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Resurrecting Chicago

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Monthly Archives: May 2018

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Lies Numb Our Consciences.

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That question again: “Why is there more evil in the world these days?” My friend had just seen the latest news about another massacre in a another school.  He just couldn’t believe how this increase in school shootings has accelerated in the past two years. How many Parklands are yet to happen? And, why?

The Catholic Church teaches that we have inherited the tendency to sin from our first parents, Adam and Eve.  If you think this idea is laughable, what answer do you come up with?  The Lord intended that his creatures would live with Him in friendship.

I love the image which the bible relates of The Lord walking in the Garden of Eden “in the breezy part of the day” all the while looking for his creatures, his friends. Where are they?  Hiding in the brush because they were naked.  “Who told you that you were naked?” Then, scripture goes on in words close to these: “You have broken trust with me by contradicting the one rule I gave you and now you are ashamed.”  They were ashamed because their consciences told them that they had wronged the Lord.

My Church refers to the twisted nature with which we are born as “Original Sin.”  Our human nature is not corrupt, it’s weakened. Our moral judgements are subject to rationalizations.  We are tempted, lured even, to sin and sometimes to an awful sense of self- righteousness.

Think the Klu Klux Klan  –which still exists. It’s sympathizers feel something like this concerning “strangers”: Lynchings for the sake of righteousness is justifiable.  Colored people, Jews, Catholics are not part of the good side of our culture.  Immigrants from  South of the border are illegal, criminals –most of them.  They bring drugs.  They are rapists. We’ve got to get them out. Out?  Yes, out of our society.

Evil is active because our consciences have been numbed by lies.  That’s why evil is so prevalent in our America, home of the free and the brave. Put in another way,  what we have is a crisis of belief. There is no God.  There’s only me and people like me. They aren’t important.  I, and people like me are meant to inherit the earth.

We Christians have to keep our consciences free from the lies and temptations of the evil one. Yes, we need to come to church but we need to go, too.  We need to reject the culture of death and violence. We need to go out and stand for kindness and justice in our schools, at our jobs, in our neighborhoods. If we don’t do this, our consciences will accuse us and indict us and the evils will go on. And, in our day,  will the death of Our Lord Jesus Christ be for nothing?

 

 

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SILENCE

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“In the beginning was the word,” says John’s gospel. Before that, there was silence.  Not nothing, simply silence.  I suppose “silence” defined would be “the absence of sound,” but silence speaks in its own way. There are multiple ways of speaking without voice.

Most meditation practices involve insulating yourself from the sounds that are out there and making yourself deaf so that you can really hear.  Peggy Noonan wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal that John Krasinski’s new film, “A Quiet Place,” just released, is essentially a silent film.  The aliens in this story are blind cannibals who will find you and eat you if you make the slightest noise.  Ms Noonan says the film is awesome because it goes against today’s prevailing film style of making great  amounts of continuous noise in order to communicate importance.   I came close to walking out of the last superman movie because it was just a long series of noisy and flashy animation.  Think virtual reality stuff of people blowing up and cars careening into one another. Very LOUD. NOISY.

When “talkies” came along they only made the silent spaces in films even more dramatic. In Kubrick’s “A Space Odyssey”, the first line of dialogue doesn’t come until twenty-five minutes into the film. The music by Gyorgy Ligeti, carries the film along with no dialogue at all. Need I mention, Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie?

Years ago I wrote to Lillian Gish, a silent film star of huge reputation, and she wrote back to me about what she was doing and how she felt about silent films. In the first place, Ms Gish says, those movies were never meant to be silent, music accompanied the visuals.  Sometimes it was orchestral music, other times it was a house organ or piano.

It was music as the “universal” language not speech which she felt made the films what they were in her day.

Hearing Al Jolson’s singing in “The Jazz Singer”  — the first talkie blockbuster– wasn’t what wowed the audiences, it was the sound of  forks and knives striking dishes in the cabaret scene that made the movies so real.

In life, especially in prayer, you have to have quiet inside and out. That’s why the first movement of prayer has to recollection.  If  you are listening to the TV or to some e-tune blaring through your headset, you are not listening for God.   You have to quiet your heart and then find an inner room where you can listen for a word.

“It is my hope that great silent films with great music (will be produced again).  These two once changed the world….” Lillian Gish. (author’s collection).

 

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Dothat Does it Again. Boo for Bad Religion.

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Some years ago I bought and read Bad Religion  by Ross Douthat. Prosperity preaching and slick evangelism got its comeuppance in that book for sure, but I found reading Douthat depressing and kind of sad.  His criticisms in Bad religion are right on target but I think he is missing both a pastoral heart and a sense of humor. It’s just hard for me to read religion abstracted from Christians who practice it.  I’m not sure why I react this way to Douthat’s intense and interesting commentary on today’s divisions in the church.  He just seems to miss the perspective of the ordinary church-goer, all twenty percent of us.

I admit without embarrassment that I haven’t read To Change the Church, Douthat’s latest book. But, I ask myself, do I want to spend upwards of twenty dollars to be led through criticism of Francis and his leadership of the Catholic Church? The college of cardinals knew the kind of person Bergolio was and that’s why they elected him. He is not a surprise pope.  He is the expected pope. The cardinals apparently wanted a pastoral pope who was smart and strong enough to deconstruct the Vatican taliban.  Many of those same cardinals, I think, like what he is doing.  They just don’t appreciate the transparency with which he is doing it.

Maybe my curiosity about how Douthat sees the Catholic Church contracting into polarities will move me to open my wallet and buy his new book. There are ultraconservatives and lunatic liberals out there but most of us are not even close to either pole. In my view, the more serious enemy to the church is secularism with all its ability to squeeze the life out of Christians. Knowing that is depressing enough. Still, I’ll likely buy his new book, the Kindle edition (It’s cheaper.) and become more depressed. But keeping the saints of the church in mind keeps me upbeat and Augustine is one of my favorite Christians.  His words about church theological divisions of his day bears repeating in our own: “In essentials, unity. In nonessentials, diversity. In all things, charity.” (See also Ephesians 4:15)

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The Catholic Church’s Pain in the Apse.

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U.S. Cardinal Raymond L. Burke. 

A couple of days ago the New York Times had a story about what many are calling the “polarization” in the church. As I’ve mentioned before, I think it’s not as simple as polarization, with Francis on one side and the liberals versus Cardinal Burke and the conservatives on the other.

First of all I think those characterizations are out of date. Who talks about liberals and conservatives anymore? Francis was elected by a huge consensus of cardinals who ran (and still run) the gamut from super-orthodox to raging free-thinkers. Some think Francis is ruining the church, others that he is saving it from ruin. Most of us are not at either extreme, nor are we moving away from each other toward separate catholic expressions.  Most Catholics respect –even love– Pope Francis. So do, most of the cardinals who elected him.

When I watch Francis on TV on Sundays speaking from his window in St. Peter’s Square for the mid-day Angelus, I see lots of banners and signs among the groups in the crowd but not a-one telling him to hit the road, nothing about “GET OUT HERETIC!”  I see pilgrims who smile and sing and chant “Long Live the Pope!”

Later, on Sundays, when I talk with people after Mass, they are not angry at the pope rather, they are concerned about their families, friends and themselves. And, this is what Francis talks about all the time: The Church has to listen to the concerns of the sheep that make up the flock that is the Church. People ask me to pray for intentions that are close to their hearts. They are not obsessed with an errant Pope Francis, although he offended lots of clerics when he said that priests must get out of their sacristies and mingle with sheep.  He suggested that priests should smell like sheep. This kind of talk makes many Catholics smile.  It also upsets those clerics who think that their spirituality causes them to fly above the flocks.

If Cardinal Burke came to Chicago to give a major speech on the heresies of Francis, I think the crowd would likely fit into the Abbey Pub.  He, in my humble opinion, is the Catholic Church’s pain-in-the-apse. He represents an alt-Catholicism which belongs in a mausoleum. If Francis appeared in Chicago for a similar event, Soldier Field might not be big enough to hold the faithful who would come to see a man who leads by saying “Pray for me.”

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