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Humanity was built for love, and unless we love, we are less human. To give is affirming of our existence, and ultimately humanizing. Indeed, the whole of human freedom is built upon this.
What is our freedom? Is it freedom to do what we please?
Is this the freedom for which Christ has liberated is?
Indeed, how did Christ liberate us? Was it not his death on the cross?
Christ’s death was an act of radical love, the complete gift of self, and indeed, the greatest love-gift possible, as he himself said “No man has greater love than to lay down his life for his friends.” This act of love opened for us a new covenant as the sacrifice of the Passover lamb initiated another, and into this paschal mystery we enter through our baptism.
By our baptism, we are initiated into the family of God, and called and gifted holiness — and what is holiness but to love? The goal and purpose of Christians is not just to preach salvation so that heaven might be peopled, but to preach Christ and Christ crucified, the fulcrum of history and axis of the universe, so that all may enter into God’s family and live the lives for which we were meant.
From the very beginning, man was called to live in the radical gift of self, complete and unwavering. As I’ve written in the past,
“If I love,
I cut my chest
and wrest my heart
and thrust myself through
the veil of death,
hand myself over
leaving nothing.
I would no other
way of dying.”
Man was made for this — to live and die for others, in service to all and in love for all, and the great tragedy is that we’re all too damnably selfish to do it. The new covenant makes it possible for man to live in this way, in the complete and total gift of self, even to death. This is Christianity — the fissure healed, the injury soothed, the rift shut, and man restored to man’s proper dignity — sacrificial love. Christianity is thus properly the only really humanizing humanism.
We find our completion and healing from our brokenness in Christ, the Christ who has freed us from sin and brought us into God’s family,
whose flesh we share,
whose name we bear,
in whose house we reside,
and being thus righted, restored to us our humanity. Only in Christ is man brought here, only in Christ may we be brought out of Egypt. But we aren’t pulled out of slavery just so that we can speak and shout about how happy we are that we’re going to heaven, and wouldn’t you like to go, too? Rather, we are made more human, and are then called to live fully human lives, the complete transformation, total theosis. Saint Athanasius wrote “God became man so that man might become God,” or rather, that God’s incarnation occurred that we might be fully remade in an image and likeness we have long since forsaken. This is a total change to human life, to our lives, and requires far more from us than simply witnessing to others.
I was hungry, and you fed me
I was thirsty, and you gave me drink
I was imprisoned, and you visited me
I was naked, and you clothed me
The very core of our faith is to love God and to love others, with the same devotion and protection as we do ourselves, indeed, to count ourselves as nothing and seek only for others — to be made totally fire.
Behold our God who calls us! Behold our God who asks so much! Live as free men, not as slaves, for we have been freed by Jesus Christ, by Jacob’s God!
I love it when stereotypes are somehow broken. I like it when people act in ways truly bizarre to those outside their heads. This is true of racists, as well.
The fact is that nobody gets up one morning and decides to be and do evil. Everyone acts according to their own sense of what’s right and what’s wrong, and sometimes that gives us gross evil and sometimes just…strangeness. I’m consistently amazed to find how many racist groups are less about murder than they are, at least in theory, about separation. In the same way I was shocked to find that Zora Neale Hurston supported segregation, here’s some Klansmen for Obama.
From the article:
“Obama might be a better candidate for our cause because he’s racially conscious. One of our big things in the National Alliance is to raise the racial consciousness of our people. Young whites in universities, they’ve been stripped of any kind of racial identity. Obama may be a racist in a positive sense for his people — that will awaken a lot of the whites, knock some sense into them. They’ll see that non-white Americans are allowed to be proud of who they are, to be racially conscious, to talk about their people or their community without being attacked as being racist. Let’s face it, white people aren’t going to fight for their causes, for their kind with a white president. I don’t think McCain even acknowledges that a white race exists. He’s all about granting amnesty to illegal aliens. The fact he wants to keep us in wars in the Middle East for 100 years, that’s not a good thing. I give Obama credit, he seems to have stuck to his guns as far as pulling the troops out of Iraq. He’s a very intelligent man, an excellent speaker and has charisma. John McCain offers none of that. Perhaps the best thing for the white race is to have a black president. My only problem with Obama is perhaps he’s not black enough.”
Whuda thunk that white supremacism had nuance?
Today was Free Book Day a James Branch Cabell Library, where they try to unload all the crap they couldn’t sell during the library sale to make way for new material. Free Book Day generally is the bottom of the barrel, but there’s some jewels in there if you’re willing to look. I, of course, went and found five of them.
Just what I need. I already have a sizeable library of two- to three-hundred books, most of which I’ve either not read at all or started, got halfway through, and got sidetracked before finishing. I’m a book packrat. I buy books. I buy them used, I buy them cheap, I buy them on whims and never touch them again. And don’t get me started on free or discounted books. I have them by the armload. It’s a problem, and I’m never entirely sure what to do about it. Most of my reading time is bound up in class; I have three lit classes this and next semester, and in between, I’m never entirely sure where to start.
- Strauss and Howe’s Generations?
- Liturgies of the Western Church?
- Against the Apocalypse?
- Under A New Sky: A Reunion with Russia?
- Alistaire Cooke’s Six Men?
- End of Empire?
- Germany Tried Democracy?
- The Jewish Law?
- Vatican II In Plain English?
- Witness to Hope, yet again (never finished it)?
- A History of the Weimar Republic?
- A Long Way Down?
- The Upanishads?
- Troilus and Cresyde?
- A Farewell to Arms?
- The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton?
- Understanding the Bible?
- An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan?
- Women in Love?
- To the Lighthouse?
- Being Geniuses Together?
- Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation?
- Man Ray’s Montparnasse?
- True at First Light?
- Babylon Revisted?
- Big Sur?
- Tender is the Night
- Mystics?
This is my reading list. Geez.
Short answer? No.
Long answer? No, because.
The Catholic Church is not based on the bible. I know, I know, that’s a weird thing for a Church to say about itself, almost an anathema, eh? But it’s true. We’re not. So how can that be?
Modern church foundations, you know, how denominations happen, are generally that someone reads the bible, disagrees with a present interpretation in some way, and feeling that he has the truth, decides to set up a church which incorporates this and other teachings which this guy has gleaned from the Scriptures. Ideally, it’ll be pretty internally consistent, too, and all of the things this church believes are things they found in the bible.
That’s a great process if you want to start up a new church, but what if your Church existed before the New Testament was written? Guess what? Ours did.
Regardless of whether or not you think Catholicism is a sort of pure and ancient Christianity (which I happen to), or that it’s been hopelessly compromised, there is a pretty well-established institutional unity dating back to at least the early second century, meaning that its direct institutional roots lay with the Apostles, meaning we pre-date the New Testament.
This basically means that we have, by necessity, a fairly different view of how to read and use the Scriptures. Since we were already kickin’ for a couple decades when the first epistles were written, and were coming up on our first century when the last of the NT was completed, and damn near in our third century when the NT was definitively compiled, and in our sixteenth when it was finally made official — we understand the Scriptures as being a tool, a gift.
We love and cherish the Scriptures, which are proclaimed from the pulpit every week. We respect the Scriptures. We study and know them. We learn from them and dialogue with them. But they quite simply are not our foundational documents, because we were already there when they happened.
We don’t really base the Eucharist on John 6 or the Last Supper narratives as present in Mt, Mk, and Lk, because we were doing the Eucharist before they were written; they were written, partly at least, as catechetical tools, aids for teaching and learning, the writing-down of the stories we were already telling, the compiling of our knowledge and memory of Christ, and especially with John, a theological exploration of who he was. But all of this predates them.
The same with Paul’s epistles; he was giving advice to churches already established, recording his remonstrations and prayers for them, instructing them in a faith that already existed before he wrote a single word.
As a record of our roots and our origins, as sacred writing, as profound theology which we have taken into our deposit of faith, we love the Scriptures. But the Church comes before it. The Church is the body of Christ, and his self-revelation is not the Bible, but the Man. And we had the Man first.
