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Please Hand Me that Whatchamacallit…

 

It seems that yet another brilliant British scientist is confusing science and philosophy. Stephen Hawking released a portion of his latest book called The Grand Design(probably not accidentally to be released during Pope Benedict's visit to the UK)
in which he says that "Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist." Immediately we are struck by the flaw in Dr. Hawkins logic. He says there is the law of gravity and there is nothing. Which is it? It can't be both. Secondly, he is confusing the tools in man's intellectual toolbox. Science, with its experiments and logic, tries to understand the order or structure of the universe. Religion, with its theological inspiration and reflection, tries to understand the purpose or meaning of the universe. Spontaneous creation is his explanation of how the universe came about. It cannot be the why there is something rather than nothing.

More importantly though, I think where the problem truly lies is that many have come to think that faith and science must be in conflict which each other. In his great encyclical Fides et Ratio, John Paul II said that "there can never be a true divergence between faith and reason, since the same God who reveals the mysteries and bestows the gift of faith has also placed in the human spirit the light of reason. This God could not deny himself, nor could the truth ever contradict the truth." Despite the fact that both science and faith are means to discovering truth about God's creation, their estrangement is prominently found in our culture today.

Even though revisionist's history would have us think otherwise, this division was not always present. In fact, it is certain Christian fundamental ideas that allowed the emergence of scientific thought to begin with. The study of science arose because of a belief in a transcendent Creator who endowed His creation with orderly physical laws. Scholasticism was responsible for the rejection of the pantheistic approach to nature. Created things did not have a mind of their own, but instead followed fixed physical laws. In fact, the pioneers of modern science, such as Galileo, Kepler, Harvey, and Newton thought that by pointing out the wonders of creation they would lead people to the praise of the Creator of those wonders.

Religious faith and science thrived side by side until the start of the eighteenth century. Because of the religious wars during this time, many Enlightenment intellectuals became disillusioned with Christianity. In response to this, they proposed a "religion of reason" that would replace the dogmas of faith. This co-option of science by the Enlightenment was characterized by its claims that science must be "value free". With the decline of philosophy and the rise of all the other sciences skepticism became widespread.

It is within this philosophical climate that Rene Descartes wrote his Discourse on Method. Descartes saw that science had become so successful because of the Scientific Method. He posited that the diversity of our opinions is a result not of some men being more reasonable than others, but that they conduct their thoughts along different lines and do not consider the same things. This led him to the conclusion that if differences of opinions come about because of different methods then the use of one method would solve the differences in opinions and beliefs. He thought he could define this method and ultimately refute skepticism by starting from the position of universal doubt. From this starting point he set out to prove his own existence with the famous Cogito ergo sum, the existence of God and then the existence of the world. He theorized that he could philosophize without looking to the external world. This lead to subjectivism and, in order to protect man from the approaching materialism he made a distinction between soul ("thinking thing") and body ("extended thing"). Ultimately, it is this "turn to the subject" and the resulting dualism that proved the most damaging for modern philosophy.

Descartes rationalism had wide appeal but ultimately it provoked the simplification to empiricism. David Hume, who was the leading proponent of empiricism, argued that there is no external reality at all but just internal perceptions of such realities. He rejected the traditional notion of causality and replaced it with the weaker notion of causation leaving man unable to discern "necessary connections" in nature. Immanuel Kant then finalized the divorce of faith and science when, in response to Hume's skepticism, he restricted science to phenomena and relegated religious faith to the subjective and private experience. He summarized his philosophy as "clearing away the pretensions of reason to make room for faith". With this idea that human intelligence really can't know anything, a "hermeneutic of suspicion that undermines all trust and claims one opinion is as good as another" was brought about.

It is precisely within this backdrop that John Paul II called for a sound metaphysics in Fides et Ratio. The Holy Father spoke of "the need for a philosophy of genuinely metaphysical range, capable, that is, of transcending empirical data in order to attain something absolute, ultimate and foundational in its search for truth." While the Church herself does not subscribe to any one particular philosophy, the Pope recommended that we look to Thomism as a possibility because of the tendency of Aquinas to give "pride of place to the harmony which exists between faith and reason." Rather than merely teaching on an abstract level, the Pope called upon the major players in the divorce to play prominent roles in their reconciliation. He called upon theologians to "ask what is the deep and authentic truth which the texts (of Scripture and Tradition) wish to communicate, even within the limits of language" and to convey these truths to the faithful. He challenged scientists to "continue their efforts without ever abandoning the sapiential horizon within which scientific and technological achievements are wedded to the philosophical and ethical values which are the distinctive and indelible mark of the human person." Finally, the Holy Father called on all the faithful to reject philosophical systems that lure people into believing that they are their own absolute master.

Ultimately, in coming to an understanding of the bad metaphysics of modern philosophy and striving to reunite faith and reason, man will return "to a unified and organic vision of knowledge."

Revealing Our Father’s Day

Pope John Paul II said that the future of the world and the Church passes through the family. Obviously if Satan is literally hell bent on thwarting God's plans, the family is a natural place for him to attack. What better way to attack the family than by weakening the head.

In Familiaris Consortio, John Paul said that, "In revealing and in reliving on earth the very fatherhood of God, a man is called upon to ensure the harmonious and united development of all the members of the family."

"Revealing and reliving the very fatherhood of God." Does the sex crazed idiot that we see on TV reveal the fatherhood of God? Never mind TV, how about the nearly 50% of all children born in this country who are born out of wedlock and will have very little contact with their dads? Or what about the dad who works 60 hours and week and sees his children less than a half an hour a day? What about the dad who spends all of his time at home on the internet feeding his addiction to porn? Do any of these dads reveal and relive the very fatherhood of God?

To begin, it is important that we recognize the power of imitation. All day long your children are imitating what they see. They learn by imitation. It is without a doubt that the habits that my children have that annoy me the most are the ones they learned from me. It takes brutal honesty though to admit your faults when you see them in your children and then set out to correct them (in yourself). One day, we were leaving Church my oldest son looked up at the doors leaving the sanctuary and said, "Damn! Those are some big doors!" I pulled him aside gently and told him that wasn't a good thing to say and asked where he heard it. He said he didn't know. In the back of my mind I was thinking of all the places he could have heard it because he didn't hear it from me. Well the next day, I am making a sandwich in the kitchen and a fly lands on it just as I am about to eat it. So I say, "Get off my damn sandwich!" He proceeded to ask me, "What's on your damn sandwich, Dad?" It didn't take any humility on my part to recognize where he got it from at that point. From the moment on I decided that I would put imitation in my parenting toolbox.

I constantly remind myself that my kids are going to imitate whoever has the most influence on them. This underscores the importance of spending time with your kids. The imitating goes on whether I am there or not, so the question becomes if I am going to be there for them to imitate. It is rare that someone would quote Woody Allen in a reflection on fatherhood but I think his point about 80% of life being just showing up is particularly appropriate for fathers.

So many families are so overloaded with activities that these organic moments of fatherhood rarely ever happen. Children need to be included in the activities that their fathers are doing. Where will our sons learn to be men? Where will our daughters learn what a real man looks like? Do our kids really need to learn both the piano and guitar or do they need to see how their father lives and how he does things? The best times are those that we "waste" with our kids, not those that are planned.

Many men today are living with their own father wounds. They don't really know how to be fathers. It is amazing though how many times God will reveal his fatherhood in your own fatherhood. One time, I was moving mulch in the backyard and one of my kids wanted to help me. I was thinking that by helping me he meant that he wanted to jump off the pile. But it turned out that he actually wanted to help me. I had one pitchfork and one wheelbarrow. He wanted to fill the wheelbarrows himself and then let me push them. My first reaction was to say no because it would end up taking me twice as long, but I could feel the Spirit tugging at my heart telling me that this is what God's Fatherhood was. He can do anything He wants without my help and in no time at all, yet He is humble enough and patient enough to let me do it.

My point then is that you need to give your children the opportunity to imitate you, imitating God.

So getting back to my point about revealing the very Fatherhood of God, we can't give our children something that we don't have. We have to know God as Father intimately in order to share Him with our children. So the first question then is what is our prayer life like?

Do our children ever see us pray? Unless they see us pray then all of the words we say to them about prayer are useless. Remember they learn by imitation. We need to let our children hear us pray. Not just rote prayers, which are certainly important, but to hear them pour our hearts out to God.

The greatest gift we can give our children is to teach them how to pray. There is nothing more manly that to be on our knees asking the Lord for help.

I get up early in the morning long before anyone else in the house is awake and pray. Sometimes my kids will come into the Bonus room and see me praying. SO many times I'll walk into the bonus room later in the day and find them with children's Bible in hand praying. This is without any prompting on my part. They go back there to pray because they think that is what they are supposed to do because they have seen their mother and father doing the same thing.

Each week I spend an hour with Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. Without any prompting of my own, my nine year old asked if he could come with me. I warned him that it was an hour and that I would take him back later if he wanted to spend less time. Instead he went with me. Why? Because he knows his father does that. The world tells us that is strange, but for our kids it will always be perfectly normal. Showing our children that faith is normal and a normal topic of conversation is extremely important for the times later in life when the world will test their faith.

Going back to the whole just showing up thing, our kids have to see us at Mass and reverent. We cannot let our wives be the spiritual heads of household. Part of our role as spiritual heads of household means going to Mass. I see every Sunday so many mothers there by themselves with their kids. That this idea of spiritual head of household is not simply a holdover from some patriarchal (as if this is necessarily bad) system it seems to bear out empirically. If a father does not attend Church regularly with his family, only 1 in 50 children will grow up and be regular Mass goers…regardless of what the mother does. We must go to Mass with our family!

As Catholics we believe that we hold the full revelation of God's truth. So obviously the other way we can reveal God's Fatherhood to our children is by properly forming them in their faith. This means that we have to be properly formed ourselves. We need to spend the time to learn about our rich tradition and all of the beautiful teachings of the Church. Learn why the Church teaches what she teaches so that when the inevitable questions come from our kids we will be able to answer them. Guess what? If we don't have the answers, they will seek them somewhere else and most likely get the wrong answers. We must never forget that we are the primary educators of our children. We are responsible for them knowing and loving the faith. It's not the Priests, not the CCD teachers and not their Catholic school teachers. They are all there to support us in our roles as primary educators…not to be substitutes.

If you want your children to be obedient to God and to you, you need to show them how you are obedient to His Church and all her teachings. If there is something you don't agree with, investigate it further. I have had a lot of issues with different teachings of the Church and amazingly enough each time that I have looked into the why, it was the 2000 yr old Church guided by the Holy Spirit that was right and not the know it all.

Teach them to love the Church and to respect all of the Bishops and Priests because of their office. Of course this means we have to show the Bishops and Priest respect by never complaining about them in front of our children.

Children love superheroes. If we can introduce them to the saints as God's superheroes it is amazing how well the kids relate and again will try to imitate.

So we can reveal God's Fatherhood by teaching our children to pray and educating them in their faith. How do we relive the Fatherhood of God? There are two ways that I especially want to focus on. The first is for us to protect our children as God protects us. Obviously there are many ways in which we protect our children, but I want to focus especially on how we can protect our children's innocence.

I think it has become very easy for us to become desensitized to all the attacks on our children's innocence that the culture throws at us.

The culture has taken to teaching children a moral relativism. The most egregious way that this is taught to our kids is through "values clarification". It teaches our kids to "make good decisions" by teaching them that they should be guided by their own subjective values. The problem with this is that because there is no consistency the kids take this subjectivism to their own behavior and learn to rationalize just about anything. We have to fight against this by teaching them that there are moral absolutes and things that are always wrong. Isn't this what has made the Church so unpopular; Her insistence that no matter what the circumstances some things are always wrong?

We have to also protect our children's innocence by monitoring their contact with the media saturated culture we live in. Notice that I said monitor. There is a tendency to deal with media contact in one of three ways.

1. Anything goes-This one is pretty obvious
   
2. Nothing goes- This is better than the first, but probably leads to problems later on
   
3. Closely monitor and limit what they do come in contact with. This is the best approach because it teaches them to make value judgments.
   

We need to watch TV with our kids. The TV has become a babysitter in many families and this is very harmful to children. We should point out when someone does something virtuous and when someone didn't. We should encourage our children to think about what they are watching and to filter what is coming in.

Keep the TV in a main room and the computer in a main room where you can see the screen as you walk into the room. This is the best way to keep "My Space from invading your space."

Finally I want to talk for a few minutes on how we should use God as our model for discipline. Keep in mind that the word discipline and disciple have the same root word. We have to keep in mind then that the goal of disciplining our children is always to teach them. Whether you decide to spank your children or not, it is important to always remember that discipline is aimed at the ear and not the rear.

First of all, if we expect our children to grow up and obey God, we have to teach them very early on to obey us. To obey means to listen and respond the first time.

We have a tendency to want to play baseball with our kids, giving them three chances to comply. I think this is not a good approach. First of all it gives them the impression that they do not need to do anything until after the second warning. The second thing is that it makes us more likely to have an explosion. Now our discipline comes out of anger which means we have a tendency to be more extreme and it can hide the love that should always be shown.

This ties in with my second point and that is to be consistent, even when it is inconvenient. Now none of us are consistent all the time, but it should still be our aim. Kids tend to pick up on the times when you are distracted or busy and will often use those times to act up.

Part of consistency is presenting a united front. By this, I mean that you and your wife need to be on the same page. Demand that your children respond to the voice of their mothers. Even if you do not agree with what your wife is saying, go along with it. It is better to present a united front than to show that one of you does not have ultimate authority. Ultimately, if one of you doesn't have full authority, your kids will see it as neither of you do.

Something that parents often struggle with too is kids in Church. Teach your children to be reverent in Church. This starts with us being reverent the minute we enter the sanctuary. We should genuflect to recognize that Christ is our King and He is truly present in the Church in the Eucharist and we should be prayerful and quiet. This will set the tone for your children by letting them know that Church is a place to be quiet. If you do have to take your children out, I would recommend that there be a stiff punishment attached to it. For younger ones if you have to take them out I would recommend that you hold them, speak to them about their behavior and then return. To let them go out and run around simply tells them that if they act up then they get to go out and run around.

One final thing I want to talk about is a devotion to St. Joseph. This is especially a good thing for those of us who for whatever reason did not have good fatherly role models of our own. God chose St. Joseph to be the teacher and protector of the most important man to walk the face of the earth. When the culture was out to get Jesus as a child and Herod killed all the Holy Innocents, Joseph dropped everything and took the Holy Family to Egypt. He searched tirelessly to find him when he was lost for three days. He taught Jesus how to read, how to pray and how to be a carpenter. Take advantage of his intercessory power to ask Jesus to make you a better father.

No Child Left Behind

A recent study in the February 2010 Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine found that long-term "abstinence-only interventions may have an important role in preventing adolescent sexual involvement." Interestingly enough, despite a commitment to "health care", the Obama administration completely eliminated funding for abstinence education from the 2010 budget. The reason was simply that the programs do not work. Despite the statistical data from this study to the contrary, I actually agree with them that in their current format they will not work long term. You only need to look at the four treatment groups in the study to see exactly why I think this is the case.

The study was based on dividing the teens into four groups which represent the culture as a whole—(1) a group that received instruction solely in abstinence; (2) a safe-sex group instructed in contraceptive use; (3) a comprehensive, or mixed message, group taught both abstinence and contraceptive use; (4)and a control group that received health education unrelated to sex. I want to focus on the first mainly and briefly touch on the third. I talked a lot about "safe-sex" in my entry last spring when the Holy Father came under fire for his comments on condom use.

Instruction Solely in Abstinence

Here I am going to take exception to the way the instruction group received "instruction". The classes didn't preach saving sex until marriage or disparage condom use. Instead, they involved assignments to help students see the drawbacks to sexual activity. In fact the authors of the study said there was no moralistic tone to the instruction at all. It included having them list the pros and cons themselves, and it found their "cons" far outnumbered the "pros." This is now the way that any "moral" issue is taught in our culture.

What is the problem with this? Two words. Values Clarification. These are two words that almost nobody knows about, but could ultimately lead to the moral demise of our country. In 1972, Sydney Simon wrote a seemingly innocuous book called Values Clarification: A Handbook of Practical Strategies for Teachers and Students. This book was based on two simple premises:

If children are left to their own inclinations their innate attraction to goodness would allow a fully developed mature system to emerge

Values are wholly personal and teachers should not impose values upon students

It does not take much to see that both of these premises are false. The first is a denial of original sin. Christian or not, everyone subscribes to the theory of original sin. They recognize that something is not right about man. They know that left to themselves, people cannot be trusted. Why else would we have oaths of office or contracts or even the checks and balances of government? As Chesterton said, original sin "is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved."

There is also the issue of the innate attraction to goodness. This assumes an absolute standard of goodness that is then contradicted in the second premise in saying that goodness is wholly subjective. In essence, Values clarification is built upon the foundation that a child left to himself will be attracted to things that he likes. It is hard to argue that one.

Of course any system that is based on a faulty foundation such as this inevitably leads to serious problems. This is especially true when the overwhelming majority of teachers (yes, even in Catholic schools) now use this in the teaching and disciplining of their students. You can immediately recognize it in your own children when rather than saying something is right or wrong, they merely say it is a good or bad choice. This is because they are taught that the gift of free will is the same thing as freedom of choice. What this does in the long run is completely destroy a child's conscience. This is why the Vatican even condemned it the 1995 document issued by the Pontifical Council for the Family, The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality: Guidelines for Education within the Family
(TMHS). This is a must read for every parent. Here is what they say about Values Clarification. It is worth quoting in its entirety:

One widely-used, but possibly harmful, approach goes by the name of "values clarification". Young people are encouraged to reflect upon, to clarify and to decide upon moral issues with the greatest degree of "autonomy", ignoring the objective reality of the moral law in general and disregarding the formation of consciences on the specific Christian moral precepts, as affirmed by the Magisterium of the Church. Young people are given the idea that a moral code is something which they create themselves, as if man were the source and norm of morality.

However, the values clarification method impedes the true freedom and autonomy of young people at an insecure stage of their development. In practice, not only is the opinion of the majority favored, but complex moral situations are put before young people, far removed from the normal moral choices they face each day, in which good or evil are easily recognizable. This unacceptable method tends to be closely linked with moral relativism, and thus encourages indifference to moral law and permissiveness.

My point is this, without any absolute moral values, you might as well just give each child a rose and play "He loves me, he loves me not". When you give children no solid moral foundation on which to build and recognize their values they are doomed to slavery. Human freedom is not intellectual or physical freedom but freedom of the will. It finds its full expression in the choice between good and evil.

Rather than teaching that sex outside of marriage is wrong because of a set of consequences, we must show them why it is only right within marriage. We need to help them see what the marital embrace really means. This is why Theology of the Body once it is presented in a digestible format is the cure for our problem with sex education. If you don't know about Theology of the Body, you need to learn it. Grab one of the many introduction books (Christopher West or Steve Kellmeyer has a pdf version of his book here) and it will change the way you look at everyone. You'll realize that the problem is not that the culture thinks too much about sex, but too little.

The Mixed Message Group

I think we all realize how ridiculous this approach is in that we basically say to kids "don't do this, but if you're going to here is how you protect yourself". Most rational people would not take this approach. However I think more of us actually do this than we think.

A report from the Kaiser foundation found that in 1300 shows they analyzed 50% of them showed sexual content and only 11% of those showed the risks or responsibilities associated with promiscuity. 76% of the teens surveyed said that one of the reasons young people have sex is because "television shows and movies make it seem more normal for teens." It is very difficult to instill in young people that sex outside of marriage is not good when the culture tells them it is. The power of Hollywood is that they can help to normalize behavior. When kids see repeatedly on TV and in movies that it is perfectly normal for teens to have sex, they begin to believe it. We also see this also playing out in spades with respect to the homosexual agenda. It is hard to find a single show on TV that doesn't have a happy, well adjusted gay character.

I do not agree with the approach that because of this, we should swear off TV and movies. Instead we must teach our children to be discriminating consumers of TV. As parents we have to take an active role in what our children watch on TV. We have to watch the movies they watch. If you do come across something objectionable, ask them questions about what they saw. Dr. Meg Meeker, in her book Boys Should Be Boys, says that a "healthy sexuality is not exercised too young, it is not artificially aroused and diverted, and it is not promiscuous." Deep down, despite what the culture says teens know this to be true.

 

Render Unto God

Before the national election of 2008, Archbishop Chaput wrote an excellent book on the role of Catholics in American society called Render Unto Caesar. Since then he has shown precisely what it looks like to carry those principles out. His latest battle has to do with the decision of a Catholic school in Denver to refuse re-admittance to two children whose "parents" are a lesbian couple. The Archdiocese issued the following statement:

"To preserve the mission of our schools, and to respect the faith of the wider Catholic community, we expect all families who enroll students to live in accord with Catholic teaching. Parents living in open discord with Catholic teaching in areas of faith and morals unfortunately choose by their actions to disqualify their children from enrollment."

As you can imagine, there is no shortage of people lining up to accuse the Church of prejudice and discrimination. So the question then is whether these criticisms of the archdiocese are valid?

There appear to be three criticisms that pop up in one form or another.

1) "I just feel the Catholic Church is a church that should be teaching acceptance and tolerance. I just don't think this is an example of that… We're all sinners. Why discriminate against this end of sinners?"

The Catholic Church should teach tolerance and acceptance and does, but I think it would behoove all of us to understand what those words actually mean. Let's be clear right up from that we accept and tolerate people. We do not however have to accept and tolerate actions and ideas that are not good. This is precisely why we teach that we are to hate the sin and love the sinner.

This brings me to the next point. "Why do we seem to discriminate against this end of sinners?" This goes to the heart of why many gays will not go to church because they do not feel accepted. But this sin and these sinners are different. The difference is not in the sin so much as the fact that they do not see it as a sin. What they really want is acceptance of their sins and not the label of sinner. This the Church cannot offer. Christ came to heal the sick, not the ones who deny their sickness. The Church is not for someone who doesn't need healing.

2) "I don't think they interview to see what parents are divorced or what parents are using birth control or other things that are against the teaching of the Catholic Church"

This is actually a common way that we have come to argue despite being wrongheaded. My kids do it all the time. When one of them gets in trouble for something they did they immediately ask why their brother didn't get in trouble yesterday when they did something else that was wrong? Unfortunately, we never seem to grow out of this way of arguing.

This is actually a logical fallacy called the argument from silence. Just because the school doesn't test parents' catholicity doesn't mean that on this issue with these two children their handling of it is wrong or that it condones the other behaviors. You have to stick to the issue at hand.

There are two other problems with this approach. First, if someone was openly campaigning telling everyone that the Church was wrong on these two issues, I absolutely think the status of their children at the school would and should be in jeopardy. In essence, the two women that were guardians of these children are openly saying the Church is wrong by their actions.

Along the same lines, nobody says that divorce is a good thing (yet). I don't see "divorce pride" parades popping up throughout the country. But again, if someone were openly saying that the Church is wrong then the approach would be different.

By the way, I wish I could shout this to the rooftops. The Catholic Church is not against birth control. We are not called to a life of being the little old woman who lived in a shoe. We are called to responsible parenthood which means that we must be prudent in our decision to have children or postpone births. The Church however is against certain means (such as artificial contraception) that are used to postpone births. I know this sounds like semantics, but we need to be precise in our language.

I was talking to a guy who said to me that I "don't believe in birth control because I am Catholic." I told him that we did believe in birth control and that we were not all called to have as many children as possible. He said that what he meant was that we didn't believe in contraception. I told him again, that we did believe in it. Clearly it exists and we would be in denial not to believe in it. But we as Catholics think it is a very bad idea and ultimately damaging to marriage. Now he was interested in why it was a bad idea.

The point of this digression is that we need to make sure we frame the Catholic understanding in a positive light. Ultimately, that is how we should present the beauty of the Church's teachings. I could have simply told him that contraception was wrong, but instead I told him it was bad for marriages. This opened a dialogue that would have been immediately shut down had I chosen the "because the Church says so" response.

3) "Punishing a child for the "sin" of the parents is immoral, unethical, and flat-out childish, especially when the Vatican was recently hit with its own gay sex scandal less than a week ago."

This response came from a Catholic contributor at the Huffington Post. I am not sure if by placing the word sin inside quotation marks he is denying the reality of sin or this sin in particular, but nonetheless it is interesting perspective. I assume he is referring to this particular sin because he mentions the Vatican scandal.

I actually believe him when he says that he had twelve years of Catholic education because he clearly doesn't understand how the Church works. Is he saying that since the men who populate the positions in the Vatican are sinners that the Church should stop preaching against sin? That there are fallen human beings in the Vatican should surprise no one. That is precisely why we call it a scandal, but nevertheless our faith is not in the men who work in the Church, but on the Man who founded it.

Ever the faithful shepherd who cares for each individual soul, Archbishop Chaput said that ultimately the reason for removing the children is in their best interest. He said that, "(T)o allow children in these circumstances to continue in our school would be a cause of confusion for the student, in that what they are being taught in school conflicts with what they experience in the home." You have to wonder why the two women didn't come to the same conclusion and not send their children there in the first place.

 

New Wine

In Luke's Gospel, Jesus tells the Pharisees that "new wine must be poured into fresh wineskins." (Lk 5:37-38). This principle is at the heart of the motivation behind the next pillar in Integral Formation—Human Formation. If we are to be filled with the new wine of grace, we must constantly strive to present ourselves to the Lord as fresh wineskins.

Recall what was said in the first article about how important it is to have a proper understanding of who man is and in particular, who he is in light of the Fall. Man is both body and soul and made in the image and likeness of God. Because of the Fall, our likeness to God was damaged and only through the invasion of grace in our lives can it be restored. With this view in mind, we can speak of "grace building upon nature". It falls on us to give the Lord the best raw material to work with.

With this authentic understanding of man then we can set out to outline a program of human formation. Since the soul is the higher power in man we will begin there. Man's soul has three "parts"—the intellect, the will and the heart. Each of these runs on one of the three transcendentals. So when we speak of forming these three we should always speak in relation to the transcendentals

Forming the Intellect

The intellect is made for truth, so that in forming the intellect we strive to teach the intellect to recognize the truth and cling to it when it finds it. How best to do this?

This of course assumes that there is a truth. In Fides et Ratio, John Paul II said that he wrote the Encyclical because the search for ultimate truth is neglected in our times. Rather than make use of man's ability to know the truth, modern philosophy has focused on the limitations of our knowing. It really is the irony of all ironies that in this climate where faith and reason are supposedly in conflict that it is the Church who is the sole defender of reason. Read Fides et Ratio and tell me if you see any conflict.

Well, what does philosophy have to do with this? The first thing to do is to recognize that man by his very nature philosophizes. This is a distinctly human activity. Furthermore, everyone has a philosophy whether they recognize it or not. As Cicero once said, the choice is not between having a philosophy and not having one, but between having a good one or a bad one. For the majority of people their philosophy is that of the culture around them and they give little thought to it. The danger of this is that behavior follows reason no matter how distorted that reason may be.

We no longer know how to reason properly. When this happens, people come to rely on their feelings. Ask most people what their opinion is on any issue and rather than saying "I think such and such" they will say "I feel such and such". There is no need to defend feelings because they are entirely subjective and in some ways we are beholden to them. I remember getting into a long discussion with someone over abortion and in the end they told me, "I logically follow you, but I just don't feel like it's wrong."

It is time to restore a true understanding to the liberal arts in our education. The original meaning of liberal arts comes from Aristotle and the purpose was the study of the truth for its own sake. Classicly understood, the liberal arts were focused on the model in Plato's Republic. There was the Trivium which consisted of grammar, rhetoric, and logic and the Quadrivium which consisted of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.

We need to learn logic. Logic helps us to find the truth by demanding that we define our terms and thus understand what we mean. Logic also demands that we have good reasons for believing what we believe. Being able to formulate an argument and evaluate others arguments is vital for an apostle. Read St. Paul's sermon at the Areopagus in Acts and note how logical what he is saying is. Also note his delivery and rhetorical approach. Rhetoric has almost become a dirty word because it is so often put to the service of falsehood. Sometimes what is needed to convince people are reasons which persuade them by moving their emotions so that they will accept the truth and act on it. This is rhetoric. If you read anything that Martin Luther King wrote (especially his I Have a Dream
speech or Letter from a Birmingham Jail) you will see a top notch rhetorician drawing on religious principles.

Finally, we should study the major philosophers. We learn how to think more logically and critically. We also see how much philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and Kant still have an effect on people today. Peter Kreeft has some excellent books to introduce the reader to their thought in his Socrates Meets… series.

Forming the Will

Pope Benedict has said that "we seem to know more about how to build bombs than how to judge whether it is moral to use them." Because of all of the specialization of education, we become specialists in certain fields of knowledge, but not necessarily in moral knowledge. Therefore we must form our will to recognize the good and cling to it when it finds it.

Vital to this is a proper formation of conscience. Remember that first and foremost conscience is a knowing about what is good and what is evil and is not a feeling. A feeling is always a result of some other cause—in this case the act of reason known as conscience. God has given us two avenues to moral truth on which we should form our conscience. The first is natural law and the second is the Revealed Law. Natural law is that which is knowable by human reason alone while Revealed Law comes through the Church. We have to remember though that the Church is the authentic interpreter of both because they both have the same source. The role of the Church in public life is to form consciences.

We sometimes simply dismiss the Magisterium as being opposed to conscience—but we must ask ourselves some important questions. What is it in me that contradicts the Magisterium? Is it perhaps only my comfort? My obstinacy? Or is it simply because society considers it reasonable?

This is why the ancients set prudence as the first of the cardinal virtues. They saw it as the willingness and capacity to perceive reality and respond to it in an objective manner.

Of course, we must still act on the good once we recognize and acknowledge it. We must train our wills and often the best way to do that is through renunciation and mortification. Remember that the purpose of life is to make a sincere gift of ourselves. That is the greatest good. If we continually seek comfort and our own good, we will not be able to act when the time comes to make that gift.

Forming the Heart

I think we have all heard the adage, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". This statement essentially means that beauty is entirely subjective. But as we said before, beauty is one of the three transcendentals and is objective just like truth and goodness. When we call someone tall, we are comparing that person to some objective standard of height and saying that they exceed that height. Likewise, when we say something is beautiful, we are comparing it to some objective standard of beauty and say that it is approaching that in some way. We may not know exactly what that objective standard is, but nonetheless we know it exists or else we couldn't call anything beautiful. Therefore, we must train our heart to recognize the beautiful and to cling to it when it finds it.

Most people can tell you what beauty is until you ask them. It is a very difficult thing to define. The philosophical definition of beauty would be that which has unity (it is distinct from all else), harmony (balance in its parts), and radiance (brightness or clarity). Aquinas said pulchra sunt quae visa placent—"beautiful things are those which, when seen, please".

Why this philosophical grounding? Because I believe we live in one of the ugliest times in the history of man. Look at the art that is produced today. Art has become all about self-expression. Listen to the music of today. Can you really say that it has unity (it all sounds pretty much the same), harmony and radiance? Half of all marriages end in divorce. Marriage loses its beauty when it loses its harmony with God's plan which does not include divorce and contraception.

What is the cure? The cure is cultivating a sense of awe. When was the last time we were caught up in awe? It is so difficult in a scientific culture that wants to pick everything apart, analyze it, and classify it to have a sense of awe. We must resist that temptation and simply take things in in their essence. GK Chesterton is someone who clearly understood this. One of my favorite quotes of his pertains to beauty. He says that "it has always been one of my unclerical sermons to myself, that that remark which Peter made on seeing the vision of a single hour, ought to be made by us all, in contemplating every panoramic change in the long Vision we call life... "It is good for us to be here-it is good for us to be here", repeating itself eternally."

I was in the mountains in the fall and looked out across the valley with the leaves all changing color and said "my God" and really meant it. That is awe and that is something that we all need more of. Beauty ultimately leads us to want to know more about the artist. In that way it can be a tremendous means of evangelization.

We need to help to cultivate awe in our children. We have to get them outside, away from the TV and the Wii and go exploring with them. Show them "all the cool stuff" that can be found in the woods. Children naturally have this sense, we as parents need to help them hold onto it.

I can't recommend Thomas Dubay's The Evidential Power of Beauty enough as a means to opening your eyes to the marvels of creation. I am constantly going back to it for meditation material.

Physical Formation

Because we are body and soul, we cannot neglect our bodies. When St. Francis was dying, he asked pardon of Brother Ass (that is what he called his body) for how harshly he had treated it. Our bodies are meant to be subservient to our souls, but that does not mean we should neglect them.

Physical activity helps to preserve emotional balance. Sports are a great means to grow in virtue. Physical exercise is a great antidote against laziness since it gives us more energy. Manual labor is also good for those of us who spend the bulk of our day at a desk. I am always drawn back to the fact that the first Apostles that Christ chose—Andrew, Simon, James and John—were obviously no strangers to hard physical work. That probably factored into Our Lord's choosing them and calling them when He did.

In two weeks, we will look at the third pillar—Intellectual Formation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Firm Foundation

In a previous post, it was discussed what integral human formation was and why it is key to the New Evangelization. It was mentioned that there was a classical ordering to the four pillars—spiritual, human, intellectual and apostolic. Quite obviously, spiritual is listed first because it is the most important dimension and the one on which the other three depend.

To see why this is necessarily the case, let's go back to whole purpose of why we need this integral formation to begin with. The answer is the same answer we give to all the important questions—Christ (try to come up with an important question to which Christ is not the answer). We are called to become little Christs and we do this by following a very specific pattern of development. We move from a knowledge of Christ, to a love of Christ and from a love of Christ to an imitation of Him. Finally, when we truly know Him and love Him, we desire to communicate Him to others. Spiritual formation pertains to the first three stages of development, while the other three pillars mainly pertain to communicating Him to others.

The Supreme Good—to Know Christ Jesus

In his letter to the Philippians, St. Paul says that he considers "everything as a loss because of the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things and I consider them so much rubbish, that I may gain Christ ". We all know that St. Paul did have a remarkable experience of Christ on his road to Damascus. He came to know that everything else was rubbish (the Greek word is scubula which translates into English as another 's' word that means a specific type of animal rubbish) compared to this supreme good. This knowledge that St. Paul is talking about then is more than to know about Him. I am quite sure that prior to his conversion experience during his persecution of the Christians that he came to know a lot about Jesus of Nazareth. But, he did not actually know Christ until he experienced Him. Since most of us will never have an experience like St. Paul, how is it that we actually experience Christ?

One question that used to really annoy me, but that I have come to appreciate more and more, is when I am asked "do you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, your Lord and Savior?" I think because Protestants rely completely on their own subjective experience they have touched on a question that most Catholics don't ask. In fact, Catholics tend to only rely on the objective presence of Christ in the Sacraments and are annoyed when a Protestant asks them that question. But to experience Christ, there must be a mixture of the two.

Well, to get to know anyone, we have to spend time with them. The obvious answer then is that we must pray. In order to pray rightly, we truly have to understand what prayer is. There is a mental picture that often helps me to stay focused on why God calls us to prayer. When a smith plunges iron into the first, he is not just trying to make it hot and glowing; he wants to make it malleable. This is precisely why we pray—not so that God can make us hot and glowing (although this happens often), but to make us malleable. Ultimately, prayer is our attempt to break our will and conform it to God's will. That is what Christ's prayer looked like in the Garden of Gethsemane and should serve as a model for all of us.

Once we understand what prayer is, the technique we use is not so important. What is important is that we set aside a specific time during the day to be alone with Our Lord. We should give Our Lord our best time of the day, which is usually first thing in the morning. If we don't have time, we could start by getting up 10 minutes earlier. If we were promised a million dollars if we got up 10 minutes early every morning for a year would we do it? A million dollars is nice, but it is not the supreme good that Paul is talking about.

Our mental prayer must be a simple conversation in which we speak to God as we truly are. To avoid it becoming sterile, we should walk away with a concrete resolution. We should see patterns develop in our prayers that tell us what God is asking of us. Once we know what He is asking, we must put a concrete resolution in place to carry it out.

Cardinal Newman described personal prayer as "God and my soul and nothing else besides". But there is more to the life of prayer than simply personal prayer. We are also called to participate in the liturgical prayer of the Church. The Mass has been called the most perfect prayer. The sacrifice of the Logos is already accepted and is accepted forever, but through the Sacrifice of the Mass we make it our sacrifice in hopes that we will be transformed into Christ. In the Liturgy there becomes no difference between Christ's actions and ours and this is why every prayer of the Mass is directed to the Father, through the Son in the Holy Spirit. The Mass is not a private devotion, but the Church's very participation in the redemptive sacrifice of Christ. It would serve us well to spend time meditating on the beauty and the gift that the Mass is. Unfortunately, because we don't do this, we are still concerned with making our "Sunday obligation".

For Christ's Love Compels Us

Once this personal knowledge has been cultivated, it opens the gate to an all consuming love for Our Lord. Just like any relationship, once we come to know another, we also want to know everything about them. In knowing more about them, we come to love them even more. So, how to we stir this knowledge into the flame of love?

This is where we look to Mary for help. We should strive to imitate her love for Christ and should implore her intercession in achieving it.

In almost all of the artwork that depicts the Annunciation, Mary is seen reading Scripture when the angel appears. While I doubt the historicity of her on a kneeler in a nicely decorated room with a bound copy of Scripture, her Magnificat shows us that she knew a great deal about Scripture. Without, she would not have been able to "ponder all these things in her heart" and see how they fit with God's promises in the Old Testament.

St. Jerome once said that "ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ". I am very often disheartened by how few Catholics know and understand Scripture. This is the book of the Church and for the Church.
Yet, for the most part Catholics leave their Bibles on the shelves or put them on the coffee tables when they have certain guests.

I am always so surprised when I hear someone say "I pray, but God never talks to me." I ask them if they ever thought of getting an audio Bible which usually elicits a puzzled look. The point is that the Bible is God's Word and it is the ordinary way that He speaks to us. When we read it, we are meant not to merely read a book, but to encounter a Person. As God's Word it seeks to become flesh in us. The Psalms are the same prayers that Jesus said. It is time for us as Catholics to start growing in our appreciation for Sacred Scripture. This is something that our separated brethren could surely teach us.

I also hear people say that they don't read Scripture because they don't understand it. That truly is backwards. Do we only watch movies that we fully understand? The only way to understand is to read it. Jesus has promised in Mark's Gospel (4:22-25) that repeated exposure to the Word of God will result in increased understanding. By closely listening and discerning the meaning of the parable, the one who is given spiritual insight will have it increased by exposure to the parables as opposed to those who will end up in greater spiritual ignorance. Scripture has a sort of double inspiration in that the Holy Spirit breathed into the authors and breathes into the readers as well.

Mary being the first tabernacle, she would also point us to the Eucharist. Imagine the joy and ecstasy that Our Lady must have felt when she received the Eucharist from St. John the Apostle when she stayed in Ephesus with him. We too should ask for the grace to love Our Eucharistic Lord in the same way. One way to do this is to make regular Eucharistic Adoration a part of our spiritual program.

Eucharistic adoration is the most important way in which the presence of Christ continues in the Church following the celebration of the Mass, Because of this, it is meant to help us sanctify everything we do and most importantly to draw us back to our next celebration of the Eucharist. What we do at the Eucharist is to eat and drink deeply of the food of our salvation. Think of Adoration then as a way to stimulate our appetites for our next sacred meal. Pope Benedict said in one of his homilies during World Youth Day a few years ago that the "Latin word for adoration is ad-oratio - mouth to mouth contact, a kiss, an embrace, and hence, ultimately love."

Learn from me for I am meek and humble of heart

From love, we are led to imitation. One very unpopular point in Christ's life that we are called to imitate is in His Passion. We make this a vivid, living reality by our own mortification and detachment. Ever since man first sinned, penance, reparation, and spiritual war have become necessary conditions of our life.

The fact that it is newsworthy that John Paul II performed acts of penance should be an indication just how far removed we are from this idea. As followers of Christ we are called to these acts not only for our own mortification but because of the redemptive value of uniting them with Christ's suffering. Fasting has gone completely "out of style" despite its spiritual benefits.

We also have avoided the Sacrament of Reconciliation. We have come to see it in a totally negative light rather than as an encounter with the Our Lord sacramentally. In the Catechism, the Sacrament of Reconciliation falls under the sacraments of healing. Do we have a medicinal view of Confession? Do we see it as a means to obtain the grace to overcome our persistent faults? I will write about what I think should be a proper view of Confession at another time, but I invite you to take it to prayer. Ask Our Lord to show you the beauty of the gift of the Sacrament of Confession. If you haven't been in a long time, go this weekend. If you have been recently, go again, but take someone with you who hasn't gone in a while.

Next week we will continue with human formation.