Lucha Con Dios

I was at a BBQ this weekend and at this event I happened to have the opportunity to speak with a "Lapsed" Catholic, at least that's what he called himself. Jim and I had quite the debate. It centred mostly around his assertion that the Church should be ordaining women to the priesthood (which I will write more about in an upcoming post) , but the argument came down to this; he said "wasn't the whole point of Jesus life, death and resurrection to demonstrate that humans who live moral existences can rise from the dead also?"
Wow.
I replied that he'd missed the whole point and starting from the Jewish practice of substitutional sacrifice and citing the book of Hebrews (which if you ever wanted a good bridge between Old and New Covenants this is it) explained how Jesus death and resurrection is the only way to reunite humanity with God. No sacrifice, no fellowship with God.
Jim replied that he liked this God even less after this realization than he did before. Before this explanation he figured that God's plan and thus God is flawed or there is no God, his reason being the presence of suffering in the world. If God allows suffering, then he is flawed.... whatever.
He left me in a ponderous state, obviously wrestling with this concept. Thinking back on it the story of Jacob came to mind. At Peniel Jacob wrestled with God. The scriptures don't say how it started, but it says that he wrestled with God until daybreak. I imagine that God approached Jacob and Jacob's response was to wrestle. In this case, God wrestled with Jacob to strengthen him and encourage him because his older brother Esau was after him with a few hundred men. Jacob was petrified of Esau from whom he had fleeced a blessing. God gave him hope that if he was given the strength to prevail against God, surely he would prevail against Esau, but so that he could not boast, God popped his hip out of joint and gave him a limp. Jacob's name was changed to Israel at this point which means to wrestle with God and his hip was never the same.
We are never the same after wrestling with God. Many times though God is not wrestling with us to build us up but to take us down a peg. In the case of Jim, he was wrestling with God's ways. He doesn't understand them and believes his own are better. He was just cruising for a bruising.
I have wrestled with God and I lost, no surprise there. I don't recommend it.

The next time you wrestle with God, think of Israel. He got a blessing out of his fight, maybe God has one in store for you. An attitude adjustment is a blessing too when you think about it.

The Agony of Discernment

So I'm moving now. The place I'm in is small, but it is cheap and nice and my wife and I like it. However there is another unit in our row-house which is big and beautiful but we would be pressed to afford it. I was asking God for his will in the matter and my wife and I took a while to think about it, and let me tell you, I agonized over this decision. My big reason for moving was that if my wife became pregnant we would need a bigger place anyway and she wouldn't want to move after becoming pregnant, but I was worried about my job. The lease for the Auto Shop I work in is up at the end of the month and our new owner hasn't said anything about renewal and my boss says we couldn't afford to move the business.
After a whole day of agonizing over the decision, I was leaning towards "no" for practical reasons when the building owner walks in 10 minutes before I am to go home (and his office is in a town 1 1/2 hours drive away) and announces that some repairs to the building are forthcoming and that we will be renewed in our lease. Well that put me over to the "yes" camp pretty quick. It's funny how God waits until the last minute to answer your prayers sometimes.
So I'm moving now and I can't wait.

Spiritual Excellence

I've been thinking of a lot of things pertaining to Christian Spirituality (and by Christian I mean Catholic) and I had one of those light-bulb-over-the-head *Eureka* moments. They come few and far between but are always a pleasant surprise.

The moment came in one of the most unsuspecting places. I was watching the movie "The Last Samurai" starring the Scientology poster boy Tom Cruise. For those of you who have not seen the movie (which I highly recommend as it is the most brilliant performance of Tom Cruise's less than stellar reperatoire), Tom's character, Cpt. Nathan Algren, has been hired by Japanese businessmen in the mid 1870's to train an army due to his bravery in the American Indian Wars. The purpose of this army is to squash a rebellion of Samurai who are fighting the increasing westernization of Japan, the westernization that these businessmen are proliferating and becoming wealthy from.
During the battle for which the peasant army was woefully unprepared, Cpt. Algren is captured by the Samurai led by their Lord Katsumoto after he defends himself admirably enough to avoid slaughter. He is then brought to a mountain village very remote and breathtaking and informed that since the winter snows have now blocked all the passes, there is no conceivable escape. During his time in the village he starts to notice the people and culture. In what seems like a cross between Stockholm Syndrome and plain curiosity he starts to understand the Samurai a little better. Then he drops what was like a bombshell to me. Presented here in paraphrase he says "From the time these people rise to the time they sleep, they devote themselves to the perfection of whatever it is they do. Everything is an artform when done perfectly." The movie shows clips of the swordmaker making swords, the Samurai doing excercises in the fields, a woman making tea and it makes it look like everyone is trying to perfect what they do and to do it perfect every time.

I then thought "That is a very admirable goal. What is it that I do that I may strive to perfect?" I have a job apprenticing to be an Automotive Service Technician and perfecting that is a lifelong process requiring constant training. I have lost some weight and could use a little more training for my body to bring myself into good physical shape and tone. However, since this is a Catholic blog, the answer I'm really driving at is the need to perfect oneself spiritually, after all Scripture says that we must be perfect as the Father is perfect. But just how does one go about that? What does it mean to attain Spiritual Excellence?

This is where I remember that I am a Catholic now and I wipe away the sweat already beading on my forehead. We have the Saints! That is what they are for, to look to as an example of Spiritual Excellence. The one however that came to mind first was St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order. Alcoholics Anonymous and all the Anonymous groups have programs based on his teachings designed to break addictions and problem behaviour and this is good because let's face it, I'm addicted to sin sometimes and it is definitely problem behaviour. So I have found a copy of St. Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises online in PDF format here. (You must be a member to get it but membership is free. The site also has a long litany of other works by authors and Early Church Fathers and whatnot.)
I figured that if you want to be physically in shape you exercise and discipline your body, so if you want to be in good spiritual shape, you must exercise and discipline your spirit.

So I will read the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola and make a valiant attempt to employ them in the pursuit of Spiritual Excellence. Pray for me in this endeavour as we don't ever perfect ourselves so much as we allow Christ to perfect us. This will be interesting. To be continued...

Value Added

I've been thinking about what we value in our society and why it is we value it. It all started like this...
My dad's sister married a guy from France, moved there and had 5 beautiful kids and they all come to visit every few years. My cousin Jérémie who is 13 and the only boy with 4 sisters seems to lack a good mentor in the faith and is starting to think like his friends, who are atheists as so many in France are now. His father is a faithful man, but what 13 year old wants to be like his dad? He is struggling with the concept of God in general as he is finding it hard to defend to his friends.
I raised the question of the value of a human being to him; "are you valuable as a human being"? He of course responded yes and I asked him why, which he could not answer.
The thing is that we as humans have absolutely no value. We are finite and the universe is infinite. Even if the universe was finite, the empty space surrounding it has no conceivable boundary. Things that are finite in comparison to that which is infinite are relative to zero. This is a mathematical principle, in fact calculus is based on the assumption that as X approaches infinity the relation 1/X becomes 0. Since the universe is infinite and we are finite, in comparison to the whole universe, we are meaningless organisms who have no value of our own.
Funny enough, if I killed someone just because I wanted to, that would be tragic and unjust. Why is that? Even if I were to kill a homeless person it would be a tragedy, and society who was so quick to forget the person in life would be as quick to convict and punish me for the murder. Why? Simply put because that person has value because they are a person and so does every other person. However how can this be since we have shown human life to be insignificant?
Just at the same time that finite things are meaningless, infinite things are meaningful since ∞/∞ is 1. It is only because finite things mean nothing that the infinite means what it does. The only source of value that exists is the infinite, which we as humans call God.
As Catholics we know that God is infinite and that God is the source of life, but in this perspective we know that God is the source of our value as well. The catechism proclaims this very truth clearly. We mean anything because we mean everything to God. He created us that way. It is easy to forget sometimes that we are valuable only because we mean something to God.
So this was the explaination I gave my cousin about the existence of God. I think it made a difference to him, but one can only hope and pray. However it opened another interesting train of though as well. If we are valuable only because God gives us this value, what else is valuable? Are the things we find valuable really valuable? In fact, if we don't have any value in and of ourselves we don't even have the authority or ability to define what is valuable. This means that we must look to God, the source of our value, to tell us what is valuable. We have all sorts of ideas about what is valuable, but without divine blessing, they aren't really valuable at all.
St. Paul writes to the Corinthians in his first letter:
3:11 For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ. 12 Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw 13 the work of each builder will become visible, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each has done. 14 If what has been built on the foundation survives, the builder will receive a reward. 15 If the work is burned up, the builder will suffer loss; the builder will be saved, but only as through fire
Whatever survives will earn the builder a reward. Whatever survives the testing fire is valuable if it rewards the builder. What will survive the fire? Works of faith, love and charity done for the Lord in his work in accordance with his will.
It is a sobering thought for me because my priorities just don't line up with that sometimes. I think we all need a wake up call sometimes.