Knowing vs. Loving God

Blaise Pascal once said that knowing God and loving God are two very different things. Nothing could be farther from the truth in my experience. It is God’s nature not to be known without love. In fact, the deeper we love, and the more that we come to understand God with the heart, the more likely we are to know something about God. Loving, hoping, desiring, these are the things the poets and hymn-writers have sung about for centuries, because they are the essence of knowledge of divine things. With King David, we may ask of God, “Incline my heart unto thy testimonies.” (Ps. 119:36) In other words, turn my heart to believe more. That’s how it works.

Imagine you are walking into a Gothic cathedral 700 years ago

Imagine it is the year 1400, and you are visiting Chartres Cathedral for the first time. You have never before seen a faithful reproduction of this truly remarkable structure, which dominates the busy, dirty, commercial city and the countryside for miles around. Climbing up the Rue du Borg on foot you enter the cathedral itself, and find yourself in a cavernous space, illuminated by the flickering light of hundreds of candles rebounding off exquisitely beautiful stained-glass windows. Though greatly moved by your surroundings, you do not find it at all difficult to understand or ‘read’ the cathedral: on the contrary, it is quite clear to you how it wordlessly communicates the Christian story.

Medieval spirituality was both more credulous and more embodied than our own. For the medieval person, a symbol was an objective piece of reality: it was that very thing it represented. An image of Christ or the Virgin in the form of an icon, or a fresco, or a sculpture was a very portal to Jesus or Mary. The builders of the first Gothic cathedrals had been taught by the philosopher John Scotus Erigena – one of the finest minds of the early medieval period – that a piece of stone may only be understood for what it really is, if we see God in it. The materials they used were thus transformed in their hands: the slab of marble forming the high altar of a cathedral would be regarded as the very stone upon which Abraham had been willing to offer Isaac, or as the place where sacrifices were made in the temple during Jesus’ time or, most importantly, Calvary, where Christ offered himself for the salvation of the world . . .

Death, Bones, and Bodies — Part 1

Catholic practice centers on things that can be touched, seen, tasted, and smelled. It is sensuous and physical. I often wonder how much understanding we lose the farther and farther away we move from the sensuous experience of death. We do so much today to hide death, to cover it up once it happens, and to put it out of our thoughts. “In the midst of life we are in death,” so says the ancient Anglican liturgy. Well put.

“Remember your death” is the best translation of the Latin phrase, memento mori. Visual artists have painted many memento mori images over the centuries. One famous triptych by Hans Memling is titled “Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation” and hangs in a museum in Strasbourg. In the three-part picture, a beautiful woman stands in the center panel, naked and holding a mirror to see herself, a lovely home and pet dog by her side. Lurking on the two panels beside her are a dead body, once buried and now decomposing, and a devil tormenting humans in hell. Triptychs have a way of telling a story that gets our attention. Sometimes we need a deadly shock of realization in order to see what’s real, and then, to come to life.

A Poem for Good Friday (by R. S. Thomas)

Often I try
To analyze the quality
Of its silences. Is this where God hides
From my searching? I have stopped to listen,
After the few people have gone,
To the air recomposing itself
For vigil. It has waited like this
Since the stones grouped themselves about it.
These are the hard ribs
Of a body that our prayers have failed
To animate. Shadows advance
From their corners to take possession
Of places the light held
For an hour. The bats resume
Their business. The uneasiness of the pews
Ceases. There is no other sound
In the darkness but the sound of a man
Breathing, testing his faith
On emptiness, nailing his questions
One by one to an untenanted cross.

“In Church,” by R. S. Thomas (from his collection, Pieta)

Try not to be clever

“When you are here, don’t walk around looking for moments of enlightened insight,” my monk-friend, Ambrose, once advised me.

“For one thing, we’re not that smart!” He laughed.

“Instead, you should walk around the monastery grounds just praying. Sit in the church before dawn, praying. Or just shut your mouth for a few days. Listen to the talks given by the retreat master, if you like. Just sit. Try your best to stop thinking.”

It sounded too easy to me. I told him that.

“What I’m suggesting is much harder than you might think. You’ll see.”

At that point, I felt the need to lighten things up. “What about a little old-fashioned scourging? Wouldn’t that be easier?”

“Yes, well,” he said, smiling, “we Trappists aren’t much into asceticism anymore. Beating yourself up doesn’t do for you what the monks of earlier centuries thought it would do. In fact, it only confuses things further,” he explained, as if he knew whereof he spoke. This is a monk who started out long before the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. He used to sleep on a wooden plank in winter in a mostly unheated dormitory.

“So, here’s your ascetical work for this week: Try your best not to be clever or insightful. Try your best not to look in the mirror. If you’re lucky, you’ll uncover some of your truer self before you leave.”

Doubt is the faith that really binds us together

Read my complete HuffPo blog post — on this topic — here.

The need for an Italian Jesus

Adding to his evidence (never stated outright as such) that Padre Pio’s stigmata may have somehow been manufactured, Sergio Luzzatto (in Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age) explains in great detail how, when it happened, the Italian people were attempting to understand their suffering during World War I.

Remember that the stigmata event was recorded as happening on September 20, 1918 — after a series of setbacks for the Italians, already several years of suffering, and horrors of trench warfare that had never before been witnessed. Padre Pio returned from the war (he was an enlisted priest/soldier), had his experience, and rapidly became an “Italian Jesus.” Within a year, pilgrims were flocking to see him in droves, and the friar’s ongoing suffering was viewed as redemptive for all of Italy.

Did Padre Pio fake his stigmata?

Sergio Luzzatto sure seems to think so, although he walks a fine line in his new bio of talking respectfully of the Church and the saint, while slowly building up the evidence against the veracity and authenticity of the stigmata.

In chapter 2, “Neurosis and Beatitude,” he trots out the usual witnesses for the defense, including Dr. Luigi Romanelli, who declared Padre Pio’s wounds to be of supernatural origin. And then he introduces the reader to Amico Bignami, professor pathology at the University of Rome, who met with the friar, found him to be lively, sweet, and good, and yet, neurotic.

Most interesting in chapter 2, however, are Luzzatto’s suggestions of what ample opportunity Padre Pio had while serving in the Italian military to learn malingering, how to simulate illness, and how to self-mutilate. As Luzzatto explains, many of the priests serving in the Italian army of the First World War did just these things. It was just after Padre Pio’s term in the military that he returned to his Capuchin monastery of San Giovanni Rotondo and experienced the wounds of Christ.

Sergio Luzzatto’s book on Padre Pio

Join me beginning Monday for a week of ongoing book review of this fascinating new study.

Italian historian Sergio Luzzatto writes beautifully (and the translation from the Italian is well-done), documents his research thoroughly, and mixes contemporary and cultural references with traditional doctrine and hagiographical analysis. At the start of his book, he cites a recent Italian study that today’s Italians venerate St. Padre Pio more than St. Francis of Assisi, the Virgin Mary, and even Jesus. All the more reason why this critical biography is so needed.

Ronald Knox on (the) baptism (of desire)

I should certainly be very much surprised if I found myself in a heaven which didn’t contain Socrates and Plato and Virgil and plenty of other people who, at first sight, would have no right to be there. How it is that such souls come to be saved we don’t know. Some have thought that at the very moment of death, and perhaps even after the moment at which a doctor would give a certificate of medical death, an illumination is given to them which, if they accept it, will achieve the baptism of desire. Others prefer to think that the desire of baptism can be implicitly contained in an act of love towards God, even an act that is confused, even an act that is inarticulate. We don’t know.

–Ronald Knox, from “The Unconscious Catholic”