"Run so as to win..."

Tempus fugit.  Time flies.

Not only does the clock turn unremittingly, but the march towards the future never slackens.

When I was with my family this past Christmas, I kept saying to my nieces and nephews about their own children, "Can they please stop growing up?"  On this, grandmothers universally agree.

In the wonderful movie Babette's Feast, there is a scene where the community of Christians gather after a sort of agape-meal, hold hands in a circle, and sing--

    The clock strikes and time goes by
    Eternity is nigh!
    Let us use this time to try
    To serve the Lord with heart and mind
    So that our true home we shall find!
    So that our true home we shall find!

Lent almost invariably catches us by surprise.  In the Byzantine Church, a two weeks' warning is given with "Meat-Fare Sunday," then "Cheese-Fare Sunday" in order to wean believers off meat and dairy products in preparation for the Great Fast.  In the Western Church, in both the usus antiquior and in the Anglican usage of the Ordinariates, a seventeen-day Pre-Lent period gears us up for Lent.

Not only that, but in many monastic communities, there is the "Monastic Lent" or the "Monastic Fast" that begins on the preceding Feast of the Holy Cross (14 September) to help monks, nuns, and canons to prepare for the Easter Season.

With that in mind, the older form of the Roman Rite anticipates Lent with a reading from St Paul, comparing the spiritual life to athletic training:

Do you not know that in a race all the runners compete, but only one receives the prize?  So run that you may obtain it.  Every athlete exercises self-control in all things.  They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable.  Well, I do not run aimlessly, I do not box as one beating the air; but I pommel my body and subdue it... (1 Cor 9:24-27).

The Apostle compares the Christian to the athlete who competes hard because only one will win the contest.  Of course there will be more than one winner in the "Christian contest," but the point remains:  A certain "spiritual athleticism" is required of us.

There are two "pastoral sicknesses," as I call it, whereby parish leaders infect believers, which undercut St Paul's exhortation.  These "pastoral sicknesses" are peculiarly Catholic anomalies--or rather, 'bastardized Catholicisms.'

First, there is the tendency to reduce the spiritual life to a set of minimum standards.  "You can do this much before committing a mortal sin..."; "You must do at least this to remain in good standing..."  It is the transposition of rubrical minimalism to the ascetic life.  Just as we say, "At least the Words of Consecration must be said" in order to confect the Eucharist, or "At least the head must be immersed in water" for the baptism to be valid, there is also that minimalism that says "You must confess your sins at least once a year" or "You must be present at least from the Gospel onward for your Sunday obligation to count."  In effect, the "at least rubric" has become the "no-more-than rubric" whereby the minimum standard becomes the highest bar to reach, thus vacating these standards of their value.

To misquote Gandalf addressing Saruman, "The spirit of casuistry...endures!"

Second, there is the tendency to go on autopilot or cruise control in being a Catholic.  The life of discipleship is not about routine but about ascent.  Very often, Catholic believers carry the attitude that Christianity simply "happens" without it being intentional.  Following Jesus is about growth; in fact, if one remains on a "plateau" in terms of intensity of prayer or acquisition of virtue, one is really receding from Christ.

A number of years ago I attended a conference where John Maxwell, the famous Wesleyan minister and motivational speaker was talking to a group of entrepreneurs.   He challenged them, "What is your plan for personal growth?"  In other words--what is your plan for enhancing your leadership skills, your interpersonal relationship-building, and your attitudes?

The very same can be said about the Christian spiritual life, except more urgently:  What is your plan for spiritual growth?  What vices need to be eradicated, and what virtues need to be acquired?  Which of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit need to be exercised more earnestly?  How is our personal relationship to God--not just rattling off transcripts of prayers but speaking conversationally with the Lord--going to improve?

We do not, I repeat, do not attain eternal life on autopilot or cruise control.  That is, in the language of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "cheap grace."  Or, in the language of Catholic ascetical theology, it is the sin of presumption.

May believers take the cultural approach to Lent by "giving up" something so as to make Easter feasting more anticlimactic.  But to do so is to miss entirely the purpose of the Lenten preparation for Easter.  This is because Easter isn't just about the Resurrection of Christ, it is also the resurrection of Christians.  We are baptised principally at the Paschal Vigil and we renew our baptismal promises on Easter Sunday precisely because the reality of our baptism--and therefore our resurrection (Rom 6:3-7)--derives its power from the Lord's own Resurrection.  The Lenten preparation, rather, is to help us live up to the perennial grace of baptism by "dying daily" (1 Cor 15:31) of being "crucified with Christ" (Gal 2:20), and, as St Paul said above, by "pommeling" our bodies in order to be subject to the indwelling Holy Spirit.

As a researcher whose specialisation involves searching out how the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit operate in the various parts of the soul, I am increasingly horrified when pastors tell their flock that meeting Jesus' standards is "too hard" or the bar is set "too high" (I'm looking at you, National Catholic Reporter) completely ignoring that the entire purpose of Confirmation is to strengthen us (hence the Latin confirmare, 'to strengthen-with') for the life of discipleship).  To decline assistance from the Sacrament of Confirmation is to effectively say to the Holy Spirit:  "I don't want your help" when he is the veritable pot of gold freely given to a thief intent on robbing a bank.

The icon at the top of this post is from St Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai, where St John Climacus once flourished.  His spiritual playbook, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, describes a ladder reaching to heaven, with each of its thirty rungs representing a particular struggle for virtue (hence 'asceticism,' from the Greek word for 'struggle').  It is a sobering icon, as it shows some monks pulled off the ladder by apostate angels early on, and others later on, as they struggle to ascend.  At the top of the ladder is the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the goal of our striving, not so much to earn heaven (Pelagianism be damned!), but to acquire the character of Christ Himself:  "Put on the Lord Jesus Christ!" (Rom 13:14).

The wonderful thing is that we do not do this on our own.  "...for God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure!" (Phil 2:13).  As St Augustine explained, grace invites, graces moves us to consent, and grace works in us to be Christlike.

At the end of the day, it's not so much that becoming like Christ is difficult.

Rather, it's that we underestimate the greatness of the human soul which, out of all of material creation, alone is able to have indwelling us nothing less than the Holy Trinity.

Aidan Nichols on Connaturality with GodAs "Empirical Dogmatics"

St Thomas specifically says that the same understanding which the theologian gains by reflecting on sacra doctrina exists in a non-theologian through the 'connaturality' or sympathy with God which charity brings about.  In other words, an experimental intimacy with God, on the part of the saint or the lover of God, leads to an intuitive grasp of what the theologian comes to understand in a more roundabout way. In the Secunda Pars of the Summa Theologiae, Thomas's account of the theological virtues and of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit sets out to show in some detail how this can be so.  Furthermore, the whole character of theology as a science in St Thomas is linked to the notion that by faith we have a share in the absolutely certain and manifest knowledge which God has of himself and which the blessed have of him by participation.  However, a good deal of later Scholasticism, without necessarily denying ex professo these convictions of St Thomas, was cast in a strict deductive mould, dependent on a somewhat narrow propositionalist view of faith, differing markedly from Aquinas' own.  A certain kind of neo-Scholasticism, accordingly, had difficulty coping with the contemplative, and subjectively engaged, aspect of historic Thomism.  In brief, a breach had opened between theology and Christian experience.  This breach was widened by the Modernist movement. In trying to redress the balance between formal theologising and religious experience--in itself an entirely proper and laudable objective--Modernism finished by subverting confidence in the Christian access to a supernatural revealed content of truth, given in history and now available through doctrinal tradition.  As an error in fundamental theology, perhaps the first that the Church had encountered since the Gnostic crisis of the early centuries, Modernism threatened to undermine all doctrines rather than, as more customary with heresies, the occasional one or two--thus earning from Pope Pius X, in his encyclical Pascendi, the sobriquet 'heresy of heresies'.  The effect on the Catholic Church of both Modernism and its mirror-image, 'integralist' anti-Modernism, was to make the word 'experience' taboo for decades.  Only in the later 19405 did the Abbe Jean Mouroux of the Institut Catholique in Paris succeed in retrieving the word 'experience' in the context of Catholic theology in his book, L'Experience chretienne.

Revd Prof Aidan Nichols OP STM

Light from the East:  Themes from Orthodox Theology

Archbishop John Carroll's PrayerFor President Joseph Bidenand the United States Government

We pray, O almighty and eternal God, who through Jesus Christ has revealed thy glory to all nations, to preserve the works of your mercy, that your Church, being spread through the whole world, may continue with unchanging faith in the confession of your Name.

We pray Thee, who alone are good and holy, to endow with heavenly knowledge, sincere zeal and sanctity of life, our chief bishop, the pope, the vicar of Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the government of his Church; our own bishop, all other bishops, prelates and pastors of the Church; and especially those who are appointed to exercise among us the functions of the holy ministry, and conduct your people into the ways of salvation.

We pray O God of might, wisdom and justice, through whom authority is rightly administered, laws are enacted, and judgment decreed, assist with your Holy Spirit of counsel and fortitude the President of these United States, that his administration may be conducted in righteousness and be eminently useful to your people over whom he presides; by encouraging due respect for virtue and religion; by a faithful execution of the laws in justice and mercy; and by restraining vice and immorality.

Let the light of your divine wisdom direct the deliberations of Congress, and shine forth in all the proceedings and laws framed for our rule and government, so that they may tend to the preservation of peace, the promotion of national happiness, the increase of industry, sobriety and useful knowledge; and may perpetuate to us the blessing of equal liberty.

We pray for his excellency, the governor of this state, for the members of the assembly, for all judges, magistrates, and other officers who are appointed to guard our political welfare, that they may be enabled, by your powerful protection, to discharge the duties of their respective stations with honesty and ability.

We recommend likewise, to your unbounded mercy, all our brethren and fellow citizens throughout the United States, that they may be blessed in the knowledge and sanctified in the observance of your most holy law; that they may be preserved in union, and in that peace which the world cannot give; and after enjoying the blessings of this life, be admitted to those which are eternal.

Finally, we pray to you, O Lord of mercy, to remember the souls of your servants departed, who are gone before us with the sign of faith and repose in the sleep of peace; the souls of our parents, relatives and friends; of those who, when living, were members of this congregation, and particularly of such as are lately deceased; of all benefactors who, by their donations or legacies to this Church, witnessed their zeal for the decency of divine worship and proved their claim to our grateful and charitable remembrance. To these, O Lord, and to all that rest in Christ, grant, we beseech you, a place of refreshment, light and everlasting peace, through the same Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Savior.

Amen.

St Gregory the TheologianOn the Cause of the Incarnation

"What, then, is the cause," it is said, "of the divine descending to this humiliation, so that belief is wavering, if God--the uncontainable and incomprehensible and unutterable reality, that which is above all glory and all greatness--is mixed with the defilement of human nature, so that his lofty activities is also degraded by admixture with humiliation?"

We are also not at a loss for a God-befitting answer to this.  You ask the cause of God being born among men?  If you take away the life the benefits that come from God, you would not be able to say by what means you recognise the divine.  For from the good things we experience, from these we recognise the Benefactor; for looking at the things that happened, through these we reckon the nature of him who is at work [in them].  If, then, love for man is the characteristic property of the divine nature, you have the reason which you sought, you have the cause of God's presence among men.

For our infirm nature stood in need of a Healer, man in the fall stood in need of Someone to set him upright, he who was deprived of life stood in need of the Giver of Life, he who declined from participation in the good stood in need of him who brings him back to Good, he who was shut up in darkness needed the presence of Light, the captive sought the Redeemer, the one in bondage the Fellow-Struggler, he who was held fast in the yoke of slavery the Liberator; were these small and unworthy things to importune God to visit human nature, since humanity was in so pitiful and wretched a state?

St Gregory the Theologian,
The Great Catechetical Oration, III.13

John Zizioulas on Personhood and Freedom

However, when the contribution of the Church is left on one side, the Western philosophical tradition takes us in a different direction. We assume that other people are a threat to us, and that we have to assert ourselves against them.  Fear takes the place of love in our account of the social and natural worlds.  If we define our freedom without reference to love, we believe that we have to make ourselves free by separating ourselves from others on the one hand, and from our embodiment in nature on the other.  The Church insists that love, along with all forms of fellowship and society, is essential to any account of human being.  Freedom and communion are both fundamental. Without a concept of person, either communion is given undue weight over freedom, or freedom over communion.

Metropolitan John Zizioulas,
Lectures in Christian Dogmatics

Fr Farrell on Unintentional Heresy

Mere knowledge of the truth, however, is not enough. Being what we are, we are going to speak of the truths we know; and it is extremely important that our speech be accurate. As many a man struggling with a foreign language knows from experience, we may know the truth and speak so badly as to spread error; or we may not know the truth yet, speaking so badly, actually tell the truth, as some fortunate students have learned to their surprise in the course of an examination. A person who does not know the truth, if he but speak insistently as well as accurately, can do a very efficient job of spreading error. The fact is that we are going to speak. For men are angels surrounded by fences; men must speak, for they must have company and their only means of vaulting the separating fences are words or their equivalents.

Words, then, are precious things to a man, things to be appreciated even more than water in a desert or hope in a fight. To misuse words, to betray them, to waste them seems criminal and has certainly produced calamitous results. When the subject matter of our conversation is the Incarnation, we have placed huge, precariously balanced burdens on the shoulders of our words. The slightest misstep brings that burden crashing to earth as the shattered remains of a superb truth which we call heresy.

Revd Prof Walter Farrell, OP STLr STM
Companion to the Summa, IV

Fr Matthias Scheebenon the Holy Spirit's Role in the Theologian

Although the understanding and scientific development of the content of the faith in itself can and should be achieved through the natural power and activity of reason, but in service to and with the aid of faith, nevertheless for the successful and appropriate operation of reason along this line and for the attainment of a living and fruitful knowledge, some supernatural influence and support of the Holy Ghost is in part morally necessary and in part extremely useful and advantageous on account of the supernatural grandeur of the objects.  And in fact it is also all the more connected with theological knowledge, since this stands in teh most intimate relation on the one hand to supernatural faith, in which it is itself rooted, and on the other hand to the supernatural life that ought to proceed from faith.  By dint of this twofold relation and the influence of the Holy Ghost corresponding to it, theology attains the character of a sacred science, which distinguishes it from all other sciences as essentially profane ones and therefore also places it in an entirely special way under the influence and the authority of the visible organ of the Holy Ghost, the Church.  These statements are explained and substantiated in the following theses.

Above all some supernatural assistance of the Holy Ghost that illumines reason is morally necessary for theological knowledge for the same reasons on account of which it is necessary also for faith, disregarding the substantially supernatural character of the latter, namely because the nature of the subject on the one hand and of the object on the other hand entails great difficulties  for the correct and full understanding of the content of faith.  As for the subject, these difficulties lie in the dependence of all intellectual knowledge generally on the senses, and also in the confusing influences of prejudices, passions, ill will, and evil spirits.  As for the object they lie in the superiority of the content of faith over the entire circle of natural ideas.  In the first respect therefore the illumination of the Holy Ghost must first exert a negative, purifying influence on the eye of reason, but in the second respect that is positive, enlightening, in order to conform and relate the natural ideas to the supernatural objects.

Fr Matthias Scheeben,
Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics, 1.2

Ratzinger on "Academic Theology"

So now we come to the second adjustment: Matthew has added to the prophetic text the aforementioned phrase from the Second Book of Samuel (5:2), originally applied to the new King David, and now brought to fulfillment in Jesus. The coming ruler is portrayed as the shepherd of Israel. In this way, Matthew highlights the loving care and tenderness that mark out the true ruler as a representative of God’s kingship.  

The answer given by the chief priests and scribes to the wise men’s question has a thoroughly practical geographical content, which helps the Magi on their way. Yet it is not only a geographical, but also a theological interpretation of the place and the event. That Herod would draw the obvious conclusion is understandable. Yet it is remarkable that his Scripture experts do not feel prompted to take any practical steps as a result. Does this, perhaps, furnish us with the image of a theology that exhausts itself in academic disputes?

Joseph Ratzinger,
Jesus of Nazareth:  The Infancy Narratives