New Song - Page 25 of 49 - Notes from a Catholic marriage

The Breath of Adam

[This is the second in a series of posts about the Holy Spirit. To see the first post, click here.]

My last post on the Holy Spirit had to do with how God brings things into some share in his word. Once God has already brought things to a share in his wisdom through the Spirit, we find that texts about the Holy Spirit fall under a second heading. Genesis 2 portrays God giving life to the first man by breathing into him a breath of life, suggesting that the life of the man is a share in God’s own breath. The word for “breath” there is not the same word in Hebrew as the word for “spirit” in Gen 1:2, but one could surmise a connection. Psalm 104 is more explicit: the psalmist says about created, living things, “When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. When you send forth your Spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the ground.” (Psalm 104:29-30) Here the word for breath is ruah both times, and the connection is clear: God sends forth his breath and renews the breath of life in animals and men.

When God creates us to begin with, we have no say in the matter: God brings us into being on the pattern of his Wisdom through his Spirit without any prior contribution on our part. But once we exist as a share in the life of the Son, we also have a share in the life of the Spirit. As God has a “breath” within him, so creatures have a “breath” or impulse within them through which they move and act. And so we find a second set of “Spirit texts” in which creatures are said to have something in them that resembles procession of the Holy Spirit.

Paul speaks of something like this in his first letter to the Corinthians, asking, “For what person knows a man’s thoughts except the spirit of the man which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.” (1Cor 2:11) Paul takes for granted a parallel between “God’s Spirit” and “the spirit of the man which is in him”. While the Spirit’s impulse brings a man into existence on the pattern of son, even on the natural level, on that same natural level a man has in him an impulse and a life that is like the Holy Spirit. In a parallel way, while reception of the grace of the Holy Spirit conforms one to the Incarnate Word, so the indwelling of the Spirit causes one to live and act as he did (see for example Roman 8, especially verses 9 through 11).

Despite the scarcity and vagueness of texts about the Holy Spirit, the conclusions I have drawn in this post and the previous one seem clear from Scripture: when we look at how God creates the world, we see him driving things toward the pattern of his Son as though by a might wind; when we look at creatures already living in the world, we see that their own interior impulse toward their fulfilment—and ultimately, toward the glory of God—is a likeness of the Holy Spirit.

Next time, I’ll take a look at what all this means about God’s own interior life, that is, the Trinity.

St. Onesimus

February 15

The commemoration of blessed Onesimus, whom Saint Paul the Apostle received as a fugitive slave and begot in his chains as a son in the faith of Christ, as Paul himself wrote to Onesimus’ master, Philemon.

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May Holy Mary and all the saints intercede to the Lord for us, that we may merit to be helped and saved by him who lives and reigns for ever and ever.

V. Precious in the sight of the Lord

R. Is the death of his holy ones.

V. May the Lord bless us, protect us from all evil, and bring us to everlasting life. And may the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in pace.

R. Amen

[To learn about praying this and other Martyrology entries, see this page.]

The Breath of the Word

[The is the second in a series of posts about the Holy Spirit. To see the second post, click here.]

For the Scripture project, I will eventually have to write about the Holy Spirit: Scripture = in-spired = in-spirited = from-the-Holy-Spirit. So I have to, but I’ll admit that it’s an intimidating assignment.

Compared to the Holy Spirit, revelation concerning the Son of God is pretty clear. “Son” is a word we use all the time, and its everyday use clearly illuminates its meaning in theology. The Son became a man like us, walking around and talking in plain language just so we would know him. The New Testament features lengthy and carefully written passages directly about the mystery of the Incarnation, such as the prologue to the Gospel of John or the hymn in Philippians 2. In the end, the procession of the Son is a mystery, for sure, but as mysteries go it is nicely laid out.

The Holy Spirit, on the other hand, is mysterious from beginning to end. Even the word “spirit” is less than clear: what are we supposed to make of the “breath of God”? Everybody knows that a son is a person; what do we say about a hypostatic wind? What’s more, the biblical witness concerning the Spirit is scattered over innumerable books of the Old and New Testament, with no one passage simply opening the mystery in an overt way. One is left to gather the pieces together as best as one can.

All that said, I hope to offer an approach that seems to me both faithful to the biblical witness and complementary to the interpretations offered by the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. The result will inevitably be a little less than satisfying, because the basis for any interpretation of the Holy Spirit is so vague and scattered to begin with, but there is no way around making the attempt.

My idea starts with the notion that the Son is the wisdom of God, the Father’s interior Word, the pattern to which God looks in creating the world. That much is clear from Scripture. From there, I think we can gather up what Scripture says about the Spirit under two headings, the first of which I’ll present in this post. Continue reading “The Breath of the Word”

The House Plant: A Philosophical Story

Some years ago, when I taught a course on the first books of Aristotle’s Physics, I needed a way of to make the idea of nature acting for an end clear to my students. Some of Aristotle’s hypothetical examples were striking, and in a little work on the principles of nature Thomas Aquinas offered a couple of brilliant comparisons. Pulling ideas from both sources, I wrote a story for my students and we discussed it together in class. Although I never taught the course again, the story has been used at Wyoming Catholic College ever since.

Last night I edited the story somewhat in light of my recent adventures in fiction writing. I am pleased to share with you “The House Plant”. Continue reading “The House Plant: A Philosophical Story”

Some thoughts on goodness

One thing I hope to do for myself in my Scripture project is to take various principles that have been at play in my mind for many years and put them in order. Which ones are more fundamental? Which ones are in fact governed by others? What relationships emerge?

A strong contender for “central principle” is the notion of a “common good.” By a common good, I mean a good that can be shared among many persons without in any way being diminished or divided. Let me unpack that idea a bit.

A cookie is not a common good; it is a private good. My cookie can only be shared by breaking it into parts so that I get less cookie at the end of the deal. And when you look more closely, it turns out cookie isn’t really sharable: the part you get is a part I can’t have, and the part I keep is a part you will never eat. What I really do when I break my cookie up is I create a bunch of smaller things, and then I keep one of them and I give others away. So I can give cookie away, but I can’t share it.

Friendship is a common good. Not only can I share my friendship with a friend, I can’t actually have friendship without sharing it. My portion of it is not diminished when another’s is increased; instead, my portion is actually increased by sharing it more. Of course, the kind of friendship we usually have in mind when we use the word is not a perfectly common good: a person can have only a few very close friends, and even though it is perfectly shared between them there is a limit to how many people can share in it.

But this is to be expected. Goods come in different kinds, and they fall on a spectrum from purely private to most common and everywhere in between. Any time we find a common good, we’ll find that even though it is common it has its limits. It will be more or less sharable, and more or less diminished when it is shared. The common good of the United States of America, for example, even though it is a great good and much more “sharable without diminution” than my personal friendships, can only extend to its people; the good folks in Argentina are excluded.

The reason is simply that goods fall on a range from less good to most good and everywhere in between. A good that is better is, so to speak, more powerfully good. As a hotter fire not only heats a person up more but also heats up more people, so a better good is not only better for a person but is a good for more people: it is more common. So more common goods are better goods, and the better a good is the more common it will be.

The only absolutely common good is the good that is goodness itself: God. Every creature in the entire universe has God as its good; in fact, every conceivable creature in every conceivable universe would have God as its good, because his goodness is never used up, so to speak, by what he has created. God is not only the good of every person, but he is more intimately the good of each person than that person’s best friends. God can be not only the friend but even the lover of every person in creation, and it never dilutes, the way human friendship dilutes when spread too far.

But revelation tells us there is even more. Even though reason rightly tells us that there is only one God, one being that is the source of every being and one good that is the good of every good, still revelation tells us that three persons are this one being. The word “share” explodes at this point, because the three persons are each identical with the divine being rather than sharing in it, but something happens that is more “sharing” than sharing itself. Rather than three friends who each have a share in the group’s friendship, and rather than three citizens who each have a share in the country’s peace, there are three persons who are each identical with the divine goodness without being identical to each other.

Fallen creatures that we are, this is the opposite of what we expected. We listened to the voice of the serpent, who whispered to us that God clings jealously to his divinity, that he wants no one but himself to be like God. But when the second person of the Trinity at last came to respond to the serpent, he did not think equality with God something to be grasped at, to be clutched like a merely private good: rather, he emptied himself, and took the form of a servant. The Incarnation of the Word revealed the Word’s eternal way of being, as the unimaginably best and therefore inconceivably communicable good.

Our reason cannot grasp it, and our sinful inclinations run counter to it, but the revelation of the Trinity tells us clearly: Goodness is even better than we thought.

Sts. Simeon and Anna

February 3

In Jerusalem, the commemoration of Saints Simeon and Anna, one being an old and devout man and the other a widow and a prophetess, merited to greet in infant Jesus as Messiah and Savior, the blessed hope and redemption of Israel, when he had been brought into the Temple to be presented in accordance with the custom of the law.

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May Holy Mary and all the saints intercede to the Lord for us, that we may merit to be helped and saved by him who lives and reigns for ever and ever.

V. Precious in the sight of the Lord

R. Is the death of his holy ones.

V. May the Lord bless us, protect us from all evil, and bring us to everlasting life. And may the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in pace.

R. Amen

[To learn about praying this and other Martyrology entries, see this page.]

Phase 1: done. New: Phase 2.

Last Saturday, in a burst of I-can-smell-the-water energy, I finished my first book-length work of fiction. After a festive dinner, the family gathered in the living room for one last read-aloud, and the thing was done. Phase 1 of the sabbatical plan is complete.

Now we turn to Phase 2, which has two parts. Perhaps most urgently, I have to do some editing work for The Aquinas Institute, which has an NEH grant to bring out a translation of Book IV of Aquinas’s Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. They’ve been waiting on me to move on the project for a very long time, and I hope nobody dies of shock when I do.

But definitely closer to my heart is the projected book on the senses of Scripture. It’s a funny project, because (a) I have no research library, and (b) I couldn’t read if I did. Since I was very young I have had tremendous difficulty reading even moderately small print, and for a year or so now I have had difficulty reading normal size print. I read by putting things on a Kindle or having them transformed into audio. But I have lost my gigantic Kindle DX, so even that modicum of scholarly activity has been trimmed.

Fortunately I have a reservoir of past research to lean on. Just recently I learned that my article on “Participation and the Meaning of Scripture,” which I wrote about a decade ago, will be published in a volume of essays from Brepols. Upside: It’s great to put that name on my CV. Downside: Nobody can afford books from Brepols, so this is pretty much a very ornate tomb in which to inter my old research. I can reuse the ideas in my book and no one will even notice.

A lecture I gave some three years ago is about to be published in the journal Nova & Vetera. No downsides there: it’s a vibrant publication that has the attention of exactly the people I would like to reach. Way back when I wrote the piece I told my wife that it was the best thing I had ever written, and that if I died now then I would have done something worthwhile with my career. Going over the proofs a few days ago, I thought the same thing. I’ll definitely be recycling those ideas.

The first step in Phase 2b is going through my old stuff and taking notes. I need to map out more clearly the connections between the somewhat imposing complex of ideas in my idea-bucket. I know in a fuzzy way what I want this book to do, but I do not yet have the master framework in view. Meanwhile, this blog will probably be livelier as I explore my way to the starting line.

Novella ho!

Today the silly story I am writing for the kids passed 30,000 words, which seems to be a commonly accepted minimum for dubbing your fiction a “novella”. For reference, Google indicates that Charlotte’s Web is a bit over 32,000 words, while The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe weighs in at 36,000 or so. According to this site, I’m on a course to hit the optimal length for the age range I have in mind.

Without putting a full day or even a half day into it, I can hit 1,000 words per day reliably. When I throw a full day at it that number goes up to about 3,000 words max. When I need to get a new chapter out and just can’t think of what to do, I take a page from Woody Allen’s playbook as reported in Mason Curry’s Daily Rituals. In Allen’s own words,

If I go up and take a shower it’s a big help. So I sometimes take extra showers. I’ll be down here and at an impasse and what will help me is to go upstairs and take a shower. It breaks up everything and relaxes me.

He’s right: the shower always busts up my writer’s block. But this is my favorite quotable quote from Curry’s collection, this time from novelist Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22:

I gave up once and started watching television with my wife. Television drove me back to Catch-22. I couldn’t imagine what Americans did at night when they weren’t writing novels.

When things go south

Last week I led a book discussion for the Wyoming Humanities Council. These groups attract random people from around town, so I find it a good way to meet people and stay in touch with how normal people think. Our book this time was The Underdogs, by Mariano Azuela, a series of depressing fictional vignettes based on that depressing reality, the Mexican Revolution.

To prepare, I also read Stuart Easterling’s The Mexican Revolution: A Short History 1910-1920. Despite the topic, Easterling’s account was fascinating, and full of amazing stories. Pancho Villa was bigger than life, and the villains as villainous as any novelist could dream up.

A few days ago, I met one of the discussion participants at the library, and she commented on how politically controversial the conversation had been, and how we had nearly gotten ourselves bogged down in a religious argument. One fellow present had declared that the reason we can’t have serious national conversation anymore is because so many people have followed religion instead of attending to science, which is real knowledge.

Of course, he had it exactly backwards: the things that science can tell us are not the things we debate as a nation, so the conviction that only science gives true knowledge would actually kill our ability to debate anything as a nation. Science can tell us that an embryo is human, for example, but it can’t tell us whether killing the embryo is good or bad. But I digress.

I admitted to my friend at the library that I found the Mexican history helpful for understanding Pope Francis. Politics and economics south of the border have been very different over the past hundred years than what we have experienced up here in the United States. Some things the pope says are clearly colored by this difference.

My friend agreed, and then commented that Pope Francis is a very interesting Pope. (We’ve all been saying that, I think.) She went on to confess that, even though she is not a Catholic, she actually burst into tears when she heard who had been chosen as pope and what named he taken for himself! Now, I have worked with this woman on a number of occasions over the past year, and I would not identify her as the emotional, teary type.

I’ll be keeping my eyes on the “Francis effect” as our book discussions go on. Given the readings, there will be some great opportunities for the group to express any anti-Catholicism it may feel.

Sts. Timothy and Titus

January 26

The memorial of Saints Timothy and Titus, bishops, disciples of Saint Paul the Apostle and helpers in his apostolate, one of whom governed the church at Ephesus and the other the church at Crete; to them were written epistles, which offer wise admonitions for pastors and the instruction of the faithful.

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May Holy Mary and all the saints intercede to the Lord for us, that we may merit to be helped and saved by him who lives and reigns for ever and ever.

V. Precious in the sight of the Lord

R. Is the death of his holy ones.

V. May the Lord bless us, protect us from all evil, and bring us to everlasting life. And may the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in pace.

R. Amen

[To learn about praying this and other Martyrology entries, see this page.]