A Logical Absurdity

 April 14, 1990

A Logical Absurdity

In the end, faith comes down to this: either it is given or it is not; either it is altogether absurd, or it is absolutely necessary. I suppose that is why, through the ages, believers and non-believers have had equal difficulty explaining their respective positions. Quite simply the God thing just boggles the human mind. Whether for a Thomas Aquinas or a Bertrand Russell it defies the most rigorous rationalization.

On such account, I rather like what the contemporary Italian philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco, a lapsed Catholic, once told an interviewer who asked whether he had ever considered any other religion: ”Between a logical absurdity and an illogical one, I would rather have the first.” In other words, whether you believe or not, you might as well go the whole hog.

The Catholic religion is built upon all kinds of rituals commemorating the sacred mysteries. None are more ancient and extravagant than those of Holy Week. None demonstrate what Eco refers to as a logical absurdity in more explicit and systematic a fashion. In but four short days unfolds the greatest drama of all times, a tale of defeat and triumph both compounding and compelling.

Thursday the Son of God, the Savior of the World is betrayed. Friday he suffers and dies on the cross like a common thief. Saturday he lies entombed, his life and teachings seemingly come to naught, his loved ones and followers thrown into blind terror and utter confusion. Sunday, as he had promised, he rises victorious from the grave.

True, the whole story is absurd, but in the end, it is also logical, as logical as the very pattern of nature, the cycle of life and death that maintains and nourishes the earth, is necessary and ineluctable.

Most of us no longer see that, of course. But before scientific progress alienated man from the soil and other living forms; before it obliterated the distinction between night and day and blurred the passage of the seasons; and before it held up the possibility of an indefinite sojourn on this planet, faith merely confirmed to our Christian forbears the higher meaning of what daily they perceived with their own senses.

They saw the sun wane at dusk, as they saw darkness yield to light at dawn. In winter animals hibernated and the fields lay frozen and fallow, but all of nature stirred anew with the advent of spring. Vines withered and then flowered. Seed had to die before being sown and germinating into new life beneath the ground, and wheat when ripe was cut down and winnowed.

Today we have come to call Black Saturday. Understandably, for indeed it is the bleakest time of the year, numbed as we have been by the orgy of pain and sorrow of the past two days and still in the dark as to its real intent and final outcome.

It is winter in our soul as outwardly the Church manifests only emptiness and desolation: the altar is left bare, the sacrifice of the mass is not celebrated, and holy communion is given only as a viaticum. But the surrounding gloom is attenuated by our certainty of his rising. We know it will come, and soon.

Tonight, towards midnight, we will celebrate His resurrection. At the Easter Vigil, a single large taper will be lit and introduced into a totally blackened church. And as we chant Lumen Christi, the Light of Christ, we will each draw light from that source until all darkness is dispelled.

What we do externally we shall do internally as well, for later in the mass we will also renew our baptismal vows, promising to reject Satan, the father of sin and the prince of darkness, and to live in the freedom of God’s children.

For a Catholic, no rite could be more meaningful and poignant than this evening’s, and no truth deeper or more compassing than the passage from death to life it commemorates. Without it our Lenten observance would be pointless, and our Easter joy incomplete.

The Meaning of Sin

 April 12, 1990

The Meaning of Sin

In olden days, today was when sovereigns distributed Maundy money, specially minted silver coins, to the needy. The practice must have harked back to the 30 pieces of silver for which Judas betrayed Jesus. Doubtless the high and mighty of yesteryears resorted to this symbolic sharing of largesse to expiate their own perfidies. Through it they sought to bear witness to the message of Christ’s passion and resurrection, which is that of greed overcome through generosity, sin transformed by grace.

No such bounty awaits our people now in the hands of those who preside over their lives. Not only is there no reprieve from their grinding poverty; today, total darkness also threatens this parched land. To many these are clear signs that the mandate of heaven has been withdrawn and that the anger of God has been unleashed. They are harsh warnings that without cleansing and contrition, there will be no redemption and resurrection.

At EDSA our prayers were answered: the sea parted to let us through and then swallowed the chariots of the pharaoh. But in exchange for our hour of deliverance, we turned contumelious and haughty anew. Our leaders schemed and squabbled. We grumbled and rebelled, resuming worship of false idols and graven gods. After four years of aimless wandering in the desert, surely the time has come to acknowledge how far we all have strayed from the law, from the path of righteousness.

We must accept that human frailty, rather than divine severity, has caused our plight, and the reason we have brought so much pain and suffering upon ourselves is that given every opportunity to do well by ourselves and others, we have chosen to do otherwise. That at its most basic is the meaning of sin.

To err when we shouldn’t and needn’t is failing sorry enough. But sin is not just wilful folly; in many instances it is also a deliberate refusal to share with our fellowmen what they need and what we can give to make life more equitable and bearable for all. Selfishness – lack of kindness  and compassion – is by far the more grievous offense, as it tempts others to despair of man’s goodness and God’s justice.

It is worse, not just because it is also more insidious and endemic. It is worse because at its root is pride, the sense, if not the conviction, that we deserve to live fully and others not, and that what we are and have is owed to our being better at what we do than the rest.

To sin, in such light, is to forget that we are all sons and daughters of the same Father, and that He has made us to be each other’s keeper and custodians of the same earth, whose goods we must therefore enjoy in common and in more or less equal measure. It is to lose sight of the truth that without Him we would not be, and that without his love and mercy we are nothing.

Above all, then, this is the lesson that Jesus, His Firstborn’s agony and death teaches us: the highest and greatest must be the last. For how can it be otherwise for us, when He who is without sin has seen fit to bear all our sins?

This is the time to remind ourselves of how far we are still from the ideal of total giving and self-forgetting, wherein the salvation of mankind ultimately lies. Today and tomorrow we must mourn, not just the dying of our God, but the reason why it had and has to be: our continued wavering in the choice between His cross and our silver.

Let us endeavour to see, in the dry and dark season that the blindness of our leaders and our own wastefulness have brought upon us, not just a reproach to inconstancy and weakness, but a call to penitence and pardon.

 

Of Nuns and Monks

 March 31, 1990

Of Nuns and Monks

Sad, but just about the only time the cloistered variety make the news these days, it sems, is when they get involved in a scandal. For instance:

Eight Poor Clares in Bruges, Belgium landed in the April 2 edition of Newsweek by providing handsomely for their retirement. They sold their convent for $1.4 million, bought a $110,000 Mercedes limo, a farm, and a string of race horses, and relocated to a chateau in the south of France. Agence France Presse, on the other hand, reported the other day that “A mother superior and an abbott in charge of neighboring religious establishments in Normandy, Northwestern France, have resigned after falling in love. It quoted the local bishops as saying the two had given up their posts “for sentimental and emotional reasons>”

Now such stuff may give some of our born-again brethren a rise, but those of us less given to passing judgment on other people’s faith should find therein an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of the monastic vocation, on the joys and hardships of living the gospels in common.

Nuns and monks turn their backs on the world and embrace poverty, chastity and obedience on the Lord’s assurance that between Martha and Mary, the sisters of Lazarus, it is the latter who has chosen the better part. While Martha busied herself with running the household, Mary merely sat and listened at Jesus’ feet. She was the first contemplative.

To those who follow her example, leaving mother, father, brother and sister behind, Christ has promised a hundredfold in this life and everlasting happiness in the next. So why are the Poor Clares feathering their nest, and why are these superiors abandoning their respective communities, the religious families of which they are both father and mother, to take solace in worldly love? The answer, of course, is human frailty.

We seculars who live in an over-stimulated environment normally equate human frailty with lust, the weakness of the flesh. Contrary to lore, however, not all problems inside the cloister are reducible to sex or the lack of it. The young and hot of blood doubtless find celibacy a major stumbling block, but the more advanced in religious life frequently find the other two vows even more problematic.

The nuns in Bruges, for instance. The eldest, who is 93, can neither see, hear nor walk. The others can’t be that much younger or better off health-wise. What you have here is eight retirees living by themselves in a convent probably built for 50, with no one to take care of them or help out with the housekeeping chores.

Being Poor Clares, they presumably have no regular source of income. Mostly they must rely on donations to subsist, but in most places the days of generous benefactors is long gone. It should be struggle enough for these sisters to feed themselves regularly and pay for the heating on time. Where will they get the funds to repair buildings more ancient than themselves? And what happens if one of them gets hospitalized or requires major surgery?

With the old, it is insecurities, rather than urges, that are a problem, but what about those in between like the two superiors in Normandy? We do not know about the lady but the gentleman is a Benedictine abbot of 49. Normally abbots are not appointed, but elected by the members of the community themselves. Presumably, therefore, we are dealing with a person of considerable maturity, talent, and leadership abilities. What happened?

The simplest explanation would seem to be that the fellow fell madly in love. But in most instances, we know that love is only the symptom, rather than the malady itself. In this case, perhaps we’re looking at a classic case of what students of human behaviour call a mid-life crisis, from which not even men and women of the cloth are spared.

Quite simply, a person wakes up one fine morning feeling empty and unhappy, troubled that his or her existence is meaningless, and that everything is for naught. Accedie, ennui is what the old monks used to call it, to cure which spiritual demon they took cold showers early in the morning, fasted on  bread and water, and spent many hours on their knees.

For many that harsh penance worked, but now that we enjoy, post Vatican II, the so-called liberty of the children of God, we are inclined to be more gentle on ourselves, and therefore also less rigorous in our observance of monastic discipline.

All right for our nuns and monks to be human, I guess, but isn’t the Lord and Master they serve a jealous one? Then and now, I’m afraid he doesn’t look too kindly on half-measures.