Confessions of a Liturgy Queen

"A tendency to overpack"

2011-10-20T13:14:00.000-07:00

From Kerry Weber's articlein America Magazine, "The Father's Way" about the new film by Emilio Estevez, starring his father, Martin Sheen. The film tells the storry of a man who loses his son and decides to walk the several-hundred-kilometre El Camino de Santiago between France and Spain.

Along the camino, the refugios, or hostels, often contain shelves of books in many languages, which people have left behind in order to lighten their packs on the road. Everyone has a tendency to overpack, Sheen said, but this unpacking can be not only a physical comfort but a spiritual one, as well.

“As you begin to let go of the material baggage then you begin to reflect on the interior baggage, and you begin the transcendence, the descent into yourself,” Sheen said. “As St. Teresa of Ávila tells us, in order to become free and to become ourselves we have to open the dungeons of our hearts and let go of all those people and those things that we’ve been hanging on to…. We’re hanging on to resentment, judgment, anger, jealously…. As we begin to descend in there and have an honest look at the baggage we’ve accumulated, we begin to let it all go and we become ourselves.”

In the end, Sheen said, it is important to remember that we are all on the same journey. “You can’t have anyone walk this walk for you,” he said. “But you don’t have to walk it alone.”

Image

"El Camino de Santiago, Spain" by flydime

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Movie Review Series at Life as a Human

2011-10-17T18:06:00.000-07:00

I have recently begun writing a regular series of film reviews for the online magazine Life as a Human. The films I review are for the most part not current but are favorites of mine that readers/movie lovers may not have seen or may have forgotten about.

There is a brief introduction to the series here.

So far I have reviewed Another Year, Tender Mercies, and Pelle the Conqueror. In the coming weeks reviews of Shall We Dance? (Japanese and American versions) and Cabaret will be posted.

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Ampro Super Stylist 16mm Sound Movie Projector by Carbon Arc

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Marilynne Robinson, Matthew 25, and the Neo-Fundamentalists

2011-10-08T16:06:00.000-07:00

Since these folk [neo-fundamentalists] claim to be defenders of embattled Christianity (under siege by liberalism, as they woould have it), they might be struck by the passage in Matthew 25 in which Jesus says, identifying himself with the poorest, "I was hungry and ye fed me not." This is the parable in which Jesus portrays himself as eschatological judge and in which he separates "the nations." It should surely be noted that he does not apply any standard of creed, of purity, or of orthodoxy in deciding whom to save and whom to damn. This seems to me a valuable insight into what Jesus himself might consider fundamental. To those who have not recognized him in the hungry and the naked, he says, "Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels." Neo-fundamentalists seem to crave this sort of language - more than they might if they were to consider its context here. It is the teaching of the Bible passim that God has confided us very largely to one another's care, but that in doing so he has in no degree detached himself from us. Indeed, in this parable Jesus would seem to push beyond the image of God as final judge, to describe an immanence of God in humankind that makes judgment present and continuous and, in effect, makes our victim our judge. Neither here nor anywhere else in the Bible is there the slightest suggestion that our judge/victim would find a plea of economic rationalism extenuating.

Marilynne Robinson, "Onward, Christian Liberals" in The Best American Essays 2007

(I love Marilynne)

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DSC 01004 by alphabunny_photos' photostream

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"How sweet it is to forget all that stuff..."

2011-10-05T08:32:00.000-07:00

Noli vinci a malo sed vince in bono malum. [Be not overcome by evil, but overcome evil by good (Romans 12:21).] The faults, imperfections, and weaknesses of people who are supposed to be holy! I have not been allowed to retain much of an illusion about the universal perfection of the house where I am going to make vows! But it is ceasing to disturb me. How sweet it is to forget all that stuff and to realize that it is none of my business to worry about the apparent faults of others outside of the simple means prescribed by the Usages. How many burdens there are that you don't really have to carry! In fact you sin by carrying them, and you give God much glory by dropping them! And so there is no need to make any decision about so many seeming imperfections in a community.

From Entering the Silence: The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume Two 1941-1952

Vancouver International Film Festival: Quickie Reviews (I)

2011-10-04T08:23:00.000-07:00

I have seen six films at the festival so far and have enjoyed all of them. Here are some mini-reviews:

Morente

This is a documentary about the well-known Spanish flamenco singer Enrique Morente. I most particularly enjoyed the music in this film (for some reason, I slept through a good part of the biographical scenes); Morente’s brand of flamenco is moving and hypnotic.

The Front Line

This is a Korean film about a group of soldiers who spend most of the Korean War taking and retaking a single hill from the enemy. The film’s anti-war message is not very subtle and the life of the ordinary soldier is in some ways over-romanticized, so in spite of some excellent battle scenes, this was the least satisfying movie so far.

The Mill and the Cross

An imaginative and moving dramatization of the 1564 painting The Way of the Cross by Pieter Bruegel, this film is a gem. The cinematography is gorgeous and the story, like the painting, is fascinating and thought-provoking. If this film, which features Rutger Hauer, Michael York, and Charlotte Rampling, comes in to general release I recommend that you see it.

Circumstance

I found this film interesting because it gave me an insight into a side of Iranian culture that I did not know existed. The story involves two young women from well-to-do families who are brought up in a world that seems to have escaped the severe restrictions and punishments of Islamic law; the young women are in love with each other. Their cozy world begins to collapse, however, when the brother of one of the women returns to the family after undergoing drug rehab, which has clearly included some Islamic indoctrination. Thanks to the brother’s growing fundamentalism and his pathological need for control, the freedoms enjoyed by the family are going to be curtailed by a creeping and insidious orthodoxy. The only flaw I found here was what I consider to be the miscasting of the two young women.

Corpo Celeste

In Corpo Celeste a quirky and independent-minded 13-year-old girl has emigrated to Italy from Switzerland and is immediately thrust into the conservative, and clearly corrupt, Catholic world of her new home. In the process of taking preparatory classes for her confirmation, she discovers the nature of the Church, the confusing and disappointing world of adults, and most of all, herself. At the same time, her determination to see and express truth provide some lessons to those around her. Excellent film and wonderful acting from the girl, who is in practically every scene of the movie.

A Simple Life

This Ann Hui masterpiece is by far my favourite of the films I have seen. It is the story of Ah Tao, a maid who has served a Hong Kong family for sixty years. Most of the family has emigrated to the U.S. but as the film opens she is still looking after one of the grandsons, Roger, a movie producer. When she suffers a stroke she decides it is time to retire and to move into a long-term care facility. The rest of the film is a character study of this remarkable woman and of the love she has given to the family which is now returned by Roger. As her health gradually deteriorates, the movie reveals, through little incidents, more facets of her character—selflessness, independence, wisdom, dignity, humour.

I love this kind of film, where nothing really happens, where there is no major conflict, and no great revelation or surprise at the end, but in which so much is revealed. I am certain that a film like A Simple Life is far more difficult to make than big, expensive blockbusters like Titanic and Avatar, and Transformers. I am also sure that the making of A Simple Life is an act of love by an artist of great depth and exquisite taste.

"It's the luxury of the well-off to be depressed"

2011-09-14T07:23:00.000-07:00

New York Times opinion and food columnist Mark Bittman writes in today's online edition of the paper that he is feeling pessimistic about the state of the world. So he called his friend Charles Kenny, "a Brit who lives in the District of Columbia and has a sharp mind, a quick wit and the fancy title of senior fellow at the Center for Global Development," to get an antidote for his depressed state of mind.

Bittman asked Kenny:

Is it, as I have long suspected, that we (humans) always believe that we (individuals currently alive) are experiencing the worst time ever?

No hesitation: "Yes. Certainly the Romans thought that, and there's a long tradition of pessimism, especially" - and he said this without cruelty - "amongst the writing classes. Nearly all really poor people around the world, those with the right to complain, don't; they say 'yes' when asked if life is going to be better for their kids. It's the luxury of the well-off to be depressed." (Italics are mine)

Charles Kenny wrote the book Getting Better: Why Global Development is Succeeding and How to Improve the World Even More, which I have not read (because I had never actually even heard of Charles Kenny before reading Bittman's column).

Image Source

"Depressed in Paris...with a bird" by Tony Birrer"

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Anonymous Authority

2011-08-29T13:36:00.000-07:00

Every so often I run across something (usually in a book) that expresses perfectly thoughts that have remained rather unformed in my consciousness. I have just picked up A.S. Neill's Summerhill and have begun reading the Foreword, which was written by the socialist humanist Erich Fromm. Neill's book was published in 1961.

Here is what Fromm has to say about "our modern industrial society":

The change from the overt authority of the nineteenth century to the anonymous authority of the twentieth was determined by the organizational needs of our modern industrial society. The concentration of capital led to the formation of giant enterprises managed by hierarchically organized bureaucracies. Large conglomerations of workers and clerks work together, each individual a part of a vast organized production machine, which in order to run at all, must run smoothly and without interruption. The individual worker becomes merely a cog in this machine. In such a production organization, the individual is managed and manipulated.

And in the sphere of consumption (in which the individual allegedly expresses his free choice) he is likewise managed and manipulated. Whether it be the consumption of food, clothing, liquor, cigarettes, movies, or television programs, a powerful suggestion apparatus is at work with two purposes: first, to constantly increase the individual's appetite for new commodities; and secondly, to direct these appetites into the channels most profitable for industry. Man is transformed into the consumer, the eternal suckling, whose one wish is to consume more and "better" things.

....

It is not that authority has disappeared, or even that it has lost its strength, but that it has been transformed from the overt authority of force to the anonymous authority of persuasion and suggestion. In other words, in order to be adaptable, modern man is obliged to nourish the illusion that everything is done with his consent, even though such consent be extracted from him by subtle manipulation. His consent is obtained, as it were, behind his back, or behind his consciousness.

This manipulation has been going on for so long now that the corporations have become country-sized economies, and the gap between rich and poor in the so-called industrialized countries and in the post-industrial economies has become nothing less than obscene. The question I ask is whether the manipulation of which Fromm speaks really does take place "behind our consciousness" and if it does, are we then victims of the system or are we responsible for a condition that has been facilitated by our own narrow consciousness?

War Minus the Shooting

2011-08-26T20:17:00.000-07:00

If winning isn’t everything, why do they keep score? Vince Lombardi

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting. George Orwell

Competitive team sport tends to stimulate certain behaviours, both on and off the field, rink, or court, that extend beyond the parameters of the purpose and the written and unwritten rules of the game. The worst of these behaviours—brutal violence and wanton destruction of property—lead one to wonder about the nature and the value of competition and about the evolution (or lack thereof) of human consciousness.

One only has to look to events of the recent past in professional and amateur sport to glean examples of the baser instincts overcoming the more refined and rational aspects of our nature.

In March of this year a San Francisco Giants fan was brutally beaten in the parking lot of Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles during a baseball game. Two Dodger fans were charged with the assault
In June riots erupted in Vancouver following the defeat of the local team by the Boston Bruins in the seventh game of the Stanley Cup final series. Youths roamed the streets of the city for hours, burning police cars, smashing windows, and looting stores
On August 18 a “friendly” basketball game in Beijing between the Hoyas of Washington’s Georgetown University and a professional Chinese team ended in a brawl when one of the Chinese players pushed a Hoyas player to the floor. Fans threw chairs and full water bottles at the Georgetown team members as they hurriedly exited the stadium
On August 20, two people were shot at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park following a professional football game

The majority of sports fans do not come close to this level of intensity in their support of this team or that team. Yet the questions I ask myself as I read of these incidents and as I reflect on my own reactions to the rise and fall of the fortunes of my favourite teams are these: Is there something essential missing in the life of a sports fan that causes him to project his expectations onto an athletic organization? Is the satisfaction I feel when my team wins in fact an affirmation to my ego, telling me that somehow I am better than everyone who supports the loser? Does society allow us to act out our disappointment with the performance of “our team” in a way that it does not allow us to do for other disappointments in our lives—job or relationship disappointments, for example?

Consider the fans of the San Francisco Giants, 2010 World Series champions. An article in the August 22 edition of The New York Times carried the following headline: “With the World Series Champs in a Slump, a City Suffers.” The Giants, in second place in baseball’s National League West (and still with a strong chance of competing in the playoffs), have not played well in August, and as a result the euphoria over last year’s surprising championship is quickly waning. The team’s current slump “has left its fans—and much of the Giants-crazy region—in a funk.”

The article describes the situation in the home of one devoted Giants fan. The fan’s wife says “she can gauge the mood of her husband…by the way the team plays. ‘He’ll be watching the Giants in his man cave and I’ll come in and I’ll look at the score’, she said. ‘And then I’ll sort of run away.’”

I recognize a version of this behaviour in myself. For example, I rarely watch on TV full games of the teams that I like because I find the experience too nerve-racking. I yell and curse at my team for their “stupid mistakes” or their “lousy play.” While this behaviour provides a source of amusement to other members of my household, I have to admit to myself that it is not the behaviour of a well-balanced, fully aware individual. Yet I do not behave this way when things do not work out to my satisfaction in other areas of my life (except perhaps when I am cooking).

And why is it that in other arenas of competition we do not see examples of extreme “fanism” resulting in incidents of violence or destruction of property? I have never heard of a brutal assault at the world figure skating championships (well, there was the 1991 Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan incident, but I’m pretty sure that was an anomaly) or of burned-out police cars and looted department stores following the Van Cliburn piano competition.

Curling is a competitive team sport, but as far as I know no one has ended up in the hospital as a result of a dispute between curlers or curling fans. One might argue that this is because curling is not a contact sport like football or soccer or even basketball. But baseball is not a contact sport either, yet the incident at Dodger Stadium mentioned above and at least one or two bench-clearing brawls per season show that the sport is no less immune to violence than more physical contests like hockey.

I have not seen psychological or socio-economic profiles of any of the actors involved in the above-mentioned incidents. Even if I had, I am not a psychologist or a sociologist, so I really wouldn’t know what to make of such profiles. Many will say that being a sports fan allows us to harmlessly vent our frustration with other aspects of our lives. Others will claim that watching sports and everything that goes with that pastime are nothing more than innocent fun. They may have a point.

Yet I do feel a sense of disquiet about how we allow our emotions to be manipulated by organized sport. This permitted manipulation says as much about us and our level of consciousness as it does about the big business of sport. If we sat back and non-judgmentally observed our reactions to the wins and losses of our teams (or to the performance of our children at the rink or on the field), we might in fact learn a great deal about ourselves. What do these reactions tell us about how happy—or more important, how unhappy—we are? What do they tell us about how we function in other areas of our lives? Perhaps they are pointing to issues that we need to deal with.

Competition pervades our everyday lives. It is present in the I’m right/you’re wrong scenarios that constantly play themselves out between spouses, partners, and friends, in the urge to get ahead of all the cars on the road in front of us, in the need to impress others with our grades, our salary, our beautiful significant other. That the thrill of winning or succeeding in all of these competitions is temporary and often comes at a cost should tell us something about the nature of competition and of our apparent need to win.

Is there something wrong with organized competitive team sport? I am not sure. But I do wonder if we’d be able to sit down at a baseball game or a football game simply for the pleasure of watching a group of highly trained athletes perform the magic of executing a play that no ordinary human could pull off, for the thrill of seeing a beautifully choreographed double play or a successful thirty-yard pass and run, regardless of which team produces the goods.

Or maybe I’m just an old spoilsport.

Images

"Angry Fan" by Alasdair Middleton

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"Baseball Brawl" by iotae

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"Midnight in Paris": A Review

2011-08-20T08:51:00.000-07:00

I have seen this movie twice this summer and have been moved each time by the beautifully imagined and realized journeys into Paris of the 1920s and, more briefly, of La Belle Époque taken by the protagonist Gil Pender (played by Owen Wilson), a screenwriter and aspiring novelist with a strongly romantic bent. How seductive the salons, bars, nightclubs, and cobbled and gaslit streets where a writer can commune with the likes of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein and listen to Cole Porter play and sing the music that became standards of the American songbook. The seduction becomes more intense when Gil meets the classically beautiful Adriana, lover of Picasso, Modigliani, and others. It is no wonder that he sits on the church steps night after night waiting for the bell to chime midnight and for the ancient cab to pull up and transport him to another encounter with his literary and artistic heroes or with Adriana, who is drawing him away from the increasingly distasteful present-day prospect of marriage to a woman entirely unsuited to his nature.

Gil Pender is a successful Hollywood screenwriter. He is also a very unhappy Hollywood screenwriter; he has long wanted to write a novel and is currently working on a story about a man who owns a nostalgia shop. Gil has come to Paris with his fiancée, Inez, the shallow, snobbish daughter of rich, conservative, and shallow, snobbish parents. It is clear from the start that these two are absolutely not meant for each other. Gil adores Paris and wants to stay; he loves wandering the streets—even in the rain, perhaps especially in the rain—exploring the little shops, watching people in the sidewalk cafés. He believes that Paris is where he can finish his novel, completing the transformation from Hollywood hack to true writer. Inez, on the other hand, is the stereotypical philistine American tourist: Paris is okay but…. When she meets up with another American couple, she is immediately taken up with the excruciatingly pedantic Paul, who knows everything about everything French. Gil is repulsed by the falsehood of this little circle and begins spending more time on his own.

One night when Gil has once again opted out of spending time with in the tedious company of Paul and his girlfriend—and Inez—Gil gets lost on his way back to the hotel. He ends up sitting on the steps of a church just before midnight. As the church bell begins to chime the hour, a gleaming 1920 Peugeot Landaulet pulls up to the curb and stops. The cab’s passengers, clearly in a festive spirit fuelled by champagne, urge him into the car. Gil quickly gives in to their exhortations to join them in their revelry and is whisked off to a lively party at a timeless location in the City of Light.

At the party Gil soon becomes aware that the company is unusual. The fellow playing the piano and singing is remarkably like Cole Porter and a young woman introduces herself as Zelda Fitzgerald; when she learns Gil is a writer she calls out to “Scott” to come and meet him. The look on Gil’s face when he realizes where he has landed is worth the price of admission alone. The romantic young novelist is soon swept into the literary world of the Fitzgeralds. He meets Hemingway, then Stein, then Picasso. And he meets Adriana (gorgeously and deliciously played by Marion Cotillard), the wistful romantic who mirrors his own character.

Night after night he returns to the church and to the literary and artistic world of the twenties to which he has become so romantically attached. It is interesting that screenwriter/director Woody Allen has made all the great figures into caricatures: the self-absorbed Zelda, the party-loving Fitzgerald, the cliché-spouting Hemingway, the grandiloquently vapid Dali. When Gil asks Hemingway to read his manuscript, the great man defers to Stein, who offers the most unhelpful advice—in fact, it is no advice at all.

It is only Gil’s mirror image, and his love object, Adriana, who is a fully developed character. Gil of 2010 loves the 1920’s; Adriana of the Jazz Age is drawn to La Belle Époque. And when an elegant carriage conducts them to Maxim’s and they meet Lautrec, Degas, and Matisse, who offer Adriana the opportunity to remain in the golden age of Paris, Gil realizes the folly of trying to live in a past era and spurns her offer to remain with her.

Meanwhile in his daytime wanderings, Gil has met Gabrielle, the proprietor of a shop that specializes in old records. He is drawn to the shop one day when he hears the singing voice of Cole Porter—the same voice he heard at the magical party. He chats briefly with Gabrielle, who is attractive and warm but definitely not the siren that Adriana represents. Nevertheless, the viewer senses a certain wisdom in Gabrielle and the vague initiation of a kinship between them.

I will not reveal the final unfolding of the plot although the astute reader will likely have guessed. Suffice it to say that Gil not only recognizes that we must all live in the now, but more important, we must all be who we really are; as long as we continue to deny our true nature, our true path, our true bliss, we will remain in a confused and conflicted condition.

Wonderful performances by all the players, including the caricatured jazz-age celebrities. My personal favourites are Marion Cotillard (you cannot take your eyes off her when she is on screen), Kathy Bates (a favourite in everything she does), and Adrian Brody as Dali. I wonder how long it will take viewers to realize who Owen Wilson is channelling as Gil.

All in all, this is both a charming and deeply meaningful film.

The Plumber and the Lawyer

2011-08-16T08:37:00.000-07:00

I'm reading Anthony de Mello's book Awareness again and last night came to the chapter entitled "Obstacles to Happiness." Here de Mello says:

You're a success in life when you wake up! Then you don't have to apologize to anyone, you don't have to explain anything to anyone, you don't give damn what anybody thinks about you or what anybody says about you. You have no worries; you're happy. That's what I call being a success. Having a good job or being famous or having a great reputation has absolutely nothing to do with happiness or success. Nothing! It is totally irrelevant.

As he does so often in this book, he tells a humorous story to illustrate his point:

Did you hear about the lawyer who was presented with a plumber's bill? He said to the plumber, "Hey, you're charging me two hundred dollars an hour. I don't make that kind of money as a lawyer." The plumber said, "I didn't make that kind of money when I was a lawyer either!"

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Keith Williamson @ flickr.com

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Robert Duvall's "The Apostle": A Review

2011-08-16T06:28:00.000-07:00

When Robert Duvall tried to get financial backing to make his film The Apostle, he was turned down. Executives told him that there was too much dialogue. Duvall’s reply was that if there was one thing that characterized all preachers, it was their ability and propensity to talk, from morning till night; Jesus talk was a preacher’s stock in trade.

The idea of playing a “holiness”—or Pentecostal—preacher came to Duvall some twenty-five years before he actually made the film; he wrote the screenplay fifteen years before The Apostle became a big-screen reality. The project had become such a large part of his soul that he ended up putting up five million dollars of his own money just so that he could get it done. Praise the Lord and thank him for inspiring Robert Duvall to make this movie. From those who have seen it, let me hear an “Amen.”

I love Robert Duvall. One of my favorite movies is Tender Mercies, for which he won the Oscar for best actor. The subtle evolution and partial redemption of the country singer/composer Mac Sledge was masterfully portrayed by Mr. Duvall and the award was richly deserved. I recently watched The Great Santini, in which Duvall plays the role of Lt. Col. Bull Meechum, the tough, deeply troubled commander of Marine unit and family unit. Duvall was brilliant. Of course, his performance as the subtly humiliated consigliore to the Corleone family in The Godfather was remarkable for its understatement. I have already talked about his role in the remarkable True Confessions (here).

The first time I saw The Apostle I would have agreed with those movie executives: too much preaching—so much Jesus talk from Duvall’s character that it simply overwhelmed the story. I thought that Duvall, who appears in nearly every scene (quite a feat, actually, given that he also directed the film), was being somewhat self-indulgent. Duvall’s 1998 interview with Charlie Rose and a second viewing of the film caused me to change my mind.

Once Duvall had secured the funding to make The Apostle, he visited large numbers of holiness churches, white, black, and integrated, in the southern United States. He met preachers famous and unknown. In nearly every case he was impressed with both the sincerity and the preaching skill of these men of God (I don’t think he mentioned any women) and imbued the character of Sonny Dewey, also known as the Apostle E.F. in the movie with these characteristics, which come out not only in Sonny’s preaching—and yes, there is indeed a great deal of it—but also in his love for the little church he establishes and for the community that grows within and without its walls.

Euliss “Sonny” Dewey’s roots are deep in southern evangelism. In the opening scenes of the film we see him as a four-year-old sitting in a black church with his nanny listening to an old blind preacher, who is shouting, stomping, prancing around the pulpit at the front of the church: “Can you say ‘Yeah, Lord’? Yeah, Lord! Yeah Lord! Thank you, Lord! Thank you, Jesus!” Later we see him as a twelve-or thirteen-year-old prodigy preacher, delivering the fiery message himself in another black church.

Sonny Dewey is a good man, a man of God. But he is not without flaws, some of which are serious. After he discovers his wife having an affair and after he is voted out of a church he created, he commits a terrible act and is forced to flee and to live life in a far-off town not as Sonny Dewey but as “the Apostle E.F.”

It is impossible for the Apostle to remain hidden, however. He needs to preach, he needs to praise the Lord in a loud voice, and he needs to create and lead a faith community. With the help of a retired local pastor, he renovates an old church and through radio sermons, charity work, and the sheer power of his belief and his charisma, quickly builds a devoted congregation.

Even after he is found and goes to prison, he continues to preach. In the final scene of the film he is leading a road gang of convicted criminals in a litany of praise to Jesus.

The Apostle/Sonny Dewey is a complex man—a man with a big heart, a big ego, big desires and appetites. He can beat the daylights out of a cracker who acts disrespectfully in his church and be as tender and as forgiving as an angel when that same man comes back with a bulldozer to knock the church down. He is clever and resourceful, impish and cute, passionate and explosively violent. He knows who he is and never pretends to anyone that he is a saint.

Robert Duvall lived with Sonny for twenty-five years before making The Apostle. It is impossible to imagine any other actor who could play this role with the same power, the same nuance, the same conviction.

What's up with Gay (-themed) Movies? (A sort-of) Conclusion

2011-08-10T08:01:00.000-07:00

Conclusion

As I was re-watching these films it quickly became clear that I had rendered a rather harsh assessment in my brief introduction to this series of reviews. Obviously I had not watched the movies carefully and thoughtfully the first time around (I guess the reason for that is rather obvious), so I am now quite prepared to eat a little crow.

While coughing up feathers in the most dignified manner possible under the circumstances, I will point out that four of the movies reviewed are romantic comedies, and IMHO, this genre does not, by its very nature, produce cinematic masterpieces. Indeed, while rom-coms like Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally are memorable and even support a re-watching every few years, they do not fit into the category of thought-provoking or artistic cinema.

Three of the films are what we might call straightforward dramas, although the stories are vastly different. I do not think that I would be interested in seeing or writing about Food of Love or Boys Love again; I suspect that two viewings have pretty much exhausted the nuance of both the story and the characters in each of these movies. Mysterious Skin, on the other hand, offers depths that I have not yet explored, so horrifying as it is to watch, it is equally fascinating and definitely worth further study.

Lilies defies classification for me at this point. As I said in my review, there may be no subtext at all and what we see in terms of story may be all we get. I am certainly willing to give this movie another look and even more looks after that, just for the sheer pleasure of it if for no other reason.

What about other gay movies? I have seen a few online, including several shorts. None has impressed me as “great” or memorable. I have been intrigued by some that I see listed on amazon.ca but they have been too expensive for me to justify purchasing on my limited budget.

And just what is a “gay movie” anyway? At least two of the directors, perhaps three (I am not sure about Ventura Pons, who directed Food of Love), of the eight films I reviewed are straight. Many of the actors are straight. Taiwanese director Ang Lee has demonstrated that a straight man can make a powerful, beautiful, and sensitive film about gay men; Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal showed that two straight men can make us believe that they love each other in the way that gay men love each other. In fact, we would never have been able to see the film if “Brokeback Mountain” had not first been a heart-wrenching short story written by (straight) novelist Annie Proulx.

Then we have the gay writer Paul Rudnick who penned In & Out, a movie I would gladly pay not to have to see again.

What's up with Gay (-themed) Movies? Part 8: Mysterious Skin

2011-08-08T08:42:00.000-07:00

Mysterious Skin

This is a harrowing, moving, brilliant film—a film I find more difficult to watch with each viewing. Director Gregg Araki has adapted Scott Heim’s novel (which I have not read, but it is in my cart at amazon.ca) into a nuanced visual tale of child abuse and its effect on two boys and the young men they become.

That Neil and Brian are both outsiders is clear by the time they are eight years old, which is where the film begins. Neil, whose single mother courts a steady succession of boyfriends, drinks too much, and dreams of her ship coming in while holding down a job as a supermarket cashier, already knows that he is gay. When his mom, obviously looking for a way to fill the child-care gap she has created by her lifestyle, enrols him in little league baseball, he is immediately smitten by the coach, a handsome Robert Redford type. Coach is a virtuoso pedophile who quickly recognizes the perfect victim in Neil and begins abusing him. He abuses other boys as well, but Neil, whose need—apparently both sexual and emotional—for a man’s love makes him believe in Coach, is his favourite.

Brian is a different story. A sensitive boy who is scorned by his father and overprotected by his mother, he is abused by Coach on two occasions, one of them when Neil is present and a participant. Brian is profoundly traumatized by the incidents and is plagued by fainting spells, bed wetting, and nightmares. The blackouts and the nightmares—and his highly active imagination—lead him to believe, even as a young man, that he was kidnapped by aliens at the age of eight. A series of meetings and small epiphanies result in the realization that another boy was somehow involved, and that boy was his baseball teammate Neil McCormick.

As an adolescent, Neil begins a career as a hustler. He starts out in the small town in which he grew up but eventually follows his childhood friend Wendy to New York, where the money is better but the “clients” are more sophisticated and more potentially deadly. Wendy finally convinces Neil to get a “normal” job at a sandwich shop, but one night on the way home from work he is accosted by a john and takes the bait. The john takes him to his apartment in Brighton Beach where he beats him savagely and rapes him. It is two days before Christmas. Neil’s mother has bought him a plane ticket to go home to Kansas the next day.

Meanwhile Brian has met Neil’s mother and Neil’s friend Eric. Eric and Brian become close (and some of the most touching scenes in the film involve the sensitive straight boy and the outlandishly gay Eric) and both await Neil’s return. Brian and a somehow changed Neil meet and Neil agrees to tell Brian what happened on that night at Coach’s house. In the final scenes of the movie Neil and Brian are in Coach’s house (now occupied by a “nice, normal” family, who just happen to be out on Christmas Eve so the boys can conveniently break in). They are on the living room sofa, Neil sitting and Brian with his head on Neil’s lap and Neil tenderly stroking his hair as he relates the horrifying details of the night of abuse a decade earlier. Neil does not dilute the story, nor does he have any expectation that the revelation will be cathartic for Brian. But we know that from this moment, the boys’ journey will perhaps begin to take a slightly different direction.

Apart from the cinematically beautiful telling of the story itself, the acting in this film is outstanding. Joseph-Gordon-Levitt as Neil is tough, tender, and sexy by turns and always believable. Brady Corbet as Brian is note perfect: confused, lost, angry, loving, determined, his character is revealed beautifully in all its touching complexity. The friends Wendy and Eric are also delightful.

One of my favourite scenes in this film occurs when Neil is in New York. He is in a bar where he usually picks up clients. The bar is dark and Neil is standing in a deliberately nonchalantly provocative pose. A man at a corner table lights a cigarette and approaches him. As he comes into the light we see that he is a Native American and that he is obviously not well. He takes Neil back to his room, which is all in white except for a large print of Vermeer’s Girl with the Golden Earring above the bed. The man is clearly of a highly sensitive nature, perhaps an artist himself. He undresses Neil and remarks on his beauty: “You are exquisite.” Then as he undresses himself, we see the lesions that afflict victims of AIDS (the setting was 1991). He tells Neil not to worry, that “This is going to be the safest encounter you ever had” and asks only for a backrub. Like Viola Davis in Doubt, this actor is only on the screen for a few moments but the depth of his portrayal -- of a man with AIDS so desperately in need to simply be touched -- is profound and unforgettable.

Mysterious Skin is a must-see.

What's up with Gay (-themed) Movies? Part 7: Lilies

2011-08-05T16:51:00.000-07:00

Lilies
This is a very different “gay” film. Having watched it twice now, I cannot help thinking that there is some kind of political subtext going on but I don’t know enough about Quebec history and culture to be able to figure out what it might be. Then again, I may simply be imagining that there is more to Lilies than comes off the screen. At any rate, I think it is an example of wonderful filmmaking.

The story begins in 1952 as the local bishop arrives at a prison to hear the confession of a dying inmate, a man that His Excellency apparently knows from the distant past. It soon becomes clear that this will not be a routine confession as the bishop finds himself confined to the confessional and forced to watch a drama enacted by the fellow inmates of the penitent.

The drama, in which all the characters are played by the inmates, and are all therefore played by males, portrays events in the lives of three Quebecois adolescents that occurred in 1912. It begins with the rehearsal of a school play, “The Death of St. Sebastian,” in which the role of the nearly naked, about-to-be-martyred saint is played by a youthful version of the penitent, Simon. Sebastian’s friend, who has been ordered by Caesar to kill him, is played by Simon’s classmate Vallier, a young man who is clearly in love with Simon. Into this highly erotic scene enter the young Bilodeau, who professes to be disgusted by this display of perversion but who is actually also in love with Simon. Simon prefers Vallier. He mocks Bilodeau’s scorn by tying him up and kissing him passionately.

The drama proceeds, seamlessly moving between the setting of the prison chapel and scenes in flashback to the village where the real-life drama took place 40 years before. Vallier’s mother, an impoverished French countess (gorgeously portrayed by Brent Carver), mentions the kiss in front of Simon’s father and the boy is beaten so severely he renounces his gay affair with Vallier and takes up with a visiting countess from Paris. It soon becomes apparent to the countess that Simon does not love her, but to preserve her dignity, the engagement is formalized and the couple plan to travel to Paris.

Meanwhile, Vallier confesses his love for Simon to his mother, who takes it upon herself to test Simon. She crashes the engagement party, followed by Vallier dressed as Caesar. Forced to choose between the countess and Vallier (in the presence of his father), Simon obeys the countess’s order to prepare for the next day’s departure for Paris. Vallier returns home defeated but finds the birthday gift his mother has rescued from the purgatory of rejected household items: an old bathtub. He strips naked and soaks in the tub, finally opening his eyes to see that his beloved has returned to him. In a touching and erotic scene the two make love in the bathtub.

Throughout all these events Bilodeau has been hovering, all the while displaying his jealousy and attempting to influence Simon to favour him. When he is finally and firmly rejected by Simon, he commits a horrendous act of murder and blames it on Simon, who of course ends up in prison for forty years.

Bilodeau becomes a priest.

Highly recommended.

Henri Nouwen: Competition vs Compassion

2011-07-30T15:53:00.000-07:00

I am reading Michael Ford's Wounded Prophet: A Portrait of Henri J.M. Nouwen. Ford notes that when Nouwen was at Notre Dame, a professor in the newly formed psychology department, he wondered how the apparent obsession with football at the university "connected with the Christian message."

In a book co-written with fellow priest and Notre Dame faculty member Don McNeill (and Douglas Morrison), Nouwen had this to say about competition:

This all-pervasive competition, which reaches into the smallest corners of our relationships, prevents us from entering into full solidarity with each other and stands in the way of our being compassionate. We prefer to keep compassion on the periphery of our competitive lives. Being compassionate would require giving up dividing lines and relinquishing differences and distinctions. And that would mean losing our identities! This makes it clear why the call to be compassionate is so frightening and evokes such deep resistance.

This fear, which is very real and influences much of our behavior, betrays our deepest illusions: that we can forge our own identities, that we are the collective impressions of our surroundings, that we are the trophies and distinctions we have won. This, indeed, is our greatest illusion. It makes us into competitive people who compulsively cling to our differences and defend them at all cost, even to the point of violence.

What's up with Gay (-themed) Movies? Part 6: Jeffrey

2011-07-30T13:27:00.000-07:00

Jeffrey

Maybe we are too far away from the days when the AIDS crisis was the number one topic on the gay community, but watching this film just did not strike me as an experience I would want to repeat—ever.

Jeffrey loves sex. But it seems that every time he is having sex with someone or is about to have sex, the disease gets in the way in the form of over-the-top caution resulting from extreme paranoia. So sex has simply become too fraught with frustration for poor Jeffrey to be willing to engage in any longer. He decides to give up the activity he loves best.

Then he meets Steve at the gym (where Jeffrey is working out, an activity he has decided is a decent replacement for sex), and there is instant chemistry. But as Jeffrey has vowed not to have sex, there is a bit of a cat-and-mouse game as Steve—along with Sterling, Jeffrey’s best friend (played by Patrick Stewart) and Sterling’s ditzy lover, Darius—tries to convince Jeffrey to jump into the sack. Things seem to be progressing nicely in this direction until Steve informs Jeffrey that he is HIV-positive. Suddenly Jeffrey has become the paranoid one and immediately backs off. Steve is hurt and offended and abandons the chase.

Meanwhile we learn that Darius is also HIV-positive, and ends up dying of AIDS. Jeffrey recognizes that he wants more than sex but is now afraid to make a commitment for fear of his partner dying. In his struggle with this dilemma he attends a workshop run by a self-obsessed New Age guru, played by Sigourney Weaver, and goes to a Catholic church to seek answers, only to be hit on by a horny gay priest obsessed with Broadway show tunes (played by the always perfect Nathan Lane).

But it is Sterling and the deceased Darius who finally convince Jeffrey that the experience of truly living life and truly loving another person is worth the pain of seeing them suffer and die. About to enter heaven, Darius tells Jeffrey, “Hate AIDS, not life.”

In its online review, Amazon.com calls Jeffrey “surprisingly lighthearted and witty.” The film just didn’t strike me that way. Apart from a funny scene with Jeffrey’s parents and Nathan Lane’s antic priest, I found it flat, self-conscious, and forced.

And it was narrated.

What's up with Gay (-themed) Movies? Part 5: Outing Riley

2011-07-27T07:26:00.000-07:00

Outing Riley

This film is slightly different from the others in that I find none of the characters particularly attractive—i.e. cute. So why did I buy it? Well, there seems to be another attraction for me….

Bobby Riley is the youngest of four sons (he has a younger sister) in an Irish-Catholic family in Chicago. Like his brothers, he is a bit of a redneck—he is chronically sartorially challenged, loves his sports, loves his beers, has a distinct tendency toward sophomoric language and behaviour. He is also gay and very much in the closet with his brothers.

As the film opens, the Riley patriarch has just died and Bobby’s sister is reminding him that he promised he would come out to his brothers after the parents were gone (the mother died some time before). The “boys” decide to go on the annual fishing trip even though their father will not be with them this time. Bobby’s sister tells him that if he does not come out to his brothers on this trip, she is going to out him herself.

The trip is a litany of adolescent pranks and activities that highlights the closeness of the brothers and only serves to deepen Bobby’s dilemma. There is simply no way he can come out to them in this environment.

On their return to the city the siblings meet at the parents’ house to divide up family possessions. The sister has suggested to Bobby that a “family” slide show will do the trick, and she includes slides of Bobby and his partner in obviously “gay” poses. The brothers are not impressed. The eldest, who is a priest, is disgusted and storms out of the room. The other two—one is addicted to Internet porn; the other to pot—believe that Bobby and his sister have pulled some kind of prank on them. It is simply not possible that their baby brother is gay.

Once the truth begins to sink in, the brothers’ reactions range from outrage to disgust to bewilderment, all of these emotions accompanied by the usual plethora of homophobic jokes and remarks. When they realize that this little family “crisis” is not going to go away, the two middle brothers decide to meet Bobby’s lover, who happens to be a smart lawyer. Of course, he turns out to be pretty much like them (except for the fact that he doesn’t follow the Cubs) and he makes them look like the boorish fools they are.

The two brothers eventually come around to accepting Bobby back into the fold: he is their family and they cannot escape the simple fact that they love him. So in typical over-the-top fashion they hold a surprise coming-out party for him, complete with a large hand-written “Bobby’s Gay!” sign and a couple of hot strippers.

On the serious side, the eldest brother is unable, as a priest, to accept Bobby’s “active” homosexuality. He appears to truly buy the teaching of the Church on homosexuality and experiences great difficulty reconciling his love for his younger brother and his moral distaste for what he does in the bedroom. To the film’s credit, this conflict is left unresolved.

Outing Riley is a sweet and touching film. The family dynamic is truthfully played out, and the siblings, as well as Bobby’s partner, are lovable, distinctly individual, and believable.

What's up with Gay (-themed) Movies? Part 4: Boys Love

2011-07-23T14:29:00.000-07:00

Boys Love

The next film in my collection is quite different from the ones reviewed in the three previous posts. First, it is Japanese. Second, although it is a gay-themed movie, the writer-director and the principal actors are all straight. Third, this movie has a distinct psychological edge to it.

The movie begins with a good-looking (of course) young magazine writer-editor, Taishin Mamiya, visiting the art studio of Noél, a (similarly good-looking) senior high school student, who also happens to be a celebrity model. The magazine is doing a series on the avocations of celebrities and this is the young writer’s first major assignment.

Both parties are surprised during the course of the interview. The artist does not get the usual stupid interview questions (“What’s your favourite food?” What’s your favourite colour?”) but rather pointed, knowledgeable questions about his art. The reporter soon realizes he is encountering real art and that in this case the “avocation” is of more interest and value than the vocation. The pair quickly establishes a kind of offhand camaraderie.

After the interview, Mamiya and Noél go out to an expensive restaurant/bar for dinner. Somewhat tipsy from polishing off a bottle of Dom Perignon, the young reporter heads to the washroom. To his shock and horror Noél has followed him and soon has his way with him in one of the stalls. Much confusion results for Mamiya.

Not so the artist. He cunningly arranges to have Mamiya visit his apartment, appearing at the door clad only in a loose sheet. The writer instantly realizes he has been deceived and tries to flee. Before he succeeds, however, Noél drops the sheet, exposing his naked body to the horrified young man.

Mamiya is becoming drawn in, however, and ends up making another visit to Noél’s apartment. But this time, it is not Noél he finds there. Instead it is the young artist’s classmate, Chidori, who suspects that Mamiya is just another of Noél’s apparently constant stream of sex partners. When he finds out that Mamiya wrote the magazine article about Noél and his art, he launches into a tirade about how he is the only one who understands Noél and his art, that he is the only one who really loves his classmate, and that Noél will eventually come to his senses and choose him as his partner. The young man (who bears an amazing physical resemblance to a brilliant and funny and lovable homestay student we once had) is clearly disturbed.

Chidori explains to Mamiya that Noél does art as a distraction, just as he engages in promiscuous sex, because he is sad. He alludes to a childhood friend of Noél, Ken-chan, who appears in the only painting that shows the artist’s feelings. “He’s more fragile and weaker than anyone.”

Mamiya employs a trick to get Noél to promise to quit sleeping around, but it is Noél who is smarter: he gets Mamiya to fall in love with him. The relationship changes them both. Noél becomes a conscientious student (and stops sleeping around) and Mamiya becomes his true self.

Chidori soon realizes what is going on between Noél and Mamiya and that his dream is about to fade. In a fit of jealousy he shows up at Mamiya’s apartment at one in the morning, expecting to find Noél there; he tells Mamiya that he will never allow him to have Noél. And in a pivotal scene, Chidori is waiting for Noél at his apartment when he arrives home. To get Noél’s attention he has removed the beloved painting and an argument ensues. Chidori forces Noél to confess his love for Mamiya and then tearfully begs him to realize that he, Chidori, is the only one who loves him. Noél replies that they are friends—no more and no less—and leaves the apartment.

Following this exchange, Noél gets very drunk and ends up nearly passed out in a seedy area. He is accosted by a man who beats him badly and rapes him. As a result of his severely messed-up face, Noél’s modeling career is on hold; meanwhile Chidori arranges for Mamiya to be implicated in Noél’s predicament and thus to lose his job at the magazine.

The two young men wait for each to text the other, until finally Mamiya sees a newspaper article explaining what happened to Noél. He rushes to Noél’s apartment after work and finds that the young artist has broken his promise and resumed his dissolute lifestyle: he is in the middle of another anonymous sexual encounter. Mamiya confronts him, calls him stupid. Noél responds that he does not believe in promises and tells his childhood story of his love for Ken-chan, an older boy who protected him from bullying and who encouraged him in his art. When Ken-chan was in the hospital and Noél was visiting him, Ken-chan promised to go to the sea with him as soon as he got better, as neither boy had ever been to the seaside. A week later Ken-chan died, and Noél realized that he loved him. The painting that Chidori took was of Ken-chan standing on the shore.

“But if loving someone is so sad, and if loving someone hurts me so much, I no longer want love. I’ll never believe in promises.” Noél starts to cry, and for the first time, Mamiya embraces him.

In the next scene they are lying on Noél’s bed together, fully dressed and chastely holding hands but obviously in love. Enter Chidori, returning the painting he stole. He sees the couple and the look on his face makes it clear he is about to go off the deep end.

Spoiler alert! Noél and Mamiya are in the artist’s apartment, celebrating Mamiya’s new job. In comes Chidori with a knife. He stabs Noél to death.

Mamiya takes the body to the seashore and carries it into the water until the lovers disappear.

One of the big problems with gay movies is that you get distracted by how cute the guys are. In this case, both Noél (who actually appears much older than a high school student; in fact, he looks older than Mamiya) and Taishin Mamiya are extremely easy to look at (especially for an old rice queen like me). The story itself is also quite gripping; it moves along quickly and the viewer is really wondering what will happen next, both in terms of the love story and of Chidori’s reaction to it.

So it is easy (for me at least) to miss the movie’s shortcomings. One wonders, for example, why Noél got so drunk after rejecting Chidori’s tearful supplication; he has appeared quite capable of chilliness throughout the story so far, and it is clear that he is in love with Mamiya. One also wonders why he didn’t go to Mamiya after he was traumatized; surely by that time there was enough trust between the two men. Also, Noél and Chidori were childhood friends. Chidori claims he has been in love with Noél since they were kids. Would he not have long ago realized that Noél did not love him romantically? And finally one wonders if it is realistic that experiencing the death of a beloved friend at age eight or so would on its own precipitate such a long-term cynical, self-destructive reaction.

Nevertheless, I do like this film.

Oh, and the title is quite clever. No doubt Boys Love refers to the love between Noél and Ken-chan, which Noél found again with Mamiya. But it also works well from a marketing perspective….

What's up with Gay (-themed) Movies? Part 3: Trick

2011-07-21T10:58:00.000-07:00

Trick

Now this one is really pretty fluffy. Aspiring young Broadway song writer and his semi-hysterical aspiring actress BFF (nicely played by Tori Spelling; it seems that women in these movies actually act while the boys just look pretty-kidding! (maybe)) present his new song at a songwriters workshop and it flops. So young composer ditches BFF and heads for a gay bar where a very hot nearly-nude guy is dancing go-go. Writer is clearly attracted but too shy/naïve/nervous/whatever to make a move.

Well, guess who gets on the same train as Young Writer is on his way home. They trade looks and Go-Go Boy follows Young Writer off the train at his station.. They go to YW’s room, which he shares with a straight guy. Straight Guy has claimed the room for the night as his girlfriend is returning from six months in France and well, they just have to get it on right away. So GGB and YW have only an hour to do the Big Deed.

Sadly, time is wasted because BFF actress happens to be in the room when they arrive; she is printing 150 resumes on an old dot-matrix printer. When she finally shoves off, YW is too nervous to get it on without all kinds of weird stimulation. And then just as things are slightly kinkily heating up, SG and France Girl show up early ready to do the BD. GGB, who lives in Brooklyn, cannot offer up his digs because he lives with an older woman who does not like him to bring guys home (Older Woman happens to be his mother, we discover some time later).

Thus the night is spent in a futile attempt to find a place to get it on. Naturally several misadventures and small crises occur along the way, all of which threaten to extinguish the possibility of a consummated tryst. But to our surprise, and no doubt the surprise of YW ad GGB, they realize that they like each other as people and do not really need to have sex right away in order to enjoy each other’s company.

They finally kiss as they are about to go their separate ways. GGB gives YW his phone number and heads for the station. YW immediately runs over to the very conveniently located bank of payphones immediately behind him and dials the number. He hears GGB’s voice on the answering machine and skips down the street singing the tune that opened the story: “Enter You.”

Sweet but not too deep. The only reason to watch it a second time is to ogle GGB.

What's up with Gay (-themed) Movies? Part 2: Food of Love

2011-07-20T17:57:00.000-07:00

Food of Love

This one starts out quite well. An aspiring young pianist, Paul Porterfield, is asked to be a page turner for Richard Kennington, a major name, in a concert in San Francisco, near where the young man lives. Before the concert, Kennington’s manager, Joseph Mansurian, who, we discover later, is also his lover, tries to put the make on Paul. There is obvious attraction between Paul and Kennington (who is approaching 40) but nothing happens and each goes his separate way.

Some time later, just as Paul and his parents are due to leave for vacation in Europe, the boy’s rather hysterical mother discovers that her husband has been having an affair. Mother and son end up traveling to Spain alone, and in Barcelona, Paul discovers that Kennington has just given a concert there. He manages to locate the pianist’s hotel and pays a visit, which leads to Paul being seduced and quickly falling in love with Kennington. There is a brief fling in Barcelona under the nose of the unsuspecting mother, until Kennington gets guilt pangs and heads back to New York.

Mansurian, in the meantime, has hired a male hustler to have sex with him while his lover is away.

Six months later, Paul is in his first year at Julliard and living in a very posh apartment with his new lover, an older artist. The apartment happens to be in the same building in which Kennington’s manager/lover, Joseph Mansurian, lives. A classmate of Paul’s is signed by Mansurian and Paul is asked to be the young pianist’s page turner at a party given by the impresario. Paul agrees, recognizing that his hope of becoming a concert pianist has just been extinguished. After the party Mansurian, clearly a calculating predator, seduces Paul, with Scarlatti playing in the background.

At Christmas back in California, his teacher confirms his fears; she suggests that he pursue another career, as an accompanist perhaps, if he can bear to stay in the world of music. On this same visit, Paul’s mother discovers that he is gay and that there is something between her son and Richard Kennington. She keeps this information to herself but there is almost unbearable tension between her and Paul over his desire to quit Julliard and the piano altogether, her paranoid suspicion that Kennington has exerted some pernicious influence over her Paul, and her continued depression and hysteria. Paul’s attitude toward and treatment of his mother lead one to suspect that he may be a reflection of his father.

After Paul returns to New York, his mother attends a PFLAG meeting, which only manages to fuel her rage at Kennington for his “negative influence” on Paul. After the meeting she decided to fly to New York; she ends up in Kenington’s apartment in the middle of a surprise 40^th birthday party for the pianist, who is on his way from Chicago. After Kenington’s arrival she confronts him and Mansurian, demanding to know the whereabouts of her son and accusing Kennington of lying when he claims that he has not seen Paul since Barcelona.

Paul is finally located in the apartment of his lover and he and his mother meet. He is horrified that she found her way to Kennington’s place and is enraged at her seemingly ridiculous accusations against Kennington. He treats her very badly.

But in the midst of her pain and her hysteria, Paul’s mother has intuited the truth about Kennington and Mansurian: that they are lovers and that they have both deceived Paul. Paul is chastened by this revelation and realizes that his mother is not a fool, after all. They are reconciled and the viewer suspects that Paul will be that much wiser in his relationships in the future.

Damn again! There is more to this movie than I saw when I watched it the first time. It does have a kind of logical structure and a kind of theme to it. And I have to say that Juliet Stevenson (loved her in Truly, Madly, Deeply, with Alan Rickman) is absolutely brilliant as Paul’s mother.

Sigh.

What's up with Gay (-themed) Movies? Part 1: Introduction and Under One Roof

2011-07-17T19:33:00.000-07:00

Over the past few years I have purchased several gay-themed movies, like Under One Roof, Outing Riley, Trick, and Food of Love. Of course, I have to be honest and admit that a (significant) part of the attraction of these films was the degree to which I felt the principals were cute. In this regard, I have not been disappointed. And perhaps I should have just been content with that bit of gratification and not harboured any other hopes or expectations—I mean in terms of dramatic interest, thematic depth, quality of writing, and so forth.

Of the six or seven films I have in my collection, I am afraid that across the board the cinematic quality is just not there. The stories are generally sweet (read, therefore, predictable) and/or marginally funny, or dramatically promising at the outset, only to lose their way in the middle.

And do all these films have to be narrated?

These are movies made for a gay audience. Surely we are capable of making and appreciating films of more depth and relevance than these. Or maybe I have not yet seen the “great gay films” of our age. So far, in fact, the most powerful “gay” movie I have ever seen is Brokeback Mountain, based on a short story written by a straight female author, directed by a straight, Taiwanese film maker, and acted by straight actors. WTF?

Now I am gay but not really engaged in gay culture, so I am humbly willing to be educated here; in fact, I beg enlightenment.

In the meantime, here is a sampling of what I have seen so far:

Under One Roof

This is the first gay movie I bought. Again, a big reason is that I was attracted to the main actor, a rather cute Asian guy (Okay, I get the feeling I am going to be—justifiably accused of hypocrisy here, or at least of wanting my cake and eat it too). The story is of a lonely young gay Chinese-American, Daniel Chang, the only son of a widowed mother, who lives with her and his grandmother in San Francisco. His mother is desperate to get him a wife so she can have grandchildren and he is desperate to tell her he is gay so she’ll get off his back. Neither has been successful and the resulting tension is palpable; it only increases when the new tenant for their downstairs suite moves in. His name is Robert. Robert is good-looking, gay, and available, and Daniel is immediately smitten, cranking the tension up another notch or two.

The boys do their clumsy and tentative mating dance in the “forbidden palace” while the “evil empress” continues to plot wedding scenarios unawares. Until a convenient sewer back-up makes the basement suite uninhabitable and pretty-boy Robert is consigned to Daniel’s room while the very-long-term repairs take their course. Daniel is determined, however, to keep his home life separate from his “homo life” and sleeps on the couch. In the meantime, Robert is ingratiating himself further and further into Mrs. Chang’s affections.

Well, Mom finally gets tired of missing her favourite night-time TV shows and Daniel is forced into bed with Robert. And after a few more steps of the dance, the boys finally get it on. The scene is actually pretty hot, and quite tender.

Anyway, they carry on this affair under the unsuspecting mother’s nose until Daniel is forced to make a choice between Robert and his mom after the city declares the basement suite illegal and Robert is forced to leave the Chang household. Ever the dutiful son, Daniel elects to stay with his family.

After Robert is gone, Daniel recognizes that the problem is not his mother; it has been him all along. His love for Robert makes him realize that if he does not close the gap between his family and his friends and boyfriends he will end up alone for the rest of his life.

Finally, Daniel tells his mother that he wants to be with Robert—“the same way that you and Dad were together.” His mother is scandalized, but Daniel stands his ground, telling her that he wants to look after her but that he will not pretend any more, not for her and not for his dead father.

Mrs. Chang invites Robert’s mother over for tea. Robert’s Mom tells her that she too was “heartbroken” and “confused” when she found out her son was gay. But then she met a friend who told her that her son had left home and never returned, and Robert’s mom realized that nothing would ever come between her and her son.

Mrs. Chang: I know Daniel is hurting. I just don’t know how to help him.

Robert’s mother: Would a second son be so bad?

Daniel is hanging out with his friend Amy when he gets a call from his Mom, telling him that she’s set him up with someone to meet. He immediately heads home in a snit, determined to set her straight once and for all.

Of course, we all know who is waiting for him when he gets to the house.

Damn! I have been watching the movie again as I write this and, well, it doesn’t seem so bad after all. In fact, it is rather touching and entirely believable (to a gullible romantic at least). I can actually imagine a Chinese only son facing a dilemma like Daniel’s and choosing family over romantic love. I’m just not so sure the real-life dilemmas are resolved as happily as Daniel’s story is.

But then it is San Francisco.

To be continued…

Henri Nouwen: Gifts

2011-07-17T11:32:00.000-07:00

From Life if the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World:

It is worthwhile making a distinction between talents and gifts. More important than our talents are our gifts. We have only a few talents, but we have many gifts. Our gifts are the many ways in which we express our humanity. They are part of who we are: Friendship, kindness, patience, joy, peace, forgiveness. gentleness, love, hope, trust, and many others. These are the true gifts we have to offer to each other.

Somehow I have known this for a long time, especially through my personal experience of the enormous healing power of these gifts. But since my coming to live in a community with mentally handicapped people, I have rediscovered this simple truth. Few, if any, of those people have talents they can boast of. Few are able to make contributions to our society that allow them to earn money, compete on the open market, or win awards. But how splendid are their gifts! Bill, who suffered intensely as a result of shattered family relationships, has a gift for friendship that I have seldom experienced. Even when I grow impatient or distracted by other people, he remains always faithful and continues to support me in all I do. Linda, who has a speech handicap, has a unique gift for welcoming people. Many who have stayed in our community remember Linda as the one who made them feel at home. Adam, who is unable to speak, walk, or eat without help and who needs constant support, has the great gift of bringing peace to those who care for him and live with him. The longer I live in L'Arche, the more I recognize the true gifts that in us, seemingly non-handicapped people, often remain buried beneath our talents. The so-visible brokenness of our handicapped people has, in some mysterious way, allowed them to offer their gifts freely and without inhibition.

More surely than ever before, I know now that we are called to give our very lives to one another and that, in so doing, we become a true community of love.

"God is a foolish farmer"

2011-07-13T11:27:00.000-07:00

I don’t often go to church these days; about the only time I do attend Mass in a Catholic church is when I visit my Mom in the small town of Chase, BC, as I did this past weekend. We usually go to the small church in Chase that is administered from the diocesan seat of Kamloops. This is the church where I first encountered Father Bob, whom I have blogged about in the past.

In spite of my disenchantment with the Roman Catholic Church and my recent ambivalence about attending church services period, I am still fascinated (for some reason) by priests and the priesthood. In my limited experience and observation, there appear to be two general kinds of priest. One of these is the cookie-cutter variety, which tends to follow a standard orthodox path in the celebration of liturgy. I usually find Masses celebrated by these priests, characterized either by excessive piety or a lack of sincere piety, singularly uninspiring. The homilies are boringly pedantic, patronizing and condescending, or simply incomprehensible. I cannot help but feel that these men are priests for reasons other than the desire to be loving and faithful servants of the People of God.

The second type of priest is the one who is truly himself. Orthodox or progressive in outlook, he simply loves being a priest, loves God, and loves the People of God. This love is apparent in all that he does, but especially in the celebration of liturgy. It is so rare to find such a priest (at least this has been my experience) that when one does encounter a man belonging to this second category, the occasion is memorable.

On Sunday, Mass in my Mom’s church was celebrated by Father Vincent, a young priest on loan to the diocese from Nigeria. The Mass was late beginning and when Father Vincent explained to us that this was because “several of our brothers and sisters needed to reconcile,” I could immediately feel genuine warmth radiating from the man. His voice was loud and strong, and he sang much of the Mass, in a powerful and beautiful baritone.

Father Vince’s English is flawless in every way except that it carries a pronounced African accent, making it, in my view, all the more charming and compelling. His homily was on the topic of the parable of the sower and the seed and was delivered without notes and without a pause or a mistake. It was also beautiful in its immediacy, its passion, and its use of imagination (“God is a foolish farmer: he sows his good seed even where he knows that it is not likely to grow”).

It is incredible to me this man could come from a country like Nigeria to the Interior of BC, where the culture is so radically different and the winters can be so bitterly cold, and pour out his love for people who must at times appear as if they came from the far side of the moon.

During the Prayers of the Faithful we learned that Father Vince’s father had just died, and at the end of Mass, he told us that he was going back to Nigeria in a couple of days to bury him.

Father, you are truly a man of God.

The photo above is not of Father Vince

Personal Holiness

2011-07-04T07:44:00.000-07:00

From Marilynne Robinson's essay "Onward, Christian Liberals," included in The Best American Essays 2007:

I believe in the holiness of the human person and of humanity as a phenomenon. I believe our failings, which are very great and very grave -- after all, we have brought ourselves to the point of possible self-annihilation -- are a cosmic mystery, a Luciferian disaster, the fall of the brightest angel. That is to say, at best and at worst we are within the field of sacred meaning, holy. I believe holiness is a given of our being that, essentially, we cannot add to or diminish, whose character and reality are fully known only to God and are fully valued only by him. What I might call personal holiness is, in fact, openness to the perception of the holy in existence itself and above all, one another....To put the matter another way, we baffled creatures are immersed in an overwhelming truth. What is plainly before our eyes we know only in glimpses and through disciplined attention. Or again: to attempt obedience to God in any circumstance is to find experience opening on meaning, and meaning is holy. [Italics are mine]

Marilynne Robinson is the author of the 2005 Pullitzer-Prize-winning novel Gilead.

Yves Congar on the Church

2011-06-29T07:10:00.000-07:00

From Richard McBrien's The Church: The Evolution of Catholicism:

There were at least six major components of Congar’s ecclesiological approach: (1) the Church is the People of God. The laity as well as the clergy and religious are called to full participation in the Church’s life, mission, and ministries. (2) The hierarchy exists to serve the Church, not to dominate it. (3) The Church is a minority in the service of the majority. It exists in itself, but not for itself. It prepares the way for the coming of the Kingdom of God. (4) The Church must always be engaged in institutional and communal renewal and reform, in both head and members. (5) The Church is a communion in which structures are only a means to enable it to fulfill its mission. (6) The Church is ecumenical in nature and scope.

And who's the guy on the left?

Augustine & Rahner

2011-06-29T07:04:00.000-07:00

“Many whom God has, the Church does not have; and many whom the Church has, God does not have.”

Theologian Karl Rahner, adapted from a saying by St. Augustine.

A Restless Soul

2011-06-27T08:04:00.000-07:00

This article has been posted at the online magazine Life as a Human.

"That one too is God"

2011-06-22T12:14:00.000-07:00

From The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

We are all reflexes of the image of the Bodhisattva. The sufferer within us is that divine being. We and that protecting father are one. This is the redeeming insight. The protecting father is every man we meet. And so it must be known that, though this ignorant, limited, self-defending, suffering body may regard itself as threatened by some other -- the enemy -- that one too is God.

It's on page 137, Your Grace.

"Glad to hear, zealous to preach, but reluctant, apparently, to demonstrate"

2011-06-20T10:14:00.000-07:00

Joseph Campbell's The Hero wwith a Thousand Faces was published in 1949. Here is an excerpt from the section entitled Apotheosis, which rings with contemporary relevance:

Once we have broken free of the prejudices of our own provincially limited ecclesiastical, tribal, or national rendition of the world archetypes, it becomes possible to understand that the supreme initiation is not that of the local motherly fathers, who then project aggression onto the neighbors for their own defense. The good news, which the World Redeemer brings and which many have been glad to hear, zealous to preach, but reluctant, apparently, to demonstrate, is that God is love, that He can be, and is to be, loved, and that all without exception are his children. Such comparatively trivial matters as the remaining details of the credo, the techniques of worship, and the devices of episcopal organization (which have so absorbed the interest of Occidental theologians that they are today seriously discussed as the principal questions of religion), are merely pedantic snares, unless kept ancillary to the major teaching. Indeed, where not so kept, they have a regressive effect: they reduce the father image back again to the dimensions of the totem. And this, of course, is what has happened throughout the Christian world. One would think that we had been called upon to decide or to know whom, of all of us, the Father prefers. Whereas, the teaching is much less flattering: "Judge not, that ye be not judged." The World Savior's cross, despite the behavior of its professed priests, is a vastly more democratic symbol than the local flag.

The understanding of the final -- and critical -- implications of the world-redemptive words and symbols of the tradition of Christendom has been so disarranged during the tumultuous centuries that have elapsed since St. Augustine's declaration of the holy war of the Civitas Dei against the Civitas Diaboli, that the modern thinker wishing to know the meaning of a world religion (i.e., of a doctrine of universal love) must turn his mind to the other great (and much older) universal communion: that of the Buddha, where the primary word still is peace -- peace to all beings.

While it is not necessary that those of us who are disenchanted with the "pedantic snares" and the "disarranged world-redemptive words and symbols" of the contemporary Church become Buddhists, we might like to reflect on the fact that our brother Jesus (as fellow blogger Michael Bayly so aptly and touchingly refers to him) was neither theologian nor cleric, neither pope nor bishop; he was simply called "Rabbi" - teacher. He was not concerned with creeds, liturgy, or "the devices of episcopal organization." His only concern was love.

"Flags are in the heads of people"

2011-06-15T07:45:00.000-07:00

I live in Vancouver. Our hockey team, the Canucks, is about to play in Game Seven of the Stanley Cup final against the Boston Bruins. The city is completely abuzz with the possibility that the team will win its first Stanley Cup in the forty years of its existence and that the Cup will return to Canada (after all, hockey is our sport) for the first time since 1993. There have been comparisons made with the excitement in the city around the hockey final between the US and Canada in the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, held here in Vancouver.

There are Canucks flags flying everywhere.

Here is another gem from Anthony de Mello's book:

Something more about words. I said to you earlier that words are limited. There is more I have to add. There are some words that correspond to nothing. For instance, I am an Indian. Now, let's suppose that I'm a prisoner of war in Pakistan, and they say to me, "Well, today we're going to take you to the frontier and you're going to take a look at your country." So they bring me to the frontier, and I look across the border, and I think, "Oh my country, my beautiful country. I see villages and trees and hills. This is my own, my native land!" After a while, one of the guards says, "Excuse me, we've made a mistake here. We have to move up another ten miles." What was I reacting to? Nothing. I kept focusing on a word, India. But trees are not India. Trees are trees. In fact, there are no frontiers or boundaries. They were put there by the human mind; generally by stupid, avaricious politicians. My country was one country once upon a time; it's four now. If we don't watch out it might be six. Then we'll have six flags, six armies. That's why you'll never catch me saluting a flag. I abhor all national flags because they are idols. What are we saluting? I salute humanity, not a flag with an army around it.

Flags are in the heads of people. In any case there are thousands of words in our vocabulary that do not correspond to reality at all. But do they trigger emotions in us! So we begin to see things that are not there. We actually see Indian mountains when they don't exist. Your American conditioning exists. My Indian conditioning exists.

And our Canadian conditioning exists, our Vancouver conditioning exists, and our Canucks conditioning exists.

(Go Canucks!)

Anthony de Mello: Awareness without Evaluating Everything

2011-06-09T10:48:00.000-07:00

From Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality:

Do you want to change the world? How about beginning with yourself? How about being transformed yourself first? But how do you achieve that? Through observation. Through understanding. With no interference or judgment on your part. Because what you judge you cannot understand.

When you say of someone "He's a communist," understanding has stopped at that moment. You slapped a label on him. "She's a capitalist." Understanding has stopped at that moment. You slapped a label on her, and if the label carries undertones of approval or disapproval, so much the worse! How are you going to understand what you disapprove of, or what you approve of, for that matter? All of this sounds like a new world, doesn't it? No judgment, no commentary, no attitude: one simply observes, one studies, one watches, without the desire to change what is. Because if you desire to change what is into what should be, you no longer understand.

The last sentence is the key: we seem always to want to change the behaviour of others so that it conforms with our expectations, and of course when it does not conform, we are not only disappointed, we judge that other person as selfish, hurtful, insensitive, thoughtless, whatever. The problem lies in our harbouring these expectations, which we often do unconsciously.If we can let them go and simply be aware, all our judgmental notions of good and bad simply dissolve.

De Mello goes on to say:

A dog trainer attempts to understand a dog so that he can train the dog to perform certain tricks. A scientist observes the behavior of ants with no further end in view than to study ants, to learn as much as possible about them. He has no other aim. He's not attempting to train them or to get anything out of them. He's interested in ants, he wants to learn as much as possible about them. That's his attitude. The day you attain a posture like that, you will experience a miracle. You will change -- effortlessly, correctly. Change will happen, you will not have to bring it about. As the life of awareness settles on your darkness, whatever is evil will disappear. Whatever is good will be fostered. You will have to experience that for yourself.

Judging (and condemning) are life-long habits -- so much so that they are automatic, mechanical, unconscious reactions. Like other habits that are unhealthy for us, we need to replace them with healthy ones. In this case we need to replace desire and expectation and unconscious judgment with the habit of observation, of awareness. Such a process takes a certain amount of discipline. But the result will be profound and miraculous: a transformation from unhappiness to happiness.

Wrestling with Faith: Embracing the Tension between Head and Heart

2011-05-24T09:18:00.000-07:00

On June 22 of last year I posted an article on faith entitled "Reconciling Faith and Disbelief (I)." I never did write the second part of this article. I approached the topic again recently and, after much additional reflection and reading, wrote a "new" piece, which appears today on Life as a Human.

Film Review: Mao's Last Dancer

2011-05-19T08:19:00.000-07:00

I recently bought a “previously viewed” copy of the film Mao’s Last Dancer from my local Blockbuster’s outlet. I had been intrigued by this film when I saw the trailers because, admittedly, the lead actor/dancer was very cute, but also because I had been a student in China during the last stages of Moa Zedong’s so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and was thus familiar with some of the film’s political and cultural underpinnings.

The story goes like this: Li Cunxin, a young boy from a very poor peasant family in Shandong Province, is suddenly plucked from his classroom by a group of strange men, put through a very painful “audition,” and as a result is chosen to attend the national ballet school in Beijing, which is at the time under the sponsorship of Chairman Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. The training is relentless and brutal, but ultimately Li falls in love with ballet and becomes a superlative dancer. When the Cultural Revolution ends and China opens her doors to the world, he is selected to receive three months training at the Houston Ballet, where after an initial period of cultural shock, he thrives, both artistically and emotionally.

The adult Li is played by dancer/actor Chi Cao.

In Houston, Li falls in love with and marries an American dancer, deciding that he is going to stay in America with his new wife. When he goes to the Chinese consulate in Houston to announce his plan, he is basically kidnapped and held until political pressure forces the Chinese authorities to release him. Upon his release he is told that he may never step on Chinese soil again and will never be allowed to see or even contact his family again. He is devastated but is determined to become a world-class artist. Soon he is offered a permanent contract at the Houston Ballet and a successful career is assured.

As China gradually opens up even further, there is hope that he will be able to see his parents again. The film ends with Li as principal dancer in a performance of “The Rite of Spring” and the surprise appearance of his parents in the audience. Tears flowed on both sides of the TV screen.

A friend who watched this movie with us commented dismissively throughout and afterward that the film was “predictable” and “schmaltzy” although she did like it overall. At one time I would have agreed with her and would have been equally disparaging. Now, however, I understand two things that I never understood before. First, this is a film about an incredible human journey, one that most of us will never choose or be required to take. Mao’s Last Dancer is in fact based on the autobiography of Li Cunxin, so the film is depicting real events in a real life. Even if we could have seen from at least one very obvious hint that the dancer’s parents were going to show up at his performance, this foreknowledge would not have diminished in any way the emotional impact of that moment, given what we know about the pain of separation in a Chinese family and the tremendous sacrifices Li made for his art.

Second, as a rather amateur and bumbling screenwriter, I know how difficult it is to write a credible script, even when it based on a true story. What details of the story do we include? How do we arrange them for the best dramatic effect? How do we make the dialogue cinematically realistic?

In the end, I think this movie is a small triumph. The story is touching and inspiring; the dancing is awesome and beautiful. And Chi Cao is never hard to look at.

Facing the Minotaur and Finding our Way to Freedom

2011-04-27T08:28:00.000-07:00

"The multitude of men and women choose the less adventurous way of the comparatively unconscious civic and tribal routines. But these seekers, too, are saved -- by virtue of the inherited symbolic aids of society, the rites of passage, the grace-yielding sacraments, given to mankind of old by the redeemers and handed down through millennia. It is only those who know neither an inner call nor an outer doctrine whose plight truly is desperate; that is to say, most of us today, in this labyrinth without and within the heart. Alas, where is the guide, that fond virgin, Ariadne, to supply the simple clue that will give us courage to face the Minotaur, and the means then to find our way to freedom when the monster has been met and slain?

"Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos, fell in love with the handsome Theseus the moment she saw him disembark from the boat that had brought the pitiful group of Athenian youths and maidens for the Minotaur. She found a way to talk with him, and declared that she would supply a means to help him back out of the labyrinth if he would promise to take her away from Crete with him and make her his wife. The pledge was given. Ariadne turned for help, then, to the crafty Daedalus, by whose art the labyrinth had been constructed and Ariadne's mother enabled to give birth to its inhabitant. Daedalus simply presented her with a skein of linen thread, which the visiting hero might fix to the entrance and unwind as he went into the maze. It is, indeed, very little that we need! But lacking that, the adventure into the labyrinth is without hope.

"The little is close at hand. Most curiously, the very scientist who, in the service of the sinful king, was the brain behind the horror of the labyrinth, quite as readily can serve the purposes of freedom. But the hero-heart must be at hand. For centuries Daedalus has represented the type of the artist-scientist: that curiously disinterested, almost diabolic human phenomenon, beyond the normal bounds of social judgment, dedicated to the morals not of his time but of his art. He is the hero of the way of thought -- singlehearted, courageous, and full of faith that the truth, as he finds it, shall make us free.

"And so now we may turn to him, as did Ariadne. The flax for the linen of his thread he has gathered from the fields of the human imagination. Centuries of husbandry, decades of diligent culling, the work of numerous hearts and hands, have gone into the hackling, sorting, and spinning of this tightly twisted yarn. Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world."

Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

A Priest's Dilemma, A Church's Sinfulness

2011-04-17T13:38:00.000-07:00

I have just finished reading Dilemma: A Priest's Struggle with Faith and Love, by Father Alberto Cutie. Padre Alberto, famous in the Southeastern United States and in much of Latin America for his work in the media, particularly in television, was propelled to international notoriety when pictures of the Roman Catholic priest and his girlfriend lying on a Miami beach appeared on the Internet and in tabloid and mainstream newspapers in early 2009. Removed from active ministry and deprived of salary and benefits, Cutie subsequently joined the Episcopalian (Anglican) Church and now serves as a priest in a Miami parish. He and his girlfriend were married and now have a daughter.

Dilemma tells the story of Father Cutie's journey of receiving the call to the priesthood from God and becoming a a very busy and active priest, both as pastor of various parishes and as media personality. It describes his increasing awareness of and concern over dysfunction in the Catholic Church, particularly among clergy and the hierarchy. And it tells the story of how Fr. Cutie was suddenly faced with an almost unbearable challenge to his promise of celibacy when he met and fell in love with Ruhama, the woman who would eventually become his wife.

The story of this priest's struggle was not as interesting to me as was the view of a Church insider of its serious state of dysfunction and of the disconnection between the institutionalized Catholicism as reflected in the attitudes and actions of the hierarchy and the real lives of the people in the pews. Father Cutie knew many priests who were cast aside by their bishop upon even the slightest suspicion of misconduct and with no opportunity to prove their innocence. He and his parishioners experienced the cold shoulder of the archbishop in times of great need. For example, in 2002 he was appointed temporary administrator of a very large parish whose "hugely popular, charismatic" pastor had been removed after allegations of sexual abuse.

Four months into my job as administrator at San Isidro, I finally went to my bishop to find out how much longer I would have to stay at the megachurch. He assured me that I would only be there a few more months. Instead, I remained assigned there for nearly two full years, working fifteen hours a day.

What was most disappointing to me is that never again in those two years did the bishop speak to me. Not once! He never visited the parish, called, or asked how the San Isidro church was doing or how the parishioners felt. There was no discussion about what the game plan should be for the future of this important parish, either.

Finally, after a few more months had gone by, I called his priest secretary - a young monsignor - to ask when we could expect the archbishop to visit; I still thought that he might be planning to speak to the hurting flock and to listen to their pain regarding their ousted pastor. The secretary's response was curt: "I'm sure the archbishop will visit San Isidro the next time that he is scheduled for Confirmation."

I couldn't believe it. Church officials were acting as if nothing special at all had happened in that parish, despite the blaze of bad press and the obvious knowledge that the people this pastor had served were feeling shattered. Never mind the fact that I had been thrown into this situation to face the press and the parish with zero support. I knew that I'd get through everything with a lot of prayer and help from people in the parish, many of whom were wonderfully understanding. What bothered me more was that Church officials obviously felt no real need to face the people of this parish, who were hungry for answers and wanted to know about the future of their spiritual home. These people had invested a lot of their time and resources into this megachurch, yet the officials of the archdiocese ran from them like the plague.

Again, I had to observe that this removed, rigid, and dysfunctional way of conducting business was all too common for the Church. It appeared as if those in positions of authority seemed determined to keep their distance from anything - or anyone - that might contaminate them or hurt their chances of continuing to climb the Church ladder. Until the time these incidents occurred, I was convinced that bishops were shepherds with a spiritual and [pastoral role to fulfill. Unfortunately, what I saw were Church leaders who ran and hid from difficult situations, including those which needed them the most.

The idealism of this young priest, including a commitment to live a life of celibacy, was gradually eroded by what he observed and what he experienced in ministry. He knew and knew of many priests, bishops, and even cardinals who secretly kept girlfriends or boyfriends, some even maintaining separate residences so that they could live with their partners. His own situation, in which he truly loved being a priest while loving a woman at the same time, made him question the wisdom of the requirement for celibacy. And through the problems and questions of the thousands of people he came into contact with in his parochial and media ministries, he began to question other Church doctrines and policies.

Father Cutie's book is a passionate, generally reasoned, and ultimately devastating critique of a Church that desperately needs reform. His decision to leave the Church he grew up in and loves reflects, apart from the fallout of the scandal he created, his view that such reform will not be quickly forthcoming.

If I have one criticism of this book, and it is not a small one, it is that Father Cutie never fails to present himself as a kind of ideal priest and as a victim of the dysfunctional hierarchy. While both of these may be true to a great degree, this approach detracts from the credibility of the story enough to diminish the effect of what I regard to be the true value of this book, a view of the rot from the inside.

Nevertheless, it is a worthwhile read.

Doing Better

2011-04-13T14:03:00.000-07:00

From Jewish with Feeling: Meaningful Jewish Practice, by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi:

The Hasidim tell of Reb Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, who used to say, before he went to sleep at night, "Master of the Universe, today I didn't do so well. I promise that tomorrow I'm going to do better."

Immediately he would chide himself. "But Levi Yitzchak, that's what you said last night!"

"Ah, but tonight," he'd reply to himself, "tonight I really mean it."

Mythology and Religion

2011-04-09T14:10:00.000-07:00

Joseph Campbell on mythology and religion:

My favorite definition of mythology: Other people's religion. My favorite definition of religion: Misunderstanding of mythology. The misunderstanding consists in the reading of the spiritual mythological symbols as if they were primarily references to historical events. Localized provincial readings separate the various religious communities. Remythologization - recapturing the mythological meaning - reveals a common spirituality of mankind.

The Wise Dummy

2011-03-30T07:57:00.000-07:00

In her book The Search for the Beloved, Jean Houston tells the story of going to visit Edgar Bergen with her father, who was a comedy writer.

Ed didn't hear us as we knocked at his open hotel door; he was sitting on the side of a bed deep in conversation with Charlie. My Dad shrugged. "He's rehearsing." But then we heard what Ed was saying. He was asking Charlie ultimate questions, like: "Charlie, what is the nature of love? What is the meaning of life truly lived? What really comprises the good, the true, and the beautiful?" And Charlie was answering! Pouring out pungent, beautifully crafted statements of deep wisdom. The funny-faced little dummy was expounding the kind of knowing that could only have come from a lifetime of loving study, observation, and interaction with equally high beings.

After several minutes of listening to this wooden Socrates, my father, embarrassed, coughed. Bergen looked up and somewhat shamefacedly greeted us. "Hello, Jack, hi Jean. I see you caught us."

"Yeah, Ed," my father said. "What in the world are you doing?"

"I'm talking to Charlie. He's the wisest person I know."

"But Ed," my father expostulated, "that's your voice and your mind coming out of that dummy!"

"Yes, Jack, I suppose it is," Ed answered quietly. But then he added with great poignancy, "And yet, when he answers me, it is so much more than I know."

Houston goes on to say how this short conversation profoundly influenced the direction of her own life:

At that moment my future was set. I had no choice but to pursue a path and a career that would discover ways to tap into the "so much more" of the deep knowledge that we all contain but rarely contact. These ways are offered in my seminars, not to produce more ventriloquists, but to enable people to inhabit more levels of themselves.

"The Pursuit of Happyness": A (Late) Review

2011-03-10T07:29:00.000-08:00

I saw this 2006 film on DVD the other night and have been thinking about it here and there ever since. My first impression was that it was one of the most agonizingly suspenseful movies I have ever seen, and I don’t mean this in any positive sense. The relentless parade of increasingly unfortunate events suffered by the main character Chris Gardner (Will Smith) and his young son had me squirming in my seat for much of the picture. I kept hoping—in vain as it turned out—that the next incident would signal an upturn in Mr. Gardner’s fortunes. Only in about the last three minutes of the film were we rewarded for our positively saintly patience with some kind of redemption.

The story goes something like this: Chris Gardner is a salesman with big dreams, as in dreams of $$$$$$$$$$$. He and his wife use all of their savings to buy a whole bunch of bone scanning machines, which Gardner then tries to hawk to doctors, clinics, hospitals. As the movie opens, sales are not going well, the rent and bills are not being paid, and the Gardners, who have a very young son, are not getting along. Gardner desperately tries to hold everything together with his salesman-like bravado but the family’s life continues to unravel. The wife leaves, Gardner and the son get kicked out of their apartment and then out of the motel they are living in and end up sleeping in a shelters, and he loses a couple of bone scanners and has his bank account cleaned out by the IRS.

One day, in the midst of these trials, our feckless hero spots an expensive red imported sports car parked by the curb; the owner turns out to be a stockbroker. Chris decides then and there that despite the ridiculous odds against success—if he succeeds in becoming one of twenty interns working for Dean Winter and learning the trade, he is also competing against the other nineteen for the one job that is waiting at the end of six-month internship—he is going to become a stockbroker.

Chris Gardner is a smart, witty, and determined man, and at the very end of the film he is chosen out of the twenty to become a broker at Dean Winter. After the film ends, we learn that he goes on to found his own brokerage firm and eventually sold a minority share in that company for a very large sum of money.

Happy ending. Well, if happy ending means I was glad the movie was over, then yes, The Pursuit of Happyness ended happily. But if this film, which was “inspired by a true story,” was meant to in turn inspire viewers to do whatever it takes (including putting your child through a virtual hell) to get a job that is going to put enough money in their pocket to give them financial security (and bolster their already significant ego at the same time), I am not sure if this is a message I would want to be giving.

I did not feel sorry for Chris Garner, nor did I cheer him on (except in the sense that I wanted him to achieve sufficient success—really quickly—to put me out of my misery). He is an egotistical, irresponsible jerk who cares only about himself. I could not help but feeling that his determination to keep his son when his wife was leaving him and his gritty resolve to succeed at Dean Winter were also manifestations of an ego out of control. I wonder what lessons the son took away from the experience his father put him through.

This is not a movie I would ever watch again, nor would I encourage a young person to buy into its message.

Update

2011-03-06T15:32:00.000-08:00

Since I began this blog in late 2009—and actually even before that—I have been pretty much allowing the Spirit to guide what I study, read, or write (or not write) on any given day. The blog entries reflect this practice, I think.

In the past few months I have been moved to read and study more widely outside of Roman Catholicism. Books that I have on the go include the one by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi quoted from in an earlier blog; a new book by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly entitled All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age; a book on general science, Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy; and the ubiquitous Joseph Campbell, to whom I always seem to keep returning. I am also writing an article about a very interesting friend who has lived in Japan for the past thirty years. And I will soon finish watching the lectures in the Yale course “Introduction to New Testament History and Literature.”

At the same time, it seems that I no longer wish to attend Mass. I am at present more inspired to spend Sunday in my office with my books and my various projects. I have no feelings of guilt or regret about this inclination to “lapse,” and will therefore not force myself to go to church just because Sunday is a day of obligatory attendance for those who call themselves Catholics.

I now have a clearer idea of where all this “drifting” may be leading although I do not wish to in any way project my thoughts into the future or to begin to hang on to something I may have been subconsciously searching for over the past few years, and especially in the fifteen months since I began blogging. I now realize that this practice of allowing the Spirit to guide my work has been leading me to gradually let go of habits, ideas, and beliefs that I once thought were terribly important and thus clung stubbornly and desperately to. I am becoming more and more conscious of the fact that I have truly begun to “follow my bliss,” which Campbell defines as “that deep sense of being present, of doing what you absolutely must do to be yourself.”

"If you can hang on to that, you are on the edge of the transcendent already. You may not have any money, but it doesn’t matter. When I came back from my student years in Germany and Paris, it was three weeks before the Wall Street crash in 1929, and I didn’t have a job for five years. And, fortunately for me, there was no welfare. I had nothing to do but sit in Woodstock and read and figure out where my bliss lay. There I was on the edge of excitement all the time."

At this moment I also feel on the edge of excitement much of the time. I am very interested in this idea of following one’s bliss and I am moved to explore it further. I have no idea of what this means in terms of my Catholicism, but I somehow feel that I will sooner or later return to it because it is “the myth that I was brought up with.” I am always inspired by Karen Armstrong, whose life and whose person are true reflections of bliss: Armstrong entered the convent seeking God but only found God when she discovered her bliss, long after leaving the convent and only after several “failed” attempts at establishing a career.

As for Confessions of a Liturgy Queen, I am not sure if I will keep it going because I think of myself less and less as a “liturgy queen” as this term was defined in the earliest blog postings. This may be because I have not been able to find a church that consistently moves me closer to God through the overall conduct of the liturgy. I do not blame any church for my own disappointment; the problem—if it is a problem—lies with me. I am apparently being called to experience God on my own.

I am profoundly grateful to all those who have followed this journey, who have endured with kindness and patience all the ramblings and rages that have appeared on these “pages,” and who have supported and encouraged me along the way.

Blessings and peace to all of you.

"A Mystical Approach to Judaism"

2011-02-21T16:20:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago a friend and former colleague, who is Jewish, came over for lunch and brought me some books to read as I had been telling her that I wished to know more about Judaism. Today is the first opportunity I have had to crack one of these books and the one I opened immediately struck my heart with a resonance that I experienced with few of the Catholic or Christian books I have read.

Here is a good part of the Introduction to Jewish with Feeling: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Practice, by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi:

A spiritual seeker is a person whose soul is awake, whose spirit has experienced -- whether the mind knows it or not -- that slap that gets the first breath going in a newborn. Such a soul is not content to stay on the level of mere observance, ritual, and dogmatic belief that it encounters in most Jewish settings. It needs a more personal and mystical approach. It wants an open-sky Judaism: a Judaism that invites the infinite and operates at a higher level of spiritual consciousness. It senses the divine just beyond the surface of everyday existence and wants to connect to that. It yearns to achieve for itself those inner experiences that lie at the heart of religion's external forms. A mystical approach to Judaism is therefore less dogmatic and more experimental. It doesn't have a low ceiling, capping the mind and frustrating its desire to unite in love and awe with a vital, living universe. It is open-minded, open-souled. It says, "Try this. If you feel it as a living reality, we're getting somewhere."

A mystical approach also recognizes that no static philosophy, no one-size-fits-all Judaism, can express the entire range of our inner growth. As we progress and develop, our spiritual needs will change. I grew up with Judaism in my mother's milk, but before committing myself intellectually to the Jewish path, I had to shed the religion I learned in the cheders, which spoke to me in almost superstitious ways. In my teenage years "the old man in the sky" was like a straitjacket. I couldn't think, or feel, or know anything about that kind of God.. I grew to adolescence during the Holocaust. I witnessed the persecution and humiliation of our people, including my own family. By the summer of 1939, when I was fifteen years old, we had to flee our home in Vienna, where I grew up, and cross the border illegally into Belgium, where we lived a precarious existence. I was so angry with God, with Yiddishkeit, with everything I'd been taught. Where were all the rewards God promised us? These, my cheder teachers said, were reserved for olam ha-ba, the world to come. In olam ha-ba there would be rivers of wine, and clothes would grow on trees, and the Mashiach would come; we'd be on top and the goyim on the bottom, and all the graves would open up and the dead would live again. I couldn't swallow these notions. My higher mind's immune system rejected them.

One weekend in Antwerp I said to myself, this Shabbos I'm going to get even with all that big rock-candy mountain nonsense. That afternoon I went to the local Orthodox youth study group, the same sort of group I used to attend in Vienna. I knew they were learning "Ethics of the Fathers," and sure enough a student began to read the introduction: "Every Jew has a portion of the world to come." "Pie in the sky!" I shouted. "Did anyone ever come back from there? It's all narishkeit, all rubbish. The opiate of the masses." I poured it all out -- standing by the door for a quick getaway. The other students wanted to tear me apart, but the man sitting at the head of the table said, "Let him talk." When I finally had nothing more to say, the teacher said, "Would you like to hear from someone who agrees with you?" He asked for someone to bring Tractate Sanhedrin of the Talmud, turned to Maimonides' commentary on the Mishnah in the back, and started to read aloud. People have no idea what olam ha-ba is all about, Maimonides says. A blind man doesn't understand color; a eunuch doesn't understand sex. How could people living in this material world understand the pure godliness and spirit of the next?

This was so freeing. The teacher showed me that debunking foolish ideas was kosher, that our tradition had some precedents for that. He later introduced me to a group of young men who worked in Antwerp's diamond cutting trade and who, like him, had become Lubavitcher Hasidim. They would sit around cutting diamonds on those special lathes and studying Torah, and I joined them for a time. They listened seriously to my adolescent questions and encouraged me to find answers that rang true for me. Not only did they initiate me into the study of Hasidic texts, meditation, and introspection; they also gave me Romain Roland, a French writer and an exponent of Hinduism, and Johannes Anker Larsen, a mystical Danish novelist and playwright. Instead of being confused, I was in-fused. My soul always seems to have felt the need to hang in tension between polar opposites, and this tension my mythical mentors provided with generosity. So even in the midst of teenage hopelessness I began to get glimpses of the Presence to which I ultimately devoted my life.

I once brought some college students to see Reb Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the last Lubavitcher Rebbe. The Rebbe spoke to them for a little while, then asked if they had any questions. One young man raised his hand: "What is a rebbe good for?" he asked. Far from being offended, the Rebbe said: "That is a very good question. Let me tell you. It is written: 'You shall be unto me a land of desire' [Malachi 3:12]. The Earth contains all kinds of treasures, but you have to know where to dig. If you do not, you will come up with nothing but rocks or mud. But if you ask the geologist of the soul where to dig, you might find silver, which is the love of God; gold, which is awe before God; or diamonds,, which is faith. A rebbe can only show you where to dig. You must do the digging yourself."

Throughout my life I have revised and adjusted my beliefs. I grew slowly, through study and prayer and God-wrestling and standing in the presence of great souls. I did not experience one seismic and pivotal moment, but a long series of epiphanies, which often seemed unrelated to one another. Like a Zen student, I needed meditative and contemplative training to make sense of these "Aha!" moments. Ultimately, just as I grew into the world of the Lubavitch, I moved beyond it. I wanted to learn from the spiritually experienced of other fields: Sufi sheikhs, Buddhist monks, Christian contemplatives, American savants. I received something from all of them. Today, once again I find myself in suspension between two polar opposites. To modern Jews I am one of the last Mohicans of pre-Holocaust Jewish mysticism. As such, I am concerned about the continuity of our tradition and lineage and making it come alive for my own children, who, with so many Jews today, are searching for the balance between the values that are specific to Judaism and those that are universal. On the other foot, I stand on concern for the future -- the future not only of our people but of the planet as a whole -- and for the survival of the human race on our way to a great and divinizing transformation.

In a world where such a universalist spirituality is possible, why be Jewish? So many of my values connect me to nature, to the planet, to compassion for all living beings, that my Judaism at moments feels like a confinement -- unless I begin to see that my Jewish values are the very ones that produced my universal concern. Today, I feel more than ever that we Jews are integral and necessary to life in the larger body of nations on planet Earth, that we need to be the healthy vital organ of the whole Earth that we are meant to be. By being the best and most enlightened Jews we can, we place ourselves at the service of all other beings with whom we share the here and now.

There is here an open-mindedness, an open-heartedness, the embrace of a universal spirituality expressed through a single, yet very rich, religious tradition, that is seldom seen in such a public display by a Catholic cleric. Yet one cannot help but think that the tension Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi speaks of in this introduction is felt by many thoughtful Catholic priests. It is a great pity and a great loss for thinking, questioning, doubtful Catholics that such healthy - even joyful - tension is kept behind the dark and heavy curtain of Catholic orthodoxy.

Photo Credit

"IMG_2511" by andydr

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The Gift of Sexuality: Canadian Bishops' Pastoral Letter on Chastity

2011-02-14T14:29:00.000-08:00

I can always count on the local diocesan newspaper, The B.C. Catholic to give me something to write about if I choose to take the proffered bait. Last week the venerable publication dangled a nice big juicy worm right where I could not resist grabbing for it.

On the front page of the February 7 issue of The BCC was the following article heading: “The virtues of chastity: Bishops release pastoral letter on chaste living.” Of course, following my rages at the Courage apostolate and its promotion of an entire life of chastity for those “afflicted with same-sex attraction,” the sight or mention of the word sets off a whole orchestra of cacophonous klaxons in my uncharitable—and definitely unchaste—heart.

The article, with a local by-line, contains all the usual clichés about the body as “a temple of the Holy Spirit” needing to be treated with “the reverence it deserves”; about our “sex-saturated society”; and about the necessity of constant prayer and regular confession to aid in leading a chaste life.

Another article in the back pages of the paper, with a national by-line, offers more quotes from the Canadian bishops’ pastoral letter as well as from prominent figures in Catholic life in Canada.

I have no idea how many single people, young or otherwise, opt for chastity in their sex lives; I am not aware of any surveys that might provide insight into this issue. Nor do I claim to know all the reasons a person may choose to remain chaste. As a healthy male, however, I think I can state with considerable confidence that living a chaste life—which also includes abstaining from sexual self-gratification, by the way—would be extraordinarily demanding.

It is commendable, in my opinion, that the Canadian bishops “want to assure those young people who are struggling to live a life of chastity that their bishops stand prayerfully with them and are there to support and encourage them.” I am certain that those who have chosen to live chastely can use all the help they can get.

But the bishops would also have young people believe that they possess the knowledge of how God intends the gift of sexuality to be used:

“When this gift is used as the Father wills, we give him glory and build up his Kingdom. When we live our sexuality in the proper way, according to our state in life, others will be able to find God through us.”

They even appear to have knowledge of what sexual activities God condones and does not condone:

“…the sexual act has to be unitive and procreative and [that is] why some kinds of sexual activity are mot chaste. Though pleasure may be present, some acts are a misuse of sex when they fall short of what God intends.”

Finally, the bishops seem to have access to information about the consequences of not living a chaste life:

“Failure to live chastely leads to a self-centered existence that blinds us to the needs, the joys and the beauty of the world around us.”

I am not so privileged as to have direct access to knowledge of God’s intentions for my sexuality, or for anything else. I do have an opinion, however, which comes from the brain that God gave me.

I agree that if human sexuality is a gift from God, it must be treated reverently, as we would treat any gift given to us by someone who loves us. And I agree that we need to teach our young people that the precious gift of our sexuality is not something to be squandered or abused by ourselves or stolen by others; the consequences of misusing our sexuality can be devastating, even fatal. But we are very fortunate in this society in that we are for the most part in control of our sexuality and are therefore able to freely choose how it is to be used.

I cannot for the life of me understand how God could on the one hand give me a beautiful gift like my sexuality and then turn around and tell me that because he made me gay or because I am unable to find a wife or because I am physically incapable of procreating, I may not enjoy this gift. One would think that such a cruel joke could only be played by Satan. I am therefore incapable of buying the bishops’ argument; I expect that a thoughtful young person would also have difficulty accepting their “teaching.”

This pastoral letter leaves me with the sad feeling that bishops as a group are quite out of touch with both authentic spirituality and the reality of modern life and that this dis-integrated condition renders them and their words irrelevant.

I can only hope that young Catholics recognize that the gift of sexuality is theirs alone to use or to share—wisely, I pray—and that the choice of expressing their sexuality in a loving relationship or remaining chaste is theirs and theirs alone.

New Testament Study: "Great logic there, huh?"

2011-01-15T15:40:00.000-08:00

For the past few months I have been watching on YouTube a lecture series which constitutes the Yale University Religious Studies course “Introduction to New Testament History and Literature.” The instructor is Dale Martin, Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies. Martin’s course examines the New Testament as text—written in the first century C.E. and providing evidence of the diversity of early Christianity and a reflection of the religious, social, and political environment of that time.

Around Christmastime friends who know of my interest in Christianity and who are devout Christians themselves loaned me a set of DVDs entitled Christianity: The First Three Centuries, From Christ to Constantine (How could a tiny sect ever conquer the world?). This lecture series is billed as “An Eight Session DVD Series by Dr. Paul L. Maier, Professor and Best-Selling Author.” Maier is Russell H. Seibert Professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan University. The DVD series is produced by Tobias Communications, an organization which appears to be mainly concerned with promoting Maier’s books and DVDs; there is no affiliation with WMU.

I am struck by the difference in the approach to the question of the historicity of the New Testament taken by these two historians. Martin is lecturing to undergraduate students at a prestigious university, so while he is a self-confessed Episcopalian, he is constrained by his environment to assume a critical-historical approach to the subject matter. Maier appears to be lecturing to adults in a non-academic setting, so he does not find himself under the same constraints as Martin. Yet both are distinguished historians, and one can thus reasonably assume that it is at least partly their prestige as scholars that has attracted a willing audience for their lectures.

While Martin’s course focuses on the New Testament and Maier’s series is a history of early Christianity as interpreted and told primarily by the early ecclesiastical historian Eusebius, each is clearly early church history.

In his opening lecture, Martin carefully explains to students the nature and purpose of the course. First he tells them what the course is not: an examination of the New Testament as Scripture, providing deeper insights into the theological message of the Bible and thus strengthening the faith of the participants. In contrast, some of the first words of Maier’s introductory lecture are, “And it all began from God’s ultimate revelation in one person, Jesus Christ.”

Lecture 13 of the Yale series is “The Historical Jesus.” In this lecture Professor Martin explains the difficulty of using the New Testament texts as historically reliable documents. He has introduced this problem in an earlier lecture, in which he demonstrates that the accounts of the life and ministry of Paul in Acts and in Galatians are completely different. In this lecture he gives another example: the birth narrative, which only appears in Matthew and Luke, the two versions being so different as to be utterly irreconcilable, leading scholars to conclude that nothing is known about the birth of Jesus.

In Lecture 13, Martin also talks about the New Testament accounts of the trial of Jesus. Modern biblical scholars have concluded that there is no evidence that any such trial ever occurred. He cites the following reasons for this conclusion:

The Romans did not need trials to crucify Jews; a Jew could be summarily executed if he was suspected of acting against the Empire
The New Testament versions of the trials are very different. In Mark’s account, for example, Jesus says almost nothing in his trial; in John’s version, he speaks a great deal
Records were not kept for trials at that time
In all four gospel accounts, the apostles had fled before the trial took place. In any case, had they not fled they still would not have been allowed to be present for any trial or hearing as they were lowly fishermen and peasants

Session 2 of Maier’s series, “Jesus of Nazareth: What else do we know?” also deals with the question of the historicity of the trial of Jesus. Maier offers as one item of evidence for the trial a riot in which Jews angry over the use of the temple treasury to finance a Roman water project for Jerusalem were attacked by Roman troops: “So Pilate has had a record of run-ins with the Jews that were pretty serious.” He then tells us about a coin minted by Pilate upon which appears a shepherd’s crook—not the crosier of the Good Shepherd but rather “the utensil used by the Roman augur” who predicted the future by examining the condition of the liver of a sheep that had been sacrificed (“Great logic there, huh?”).

Maier goes on:

And so this helps set the stage for Good Friday and the trial of Jesus. Pilate is under pressure; he’s had two or three run-ins with the Jews already. And so this is fresh detail that tremendously informs our knowledge of the politics behind the crucifixion and what’s going on on that day that changed the world, namely Good Friday. And yet you can’t believe how many critics doubt the historicity of the trial of Jesus, and I don’t know why they doubt it. You know we have the judge’s [i.e. Pilate’s] name on stone; we have his coinage; we have the evidence of his projects in Jerusalem according to [Flavius] Josephus. And then what about the prosecutor himself? He was the high priest of the Sanhedrin, you’ll recall: Joseph Caiaphas. And we get additional detail of Caiaphas from Josephus, from the rabbinical traditions, from Eusebius, and even from archaeology”—the discovery of Joseph Caiaphas’s ossuary. “The hard evidence [for the truth of biblical stories] is all over the place.

So here we have two approaches to historicity by two distinguished historians. The first is, at least in part, an attempt to determine the historical reliability of the biblical texts through careful exegesis and modern historical methodology. There appear to be no assumptions made and no attempt to “defend the faith.” The second is simply an exercise in Christian apologetics.

I have no problem with either approach. In both cases, the audience for the lectures is made up of adults who are capable of thinking critically and who are free to believe or disbelieve the information offered by the lecturer and to accept or dismiss the “evidence” provided.

I am curious, however, as to whether the people who attend Professor Maier’s lectures and buy his books and DVDs are aware beforehand of the obvious weakness of the evidential foundation of his claims for the historicity of the New Testament. If we are people of faith, is our faith so weak that we need to construct bogus “proof” for the factuality of our story in order to defend it from real or imagined enemies?

And what of Professor Maier? How can a historian who is trained in Western critical scholarship and who is a faculty member of a publicly accredited American university make such a mockery of his profession in what he would have us believe is a sacred cause?

Perhaps he has been listening to the wise words of another good Christian, Joel Osteen, who said “God wants us to prosper financially, to have plenty of money, to fulfill the destiny He has laid out for us.”

Photo Credit

"Easter Pageant 2009, Pontius Pilate what is truth" by divemasterking2000

Creative Commons:some rights reserved

Life Interrupted

2011-01-03T08:44:00.000-08:00

Well, I am still slightly traumatized from Saturday evening’s incident.

About 8:05 pm on Saturday January 1, after the dishes were done and dessert taken care of, I went out to my garage office to check some hockey scores on my computer. I walked into the room to see a young man crouched down in front of my computer table, putting things into what looked like a soft briefcase. He was a good looking guy and he was wearing a very nice fedora. As he looked up at me, my mind went into a state of complete confusion. I host international students, so there are always people in my house, sometimes including students who no longer live with me but are still in Vancouver. It took me a couple of seconds to realize that this fellow was not someone I knew and was therefore an “unauthorized visitor,” so to speak.

The sequence of events that followed this brilliant deduction passed very quickly. As I asked him who he was (as if he was going to pull out his passport or driver’s license and show it to me so I could record the details), he stood up and began to leave—or maybe I told him to get out. While he was going out the door, another blinding flash of insight struck me: he was leaving with a bagful of my stuff, including my precious laptop.

So I followed him outside and grabbed him around the waist as he was headed out to the back lane. He did not resist and immediately dropped the bag into the planter beside him. I let him go. I deliberated for a few seconds as to whether I should call the police and deciding to do so dialed 9-1-1, thinking I would be upbraided for calling the emergency line for a non-emergency.

To my utter surprise, I was asked for a description of the individual and the direction I thought he might be moving in and was told to stay on the line as there were police and dogs in the vicinity, as well as a surveillance helicopter with an infra-red device (helicopter!?). Within three minutes police, dogs, and helicopter arrived. They found the young man’s shoe in the garden—it must have come off when I grabbed him—gave the scent to the dog and within a few moments the “perp” was caught. He had been hiding between my garage and the garage next door.

The police hung around while I wrote a report of the incident and then a fingerprint guy tried to lift the prints from my computer. And then it was all over.

Except it’s not over. I was very fortunate that I got my stuff back right away and that the young man was not carrying a weapon and was not violent. Still, I have been somewhat traumatized by this incident. I cannot seem to stop it from replaying over and over in my consciousness. And of course, every time I am outside I am looking around to see if he or his friends are lurking in the shadows because they have decided to exact revenge for my calling the police. I lock all the doors even during the day when I am inside.

A friend is a trained counselor who once worked for the victim services section of her local police department. She told me that my reaction is normal and assured me that the trauma will diminish in a few days.

Yet I am bemused by my reaction, by how easily my life can be derailed from its normal, peaceful track. I am thinking that the ground under that track is not as solid is I imagined it to be.

I also keep thinking about innocent victims of violent crime—a woman beaten by a husband or boyfriend, an elderly person attacked in his home by a robber, a girl or young woman sexually assaulted on a dark street or in a park. If I am affected by a crime that was neither violent nor resulted in loss or damage to my property, what must the suffering of these people be like?

Oh, and he dropped the nice fedora on the ground outside as he was making off with my stuff. It wasn't until I picked it up later that I realized it was mine.

Photo Credit

"Robbery in Progress" by me'nthedogs

Creative Commons: some rights reserved

The Attractiveness of Jesus

2010-12-29T07:29:00.000-08:00

In an article currently featured in the online edition of the National Catholic Reporter, Georgetown professor of theology Fr. Peter Phan is asked the following question:

If most people at Jesus’ time and a large number of people in our time did not know or acknowledge Jesus’ special relationship to God, why were they attracted to him ?

Here is part of Fr. Phan's answer (italics are mine):

"What then is the attractiveness of Jesus? Rarely is it the Jesus as presented by the Christian dogmas in the abstract Greco-Roman philosophical categories. It is rather the Jesus as narrated in the gospels, with his teachings on how to live a fully and truly human life, the example of his life dedicated to the service of the poor and the marginalized until death, and his deep and unconditional love for and obedience to God . In other words, people are attracted to Jesus because in him they find a full flourishing of human life. Let’s note that it is not “happiness” as defined by modernity -- the self-centered satisfaction of material, psychological and even spiritual needs -- that Jesus refers to when he says he gives “abundant life.” Many of Jesus’ teachings are indeed “hard sayings” that require a total renunciation of the self to be his disciples. In spite of this highly demanding ethical ideal, many people are attracted to Jesus, precisely because they find in him the concrete way to live a fully and truly human life."

Read the full article here.

Photo Credit

"Jesus is the Light" by Rio Calle

Creative Commons: Some rights reserved

Negative Capability

2010-12-26T16:57:00.000-08:00

Sportswriter Thomas Boswell on the steroids controversy in baseball:

“The moralist wants to decide what’s right and wrong; the artist wants to see things exactly as they are, even if there are so many shades that right and wrong isn’t a place that you get to. John Keats wrote in a letter—and he was talking about William Shakespeare—he said that the feature that distinguished Shakespeare the most and made him the greatest of all writers was what Keats called 'negative capability', which he described as the ability to remain in tension, undecided between opposing poles. And he said that Shakespeare had that negative capability, the ability to see everything and not jump to one side of the question, to a greater degree than any other artist.

“Now we live in a sports age and a baseball age, where nothing’s more valuable than negative capability because if we’re just in a rush, if we can’t wait to see Roger Clemens or Barry Bonds, or whoever it is, as right or wrong, then we’re missing the complexity of these people and the difficulty of the age that they’re living in.”

From "Inning Ten: Bottom of the Tenth (1999-2009)" in Ken Burns Baseball

Photo Credit

"A-Rod's Baseball Collection" by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Creative Commons: some rights reserved

Christmas

2010-12-24T13:06:00.000-08:00

At this time of year people of faith are always asked to remember “the true meaning of Christmas”—the humble birth, to an immaculately conceived virgin, of the child Jesus in Bethlehem, a child who was the Son of God, the Messiah, the Saviour who would atone for our sins by dying on the cross. We are told by our pastors that it is this story that we should hold foremost in out hearts and minds at Christmas. We are urged to rejoice that Christ the Saviour is born.

I recognize that the Nativity story—told only in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, and differently in these two—is both believed and beloved by millions of Christians worldwide. And it is indeed a beautiful and magical story—the star, the Magi, the gifts, the angels and the shepherds, the manger.

But as it tells me nothing about how to live in this world, unlike the life and teachings of the adult Jesus, it carries little significance for me and moves me not deeply.

If we believe, however, that the love Jesus felt for us was so great that he eschewed all material comfort and lived a life of poverty and simplicity in order to spread his message of love, and if we believe that he ultimately gave his life to show the power of love and of truth, then his birth into a world of conflict and suffering, of greed and hypocrisy, carries powerful and timeless symbolic significance for every Christian and even for non-Christians.

It seems to me that we need this message much more than we need the quaint story of the Nativity and the promise of forgiveness of sin so that we might achieve eternal life in the next world.

An important part of the Christmas message is “Peace on Earth and Goodwill to Men.” The message is meaningless, however, unless we understand that celebrating the birth of Jesus includes an invitation to constantly re-create ourselves in his image. Only when the peace of Christ and good will toward both those who love us and those who do not love us are born in our hearts again and again can we truly be said to have captured and embodied the spirit of Christmas.

Blessings to all this Christmas season.

Photo Credit

"Christmas in Malta" by Peter Grima

Creative Commons: Some rights reserved

Once "a Blue-Collar Sport"

2010-12-23T20:24:00.000-08:00

In 1869 Harry Wright, manager and outfielder for the Cincinnati Red Stockings, made seven times the average working man’s wage. In 1976, 107 years later, a ballplayer still made just eight times the working man’s salary. By 1994, the average major league salary would be nearly fifty times that of ordinary Americans.

“The big difference, now that players get so much, is that it has distanced them from us. It was a blue-collar sport, and people in the stands could look at these people playing ball and think of them as workers because they were getting paid workers’ salaries, and this perpetuated the illusion that with a little luck that could be me out there. The sense of “we” between fans and players was very strong in those days and players stayed on a lot longer with a team so they were familiars, like someone who worked in the same office with you almost. And all that has gone; it’s quite different now.” Roger Angell

From "Inning 9: Home 1970-1992" Ken Burns Baseball

"You're Not So Ugly"

2010-12-16T12:26:00.000-08:00

An article I wrote recently about some Korean homestay students who were/are very special to me was posted on Life as a Human last night.

"Mr. Rickey, it's my skin."

2010-12-16T11:27:00.000-08:00

Branch Rickey: Baseball people are generally allergic to new ideas. It took years to persuade them to put numbers on uniforms. It is the hardest thing in the world to get baseball to change anything, even spikes on a new pair of shoes. But they will, eventually; they are bound to.

In March of 1945, Mr. Rickey told me in confidence that only the board of directors of the ball club knew and only his family knew, and now I was going to know that he was going to bring a black player to the white [Brooklyn] Dodgers.

And Mr. Rickey said that going back to when he was the baseball coach at Ohio Wesleyan University, he took the team to play a series down at South Bend, Indiana with Notre Dame, and he said, “My best player was my catcher, and he was black. But,” said Mr. Rickey, “when we were registering the squad in the hotel, when the black player stepped up to sign the register, the clerk jerked the register back and said. ‘We don’t register niggers in this hotel.’” And Rickey remonstrated and said, “This is the baseball team from Ohio Wesleyan. We’re the guests of Notre Dame University.” He said, “I don’t care who you are. We don’t register niggers in this hotel.” Well,” Mr. Rickey said, “there are two beds in my room, aren’t there?’ And he said, “Yes.” “Well,” he says, “can’t he use one bed and not register?”

The clerk grudgingly allowed that to happen and Mr. Rickey took the key, handed it to the black player, and said, “You go up to the room and wait for me. Soon as I get the rest of the team settled, I’ll be up.”

Mr. Rickey said, “When I opened the door, here was this fine young man, sitting on the edge of his chair, and he was crying. And he was pulling at his hands, and he said, ‘Mr. Rickey, it’s my skin. If I could just tear it off, I’d be like everyone else.’”

And Mr. Rickey told me this day in March of 1945, he said, “In all these years I have heard that boy crying. And now,” he said, “I’m going to do something about it.” Red Barber, sports broadcaster

(From "Inning 6: The National Pastime, 1940-1950") Ken Burns Baseball)

On April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson played his first game with the Brooklyn Dodgers of the National League.

Photo Credits

Jackie Robinson by Paul Lowry

News History Gallery by ttarasiuk

Creative Commons: some rights reserved

New Life and Old

2010-12-12T13:31:00.000-08:00

There was a baptism at Mass in our church this morning. It has been a long time since I have attended a Catholic baptism, so I am not familiar with the ritual, especially when it takes place in conjunction with a Mass. At any rate, at the beginning of the liturgy the family, including parents and godparents, stood at the front of the sanctuary with the baby while the priest introduced them and said a few prayers. The actual baptism took place at the end of Mass. (And even with a homily, we still managed to finish in an hour.)

What touched me at this special Mass happened at the homily. The priest, a man in his seventies, came down from the pulpit and from the sanctuary, went over to the pew where the couple were seated and took the baby in his arms. He held the infant, gently rocking him back and forth, like the most loving mother would cradle her only child, throughout the entire homily as he walked up and down the aisle, back up to the pulpit where he read words from the first reading, and down into the aisle again. The child made no sound and hardly moved while the priest held him.

There was no suggestion that the baby was a prop for the purpose of illustrating the homily. To me, in fact, the priest and the child were the homily.

The expression of love can be so simple and yet so profound.

Photo Credit

"A Big Event" by Clairity

Creative Commons: some rights reserved

The Legend of the Hot Dog (One version anyway)

2010-12-09T20:22:00.000-08:00

Bad food and overpriced drink had been sold at ballparks since the 1850s. But it took one very ambitious British-born caterer to turn concessions into an empire. Harry M. Stevens had begun his career hocking scorecards in the 1880s, all the while regaling the crowds with quotes from Byron and Shakespeare. By 1901 he was peddling hard-boiled eggs, ham sandwiches, ice cream, and slices of pie in stadiums from New York to Ohio. Then, one cold afternoon when ice cream sales slowed at the Polo Grounds, he sent out for German sausages, which he put in long buns so fans could hold and eat them. He had made his greatest contribution to the game, introducing hot dogs to the ballpark.

From "Inning 2: Something Like a War (1900-1910)" in Ken Burns' Baseball

The Louisville Slugger

2010-12-09T12:01:00.000-08:00

Pete Browning, the old gladiator of the Louisville Eclipse, had a lifetime batting average of .343 and was the idol of Kentucky fans. One day, in 1884, he broke his favorite bat. After the game, an apprentice woodworker named Bud Hillerich offered to make Browning a new bat. The next day Browning went three for three; thereafter he would use no one else’s bat. It was the first Louisville Slugger and Browning would eventually own more than two hundred of them, to each of which he gave a name taken from the Bible.

From "Inning 1: Our Game" Ken Burns' Baseball

One Year

2010-12-07T07:43:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I had lunch with a friend whom I had not seen for a very long time. Naturally there was a great deal of catching up to do on both sides. After I told him about what I had been doing these past few years—returning to Catholicism, studying various aspects of religion and particularly the Catholic Church, and blogging about my thoughts and experiences—he asked me what the focus of my work was.

I had not been asked this question before, so I had to stop and think a bit before answering. I thought about my original purpose in starting this blog—to articulate the rather disparate thoughts that came to mind in the process of traveling on a spiritual path. And so I told him that there was no real focus to my study and writing beyond the need to find joy and excitement in the journey itself.

Today is the one-year anniversary of the establishment of Confessions of a Liturgy Queen. I am happy that I began the journey and grateful for the wonderful adventures it has taken me on. I am also grateful for the support and for the insights of my faithful readers, who have patiently and lovingly read and commented on my various rants and soul-baring exercises.

Due to a large number of rather stress-filled distractions, I have not been able to write much this fall. Moreover, as I stated earlier in the season, I would like very much to be moving away from polemics and more into reconciliation and contemplation in my thinking and in my writing. We shall see. Regardless, as things are starting to calm down, I am hopeful that I will be able to resume my studies and my writing and once again post regularly on this site.

Blessings to all.

Easy to Preach, Not So Easy to Practise

2010-11-10T14:30:00.000-08:00

I have posted a few articles recently on issues like surrender over struggle, following one’s bliss and trusting God, and practising the virtues of charity, humility, and forgiveness. These articles usually arise from some incident or crisis or conversation in my personal environment that has caused me to reflect on how I—and others—react to life. The musings that are these articles come from an inclination to transcendence and from a passionate heart, but they have yet to be translated into a mode of living that is a true imitation of Christ.

I suppose I can say that I live “in community.” I have been hosting international students in my home for the past seventeen years; I am what is known in the international education field as a homestay father. So far, more than seventy-five students have lived in my home for periods ranging from two weeks to more than six years; they have come from Japan, China, and Korea, Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil, and several Western European countries. Overall the experience has been more than positive as most of the students have been “family” in the warmest sense of the word and there are many with whom I still keep in touch.

This year, however, has for some reason been rather difficult. There has recently been a spate of students who have been variously unbelievably boorish, unengaged and uncommunicative, boorish 2, and finally prima-donna-like. These characteristics often manifest themselves in behaviour that is thoughtless, insensitive, and self-centered or just plain selfish. They also show themselves in attitudes toward food. Here are some recent behaviours and comments at the dinner table:

A student who likes his meat well-cooked comments on a barbecued steak (expensive cut) prepared for him: “What is this black thing you’re giving me?”
A student vigorously scrapes the blackened surface of broiled ribs, completely oblivious to the incredulous stares of everyone else at the table
A student requests soy sauce to put on the curried fish he was served
When asked how they liked meatballs cooked in the slow cooker (and they were delicious), one complains that he only likes “classic” meatballs; another complains of too much garlic
A student grinds enough salt to preserve a whale on his food at every meal

Most of these students never offered/offer to help with the preparation of a meal by setting the table or making salad, preferring to lie on the sofa or sit in the big easy chair watching TV while the work goes on nearby. Students are often late for dinner and on numerous occasions have called from downtown an hour or less before the meal to announce that they will not be eating at home. On several occasions I received no call at all.

All of my students are “adults.”

As you can see from the tone of what I have written so far, these behaviours do not sit well with me, especially where they concern food. Often a great deal of preparation, as well as expense—not to mention love—goes into an evening meal in our home. The lack of manners, and more important, of appreciation are appalling to me, and on a few occasions over the past few months, I have found myself so angry I have been unable to sleep and have stayed angry for more than a day.

I am relating this in order to point out that there is a profound disconnect between what I have been preaching—to myself primarily, if truth be told—and what actually happens in my daily life. It seems that the habits of a lifetime—reacting to perceived insults or offences due to over-sensitivity—are not magically transformed with a few pretty phrases about charity and forgiveness and surrender. Old baggage must be consciously cast off through practise, and the practise of observing the ego so that it may be dissipated must be as constant as one can make it.

I am reminded of the story told by Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. When Tolle was a university student in London, he often saw a woman “who appeared to be quite insane” on the train as he rode to school. “She looked extremely tense and talked to herself incessantly in a loud and angry voice….There was the angry tone in her voice of someone who has been wronged, who needs to defend her position lest she become annihilated.” It turns out that the woman got off at the same stop as Tolle and actually walked to one of the university buildings and entered, all the while talking aloud in the same aggrieved voice.

I was still thinking about her when I was in the men’s room prior to entering the library. As I was washing my hands, I thought: I hope I don’t end up like her. The man next to me looked briefly in my direction and I suddenly was shocked when I realized that I hadn’t just thought those words, but mumbled them aloud. “Oh my God, I’m already like her,” I thought. Wasn’t my mind as incessantly active as hers? There were only minor differences between us. The predominant underlying emotion behind her thinking seemed to be anger. In my case, it was mostly anxiety. She thought out loud. I thought—mostly—inside my head. If she was mad, then everyone was mad, including myself. There were differences in degree only.

Some of us have had a lifetime of this angry or anxious mental activity, reacting to the world around us, near and far. It seems to be very difficult, especially as one gets older, to even be conscious of the voice, let alone to let it go by surrendering in love and forgiveness to a greater voice.

It seems that I am being tested these days on my ability to practise what I preach. I don’t think I want to show anyone my report card just yet.

Photo Credit

"Anger" by sahlgoode

Creative Commons: some rights reserved

Book Review: What Happened at Vatican II, by John W. O’Malley

2010-11-04T09:00:00.000-07:00

In the Introduction to this marvellous book, Father O’Malley states his purpose as author:

In this book I will analyze [the sixteen conciliar] documents, but I will not provide a detailed theological commentary on them….What I will do, rather, is put the documents into their contexts to provide a sense of before and after….Only by tracing the documents’ genesis, and even more important, locating them in their contexts can their deeper significance be made clear.

He identifies the main historical contexts for Vatican II as “the long and the broad history of the Western church” from Constantine and Nicaea to the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation; “the long nineteenth century,” including the French Revolution and Pius IX and Vatican I; and “the period beginning with World War II and continuing up to the opening of the council.”

O’Malley also identifies what he considers to be the most important issues dealt with at Vatican II. These included the place of Latin in the liturgy, the relationship of Tradition to Scripture, the relationship of the church to the Jews and then to other non-Christian religions, religious liberty, the role of the church in the modern world. There were many more.

But the author believes that it is really the “issues under the issues” that characterize Vatican II and make it unique in the history of ecumenical councils. These are:

1. The circumstances under which change in the church is appropriate and the arguments with which it can be justified.

2. The relationship in the church of center to periphery, or put more concretely, how authority is properly distributed between the papacy, including the Congregations of the Vatican Curia, and the rest of the church.

3. The style or model according to which that authority should be exercised. Here the council becomes more explicit by introducing a new vocabulary and literary form. Words like “charism,” “dialogue,” “partnership,” “cooperation,” and “friendship” indicate a new style for the exercise of authority and implicitly advocate a conversion to a new style of thinking, speaking, and behaving, a change from a more authoritarian and unidirectional style to a more reciprocal and responsive model.

I believe that this is the issue captured by the expression “the spirit of the council,” that is, an orientation that goes beyond specific enactments.

Once O’Malley’s account reaches the opening of the council, the book often reads like a novel, filled with characters in conflict with each other, intrigue, surprises, and pathos. The council fathers quickly split into what the author calls the majority and the minority. The latter group was made up of members of the Roman curia and its supporters who believed that the council should be a reaffirmation of doctrine laid down by previous councils and by popes like Pius X. The majority, on the other hand, soon recognized that the council was an opportunity to bring about significant change in the way that the church related to the modern world. These two opposing views resulted in four years of tension and more-than-occasional vitriolic outbursts.

While faithfully recording these dramatic moments, the author does not fail to bring us back to the issues he laid out in his Introduction, placing events and outcomes in their proper historical and ecclesiological context.

Let us take the “lightning-rod issue” of collegiality—“the relationship of the bishops, or episcopal hierarchy to the papacy”—as an example.

What kind of authority did the bishops have over the church at large when they acted collectively, that is, collegially; how was that authority exercised in relationship to the pope; and how was collegiality different from “Conciliarism” (supremacy of council over pope), a position condemned in the fifteenth century and repeatedly condemned thereafter?

The issue of collegiality was addressed primarily in chapter two—later to become chapter three—of the much revised schema on the church, which in its final form would be entitled Lumen Gentium. One of the points made by this chapter was that bishops were ordained rather than consecrated and that this sacrament of ordination conferred on them “the tripartite office of teaching, sanctifying, and governing their flocks.”

O’Malley tells us:

It was over the last of those three—governing—that the difference arose. Thus this difficult topic blended into the final point [of chapter two], episcopal collegiality. The original [version of the schema, prepared by members of the curia] insisted that, though the sacrament conferred the office (munus) of governing, it did not confer the power to exercise it, which bishops received from the Roman Pontiff.

The new text was more intent on emphasizing that bishops have inalienable authority by virtue of the sacrament….This text agreed with the original that bishops were “vicars of Christ,” and a few lines later added a telling quotation from Leo XIII that they were “not to be thought vicars of the Roman Pontiff. They are called bishops (antistites, overseers) because they exercise an authority properly their own and really govern the flocks that are theirs.

Discussion of chapter two, which was often heated, went on from October 4 to October 15, 1963 during the second session of the council. Finally, in “a congenial meeting” with Pope Paul VI, the council moderators came up with the idea of asking the fathers to vote “on the contested issues of chapter two in a way that would indicate where the bishops stood on them and also be binding on the Doctrinal Commission in its revision of the chapter.”

On the day of the vote, however, it was suddenly announced that it had been cancelled; no explanation was given for this move. According to O'Malley, “Somebody had got to Paul VI.” As a result of his unexpected intervention, the pope was “besieged” for several days, and following a series of negotiations and no doubt due to pressure from leaders of the majority, a revised ballot was created and the vote took place.

The issue of collegiality was addressed in one of five questions to be voted on by the council fathers:

Should the schema assert that the so-called Body or College of Bishops in its evangelizing, sanctifying, and governing task is successor to the original College of the Apostles and, always in communion with the Roman Pontiff, enjoys full and supreme power over the universal church?

The result of the vote on this question was 2,148 affirmative, 336 negative. But as we shall later see, this was not the end of the story for collegiality at the council.

In his Conclusion O’Malley underlines the overall significance of this issue for the council and for the church.

No instance of ressourcement was more central to the drama of Vatican II and to its aspirations than collegiality. Proponents of collegiality at the council saw it as a recovery of an aspect of church life increasingly sidelined in the West since the eleventh century. It had been virtually pushed off the ecclesiastical map by the ways the definition of papal primacy of Vatican I had been determined and implemented. Yet, though the church had never officially defined collegiality as part of its constitution, for centuries it had taken it for granted as its normal mode of operation. The church of the first millennium functioned collegially…and in local councils and other ways the collegial mode continued to function even in the West well into the modern period.

In the West, papal primacy “developed” incrementally in a steady and almost continuous line up until the long nineteenth century when it accelerated at (for the church) almost breathtaking speed—papal definitions of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption, the growth and increasing authority exercised by the Roman Congregations, the devolution of the appointment of bishops almost exclusively into the hands of the pope, and of course, in 1870 the definition of papal primacy and infallibility.

The majority at the council certainly did not press for a statement on collegiality merely to make a theological point. They brought it to the fore, like other ressourcements, because it had practical ramifications. The bishops who promoted the doctrine and fought for it so passionately wanted to redress what they saw as the imbalance between the authority exercised especially by the Roman Congregations and their own authority as heads of “local churches.” Collegiality was the supreme instance in the council of the effort to moderate the centralizing tendencies of the ecclesiastical institution, of the effort to give those from the periphery a more authoritative voice not only back home but also in the center.

I had hoped that Father O’Malley would deal with the apparent reversal of at least the spirit of the council by John Paul II and Joseph Ratzinger. He does not do so in this book but his treatment of Pope Paul VI gives a clear indication that this process was underway long before John Paul II was elected; in fact, the dismantling began during the council itself.

By the time the second session of the council opened in September 1963, it was clear that the majority of the council fathers would be more and more insistently calling for the reform of the curia. “The Curia abused its authority, its critics maintained, and tried to lord it over the bishops. The behavior of some its members during the first period seemed to justify the indictment. The animus was widespread, by no means confined to the leaders of the majority.”

In a an address to the curia shortly before the resumption of the council in 1963, Paul admonished its members to cooperate more fully with the council and informed them that changes would have to be made to the curia’s mode of operation. At the same time, “he communicated that he was removing reform of the Curia from the agenda of the council. ‘The reform will be formulated and promulgated’, he said, ‘by the Curia itself.’” Naturally, a curia that has no interest in reform in principle will be unwilling to consider reform for itself; John Paul II had a ready and willing tool waiting for him when he ascended the throne of Peter and began dismantling Vatican II and restoring the Church of the “long nineteenth century.”

Unlike John XXIII, Paul intervened often and significantly in the business of the council. “His interventions and the way they were made are a crucial part of the story of Vatican II and of the larger problem of the relationship of center to periphery” and they reflect a preference for the primacy of papal authority over episcopal collegiality.

The most substantive—and to some, the most egregious—intervention came in the last week of the third session. The pope “communicated for Lumen Gentium [the final text of which was due to be voted on during this last week] a ‘Preliminary Explanatory Note’ (Nota Explicativa Praevia) that interpreted the meaning of collegiality in chapter three.” Most commentators agreed that the Note did not change the meaning of the text, but Joseph Ratzinger “found this ‘very intricate text’ marked by ambivalence and ambiguities and saw it tipping the balance in favour of the primacy.”

The Note won the support of the minority for the chapter and for the schema, as shown in the final voting— only 5 negative votes out of 2,156 cast. The price for that virtual unanimity was high. No matter what the pope hoped to accomplish, he in fact gave those opposed to collegiality a tool they could—and would—use to interpret the chapter as a reaffirmation of the status quo.

Father O’Malley has successfully incorporated a thoughtful and credible analysis of the issues treated by the council into the gripping story of Vatican II. I could not help but wonder, all the way through, how such a seemingly powerful wave of optimism and enthusiasm for change, such a compelling movement for dialogue and conciliation could be so quickly and so thoroughly subdued.

This book will never spend long enough on my bookshelf to gather much dust. Highly recommended.

Two Kinds of Naïveté

2010-11-03T07:13:00.000-07:00

Isn’t it interesting that so many people consider it naïve to think that belief in and the practice of the virtues of charity, humility and forgiveness are one way to save this troubled world. It is more fashionable to believe that small-government or trickle-down or tax-and-spend economic policies or trade protectionism, or trade liberalization, will save us. We just have to elect that other guy, not the loser we elected last time, and we'll be back on the right track headed toward prosperity and economic security. We prefer to put our trust in governments who tell us that tightened airport and border security or gun control or sending young people to fight in foreign wars will keep us safe from the threat of terrorism. We think that all we have to do to be happy and safe is to make our country stronger and richer (than those other countries) by spending more at Wal-Mart (on credit, of course).

No, no, we are not naïve. Everyone knows that the only way to win is to beat the other guy. Those old sayings like “Love thy neighbour” and “Turn the other cheek” are for dreamers and wimps.

It just might be time for us to open our eyes and look around at what our lack of naïveté has brought us. If we are truly not naïve, we will quickly see that it ain’t prosperity, it ain’t security, it ain’t happiness.

We are, in fact, profoundly naïve. If we think that the politicians we send as our representatives to state/provincial and federal governments have our interests at heart, we have not been paying attention. If we believe that the increasingly large corporations from whom we purchase our goods and services hold up excellent customer service as their chief ideal, we have not been paying attention.

When Barack Obama’s stimulus package went to a vote in the U.S. Congress earlier this year, not a single Republican voted in favour of the bill. Are we naïve enough to think that every one of these representatives believed that it was in the best interest of his or her constituents to vote against this bill rather than put individual political aspirations to one side and enter into a dialogue with the Democrats in a spirit of selfless service to the people of the United States in a time of great crisis and need? I wonder what the outcome might have been if every Democrat and every Republican had practised the virtues of charity, humility, and forgiveness in the process of dealing with the economic crisis.

The other day I received an e-mail with the following (unverified) information about Wal-Mart:

At Wal-Mart, Americans spend $36,000,000 every hour of every day (and Wal-Mart is not only in the U.S.)
This year, 7.2 billion different purchasing experiences will occur at Wal-Mart stores
Wal-Mart now sells more food than any other store in the world, including Safeway. In the fifteen years it took to accomplish this end, 31 supermarket chains sought bankruptcy
The value of products for Wal-Mart passing through the port of San Diego each year is a larger sum than 93% of ALL countries’ Gross National Product (GNP) ...and that is only ONE port ...one way that Wal-Mart gets its stuff
Of the 1.6 million Wal-Mart employees, only 1.2% make a living above the poverty level
There are more millionaires per square mile in the city of Bentonville, Arkansas, the location of Wal-Mart's head office, than any place on earth
Wal-Mart, and MOST large companies, takes out life insurance on its employees, without the employees’ knowledge. If an employee dies, all the life insurance benefits go to the company. For example, if an employee making $18,000 per year dies, the company could reap as much as $1 million. This money is usually paid out to executives as bonuses
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is responsible for calculating the consumer price index (CPI), Wal-Mart’s prices are not significantly lower than those of other retailers

Even if this information is only somewhat true, the situation is still shocking. In our naïveté we are contributing to the concentration of more and more wealth in the hands of a few corporate moguls. Even we are not naïve enough to think that Wal-Mart is a charitable organization.

And while it may be the largest, Wal-Mart is not the only corporate entity that relies on our naïveté to make its executives and shareholders rich. Yet we continue to shop in these places while the local shopkeeper is forced to live hand to mouth or is driven out of business altogether.

I realize that we live in a democracy and in a capitalist economic system, which is generally understood and accepted as the best available system at the moment. But we have failed to recognize that the freedom this system affords us in order to prosper and live well must be balanced with the responsibility to be moderate in our appetites for material wealth. Our naivete is actually the gullibility that is the result of our greed.

Our greed has led to a state in which we believe the false claims and promises of politicians who, for the large part, represent no one other than themselves. We should know by now that only certain types of people enter politics; such awareness should inspire us to keep a careful watch on their activities. Our greed has led us to a state where much of our lives are controlled by very large corporations. The quality of the food we eat, the programs we watch on television, the working life of the appliances or automobiles we purchase, the money we entrust to banks—the list is endless—are all controlled so as to maximize profits and return on investment. There is no concern for the individual customer.

Our greed has brought us to this state, so there is no point in blaming the politicians or the giant corporations because they are better at being greedy than we are.

We must get off this treadmill and retake control of our lives, first by recognizing the mess we have made and then by embracing the other kind of naïveté, the sweet one that Jesus taught. We must admit to ourselves that our greed has not brought us happiness. We must understand that, regardless of whether we are Christian or not, whether we belong to a church or not, practising the virtues of charity, humility, and forgiveness will put us on the path to true joy.

Photo Credit

Mother-Teresa-collage by Peta-de-Aztlan

Creative Commons: Some rights reserved

John Shelby Spong on Life After Death

2010-10-27T16:00:00.000-07:00

From Eternal Life: A New Vision:

The drive to survive seems to motivate human life so deeply that perhaps the time has to come to face openly and honestly the question of whether the human hope and yearning for life after death might will turn out to be just one more manifestation of this biologically driven survival desire that is present in all living things....It cannot be denied that this is at least a possibility.

Homily Blues

2010-10-12T12:58:00.000-07:00

One of the first books I bought and read after I returned to the Church in 2006 was Still Called by Name: Why I Love Being a Priest, by Dominic Grassi, a priest in the archdiocese of Chicago. I got this book because I felt called to be a priest myself but wondered how, in the Roman Catholic Church of today, one could answer this call and still fully be oneself. I hoped that Still Called by Name would enlighten me in this regard.

I love this book and I am full of admiration for Father Grassi, a man who is so fully in touch with and accepting of his own humanity that he can relate with unreserved compassion to the people to whom he ministers and with whom he shares a community. His honesty, integrity, and vulnerability make him a real pastor rather than an archdiocesan functionary or a mouthpiece for teachings that have nothing to do with the reality of people’s lives.

There is a chapter in Still Called by Name entitled “Dancing with the Word,” in which Father Grassi tells of how he learned to be an effective homilist. In the early days of his priesthood his sermons, which he memorized and recited word for word, were like “theology lectures” made up of “the stuff that had been poured into me in the seminary.” Fortunately, he listened to the feedback of his parishioners and of his own body and sought out “the best preacher I knew” for advice. As a result, he began to preach from his heart as much as from his head. Eventually, he experienced another breakthrough:

Fortunately I stumbled upon—or the Spirit kindly led me to—something called theology of story. At that time authors such as Jack Shea and others were creating a new way of looking at the story of what our faith means. Its premise, simply stated, is that to effectively share the story of salvation, of God’s love for us, that is found in Scripture and in our tradition, a preacher needs to get in touch with and be familiar with not only the word of God but also his own story of faith and the stories of the people with whom he shares his thoughts. I believe it was during that difficult period of growth that I first became a storyteller.

My homily eventually became a kind of spiritual dance, with my story touching the stories of the people to whom I preached. And together we explored and shared the mystery of the Story, found primarily in Scripture but also found in human history. What a difference this new approach made. No more headaches. Now I was eager to make those connections that were building up inside of me.

Over the years, Father Grassi has developed his storytelling skills and, to this day, continues to work on learning new techniques and improving his homilies.

Most important, however, I have learned that a good homily comes from the heart. Often I am preaching something that I myself need to hear. Anything less than complete honesty will not only shortchange the listeners but also will destroy the power of the message.

Apart from the homily, the liturgy of the Mass is for the most part a “set piece.” While the readings, prayers, and liturgical actions speak to each of us in different ways, they are prescribed by the national bishops’ conferences for every day of a three-year period. It seems to me, then, that the occasion of the homily presents an opportunity for the homilist to draw together the elements of the liturgy for that Mass and to tease out their relevance to the world of today and to the lives of the people in the pews.

A good homily is not a form of entertainment, designed to keep the congregation awake and to enhance the popularity of the homilist. I am certain that Father Grassi does not tell stories to entertain his parishioners. But stories—especially those that are well told—do have a way of engaging the listener, of touching his or her life, of raising questions that the listener is moved to consider.

Now there are didactic stories and mimetic stories. A ridiculously pious and condescending young priest in my mother’s parish once gave a homily in which he told the story of his attending an interreligious conference. At the conference were Anglican and Lutheran priests and ministers, whose liturgical rites are very similar to those of the Catholic Church but who tend to be theologically liberal. The young priest told us that he felt far more at home with the fundamentalist Evangelicals because their moral teachings were similar to those of Catholicism. This was a didactic story because it was—unsubtly—designed to teach us a lesson about the potential moral perils of ecumenism. Like all of this young man’s homilies, it was delivered to us as if we were participants in a children’s catechism class.

A mimetic story is one that gives an engaging picture of some vital aspect of life but allows us to ask our own questions and to draw our own conclusions about the issue presented. Most modern prose falls into this category. As a reasonably mature and intelligent adult, I relate more readily to mimetic than to didactic stories.

My bet would be that Father Grassi's stories are predominantly mimetic.

I am sure that it must be very difficult for a priest to come up with a fresh and inspiring homily every week, especially given the heavy workload imposed on today’s clergy. I am also sure that some priests just eventually give up. In my former church the pastor would usually tell a joke at the start of the homily and then read from a prepared text. He is not a native speaker, so his English is not always idiomatic or grammatically correct. Yet the (mercifully brief) homilies he read were in perfect English. This often made me wonder how it is possible to passionately communicate with the people in the pews using someone else’s words.

In a 2009 article in America entitled “Preaching in a Vacuum: Why Routine Feedback on the Sunday Homily is Essential,” South African Jesuit Chris Chatteris offers the following:

I can think of no greater service to the pastoral practice of the church than constructive criticism of preaching. If such a movement were to take hold among the people of God, there would be nowhere to hide for the unprepared, the hollow and the offensive.

Father Chatteris recommends that the people of God, in any given congregation, offer “straightforward and trenchant feedback” on the homily. This is contrasted with the “body language feedback”—glazing over of the eyes, close examination of the bulletin, fidgeting—that preachers often ignore.

One suggestion that Chatteris offers for the improvement of homilies is “the formation of a preaching committee—a group of parishioners asked to assist the priest, deacon or lay preacher in the preparation, delivery and assessment of the homily.”

The U.S. Catholic bishops have wisely written: “Only when preachers know what their congregations want to hear will they be able to communicate what they need to hear” (Fulfilled in Your Hearing, 1982). A preaching committee can help a preacher to discern a congregation’s needs and thus assist in finding helpful themes for homilies. Such a group can also break down the alienating sense of loneliness that can accompany the process of preparing homilies, an awful feeling of flying solo.

How much more uplifting and inspiring a Sunday Mass would be if the homily touched the hearts of the listeners in a way that left them wondering or marvelling or somehow motivated. How much longer the Mass would last in the minds of the congregation as they moved into their Sunday routine. And how deeply fulfilled the homilist would be knowing that on giving inspiration he received love in return.

Photo Credit

Homily Ni Padre by busyPrinting

Creative Commons: Some rights reserved

Fear, Bliss, Surrender, Trust

2010-10-10T17:58:00.000-07:00

I realize now that I grew up in fear—fear of my father, fear of punishment, fear of bullies, fear of rejection—and that my life has been circumscribed by this fear. In fact, for most of my adult years fear has caused me to say no to life rather than to say yes. Instead of taking risks and thus experiencing the adventure, I played it safe all the way down the line. Practically everything I thought, said, and did was filtered through an imagined social approval system; thus my individuality, creativity, and emotional growth were virtually suffocated in the process. The person that God meant me to be never blossomed.

I do not want to try to imagine what my life might have been had I not been so controlled by fear. What might I have accomplished or created? What melodramatic love affairs might I have experienced? What memorable conversations might I have had with interesting people? What might I have contributed to the world?

If I am truly honest with myself, I must admit that I have not lived; I have merely existed.

Now that I am nearly sixty, I wonder how this habit of fear, so deeply rooted, can be overcome and a healthy life lived. Certainly, recognition of the ways in which fear still governs my life can be a first step in freeing myself from it. Worry and anxiety, particularly of the obsessive variety, are common manifestations of fear, for example. Shyness is also a symptom of an underlying fear. Lack of confidence is born out of the fear of failure or rejection. All of these syndromes have a paralyzing effect on human development and are a barrier to a happy, healthy, creative life.

Most people’s fears are illogical; they are out of proportion to nearly all worst-case-scenario outcomes. Yet it seems that fear cannot be banished or overcome by logic. The child who is afraid of monsters in the dark can only be comforted by the security of parental protection, not by assurances that monsters do not exist. Adults are not much different, it seems. I know that our neighbours or our homestay students are not going to hate us if our smoke alarm goes off while we’re making boeuf bourgignon and we don’t get it silenced right away. Yet my heart rate immediately goes up and I try every means possible to shut that noise down. (Such an incident—and my predictable reaction— actually occurred while I was writing this paragraph.)

So how do we set fear aside and begin to live—really live? One way is to find and to follow your bliss, a pursuit you so deeply love that it takes you outside of yourself and thus beyond all fear. Fear is, after all, a profoundly self-centered emotion; true love or passion (not infatuation), on the other hand, is other-centered. I found my bliss a few years ago, but I now understand that I have not been truly following it.

Following your bliss involves complete surrender to the journey. And what is it that you have to surrender? You have to let go of your ego; you must surrender all desire. As soon as you have expectations—of “results,” (such as visits to your blog) of acceptance (comments on your blog), of material gain as an outcome of your effort (making money from your writing)—you will also have fear that those expectations will not be met and disappointment when they are indeed not met.

The bliss, then, must be pure.

Complete surrender can only be accomplished when there is perfect trust. When I am truly following my bliss, I trust that wherever that journey takes me is where God intends me to be at that moment, and if I believe, as Henri Nouwen says, that I am the beloved child of God, I know it will always be a place of joy. If I trust, I am free to follow my dream—to act on my inspiration—without fear of danger or loss or pain and without expectation of outcome. I am free to be who I really am, and as Henri tells us, I am not what I do, I am not what I have, and I am not what others think of me.

Photo Credit

Parade Bliss by sabertasche2

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Faith?

2010-10-09T18:06:00.000-07:00

I decided to write this book because over the last number of years I realized I did not agree with the faithful (or at least all they said) so much as disagree with the unfaithful (or those who say they do not have faith). That is, sooner or later, one has to answer those who make it a point of saying that you and most of those you love are wrong.

Novelist David Adams Richards in God Is. My Search for Faith in a Secular World

Joseph Campbell and the New Mass

2010-10-09T10:16:00.000-07:00

This is from the PBS series Joseph Campbell: The Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers:

There’s been a reduction, a reduction, a reduction of ritual. Even in the Roman Catholic Church. my God, they’ve translated the Mass out of the ritual language into a language that has a lot of domestic associations. Every time…that I read the Latin of the Mass, I get that pitch again that it’s supposed to give, a language that throws you out of the field of your domesticity. The altar is turned so that the priest’s back is to you, and with him you address yourself outward [gestures upward with his hands] like that.

Now they’ve turned the altar around; [it] looks like Julia Child giving a demonstration—all homey and cozy. They’ve forgotten what the function of a ritual is: it’s to pitch you out, not to wrap you back in where you have been all the time.

Photo Credit

Photo by Wonderlane

Creative Commons: Some rights reserved

Update

2010-10-05T12:57:00.000-07:00

It has been a few weeks since I wrote something on this blog. To those faithful readers who keep looking for something new (or who have long since given up), my apologies for the long absence.

One of the reasons for the paucity of blog postings in the past month is pure circumstance. I had several house guests, homestay students moving in and moving out, a floor refinishing project that required removal of all items, large and small, from the living room and dining room and their replacement after the floors dried—a much larger job than anyone in this house had imagined. Just when this project was finally completed and I was ready to settle into my regular life of study and writing, there was a major flood in the basement. This was an enormously disruptive and stressful event from which I am just beginning to emerge.

The second, and more significant, reason for my blog silence is that my journey seems to be taking me in a new direction. I have been feeling this change coming for a while but it has yet to take on a definite shape, so I am unable to articulate it in any coherent way at this moment. Suffice it to say that my interest in all things Catholic is still much the same but my perspective appears to be changing. I have had an interest for some time now in Joseph Campbell’s work in the field of mythology and may seek to apply some of his insights to my own study of religion. I am also interested in a more contemplative approach to spirituality, one that is less reactive, more accepting and forgiving, more peaceful and loving.

Of course, I will continue to speak out against what I consider unjust in the Church and in the world, but I hope that my speaking out will come less from a sense of personal affront and more from an inclination toward reconciliation.

In the meantime, I have been attending Sunday Mass at St. Augustine’s, still very quietly and anonymously but with an eye to perhaps becoming more involved. I suppose my next step will be to have a private chat with the priest to determine whether the parish will allow me to be active and be who I really am.

Photo Credit

"Contemplation" by tim (the enchanter)

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The Real Church 2

2010-09-16T06:40:00.000-07:00

Part Two of my article "Open the Doors and See All the People" has been posted on Life as a Human.

The Real Church

2010-09-09T06:40:00.000-07:00

My article "Open the Doors and See All the People: Part One" has been posted on Life as a Human. In the article I attempt to explain that the Catholic Church is much more than the hierarchy and its scandals and stupidities.

Photo Credit

"Books and Rosary" by Susan Mogan

Victimhood or Responsibility?

2010-09-03T15:49:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking about the economic crisis in the United States* and wondering about responsibility. Perhaps I am projecting or reading more into the situation than there really is, but it seems to me that America is about to punish Barack Obama and the Democrats for their failure to alleviate the economic woes of the country. How severe that punishment will be, no one knows, until the smoke has cleared from the November mid-term elections. Nor can one really predict the longer-term effects of the down-on-Obama-and-the-Democrats mood, but I shudder to think that the likes of Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck might take over the White House in 2013.

I am convinced that the anger and the pain of millions as a result of the economic crisis are being intensified by hysterical pundits in the media and office-seekers on both sides of the political divide.

Does the voting public of America truly believe that by kicking out Democratic congressmen and replacing them with Republicans, the job is going to get done and America will get right back to work? Is it really that simple? Should the government step up and throw billions of dollars more at the problem, using money that it actually does not have? Why do we consider it the responsibility of government to get us out of economic trouble?

We are a society that is encouraged - perhaps I should say "tempted" - to live beyond its means. The credit card companies want us to use their cards so they can collect their 18 percent interest per year; the department stores are even more avariciously delighted when we use their cards and pay them back at a rate of 29% per year. The banks and finance companies would like us to take out loans and mortgages that we can't really afford so their shareholders can get 15-20% annual returns on their investment; of course, when we cannot pay back the loan, we lose the house or the car and all the money we put into it.

There is no such thing as job security; there has not been for many years. And no country is recession-proof, so we know that every few years, we are going to have some kind of economic downturn and there is going to be job loss; the lost job just might be ours. Moreover, none of us knows when personal disaster may strike, leaving us with huge bills to pay. Yet we continue to live on credit, spending well beyond our means and saving nothing. And then when the shit does hit the fan, we blame the government or the big corporations, and we expect government to come and rescue us. Because we are victims.

Of course there are those - and they are not few - who are genuinely disadvantaged and who need our help, in good economic times and in bad. These are the people that our tax dollars and our charitable donations should be used to help.

The rest of us, I think, need to learn a little responsibility. We are responsible for taking a serious look at our lives and deciding if we truly need all the junk that we buy. We might also think about why we buy all that stuff and ask ourselves if this ridiculous consumerism is not a substitute for happiness. Perhaps there are other ways to make ourselves happy.

It seems to me that the old saw that consumerism fuels the economy is a bit misleading. Exactly whose economy is benefiting? If several million people did not buy an iPhone4, Steve Jobs and the Apple Corporation and however many shareholders would not be applying for welfare anytime soon. And if I get fewer hours, say as an Apple Store employee, I am okay because I have decided I don't really need to check my e-mail while standing in line to wait for my $4.00 Starbucks coffee. And if I recognize that I can make a great coffee at home, I'll have more time to use my creativity or be with my kids or whip up a gorgeous (and inexpensive) meal for my friends. And if I don't have an iPhone4, I can actually have a conversation with my friends because I won't be checking my e-mails while I am sitting at the dinner table. Oh, and if I don't have to work every day, maybe I don't need my car everyday; I could share it.

I strongly believe that each of us is responsible for his or her own happiness, whether we have taken our own happiness away through choices we have made or it has been taken away from us by circumstance. The vast majority of us are not victims, even though our society - and our own laziness - encourages us to believe that we are. Very few of us do not have the energy, the creativity, and the heart to make a beautiful life for ourselves. Unfortunately, we allow ourselves to be drawn in - sucked in - to the negativity that dominates our social and political existence.

JFK said (something to the effect of) "Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country." Maybe we first need to ask what we can do for ourselves, for our loved ones, and for our friends. Congress and the White House, Obama and the Tea Party, Democrats on the left and on the right, Republicans and Democrats may all be locked in perpetual conflict and have therefore placed the nation in a state of gridlock, but Americans do not need to wring their hands in despair and hurl epithets at this group or that. Surely we have come to realize that no matter who is in the Oval Office and which party has a majority, there is always some kind of crisis, and life always goes on. The bottom line is that the government, like any other organization, group, or individual, cannot make us happy, cannot solve our problems.

Joseph Campbell says:

You might ask yourself this question: if I were confronted with a situation of total disaster, if everything I loved and thought I lived for were devastated, what would I live for? If I were to come home, find my family murdered, my house burnt up, or all my career wiped out by some disaster or another, what would sustain me? We read about these things every day and we think, Well, that only happens to other people. But what if it happened to me? What would lead me to know that I could go on living and not just crack up and quit?

I've known religious people who have had such experiences. They would say, "It is God's will." For them, faith would work.

Now what do you have in your life that would play this role for you? What is the great thing for which you would sacrifice your life? What makes you do what you do; what is the call of your life to you - do you know it? The old traditions provided this mythic support for people; it held whole culture worlds together. Every great civilization has grown out of a mythic base.

In our day, however, there is great confusion. We're thrown back on ourselves, and we have to find that thing which, in truth, works for us as individuals. Now how does one do this?

I suggest that we do not do it by living on credit in order to keep consuming. I suggest we cannot do it by waiting for the government to act on our behalf. Rather we have to stop, be quiet, and look deep within ourselves to find our "mythic support." It might be God, it might be art, it might be nature.

I'm pretty sure it won't be the Tea Party.

*I am a Canadian and do not presume to speak for Americans or to possess either broad or deep knowledge of American social and political issues. Canadians are exposed to a great deal of "Americana," however, and as our politics is really quite boring, many of us take an interest in what is going on south of the border. In 2008, a very large majority of Canadians indicated that they would like Barack Obama to be their Prime Minister.

Photo Credit

"an unwitting victim...bwahahhahahaa" by bark

Creative Commons: some rights reserved

New Church?

2010-09-02T08:02:00.000-07:00

Well, I do miss going to Mass and I do not at this point appear to be highly motivated to attend services at any of the Anglican churches. So last Sunday, after a bit of research, I attended 9:00 Mass at St. Augustine's parish in the Kitsilano area of Vancouver. I chose this church because the pastor has been married and has children and grandchildren. The autobiographical sketch posted by this priest on the parish website reflects a warm, open-hearted character. I thought that perhaps a parish run by such a man might be a little more realistic, a little more inclusive, a little less doctrinaire than the norm in this archdiocese.

The church itself, built in 1931, is beautiful inside and out. There is something about older church buildings: they have an atmosphere that makes them seem more like churches than the newer creations. The congregation was more heterogeneous than that of my former parish, both in age and ethnicity. There were numerous children and young people, along with the elderly and very elderly. One woman seated a couple of pews in front of me was obviously in early- to mid-stage dementia. On one side of me was a woman from somewhere in the West Indies and on the other side a Filipino woman and her teenaged son. The caucasians in the congregation were not all white-haired.

It turned out that the pastor was the celebrant. While I was not greatly impressed with the manner in which he conducted the liturgy or with his homily - both were rather insipid - it was quite clear that the laity play a large role in the celebration of the Mass at this church. There was also an intangible sense of the warm connection between this priest and the parishioners of St. Augustine's.

This connection was made very clear at the end of the Mass when the priest asked everyone to be seated and a man came up to the front of the church and began to read, with great emotion at times - what turned out to be a farewell speech to the pastor. After four years at St. Augustine, and only one year as pastor, he had been reassigned, and this was his last Sunday Mass.

Still, I think I will continue to attend Mass at this church. Here is what the home page of St. Augustine's website says:

As an Oblate parish, we are really a family, imbued with the charisma of the Founder of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, St. Eugene de Mazenod. Consequently, the parish has and does reach out in mission “at home and abroad”, as far away as Peru and Africa. Youth has always been a focus, as are the elderly, the sick and shut-ins, the poor and the marginal in Vancouver. The community supports the arts and is ecologically conscious. We do liturgy well and are known for our music, we are generous and hospitable. As you browse about the Site, we hope you might be inspired to come and visit us, if not simply to visit, you may attend one of our two daily masses, or come to one of four on the weekend. We have a staff of 7 and numerous wonderful volunteers that keep the parish running and active.

While I do not quite qualify as "elderly" yet, perhaps I could be called "marginal." At any rate, I do get a good feeling from this parish, so I think I will keep going for a while.

Photo from St. Augustine's parish website

Hitchens: Religion, Dr. King,, and the Civil Rights Movement

2010-08-27T09:10:00.000-07:00

In God is not Great Christopher Hitchens attempts to explode the notion that religion causes people to do good things. The chapter entitled "Does Religion Make People Behave Better?" looks at the story of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement in the United States. While King was a religious man and used biblical imagery in his speeches, especially the story of Moses and the liberation of the oppressed people of Israel from their Egyptian masters, "the examples King gave from the books of Moses were, fortunately for all of us, metaphors and allegories."

While employing biblical rhetoric to inspire his followers, King was trying to throw off the "heavy burden" of southern Christian racism:

The southern churches returned to their old ways after Reconstruction, and blessed the new institutions of segregation and discrimination. It was not until after the Second World War and the spread of decolonization and human rights that the cry for emancipation was raised again. In response, it was again very forcefully asserted (on American soil, in the second half of the twentieth century) that the discrepant descendants of Noah were not intended by god to be mixed. This barbaric stupidity had real-world consequences. The late Senator Eugene McCarthy told me that he had once urged Senator Pat Robertson - father of the present television prophet - to support some mild civil rights legislation. "I'd sure like to help the colored," came the response, "but the Bible says I can't." The entire sefl-definition of the south was that it was white, and Christian. This is exactly what gave Dr. King his moral leverage, because he could outpreach the rednecks. But the heavy burden would never have been laid upon him if religiosity had not been so deeply entrenched to begin with.

Hitchens points out an interesting fact about the people around Reverend King:

As [King biographer] Taylor Branch shows, many of King's inner circle and entouraage were secular Communists and socialists who had been manuring the ground for a civil rights movement for several decades and helping train brave volunteers like Mrs. Rosa Parks for a careful strategy of mass disobedience, and these "atheistic" associations were to be used against King all the time, especially from the pulpit. Indeed, one result of his campaign was to generate the "backlash" of white right-wing Christianity which is still such a potent force below the Mason-Dixon line.

Hitchens concludes:

Anybody, therefore, who uses the King legacy to justify the role of religion in public life must accept all the corollaries of what they seem to be implying. Even a glance at the whole record will show, first, that person for person, American freethinkers and agnostics and atheists come out the best. The chance that someone's secular or freethinking opinion would cause him or her to denounce the whole injustice was extremely high. The chance that someone's religious belief would cause him or her to take a stand against slavery and racism was statistically quite small. But the chance that someone's religious belief would cause him or her to uphold slavery was statistically extremely high, and the latter fact helps us to understand why the victory of simple justice took so long to bring about.

Sister Margaret McBride

2010-08-25T11:53:00.000-07:00

Life as a Human just published my article, "The Common Sense of Mercy," on the controversy surrounding the excommunication of Sister Margaret Mary McBride by Thomas Olmstead, Bishop of Phoenix, for her role in the approval of an abortion performed at St. Joseph's Hospital in Phoenix in late 2009.

To read the article, go here.

"God is not Great" is not Great

2010-08-20T07:39:00.000-07:00

Along with The Bishop's Man, I am also reading Christopher Hitchens' God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. After eight chapters and some, I am finding it a bit of a tough slog, a bit like certain chapters in the Old Testament.

There is no question that Hitchens is an excellent writer, an intelligent man, and someone who is passionate about religion - obviously in an anti-religious way. But there are two things that strike me about God is not Great. First, what was the purpose of writing it? Did Hitchens think that by proselytizing his anti-religious views, he would win converts to atheism? Did he hope that Christians or Muslims reading his books would suddenly see the error of their ways and remove the blinkers from their eyes?

The second thing that strikes me about this book is the fact that Hitchens virtually ignores the good that religion has done for people throughout history. Does he really think that an individual intelligent and curious enough to pick up his book and read is not going to quickly notice that it paints an utterly one-sided picture of religion, thereby utterly invalidating everything he says?

I can hardly wait to read Dawkins.

"Relating an opaque theology to contemporary circumstances"

2010-08-19T10:40:00.000-07:00

I am reading, for the second time, Linden MacIntyre's award-winning novel The Bishop's Man. It is the story of a priest, just turning fifty, who is assigned by his bishop to a small parish in rural Nova Scotia. This is his first pastoral appointment after many years of being the "bishop's man," a special agent of the chancery sent out to deal discreetly with the problem of wayward (i.e. abusive) priests.

Here are some of his reflections on being a pastor:

Nothing in the seminary or since had prepared me for what I now faced every day. Relating an opaque theology to contemporary circumstances. Seeking guidance in the ruminations of great medieval minds, now rendered unintelligible except in transparently manipulative parables, the old promises and threats designed to sway the superstitious, now empty. I thought of Pat and laughed aloud. I thought of Sextus and my sister. There was nothing in my experience, personal or pastoral, to help me deal with these realities.

But it didn't seem to matter. It seemed to be sufficient that I was here. It hurts, they've told me, when a place loses a school, a post office, identity. Losing the church would be the last straw. I agreed with everything. The church is the guardian of life itself, a lonely sentinel. I didn't tell them what I really thought: how the spire has been supplanted by the satellite dish. I dared not tell them what I think about the right to life.

They wouldn't listen anyway.

I wonder how many real priests come to the same conclusions as this fictional one and how they deal with the cynicism, the disillusionment.

This one seems to like to drink.

Photo Credit

"View of St. Mary's Basilica through the Old Burying Ground, Halifax"

by cphoffman42 at flickr.com

Creative Commons: Some rights reserved

The $18,000 Dead Cat: Please do not tell anyone in Pakistan

2010-08-18T21:09:00.000-07:00

In Pakistan some 20 million people have been affected by flooding; thousands have already died, and thousands more will die. People are so desperate to escape the rising waters they are climbing trees, only to be bitten by poisonous snakes. Refugees are forced to live in squalid makeshift camps, with filthy water, mosquitoes, and little or no medical attention. The suffering is unimaginable, and it is likely to go on for a very long time. Aid organizations are complaining that the response from the public around the world to this disaster has been weak at best; donations trickle in.

Of course, this is a big international news story.

At the local level in the meantime, this story: Harley the cat, who was found soaked in paint thinner in a Vancouver suburb last month, had to be put down last Friday. The thousands of dollars raised for the cat's care as a result of public outrage over the incident was apparently not enough to save his life. According to the news story, "Before Harley's condition deteriorated, the hospital capped the bill for his care on compassionate grounds, but it still came to $18,000." The cat's owner says the cat was that important to her and her young son.

An administrator at the animal hospital has said that she will likely have to bring in a counselor to counsel some of the nursing staff who are distraught over Harley's death.

This is a true story.

God help us see the tragic and absurd errors of our ways.

Struggle and Surrender

2010-08-17T09:46:00.000-07:00

Much of what we do in life involves struggle. For billions, of course, the struggle is for survival. Most of us in the so-called developed world, however, do not have to be concerned with survival: we have shelter, clothing to wear when it is cold, and enough food to eat. Yet we do struggle. We struggle to get, to win, to accomplish, to measure up, to understand, to control. In fact, we spend a significant part of our lives in struggle.

The root of most of our struggle is “I want”—to buy a better car, to hurt my spouse (because he or she hurt me), to be a great cook, to make my father proud of me (finally), to understand why someone suffered and was taken from me. We want to control our own lives and those of others, often because we are afraid of change or of loss.

Winning the struggle often brings the illusion of happiness, but that “happiness” soon disappears because a new want presents itself and we are right back in the struggle. The Buddhists say that desire is the root of all suffering and that our suffering will not end until our desiring ends. And we do suffer for our desire; the suffering is called stress in modern-day terms.

I wonder if we know all this but are somehow compelled to continue the struggle—to keep on wanting—perhaps because we know of no other way. Our parents struggled, after all, to feed and clothe and educate us and pay for Christmas presents and vacations and weddings. And we see struggle all around us, often in the form of conflict, presented in TV news stories and “discussion” forums, in movies and TV dramas, in personal relationships. We even see it in the Church: progressives vs. conservatives, modernists vs. anti-modernists. Read a few pages of Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth and you will immediately recognize the constant struggle that takes place within your own mind.

What if we just stopped for a moment and thought about what we are doing, to ourselves and to each other? What if we considered another approach?

“Surrender” has never been a particularly positive term in our culture. It has usually meant giving up, conceding defeat. An army surrenders to a force of superior power or strategy; the losing side is shamed. A fugitive surrenders to authorities and is seen on TV in handcuffs and leg shackles—humiliated. We are outmatched in an argument and reluctantly surrender, embarrassed at our ineptitude.

And none of these surrenders is complete. The defeated army is eventually rebuilt and made ready to fight again. The fugitive surrenders his physical self because he has been outnumbered and outsmarted, but it is unlikely that he has surrendered his heart in humility and contrition for his crime, if indeed he committed one. We vow to regroup and win the next argument to heal our wounded pride. The struggle, then, does not end with the surrender.

The only time we see surrender in a positive light is when a person surrenders his or her heart to another in a romantic relationship. The other night I watched with a friend the beautiful film Tender Mercies, in which a broken and defeated and angry man gradually surrenders his heart to a struggling young widow and her son. I have watched this movie many times yet it never fails to bring tears to my eyes.

Each of us is, to some degree, broken and defeated. Yet we struggle on, seeking victory over our unhappiness. We try to fix our brokenness by working harder, playing harder, planning and plotting more intensely. The last thing we want to do is to acknowledge and accept our brokenness, our defeat.

But if there is no struggle, there can be no defeat. If there is surrender to God’s love, there can be an end to desire and a beginning to happiness. This of course does not mean that we stop working, go on welfare, and meekly accept everything evil that takes place in the world. It is more about a change of consciousness—from a mindset of struggle to one of surrender.

Like many others, I have been angry with the Church over many issues, especially homophobia, which touches me personally. I know that my anger is ignored by the Church and harmful to me, yet I allow myself to be controlled by it.

In a recent post on the blog The Open Tabernacle, blogger Terence Weldon wrote about “attending the launch of theologian James Alison’s new book ‘Broken Hearts and New Creation.’” Terence noted that in the interview and Q&A that were part of the launch,

Alison again placed a lot of emphasis on the importance of not allowing ourselves to fall into a feeling of “victimhood” because of our position in the Church. Victimhood, he says is a dead end. Instead, it is important that we relax into a new identity, given to us by God – for which we must wait, based on trust. One danger in creating our identity based on victimhood is that we then shape our identity in terms of the other victims like ourselves, and set against the others who do violence against us.

Alison’s idea of relaxing into a new identity equates, I believe, to the idea of surrender. If we think of ourselves as victims, we struggle against the forces that “victimize” us rather than surrender to God’s love for us, no matter who we are, thereby neutralizing the effect of the “victimization” and offering instead an example of charity and humility.

Can any of you, for all his worrying, add a single cubit to his span of life? If the smallest things, therefore, are outside your control, why worry about the rest? Think of the flowers; they never have to spin or weave; yet I assure you, not even Solomon in all his regalia was robed like one of these. Now if that is how God clothes the grass in the field which is there today and thrown in the furnace tomorrow, how much more will he look after you, you men of little faith? (Luke 12: 25-29)

I know that this passage speaks to me as much as it does to anyone.

The Toilers in the Vineyard

2010-08-11T07:26:00.000-07:00

Sister Joan Chittister has written a courageous article which appears in the National Catholic Reporter today; the article is apropos the Leadership Conference of Women Religious currently meeting in Dallas and the ongoing "visitation" of women religious in the United States by the Vatican, which seeks to determine if American nuns have strayed too far from tradition and Church teaching.

Sister Joan says:

What shall we think about such a time as this when the women religious who have built, carried, led and staffed every work of the church from the earliest days of this nation to this present time of turbulence and transition are being accused of being unorthodox, unfaithful, and unfit to make adult decisions about what they need to hear and who they want to have say it?

The problem is that in the face of opposition they have also been unafraid.

It is time for thoughtful Catholics to recognize and acknowledge that the hierarchy of the Church, increasingly obsessed with maintaining power and preventing change - in fact, with returning to the pre-Vatican II Church in which all authority was held by Rome - is not the Church. The Catholic Church is the People of God, the workers in the vineyard, who every day, quietly and joyfully, obey the "new commandment" to "love one another as I have loved you."

Sister Joan makes a clear distinction in her article between leadership and authority, taking a shot at the hierarchy in the process:

Now we are at another crossroads moment in time. This is a time, too, of deep crisis and great needs, of the rejection of those who raise new questions and a reaction against those who raise new ideas in a system trying to preserve the old ones in order to preserve itself.

It is a time, as it has always been, for leadership.

But leadership and authority are not the same thing. It can take a long time to learn the difference between the two but there is nothing in life that demonstrates the difference between the two better than a crossroad.

At the crossroads in life, authority goes one direction: back. Authority goes in the direction that's already in the book; the path that has been clearly trod before now, the way that is safe and sure, clear and certain, obedient and approved, applauded and rewarded.

Leadership, on the other hand, rewrites the book. It takes the direction that leads only to the promise of a better tomorrow for everyone however difficult it may be to achieve it now. "The seed," the Zen master teaches, "never sees the flower."

The times are clear. The needs are now. The time for new decisions is upon us. Authority is not enough for times such as these. We need leaders now.

Amen, Sister. Amen.

Old Souls

2010-08-08T10:43:00.000-07:00

For cynical people with questions about life and death and doubts about heaven, hell, and purgatory (thank goodness Limbo has been confined to the theological landfill), reincarnation is a most attractive concept. It just seems to be able to provide more satisfying answers to the age-old questions like “Why are we here?” and “Why is there so much suffering in the world?”

The CBC National News usually includes one or two in-depth feature stories in its nightly broadcast. A recent story took veteran reporter Joe Schlesinger to Calgary, Alberta, where he interviewed 14-year-old classical pianist Jan Lisiecki, who is considered a prodigy. Schlesinger says, “He may still be a child but Jan Lisiecki …has a record of mature, sophisticated performances that have wowed critics and audiences the world over.” The maturity and sophistication are manifested in Jan's gorgeous tone and in his interpretation of the pieces he plays with such astonishing mechanical facility. Violinist and conductor Pinchas Zukerman says of Lisiecki that “talent of that magnitude comes at least two or three generations apart.”

If there is such a thing as an “old soul,” Jan Lisiecki truly fits the category. When he was six years old, his piano teacher had him play “a boringly technical finger exercise.” Jan’s teacher says, “Usually it’s just a matter of playing the notes. He played it so beautifully, I…never could’ve even imagined it played so musically. It transformed these kind of dry notes into beauty.” Think of the average six-year-old. Then think of a clever and talented six-year-old. Now imagine a six-year-old that can not only recognize and understand beauty but can express it through a powerful and sophisticated musical instrument.

Zukerman said the first time he heard Jan play, “within the first seven or eight bars” the boy had already impressed him deeply. “I can tell you that if I didn’t know who was playing, I would hear an old soul. An old soul is what you hear in great talent.” Conductor Boris Brott, another admirer and supporter of this young pianist, marvels at Jan’s ability to interpret composers like Chopin, Mozart, and Beethoven, “to literally don their cloak, to wear their jacket as it were.”

The “old soul” deal is sealed for me when I hear this young man speak. Because he is fourteen, there is “childish impishness,” an impishness often seen in the 80-year-old Vladimir Horowitz. But there is also wisdom, insight, and humility rarely seen in human beings of any age, never mind a young teenager.

On being called a child prodigy, Jan says, “I really dislike being called a prodigy or a genius because I feel that doesn’t really describe me. I feel that I’ve been very lucky with the people that I’ve met and with the people that have been helping me, and that I’ve also worked very hard for what I’ve got. And possibly I do have talent, depending on what your definition of it is. But really I don’t think that being called a child prodigy and thinking of ‘Where will he go? What will happen?’ is not really a good thing for the child.” He keeps the numerous awards he has won in a box on a shelf in the basement.

After music, Jan’s second love is flying. When asked by Schlesinger, “And what if a career in music doesn’t work out?” Jan replies, “Well, I think I’d be a little bit disappointed, but I would still love the music, and [big smile] I would have the option of becoming a pilot.”

Jan has skipped three grades in school and will likely graduate at fifteen.

How is it that a 14-year-old can have such depth and maturity, yet a 75-year-old still has not recognized that he or she is acting out childish insecurities through jealousy, compulsive behaviour, bigotry, and self-absorption? How is it that this boy is able to experience a thrilling, fulfilling yet peaceful life, embraced by the love of wise parents, while other children his age are neglected or brutalized or suffer disease or starvation?

We could, as Christians, say that God has smiled on Jan by giving him talent and tender support, but that does not explain the depth and the maturity of this young man. Nor does it explain his apparently privileged position, one that other children could not even dream of.

But could it be that Jan’s hard work has not just been the work of this life? Is it possible that Jan has worked hard through many lives, including lifetimes in which he suffered terribly and seemingly without reason? Perhaps that is what the 75-year-old is doing—working his or her way through the mystery, not only in this lifetime but in many more to come. And maybe those children who suffer—needlessly, we think—are working their way through the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth as well, and will some day, like Jan Lisiecki, be called an “old soul.”

The Beloved of God: Letting Go of Ego

2010-07-31T09:33:00.000-07:00

I have been keeping a journal for some time, but since I started this blog as a vehicle for articulating my thoughts on life as a Christian, the journal only receives attention when I feel somehow disconnected from God and from who I really am. I wrote the following entry yesterday.

July 30

I wonder if I am becoming more aware of my ego when it is in control. I am thinking more and more often that I have to let it go and to accept what God has planned for me. I spoke with Richard on the phone last evening and we had one of our nice conversations about God and spirituality. He asked me when I felt connected with God and I had to honestly answer that the occasions were not as often as I would like. I did think at the time, as I was scrambling for an answer, that my ego is the biggest obstacle to allowing awareness of God within and around me to flood my consciousness. I simply must let go and be like the tree that accepts its lot and keeps its beauty and nobility and its joy.

One of the biggest banquets for the ego takes place in the dining hall of relationships. Why do we see others as “the other” and not as “us”? Why do we relate to those around us in dualism rather than as brothers and sisters equally “beloved of God”? Why do we have to judge and blame and point our mental fingers rather than modeling the tree that welcomes the wind and the rain and the sun patiently, stoically, and without complaint or agenda?

It probably doesn’t matter where we begin: with humility, with love, with forgiveness, just as long as we begin to see that these “virtues” are the reality of God and that everything else—materialism, conflict, superiority and inferiority, dominance and submission—are illusion. From illusion comes suffering and pain; from reality comes joy. From illusion comes grasping and struggling and rushing and stress; from reality comes silence and peace and creativity.

We must see who we are, without guilt, without shame, without pride, without defensiveness. We must accept who we are—who God made us to be—with humility and gratitude and love. As Henri Nouwen said, we are not what we do and we are not what others think of us. We are the beloved son and daughters of God; we are God’s beloved.

I think that I should write like this every day so that I am constantly reminded of these truths until they become part of me, until I see who I am, who God made me to be. I will forget, again and again, as I do now, but what is important is that I know I forget and in knowing, I bring myself back to God.

Modern Church Irony

2010-07-27T08:55:00.000-07:00

Just when I think I do not have anyone or anything to smack at on my blog, the editor of the local diocesan paper gets on the mound and offers a pitch that no self-respecting batter can resist swinging at.

In an editorial in the most recent issue of The B.C. Catholic Paul Schratz trumpets the entry of the paper into the age of social media. BCC is blogging and tweeting, has its own Facebook page, and has just launched a new website "that will allow us to get local stories online in real time.”

Schratz cites a recent study in the U.S. which shows that “churches are not taking advantage of social networking.” He quotes the owner of BuzzPlant, an Internet marketing company:

“American churches have millions of people on their rolls who do not feel connected today because churches, as a whole, have failed to effectively connect with them as times dictate.”

I suspect that Mr. Schratz does not recognize the delicious irony of the statement he quotes.

Photo Credit

Anglepoise Apple iMac and Windows by Dominic's pics

Creative Commons: Some rights reserved

Anglican High Mass

2010-07-27T08:08:00.000-07:00

This past Sunday I attended my first Anglican service, at St. James church in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The service was actually a Tridentine high Mass, sung in English, with celebrant, deacon, and sub-deacon facing the altar. There was enough incense to make the Dalai Lama’s eyes water.

I was most pleasantly surprised and relieved to find at the front of this beautiful church pamphlets containing the entire text of the liturgy of the Mass, along with instructions to stand, sit, and kneel at the appropriate places. The pamphlet also contained information about the music performed during the service, as well as what was essentially the church’s Sunday bulletin.

Sunday Mass at the Catholic church I attended for four years was partly a social occasion for many of the members of the congregation, largely made up of Filipinos. There were lots of greetings, chatting, and laughter. Not so in the Anglican church. In the church pamphlet, on a page headed “Before Mass,” is written: “You are encouraged to take the opportunity before Mass for silence, stillness, and prayer. Please refrain from talking before Mass begins.” At the end of the Mass, I was also surprised to see that there was no rush to exit the church. Even after the closing hymn was over, the members of the congregation remained in the pews to pray quietly. I was almost embarrassed to be the first to get up and leave the church.

The Mass itself was beautiful. The liturgy was celebrated with great reverence; there was no rushing through any of the elements. I was moved by one practice that is either uniquely Anglican or unique to this church: For the gospel reading, the acolytes, thurifer (constantly swinging the thurible), sub-deacon, and deacon (who is actually the reader) move into the center aisle of the church; as I was on the aisle, the deacon read the gospel—clearly and meaningfully—within a few feet of where I stood. The homily—on prayer—which was also given by the deacon, was well considered, well prepared, and relevant. Holy Communion was distributed to communicants as they knelt at an altar rail; I had not seen this practice since pre-Vatican II days.

This was my first Anglican high Mass, so I felt awkward at times because I was not familiar with the liturgy. I have also been accustomed to the larger, more lively congregations of my former Catholic church; the silence in St. James before and after Mass was a little disconcerting. Nevertheless, the community is welcoming, and from what I read in the bulletin, is also gay friendly. I will definitely visit this church again.

Photo Credits

St. James' Anglican Church by sillygwailo

St. James Anglican Church by Su-Laine

Creative Commons: Some rights reserved

Father Greg Boyle

2010-07-21T06:56:00.000-07:00

Life as a Human has just published my article "The Jesuit and the Homies: It's all about Kinship." The article is about Father Greg Boyle, a Jesuit priest who started Homeboy Industries, an organization that helps L.A. gang members learn skills and turn their lives around. Father G, as he is usually called by his beloved homies, has recently published a book about his experience in this inspiring ministry; the book is entitled Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion; I enthusiastically recommend it.

Photo Credit

Fr. Greg Boyle by bbcworldservice

flickr.com Some Rights Reserved

Bishop Dowling and Condoms

2010-07-09T22:59:00.000-07:00

It seems that taking a courageous position on a controversial issue is nothing new for Bishop Kevin Dowling
.

Bishop Dowling, the "cappa magna," and humility

2010-07-08T11:45:00.000-07:00

The blog of America Magazine has re-posted a piece that appeared on the site of the Independent Catholic News. The piece is the text of an address “given by Kevin Dowling CSsR to a group of leading laity in Cape Town, South Africa on 1 June." [Note: the text has been removed from the site of the Independent Catholic News but has been posted on the website of the National Catholic Reporter, with the bishop's permission.]

Bishop Dowling’s address essentially takes a metaphorical scalpel to a trend that has developed over the last 30 years in which all Church authority has steadily become concentrated in the hands of the pope and the “Curial Departments and Cardinals.” Much of this authority, according to Dowling, rightfully belongs in the hands of the People of God at the level of the local churches and of the local episcopate, and of the Synod of Bishops. The letter and spirit of Vatican II, which reaffirmed this horizontal paradigm, has been replaced by

“the mystique which has in increasing measure surrounded the person of the Pope in the last 30 years, such that any hint of critique or questioning of his policies, of his way of thinking, his exercise of authority, etc. is equated with disloyalty. There is more than a perception, because of this mystique, that unquestioning obedience by the faithful to the Pope is required and is a sign of the ethos and fidelity of a true Catholic.”

For Dowling, a potent symbol of the “restorationism” that has been taking place these 30 years was the “cappa magna” worn by Bishop Edward Slattery of Tulsa, Oklahoma as he celebrated a Tridentine Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine in Washington in April. Dowling describes the garment as “the 20-yard-long brilliant red train behind a bishop or cardinal that has become one of the symbols of the revival of the Tridentine Mass.” The wearing of the cappa magna and the elaborate processional pageantry that preceded the Mass in Washington “bore the marks of a medieval royal court, not the humble servant leadership modeled by Jesus.”

Dowling laments the disappearance of

the great theological leaders and thinkers of the past…and the great prophetic bishops whose voice and witness was a clarion call to justice, human rights and a global community of equitable sharing….Again, who in today’s world “out there” even listens to, much less appreciates and allows themselves to be challenged by the leadership of the Church at the present time? The moral authority of the Church’s leadership today has never been weaker. It is, therefore, important in my view that Church leadership, instead of giving an impression of its power, privilege and prestige, should rather be experienced as a humble, searching ministry together with its people in order to discern the most appropriate or viable responses which can be made to complex ethical and moral questions—a leadership, therefore, which does not presume too have all the answers all the time….

The concentration of authority in the hands of the Pope and the Vatican Curia and “the policy of appointing ‘safe’, unquestionably orthodox and even very conservative bishops to fill vacant dioceses over the past 30 years” has made it very unlikely that the College of Bishops “will question anything that comes out of Rome, and certainly not publicly.” How courageous it is, then, for Bishop Dowling, a single voice in this deafening chorus of orthodoxy, to raise it in respectful and humble dissent and to point out, however indirectly, the hubris of those who would take it upon themselves to reject the spirit of Vatican II and scorn the legacy of Blessed John XXIII by usurping the authority of the local churches and thus the People of God.

And how clever the bishop is to use the words of Joseph Ratzinger himself to demonstrate how far we have strayed from Vatican II:

Over the pope as expression of the binding claim of ecclesiastical authority, there stands one's own conscience which must be obeyed before all else, even if necessary against the requirement of ecclesiastical authority. This emphasis on the individual, whose conscience confronts him with a supreme and ultimate tribunal, and one which in the last resort is beyond the claim of external social groups, even the official church, also establishes a principle in opposition to increasing totalitarianism.

(Joseph Ratzinger in: Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II ,Vol. V., pg. 134 (Ed) H. Vorgrimler, New York, Herder and Herder, 1967).

Among the many things about this article that impress me is its call for greater humility on the part of the leadership of the Church—“the humble servant leadership modeled by Jesus.” Church leaders would do well to return to the New Testament accounts of the life of Jesus so that they might learn the true meaning of humility. Surely a man who regularly ate with sinners, with the impure, and with the marginalized; who, unlike “foxes and the birds of the air,” had “nowhere to lay his head;” and who allowed himself to be subjected to the most degrading punishment of his day, has by his very way of life and death something to teach the wearers of the “great cape.”

When will they attend?

Photo Credits

IMG_5985: "Cardinal Rode in Cappa Magna"

IMG_5937: "The Cardinal assumes the Cappa Magna at the throne"

by jdbradley

Creaative Commons: Some rights reserved

Scott Hamilton: Jazz Standards

2010-07-06T14:58:00.000-07:00

The Vancouver International Jazz Festival has just ended. Every year I thoroughly scour the festival brochure to see if there is anything that I and my friends might like to take in, and every year the list of possibilities seems to get shorter and shorter. What has traditionally been called mainstream jazz—and is now called “traditional”—is giving way steadily to alt/indie/noise, avant/free/improv/experimental, electro/ambient, fusion/jazz rock/nu jazz, and post bop.

I grew up with the jazz standards—“Body and Soul,” “Lullaby of Birdland,” “September Song”—played or sung by the likes of Stan Getz, Lester Young, Art Tatum, and Sarah Vaughn. To my mind, there are enough ways to improvise on the gorgeous ballad “Tenderly” to sustain one through a thousand hearings. As the old Duke Ellington tune says, "It Don't Mean a Thing if it Ain't Got that Swing." Funk and fusion and hard bop just don't do it for me.

So when I look through the jazz festival brochure, I am looking for a band that will give me a generous portion of those old-time standards. And did I ever get lucky this year.

There is an old jazz club in Vancouver called The Cellar. It has been around since I was a teenager and has gone through some rough years and has changed ownership numerous times. Some time ago the club was taken over by a local musician, a tenor sax man by the name of Cory Weeds, and Mr. Weeds, who seems to have an entrepreneurial bent and a great deal of courage in addition to substantial musical chops, has transformed the old place into a significant jazz venue in the Pacific Northwest. The Cellar,which also serves pretty good food, is one of the featured venues of the Vancouver International Jazz Festival.

This year the name of one of the performers booked into The Cellar for jazzfest caught my eye; it was a name I was quite familiar with but had not heard in some years: tenor saxophonist Scott Hamilton. Hamilton was to be accompanied by a local group of stellar musicians led by guitarist Oliver Gannon.

There is something about jazz in a club atmosphere that jazz performed in a concert hall cannot match. Our table was right up against one end of the stage, so we had a great view of the musicians and could hear all the instruments—piano, bass, and drums, in addition to Hamilton and Gannon—clearly. It was fascinating to watch the beautifully expressive faces of the musicians as they played solos, accompanied their fellow band members, or simply listened as another played. On those faces was passion, humour, deep concentration, and an obvious love for the music they played and for the people they played with.

Scott Hamilton is an American, but he has lived in Italy for the past several years. Before arriving in Vancouver from Florence, he had been traveling for 38 hours. The four cans of Red Bull under the piano at the end of the evening (and the fifth we saw in his hand outside the club as we passed him on the way to the car) attested to the jet lag he must have been feeling. Yet after the first couple of choruses of the opening number—“What is this Thing Called Love?”—I knew we were going to have a wonderful musical evening. These five musicians, who had just met the previous day, played as if they had been together for years. They established a relaxed and swinging groove from the first tune that did not let up for the entire two-set, two-hour performance. Ballads, swing tunes, and blues filled the packed room with a mellow joy that the best of jazz can only inspire.

And just about every song they played was a jazz standard that I was familiar with.

God is good indeed.

Photo Credits

"Scott Hamilton, Ray Brown: Concord Jazz Festival, 1979"

by guyman22

IMG_6613 (Oliver Gannon)

by estwo