During the course of a homily on the virtue of faith I heard this Sunday, the priest gave an anecdote from his teenage years. I can’t quote him verbatim, but this is essence of what he said:
As a teenager, I thought that Heaven was essentially a mass that never ended. The very idea of sitting through a never-ending series of church hymns repulsed me. Nevertheless, I wanted to want this because I believed I should.
His experience of wanting Heaven despite his visceral repulsion to it is an example of what I think makes up the essence of the spiritual life: you must strive to want what you must want.
Isn’t that a strange concept? If I want to want something, don’t I want it? Not really. The fact that you can want to want something that you don’t desire shows that there are at least two parts of you that “want” and that these parts are out of line with one another. The first part is the will and the second part is an affective desire. The spiritual life is essentially the task of aligning these naturally misaligned faculties. Specifically, the will, informed by the intellect, should govern your affective desires.
A friend of mine recently posted the following picture on Facebook:
I took it upon myself to try and respond to the misunderstanding exemplified by this picture. I’ll post the response below for the benefit of anyone who may be interested in reading it. You may notice that it isn’t as detailed or as precise as my usual writing. Therefore, since I have written on these topics before, I’ll include a link to an article that I did on the book of Sirach.
Here’s my comment:
Due to time/energy constraints, I’m going to write this briefly and I’m mostly going to make biblical allusions, not quotations.
Firstly, there’s the question of how Christians are supposed to approach the Mosaic Law. Luckily for me, there is a connection between this and the question of homosexual marriage. There are some allusions to the Mosaic Law in the Gospels, but I think that the clearest references (clearest in terms of meaning) are those found in Acts of the Apostles and the Letter to the Galatians. In the Acts of the Apostles, Peter has a dream in which he sees a platter full of unclean (by Mosaic standards) animals. Then, he hears the voice of God telling him, “Slaughter and eat.” Peter refuses, saying that he will not touch unclean food. This is repeated three times, and on the third time, the voice of God says, “What I have made clean, you will not call unclean.” After that, Peter informs the Apostles of his dream and they decide to allow newly-converted Christians to eat foods that were formerly forbidden.
Why the change? St. Paul explains it pretty well in the Letter to the Galatians. Essentially, what he says is that God revealed himself gradually to the Jews, not all at once. For them, the laws served the purpose of preparing them to receive the Messiah. However, once the Messiah arrived, there was no longer any need for the Law. Upon further examination, some of which will be clarified later, it becomes clear that the laws can be categorized. Some of them expressed timeless moral truths, such as the Ten Commandments. Some were merely hygienic. Others were meant to moralize the Jews. (Which makes a lot of sense out of some of the more horrid-sounding laws, for example, that rapists be required to marry their pregnant victims. Sounds awful for the bride right? Well, of course, but this was a means of holding a man accountable for his actions. Now, instead of having a woman and a child with no economic means of support, Israelite society now has a man who will have to spend the rest of his life embracing the consequences of his actions and providing for a woman he wronged and a child he brought into the world.)
Then, there’s the question at hand. What does all of this have to do with homosexual marriage? Well, the New Testament makes very few mentions of homosexuality, and only mentions sexuality of any sort a handful of times. However, there is one passage that is very relevant here. Here is a bit from the beginning of Matthew 19 (The capital letters are quotations from the Old Testament):
Some Pharisees came to Jesus, testing Him and asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?”4And He answered and said, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning MADE THEM MALE AND FEMALE,5and said, ‘FOR THIS REASON A MAN SHALL LEAVE HIS FATHER AND MOTHER AND BE JOINED TO HIS WIFE, AND THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH’?6“So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.”7They said to Him, “Why then did Moses command to GIVE HER A CERTIFICATE OF DIVORCE AND SEND her AWAY?”8He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way.9“And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.”
Jesus makes it clear that some of the Mosaic Laws were made out of political expediency. However, God had not intended marriage to be as it was under that law. (In other words, all of the Old Testament allusions in your photo above are irrelevant.) So then, to find out how marriage was “supposed to be” according to Jesus, what we have to do is go back to “the beginning” or Genesis. There, we find a man and a woman in a lifelong commitment. So then, according to the Christian view, as derived from the Christian approach to the Bible, a marriage is supposed to be between a man and a woman and there is to be no divorce.
Some of you may be familiar with the March for Life. If not, it’s a political demonstration that takes place every year on the anniversary of the Supreme Court case – Roe v. Wade – which made abortion (until viability) a constitutional right in the US. This past week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments for two cases, one about the constitutionality Proposition 8 in California, and the other about the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Mirrored after the March for Life, and March for Marriage was organized to show support for both Proposition 8 and DOMA on the first day of the oral arguments. The Love and Fidelity Network (LFN) planned a trip to to DC to march, and I went with them.
Soon after the March, the director of the LFN asked me if I wouldn’t mind writing something for their blog about my experience. Here’s what I wrote.
Here, I’d like to add a thought or two:
Basically, I think that it’s great that our country has such a strong love of liberty and justice. Our country was founded on the principle that a government exists to protect individual rights and civil liberties. If you think about all of the tyrants that have existed throughout human history, it won’t take you long to realize that we are extremely blessed to live in the time and place that we do.
But here’s the problem. We’ve gotten so hung up on the idea of personal freedom that we’ve equated it with total autonomy. This means that justice today is a one-way street. The individual doesn’t owe anything to anybody – society or otherwise. Rather, the individual deserves everything. This, however, is a dangerous and unsustainable philosophy. Firstly, this understanding of freedom and justice does not make sense in light of human nature. It is a simple fact that I cannot do whatever I want. Rather, I must act in accord with my nature to fulfill myself. Secondly, this understanding of freedom and justice does not make sense in light of human relationships. Nobody likes one-way relationships. Not only do people feel used, but soon enough, the people doing all the taking find that their lives are empty from not doing any giving.
If you read the article that I linked above, you’ll see an outline of what I understand marriage to be. The reason I spoke here so much about freedom and justice is because I didn’t have much more space to do so in the article. So the point that I want to emphasize is this: given the strength of our passion for freedom and justice (as demonstrated by the fervor of the protestors who were protesting our March) in this country, if we manage to rediscover the meaning of marriage as rooted in human nature, then we will have a very, very strong force on our side that will be directed toward the good of society.
For anyone who follows this blog on a regular basis, I thank you for your patience and apologize for the lack of content. This past August, I moved to Washington, DC. The primary reason behind the relocation was to be near the Catholic University of America, where I wanted to do my PhD in Moral Theology. I wanted to be nearby so that I could meet with professors and keep in touch with people at the school so as to make my interest in their program abundantly clear. But I’m getting ahead of myself; I should start at the beginning.
In the beginning of the year 2011, I was going through some intense discernment. To put it simply, my plans for the future fell through and, as a recent college graduate, I had no idea where my life was going. That summer, I decided that it was my calling in life to pursue an academic career in moral theology. At the time, I was enrolled in an MA program at St. Joseph’s Seminary in New York.
I started to look into schools and, that fall, I picked four schools that I wanted to apply to. Of those four, Catholic University was by far my top choice. After a stressful period during which I was trying to complete four graduate courses, four PhD applications, and work as a painter in order to support all of this, that awful waiting period which follows the application process began. I first got a rejection letter from one school, and began to worry. A few weeks later, I received an e-mail from a professor at Catholic University, telling me that he was very happy with my application and thought that I’d be a good fit in his department. I was accepted there with strong enthusiasm from the faculty. They told me that they would do their best to “advocate for funding on [my] behalf.” Unfortunately, however, the funding never came through. After considering the possibility of taking out loans to pay for a 5-year graduate program in liberal arts, which doesn’t have very promising career potential, I decided to defer my acceptance to Catholic University.
Unfortunately, the other two schools didn’t accept me either. Great, I got into my first-choice school, but without any funding, and nobody else wanted me. After some discussions with some of the professors at Catholic University, they told me that they felt confident that they could fund me in the future, but that they couldn’t guarantee it. In their opinion, there were several things that I could do to boost my chances, but the best option would be to retake the GRE.
I spent the summer of 2012 working and doing GRE practice. I worked through an entire GRE Math practice book, and I memorized 650 vocabulary words. I also practiced writing essays a bit, and asked some of my friends to critique them. In August, I retook the exam and improved my score in all three sections. In addition to all of that, I also studied Latin quite a bit; so much so that I felt confident enough to list it on my CV as a language that I could “read with a dictionary.” I already had French (a very useful theological language) and Spanish (a not-so-useful theological language, at least for the work that I want to do) listed there. Lastly, I got myself published in Fare Forward, which I thought might help.
After all that, I moved to Washington, and kept in touch with the professors that I wanted to work with. I made myself visible on campus, and showed up to one or two functions. Later in the fall, I sent the admissions department at Catholic University my updated information, and I also included a two-page letter outlining why I thought that I deserved any funding that they had to offer. Essentially, my argument was that though my GRE scores might not have been the highest that they had ever seen, I had a number of other qualities that would make me a successful graduate student an academic. Particularly, I emphasized my linguistic ability, teaching experience, and ambition.
I hoped that this would be enough, but just to be sure, I sent applications to six other graduate programs. Finally, just last week, I received an e-mail from the same professor who informed me about my acceptance last year. He told me that I’d be receiving a scholarship that would cover all of my tuition and a yearly living stipend! So, it seems like a year’s worth of hard work and perseverance paid off. I am happy to say that I will be starting a PhD program in moral theology at Catholic University this August.
Since receiving word of the financial offer that the university would be making me, I have experienced a whole range of emotions, but the most prominent of them has been gratitude. I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to spend so much time studying theology, the noblest academic discipline. So many generations before me, and so many people today, could not even dream of such a possibility. Having spent a year striving so hard for this, I think it impossible that I could ever become complacent and take my wonderful opportunity for granted. I sincerely hope that I manage to sustain my feeling of gratitude for as long as my life as an academic endures, and that because of it, I may work to the best of my ability in what I do.
I thank you, God, for the opportunity to learn more about your Church, your teachings, and you yourself.
Returning to the lack of content, I hope it is clear why I haven’t been posting much here. Not only have I been very busy working two jobs and trying to get myself funded at Catholic University, but I haven’t been able to read much theology at all for the past few months. When you’re busy with worldly things and not engrossed in theology, it’s pretty tough to come up with regular posts about it. I have no doubt that, as my non-academic schedule gets lighter and as I start studying theology again, this page will be as productive as it was before.
So I finally decided to see what all the fuss was about; last week, I watched the first episode of ‘Downton Abbey.’ Today, I finished the second season. Yeah, it’s that good. The acting is excellent, the directing is fantastic, and it’s refreshing to finally see a TV series with some serious character development, but I think the rush of attention that Downtown has been getting recently has to do with more than all of that. Downton brings us back to a different time. It’s a time which is simultaneously near and far from our own. Near in that it was only a century ago, far in that most of us couldn’t possibly imagine living in it.
This should come as no surprise; the 20th century brought about the greatest social changes the Western world has ever known. Many of these changes, I dare not dispute, were for the good. And yet, I am confident that some of the well-intentioned reforms brought disastrous consequences with them. Make no mistake, I do not wish to live in the world of Downton Abbey; I am the son of a painter who will soon be pursuing a terminal degree in the liberal arts. Such social mobility would have been unthinkable 100 years ago. Indeed, I am quite happy with many of the social changes that were introduced in the last century; I merely think that some of the reforms went overboard.
It seems to me that the reason behind the allure of “Downton Abbey” is that is shows us a world which contains many things that ours lacks. Let’s take a look at some of the (I think) good things found in the world of Downtown that are either absent from our own or are present in truncated form:
1) Gender Roles
Alas, for the first discussion I have chosen a topic that is sure to be the touchiest of them all. Nevertheless, I think it is important for a society to recognize that there are differences between men and women and to treat them accordingly. I don’t think that the Downton World does a perfect job of treating men and women properly, but it does treat them differently and that’s my point.
It is a simple fact that men and women are different. A woman is a member of the human species who has the potential to become a mother. A man is a member of the human species who has the potential to impregnate a woman. In different times and places, these essential facts will have different consequences, and men and woman will need to have the appropriate virtues formed for dealing with them. Accordingly, the social atmosphere of a certain time and place must be conducive to the development of those virtues.
2) Civility
Though the Downton World is certainly rife with examples of snark and backhanded nastiness, the politeness that the characters show for one another is quite refreshing. For example, in one scene, two families are to dinner, and a dispute arises within one of the families. The mother of the other family goes to make a comment, and her son stops her saying, “Mother, it is not our place to have an opinion.” What maturity! It would be wonderful to live in a world when people know when to keep their noses out of other people’s personal affairs.
3) Hierarchy
Before I continue, I’d like to point out something that I found interesting about the different social clases in the Downton World. The characters on the show express the opinion from time to time that the members of the upper class have more freedom than the lower classes. To me, this doesn’t seem to be the case. In several instances, a member of the upper class falls in love with a person of lower class. They are both equally unfree to marry each other. The members of the upper class have seriously high expectations for one another with regard to other things as well: where they live, the type of house they will have, how they are to dress, etc.
Now about hierarchy as such. I think it is quite obvious that human beings are naturally hierarchical; hierarchy seems to have arisen in every society with which I am familiar. I don’t think that this is just some quirky part of human nature that we should do away with; I think it’s a good thing. It’s good to know your place.
For example, I remember once being enrolled in a course taught by a professor who desperately wanted to be popular with his students. He told us (bad) jokes, had us call him by his first name, and even cut class short a few times to let us go home early. The problem with this, is that it fosters a sense of familiarity, and even friendship. This is great for equals, but it is not good for superiors and subordinates. In this example, it was difficult for the professor to grade our papers fairly. Wanting to please us, and also not wanting to violate the feeling of friendship that he had with some of us, it felt like betrayal to him to give us bad marks. The problem here is not only that students were getting away with shoddy work, but that they weren’t being forced to better themselves as students. The student-teacher relationship was inhibited, and the students suffered the consequences.
It is important to treat your superiors as superiors, otherwise you won’t be able to learn from them. After all, if we are all equally skilled and equally important, why on Earth would we take advice from one another?
4) Articulation
The Downton World is a place where people place a high value on the ability to speak well. Consider the following quotation:
Woman to her mother-in-law: Are we to be friends then?
Mother-in-law: We are allies, my dear, which can be a good deal more effective.
Cold as it might be, the mother-in-law is drawing a distinction between two different relationships. Being allies is similar to being friends, but because of its coldness, it can be more useful than friendship. The mother in law managed to convey that idea in one sentence. Imagine if we could all speak like that?
On that note:
5) Enduring through Difficulty
The people of Downton had apparently not forgotten that good can arise out of evil. More importantly, they recognized that enduring through difficulty was a very effective way of developing one’s character. In today’s world were the minutest amount of discomfort is to be avoided, we might do well to consider the words of Lady Sybil to her sister:
“You’re far nicer than you were before the war, you know.”
Apparently, having endured through the stress of World War I, Edith (Sybil’s sister) had gained a new perspective on things. Some things that used to bother her now no longer did, probably because she recognized how foolish it was to let such things annoy her.
6) Taking Pride in Your Work
I find it very gratifying to see how many of the characters in the Downton world take pride in their work, no matter what they do. In one scene, a butler chides a footman for serving dinner with a tear in his jacket:
Butler: William, are you aware the seam at your shoulder is coming apart? Footman: I felt it go a bit earlier. I’ll mend it when we turn in. Butler: You will mend it now and you will never again appear in public in a similar state of undress. Footman: No, Mr Carson. Butler: To progress in your chosen career, William, you must remember that a good servant at all times retains a sense of pride and dignity that reflects the pride and dignity of the family he serves. And never make me remind you of it again.
In this and other scenes, the Butler has shown himself to take incredible pride in his position. It didn’t seem to matter to him that he was not the Lord of the house. He was the butler, and what mattered to him was that he did his job well. I sincerely wish that I could appreciate my work as much as he.
Again, there are many things about the Downton World that I’m happy to do without, but I think that we’d all be a bit better off if we rescued a few of the vestiges of this time that were thrown out in the name of progress.
This is a post that I submitted for the Catholic Voices USA blog. It is going to appear there, in edited form, next week.
My getting-up routine this past Monday was the same as it always is; I rolled out of bed and opened my laptop to try and read my e-mail through bleary eyes. That morning, however, I had an extra-pertinent reason to try to blink the sleep out of my eyes – I had two e-mails informing me that Pope Benedict XVI had resigned! Not being very familiar with those who sent me these e-mails, I decided to verify the information on the news. Sure enough, the news reported that the Pope had given a brief statement indicating that he would be leaving his office at the end of the month. My first reaction was shock. I can’t stand missing work for two days because of an illness; imagine leaving your career at its height!
Still not sure how to react, I decided to start the day by reading the daily mass readings. It seemed providential that the first reading should be the first Creation Story from Genesis. This dramatic account of Creation, with its repetition of the name of God at the beginning of each clause, emphasizes the purposefulness with which God created the cosmos. The world was planned, and it was created for man. For people of faith, we can take solace in the facts that the setting in which we find ourselves, the major events that happen in our lives, and the prayerful decisions that we make, are all meaningful.
For the person of faith, with his eyes set on the world to come, earthly actions take on a new significance. The aspiring classics scholar who discerns that she would make a better gift of herself to the world as a doctor decides to go to med school instead of grad school. The ambitious young women who just got admitted to law school decides instead to stay at home with her new family. The man who wants a son more than anything in the world discovers that he is called to serve as a reminder of what the next world holds and so becomes a priest. These actions only make sense in the light of a faith made possible by a God who created a purposeful world.
It is with this perspective then, that we can admire the Pope’s decision. He humbly recognized that he was no longer able to carry out his tasks as pope. Trusting in God to guide the Church, he released the reigns, having no say in who would follow him. Though it may be difficult now, Catholics can trust that this was part of God’s plan, that Pope Benedict XVI was needed for the time he was around, and that the next pope will continue to guide the Church as we progress into the third millennium.
Today, I rejoin the blogosphere after a long hiatus which was due to the time-consuming process of applying to graduate school for next year. I applied to seven (!) graduate programs, which I consider a serious accomplishment. Applying to grad school is no easy task. For one, it can be incredibly intimidating, since you’re trying to look smart in the face of professors who’ve shown themselves to be complete rockstars in your field. Then, with your confidence bruised and battered, you have to write essays all about how amazing you are and how you’re going to change the world. Well, hopefully I managed to squeeze out something of value and all will be well for next year. In the meantime, however, I’m going to put this behind me, as I wait to hear back from schools, and write about something that kept me going throughout this process: keeping my eyes fixed on Jesus.
Providentially, perhaps, the first reading from yesterday’s mass was a wonderful selection from one of my favorite books in the bible: The Epistle to the Hebrews. This book has a lot of wonderful theology which speaks about Christ in the New Covenant and compares our relationship to him now to our relationship to God in the Old Covenant. Great stuff. The first sentence of yesterday’s reading went like this, “Brothers and sisters: Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us rid ourselves of every burden and sin that clings to us and persevere in running the race that lies before us while keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus…”
The first part of this verse, which is an allusion to the Communion of Saints, provides some great motivation for avoiding sin; there are tons of people watching you at every second. Cool. But then there’s this second part, about keeping our eyes set on Jesus while running “the race that lies before us.” Banal and commonsensical as it sounds, this is one of the most important and oft-forgot tenets of Christianity. It can be tough to pull off, but doing so is the key to doing Christianity right, and, as we Christians believe, the key to happiness. One of my roommates, Daniel Klimek , is very happy guy, reason being that he is very good at keeping things in perspective, that is, in relation to the ultimate goal of encountering Christ.
The first important thing to realize, in my opinion, about the words of the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, is that we are all running a race. We have no choice in the matter; every human being is trying to get something out of life. That’s why we get up in the morning, that’s why we go to work, that’s why we apply to seven graduate programs. What we do have a choice in, however, is what we run for. We all have to put our eyes on something – what is it going to be? For all of us, it is easy to put our eyes on the thing that we think will free us from our present problems. When we have money problems, we put our eyes on getting more money. When we are stressed, we put our eyes on vacation. It’s okay to set our eyes on such things as short-term goals, but the ultimate thing that we should set our eyes on is Christ. I think that there are two main reasons for this.
The first is that contemplating Christ is the most useless thing that a person could possibly do. If that sounds disrespectful, I think it’s indicative of our culture’s obsession with utility. Most of the things that we do, we do for the sake of something else. We work to earn money, exercise to maintain health, and study so as to gain knowledge. But there are some things that we do purely for their own sake. These things are useless, because we can’t do them for the sake of anything else, but, if you think about it, they’re also the most important things. We read novels for pure enjoyment. Doing so is useless, but it is also wonderfully satisfying. Everything else that we do in life, we do so that we can do things like read novels. This shows that there is something about reading novels that fulfills us more than the other, practical things we do on a daily basis. We are beings of significance. We like things to make sense, we like to understand what’s going on around us (how else do you explain gossip? or the awful feeling in the pit of your stomach when you see people sharing secrets that you’re not privy to?). It follows, therefore, that the thing that will bring is the greatest satisfaction is the thing that has the greatest significance, which is Jesus. Praying to Jesus, contemplating him, is the most useless thing that a person could do. This means that everything else that a person does is less important than contemplating Jesus, and so everything else must be subordinated to this activity.
The second thing, I think, is that, since contemplating Jesus is the most significant thing that a person can do, it is also an activity that can enlighten and enliven all of our other activities. Living our lives with our eyes set on Christ adds a deeper level of significance to all of our daily activities. Not only do I work to make money, but I make money so that I can feed my family (this is hypothetical – I don’t have a family to feed), which Jesus himself told us was the moral equivalent of feeding him! (Matthew 10:42) I apply to grad school not so that I can make a name for myself as a prominent professor, but so that I can study the words of Jesus and share my findings with anyone who cares to listen. This approach reduces the stress of the whole grad school application process, because I know that, if I do my best, then I am doing the work of the Lord and I am successful in that even if I am not practically successful in actually getting accepted to the schools that I want to go to. In effect, Jesus told is to “be perfect” (Matthew 5:48) and I think that the only way to be perfect, that is, to maximize our abilities in an intergal way so that we work for the sake of the good, is to do everything for Jesus. Running the race with our eyes on fixed on Jesus assures us of a permanent goal (ie, one that doesn’t fade away, like worldly fame) that is attainable (ie, doing the work of Christ can sometimes be aided by worldly success, but doesn’t depend on it), and effects everything we do (ie, sometimes we get so hung up on one goal, that we neglect other parts of our person. For example, an athlete may neglect his intellectual development, and a professor may neglect his physical development).
Keeping our eyes fixed on Christ therefore provides us with the most fulfilling, longest-lasting, and all-encompassing happiness that we could possibly find. Let’s not forget to do it
Despite my brief hiatus, which I hope will end soon, I managed to write a little something for the blog at the Love and Fidelity Network’s website. Enjoy!
Today begins the second round of my PhD application process. I will therefore be spending every waking moment of my life either at work or doing applications. Although I had some great ideas for blog posts, they are going to have to wait until I have finished my applications.
I hope that you are all having a profitable Year of Faith so far and that Advent will be a time of spiritual maturation for all of you.
