A Lesson Missed in the Gulf Oil Spill

This past week I had the chance to overfly some of the oil slicks that are washing ashore in the Gulf region.  The sight of hundreds of acres of oil slick looming just off the coast was daunting, and dwarfed the few shrimp boats that had been sent out to begin skimming.  Then, this morning, as I was browsing through a slideshow of the pictures from the devastating mess that the whole thing has turned out to be, it finally sunk in that this is a disaster that, right now, has no end in sight, and that will likely take decades--if not longer--for the region to recover from.

In the midst of all the blame and finger pointing between the government and BP, debate about how we ought to try to cope with the immediate consequences of the disaster while maintaining the supply of oil that is the lifeblood of our entire socio-economic structure, and starting to collect lessons learned to prevent future incidents of this magnitude, we have overlooked one critical lesson.  It is one that our secular society, would dare not mention, for fear of admitting that we human beings are very far from having it all under control.  The disaster, and all disasters like it where man encounters the abruptness and unforgiving tendencies of nature, is a stark reminder of how little control we have over the world around us, and even of our own existence.  It is so easy to go about the ho-hum of our daily lives feeling like we are in control of our immediate circumstances, of our comings and goings, and that in some obscure sense that the future--tomorrow, and each day after it--are somehow "owed" to us.

The reality is that we are still living in exile from the garden, in the shadow of the fall.    While the God of the Universe, who loves us infinitely, certainly holds creation and the circumstances of our lives completely within his grasp, those circumstances, including whether or not we take our next breath or see the sun rise on tomorrow, are no more in our control than the millions of gallons of oil that have been gusing into the Gulf each day.  In fact, they are less so.  We will eventually get the spill contained and recover from the damage done, but because of our sin we must struggle every day to surrender the uncertainty of our lives and of the human condition to the one who does know and control all things.  Nothing during our brief time on earth is promised us, save one thing: Christ's promise that (1) he is with us always, and (2) if we remain faithful, he will see us through our end on this earth to the unimaginable joy of eternity with him.  The reality of that promise is one that often escapes our consciousness, but we can rest with greater assurance of it than of our expectation that the world will keep turning and the sun will rise tomorrow.  Without it we are left utterly hopeless

As the words of Psalm 46 remind us, "God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in trouble.  Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountaints shake in the heart of the sea; though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult.  The nations are in an uproar, the kingdoms totter; he utters his voice, the earth melts.  The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge." (Ps. 46: 1-3).

Joy Delights in the Beloved

This Rock Magazine (Catholic Answers' bi-monthly magazine of Catholic Apologetics and Evangelization) continues to stun me with the quality of their articles.  The current issue (May-June 2010; Volume 21, Number 3), which I had the pleasure of reading today during a 10-hour flight, was no different.  It contained a handful of powerfully written and pertinent articles, and one in particular, like Father Frank Pavone's article When It Is Okay to Disobey from the March-April 2010 issue, was one I could not help but share.

Professor Anthony Esolen's article, Joy Delights in the Beloved, is not yet available on the 2010 forum as of this posting, but below are some excerpts that will hopefully give you a good enough preview that you'll want to read it for yourself.  In his article, Esolen draws on his expertise as the editor and translator of the Modern Library edition of Dante's Divine Comedy to contrast Dante's portrayal of true, timeless joy and beauty (in Purgatorio and Paradiso) with the cheap counterfeit of temporal and material satisfaction that secular society would have us swallow instead.  Commenting on the manner in which secular society seeks to reduce the depthless wonder and beauty of the unique and irreplaceable human being, created in the image and likeness of an infinitely beautiful, good, and unfathomable God, to the level of a mechanically functioning machine, Esolen writes:

If I am right, then we might define contemporary secularism as the cultural analogue to a machine.  Imagine the vast and intricate stainless steel contraption used to print a little "m" on pieces of candy, hundreds at a time, indistinguishable from one another.  There is nothing veiled about it.  It is reducible to a blueprint, frank and simple.  It is naked metal.  It does what it is supposed to do.  More to the point, it does not do what it is not supposed to do.  It will not surprise.  It will not muse about the past...It does not fear the future, the day of judgement...

It is only a machine.  The trouble is that man does not only fashion machines for his purposes; he too often fashions himself after the purposes of his machines.  That is especially true of the contentment offered by the secular state, and its subordinate machinery in the schools and what is tellingly called the entertainment "industry."  If man is conceived in the mechanistic terms, then the best we can do with him is to make him predictable--to strip him bare of mystery--and engineer the public domain so that what is left of his personality will be reasonably content.  What is offered to man instead of the genuine adventure of joy and abundance of life is a managed, planned satisfaction of material desires.

He continues, again contrasting the false joy of the secular world with the veiled and gradually-revealed true joy--a life lived "more abundantly" (cf. John 10:10)--that God, through the person of Christ, offers us by welcoming us into eternal communion with himself.  In Dante's allegory, this welcoming was represented in the character of Dante's beloved Beatrice, who remains veiled to both Dante and his guide, Virgil, as she leads them through the joy of anticipation in Purgatorio to the threshold of the fulfillment of joy, knowledge of the inexpressible beauty of the unveiled Godhead in Paradiso:

But we grow used to treating persons as if they were mechanisms, and the things of the world as if they were inert matter, manipulable according to our wish.  That secularism which reduces one's fellow man to a chemical machine lays bare the natural world, as if the blade of grass were no more than a sunlight-converter.  In such a world turned wrong-side out...we close off the possibility of joy, and our awareness of God recedes into numbness.  The false familiarity whereby we think we know what a star is...is analogous to the demand, among some radical secularists, that God become the object of that same false familiarity, else we shall not believe in him.

and later:

Whenever God shows himself, he necessarily also veils himself, and if we isolate any such showing and take it as final and definitive, we risk falling before an idol, with presumption and despair soon to follow.  God not only must remain infinitely beyond our power to grasp, but, by his love for us and our answering love for him, we cannot wish it otherwise, just as Dante could never wish to come to an end of the light of Beatrice's beauty.

Pick up a copy or subscribe to This Rock to read the full article or a variety of others.  I hope that they will remind you, as they have reminded me, of the unfathomable beauty and depth of our faith.

Ordinary Time, Still Extraordinary Grace

This past Monday, May 23, as I walked into the chapel for daily mass, I was struck by something that I don't recall ever having taken such particular notice of before.  Everything was green.  The white of the Easter season was gone, and had been replaced with the green that will decorate the sanctuary for the next 27 or so weeks, until the beginning of Advent season.  Sure I've noticed the color change before, but the full spiritual significance of it never captured my attention like it did six days ago.

The white of Easter tends to draw our eyes upward to the joy and the glory of Christ's Resurrection and conquering of the plague of sin and death.  It is the most joyous season, and rightly refocuses our attention toward Heaven, and what God has in store for his faithful ones.  It can be tempting for us to want to stand with our gaze fixed on the promise of eternal glory, and, like Peter, James, and John before the Transfigured Christ, to want to pitch a tent there and forget about the work that remains to be done in the world: "Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah" (Matthew 17:4).

But, the Easter season has passed, and the shift into Ordinary Time echoes the words of the angels who drew the Apostles' attention back down from the sky after Christ's Ascension: "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?  This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come again the same as you saw him go into heaven" (Acts 1:11).  The promise is unchanged and always remains with us, but our attention is now refocused on the gravity of the immediate task ahead.  Now we have to take the same spirit of worship, joy, and blessing with which the Apostles returned to Jerusalem (cf Lk 24:52-53) and, armed with the grace and power of the Spirit that we have witnessed, to go out into our world and do what the color green traditionally reminds us to do: to get to work growing the Church by spreading the Gospel into the world, so that when the Master returns we can present him with a bountiful harvest.

"God is not dead. He isn't even tired." Christendom College Commencement Address, May 15, 2010, by Dr. Charles Rice

This an incredible commencement address by Dr. Rice.  Our society stands at the crossroads of a stark choice, to turn back toward God and be spared like Nineveh, or continue unrepentant and be destroyed like Sodom and Gomorrah.

"God is not dead. He isn't even tired."

The Right Tools for the Job

"It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.  But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." Acts 1: 7-8

Anyone who has ever done any work with tools (which is, more or less, everyone) knows that the first step is to make sure you have all the tools for the job.  Trying to plane wood with a drill or turn a screw with a hammer simply won't get done what you need to get done.  The same is true of us.  When it comes down to it, we are created to "know God, to love him, and to serve him."  To serve him means to allow ourselves to be used as he would use us; in other words, on his terms, not on ours.

Jesus knew that we could not accomplish the work on our own.  We are simply too weak-willed, too stubborn, too selfish, and too fearful to take up the mission that he commanded the Apostles to take up.  That fear started with the Apostles themselves, who first abandoned Jesus in his hour of greatest trial, after the whole ordeal locked themselves in a house for fear of the Jews (cf Jn 20:19), and then after he had ascended and they selected Matthias to replace Judas, they sat in waiting, not really sure what to do or where to go from the whirlwind of the past 50 days in Jerusalem.  I don't blame them; any of us having gone through the same events and now left without our leader, would have been afraid, lost, and confused too.  They were workers, sent out to do a job, but they didn't yet have the right tools.

Today we celebrate the day when Christ fulfilled his first promise, that even as he was leaving to return to the Father, he would remain with us and give us what he knew we would need: his Spirit, with all of his power and authority, to mark us, seal us in faith, and be for us "the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God's own people" (Eph 1:14).  It is easy to forget the fact that this is the same Spirit that brought Christ to earth as a man in the great mystery of the Incarnation, and the Spirit that raised him from the dead back into eternal life and glory, is now ours for the claiming.  That same Spirit comes to us now and gives us the very same power, transforming us from being slaves to our human nature and living in fear of our mortality; it "joins with our spirit to bear witness that we are children of God."

While giving us the ability to look to the Father as Christ did, the Spirit also gives us the "spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline" (2 Tim 1:7) that we need to persevere during our life here on earth. It gives us the gifts that the prophet Isaiah (11:2) foretold would come to rest on Christ and his Church: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord (CCC 1831).  He possesses them in their fullness, and in sending his Spirit now shares them completely and unreservedly with us to join him in loving obedience as sons and daughters of a loving Father; a Father who, as in the story of the Prodigal Son (Lk 15:11-32), sees us from far off, is filled with compassion, and is already preparing a celebration beyond our wildest imagination.

I like receiving gifts, especially tools.  To have been given such a complete "package" of gifts as we are given in the Holy Spirit is beyond any capacity I have to be grateful in return.  The best way to show our gratitude, as with any gift, is to use the gifts as they were intended.  So, let us do that.  Let us live as beloved children, and be "witnesses to the ends of the earth" of his unimaginable love and plans for us.