Let's Get Physical

In today's Wall Street Journal, a letter-writer responded to this article: The Shroud of Turin: Faith, Proof and Relics - WSJ.com with this letter: Letters - WSJ.com. You don't have to read either one.

In part, he wrote:

"The desire for physical connection to Christ's human existence, however well-intentioned, may reflect more of a human weakness rather than a rational search for truth. If one is a Christian, the value of any holy artifact, even the actual shroud of Christ, is inconsequential relative to the sacrificial act of dying for mankind's sins. An obsession with relics can be a distraction from that fundamental truth."

Well, yeah, an obsession with anything is bad...that's part of the definition. I don't pay too much attention to the Shroud myself: the Wind of Science blows this way.....then that way....then another way. Who can say if the Shroud wrapped Jesus? But besides that, I believe the writer suffers from The Western Disease, i.e., discounting the physical as a valid (may I say equal) way to access God, while unduly favoring the spiritual, which is often a stalking-horse for the 'Rational' 'Intellect.' (That last bit was a digression)

Anyway, the writer mentions the Golden Calf: "the people of Israel lose faith in God and build a golden calf to worship, an apparent human need to have a comforting physical representation of their deity." The problem I have with this is yes, worshiping the Golden Calf was a sin, but wanting a comforting physical relationship with the 'deity' is not. We're weak, we have needs....yes we do. God knows this, loves us, and responds accordingly.

Let's remember, a non-physical God made Adam from dirt, Eve from a rib. Yet the relationship of God & Man in the Garden was in some sense physical. God the Father has no body, yet Adam & Eve related to him through their physical natures as well as spiritual (e.g, Gen 3:8). This access was broken by the Fall, but the desire for humans to know God through both their natures remained.

For millennia, then, God remained physically remote in a direct sense (he was still indirectly physically accessible in a limited way through media, e.g., the tablets, Moses' stick, Elisha's bones, Elijah's cloak, the Jordan river, etc.). Remember poor Moses, 40 days on Sinai, all that time in the meeting tent...."could I just have a little peek at your face, LORD, I just wanna see" and God says, "sorry....it'd kill ya." And who isn't like Moses, or Thomas, "yeah, but....I wanna see. Please?"

And this is the great change with Jesus. People could see God, hold onto him, hear his words go out of his mouth and right into their ears; they could even smell him. No more Moses wanting a glimpse, just a glimpse. And Jesus worked all his miracles through people's physical encounters with his physical nature. Lord, my son is possessed; Lord my daughter is dead; if I can just touch His tassel; let me wash off this mud from my eyes; let me pull some bread & fish out of this basket; let's lower our friend through the roof. Nobody said, "hey Jesus is in town, let's all pray for him to heal our paralyzed friend" or "I'll pray for Him to heal my leprosy." No. It was "hey Jesus is in town, it's time for action." Remember the paralytic's friends? Jesus saw their faith, because he saw what they did physically, through his own physical nature. And so could everyone else who was there.

But to believe a man was God presented its own problems...how many Pharisees looked right at Jesus working miracles, and insisted on not believing? Even Thomas had to have faith.

This is a great gift: God made us with bodies and souls. In spite of the wreck sin has made of the natural order of things, both body & soul are good, and we were created to know & love God through both natures. And Jesus having a body (He still has it, BTW) makes it possible for us to do so even today (the technical term for this is 'incarnation,' a word I'm not fond of. It just goes in one ear & out the other). But can we access Jesus' physical nature through something besides our own bodies? No. Even everything I know about other peoples' souls I infer from using my senses to observe what they say and do with their bodies, their physical natures.

So what does this have to do with things now? Let me recount some Wednesday Sunday School:

I use a bone (2Kings 13:21), my suit jacket (2Kings 2:6-14), and a rag (Acts 19:11-12) among other things to act out how God uses things as conduits, as media for His power. By the way, the bone is a chicken bone, we just pretend it comes from Elisha....it's not worth anything on the black market.

We act these things out, and read the story as needed: oh no, here come bandits! No time right now to bury him, just throw him down there on Elisha's bones, we'll come back when it's safe.

How am I gonna get back over the river....?

.

Dear wife, our daughter is gonna die, but Paul is in town. She's too sick to move, what'll we do? Give me your apron, I'll go to Paul..... I'm back, I got close enough to press the apron against Paul's skin.....let's cover her with it.

Note that in 2Kings 2:6-14 the cloak continued to mediate God's power even after Elijah was gone, which points out that God's power didn't abandon the cloak after Elijah's departure. We might observe that Elijah had already authorized Elisha to succeed him, so maybe it doesn't have anything to do with the cloak, per se, but the authority of the wielder. Maybe so. Maybe not.

But who were the nobodies who used aprons and facecloths to carry healing to the sick and possessed? Probably just faithful Christians. And might the power persist over time? Would the faithful treasure those cloths, those aprons until they wore out? Could they heal more than just one person, one time? Given that these miracles happened after Jesus had ascended, and Paul had not known Jesus during his earthly ministry, is it reasonable to think the healing remained in the items as long as they lasted and weren't tied to Paul's authority? Was it it reasonable, or superstitious, to do the apron thing in the first place?

So I use this line of thinking to explain the reasonableness of relics, and as an introduction to sacraments. God's grace & power continue to flow through physical things, including people and their dead bodies. EEeewww! chorus the 6th grade girls.

Here's a question: was God with Abraham? Yes. Was he with...Noah? Yes. Moses? Yes. David? Yeah. Ezekiel, Isaiah, all the rest? Yes, of course. Now jump ahead to Jesus, (Matt 28:20) "I am with you always, until the end of the age." Uh-huh, so what's new? But the apostles weren't going to be losing God spiritually as Noah might have; they were going to miss His physical presence. I believe Jesus, whose distinction among the Trinity is his physical existence, meant not just that he'd be with us always spiritually, but physically as well. Thus through sacraments, especially the Eucharist (another word I'm not fond of....don't care for 'communion' either), Jesus provides that physical link to his body. He ascended with it and still has it. I assume it exists as matter in dimensional space (sounds like another post gestating) somewhere, and he makes it objectively available to us in our limited reality through the Eucharist. So he's still with us, spiritually and physically.

So back to the letter: "The desire for physical connection to Christ's human existence, however well-intentioned, may reflect more of a human weakness rather than a rational search for truth." Our desire for a physical connection to Christ's human existence is correctly-intentioned, reflects human weakness only as a consequence of sin, not as a consequence of physical existence itself, and is an indispensable part of a rational search for truth.

Presbyopia/ Tempus Fugit

My family (minus the sons) went to the beach last week (daughters' spring break). Our tradition is to do at least one 1,000 piece puzzle during that week. Last year I had no trouble doing a puzzle. This year my vision had changed enough that I wished I'd brought reading glasses- couldn't focus on the pieces at the distance I was used to.

The steady drip, drip, drip, of mortality leaks on.

It's just like my wife & I say: No Loitering.

Dark Wine and a Thousand Roses

Around 1981 I was in school in Italy, took a train to Berlin. Enroute I shared a compartment for a while with an older, proper German Burgher who looked askance of the Innocent Abroad. But I had a bottle of Amaretto & some plastic cups, and his English was very American, so we got to talking, and maybe I wasn't so callow after all.

So, where are you going in Germany?

Berlin.

Why are you going to Berlin?

To visit a German girl I met last month....she's a student in Berlin.

And where is she from?

Near Bamberg.

O-ho! A Franconian girl!

Um, yeah (I guess).........your English is very good, how'd you learn to speak without an accent?

Ah. Yes. I was prisoner in America during the War, I learned a lot of English.

Where?

In Mississippi. There were a group of us who worked on farms in the country. We had a camp we lived in, but went out to work each day & returned on our own. We even got paid a bit so we could buy cigarettes and so forth at the stores like anyone else.

You weren't locked up?

No, there was nowhere we could escape to; besides, there was no reason to escape. We all knew the war was lost. When I arrived in America by ship, we were put on a train to Mississippi. Looking out the window, I saw a factory which was building vehicles. Hundreds of them filled a lot in front of the building. I pointed this out to a guard. He laughed & said those cars were owned by the workers. I couldn't imagine such a thing. That's when I knew it was over for Germany.

But we enjoyed life in Missisippi. Many of us didn't want to leave after the war. Some of us fell in love, some became like sons to the families they worked for.

We used to put on magic shows around where we worked. One night we were putting on a show for some very poor, uneducated people. When the magician started to saw the man in the box in half, a man in the audience jumped up & shouted, "Stop! No, don't kill him!" He thought it was real. I don't think they knew what magic was.

So where were you captured?

In Normandy. I had been wounded earlier and was in a rocket unit.....we had these steel frames the rockets went on. We were all kids, hardly knew how to use them and so.

Huh....were you captured around Falaise?

Yes. You know about Falaise?

Yeah, some.

The smell of all the dead men and horses was terrible....

I've read that....must have been awful. So where were you before Normandy?

Oh....I was in Russia.

Where in Russia, north, south....?

North....different places.

Leningrad?

No, not so far north.

Hmmm...Staraya Russa? Velikiye Luki? Demyansk?

Yes.... you know these places?

I've read about them.

He paused, stared at nothing. Then said, "Russia was too big. Nobody could conquer it. It was just too big."
Why I asked this next question I'll never know, but I am glad even today that I did so: what sort of books were you reading then? He perked right up at that.

Oh, we were all reading the Cornet, by Rilke. We didn't understand Rilke, but we read him. We were too young, really.

He subsided again.

Then we mostly sat there sipping Amaretto until he got off in Munich. I'd never heard of Rilke or the Cornet, but back in America I ordered a copy, having no idea what it was. Turned out to be a small book: Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke/ The Song of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke. About 70 pages, 1 paragraph per page, left page German, facing page English. Something between poetry and prose. Something that showed German to be beautiful, artful, mysterious, uniquely expressive. Nominally about a 17th century soldier riding East against the Turk, but that's not what it's about, exactly. Or especially.

I had been used to tourist German, movie German. This Rilke German was nothing like any German I knew of...I mean, can you imagine lush German? Caressing German? Ya kiddin' rite? And so much of the impact of the words didn't translate into English...why not?

Well, I'm not going to quote gobs of Cornet, it's easy enough to find online or at libraries. I'll confine myself to this one line I've returned to again and again for more than 25 years:

Aus dunklem Wein und tausend Rosen rinnt die Stunde rauschend in den Traum der Nacht.

In English: Out of dark wine and a thousand roses runs the hour rushing into the dream of night.

I think it's pretty good in English, but still......not as good. This sentence persuaded me that everything may not be equally expressed in every tongue, and that to access the fullness of what an author intends, the text should be read in the original language. The sentence in English does not generate the mystery, the peace, the calm, the serenity, the (uh-oh, here it comes) je ne sais quoi, the ineffable something that moves me right now.

And to imagine percolating on this for so many years, and yet I'm really no closer to understanding or even putting into words what hold it has on me. This frustration at being unable to express what is very real points me again to life beyond death; I'm a sinful person stuck in a sin-cracked world which stunts my full potential, and I sense it. I ought to, should be able to understand fully at least this single German sentence. Yet even such a tiny thing eludes me. As St. Paul says, "For now we see through a glass, darkly...but then shall I know."

I'm ready for the "then shall I know" part.

plus de Tempus Fugit

Last week the Fabulous Wife, my father & I went to Atlanta to visit my 39-year-old 'baby' sister, who gave birth to her first daughter about a month ago. We'd been there an hour or so, I was holding the baby. I said, "Oh yeah...this baby is my niece....not my granddaughter."

The FW laughed & pointed out the girl's grandfather was actually sitting there with us. Yeah....yeah....that's right. My niece.

After I became a brother, all babies seemed like my siblings.

After I became a father, all babies seemed like my children.

Now that I'm a grandfather, they all seem like my grandkids.

Current Events

The kids are always stimulated by using material that's not in the textbook to teach a lesson. And they like it when they're expected to rise above being just a "6th grader." For example, today I read this article in the Wall Street Journal about the Catholic use of YouTube to disseminate the anti-abortion message:

( http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123854185757175689.html ).

The critical quote is, "We're able to reach people directly," said Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life. He stars in a series of matter-of-fact videos that explain how abortions are performed, with a plastic model of a fetus as a prop."

I have a plastic fetus I received from the Family Honor program a few years ago, it's a great prop, the kids've seen it a half-dozen times already. Here's the quick 2-minute pitch I made with the article & the fetus:

I started by asking the class if they've ever heard of YouTube, which gets them laughing & perked up, since who doesn't know what YouTube is? Ya kiddin' rite? YouTube... what fun!

Then I showed the front page of the WSJ, said I consider it America's best newspaper. Turned to the article, described it briefly, including the YouTube reference, then read the aforementioned quote. Right before I get to the part about the fetus, I bring my fetus up from behind the newspaper. They focus on the fetus for a second before they hear "plastic fetus." Putting down the paper, we do some review about abortion and have a laugh at how the Wall Street Journal and YouTube are just now catching up to our class, which has been hip to plastic fetuses for months.

I close by noting the Catholic Church is hated by some people (and remember, Jesus was hated too) for opposing things like abortion, that YouTube can be more than entertainment. Then I kiss the fetus & speak to it like you'd kiss and talk to a baby, silly goo-goo talk "you're such a sweet little thing, you're so cute," so the kids'll cringe "eeeewww" and I remind them, hey don't "eeeww" me, you used to look just like this! Were you a person then? Yes! That's right, you were!

This is standard every time the fetus makes an appearance, so they kind of expect to groan, and then be reprimanded. By doing this I hope to get them past how weird fetuses look, and to accept them as regular babies.

Tempus Fugit

A couple of months ago I was driving while chatting with one of my daughters. At some point she wasn't speaking clearly/loudly enough, so I tried to make her more audible by increasing the Volume setting on the steering wheel's sound system controls.

TV and Lent

About 35 years ago I was watching Firing Line, William F. Buckley's TV show. He was interviewing Malcolm Muggeridge, who at some point said, "you know, every important thing I've learned I learned by suffering," or words to that effect. I was about 15 years old, and thought that was a dumb thing to say. Old British twit. I had learned plenty and was not a sufferer by any means. But it was such an intriguing concept that I retained it, even though I didn't understand it....which makes a good motto: remember now, understand later. It would sound better in Latin. Or French.

Anyway, I was raised on TV. Not that I watched some insane amount of it, but it was a normal part of life. But after having kids of my own I began to worry that the quantity & quality of cable fare was more problematic than the programming content of my childhood, both for me and the kids. Not that I did anything about it.

Then about 13 years ago, our pastor, Fr. Day, suggested at Mass that we parishioners consider giving up TV for Lent. I'd considered it before....and passed. But that year while driving home, my Fabulous Wife and I decided we'd try it, cold turkey. The kids were maybe 4 or 5 years old; they were not consulted.

The next day, Monday, I returned the converter box. The cable company rep asked me what was wrong with the cable box? Nothing, we're just giving up TV for Lent. A couple of people thought that was incredible, asked about the thinking behind it. I pointed out we hadn't actually missed any TV yet, and it might not work out.

Monday was awful. So was Tuesday. But by Sunday, we were adjusting. Within 2 weeks, we were acclimated. Easter Sunday rolled around, and we and the kids decided to just leave the TV off indefinitely.

Now, years later, life is good. We adults watch DVDs late in the evening, which is controllable and requires effort. The kids can do the same on the weekends, but they usually don't. The house is quiet, a refuge. Family dinner conversation often extends beyond the meal. The kids turned out just fine. For being teenagers, they are surprisingly unmaterialistic.

And the credit goes to the Church, whose institutional memory knows the value of sacrifice, and suffering (not that this was all that painful, but that's part of the point, like giving blood: actually donating it is easier than anticipating donating it). And of course, we learned from this experience, although at the start all we expected was to suffer, not to learn; certainly not to to learn we could be happier by giving up something that we liked. And in the bigger picture I learned to pay closer attention to what the Church teaches, even if (especially if) it's something I don't much want to do.

Smart Church...she knew this would happen.

Muggeridge, too. Smart Brit twit.