Desperation and evil

Sometimes, while listening to the news about various horrible events, I reflect on the traditional "seven deadly sins" (the wikipedia article here is fantastic). I am especially keen on the groupings of all of the sins into three: concupiscent (lust, gluttony, greed, envy), irascible (wrath), and "intellectual" (pride, vanity, despair, sloth).

Notice there are nine items here. The modern version combined pride and vanity into one, and despair and sloth into one. I think it's helpful to keep them distinguished. One can be vain without necessarily being narcissistic. Vanity or vainglory carries the connotation of futility, which I might loosely interpret as superficiality. A preoccupation with the meaningless.

Similarly, despair and sloth are related but not the same. Sloth or acedia (pronounced by one of my professors "aksedia") is more like what we would call clinical depression. And it is a mental illness. But calling something a mental illness does not completely empty it of moral significance. If one feels himself slipping into acedia, and he cannot overcome it by sheer force of will, then there is a moral obligation to find help and to persevere.

Despair, however, is less about activity (or the lack of it), but about ideas. Absolute despair is despair of God; but there can also be despair of friends, of love, of one's own prospects.

Anyway, as I listen to the news, I think about the collective sins that are sweeping the world, including my own, and I wonder how the traditional classifications apply.

In the first place, I think of poverty-stricken communities that coalesce into gangs, and here I believe desperation reigns. In terms of sheer numbers, I imagine that most crimes are desperate crimes. Desperation has the ability to turn any decent, good natured person into a criminal; even a murderer. On Paul Kennedy's "Ideas," I learned about Thucydides, who understood this well. Depravity is not a condition of some people, but a latent character of each of us when pushed to our physical and emotional limit. "War takes away the easy supply of daily wants, and so proves a rough master, that brings most men's characters to a level with their fortunes."

How does desperation fit into the classical schema of sins? I am not sure that it does. Desperation is not born out of an over-reaching desire for what is not God. Rather, it is born out of an unreflecting impulse to the sudden loss of the entitlements due the human creation of God. It is the self-defensive reaction to violations of human rights and dignity. When food, water, shelter, and companionship are all robbed (whether by human agency or nature), the victim may enter into a mindset determined to reacquire these these things. The desperate mindset will place this re-acquisition at a higher priority than the lessons of civilization of which the comfortable human mind is more capable.

And there you have it: gangs. Collectives of fear within an atmosphere of hostility (cyclically reinforced), for whom the solitary rule increasingly becomes: whatever it takes, whatever works, to protect us and ours. Desperation is at once the greatest threat to civilization and the primordial foundation of it.

But desperation plays a much larger role in human behavior than this. Gangs are perhaps the most basic level of organized desperation. But feelings of desperation can obtain at every level of material wealth and comfort. Perhaps because of this, we can assign a spectrum of culpability to the phenomena of desperation.

The crimes of a truly desperate person might be forgiven on the grounds that, at the limits of human survival, few would act otherwise.

But the crimes of one who merely feels desperate, because of delusions or an exaggerated sense of entitlement, are less excusable. The wealthy who sacrifice thousands of jobs out of fear that their stock might be worth less the next morning. The husband who philanders out of fear that he will never have another chance to feel the thrill of fresh affection.

This exploration reveals that desperation is, in reality, a synonym for the irascible passions--the passions "against" something--in particular, the passions against loss. So desperation is really the opposite side of the coin of wrath, of extreme anger. But whereas wrath is directed at an "enemy", desperation is directed at a "need".

Desperation and anger are of course very close siblings. The whole phenomenon of scapegoating (thank you René Girard) is based on this partnership.

To that extent, aren't all sins, in some respect, desperate? No. The excesses of comfort and security invite a host of evils that have nothing to do with the fear of loss...

[sigh, the necessities of life].

The child in all of us

One may have noticed that my interest of late has not only been romantic but youthful. As I come closer to age 30 I learn to appreciate how the child in us never really dies. Without undue cult of childhood, I think its safe to say that the truest part of each human being is their childhood self.

This is important. It gets to the heart of successful relationships, good business, and a right relationship with God. When we understand that we are children in adults' clothes, not only will it transform he way we relate to each other, but it could be the salve to relieve "my" pain at life's endless disappointments.

Why is such a simple, basic truth obscured? Well, it's misunderstood. A lot of "inner child" talk is caricatured as patronizing. But patronization assumes that "I" myself don't accept my own status as a tall child. Only someone who imagines himself an adult among children can be patronizing.

But the reality is so elemental. We're helpless when we're born. We're helpless when we die. And in-between, the only difference is ultimately a facade. An important facade, but a facade nevertheless. Culture runs on facade. But culture serves the individual, who is and remains a child.

"I love you so much."

I'm currently reading a book, "A Happy Marriage" by Rafael Yglesias. It's a bitter sweet story, a mostly autobiographical novel about a 30-year marriage, told alternately from the vantage points of its beginning, and its end in Margaret's death.

I'm not quite half way through the book yet, so whatever I say at this point will be modest. However, there is a line in one of the sad chapters that touched me: Margaret tells Enrique, "I love you so much. I love you so much."

What an amazing modification.

In my present early years with Laura, my "I love yous" come abundantly, and each one searches for some way to top the one that came before it, sometimes failing. It's a tough exercise in creativity, actually. I expect the torrent to continue indefinitely for the foreseeable future. At the very least, their scarcity would be conspicuous.

But with the neverending "I love yous" comes a worry that the words threaten to become habitual, and perhaps eventually even hollow. This possibility terrifies me. And so each one is spoken self-consciously. If the words ever escape my mouth unthinkingly, I scramble to find a way to rescue them from banality. If the words are ever a mere echo of the past, they must be filled with novel, present-moment sentiment. That sometimes takes effort, but it is a pleasure, especially when it brings Laura a smile.

Margaret's words, "I love you so much," affected me in three ways.

First, she is topping her husband's preceding "I love yous," not competitively, but appreciatively and complementarily. With her words she acknowledges and reveals her awareness that her husband's "I love yous" are sincere without embellishment, and that she is absorbing them.

Second, Margaret's words reveal to Enrique a fresh sincerity in her love. In the novel, he is insecure, and he has not been adequately attentive to, or trusting of the fact of Margaret's adoration. With the tiny modification, "so", Margaret in her dying dispels decades of insecurity. In its simplicity and innocence, "I love you so much" is a child's verbal squeeze of affection.

Third, the word "so" always indicates something new and fresh. Maybe the word "so" is excused from ever being over-used. It's a constant renewal. "The grass is so green". "The mountains are so beautiful." "The day is so nice." The tiny word does a lot of heavy lifting, carrying so much weight as a banner of immediate, present-moment character.

And so, if I sometimes neglect to adequately embellish my "I love yous", I have, for the time being, a fallback

I love you so much.

Fulfilling human desire.

"My heart is restless until it rests in thee." Saith St. Augustine. And I do believe this is true. It belies some of the more austere and stoic expressions of Christian faith--the rigid systems that today's disaffected former Catholics say was their lot as children.

Contrary to all of that, there is a basic understanding that the Christian heart should not be restless. But what does it mean for the heart to rest in God?

For Augustine, it did not mean that the heart must disdain everything besides God. Rather, whatever the heart loves, it must love it in God. God becomes the cipher through which our love of everything in the world is purified and made good.

This doesn't mean that all of that Christian tradition of "contempt of the world" is invalid. To love something in God, it is necessary to be willing to give it away. This is the paradox of our existence. It is fine to love something so much that you would die for it. "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends" (John 15:13).

But Jesus' teaching presupposes that the love is already rooted in God. That very same act, of dying for what one loves, can be twisted. Think of Gollum pitching headlong into the lava of Mount Doom, clutching his filthy bauble. The difference is that Gollum's love was not rooted in anything. It was a closed love--a closed system. Therefore it became subject to entropy, self-enervating without the ability to replenish itself from any source beyond.

That kind of twisted, closed love can be had for human beings just as much as inanimate objects. Just because we are God's most sublime creation doesn't excuse us from entropy; and latching ourselves to one-another will not save us from the passing away of the world. And so, yes, we love one-another, but we do so "in God", always opening up our personal interconnections to an infinite source.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

But the above text is not the reason I sat down to write. I wanted to reflect on an emotion I felt one night, while I was driving down AZ79 with Laura, from Florence AZ to Tucson, during our vacation there last March.

The emotion was a flood of pleasant childhood feelings and memories. Listening to the gurgling of a humidifier when I was sick. Mom on Christmas Eve telling me that a red light in the sky was Rudolph. Sleeping in the recliner in my parents' room when I was afraid of a nightmare.

I can't help but think that the most intense longings we have--the longings that drive our thousands of adult efforts--are shaped by our first experiences of tenderness. It sounds like common sense. Pop psychology. But I wonder if it might not be deeply true. How far can we go with this idea? Is our quest for happiness always a reclaiming of happinesses lost? Is the Biblical hope for the New Creation not also in some respect the individual hope for a personal new Eden?

I confess that a part of my excitement and joy at the prospect of being a family man is that Laura and I will have an opportunity to create the same wonders and joys and heavenly comforts for our children that we ourselves experienced. We get to bring back the long-past mysteries of our first life discoveries, and we get to live them again, only this time, as the parents.

Is it wrong to hope to live vicariously through one's children? Only if that means that one's children are nothing more than a vehicle of one's own self-project. We can't ultimately control our children, who they become, or even what they think of us. We can't impose our immature dreams on our children, as if their purpose is to leave a mark on the world in the way I failed to do.

But I don't think it's wrong to take great pleasure in our children's childhoods--to permit them to stoke the old glowing embers of our own childhoods, to relive old moments of tenderness with the same serenity of my eight-year-old self sleeping by the humidifier.

When we become adults, we never cease to be the children our parents loved--and the children that God loves. Everything we once have been subsists inside of a skilled social professional. But the social professional, the solemn choice-maker, the adult, is after all the expression and the servant of a soul that yearns to be held. The mother holding her baby is, at one and the same time, holding and being held; creating a new experience of love and reliving it.

If the elderly sometimes seem more child-like to us, perhaps this is not so much of a regression as an unveiling of what was always there. With age, and with relief from the pressures of professional life, perhaps the adult is allowed to recede a bit and permit the deeper and more persistent self to show.

"...for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these" (Matt 19:14). Jesus may not have been speaking loosely. I have heard priests explain that Jesus meant to emphasize a child's openness and faith. That may be true, but I think more can be said. To be child-like is to be vulnerable and passive in a way that we always are before God, but which we hide as adults to protect ourselves from a world broken by sin. Maturity is a defense mechanism--and a good and necessary one. But when the world has finally passed away in full, what need do we have for maturity in Heaven?

I need to make a distinction. The absence of maturity, i.e. adult defenses, professional social graces, etc. is not the same thing as immaturity as we conceive of it negatively. There is a difference between the one who is child-like and childish. To be child-like is to be innocent, naive, unafraid, open, awed, wondering. What we call childishness--brattiness, selfishness, etc.--is in fact the unrefined very beginnings of adult defenses.

An analogy. The child-like person might be like a figure skater. Figure skating is innocent of goals, pucks, and sticks. The childish, immature person is the beginner hockey-player. Consider the scene from "The Mighty Ducks" where the kids start by clumsily whacking the puck around. Michael J Fox illustrates their immaturity by replacing the puck with a raw egg, which predictably breaks. By learning how to play hockey with an egg, learning how to gently coax it instead of annihilating it, the Ducks learn maturity.

For Jesus, maturity is necessary and good. "Behold, I am sending you like sheep in the midst of wolves; so be shrewd as serpents and simple as doves" (Matt 10:16). But it becomes obsolete in heaven. The saints in heaven are figure skaters. The saints on earth are professional hockey players. But while on earth, we taste heaven when we put the stick, the puck, and the padding away.

Diagnostic flow-charts.

Recent lessons learned

The dichotomy between feelings and reason is too simplistic. I've paid lip service to this before but I've found concrete evidence of it. That evidence is in love.

In Catholic culture much is made of the fact that true love is not so much an emotion but a choice. I believe this is true. Emotions, as I am fond of saying, are brain chemistry. My intention isn't to belittle emotions but only to point out that, like everything in nature, they are always changing, and are subject to forces beyond our control.

Now here comes the new lesson I've learned: Love is more than emotion, but it can't be less than emotion.

I do not say that occasional dryness bespeaks love's dissipation. Love is no reed blowing in a wind. Love is constant and trustworthy, in a way that feelings, good though they may be, are not.

But neither does true love exist in any kind of vacuum of feeling. In fact, contrary to my previous way of thinking, love doesn't thrive independently of feelings. Absent of emotion, love can subsist meagerly, for a time--perhaps even indefinitely, dormantly, like an animal in hibernation. But such a hibernation is not typical, nor should it be celebrated. In some pairs of lovers, the emotional aspect never flags.

Love without emotion (or very little of it) is a soul without a body. It is an incomplete being; a ghost seeking closure.

Catholic ambivalence about love is that emotional love is a passion. "Passions" is basically another word for emotions, but the formal term "passions" reveals something about them, namely, that they affect us. We are "passive" to them. By calling them passions, we illustrate that they are not so much something we do as they are something that happens to us.

Catholic theology has much to say about the passions. We regard them with a wary celebration--a little like the Red Ryder BB Gun of A Christmas Story: "You'll shoot your eyes out!" They are both wonderful and dangerous. Every passion can be directed toward good or evil. The "seven deadly sins" are corrupted passions; for each of them, we can point out a corresponding virtue. Anger becomes courage for justice; sloth becomes temperance; envy becomes a desire to match others' virtue.

The sanctioned approach is to ensure that our passions are rooted in God. Which, for the scholastics, meant rooting them in Truth, made most explicit in reason.

It sounds a little Vulcan (BTW, just saw the new Star Trek movie... best part of it is Leonard Nimoy).

But it's different than the Vulcans in two important ways. First, unlike the Vulcans, we don't say that our passions are in conflict with reason and truth--only that emotions are best when they are molded by reason and truth.

And second, our natural passions are meant to be understood as faint shadows of something which is supernatural--the ineffable, wordless, mystical aspect of God. Passions and emotions shame the logic's pretensions to know the whole universe. This simple animal function of our organism, this brain chemistry, breaks open our logical deductions into awe, wonder, and speechless gratitude.

Reason and the passions both image God in their own proper way.

Now here's another piece of the puzzle.

We say that God loves, and that God desires (i.e., he desires us). Now, technically, God can't desire because desire is a form of passion. God can't have passions, since God is not passive. This is just jargon for saying that God isn't affected by anything; he's always the one doing the affecting. Since God isn't affected (by nature, by forces, by sad movies), God doesn't have affections.

But if that's true, how can God love? Even more difficult, how can God desire? Desire is not just a passion, but a whole category of passions: the concupiscible passions. So it seems impossible to say that God desires.

A few points in response:

First, to say that God desires is a little bit of an equivocation. God's desire is not a passive desire; it is not a passion; i.e., it is not an appetite. God is not "hungry". Just as we can observe that human love is sometimes "hungry"--self-centered, consumptive, needy--God's love conspicuously lacks this dimension. God's desire is always a desire to give himself away. "My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to finish his work" (John 4:34).*

Second, in spite of this, we can still say that God's love is attended by yearning. God is not passive (to emotions); and yet, in his very being, he is eager to give himself away.

What I'm finding here is a passion which is not a passion. In love, there is an experience which is "passionate," but unlike the other passions, it does not become corrupted by its extremes. True love is the only emotion that does not become destructive when it is experienced in its absolute form. Yet it is truly an emotion. Or at least, it is attended by an emotion. An eagerness; a yearning.

Perhaps, in psychology, we have here something like evidence of the uniqueness of a certain emotional phenomenon.

And in theology, we may have here evidence for the presence of grace.

As for me, I have learned: love's emotion is as holy as love's solemn choice.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

* - To be sure, in natural love there is nothing inherently wrong with concupiscence, i.e., being needy. We believe that God himself experienced neediness in Jesus. "I thirst" (John 19:28). Appetites, needs, passions--these are all the curious byproduct of our creation as finite, limited beings. We are a "new" kind of existence, somewhere between the infinite and nothing. Passions are our unique expression.

On sales.

The skills of the salesman are unabashedly manipulative. In a week's training with The Simple Group in door-to-door office supply sales, I learned that the four most powerful tools in the seller's pocket are greed, urgency, fear of loss, and indifference. Unlocking your customer's anxiety is the key to success.

I am a conscientious objector to the predator-prey model of sales. I stake my job and my good name on my ability to subvert and transform that model and also exceed sales expectations. This is possible because all things are possible, and I am a darn good seller.

Sales are the absolute bread and butter of the department. Our technicians' livings don't come from their talent in disassembling laptops but in customer purchases. While, in the long run, our skill and our reputation is important for sales, we must have short-term action on the sales front. We are a business. This is legitimate and good.

So, in this post, I will outline the fundamental principles that run through all of my interactions with customers and that make me an effective salesman.

1. Truth comes first. This is expressed in two parts: fairness, and the good of the customer. This is a priority that I can proudly hold and make explicit to the customer. The foundation of our business relationship is one of transparency and trust. The customer already knows that we are a business. The customer knows that I expect reciprocal fairness for the fairness I provide. The customer can also know that I owe my organization due compliance in exchange for their empowering me to serve the customer. But most importantly, the customer can know that what I want most is to solve their real problems and do it well.

Demolish pretenses, "techniques", and manipulations right off the bat. This is especially true when the customer brings emotions or unfulfillable demands to the table. But it applies to all cases.

1b. Tranquility. Don't underestimate the importance of emotions to our industry. When customers purchase our services they are not purchasing a repaired computer; they are not even purchasing our labor. They are purchasing assurance and relief from anxiety. Customers will pay more for a service they can get elsewhere when assurance and confidence is projected by a department. Comfort is the real product. Your ability to be a comforting presence at the point of sale and throughout the business relationship is paramount.

1c. Realism. Every transaction must be grounded in realistic expectations and fulfillable terms. Never lose sight of limitations on our time and resources when conversing with the customer. We need not advertise our limitations, but assure the customer that the promises we make are good. Do not write a bad check to the customer.

1d. Clarity. Mutual understanding between the technician and the customer must be double-confirmed. Every incorrect belief is a time bomb.

2. Know, love, and trust your product, your company, and yourself. It's easy to be a seller in Fry's Electronics. Our services are cheap and we're *&^% good at them. We do more for our customers than the competition. We will take care of the customer. And if there's any way this has not been true in the past, we will make it true now. I will make it true. For you.

Genuine, sincere pride is a double-virtue in the service industry. It projects a good image and it purifies the operation internally. So long as they are rooted in truth, realism, and clarity, bold statements reassure the customer and create a motivational investment on the part of the technician. But boldness must be rooted in sincerity.

(I am an advocate of units being assigned to the technician who checks them in, with exceptions made when necessary.)

2b. Everybody can afford and will benefit from our services. Failing to offer services is not a failure to sell; it's a failure to serve. Under no circumstances should we be giving customers back filthy, disgusting computers; slow, unoptimized computers with not enough RAM, computers with lost data, or laptops whose wireless function they're not using, or that they're using dangerously on unsecured, poorly configured networks. Why would we allow customers to spend $1000 on a prefab gaming desktop when we can build a better one for $700?

Offering services is not up-selling. It's not, "Would you like fries with that?"

It's consultation and problem solving.

Companies pay technicians a lot of money for expert consultation. We provide that service to individuals for free. Don't be embarrassed to offer services. Be proud of yourself and your team mates. That's team knowledge. There is no IT problem we can't solve together.

On women's clothing.

This isn't something I've given much thought to. To the extent that it relates to feminism, I suppose it doesn't break the mold of this blog much. But here it is: I want to sort through the complexity of women's apparel.

I've never been very opinionated about whether women should dress modestly or not. Being a man, I've never having seen women arguing about how men out to dress, so I figured I'd return the favor. In seminary, of course, I heard talk about women's apparel routinely--how scandalously some women appear when they go to church, etc. I once received instruction (from a close friend) on how women's jeans are tailored to be deliberately seductive, with seam lines directing attention to the crotch.

I haven't missed the irony, that the men most concerned about how women ought to appear seem to spend an inordinate amount of time staring at, analyzing, memorizing the sundry ways they ought not. The objectification of women is a pathology to which both playboy and puritan are susceptible. Perhaps those two are not opposite ends of a spectrum. Perhaps they are, rather, two expressions of a single characteristic: being hot-blooded, and working out ways to deal with it.

Neither caricatures of the puritan or the playboy seem especially concerned with women's subjectivity. The playboy might pay superficial lip-service to the idea that "women can do what they want," but it's only for show. Throwing women's fashion to the lions of the free market can only have one result: a playboy-friendly skimp-fest. Both stances are male-centric; only the puritan is more transparent about it.

But I don't seek to argue that male perception is, or should be, irrelevant to the question. Neither, I think, would most female shoppers. Rather, male perception is one of many factors women think about. How does this make me feel? What aspect of me does this appearance express? What impression will I make on women? On my coworkers? On my family? How comfortable is it?

The issue of male perception remains a part of the whole, but perhaps it should be a lesser part than it presently is.

So given that, there is one word I want to explore and understand: modesty.

The initial impression I get (and I think I'm not alone) is that the word 'modesty' originates with the puritans and will never really shake a puritanical connotation in common speech.

Thou Shalt Chill Out: Gentleness and Catholic faith

A Basic Distinction

"For modern American culture, everything is tolerated but nothing is forgiven, while for Christianity it’s exactly the reverse – many things aren’t tolerated, but everything can be forgiven." --Francis Cardinal George, Archbishop of Chicago

This pithy teaching stuck in my mind from Francis George's homily given at the ordination of a new bishop in late 2005-early 2006. It's also a point from his book, The Difference God Makes. As a sound byte, it might be criticized for generalizing (especially in regards to his description of American culture).

However, as a description of Catholicism, it is spot on.

Here is a basic distinction that I wish had been taught to me when I was learning about my faith as a teenager. On the one hand, you have what the Church teaches. And on the other hand, you have how the Church loves (i.e., how the Church administers care).

We might call these moral theology and pastoral theology.

Or better: what the Church hopes you will do, and how the Church responds when you (of course) didn't do it.

Now, the distilled results of moral theology are available to anybody with a Catechism. That is not the focus of this post. It's the second half, how the Church loves, which feels a little bit neglected in popular discourse.

Here is the basic problem: it is too easy to associate a strict morality with harshness. This is understandable, but it is a mistake. A strict morality is no more necessarily harsh than a lax morality is gentle or kind. Harshness and gentleness are not products of a certain teaching or moral truth; they're products of one's attitude, one's fundamental worldview, one's anthropology.

If someone is harsh, the defect does not lie in the content of his moral opinions, but in his understanding of the human drama.

Let me illustrate, graphically, the difference between living Catholicism knowing What the Church Teaches without knowing How the Church Loves.

The first level represents a catechumen's first lesson in Catholic morality. It's terrifying.

The second level represents a slightly deeper understanding based on some of the complexities of moral theology. Its highs and lows may vary from person to person, as we all try to speculate about how serious our sins really are, erring on the side of mercy or condemnation, as our personalities are inclined.

This is still lacking any sense of pastoral theology. It is only accurate on the most superficial level--a little bit like the pictures of atoms we saw in our 5th grade science textbooks. If followed rigorously and exclusively, it can become misleading and spiritually dangerous. This is, ultimately, only the dark side of the moon. It is time to start looking at the other side.

Breaking Apart the Charts: Sin and Judgment

The Doctrine of Original Sin: (Of Ourselves) We Can't Not Sin.

One of my most inspirational professors was C. Colt Anderson, Ph.D. He is a specialist of medieval church history, and has written about the theology of St. Bonaventure and St. Gregory the Great. He is now a professor at Washington Theological Union.

Dr. Anderson made a point often in his lectures that some of the gloomier aspects of Catholic theology--Original Sin, the Fall, the corruption of the world and humanity--serve to generate an atmosphere of gentleness, not judgement.*

Anderson stressed that the doctrine of Original Sin yields not misanthropy, but humility. To be an understanding Catholic is to be wretched among the wretched. Per Augustine, it is to know that, of ourselves, we do not have the "power not to sin" (posse non peccare). The worldwide Church is groaning in pain. It is true that sanctifying grace gives us the posse non peccare. Nevertheless, the question of future sins for any newborn on this planet is not a possibility; it is a certainty (Romans 3:23).

The misery of the human condition is a fact that Catholicism will not allow attentive listeners to forget. In the high middle ages, it took shape as a celebrated genre of literature, contemptu mundi, "Contempt of the world," the most famous example being Pope Innocent III's "De Miseria Humanae Conditionis".** In it, the Pope describes the suffering and depravity of men with such detail and grit that human accomplishments appears only as so much scum. "Therefore, worm, why art thou proud?"

But the cumulative psychological effect of all of this negativity may be unexpectedly positive. If "there is no one just; not one" (Romans 3:10), then we are all co-conspirators in the world's crime. That fact ought to rob us of the passion to condemn. But how much more strikingly do we feel it, when again and again we run to the confessionals (or the lesser consolations we provide ourselves). There is a camaraderie of the wretched. It is as though a bride and groom, both dressed in white, stood in the middle of a demolition derby on a rainy day. And the drivers all have paint guns. Who will point the finger at who?

Judgment Belongs to God Alone

The Bible is unequivocal about judgement. There is no excuse to judge, not ever. However, some points bear mentioning.

First, we must make a distinction. Judging is not the same thing as discerning moral truths, nor is it the same thing as observing moral realities. If this were the case, the New Testament would invalidate itself, and life would be incoherent. If judgment includes defining moral laws, and there is a moral law against judgment, then the law is illegal (therefore, to judge against judging is also wrong, and we can judge with abandon!)

On the contrary, the sin of judgment involves chiefly two errors. The first is a self-deception: that I know your heart. The second is a blasphemy: that I know your sentence. We can observe actions, but not hearts. And we can provide solutions, but not eternal sentences.

Now, here is the second (and most critical) point: there is no reason why the commandment ought not apply to judging oneself any less than it applies to judging others. At first this might not be clear. After all, I know my own heart in a way nobody else does. I know my intentions, and I know how good/wretched I actually am.

But do I?

As Augustine wrote, addressing God, "You are closer to me than I am to myself."

One does not need to be religious to understand that the human capacity for self-deception is enormous. Ordinarily, we might imagine that self-deception most errs on the side of self- forgiveness and laxity. However, for perhaps just as many people, it errs on the side of self-loathing and spite.

When I sin, the last person I want to be in charge of deciding a just punishment for my crimes is myself. I know. I've imagined the things I thought I deserved. They haven't invented the machines required to carry them out.

And so, the commandment not to judge represents a doorway, not only out of condemning others, but self-loathing as well. Understanding and absorbing this great teaching of Jesus immediately changes the Catholic's understanding of the moral life. Let's chart it.

If we concluded at this point, It might feel a little like we are playing a game in which God is hiding the scoreboard. Our ignorance of the mind of God is little consolation to our guilty consciences. In the end, the temptation remains to operate by to a dangerously incomplete model, even if we acknowledge its being hypothetical.

That is because, up to now, we have operated only on the level of What the Church Teaches. Nothing of what we have said so far has integrated How the Church Loves, or pastoral theology.

Thus, in the immortal words of Leonardo DiCaprio, we have to go deeper.

Replacing the Charts: Pastoral theology, Jesus and the Church

Jesus: The Model of Pastoral Theology

When I was in the seminary, "pastoral theology" was largely synonymous with "breaking rules in order to be nice." It wasn't until after I left, sadly, that the nature and importance of pastoral theology made itself known to me.

Part of the problem was that some of my instructors had developed faulty models of pastoral theology. Either they had grossly sentimentalized Jesus into a milquetoast, feel-good, self-help author; or else they had no model at all save for a mushy, inoffensive, cynical filter for decision-making.

Part of the problem was that my perception was colored by my own, myopic, ahistorical, mechanical, "What the Church Teaches" approach, which was as harsh to me as it was against the people I judged.

Now, Christians are always using Jesus as the model for something. "Jesus this" and "Jesus that". But that is not only because we confess Him as "my Lord, and my God." There is real content here. While our Lord was on earth, he did not only teach--he lived. And so his bullet-points of Dos and Don'ts, while serious business, are not the whole content of the Gospel.

Some highlights from the Life and Times of the Almighty:

• Jesus taught a hard law. His sexual morality was conservative, condemning divorce, and even advocating celibate chastity for those who could. He demanded severing ties to personal property, families, and even sacred duties such as burying the dead. He rewrote the thinking on fairness, setting the principle of sacrifice above the principle of proportionality. And he expected urgent, concrete results and had little respect for his disciples' wishes for personal safety or security.
  
  
• Jesus spent time with sinners, doing things that sinners enjoy. He drank and ate. Sometimes he even supplied the booze. His enemies accused him of being a drunkard and a glutton (Luke 7:34). For Jesus, the presence of sin (even not-yet-repentant sin) was not an obstacle to delight, whether his own or that of his company.
  
  
• Jesus was sparing in his use of harshness. The wrath of Jesus can be seen as having primarily three targets: first, the lazy, cowardly, or fruitless; second, the malicious exploiters of religious authority; and third, communities that definitively rejected his signs and teachings.
  
  The first group includes Peter when he begged Jesus not to go to Jerusalem; the disciples who wanted to bury their dead before following Jesus; and disciples represented in parables (the fig tree; the man who buried his talent; the foolish virgins; the improperly dressed wedding guest, etc.) With regard to the first group, Jesus had a practical license to use harsh words, because their intended audience was already loyal to him. It makes no sense to rib someone for laziness unless they are already oriented in the right direction. In De Doctrina Cristiana, St. Augustine describes the "grand style" of preaching, which can be usefully employed only when one's audience is already loyal (and thus thick skinned).
  
  Concerning the second group, the corrupt authorities, here Jesus reveals a divine intolerance for malice. Showing gentleness toward the malicious would ultimately cause more spiritual harm than confrontation. Malice--especially premeditated, calculating malice--does not call for gentleness.*** Forgiveness, yes, but not a cheap forgiveness.
  
  The third group are the communities that rejected the Gospel. At no point in Jesus's earthly mission did he entertain hopes of universal acceptance. He was pragmatic in his approach. He encouraged his disciples to economize their efforts--do not waste time where it will do no good. Modeling this principle, Jesus did not lay attractive words at their feet. Where his message (and signs) were definitively rejected, he foretold wrath (Matthew 11:21-24) and implied that their obstinateness had fewer excuses than that of previous smitten cities. Yet it is worth noting that even here, Jesus is measured in his language. He does not call them names. He is not indulging in a personal vendetta.
  
  
• At no time did Jesus employ harshness or shame as a response to people bound by sins of weakness. Even his reproaches against the lazy/fruitless can be interpreted as signalling a passionate and frightful urgency--something like this--rather than a "how dare you". This is where the great medical analogy comes into play: "Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do" (Matthew 9:12). Sins are crimes, yes, but they are also wounds.
  
  This connection was deeply understood by the populace of Jesus' day, who, after all, correlated congenital defects with inherited guilt. But in Jesus it represents a genius innovation. If sins are crimes, crimes call for punishment, and criminals will flee. If sins, however, are wounds; wounds call for treatment, and the wounded will gather. Christ the physician transforms the response of his followers to the phenomenon of sin.
  
  
• For Jesus and his followers, the foundation of every interaction was peace and comfort--not anxiety. The words, "Do not be afraid," occur 15 times in the Gospels. The Resurrected Christ introduces himself with the words "Peace be with you." Jesus reasons, "Can any of you by worrying add a single moment to your life-span?" Paul writes to the Philippians, "Have no anxiety at all." Throughout the New Testament, there is a veritable commandment to relax.
  
  How do we reconcile Jesus' repeated calls to "chill out" with his equally repeated calls to drop everything, take risks, and get results?
  
  A dancing analogy. Laura and I are teaching ourselves how to dance. We watched several instruction videos, and tried a few things, but it was all a jumbled (and hilarious) mess. Then, one video she brought home from the library changed things. It was The Wedding Dance with Paul Overton and Sharon Ashe. This video gave more instructions on standing still than any of the others we looked at. Don't lock knees. Loosen the shoulders. Lean slightly into each other. Feel, don't think. Listen to the movements of your partner.
  
  Relax. Relax. Relax.
  
  Now go.
  
  There is no greater enemy in the spiritual life than anxiety and discouragement. Jesus and the apostles understood this. Peace is the foundation. Journey, effort, and even struggle must all have a bedrock of peace. Urgency is built on peace.
  
  For Christians, peace is both the prerequisite for holiness and its final reward. And it must constantly be renewed.

These are the foundations of pastoral theology, which is ultimately the imitation of Christ the Good Shepherd. At no point does Jesus provide any excuse for doctrinal or moral laxity, nor for brutality.

In spite of his doctrinal rigor, Jesus' approach to ministry appears oblivious to the realities presented in my introduction to Catholic morality. Where are the emergency confessions? Where is the "Confession" iPhone app? I speak, a little bit, in jest (although I hear the iPad 2 has a time machine app).

But I gesture in earnest to the example of Christ the Physician, whose message was serious even while his ministry to his patients was joyful, celebratory, and anxiety free. Jesus does not want you to be anxious.

The Catholic Church: For the Saints, a Gymnasium; For the Sinners, a Hospital

The Catholic Church is the spiritual equivalent of Gesundheit! Institute and the U.S. Olympic Training Center combined and writ large. It is a hospital for sinners and a gymnasium for saints.**** It is critical to remember that the patients and the athletes are one and the same. They are also, always, the nurses and doctors, spotters and trainers. Every single one has a debilitating handicap; most have several. And the paraplegic's first toe wiggle is absolutely as momentous as the first nine-second hundred meter dash.

In this model of the Church, it makes no more sense to rally against a moral doctrine than it does to rally against the desire of the paralyzed to walk. It makes no more sense to berate a sinner than for a smoking lung cancer patient to mock their room-mate recovering from a triple bypass.

But pastoral theology is not just an extended analogy of a hospital. It is a realistic and faith-filled encounter of moral theology with life. Some points:

First: All sin, even venial sin, is serious. Nothing in this article is intended to persuade anybody otherwise. A single drop of ink blackens a whole cup of water. Our whole being comes from God, and a tiny peccadillo contradicts the whole God. Be this as it may, Jesus assured us, God's love and forgiveness extends far beyond our imagining. Our meager hearts can forgive great wrongs (with a little effort). Would we dare insinuate that God is stingier than ourselves? So the perspective of faith works both ways: God perceives sin's horror infinitely more than we; and he forgives infinitely more generously.

Second: Sin, even mortal sin, is not a reason to be anxious, for three reasons:

(1) Jesus does not want you to be anxious. We have covered this, but it bears repeating. It's a commandment from God himself. Thou Shalt Chill Out. This is not just a command; it's an invitation to trust. Do not be afraid. Peace be with you. Jesus even appeals to your sense of efficiency! What good does worrying do? What has your furrowed brow accomplished? If God tells you to relax, please, rest assured, it's ok.

(2) God does not desire your condemnation (Ezekiel 33:11). There, see? God is on your side. He is your judge, yes, but he is also your defense attorney. Yes, you sinned... nobody needs to present any evidence. And you really couldn't survive a genuinely proportional punishment. So let's work something out instead.

Consider this small fact: when you sin, even if you rape and murder, you don't vanish and go straight to Hell. Have you ever considered that God would be entirely in his rights and ability to do make it happen? However he does not. Even if you utterly sever your connection to I AM WHO AM, even if you reject the origin of being itself: nothing happens. You can curse God for hours, burn churches, do unspeakable things to the Consecrated Host, and still, air repeatedly fills your lungs, nourishing your silly hairless chimp body for another few minutes of life.

Even when we cut ourselves from the source of life, we live. Our bodies are that amazing. They are not just our interface with the world. They are not just a Temple of the Spirit. They double as the life-raft on the wrecked Titanic of our failed self-projects. As long as my heart beats there is hope. It carries me from Eucharist to Penance and back. As long as the sacraments are there, there is hope. That is how I know that God does not desire my condemnation.

(3) God knows your heart. To illustrate, here is a last bit of doctrine for you. Maybe you've lost the state of grace. And maybe you can't make it to Sacramental Penance. All right. If you're truly sorry, then say yourself an Act of Contrition and make a mental, concrete, sincere plan to go. Don't feel sorry enough? Just let God know, and ask him for the necessary sorrow. Got it? Good. You're covered. Stay sincere, and no Hell for you, even if you died right now. Even if you died halfway through saying the Act. Seriously. It's the truth. Ask any bishop.

This is not magic. It's just the built-in mercy of Catholic faith. Yes, repentance must happen in community because sin is a break with community. But just because Catholicism is not individualistic does not mean that our salvation hangs on an unpredictable thread.

The external observances keep us honest and sincere--they prevent us from paying half-hearted lip service and going our merry (corrupt) way. The externals are necessary and good. God became physical, so why shouldn't our salvation also be physical? But although we depend on the externals, God in himself does not. Therefore, at no point--not during a single minute--of a sincere Catholic's life does he need to expect Hellfire. Pray for salvation from it, yes. Expect it, no.

Last point. Sanctification is gradual. Pastoral theology, in a way, is the practical art of serving God's process of sanctification, both in oneself and in others. And that is the word of the day: process. Time, which is God's creation, is also his instrument of salvation. Sanctification is gradual. This may be frustrating to the moral theologian, for whom "error has no rights." And to be sure, one must never cite the gradual nature of sanctification as an excuse for past (or present) sins.

But I think we should frequently remind ourselves that genius should not be rushed--especially Divine Genius. God is the agent of sanctification, not us. No, we won't be lax in calling for goodness and justice; but also, no, we won't fret or worry. There's no use in it.

After all. God isn't worried. So why should we be?

"All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well." --St. Julian of Norwich

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

End Notes!

* - Dr. Anderson recounted that his own spiritual journey was enhanced, not by coming to accept an easy doctrine, but a hard one: the existence of Hell. When he was a young universalist ("everybody goes to Heaven,") he was filled with intense anger at the injustices of the world. There was no equilibrium. He had absorbed a sense that it falls to us humans to exact the vengeance that the universalist God did not. By learning a new trust in God's justice, Anderson literally disabused himself of the burden.

** - Innocent always intended to write a corresponding, cheerful tract, but he never got around to it.

*** - A note on malice. In Catholic moral theology, I believe not enough emphasis is placed on the distinction between sins of malice and sins of weakness. The line dividing them is blurry, of course, but there is something tangibly present in the Gospel that is vital for Catholic understanding. It is not that sins of malice are necessarily more grave (although I presume they usually are). It is that their remedies are so different.

**** - I first heard this phrase from another professor, Fr. Robert Barron of Mundelein Seminary. Research shows that it seems adapted from a quote from Abigail Van Buren, “A church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.” David True uses similar verbiage in his article, Rethinking Church.

Revising the strategy.

I have had something of a revelation, and it's thanks to an unassuming speaker by the name of Chris Steadman who talked (nervously) to a small gathering at Elmhurst College. He is an evangelical-turned-"new-atheist"-turned-"can't we all just get along" atheist or "faitheist."

Two points Chris brought up piqued my attention. Here they are, with my elaboration.

First, the most obvious line dividing culture, and the true line, are not the same. The most obvious line is between belief and non-belief. But the true line is the line dividing totalitarians from pluralists. Those words need some definition. By totalitarians I'm not talking about Hitlers and Stalins. I'm referring to anyone who sees elimination of one's ideological others as the most desired outcome. And by pluralism I'm not referring to relativists, nor am I referring to pluralist theologies of religion. I mean simply that pluralists engage their others with a view toward cooperation, dialogue, and yes, disputation. But not elimination.

Second, Chris Steadman stopped hating religion when he stopped concentrating narrowly on the texts of religion and started engaging religious people. The text is not the doorway to understanding the people--the people are the doorway to understanding the text.

Let me address the first point with a hypothesis: A traditional Christian can be a pluralist. A pluralist can be engaged in persuasion, even evangelization; but the pluralist partakes in mission while possessing a gentle regard for human epistemology. The pluralist honors God's creation of time by allowing God's grace to make use of time as He sees fit. Moreover, the pluralist does not regard himself a completed project, impervious to sanctification from any instrument God sees fit to use. Far from it--the pluralist evangelizer operates as a wounded medic--a medic in need of a medic. He has something to offer, and something to beg for.

Moreover, traditional Christians can be pluralists when they acknowledge that their engagement with their ideological others should not be constrained to, or hampered by, the activity of evangelization. Traditional Christian pluralists ought to recall that cooperation and dialogue are equally important and inseparable. Evangelization should not be indulged at the expense of cooperation and dialogue.

Chris Steadman's second point captivates me for two reasons. First, it strikes me as a deeply Catholic idea. Books don't Reveal God. People do. Catholic theology understands that the Holy Bible is a vessel of Revelation that God gives in the form of flesh and blood. This happens unsurpassed in the Incarnation. But it also happens sacramentally, as a continuous ripple, in the life of the People of God, the New Jerusalem, via the Holy Spirit. This ripple is what Catholic theology calls Tradition.

The Catholic understanding of revelation is sometimes shorthanded as "Scripture and Tradition;" however, it may be better stated: "Scripture through Tradition." The Church (the whole People of God), as it actually lived and lives, is the lens through which the Bible is read as a living Word and not a dead letter.

Now, this kernel of an idea should be treated with kid gloves. It could be abused. In matters of Christian doctrine I am not a populist (revealed Truth does not obey democracy) nor a modernist (revealed Truth does not change based on the evolution of human culture; however, its expression can unfold and deepen with time).

In this, I regret that Chris Steadman and I would continue to be at odds in our assessment of same-sex activity and lifestyles. However, I hope that he can see this is not a personal condemnation on my part. I respect his conscience and his personal story, even while I critique the foundations of the axioms of the sexual revolution--and I do so as a flawed man, myself.

But there's another reason Chris's idea--that the people are the doorway to understanding the text--interests me. Because this principle can be applied to atheists as well.

One of my fundamental critiques of modern irreligion is that its apologists misrepresent secularism as being innocent of ideology. "It's not a religion. It's not a belief. It is the absence of a belief. We do not believe in any gods." This line of reasoning upsets my training in logic. If q = "A god or gods exist", and p is ~q, p remains a proposition.

Every proposition, whether an affirmation or negation, mundane or fantastic, entails and implies a host of propositions upon which it depends. These may be ordered into a hierarchy of dependencies, terminating in axioms.

The ruptures in western discourse that cumulatively gave birth to modern secularism are well-documented. For each rupture, one can detect an ideological mitosis into the competing axioms, which today have coagulated into the organisms we observe today as species of belief and unbelief. That those axioms have often submerged into the collective subconscious does not negate their reality.

For every believer's Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Paschal and Von Balthasar, there is a non-believer's Feuerbach, Comte, Marx, Russel, and Sartre.