May 2010 Archives

Been thinking a lot about the Holy Spirit lately. Fr. J said in his homily last Sunday said that the Holy Spirit "makes the difference." It makes the difference between a loving church community and a cold and distant one. It makes the difference in a generous and giving person and a miser. It makes the difference between a person who is ready to change and a person who is stuck in his old ways.

David Mills of "First Things" magazine wrote this week about "Spirituality without Spirits," or the modern popular concept and lifestyle of "spirituality" as opposed to supposedly cold hard "religion."

He writes about Lady Gaga -- who may not be so celibate after all -- telling a newspaper that although she was raised Catholic, she now prefers a more "spiritual" type of God.

"There's really no religion that doesn't hate or condemn a certain kind of people, and I totally believe in all love and forgiveness, and excluding no one," she says.

Mills debunks the whole "spirituality" myth -- which is that one can be spiritual without the actual relationship with the kind of Spirit that one encounters only in religious practice. To be religious is to be spiritual -- to engage with and encounter a true spirit that is beyond us, that challenges us, and that can change us.

I'm presently reading a book by John Paul II on the Holy Spirit: Dominum et Vivificantem: The Holy Spirit in the Life of the Church and the World. That first Latin part means "Lord and Giver of Life," which is what we Catholics call the Holy Spirit every Sunday at Mass.

Because every human heart desires God, I think it can certainly be said that persons who subscribe to these sorts of popular, ephemeral, non-substantive types of "spirituality" are looking, objectively, for the Holy Spirit. In other words, everyone wants life, and the Holy Spirit stands ready to give it to them to the full. But their perception, often received from popular media, is that the Holy Spirit, and the Church to which He gives life, will not give them the kind of happiness that they seek from living spiritually.

Why? Because of the moral claims that they make. It's that "Holy" with a capital "H" that some of us find so unnerving. That's what, I suspect, Lady Gaga is talking about. She thinks that religion is about hating and condemning people. That's her concept of morality. If it was my concept of morality, I would agree with her. A lot of people would, and that I suspect is why the concept of "spirituality" is so appealing, why so many characterize themselves as "spiritual but not religious."

But religion, at least the Christian religion, is about loving and accepting and including people. But therefore it must be about hating and condemning certain lifestyles and practices, both in our own lives and in the world writ large, that are fundamentally incompatible with loving our neighbor the way Christ loves us. If certain sexual practices -- and let's be frank, the vast majority of objections people have to the moral claims of the Church come down to sexual practices -- are condemned and excluded by the Church, that is the reason.

The reason why certain practices must be excluded may not always be clear to us, but many things regarding God are not always clear, and nonethless true. My purpose here is not to make the case for these teachings. That would take many more blog posts. I simply say the basis of these teachings is not hate and exclusion, but love and inclusion -- of all people.

The concept is rooted in scripture, as John Paul II notes in his book. In John Chapter 16, Jesus tells his disciples that when the Holy Spirit comes, He will "convince the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment."

Well there's the rub. All you have to do is watch a few episodes of "Intervention" to know that we human beings do not like to be convinced of our own sin -- of our imperfections and our need to change. Religion -- Holy Spirituality -- does that. Spirituality does not.

Just in case anyone missed this. This is an extended cut of my friends Justin and Kelly winning the O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships "Punniest of Show" competition, in Austin Texas on May 22. It includes interviews before and after, and the trophy presentation.

This was awesome.

My roommate Justin Golbabai and our friend Kelly Dupen perform their now famous pun-laden routine in which they play a five-years-dating, not-yet-engaged couple at the end of their rope. On May 22, 2010, in Austin Texas, their ingenious routine won first place at the O. Henry World Championship Pun-Off's "Punniest in Show" event.

Last night, T, her maid of honor, and I watched the Disney film The Princess and the Frog.

I've only been to New Orleans once in my life, which is weird for a Cajun boy from Lafayette. But based on my limited experience, it's pretty spot on. Spot on in a cliché way of course, but as my fiancé observed, they were respectful of the Cajun people. The writers could have been a ot more ridiculous and poked a lot more fun at Cajun culture. But then, if they had, the last thing you would see is a group of politically correct Cajuns protesting the movie. There's no Association Against the Defamation of Cajuns or anything like that.

Some parts of Cajun culture are omitted from the film -- including its deep religious elements. I found it interesting that the clearest depiction of religion or the supernatural was the voodoo villain Dr. Facilier. There is a good-guy voodoo lady in the film as well, but of course, she fights voodoo with more voodoo. Other than them the closest thing to religion in the film is wishing on a star. The central character recognizes at one point in the film the utter futility of doing so, while the voodoo powers are clearly very real from beginning to end.

This is not a big surprise, of course. It's a Diseny movie, and Disney has never been about the kind of religion one finds in the real world. Disney is about "magic." Disney characters don't pray. They "wish upon a star," because that is supposedly more appealing to a mass audience.

None of this is a deal-breaker, mind you. The movie is fun and laugh-out-loud funny at times. The characters are all endearing in their own way. The coolest one is Ray, an adorable firefly who helps guide the central characters through the swamp. Ray's Cajun accent is uncanny. He is voiced by Jim Cummings, who among other things has provided the voice for WInnie the Pooh (and Tigger too) going back to the 1980s.

I give it three stars out of four, which in the world of Ebert and Roeper is a thumbs up. I liked it.

... Ha! I just looked up Roger Ebert's review and he gave it three stars too! He actually makes the good point that the film reverts back to classic Disney animation. No CGI, no 3-D chicanery. Just great and simply drawn characters living in a world of painted backdrops. Awesome.

And the film got 84 percent at Rotten Tomatoes. If you haven't seen this movie yet, and you're looking for some funny, classically animated Disney adventure, this won't knock your socks off but it is a safe bet.

Came across an interesting article at the website for Crisis Magazine, a lay Catholic publication, by a guy named John Zmirak, whom I've never heard of but seems pretty insightful.

His argument: the theological virtue of love (or more clearly charity) cannot be properly understood or properly practiced without a proper understanding and practice of the "merely natural" virtues of justice (moral righteousness), temperance (moderation, avoidance of excess), fortitude (courage), and prudence (smart thinking).

Without the clear understanding and proper practice of those virtues, we cannot fulfill Christ's commandment, that we love one another as He loved us. For Jesus Himself was a model not only of the theological virtues (faith, hope and love), but of those four natural virtues as well.

The Christian message of Love, Zmirak writes, is not that only our conception of "love" by itself is sufficient without anything else to place it in context.

The example upon which he draws is indeed Benedict's comments regarding the abuse scandals, when he said:

"Forgiveness is not a substitute for justice. In one word we have to re-learn these essentials: conversion, prayer, penance, and the theological virtues."

Love without respect for justice is not really love, but a corruption of it. In modern popular culture, there are many conceptions and practices of "love" that do not include justice, or temperance, or courage, or prudence. They may involve strong emotional attachments and warm-fuzzies, but a strong emotional attachment and warm-fuzzies are not a foundation for a loving relationship in the Christian sense.

Some may argue that this makes it appear that God's Love is not enough, that we devalue God's Love by saying that it needs other virtues to make it work.

But I would say it is precisely by practicing these simple, ordinary human virtues that we place the value in Love that it truly deserves. Without these ordinary virtues, we strip Love of its identity. Love becomes merely an undiscerning affirmation of everyone, even those who need to be called to conversion, and everything, even the most heinous crimes. Love is challenging. As Zmirak put it:

Grace builds on nature, but it cannot simply replace it. If we're unjust, rash, intemperate or irresponsible, it won't simply cripple our attempts to practice faith, hope, and charity -- it might actually render them evil.

To my surprise, I have actually been told by a couple of readers that I have been slacking on my web log. On one hand I find this very affirming, since I suppose it means there is some demand for my writing. On the other it is a bit distressing since I have not been doing enough to meet said demand.

I heard somewhere once that writing is never finished -- it is merely abandoned. Writing will never reach the level of perfection that we writers desire for it. We aren't God, but we wish we could be so capable. We have to be content with what we have been able to produce, imperfect as it is, because we won't produce anything much better if we work hard on it for another ten years, and we certainly won't improve it at all by our deadline.

That's a good thing for me to learn in approaching this particular project in my life. I often start to write something and then I leave it in the "draft" section because some sentence here is not quite what I'm trying to say or some word there may rub certain people the wrong way, or some readers might respond in this way to that argument and then dismiss whatever else I have to say, or I haven't figured out a clever enough way to end the post.

For all these reasons, and because I have been rather busy in other areas of my life, I have only managed to do a handful of posts in May. So I will now try something new. I will try each day (or as often as possible) to post something up here, and after 30 minutes to an hour max of work on it, I will simply abandon it. I will hit "publish" and what will be will be.

The most difficult thing about writing for me is letting go. So now I'm working on letting go. If any of the imperfections listed in the third paragraph come glaring through in a post, I welcome comments to that effect. Either way, enjoy!

It's been all over the news since he said it. Here and here for starters. Pope Benedict XVI has said that it is sin "within the Church" that has led to the sex abuse crisis the Catholic Church now faces.

Sounds pretty terrible and scary. But it is good news.

It looks like Vatican Radio broke the story and everyone else ran with it. Said the pope:

... attacks against the Pope or the Church do not only come from outside; rather the sufferings of the Church come from within, from the sins that exist in the Church. This too has always been known, but today we see it in a really terrifying way: the greatest persecution of the Church does not come from enemies on the outside, but is born from the sin within the church ...

His words are getting billed in the press as the "strongest comments" on the sex abuse scandal, that he is dismissing the idea that the whole sex abuse crisis has been ginned up by a press that hates the authority of the Vatican, the celibate priesthood, and him.

But his comments aren't surprising. He is essentially saying what those who follow the pope, and what many faithful Catholics, have known since the sex abuse scandals first started to break in America.

The crisis in the Church is a crisis of fidelity to Christ. It is rooted in the steady departure of the Church from fidelity both in preaching and in practice to the New Covenant in Christ. Components of this departure include a watering down of solid theological and moral teaching, and thereby a de-valuing of the admission of personal imperfection and penance before Christ. But at the root of it is a departure from prayer. At some point, Benedict seems to believe, the Church lost her prayerful soul. All the other ills flowed from that. Benedict continued:

... the Church therefore has a deep need to re-learn penance, to accept purification, to learn on one hand forgiveness but also the need for justice. Forgiveness is not a substitute for justice. In one word we have to re-learn these essentials: conversion, prayer, penance, and the theological virtues.

Bad or inaccurate media coverage, or slanderous accusers, or anything else external, could not create the crisis the Church now faces. Could they in some way contribute to it? Probably. But what could have prevented the crisis from becoming the cancer that it is on the body of the Church is and has always been prayer.

Again, this is good news. Why? Because the illness can be cured with prayer. Our prayer.

It has long been understood that the Church is not limited to the clerical hierarchies and religious celibates. The Catholic Church is all the baptized Catholic faithful. We can hardly affect what detractors and critics on the outside say about the Church and about her faithful. We are quite in a position to strengthen the soul of the Church itself, which is the Body of Christ.

If a man's body is bleeding because of what someone else is doing to him, then he faces the tall order of defending himself and changing the behavior of another. But if a man's wounds are self-inflicted, what he must do is simply change his own behavior. Unlike if his wounds are inflicted by an outside agressor, if he and he alone is responsible for his wounds, then the choice of what to do now is entirely his.

What happens to the Church now has nothing to do with the kind of press she gets. As the Holy Father has said, it requires conversion. In other words, it is our free choice.

Came across this passage from Hebrews Chapter 3, verse 13 while praying the Divine Office this morning:

Encourage yourselves daily while it is still "today," so that none of you may grow hardened by the deceit of sin.

It reminded me of that Kris Allen song "Live Like We're Dying," which is basically about not waiting before you say or do something really important to or for a loved one. The song definitely has a Christian element to it, about how we never know when the end is going to meet us face to face, and we need to always make sure we are reconciled with others.

Encouragement does not only mean "affirmation," telling someone he or she is doing a good job. It can also include telling someone that he or she is capable of doing better.

None of us, in this life, will ever reach a point where we cannot be any holier than we are at the present time. There will always be something more we can give to God. There will always be a way for us to grow closer to Him, to invite Him more into our hearts. There will always be some aspect of our lives in which we can be more like Jesus. That is a good thing, not a bad thing.

Think about who in your life needs to hear that.

Because the key is not to beat ourselves up for not being better than we are now, but to encourage each other to grow.

Prayer is like planting a tree in an empty backyard. One may not always feel like planting a tree. One may even be pressed into doing so by a friend or politely asked to help do so by a dad to whom one owes much of his present success.

Planting a tree takes a great deal of effort, especially in a place like Central Texas, where one encounters hard rock about an inch beneath the surface. You plunge the shovel into the nice brown dirt a couple of times, and then, CLANK.

At that point, all you can really do is keep plunging the shovel into the ground again and again. And what difference might you see between one plunge and the next? If you're not the strongest dude on the block, probably not a whole lot.

So it is with prayer. It may have a certain novelty and fun at first. But then it becomes work. And at times it may appear to be fruitless work. You may not see much if any difference in your life from one prayer to the next. In that way, it may be easy to get discouraged. But one must keep the end in mind.

You might ask yourself, while you're plunging that shovel into the ground over and over again, only to dislodge a couple of tiny limestone shards, what is even the point? The point is not merely to plunge away with increasing impatience and anger at the rock. The point is to make room in the ground. Why? To plant a tree.

You're plunging that shovel into the ground over and over again, at great discomfort to yourself, blistering your hands, in order to bring new life, new beauty into your backyard (or your parents' backyard, as the case may be). The tree spices up the backyard and brings shade to the grass below. It turns the backyard from a flat, uninteresting place to potentially, one day, a garden.

But it starts with plunging that shovel into the hard rock ground.

So it is with prayer. It is the first step to bringing new life into the spiritual soil of one's soul. And at first all one can do is repeat the motions. But one must keep the end in mind. The end in mind is holiness -- turning our flat, uninteresting lives into something more, something blessed and joyful. Prayer is making room in our very crowded hearts and minds for that new life -- which is God.

If I had brought the new tree into the backyard and just thrown it on the ground without first making room for it, the tree could not have taken root. No roots, no life. No life, no shade. No new beauty. In order to enjoy the benefits of the tree, I have to make room for the tree.

If we want to enjoy the benefits of God in our lives, if we want the deep interior happiness and comfort that only He can give, we have to make room for Him. Over and over again.

I was very sickly and pathetic on Friday. After spending the day mostly sleeping off a dreadful sinus headache, my beautiful fiance, whom I love very much (and who alone knows where this is going), came by my apartment to take me out to get dinner. Again, I very much appreciated this.

At this point I should make clear that while I have a history of indecision and second-guessing when it comes to big choices, like what to do with my life, I have no such problems when it comes to little things, like where to get food on a Friday night. With that in mind, observe the following exchange with T and me, as we sat in her car.

T: So where do you want to eat?

I rub my forehead in pain. I should also mention that Terri hhad her keys in the ignition, but she had not yet actually started the car.

T: Awww, baby.
Me: I don't know. I can't think.
T: How about Elevation Burger?

Now at this point, I'm thinking, Oh that could be good. That's the moment of decision for me. So I say to her --

Me: Sure honey.

Here's the problem. When you are very sickly and pathetic, you can't really sound very enthusiastic about anything. Not even Elevation Burger.

T: Do you want to eat somewhere else?
Me: No, Elevation Burger is fine, honey.
T: Are you sure?
Me: Yes, I'm sure.
T: But you don't look sure.
Me: Could you please start the car, honey?
T: You're sure you don't wanta eat somewhere else?

I rub my forehead again.

M: Ummm ...

At this piont, she has almost convinced me to start considering other possibilities. She pats my knee reassuringly.

T: Anywhere you want, honey ...

My head was spinning. I almost said Plucker's. I summoned up all my strength ...

Me: Oh! I have an idea.
T: What?
Me: ELEVATION BURGER!

I reached for the keys and and turned the car on myself.

But again, I really appreciated it very much.

Of course, Chick-Fil-A is relatively close to Elevation Burger. So naturally as we were approaching, Terri asked:

T: Do you want to go to Chick-Fil-A instead?

I rubbed my head again.

Me: Why, do you wanta go?
T: No I just thought maybe you would like to.
Me: ...Well now that you mention it ...
T: Yeah? You want to?
Me: ELEVATION BURGER!