“Give me poetry or give me death!” Patrick Henry should've said, after that liberty thing got nailed down. I would've agreed in kind, though not that I read poetry that much – it draws too much attention to itself. I prefer poetry masquerading as prose. I like music. Movies are nice although I've found I'm increasingly under the title "tough crowd". For Mother's Day we took my mom and a grandchild to see “Nim’s Island”, a tryingly trite entertainment. The South Pacific island locale promised great photography and escapism but this seemed a bit too… fanciful, and that wasn’t just limited to plot twists. 'Twas very Rousseauian. Good movie for kids though.
But real art... well, it has the element of surprise and refreshment. Sometimes it’s hard to see art as secondary let alone irrelevant, though it is for so many who are in parts of the world where there isn’t enough food, let alone art. I think “The Lost Weekend” was a title of book, or a movie, or a book and movie but I can’t relate; I never have lost weekends because that's where the art lay. I have lost weeks and found weekends but never the reverse.
This month's meeting was made bearable by a co-worker giving out “Buzzword Bingo” to five of us. Everyone had different words, and it increased mental acuity by 74% by forcing you to pay attention. I was able to get five buzzwords but not such that I could stand up and yell “buzzword bingo!”. Amazingly, one of the big guys knew about it and played along, asking during lulls in the action how we were doing. I asked if he took bribes.
It was pleasant to read Scott Hahn’s account of his sticking with "dull" Presbyterianism at college in his latest book despite being surrounded by Pentecostal kids getting more “bang for their spiritual buck” in terms of emotion. Hahn turned his back on the emotionalism and enthusiasm and even apparent miracles of this other church when his Presbyterian services were so dull and seemingly lifeless. It all hinged on his buddies going to get “re-baptized”; the rubicon was reached. Infant baptism – yes or no? He went to see his professor who suggested he write a paper on it and Scott was reinforced in his Presbyterianism but, at the same time, you could see how he was destined for Rome from that. If you’re not going to go for the emotionalism & miracles then an awful lot of searchers are going to go Roman. Catholicism feels a bit of the headwind of history in that nowadays we so don’t want intermediaries because our world is full of prefunctories and intermediaries and yet…and yet we have the Eucharist, which is God, without even the direct pipeline, and the salvation economy is centered on intermediaries in the form of not only priests, in persona Christi, but lay people who are to bring God to each other.
No wonder Pope John Paul II was so taken by personalism as a philosophy. It is the ache of modern man. We want “authenticity”, which may well be another word for the “personal”. An authentic signature is different from a robotized signature only because the former is personal. Pope Benedict is so right in emphasizing the personal relationship aspect with Christ. As he said in his recent visit to America:
“Saint Irenaeus, with great insight, understood that the command which Moses enjoined upon the people of Israel: “Choose life!” (Dt 30:19) was the ultimate reason for our obedience to all God’s commandments. Perhaps we have lost sight of this: in a society where the Church seems legalistic and “institutional” to many people, our most urgent challenge is to communicate the joy born of faith and the experience of God’s love.”The great problem of modernity is alienation – alienation from land and man due to industrialization and individualism, and both of those lead to alienation from God, because we see God as similar to the “neighbor whom we can see” - be it the asphalt we constantly pave or the neighbors from whom we feel distant because they are simultaneously both too much with us and too little needed. We feel extraneous and ubiquitous.
St. Faustina wrote, during a period of darkness, “O Lord, though I cannot comprehend You and do not understand Your ways, I nonetheless trust in Your mercy.” How could someone not comprehend God and not understand His ways and still love him? I think because she knew God enough to compare him to the sun: “Despite the deep night…I know the sun never goes away.”
We do not have a pontiff unsympathetic to the subtleness of the Spirit. Benedict continues:
In a word, it is not always easy to see the light of the Spirit all about us, the splendor of the Risen Lord illuminating our lives and instilling renewed hope in his victory over the world (cf. Jn 16:33).This week Jesus returns our longing in the gospel of John: “I wish that where I am they also may be...” and “that the world may know that you sent me, and that you loved them even as you loved me." What greater surety is there than the Father’s love for Christ?
Yet the word of God reminds us that, in faith, we see the heavens opened, and the grace of the Holy Spirit lighting up the Church and bringing sure hope to our world. “O Lord, my God,” the Psalmist sings, “when you send forth your spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth” (Ps 104:30). These words evoke the first creation, when the Spirit of God hovered over the deep (cf. Gen 1:2). And they look forward to the new creation, at Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles and established the Church as the first fruits of a redeemed humanity (cf. Jn 20:22-23). These words summon us to ever deeper faith in God’s infinite power to transform every human situation, to create life from death, and to light up even the darkest night. And they make us think of another magnificent phrase of Saint Irenaeus: “where the Church is, there isthe Spirit of God; where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church and all grace”.
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