Strange Coincidence?

In the Thursday night re-run episode of Joan of Arcadia called “The Uncertainty Principle”, God tells Joan to ask a troubled and lonely guy to a dance, a bully that no one likes.

Joan:  Well, you never told me to ask evil out on a date before.

God:  Evil is not a word to use lightly. It’s only the darkest end of a broad spectrum.

Joan:  You mean like light?

God:  Exactly like light. Nobody is born in total darkness. Most of you live on the grey end of the spectrum, a lie here and there, jealousy, wrath. But you only get to absolute evil by doing one thing after another till eventually you’re transformed.

Joan:  Like, into a monster.

God:  A monster is a creature with no consciousness. They’re extremely rare, but they do exist.

Joan:  Have you watched the news? I’m not sure they’re so rare.

God:  Almost everybody has some light somewhere. And light is always worth fighting for.

Joan:  Ok. So I’m supposed to find Ramsey’s light?

God:  I just want you to listen and observe. Be present.

Joan:  That’s it?

At the end of the episode, Joan is disappointed in the outcome. God tells Joan that disaster was averted by just her presence:

Observation is a more powerful force than you could possibly reckon. The invisible, the overlooked, and the unobserved are those that are most in danger of reaching the end of the spectrum. They lose the last of their light. From there, anything can happen.

Then, in yesterday’s post called “Consolation and Desolation”, I quote from C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters about the objective of Satan, to draw “all other beings into himself” by subjugating their souls and wills. In other words, humans are food for Hell.

Later that afternoon, I caught “Catholic Answers Live” on the radio while driving across town, and the topic for the show was “Does the Devil Really Exist?”

And finally, I was channel surfing in the evening and caught Fr. Corapi on EWTN. He was discussing the first of seven series on the devil and spiritual warfare.

Now, I do not believe in accidental coincidences anymore. All of these events are seeds for contemplation. I am not particularly compelled to study this aspect of spirituality, but I do not deny its existence. I have a list of books in the queue for reading this summer and none of them directly address the issue of evil.

As with most things that I have little understanding in relation to faith, I will offer it up to God in prayer. And over time, little by little, I begin to understand more. It is a cool process. As a result, I have learned more patience from it. Learning about God and faith and such, on the whole, should be a slow-growing process. It takes time to reflect, assimilate, and build upon. Thank you Father for leading the way. I am an eager student.

Consolation and Desolation

In the last scene of the season’s final episode of Joan of Arcadia, Joan’s parents are quietly talking in Joan’s hospital room. Helen had talked to a priest earlier in the day…

Helen: He said that we go through times on consolation and desolation. Consolation is when things are flowing, and everything makes sense, and you feel connected, and you’re aware that God is present and has plans for you, maybe, even likes you a little bit. You remember that?

Will: Sometimes.

Helen: Desolation is the other thing. When you are scared and confused and alone and out of step, and your cell phone doesn’t work, and your daughter gets sick, and the cops come to the door and say there’s been an accident. God retreats, and you’re left with your own thoughts, and those thoughts are dark. There are answers there. He told me. And strength.

Will: How long does desolation last?

Helen: As long as it needs to.

This reminds me of the Law of Undulation from C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters. From Letter #8:

Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal. …As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. …periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty.

If you are not familiar with Screwtape, he is a devil with some considerable authority in the hierarchy of Hell. He writes a set of letters to his nephew Wormwood on the finer points of being a first-time tempter of humans. Later in Letter #8, there is a brilliant piece describing the difference between the objectives of Hell and Heaven, and it concerns humans with the Law of Undulation, in particular, in experiencing the troughs or desolation of our lives. Be forewarned, the following quote is from the perspective of the devils and their attitude is kind of backwards.

Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, [God] relies on the troughs even more than the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us a human is primarily food; or aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which [God] demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but the appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He as absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world which [Satan] has drawn all other beings into himself: God wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.

And that is where the troughs come in. You must have often wondered why [God] does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve. He is prepared to do little overriding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone the duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients [humans] along by continual tempting, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with, the better. He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do [God’s] will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

The operative word here is seems. God is always there. He is always with us, in us, around us. It only seems like He is not. And that is where trust, hope, and faith come in.

Persevere my friends…

Putting Love into Practice

Love consists in sharing
      what one has
      and what one is
      with those one loves.

Love ought to show itself in deeds
      more than in words.

— St. Ignatius of Loyola

The Bible

It is the very nature of the Bible to affront, perplex and astonish the human mind. Hence the reader who opens the Bible must be prepared for disorientation, confusion, incomprehension, perhaps outrage.

— Thomas Merton

A couple of days ago, I received an email from Anita asking me to write about what is meant by “the Bible is inerrant.” Whew! What a loaded question.

I’ve mulled it over, prayed a little bit, and finally read the comments to her post on her website. As I feared, a few of the comments focused attention on some of the inconsistencies within the text of the Bible. Some comments took the position of “I believe…” and attempted to support their claim. All of these are important discussions on different levels for different reasons, but I have a feeling that Anita might be searching for something deeper, something closer to the heart.

To be honest, the issue of inerrancy in the Bible has never been a stumbling block or hurdle for me. I guess I lump the writing of the Bible in with the Church. Both are inspired by God. Both involve humans, and anytime humans get involved in something, well, let’s just say things seem less than perfect. God is stuck working with us humans despite all of our faults and talents, prejudices and preferences, hate and compassion, cultural indoctrinations, and free will. It is through our humanity that God reaches us, touches us, teaches us, loves us. All of this is obviously represented in the person of Jesus Christ, the living Word of God.

In order to reveal himself to men, in the condescension of his goodness God speaks to them in human words: “Indeed the words of God, expressed in the words of men, are in every way like human language, just as the Word of the eternal Father, when he took on himself the flesh of human weakness, became like men.” (CCC, #101)

Christians believe that the Bible is the revealed Truth of God. It is not the complete or whole Truth since no created thing can contain the whole Truth about God, but the Bible is more complete than any other religious text written in history.

As for the inconsistencies that seem to exist within the text of the Bible, they are superficial to me. I am not a Bible scholar, but I am a student of human nature. The debate over them seems to miss the meaning of whatever the passages are trying to convey. Furthermore, many non-believers find such inconsistencies to be an easy and convenient excuse for not believing in God. How could any rational, intelligent person believe in a book with inconsistencies? If the Bible was supposed to be the word of God and appeared to contain flaws, then they are going to buy into it. The book has to be “perfect” for them to begin to look at it.

Unfortunately, many people buy into this copout because they do not really understand what it means to have faith. If God came down and handed us the “perfect” book with all of the answers to life’s questions easily spelled out, then where is the challenge to faith? Here’s this “perfect” book. It’s from God. Yahoo! We have proof in the existence of God. Life is easy now. And as a result, there would be no doubt, no struggle, no hope, and more importantly, no free will.

The last two paragraphs remind me of a story:

The devil once went for a walk with a friend. They saw a man ahead of them stoop down and pick up something from the ground.

“What did that man find?” asked the friend.

“A piece of the truth,” said the devil.

“Doesn’t that disturb you?” asked the friend.

“No,” said the devil, “I shall let him make a belief out of it.”

Anthony de Mello’s footnote to this story is that a religious belief is like a signpost pointing the way to truth. When you cling to the signpost you are prevented from moving toward the truth because you think you have it already. Debating over inconsistencies in the Bible is like arguing over the color of the signpost and ignoring where it points.

This leads to two senses in which meaning is conveyed within the Bible, literal and spiritual. It is in the spiritual sense that the Bible is inerrant. For example, in the crossing of the Red Sea, one may or may not have a hard time believing in the literal meaning of this scene, but the spiritual sense is a sign of Christ’s victory and of Christian baptism.

Thomas Merton, in Opening the Bible, wrote that the Bible as a whole is a story of redemption, reconciliation, and liberation, all framed around the living Word of God, Jesus Christ. And discernment of what a particular passage means must be examined within this light.

Whether or not the reader is capable of theological faith in the Bible as “the word God,” and whether or not he is able to find any meaning at all in the notion of faith, he cannot begin to understand the Bible unless he agrees to accept something that was obviously in the minds of the authors and the editors alike: the belief that through the Biblical text there comes an inner content which challenges the reader and demands of him a personal engagement, a decision and commitment of his freedom, a judgement regarding the ultimate question.

This…requires two levels of understanding: first, a preliminary unraveling of the meaning of the texts themselves, …which is mainly a matter of knowledge acquired by study; then a deeper level, a living insight which grows out of personal involvement and relatedness… Only on the second level is the Bible really grasped, and it is to this deeper level (not necessarily “mystical” or obscure, but certainly personal) that the writers and editors of the Biblical canon obviously addressed themselves.

Else where in his book, Merton wrote:

For most people, the understanding of the Bible is, and should be, a struggle: not merely to find meaning that can be looked up in books of reference, but to come to terms personally with the stark scandal and contradiction in the Bible itself. It should not be our aim merely to explain these contradictions away, but rather to use them as ways to enter the strange and paradoxical world of meanings and experiences that are beyond us and yet often extremely and mysteriously relevant to us.

Because:

…the Bible raises the question of identity in a way no other book does. As [Karl] Barth pointed out: when you begin to question the Bible you find that the Bible is also questioning you. When asked: “What is this book?” you find that you are also implicitly being asked: “Who is this that reads it?”

I highly recommend Thomas Merton’s book, Opening the Bible. This non-denominational book does not teach how to read or interpret the Bible. As a reviewer at Amazon.com wrote, “This book gives an excellent frame of reference with which to read the Bible. Merton clearly addresses what the Bible is and what it is not, what to expect and what not to expect. This book prompts the reader to examine their own life and purposes; it calls on the reader to have a personal relationship with the Word of God. It cautions the reader who reads with a proscribed agenda and begs each individual to set aside their own preconceived ideas and let the Bible speak to them in its own way.”

Finally, to rap things up, I leave you with a quote from St. Bernard (ref):

The Christian faith is not a “religion of the book.” Christianity is the religion of the “Word” of God, a word which is “not a written and mute word, but the Word as incarnate and living”.

Stress Test

The attached photo was used in a case study on stress level at St. Mary’s Hospital. In the photo, you will see two dolphins jumping out of the water. The dolphins are identical. A closely monitored, scientific study revealed that in spite of the fact that the dolphins are identical, a person under stress would find differences in the two dolphins. If there are many differences found between the two dolphins, it means that the person is experiencing a great amount of stress.

Look at the photograph, and if you find more than one or two differences, you may be in need of a vacation.

Click here to view the photo.

(Found at Trust the Truth)