Vocation discernment time...
Friday, December 29, 2006
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Salvation Begins at Home: The Holy Family and the Analogia Entis (Part 2)
In my last article I gave a brief introduction to the notion of the Analogia Entis and how this idea gives special meaning to the Feast of the Holy Family; Mary and Joseph embody the "first ripples" of the Incarnation, and together with Jesus they form an even more explicit revelation of God's love than an abstract notion of Jesus apart from his family or his life. In this article, I hope to explain more deeply how the Holy Family itself sends ripples of meaning in all directions. By this I mean that the Holy Family not only tells us something about families and about the Church (the horizontal direction) but it even tells us something about the God who, through the Incarnation, is both its creator and one of its members (the vertical direction).
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Salvation Begins at Home: The Holy Family and the Analogia Entis (Part 1)
When Mr. Carpenter invited me to write an article for his magazine, he felt it necessary to remind me that I should write simply; as though for USA Today--not the New York Times (much less the New Yorker)! I have not forgotten the warning. But in my taste for mischief I did let slip some Latin into the title. Mea culpa!
Speaking of mischief, I wonder how many Catholics have had the all-important discussion of whether the child Jesus ever got himself into trouble. Anyone who can remember being a child, I imagine, knows how easy it is to upset "Mom and Dad" without actually sinning. After all, such was the case in Luke's account of young Jesus losing himself among the crowds in the Temple, only to be found impressing the local clergy with his "understanding and his answers" (Luke 2:47). Perhaps it would be mischievous to ask why the only Scriptural account of Jesus' adolescence shows him involved in, shall we say, holy mischief. Maybe the evangelist felt that, amid all of the testimonies he had collected, prudence and edification demanded that only one should be published.
Yet neither Luke's goal nor my own is to sentimentalize the Holy Family, or to make its important moments into fodder for cheeky humor. Rather, I only point out the delight of the Feast of the Holy Family: it reminds us that our God, and First and the Last, Coeternal with the Father, saw fit to have a "Mom and Dad". So far as our human history is concerned, salvation begins at home--Jesus' home, this household of three, this little seed, out of which sprouts the universal Church and the redemption of the world.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me answer a question: "What is the analogia entis?" In English it is translates as the "analogy of being," which is scarcely more intelligible than the original. But the idea is not hard. In a nutshell, it means that every thing is related to every other thing, and everything together is related to God. Just like you can go to family reunions and guess which relatives belong to the same family tree by their looks, so also we can see how every creature is related as one Family, called Creation, and how this Creation is the child of one Parent, God.
Or consider another image: an object dropped into a still puddle makes ripples that move outward. The shape of the object has an effect on the pattern of the ripples. Perhaps if we knew enough about the ripples, we could guess some things about the shape of the object that made them, even without seeing the object itself. We also see how the ripples are related to each other.
This idea has been around long before Christianity; the Greek philosophers tried to understand God based on what they saw in nature; and the Jews came to understand God through his own revelation in the prophets and patriarchs. That is why Paul can say to the Greeks in Areopagus that God made the nations "that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him" (Acts 17:27); and why the Letter to the Hebrews says, "In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets," (Hebrews 1:1).
But after the Incarnation--that is, after the first Christmas--everything changed. Now, suddenly, the source of the waves was present for all to see. "The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all men everywhere to repent" (Acts 17:30); for "in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom he also created the world" (Acts 1:2); says Christ himself, "He who has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9).
This brings us back to the Holy Family. Now, we would expect that a very large object (say, God incarnate) thrown into the ocean of human history would make some very large waves. Enter Jesus, and the ripples begin even before his birth. The annunciation to Mary by an angel, her union with Joseph, the leaping of the infant John the Baptist in Elizabeth's womb are all the beginnings of Christ's promise to "draw all things to myself" (John 12:32). And while Jesus Christ himself is entirely God without any additions or accessories, still, those waves travel and bring to us (who live on the proverbial shore) ever deeper knowledge of himself, the inner life of the Trinity, and the saving work of God. So it is with the Holy Family. Christ is too big, in a sense, to contain himself and leave the world untouched by his presence. Rather, his truth unfolds in all directions like in a shock wave, beginning with the Holy Family, extending to the Twelve Apostles, encompassing the Universal Church, and extending finally to the whole world.
In my next article, I will show more specifically how the Holy Family is a beautiful and persuasive image extending in all directions--how it is a symbol of the Trinity, a the archetype of the Church, and a model for every family (literally, "bringing the message home").
Speaking of mischief, I wonder how many Catholics have had the all-important discussion of whether the child Jesus ever got himself into trouble. Anyone who can remember being a child, I imagine, knows how easy it is to upset "Mom and Dad" without actually sinning. After all, such was the case in Luke's account of young Jesus losing himself among the crowds in the Temple, only to be found impressing the local clergy with his "understanding and his answers" (Luke 2:47). Perhaps it would be mischievous to ask why the only Scriptural account of Jesus' adolescence shows him involved in, shall we say, holy mischief. Maybe the evangelist felt that, amid all of the testimonies he had collected, prudence and edification demanded that only one should be published.
Yet neither Luke's goal nor my own is to sentimentalize the Holy Family, or to make its important moments into fodder for cheeky humor. Rather, I only point out the delight of the Feast of the Holy Family: it reminds us that our God, and First and the Last, Coeternal with the Father, saw fit to have a "Mom and Dad". So far as our human history is concerned, salvation begins at home--Jesus' home, this household of three, this little seed, out of which sprouts the universal Church and the redemption of the world.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me answer a question: "What is the analogia entis?" In English it is translates as the "analogy of being," which is scarcely more intelligible than the original. But the idea is not hard. In a nutshell, it means that every thing is related to every other thing, and everything together is related to God. Just like you can go to family reunions and guess which relatives belong to the same family tree by their looks, so also we can see how every creature is related as one Family, called Creation, and how this Creation is the child of one Parent, God.
Or consider another image: an object dropped into a still puddle makes ripples that move outward. The shape of the object has an effect on the pattern of the ripples. Perhaps if we knew enough about the ripples, we could guess some things about the shape of the object that made them, even without seeing the object itself. We also see how the ripples are related to each other.
This idea has been around long before Christianity; the Greek philosophers tried to understand God based on what they saw in nature; and the Jews came to understand God through his own revelation in the prophets and patriarchs. That is why Paul can say to the Greeks in Areopagus that God made the nations "that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him" (Acts 17:27); and why the Letter to the Hebrews says, "In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets," (Hebrews 1:1).
But after the Incarnation--that is, after the first Christmas--everything changed. Now, suddenly, the source of the waves was present for all to see. "The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all men everywhere to repent" (Acts 17:30); for "in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom he also created the world" (Acts 1:2); says Christ himself, "He who has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9).
This brings us back to the Holy Family. Now, we would expect that a very large object (say, God incarnate) thrown into the ocean of human history would make some very large waves. Enter Jesus, and the ripples begin even before his birth. The annunciation to Mary by an angel, her union with Joseph, the leaping of the infant John the Baptist in Elizabeth's womb are all the beginnings of Christ's promise to "draw all things to myself" (John 12:32). And while Jesus Christ himself is entirely God without any additions or accessories, still, those waves travel and bring to us (who live on the proverbial shore) ever deeper knowledge of himself, the inner life of the Trinity, and the saving work of God. So it is with the Holy Family. Christ is too big, in a sense, to contain himself and leave the world untouched by his presence. Rather, his truth unfolds in all directions like in a shock wave, beginning with the Holy Family, extending to the Twelve Apostles, encompassing the Universal Church, and extending finally to the whole world.
In my next article, I will show more specifically how the Holy Family is a beautiful and persuasive image extending in all directions--how it is a symbol of the Trinity, a the archetype of the Church, and a model for every family (literally, "bringing the message home").
Thursday, December 21, 2006
Three more pending rants...
I've been "YouTubing" more than I've been blogging lately. But there are some topics that I'm not willing to speak off-the-cuff in front of the camera about. My 9th video actually took three cuts and a little editing to get it acceptable. I hope to turn these topics into videos, but I want to write them down here first so that I have basically what I want to say. Here's my project agenda:
On racism - hidden covert racism; my own reflexive/subconscious racist feelings; the dual nature of racism; the coincidence of discrimination and human standards of excellence; combating racism "from both sides"; the "reverse-rebellion instinct"
- A video response to this guy: "God Help Me, I'm a Christian!"(scraps and notes below)
- A reflection on racism (scraps and notes below)
- My long-promised series on God and morality.
On racism - hidden covert racism; my own reflexive/subconscious racist feelings; the dual nature of racism; the coincidence of discrimination and human standards of excellence; combating racism "from both sides"; the "reverse-rebellion instinct"
Saturday, December 16, 2006
YouTube stuff...
I now have a YouTube channel, with a few videos posted. Pretty boring stuff, for the most part. I'm not very photogenic (filmogenic? cinemagenic?) and my nerves are definitely making me stiff in front of the camera.
Windows Movie Maker is a great, simple little program. Even though my camera doesn't record sound, I was able to record the sound separately and drop the video and audio into WMM with just a few glitches. First, my Dell Pocket PC can't seem to record anything longer than eight minutes; and second, the audio and the video weren't perfectly in sync, so I had to manually cut parts out of the audio track so that the words would fit my lip movements.
As it stands, though, the first two videos (where I don't speak) are my favorites, and I might start a new trend of "speechless" YouTube videos.
At one point I had a clever idea of rubber-banding the camera underneath the bill of my Purdue baseball cap and wearing it to get a first-person PoV. As I wore the camera, I filmed myself writing some thoughts (and complaints about secularistic Internet culture) on the whiteboard. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to see the viewfinder of the camera while I was doing this, and the video was all but worthless since my whiteboard messages were about six inches cut off at the bottom.
Religion debates are all over the place on YouTube, and sadly it's pretty much the same fare as one can find anywhere else on the 'Net. It's also almost completely dominated by irreligious people. One thing that bugged me in particular was how often they used phrases like "my personal philosophy...".
There is no such thing as a "personal philosophy." There are perspectives, of course, but until those perspectives come into contact with a broader world of knowledge and wisdom, it doesn't seem right to me to give them the distinction of the name "philosophy." Nietzsche didn't write, "my personal philosophy is that God is dead." Plato didn't write, "My personal philosophy is that the state should be governed by philosopher kings."
Listen my fellow YouTube amoebas. If you have the cojones to plaster your faces on hundreds of screens all over the world, don't waste our time with "philosophies" that you think are only valid or meaningful for yourself. At least have the courage to suggest that whatever opinion you're deigning worthy of our ears is something more, i.e., a part of the truth, something with bearing on our beliefs. Because then, then, you open yourself up for critique and argument, and you can't hide behind the "I'm OK, you're OK" mantra of the secularist credo.
Windows Movie Maker is a great, simple little program. Even though my camera doesn't record sound, I was able to record the sound separately and drop the video and audio into WMM with just a few glitches. First, my Dell Pocket PC can't seem to record anything longer than eight minutes; and second, the audio and the video weren't perfectly in sync, so I had to manually cut parts out of the audio track so that the words would fit my lip movements.
As it stands, though, the first two videos (where I don't speak) are my favorites, and I might start a new trend of "speechless" YouTube videos.
At one point I had a clever idea of rubber-banding the camera underneath the bill of my Purdue baseball cap and wearing it to get a first-person PoV. As I wore the camera, I filmed myself writing some thoughts (and complaints about secularistic Internet culture) on the whiteboard. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to see the viewfinder of the camera while I was doing this, and the video was all but worthless since my whiteboard messages were about six inches cut off at the bottom.
Religion debates are all over the place on YouTube, and sadly it's pretty much the same fare as one can find anywhere else on the 'Net. It's also almost completely dominated by irreligious people. One thing that bugged me in particular was how often they used phrases like "my personal philosophy...".
There is no such thing as a "personal philosophy." There are perspectives, of course, but until those perspectives come into contact with a broader world of knowledge and wisdom, it doesn't seem right to me to give them the distinction of the name "philosophy." Nietzsche didn't write, "my personal philosophy is that God is dead." Plato didn't write, "My personal philosophy is that the state should be governed by philosopher kings."
Listen my fellow YouTube amoebas. If you have the cojones to plaster your faces on hundreds of screens all over the world, don't waste our time with "philosophies" that you think are only valid or meaningful for yourself. At least have the courage to suggest that whatever opinion you're deigning worthy of our ears is something more, i.e., a part of the truth, something with bearing on our beliefs. Because then, then, you open yourself up for critique and argument, and you can't hide behind the "I'm OK, you're OK" mantra of the secularist credo.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Pending rants
This is just a placeholder. I want to...
- Wrap up some thoughts on music and meaning.
- Discuss the contradiction implicit in rejecting "natural law" arguments against homosexual intercourse and yet defending homosexual marriage on the basis of "civil rights".
- Recap a discussion I had with a half-way deep thinker who believes that there is a "middle way" between agnosticism and religion (ho hum, probably just another "mystic", believes in all religions, blahdeeblah).
Sunday, December 10, 2006
Not Noteworthy analytics!
A couple of weeks ago I set up NN with Google analytics. Great stuff! Here's some interesting facts.
In the last week, I've gotten hits from California, Texas, New York, a couple from the Philippines, one in Australia, and even one from Malaysia.
Keywords used to search for this site include "secular music christian perspective" and "undying occuria" (apparently a Final Fantasy XII fan stumbled on the blog). Also, "amateur shower"... uh, sorry to disappoint.
In the last week, people have linked directly to my post on hope, on Internet secularists, and a couple of my photography posts. The Final Fantasy rant has seen a lot of views, which goes to show that putting abundant references to popular video games is a great way to lure unsuspecting readers! As well, the Secular Quest for Happiness posts have seen a few individual views.
In the last week, I've gotten hits from California, Texas, New York, a couple from the Philippines, one in Australia, and even one from Malaysia.
Keywords used to search for this site include "secular music christian perspective" and "undying occuria" (apparently a Final Fantasy XII fan stumbled on the blog). Also, "amateur shower"... uh, sorry to disappoint.
In the last week, people have linked directly to my post on hope, on Internet secularists, and a couple of my photography posts. The Final Fantasy rant has seen a lot of views, which goes to show that putting abundant references to popular video games is a great way to lure unsuspecting readers! As well, the Secular Quest for Happiness posts have seen a few individual views.
Should I start a YouTube channel?
NN doesn't have many readers. Last week it saw 85 page views, but probably a third of those are my own since it's the first page my browser loads (you know, to remind me when it's been too long since I've posted, and stuff).
I've been watching a bit of YouTube videos and I now ask myself whether I should jump onto that bandwagon. A video Not Noteworthy would give me the advantage of being able to use a whiteboard to make graphical illustrations of some of the thoughts I have on here. But it would have the disadvantage of forcing me to actually talk. I've never spent a long time talking in front of a camera; I somehow doubt that it would be like teaching religious ed. In my Confirmation class, I get pretty wild and animated not just because of the material but because I have the company of my class. Could I explain things compellingly in front of a camera?
It seems like it would be a little difficult to develop interesting presentations in video form. On the other hand, if I had a halfway decent camera and some basic video editing software, I could really show people the sources of my own thinking; actually display book pages with highlighted passages, or take videos of liturgical oddities. I could control the visual context of the presentation; even include music and such.
I dunno, what do people think?
I've been watching a bit of YouTube videos and I now ask myself whether I should jump onto that bandwagon. A video Not Noteworthy would give me the advantage of being able to use a whiteboard to make graphical illustrations of some of the thoughts I have on here. But it would have the disadvantage of forcing me to actually talk. I've never spent a long time talking in front of a camera; I somehow doubt that it would be like teaching religious ed. In my Confirmation class, I get pretty wild and animated not just because of the material but because I have the company of my class. Could I explain things compellingly in front of a camera?
It seems like it would be a little difficult to develop interesting presentations in video form. On the other hand, if I had a halfway decent camera and some basic video editing software, I could really show people the sources of my own thinking; actually display book pages with highlighted passages, or take videos of liturgical oddities. I could control the visual context of the presentation; even include music and such.
I dunno, what do people think?
Friday, December 08, 2006
The secular quest for happiness, continued, and more on music
My last post on this subject was long. Very long. So why am I continuing on? Well, I have more source material.
In the first place, I copied a version of my essay into a forum populated mostly by non-religious older teens and twenty-somethings, in a section meant for indy music fans. Although none of my references were to indy bands (we don't have an indy music station in Tucson), the forumites actually appreciated the bulk of what I was saying, although the thread was eventually sidetracked into a common discussion of whether "Christian rock" was worthwhile (with some interesting points).
One user made a post in the thread (which I will copy here if I get his OK) expressing his own existential angst; he said something to the effect of, 'everything we do is to forget that we will die.' It reminded me of a line from Pascal's Pensees: "Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair."
I've been distracted; I hope to finish this later.
In the first place, I copied a version of my essay into a forum populated mostly by non-religious older teens and twenty-somethings, in a section meant for indy music fans. Although none of my references were to indy bands (we don't have an indy music station in Tucson), the forumites actually appreciated the bulk of what I was saying, although the thread was eventually sidetracked into a common discussion of whether "Christian rock" was worthwhile (with some interesting points).
One user made a post in the thread (which I will copy here if I get his OK) expressing his own existential angst; he said something to the effect of, 'everything we do is to forget that we will die.' It reminded me of a line from Pascal's Pensees: "Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair."
I've been distracted; I hope to finish this later.
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
On a forum today...
Former Catholic: "Jesus didn't preach about shepherds to tell Christians that they need to become sheep."
John chapter 10, man. Baaaaaaaa.
John chapter 10, man. Baaaaaaaa.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)