforts, however our freedom of conscience may not fare so well. The override of this liberty would mark the entry of our nation into an intolerant period in which all sorts of intellectual and spiritual pursuits were subject to suppression.
Credo of Sam Osborne
Reflection in historical evolution:
Years of curiosity and more recent days spent in reading and contemplation of the origin and development of religion have led me to formulate a bit of way‑station theology of my own.
I have been greatly influenced and encouraged by Teilhard de Chardin's thoughts on the religious implications of progress in general; the Vatican's position, as voiced by John Paul II, on the scientific validity of the concept of evolution; and John XXIII and Vatican II's views on the role of progress in theology.
In reflection of the thoughts of Teilhard de Chardin, Richard Kropf writes in Evil and Evolution:
Just as the general theory of biological evolution has become the working model for the majority of modern scientific endeavor, so too I believe, as did Teilhard de Chardin, that any area of human thought, be it sociology, psychology, history, even philosophy or theology, must take the evolutionary structure of our world and our development into consideration.
My Church, which draws me to worship the God of my faith, has expressed sympathy for such a consideration. In an October 22, 1996 address to a plenary assembly of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope John Paul II allowed that the theory of evolution was "no longer a mere hypothesis." He said:
It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory.
In recognition of the evolutionary nature of faith, John XXIII, in Encyclical Pacem in Terris Paragraph 5 issued April 11, 1963, stated, "The search for truth and goodness is never a ready made nor a `once and for all' discovery but rather a growing and dynamic search in historical evolution." De Ecclesia Constitution of the Church of the Second Vatican Council in Article 8 of the Constitution of Revelation of the Church proclaims, "The Church, we may say, as the ages pass, tends continually towards the fullness of divine truth, till the words of God are consummated in her."
A Faith in Existence, Life, and Awareness
—
In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning God,
and without him nothing came to be.
What came to be through him was life,
and this life was the light of the human race;
the light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness has not overcome it.
John 1:1‑5
In The Modern Temper, Joseph Wood Krutch expands on William of Ockham's 14th‑century view that man knows nothing outside of particulars to be real, and that the mind of man can therefore not know the essential and inimitable being of God. Krutch writes:
It is only when the thinker discovered how small are the things he can do that he succeeded in doing anything at all, only when he renounced the effort to find the key to heaven that he was able to keep chimneys from smoking and only after he had stopped believing in the possibility of eternal life that he learned how the gout might be prevented.
In the unending cycle of things, the reverse of Krutch's contention is just as evident. It is only after toiling‑man learned how to keep chimneys from smoking and discovered how gout might be better endured that he enjoyed enough time and comfort to focus his thinking more keenly on the root meaning of it all.
I have come to root my religious beliefs in what I know personally to be most true, the "particulars" of my life and times. I cannot accept religious contentions that require me to assume things that exist outside of these particulars or that operate in a manner separate from the ways of the present, or of the past as revealed in recorded history, scientific investigation, and common experience. Angels, evil, show‑offish miracles, and much that goes bump in the night hold no more mystery or import to me than do tricks of the sleight of hand.
Primitive understandings, misunderstandings and superstitions served early mankind's needs, but many do not fit with what we know to be true today—nor will those of today with what will be known tomorrow. Even the most sacrosanct of contentions of early believers—like the misdirected astronomy that held the earth be the center of our solar system—were but steps and missteps along mankind's path to ever greater understanding.
The relatively advanced knowledge of the present times brings to our awareness miracles of a nature different from those that were assumed in times when mankind understood little of the conditions and forces that affected life and death. Current knowledge allows us to focus our faith in miracles that are more basic, more real and more compelling—such are the miracles of (1) existence, (2) life, and (3) awareness.
EXISTENCE: It amazes me that there is a something—existence. As Irish playwright Samuel Beckett observed, "Nothing is more real than nothing." Thus for me it is easy to understand how there could be absolutely nothing, all a total void, but this is not so. There exists a universe and it is as real as nothing.
Our current understanding of this universe indicates that matter is energy, and time and space proceed in mirrored image of each other. And, all at base constitutes continuous process—cause upon cause upon more cause. Reminiscent of Ockham's observation, psychologist B.F. Skinner contended that mankind, even with the most powerful of scientific efforts, cannot know ultimate cause—such is beyond science. Although Skinner may have been an agnostic, his observation on "ultimate cause" admits the existence of an essence that precedes all. This essence and Essence of essence is God the Father of Existence. Thomist theology extracted this point of view, ipsum esse subsistens, from the Septuagint, the ancient Greek rendering of the Hebrew Scriptures and writings. Thomas Cahill in The Gift of the Jews writes, “It was this translation that Thomas Aquinas used in the thirteenth century to build his theology of God as the only being whose essence is Existence, all other beings being contingent on God, who is Being (or Is-ness) itself.” The God said to have said unto Moses, "I AM WHO AM."
LIFE: It further amazes me that within existence, there is life. It is difficult if not impossible to adequately define what this miracle of life is, but we know that it exists. Such an essence can exist in the germ of a seed that can rest there for hundreds of years and then sprout forth in new abundance. This promise of miraculous inception, conception, sustenance and renewal is Jesus Christ the Son of Life, the essential presence in the celebrated Eucharist of bread and watered wine at
AWARENESS: Atop these two miracles rests a third, that of awareness—an incomprehensible capacity to comprehend. As the great Hebrew scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel observed in MAN IS NOT ALONE—a philosophy of religion, "The most incomprehensible fact is the fact that we comprehend at all." Of what there is to comprehend, the man of science Albert Einstein said, "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."
We can know and know, and know that we know, but the essence and personal nature of awareness is encompassed in an ultimate understanding and persona that goes before and beyond us, the Holy Spirit of Awareness. Of sensing and experiencing this Awareness, German theologian Friedrich Benesch wrote: “The Father God lives in being; the Son God lives in creating and transforming; the Spirit God shines forth from the Father and the Son as the essential, divine consciousness.”
The Father, the Son, and the Spirit form a triune essence that makes possible all personal existence, life and awareness. This is the Great Personal Trinity that essentials the being of the children of God. This is the fount from which flows all being, love and meaning.
It is the Trinity of Existence, Life and Awareness with which I, as a person of my times, commune. This is the One I reach out to in worship services, prayers of thanksgiving, cries of anguish, periods of meditation, service to others, and moments of awe. This is who I respectfully contemplate when reading the primitive Scripture that is loosely sketched in my Bible, and when observing the Tradition that has been passed down to me by the Church.
This is a personal and essential God that lovingly gives rise to all that is personal, essential, and loving in me, and all reaches of the universe—the God of all times, and the God of these times. This is the God that I comprehend directly through enjoyment and celebration of existence, life and awareness—the God of the excitement of bright beginnings, the comfort of loving nurture, and the fulfillment of apt conclusions. This is the God of infinite grandeur whose inchoative flux is perceived as weal and woe by a limited humanity.
This is the real God evidenced by unswerving faith in what we know to be lastingly tangible and true. The One from whom cycles all that humanity embraces as most dear: love and compassion, joy and good humor, expectation and reward, dignity and respect, beauty and appreciation, peace and tranquility, and comfort and good will.
It is from the Father, with the Son and through the Spirit that we share these goods‑of‑God with friends, neighbors, loved ones, and occasional strangers. All this shared within the Wondrous Image of Certainty reflecting back to me the certainty of my own existence, life, and awareness.
In want of heat and light and good
This is the God who sustains us in our struggle over the self‑inflicted woe that we have come to call evil—evil being a lacking of good as cold is of heat, and darkness is of light. The limits of this lacking are described by Karl Rahner in his commentary on Evil and the Devil: “There is not absolute evil. All evil is finite; it is not a positive reality in itself but a want of good in an entity that remains good in its substance as coming from God and indestructible.”
The only devils to be encountered in life are the misdeeds that appear as the dark side of any of us. With mankind being a part of and not apart from the universe, the dark side of any of us is but a collecting point for bits of folly and futility that seem momentarily to impede the inherent progress of existence, life and awareness. As a St. Pogo would say if he existed, "We have met Satan and he is us." Or, as Mark 7:15 has Jesus teaching, “Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person; but the things that come out from within are what defile.”
To paraphrase Mike Bryan from his book, Chapter and Verse, weal and woe would not exist on the planet Mars until God's children had arrived. Or as Shakespeare has Hamlet saying of the world in general and Denmark in particular, "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison."
Finding God's good in order
Wherever there is mankind, his preference for weal over woe is the motive force in the unending and unrelenting search for meaning—a search that progressively finds new order from that which was mistaken for chaos. "Order" (which is) is the Word of God; it is the "Logos" of early Greek and "dbr" of ancient Hebrew (dabar [dbr] being a term that according to Walter Ong, in his book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, meant to the ancients both 'word' and 'event'). "Chaos" (which is not) is but a curse uttered by mankind when confused by an unknown part of the Order of God.
As Claude Levi-Strauss observed in talks on CBS Radio in 1977 under the title Myth and Meaning and recorded in text in a book of the same title:
To speak of rules and to speak of meaning is to speak of the same thing; and if we look at all the intellectual undertakings of mankind, as far as they have been recorded all over the world, the common denominator is always to introduce some kind of order. If this represents a basic need for order in the human mind and since, after all, the human mind is only part of the universe, the need probably exists because there is some order in the universe and the universe is not a chaos.
Abraham Heschel in his study, Who is Man, says of order, "The order of things goes back to an `order' of God." Of the meaning of things, Heschel says, "Meaning insinuates itself into our existence. We cannot grab or conquer it; we can only be involved in it."
The divine insinuation of meaning is the presence of God that descends to me from the awe of Neanderthal man; the wonder of Cro‑Magnon man; the Sumerian folklore of Gilgamesh; the imagination of Akhnaton; the faith of Abraham, Moses, Peter, Paul, Mark, Justin, Augustine, Aquinas, Ignatius and Newman; the doubt of Galileo, Darwin and Einstein; and the love, respect and tolerance of Teilhard, John XXIII, and my family. This is the God that I celebrate and seek communion with through the Body of Christ, the Church, and the One found just as readily in the sharing of God's love with God's children.
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The above statement was taken from the first eight pages of my personal apologia.
