4th Sunday of Advent: A Still, Small Voice & The Lord of Creation

     Today, Sunday of the Fourth Week of Advent, we anticipate the Nativity of Our Lord in a few short days.  The (seemingly) unexpected appearance of the Lord of Creation in the form of a human infant in a stable reminds me of the following passage from the Old Testament, in which God comes to the prophet Elijah as he hides in a cave:

And he [the Lord] said, "Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the LORD." And behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice; And when Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. And behold, there came a voice to him, and said, "What are you doing here, Elijah?"  (1 Kings: 11-13)

This, in its way, is as clear a foretaste of the Messiah as the "messianic" passages we read in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel throughout advent.  We may have heard that, before the coming of Christ, people lived in fear of divine power.  Encountering God was something to be avoided: the point of praying and offering sacrifice, even sacrificing one’s own flesh and blood, was so that God (more often understood as “the gods”) would leave you alone.  
     We can detect echoes of this ancient attitude in the account of Abraham as he brings  his beloved son Isaac up Mount Moriah, prepared to offer him up (Genesis 22).  At the last moment God sends an angel to stay Abraham's hand, and provides a lamb for the sacrifice. The unexpected reversal in the story of Abraham and Isaac shows us the end of Christ’s earthly ministry; the story of Elijah in the cave shows us its surprising beginning. God doesn’t show himself in any of the terrifying guises one would expect (wind, earthquake, fire), but as a “still, small, voice” (in some translations a “whisper”).  In just the same way, the second person of the Trinity comes among us in the least threatening way imaginable: a helpless little baby, cradled in a feeding trough.  No wonder, when the Angel announces Jesus’ birth to the shepherds, he first tells them not to be afraid; and then he says:

For behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people: for to you is born this day in the city of Davis a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.  And this will be a sign for you: you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger. (Luke 2:10-12).

Good News , indeed.  It is, in fact, a Great Joy, and not at all a bad thing when God is in our midst, for “God is Love”(1 John 4:8); and the Infinite Creator of the Universe makes himself finite, small and vulnerable . . . for us.


For more Catholic Commentary from the past week, please see the following from the blog Nisi Dominus:

God's Truth is better than anything we can imagine: “Awaiting The Arrival of the God Who is Man”

The Mass and what makes the Church ‘Catholic’ - “A Tale of Two Sundays: God’s Love is Universal”

Our worth comes from God: “What We Have vs. What We Are”

Christmas is coming . . . but not quite yet: “The Reasons for the Season of Advent”

Our Eternal Destiny: Armed Robbery, or A Warm Place By The Fire?

Today is Ascension Thursday; click here for my Ascension Thursday post on the blog Nisi Dominus. The throwback below, which first appeared on Nisi Dominus April 19th 2015, examines the (apparently) vexing question as to how Eternal Salvation differs from a mugging.. 

  Analogical thinking, it would appear, is a dying art.  I recently heard Catholic apologist and scholar Peter Kreeft on Catholic radio, and he was pointing out that brains which spend a lot of time interacting with video games and various other electronic devices simply don’t develop in the same way as those formed by extensive reading.  Among the those things that are undernourished are linear and analogical thinking.  Professor Kreeft has found that this makes it difficult to teach a subject like Theology that requires dealing with a lot of difficult and abstract ideas.

Is this your image of God?

     Over my own nearly 30 years of teaching high school students I’ve observed the same trend.  Fortunately, we still have a long way to go: while many people, especially young people, may not be as quick to grasp them as they might have been several decades ago, analogies are still the most effective way to communicate many ideas.  They have always been a preferred way of explaining Christian Doctrine: think of the parables of Jesus, or St. Paul's comparison in 1st Corinthians of the Church to a body, with all the members working together at their own assigned tasks; not only that, but one of the four traditional Levels of Meaning in scripture, the Allegorical, relies very heavily on analogical thinking.  Analogy is often the only reliable way for us who are composed of both spirit and matter to understand spiritual realities.

     Not surprisingly, analogies are also an essential tool in any dialogue with atheists and agnostics.  I recently became aware of the following analogy, which is appears to be in vogue in atheist circles: God, as we Christians envision Him, is like an armed robber with a gun to our heads, and he is offering a choice between giving him all our money (i.e., living according to the Gospel and spending eternity in Heaven), or having our brains blown out (which is spending eternity in Hell).

     Now, clearly, there are some very obvious problems with this analogy.  The vast majority of people, even many non-Christians, will have a hard time seeing going to Heaven as equivalent to getting mugged, even if we accept the premise that living a Christian life “robs” us of pleasures we might otherwise enjoy: Heaven promises something infinitely better than anything available here, whereas an armed robber does not even pretend to make our life better than it was before we met him.  And of course there is quite a lot of secular, sociological evidence that following God’s law actually makes us happier in the here-and-now.  Also, the robber analogy depicts Hell as something that God imposes on us, in which we take no initiative at all, when in fact the Catholic conception of Hell is that it is something that we choose for ourselves, contrary to God’s wish, by our rejection of his freely offered love.

Wouldn't you rather be inside?

     I propose a better analogy to communicate the eternal choice which God presents to us.  Imagine that we are standing outdoors on a cold, rainy night.  Somebody opens a door and invites us to come inside with them, where it is warm and dry (although, of course, we need to take off our wet muddy boots and our wet, dripping coats).  That’s God’s offer of eternal salvation.  We can say yes, although we are equally free to say no.  In fact, we can say “No, you can’t tell me what to do! Besides, can you prove it’s really warm and dry in there before I go in?”  and remain out in cold, wet darkness.  That’s Hell, the product of nothing but our own pride and stubbornness.

     The second analogy presents a much more accurate image of the Catholic view of our eternal destiny.  Not only that, when juxtaposed to the “armed robber” scenario, it also casts light behind it, as it were, giving observers a vivid illustration of the different worldviews that have generated each analogy: the atheist worldview which is concerned with power, force, and will, and in which one party must be the loser, and the Christian perspective, which envisions a reality in which love can triumph, and everyone can win.  Which is likely to appeal to more people in the end?

"To Whom Shall We Go? You Have The Words Of Eternal Life" (from Nisi Dominus)

    Our first child seemed reluctant to be born.  The baby (we didn't yet know whether boy or girl) was almost two weeks overdue, however, when we went to Mass one Sunday in March, so we knew that we would have a newborn child in our home before the Lord's day came around again.  We heard this first reading at that Mass:

And Jesse made seven of his sons pass before Samuel. And Samuel said to Jesse, "The LORD has not chosen these." And Samuel said to Jesse, "Are all your sons here?" And he said, "There remains yet the youngest, but behold, he is keeping the sheep." And Samuel said to Jesse, "Send and fetch him; for we will not sit down till he comes here."
And he sent, and brought him in. Now he was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome. And the LORD said, "Arise, anoint him; for this is he."
Then Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the midst of his brothers; and the Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon David from that day forward. And Samuel rose up, and went to Ramah. (1 Samuel 16:10-13)

St. Frances X. Cabrini Church, Scituate, MA (Boston Globe photo)

We had not yet settled on a name for our baby, although "David" was on the short list. Now we were sure that our child would be a boy, and that we would name him David (as an aside, we heard the same reading six years later before the birth of our youngest son, whom we had already decided would be named Samuel if he were a boy).

    Now, almost twenty years later and several states away, I see this same little church is in the news, but the news is not as happy as it was for us and our son David.  Granted, if you look at the Friends of St. Frances X. Cabrini website, you see all the signs of thriving, vibrant parish: a wide range of charitable works and causes, parish activities such as craft fairs and picnics, prayer services, etc.  Most pastors would be ecstatic to have such involved, committed parishioners, except . . . there is no pastor.  There is, in fact, no parish any longer.  St. Francis X. Cabrini was one of several dozen parishes ordered closed by the Archdiocese of Boston 11 years ago, and the people devoting so much time and energy to their local church in Scituate have been occupying the property all these years in direct defiance of their bishop . . .

(To read the rest of this post go HERE)

Is Raul Ready To Repent? (from Nisi Dominus)

The Devil Can Quote Scripture  

The Devil himself can quote Scripture for his own purposes (see Matthew 4:6 & Luke 4:10), but sometimes even the most hardened sinners really do come to repentance. We can't tell, of course, what's happening in another person's heart, so it's hard to know what to make of Cuban President Raul Castro's remarks at his recent visit with Pope Francis.  After his visit with the Pontiff, according to an account in the Wall Street Journal, Castro said:

When the Pope goes to Cuba in September, I promise to go to all his Masses, and with satisfaction.

He also assured us :

I read all the speeches of the Pope, his commentaries, and if the Pope continues this way, I will go back to praying and go back to the Church, and I'm not joking.

Pope Francis with a no-longer-secret admirer

You'll pardon me if I entertain a few doubts about Castro's sincerity.  For more than half a century now he and his brother Fidel have been busy murdering, torturing, and impoverishing their fellow Cubans, and he has shown little indication that he ready to change his ways . . .

(Please read the entire post HERE at Nisi Dominus)

When "Progress" Isn't Progress

Progress? I think not . . . 

A thoughtful friend recently lent us a book called DisOrientation: The 13 “isms” That Will Send You To Intellectual  “La-La Land”.  It is a collection of essays edited by John Zmirak with contributions by such luminaries as Jimmy Akin, Robert Spencer, and Fr. John Zuhlsdorf (a.k.a. “Fr. Z”), among others.  Its purpose is to prepare prospective college students for the various intellectual traps that await them, such as Relativism, Hedonism, Utilitarianism, etc.  One of my favorite essays in the collection is Peter Kreeft’s contribution on Progressivism.  He starts out by clearly delineating what it is to be a “progressive”:

The opposite of Progressivism is conservatism or traditionalism. A conservative, by definition, is a happy person, one who is happy with what is.  It is only for that reason he wants to conserve it.  A progressivist, on the other hand, is by definition an unhappy person, one who is unhappy with what is.  It is only for that reason he wants to change it . . . Adam and Eve were conservatives until the Devil made them into progressives.  For the Devil himself was the first progressivist.  The other angels were happy with God and His will, but the Devil wanted to progress to something better.

Now, Kreeft may be having a bit of mischievious fun with his argumentum ad Satanam, but his point is nonetheless valid.  Satan’s chief sin was Pride, a belief that he knew better, and isn’t the belief that one’s self knows better than the unenlightened rubes of the past and the ignorant and/or evil-minded boobs of the present the driving force of progressivism?

(Please read the entire post HERE at Nisi Dominus)

Archbishop Cordileone, Catholic Teachers, and the ‘Torre Test’ (from Nisi Dominus)

Many of you are familiar with the name George Steinbrenner, the long-time owner of the New York Yankees, arguably the most famous sports team in the world.  Steinbrenner was reputed to be an erratic and difficult man who could be very unpleasant to work for.  Nonetheless, Joe Torre successfully managed his baseball team for many years.  When asked how he was able to put up with his prickly and demanding employer, Torre replied (as best as I can recall), “You take the man’s money, you put up with his _____" (I have excised the scatological term used by Mr. Torre, but you get the idea).  It seems like a pretty straightforward proposition: you do what you’re hired to do, and if you can’t or won’t do the job, go somewhere else.

Former New York Yankees manager Joe Torre

     Simple, and yet there are those who just don’t get it, at least as it applies to Catholic schools.  For instance, there has been a lot of fire directed at San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone because of his insistence that teachers in the Catholic schools in his diocese agree to refrain from publicly opposing the teaching of the Catholic Church.  There was even a petition sent to the Pope signed by purported “prominent Catholics” asking that Archbishop Cordileone be removed . . . 

(Please read the entire post HERE at Nisi Dominus)

Those Who Love Him Will Keep His Commandments (From Nisi Dominus)

Where there is no prophecy the people cast off restraint, 

but blessed is he who keeps the law.   (Proverbs 29:18)  

     Many years ago, shortly after I had returned to the Church after my youthful sojourn among the secular agnostics, I read a book called The Education of Henry Adams.  Although it doesn’t sound like it from the title, it is an autobiography, and the author was  the grandson of U.S. President John Quincy Adams, and the great-grandson of the second President and revolutionary leader John Adams.      The one thing from Adams’ book that made the largest impression on me was the author’s dissatisfaction with (among other things) the spiritual emptiness of the Unitarian churches which his family attended; here, the drama of Salvation had been reduced to little more Christian morality.  It struck me that these same churches, just a few generations earlier, had been peopled by zealous Calvinists fleeing the Anglican Church because it had, in their view, strayed too far from the Gospel.  What had happened?  How had they changed so much, so quickly?

     I realized that the cause of the erosion of their faith was that they had cut themselves off from the Catholic Church, the power of its Tradition and its infallible Magisterium, the Church that St. Paul had named “The pillar and the foundation of the Truth” (1 Timothy 3:15).  After all, however zealous our belief, however sincere our intentions, we fallible humans tend to wander off course without direction from above . . . 

(Please read the rest of the post HERE at Nisi Dominus)

Our Eternal Destiny: Armed Robbery, or A Warm Place By The Fire? (from Nisi Dominus)

 Analogical thinking, it would appear, is a dying art.  I recently heard Catholic apologist and scholar Peter Kreeft on Catholic radio, and he was pointing out that brains which spend a lot of time interacting with videogames and various other electronic devices simply don’t develop in the same way as those formed by extensive reading.  Among the those things that are undernourished are linear and analogical thinking.  Professor Kreeft has found that this makes it difficult to teach a subject like Theology that requires dealing with a lot of difficult and abstract ideas.

Is this your image of God?

     Over my own nearly 30 years of teaching high school students I’ve observed the same trend.  Fortunately, we still have a long way to go: while many people, especially young people, may not be as quick to grasp them as they might have been several decades ago, analogies are still the most effective way to communicate many ideas.  They have always been a preferred way of explaining Christian Doctrine: think of the parables of Jesus, or St. Paul's comparison in 1st Corinthians of the Church to a body, with all the members working together at their own assigned tasks; not only that, but one of the four traditional Levels of Meaning in scripture, the Allegorical, relies very heavily on analogical thinking.  Analogy is often the only reliable way for us who are composed of both spirit and matter to understand spiritual realities.

     Not surprisingly, analogies are also an essential tool in any dialogue with atheists and agnostics.  I recently became aware of the following analogy, which is appears to be in vogue in atheist circles: God, as we Christians envision Him, is like an armed robber with a gun to our heads, and he is offering a choice between giving him all our money (i.e., living according to the Gospel and spending eternity in Heaven), or having our brains blown out (which is spending eternity in Hell).

     Now, clearly, there are some very obvious problems with this analogy . . . 

(Please read the entire post HERE at Nisi Dominus)

Is The Church a Political Animal? (from Nisi Dominus)

   You’re going to find politics wherever people gather, or so someone once told me when I had objected to using the secular political terms “liberal” and “conservative” to describe different factions within the Church.  And he was right, if by “politics” we mean the small-p wrangling that unavoidably accompanies any human enterprise requiring two or more people.  But that is a very different thing from Politics, of the partisan variety.  The Church is not a political party, and does not work like a political party.

The Synod on the Family, 2014

     That may seem an obvious point to you, but it’s not at all obvious to very many people.  It’s a distinction lost on most people outside of the Church for instance, for many of whom politics has taken the place of religion, and so has become the lens through which they interpret everything. Many such people have come to dominate the secular media in the developed world, with the result that the mass media projects the secular political model onto the Church, with “bad guys” called conservatives working to thwart the “good guys”, the liberals (sometimes referred to as progressives), who are fighting to bring about a kinder, better future.  This is the only image of the inner-workings of the Church most people see, including most ordinary Catholics . . .

(Please read the entire post HERE at Nisi Dominus)

Sins of the Fathers . . . And of Kings (From Nisi Dominus)

Richard III

     530 years is a long, long time to wait.  Thursday England’s King Richard III, the last English monarch to die in battle, and one of the last English kings to die a Catholic, will, finally, receive a Christian burial.  Not a Catholic funeral, unfortunately, but his interment in the Anglican Cathedral of Leicester will be a great improvement over the hasty, unmarked burying of his desecrated corpse after the Battle of Bosworth Field 530 years ago.

     Richard remains one of the most controversial of British kings.  He assumed the throne when his twelve-year-old nephew Edward V was declared illegitimate by Parliament. Edward and his younger brother Richard were sent to live in the Tower in London (which was not yet used exclusively as a prison), and their uncle became King Richard III.  The two boys disappeared from public view and just two years after his accession Richard was deposed by Henry Tudor, who then became Henry VII.  Richard has been suspected of having the “little princes” murdered  ever since, although historians today (for instance, Paul Murray Kendall) acknowledge that there is no evidence that he had anything to do with their deaths, and that Henry Tudor had far more motive to kill them than Richard did.*

     As interesting as it would be to speculate on the probable guilt of the various parties involved (and it would be), that’s not the purpose of this blog.  Instead, I’d like to focus on what can happen when we let desires untamed by a properly formed conscience have free rein . . .

(Read the entire post HERE at Nisi Dominus)

Where Have All The Fathers Gone? (from Nisi Dominus)

Today is the Solemnity of St. Joseph, which seems a good time to republish this post on the importance of Fatherhood (originally posted January 22nd, 2014)

Decline of Fatherhood

It's not easy being the Dad . . . Federico Barrocci's Aeneas' Flight From Troy

      One of the largest elephants in the room today (if I may further abuse an already overworked metaphor) is the decline of fatherhood.  It is just one of the factors in the implosion of the traditional family, but it’s a - make that the - key one. If you google “the importance of the father” you’ll find 98,600,000 results. That’s 98 plus million. These are not mostly religious or conservative sources: most are related to various universities or government agencies, some are mainstream magazines not known for their cultural conservatism, such as Parenting and Psychology Today. Whatever their perspective they all have the same general message: growing up without a father is bad. Real bad.
     In order to get a sense of the immensity of the problem  . . .

(Read the entire post HERE at Nisi Dominus)

Cicero At The Gym (from Nisi Dominus)

 "Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, latrinis femineis nostris?"

O Tempora, O Mores!

Are we living in a neo-pagan culture?  One could argue that we are doing just that, or heading in that direction, given that our culture has largely abandoned God and Christianity.  If we are, then we Neo-pagans are in much sorrier shape than the Old Pagans ever were, because they had no access to the Revelation of Jesus Christ, but we do, and we are consciously rejecting it.  Along with Supernatural Truth, we are also increasingly abandoning even natural truths in a way that would have horrified the heathens of old.  Consider, for instance, what the Roman orator, philosopher, and writer Cicero has to say about what we would call Natural Law . . .

(read what Cicero has to say, and what it has to do with the latest battles in the Gender Wars, here at Nisi Dominus)

The Catholic Teaching On Marriage Is Rooted in Love (from Nisi Dominus)

    Katherine Jean Lopez has a good piece in National Review Online (read article here) about the March for Marriage in Washington, D.C., with a focus on San Francisco Archbishop Cordileone.  The good Archbishop was scolded by various left-leaning types, including “Catholic” politician Nancy Pelosi, for encouraging “hate” by attending the pro-traditional marriage event.  Lopez quotes extensively from Cordileone’s speech at the March to show that the Church is motivated not by hate but by love when it upholds traditional marriage.

     The false charge that any opposition to the deconstruction of the institution of marriage is motivated solely by hatred has been repeated so often by those on the left that not only have they convinced themselves, they have persuaded half the country as well.  Even Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy  . . . (read the entire post HERE at Nisi Dominus)

The Geometry of Faith (from Nisi Dominus)

“The Catholic Church,” according to G.K. Chesterton, “is much larger on the inside than it is on the outside.”  Those of us who have been out and now are in (back in, for some of us) know how true it is.  And it stands to reason: as both a worldly and a spiritual entity, the Church cannot be contained within purely physical bounds.

What is both seen and unseen?     

This sounds like sheer nonsense, of course, to those who are formed in a materialist worldview, because they reject a priori the existence of a non-physical reality.  It may be a decided minority who consciously embrace such a worldview, but many, many more unthinkingly see the world in the same way.  Explaining Catholicism and the Catholic Church under these circumstances (except, maybe, in the most zealously orthodox Catholic schools) sometimes feels like trying to converse with someone who speaks a completely different language . . . (Read the entire post HERE on Nisi Dominus)

Dressing for The Wedding Feast of the Lamb (from Nisi Dominus)

It’s hard to deny that the standard of dress for Mass attendance is significantly lower than it was a few decades ago.  I’m not talking about people who, due to work schedule or other external circumstances, need to attend Mass in other than their “Sunday Best”, but abou the very large number of Catholics who could dress better but, for whatever reason, don’t.  And it’s not simply a matter of people being poorly dressed, but also many dressing immodestly, some to the point where they create a near occasion of sin for their fellow congregants.  I propose that we all undertake to bring back the concept of our “Sunday Best” for Mass, and encourage our fellow believers to do the same.

Dressed for the Wedding Feast: not a t-shirt or pair of shower clogs in sight

Maybe God does care what you're wearing . . .

Some will say, “God doesn’t care what I’m wearing, as long as I’m there.”  I respectfully disagree; consider the following passage from the Gospel of Matthew, (a similar one appears in Luke) . . .

Click HERE to read the entire post on Nisi Dominus